The easiest way to make congressmen more honest is to make them rich. It's easier to buy a beggar than a CEO.
You are implying that rich people are less corruptible than poor people. This is patently false. It may be cheaper to buy a beggar than a CEO, but they both have their price.
Honesty and morality are not tied to wealth or income.
The idea of appointing congressmen at random has some merit, though I would want to see some restrictions on the pool of candidates, i.e., no one who is insane, or is in prison, or who has ever voted Republican:)
There are also drawbacks to a system which takes jury duty as its model, as anyone who has ever sat on a jury knows all too well.
I find this protection a breath of fresh air. It is almost as if the publisher is saying "Here. If you know enough to bypass this, presumably you understand copyright law and won't swap files." No scheme will stop a dedicated cracker, so they offer one that doesn't even try.
So why not just get rid of copy protection altogether? They aren't stopping piracy by doing this, they only piss of the "casual users" who want to make a copy (perhaps even one that is permitted by fair use) and who can't figure out how to press the SHIFT key. It's as if they're the Highway Patrol and they can't catch the guy in the Ferrari doing 200MPH, so they take out their frustrations on the poor slob doing 80MPH in his Hyundai.
This "light" protection is better than the wanton data degradation of other schemes, but it is no breath of fresh air. Unless you mean it's like when the prison guard removes your hood for a moment so you don't asphyxiate:)
"When laws stop making any kind of sense or justice, I stop obeying them."
If I remember my Thoreau correctly, one must not merely disobey an unjust law, but must do so publicly, and must be willing to accept whatever punishment is required by the law. Thus simultaneously showing respect for the principle of law while protesting its injustice in a particular instance. I think this point is often overlooked by those claiming to practice "civil" disobedience.
On the other hand, today's laws are so complex and numerous that we are all constantly breaking them in one way or another.:)
All these guys are now wondering how much ramen one can buy with $500!
That depends. Are we talking about Top Ramen? Or one of its close cousins: Bottom, Up, Down, Charm or Strange Ramen?
(Mmmmm. Strange Ramen!)
My local store sells ramen for about $1 each. If you bought 500 packets of ramen and ate them all, one after the other, what would happen? Well that is something to which we already have the answer. You would enter a sort of mental fugue, and your perception of time would slow down to the point that you could finally read all those compiler warnings before they scroll out of view...
Space is merely what tourists will pass through on their way to exciting destinations. For myself, I intend to start selling trips to the surface of the sun. Can you think of a hotter, more exciting place to be? I can think of several groups off the top of my head who would be good sales prospects:
The American Bar Association
The Internal Revenue Service
The Recording Industry Association of America
SCO Management
The International Organization of Spammers
The International Organization of Spam Purchasers
All it takes is one guy with an AK to spot it, and there goes your robot worth as much as a brand new SUV.
True, but it's better than the alternative of sending a soldier out into the line of fire. Especially if the soldier becomes a casualty. No one will be dashing out into a combat zone to pull a robot back to safety.
And if you are worried about the cost, it has to be less than the cost of training, deploying, and supplying a soldier in the field.
Arguably, scammers are getting very clever at their email attacks. They'll send you an email with a link like this:
I imagine someone's already considered this, but couldn't browsers and e-mail readers check for this kind of link spoofing? One method could be to check the text of the link against the URL - another could be to look for commonly spoofed domains (eBay, PayPal, banks, etc.) in the link text and check it against a database of good domains. Then a bad link could be marked as "suspicious" in some way. Just a thought...
Did anyone else get a mental image of a guy with a thin mustache wearing an unbuttoned shirt and jackboots, holding a cigar in one hand and a textbook in the other? Saying "Olé!"?
An arrangement of "dumb" processing nodes in a style mimicing that which the greybacks of AI (such as Minsky and Turing et al) once believed real biological neurons used.
So, I take it this means that the "greybacks of AI" no longer believe this to be true? What is the new thinking?
Please confine your answer to words of less than ten syllables:)
quoting from the referred post:
You do know that the glamorized "sports player and musician" frequently helps millions of people, right? Even if that "help" is only entertainment, it's still valuable.
