From what I gather, this would be optional. It provides a way to be anonymous. If you like the current system, and you don't want to be anonymous, things work just as they do now, no collateral required.
This is an example of libraries trying to help people in the face of the PATRIOT act, and you're bitching about interest payments. I think your priorities are a little screwed up.
"What they are doing" isn't communism. It is communal ownership, but it's limited to particular area of focus (a farm, or a shipyard, or a manufacturing company, or whatever) and has to step back into the Argentinian governing framework to resolve disputes across boundary lines.
In regards to capitalism not addressing micro-scale issues, I have to ask for an example. I don't understand what you mean by that.
I disagree with the statement that "communism is an economic method, not a governing method". It is both, simply because the former cannot exist without the latter. How can the commune make decisions about the allocation of resources across industry boundaries without a governing body?
For instance, how can a decision about the appropriate use of a waterway, for agriculture or industry, be made without a government? Local committees can't work, because a river can stretch for miles, with the interests of those involved being completely at odds, so at some level, government has to intervene.
You're right when you say that the structure of this government can vary, but I have to ask: how many times has communism not taken the form of a dictatorship? It gets back to the original criticism: just because communism could, in theory, not be authoritarian, can it ever not be authoritarian in practice? How would the rise of authoritarianism be prevented?
The problem I had with the GP is that he tried to extrapolate from the fact that there were communally owned and operated farms and factories in Argentina that communism as a system was a good thing. But the truth is, that while these efforts may be fine in their limited aspects, they do not address macro-scale issues. At best, the GP's post shows that communal efforts can integrate into a capitalist system.
the parent was trying to say that the bush whitehouse is not comparable to an authoritarian regime because he hasn't exercised the power of the veto. i was simply pointing out that when one's own party is in power, one typically doesn't have that many issues with the legislation that's being passed. in the "too much power" debate, the lack of vetoes means nothing.
that doesn't mean i think bush is an authoritarian dictator, or that the use of the veto is a bad thing or a good thing, or that if bush vetoes one or two bills then the world will fall to pieces. i was just saying that the veto record is pretty meaningless in the context of this debate.
First you say that its illegitimate to redefine communism in terms of its bad examples, then you throw back a redefinition of communism that's a good example. You can't have it both ways.
Argentina is not a communist state. I'm not an expert on Argentina but a quick look on google reveals that the economic collapse of 2001 has been mostly reversed and that the government is stable. At most, only small sections of the economy are run by anyone resembling communists, and participation in those ventures is purely optional. To call Argentina communist because there are some communal efforts towards growing soybeans is ridiculous.
Further, to say that the success that those efforts may have somehow suggests a communist state could be successful as well is utterly moronic. Do these collective farmers have to support a military? Do they have to negotiate treaties with other nations? Would a person in a soybean collective ever have to make a decision about the allocation of resources for a steel collective? What happens when someone in the collective commits a crime? You make the distinction that "anarcho-communism is doing wonders for those who accept it"; what about those who don't? There's a bit more to running a state than there is to running a farm or a factory. Micro-success does not imply macro-success.
How many bills had Bush vetoed?
None. What does that signify? Hasn't the Congress either been exactly split or Republican during his entire time in office? Why would he veto bills sent to him by his own party?
To say that there has never been a 'true' communist government sidesteps the bigger question: even if you grant that a communist government would be a good thing, can there ever be a true communist government? I think the answer is 'no', because communism requires central planning of the economy, and any time power is concentrated, it tends to be abused, leading to authoritarianism. The fact that all attempts at communism have gone down this road is supporting evidence of this view, but it isn't the only reason to think that this is so. Any ideology will tend to fall by the wayside when that ideology happens to conflict with the interests of those in power.
It's like saying the the crime rate would fall if everyone would just quit robbing, raping, and killing each other. Just because the statement is true, that doesn't make it useful. The "true communism has never been tried" argument is equally fatuous.
it's not like saying that, it is saying that. if there were a transistor that could represent 16 different values, it would store numbers far more efficiently than a binary transistor.
as far as the hardware implementation goes, that's not my problem. i just use what they give me. but it isn't some ridiculous idea; it would just be a matter of interpreting more values from more bins in the range of possible voltages. it's not like transistors are little inherent 1s and 0s; all information is just representation and interpretation, including the electronics of a modern binary computer.
Let's say you had a computer that stored decimal digits. The number of digits necessary to hold the value 9 is 1, compared to 4 bits (1001); the number of digits needed to store the value 256 is 3, compared to 9 bits (100000000)... so on and so forth. If a digit (or a trit, or a hexit, or whatever) could be implemented in hardware in the same way as bits, we would drastically improve storage capacity.