The collective value of that entertainment can very frequently be "orders of magnitude" more than the work of your average "scientist, engineer and general tinkerer" simply because of the number of people affected.
I do not agree with your premise. First, you are comparing a "glamorized" entertainer (by which I assume you mean a star with wide appeal) to an "average" scientist or engineer. The comparison is invalid. A star performer should be compared with a Nobelist, and an average scientist with an average entertainer.
Second, I think you grossly overestimate the value of entertainment. Do you really think that Jonas Salk contributed less to society than, say, Ernest Borgnine, who won the Academy Award for "Marty" the same year that Salk introduced his vaccine for polio? I doubt Borgnine would claim that his efforts were more valuable than Salk's, certainly not "orders of magnitude" better. Not to mention that scientific and engineering breakthroughs are valuable to all cultures - entertainment tends to be culturally specific. So science really has wider application than entertainment. True, people appreciate the drivel that comes through their TV sets, but were it not for the engineers, they would not be watching TV at all.
It is unrealistic to think that we could replace the reverence for entertainers with reverence for teachers. I only meant that the difference in status of the two groups reflects (badly IMHO) on our culture's values. Its true values, not the ones it claims to have.
People need to realize that most kids don't have a desire to learn these things
And why do they lack the desire? It is because American culture does not truly value learning. Sure we say that school is important, but most parents and students don't act that way. Look at who we revere in this country: actors and athletes. I'll bet most Americans couldn't name a single Nobel prize winner.
This is not new. We have an anti-intellectual streak that goes back to the time of the Puritans. (Here is an interesting reflection on this phenomemon.)
One need only look at the disproportionate educational achievements of Asian and Jewish immigrants to see what a difference it can make when the culture of the community really values learning.
Well, it has to be better than most of what you see on the Sci-Fi Channel. Perhaps you would prefer more episodes of "Mad Mad House" or "Scare Tactics"?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Anything like this?
Built with vxWorks, I believe. Just saw one today at the local Coffee Bean. Cool toy, though I wouldn't be likely to shell out any $$ for it ...
What I love about this is that to turn off Autoplay you find the policy named "Disable Autoplay", and then change its setting to "Enabled". :)
You are implying that rich people are less corruptible than poor people. This is patently false. It may be cheaper to buy a beggar than a CEO, but they both have their price.
Honesty and morality are not tied to wealth or income.
The idea of appointing congressmen at random has some merit, though I would want to see some restrictions on the pool of candidates, i.e., no one who is insane, or is in prison, or who has ever voted Republican :)
There are also drawbacks to a system which takes jury duty as its model, as anyone who has ever sat on a jury knows all too well.
I find this protection a breath of fresh air. It is almost as if the publisher is saying "Here. If you know enough to bypass this, presumably you understand copyright law and won't swap files." No scheme will stop a dedicated cracker, so they offer one that doesn't even try.
So why not just get rid of copy protection altogether? They aren't stopping piracy by doing this, they only piss of the "casual users" who want to make a copy (perhaps even one that is permitted by fair use) and who can't figure out how to press the SHIFT key. It's as if they're the Highway Patrol and they can't catch the guy in the Ferrari doing 200MPH, so they take out their frustrations on the poor slob doing 80MPH in his Hyundai.
This "light" protection is better than the wanton data degradation of other schemes, but it is no breath of fresh air. Unless you mean it's like when the prison guard removes your hood for a moment so you don't asphyxiate :)
Wish I had points, I'd mod you up.
"When laws stop making any kind of sense or justice, I stop obeying them."
If I remember my Thoreau correctly, one must not merely disobey an unjust law, but must do so publicly, and must be willing to accept whatever punishment is required by the law. Thus simultaneously showing respect for the principle of law while protesting its injustice in a particular instance. I think this point is often overlooked by those claiming to practice "civil" disobedience.
On the other hand, today's laws are so complex and numerous that we are all constantly breaking them in one way or another. :)
That depends. Are we talking about Top Ramen? Or one of its close cousins: Bottom, Up, Down, Charm or Strange Ramen?
(Mmmmm. Strange Ramen!)