There's also absolutely no reason that a digit can't be treated as boolean... if it's zero, it's false, if it's anything else, it's true. This is the way booleans are abstracted with integers in C. Greater-than-binary digits have the added advantage of being able to represent everybody's favorite logical state, "unknown".
AFAIK, the reason contemporary computers are binary is because that's the easiest way to do it from an electronics standpoint, but I'm not into EE, so I could be wrong on that. There have been ternary computers; see the
Setun for an old example from Russia...
well, yeah, we had to go with locks. everything is now tethered by a short chain bolted to the wall. we had originally wanted everything to be portable, because we thought it would be better to invest in some nice equipment that would get used all the time rather than enough cheap equipment to fill all our rooms, but where each room would only be used for relatively short amounts of time. from a scheduling perspective, things were going great; it's just that idiots (most with phds) wouldn't respect the equipment.
if it's set up and not "fooled with" (people turning it off while its busy, ISDN lines getting unplugged, etc.)
This cannot be a criterion for success if multiple people are going to be using it without supervision. If you're willing to have a someone hired to babysit the conference room, it's fine, but otherwise people will turn it off while its busy, people will unplug the ISDN lines, etc.
At my old job we had AV racks that could be rolled around to different rooms. On these racks were large, clearly visible signs that read "DO NOT MOVE UNLESS ALL CABLES ARE UNPLUGGED FROM THE WALL SOCKETS". So, of course, people would move the whole rack with all the cables plugged in, all the time. It got to the point where we had to pick permanent AV rooms, but there was no money in the budget to get new equipment racks. So we just removed the wheels from the ones we had. We thought, "surely no one will try to move these huge heavy carts without any wheels and big signs saying 'Do Not Move'" but humans are remarkably adaptive in their stupidity. Not one day went by after the switch before we got a call, saying the AV system wasn't working. When we asked for the room number, it was a room that shouldn't have had a system in it - the professor had gotten the pair of football players in his class to carry the whole cart from the room down the hall...
The best thing to do if you absolutely need it to work out well is to hire someone to do it for you, so that when it doesn't live up to your boss's expectations (which it won't), at least there's a bit of a buffer between you and the reason why.
A little more specific to your question, the place I used to work had SMART boards installed in several of our meeting rooms. They are cool, but they are also aggravating. There is a short but obvious lag between when you make a mark and when it shows up on the screen. If the calibration is off even by just a little, the cognitive dissonance of writing one place and having it show up another causes you to "chase" your own handwriting. It's very annoying.
Or they were raised as needed, form part of the total decision the Jury made, and we are simply not hearing about it in this article.
yes, the probability that a 500 word blurb does not convey the entire body of relevant facts of a legal proceeding is pretty high:)
Here's the analogy: it's legal to go to a salvage yard. It's illegal to steal someone else's car. A way to profit from stealing a vehicle is to salvage the vehicle. If the only information you have is that a person visited a salvage yard, there is no way you can prove that the person stole a particular vehicle. However, if you have other evidence that a person stole a particular vehicle, the information that the person also recently visited a salvage yard becomes relevant, in that it provides a legitimate explanation of why the car cannot be found.
Applying it back to the case at hand: it's legal to use encryption software. It's illegal to possess child pornography. A way to hide child pornography is to encrypt the child pornography. If the only information you have is that a person uses encryption software, there is no way you can prove that the person possesses child pornography. However, if you have other evidence that a person possesses child pornography, the information that the person uses encryption software becomes relevant, in that it provides a legitimate explanation of why the offending material cannot be found.
IANAL, so I don't know if this line of reasoning is a valid legal argument, but this was how I understood the comparison the GP post was trying to make. I'm not awake enough to decide if I personally think this should be valid or not...
oh man, that's just like, if i buy a book, and it's just some letters thrown down on some paper, then what have i bought? it's not even really a book is it? so, when i buy a book, i'm really buying the author's soul; it's like the author is giving me his very being. but you can print a book over and over again, so it's like, the author is infinite. and who's infinite? god, that's who. so the author is like, fused with god. but, whoa, i'm writing stuff right now. that means i'm an author, so i must be fused with god, too. so like, we're all god, except for illiterate people. that's why you've totally got to learn how to read, or at least write...
freaked out, man. it's like, information doesn't weigh anything, you know? so it like, doesn't really exist, not like things exist, you know? so we've all got this idea but it's not really an idea, it's like, god, and he's all, "information can be anything, because it's nothing" and that's like, totally far out.
This is false! Kids, listen: If you want to get laid, buy a Powerbook, get some black-rimmed glasses and a dog-eared copy of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and go find a good coffeehouse near a university. Grab a table near a napkin dispenser. Do not open the Powerbook but place it conspicuously on the table in front of you. Pretend to read the novel. Make eye contact with the grad student across the way and smile.
If things go well, she will decide that she needs some napkins, and while gathering them together will accidentally drop some on the floor. Help her pick up the excess paper and make a stupid little joke, something like "Oops, there go some trees." She will then say something like "I love Pynchon" at which point you reply "Have you seen Zak Smith's illustrations for Gravity's Rainbow?" You will then open the Powerbook and visit the site via a bookmark in a folder named 'Diversions'. It is important that she not see the folder marked 'Linux stuuf' or 'pron'. Spend the next thirty minutes saying things like "I really do think media is ultimately the message" etc. If you successfully complete this sequence of steps, sex is all but guaranteed.
Tiger's Eye the golf course opened in 2000, at the zenith of Woods' first great run. So it wasn't there 'way before Tiger Woods became Tiger Woods'.
Also, a fairly thorough Google search of "Tiger Woods" with "Tiger's Eye" alone or along with "lawsuit", "dispute", "pro shop", "Nike", etc., turns up nothing. In contrast, Woods' dispute with an artist, a yacht company, and an advertising company all jump right out.
So, unless you can provide a link, I call bullshit.
If being able to manually set the seed value of an RNG is not a feature, then why do so many RNGs offer that capability? There's no reason that an RNG must expose the seed value; querying an entropy source could be hardcoded in the RNG. There are times when reproducibility is desirable (i.e., testing) and there are times when it isn't. Exposing the seed value to the programmer means that flexibility to decide is there.
Being able to reproduce random sequences is a good thing. Let's say you want to set up a test that feeds random data into a program until it crashes. It would be nice to be able to rerun that sequence (without having to store the sequence) to make sure the problem gets fixed.
That's why most random number generators let you specify a seed value. As long as you use the same seed value, you get the same sequence back. If you want a new sequence every time, peg your seed value to some number that varies, like the current time...
Yeah, stupid Apple, all "Listening to what the customers want" and stuff instead of throwing research dollars into speculative gambits. And they call themselves a tech company.
The semantic web sounds a little like a massively distributed Prolog program, with each separate semweb component defining a rule or relation, and each semweb-aware program just being a query into the environment...
Other questions: how do you avoid redundancies, or pulling data you don't want, or keeping data confined to specific locales or interpretations, or keeping labels synced with the actual data? What prevents someone from declaring something foo when it's actually bar?
No, no, no, you misunderstand. "COBOL is a bad language" should not be interpreted as a value judgment, like "blue is ugly", but instead as a tautology crossing languages, like "azul is blue" tanslates spanish into english. "COBOL" is just programmerese for "bad language".
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This is an example of libraries trying to help people in the face of the PATRIOT act, and you're bitching about interest payments. I think your priorities are a little screwed up.
In regards to capitalism not addressing micro-scale issues, I have to ask for an example. I don't understand what you mean by that.
For instance, how can a decision about the appropriate use of a waterway, for agriculture or industry, be made without a government? Local committees can't work, because a river can stretch for miles, with the interests of those involved being completely at odds, so at some level, government has to intervene.
You're right when you say that the structure of this government can vary, but I have to ask: how many times has communism not taken the form of a dictatorship? It gets back to the original criticism: just because communism could, in theory, not be authoritarian, can it ever not be authoritarian in practice? How would the rise of authoritarianism be prevented?
The problem I had with the GP is that he tried to extrapolate from the fact that there were communally owned and operated farms and factories in Argentina that communism as a system was a good thing. But the truth is, that while these efforts may be fine in their limited aspects, they do not address macro-scale issues. At best, the GP's post shows that communal efforts can integrate into a capitalist system.
that doesn't mean i think bush is an authoritarian dictator, or that the use of the veto is a bad thing or a good thing, or that if bush vetoes one or two bills then the world will fall to pieces. i was just saying that the veto record is pretty meaningless in the context of this debate.
Argentina is not a communist state. I'm not an expert on Argentina but a quick look on google reveals that the economic collapse of 2001 has been mostly reversed and that the government is stable. At most, only small sections of the economy are run by anyone resembling communists, and participation in those ventures is purely optional. To call Argentina communist because there are some communal efforts towards growing soybeans is ridiculous.