My local store sells ramen for about $1 each. If you bought 500 packets of ramen and ate them all, one after the other, what would happen? Well that is something to which we already have the answer. You would enter a sort of mental fugue, and your perception of time would slow down to the point that you could finally read all those compiler warnings before they scroll out of view...
There are two robot dogs in that painting. Can you see them? No? Me neither :)
Space is merely what tourists will pass through on their way to exciting destinations. For myself, I intend to start selling trips to the surface of the sun. Can you think of a hotter, more exciting place to be? I can think of several groups off the top of my head who would be good sales prospects:
The American Bar Association
The Internal Revenue Service
The Recording Industry Association of America
SCO Management
The International Organization of Spammers
The International Organization of Spam Purchasers
and of course,
The League of Telephone Sanitizers
You must be thinking of Bakersfield ...
Is she hot?
True, but it's better than the alternative of sending a soldier out into the line of fire. Especially if the soldier becomes a casualty. No one will be dashing out into a combat zone to pull a robot back to safety.
And if you are worried about the cost, it has to be less than the cost of training, deploying, and supplying a soldier in the field.
Just be glad that he didn't whip out his EBCDIC...
I imagine someone's already considered this, but couldn't browsers and e-mail readers check for this kind of link spoofing? One method could be to check the text of the link against the URL - another could be to look for commonly spoofed domains (eBay, PayPal, banks, etc.) in the link text and check it against a database of good domains. Then a bad link could be marked as "suspicious" in some way. Just a thought ...
Did anyone else get a mental image of a guy with a thin mustache wearing an unbuttoned shirt and jackboots, holding a cigar in one hand and a textbook in the other? Saying "Olé!"?
No? Just me then...
Maybe it's just that to destroy Canadian monuments you need Canadian monsters. And it's not easy to think of any good ones:
(...out of the frozen tundra of the Great North he comes, destroying everything in his path, twin antlers blazing with radioactive fury...)
"Look out, eh? It's... Moosilla!!!!!"
(sigh) I've had that last one, and it ain't fun. Imodium usually clears it up quick though...
So, I take it this means that the "greybacks of AI" no longer believe this to be true? What is the new thinking?
Please confine your answer to words of less than ten syllables :)
So ... would that be done by the Internal RunOverYou Service?
(one bad pun deserves another) :)
Where are the sirens?
I do not agree with your premise. First, you are comparing a "glamorized" entertainer (by which I assume you mean a star with wide appeal) to an "average" scientist or engineer. The comparison is invalid. A star performer should be compared with a Nobelist, and an average scientist with an average entertainer.
Second, I think you grossly overestimate the value of entertainment. Do you really think that Jonas Salk contributed less to society than, say, Ernest Borgnine, who won the Academy Award for "Marty" the same year that Salk introduced his vaccine for polio? I doubt Borgnine would claim that his efforts were more valuable than Salk's, certainly not "orders of magnitude" better. Not to mention that scientific and engineering breakthroughs are valuable to all cultures - entertainment tends to be culturally specific. So science really has wider application than entertainment. True, people appreciate the drivel that comes through their TV sets, but were it not for the engineers, they would not be watching TV at all.
It is unrealistic to think that we could replace the reverence for entertainers with reverence for teachers. I only meant that the difference in status of the two groups reflects (badly IMHO) on our culture's values. Its true values, not the ones it claims to have.
And why do they lack the desire? It is because American culture does not truly value learning. Sure we say that school is important, but most parents and students don't act that way. Look at who we revere in this country: actors and athletes. I'll bet most Americans couldn't name a single Nobel prize winner.
This is not new. We have an anti-intellectual streak that goes back to the time of the Puritans. (Here is an interesting reflection on this phenomemon.)
One need only look at the disproportionate educational achievements of Asian and Jewish immigrants to see what a difference it can make when the culture of the community really values learning.
Man, talk about overkill! Who does this guy think he is, Captain Nemo?
Wouldn't it be easier just to get her some floor wax and some rumba lessons??
In Soviet Russia, link follows you!
Well, it has to be better than most of what you see on the Sci-Fi Channel. Perhaps you would prefer more episodes of "Mad Mad House" or "Scare Tactics"? :)
That's easy to solve. Make all the windows out of peril-sensitive glass