Further, to say that the success that those efforts may have somehow suggests a communist state could be successful as well is utterly moronic. Do these collective farmers have to support a military? Do they have to negotiate treaties with other nations? Would a person in a soybean collective ever have to make a decision about the allocation of resources for a steel collective? What happens when someone in the collective commits a crime? You make the distinction that "anarcho-communism is doing wonders for those who accept it"; what about those who don't? There's a bit more to running a state than there is to running a farm or a factory. Micro-success does not imply macro-success.
How many bills had Bush vetoed? None. What does that signify? Hasn't the Congress either been exactly split or Republican during his entire time in office? Why would he veto bills sent to him by his own party?
It's like saying the the crime rate would fall if everyone would just quit robbing, raping, and killing each other. Just because the statement is true, that doesn't make it useful. The "true communism has never been tried" argument is equally fatuous.
it's not like saying that, it is saying that. if there were a transistor that could represent 16 different values, it would store numbers far more efficiently than a binary transistor. as far as the hardware implementation goes, that's not my problem. i just use what they give me. but it isn't some ridiculous idea; it would just be a matter of interpreting more values from more bins in the range of possible voltages. it's not like transistors are little inherent 1s and 0s; all information is just representation and interpretation, including the electronics of a modern binary computer.
There's also absolutely no reason that a digit can't be treated as boolean... if it's zero, it's false, if it's anything else, it's true. This is the way booleans are abstracted with integers in C. Greater-than-binary digits have the added advantage of being able to represent everybody's favorite logical state, "unknown".
AFAIK, the reason contemporary computers are binary is because that's the easiest way to do it from an electronics standpoint, but I'm not into EE, so I could be wrong on that. There have been ternary computers; see the Setun for an old example from Russia...
well, yeah, we had to go with locks. everything is now tethered by a short chain bolted to the wall. we had originally wanted everything to be portable, because we thought it would be better to invest in some nice equipment that would get used all the time rather than enough cheap equipment to fill all our rooms, but where each room would only be used for relatively short amounts of time. from a scheduling perspective, things were going great; it's just that idiots (most with phds) wouldn't respect the equipment.
if it's set up and not "fooled with" (people turning it off while its busy, ISDN lines getting unplugged, etc.) This cannot be a criterion for success if multiple people are going to be using it without supervision. If you're willing to have a someone hired to babysit the conference room, it's fine, but otherwise people will turn it off while its busy, people will unplug the ISDN lines, etc. At my old job we had AV racks that could be rolled around to different rooms. On these racks were large, clearly visible signs that read "DO NOT MOVE UNLESS ALL CABLES ARE UNPLUGGED FROM THE WALL SOCKETS". So, of course, people would move the whole rack with all the cables plugged in, all the time. It got to the point where we had to pick permanent AV rooms, but there was no money in the budget to get new equipment racks. So we just removed the wheels from the ones we had. We thought, "surely no one will try to move these huge heavy carts without any wheels and big signs saying 'Do Not Move'" but humans are remarkably adaptive in their stupidity. Not one day went by after the switch before we got a call, saying the AV system wasn't working. When we asked for the room number, it was a room that shouldn't have had a system in it - the professor had gotten the pair of football players in his class to carry the whole cart from the room down the hall...
The best thing to do if you absolutely need it to work out well is to hire someone to do it for you, so that when it doesn't live up to your boss's expectations (which it won't), at least there's a bit of a buffer between you and the reason why.
A little more specific to your question, the place I used to work had SMART boards installed in several of our meeting rooms. They are cool, but they are also aggravating. There is a short but obvious lag between when you make a mark and when it shows up on the screen. If the calibration is off even by just a little, the cognitive dissonance of writing one place and having it show up another causes you to "chase" your own handwriting. It's very annoying.
Or they were raised as needed, form part of the total decision the Jury made, and we are simply not hearing about it in this article. yes, the probability that a 500 word blurb does not convey the entire body of relevant facts of a legal proceeding is pretty high :)
Here's the analogy: it's legal to go to a salvage yard. It's illegal to steal someone else's car. A way to profit from stealing a vehicle is to salvage the vehicle. If the only information you have is that a person visited a salvage yard, there is no way you can prove that the person stole a particular vehicle. However, if you have other evidence that a person stole a particular vehicle, the information that the person also recently visited a salvage yard becomes relevant, in that it provides a legitimate explanation of why the car cannot be found.
Applying it back to the case at hand: it's legal to use encryption software. It's illegal to possess child pornography. A way to hide child pornography is to encrypt the child pornography. If the only information you have is that a person uses encryption software, there is no way you can prove that the person possesses child pornography. However, if you have other evidence that a person possesses child pornography, the information that the person uses encryption software becomes relevant, in that it provides a legitimate explanation of why the offending material cannot be found.
IANAL, so I don't know if this line of reasoning is a valid legal argument, but this was how I understood the comparison the GP post was trying to make. I'm not awake enough to decide if I personally think this should be valid or not...
oh man, that's just like, if i buy a book, and it's just some letters thrown down on some paper, then what have i bought? it's not even really a book is it? so, when i buy a book, i'm really buying the author's soul; it's like the author is giving me his very being. but you can print a book over and over again, so it's like, the author is infinite. and who's infinite? god, that's who. so the author is like, fused with god. but, whoa, i'm writing stuff right now. that means i'm an author, so i must be fused with god, too. so like, we're all god, except for illiterate people. that's why you've totally got to learn how to read, or at least write...
freaked out, man. it's like, information doesn't weigh anything, you know? so it like, doesn't really exist, not like things exist, you know? so we've all got this idea but it's not really an idea, it's like, god, and he's all, "information can be anything, because it's nothing" and that's like, totally far out.
This is false! Kids, listen: If you want to get laid, buy a Powerbook, get some black-rimmed glasses and a dog-eared copy of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and go find a good coffeehouse near a university. Grab a table near a napkin dispenser. Do not open the Powerbook but place it conspicuously on the table in front of you. Pretend to read the novel. Make eye contact with the grad student across the way and smile.
If things go well, she will decide that she needs some napkins, and while gathering them together will accidentally drop some on the floor. Help her pick up the excess paper and make a stupid little joke, something like "Oops, there go some trees." She will then say something like "I love Pynchon" at which point you reply "Have you seen Zak Smith's illustrations for Gravity's Rainbow?" You will then open the Powerbook and visit the site via a bookmark in a folder named 'Diversions'. It is important that she not see the folder marked 'Linux stuuf' or 'pron'. Spend the next thirty minutes saying things like "I really do think media is ultimately the message" etc. If you successfully complete this sequence of steps, sex is all but guaranteed.
Let's see:
Tiger's Eye the golf course opened in 2000, at the zenith of Woods' first great run. So it wasn't there 'way before Tiger Woods became Tiger Woods'.
Also, a fairly thorough Google search of "Tiger Woods" with "Tiger's Eye" alone or along with "lawsuit", "dispute", "pro shop", "Nike", etc., turns up nothing. In contrast, Woods' dispute with an artist, a yacht company, and an advertising company all jump right out.
So, unless you can provide a link, I call bullshit.
If being able to manually set the seed value of an RNG is not a feature, then why do so many RNGs offer that capability? There's no reason that an RNG must expose the seed value; querying an entropy source could be hardcoded in the RNG. There are times when reproducibility is desirable (i.e., testing) and there are times when it isn't. Exposing the seed value to the programmer means that flexibility to decide is there.
Being able to reproduce random sequences is a good thing. Let's say you want to set up a test that feeds random data into a program until it crashes. It would be nice to be able to rerun that sequence (without having to store the sequence) to make sure the problem gets fixed.
That's why most random number generators let you specify a seed value. As long as you use the same seed value, you get the same sequence back. If you want a new sequence every time, peg your seed value to some number that varies, like the current time...
Have you seen the Bush twins? If I can get a date with one of them, then this all might have been worth it...
if you want something more than the glossover,here you go: http://www.oscars.org/77academyawards/sci-techawar ds/
Yeah, stupid Apple, all "Listening to what the customers want" and stuff instead of throwing research dollars into speculative gambits. And they call themselves a tech company.
The semantic web sounds a little like a massively distributed Prolog program, with each separate semweb component defining a rule or relation, and each semweb-aware program just being a query into the environment... Other questions: how do you avoid redundancies, or pulling data you don't want, or keeping data confined to specific locales or interpretations, or keeping labels synced with the actual data? What prevents someone from declaring something foo when it's actually bar?
No, no, no, you misunderstand. "COBOL is a bad language" should not be interpreted as a value judgment, like "blue is ugly", but instead as a tautology crossing languages, like "azul is blue" tanslates spanish into english. "COBOL" is just programmerese for "bad language".