This ambiguity comes from this This (and all Thises). These Thises should know better than to be named for a demonstrative pronoun like "this".
This is another example of misnominy, the practice of naming people in really unfortunate ways. Movie stars started this trend by naming their kids after fruit and physical abstractions ("Apple", "River", "Moon", etc.) Now it's spreading to scientists and cooks.
Someone, please stop the insanity! For the children!
On the other hand, since the method appears to rely on physically moving the particles to adjust to different wavelengths of light, there is an inherent lag time. It would be great for slow-moving but not permanent displays like billboards, airport schedules, and clocks.
But what about using it for an input device? If you had a pen that could generate electromagnetic force at a variable frequency... hmmm, not sure how that would work. Still as a simple monochrome writing tablet that both you and a computer could read, it would be cool.
The problem isn't black-box electronic voting, or paper ballots with dimpled chads, or any of the hypothetical situations you can conjure. One aspect of the problem is trust. We must not trust any one entity, whether Diebold or Fred and Ethel the election judges, to count the votes.
There are two fundamental resources in voting, the physical ballot and the information contained on the ballot, the votes. The ballot is important as a physical record of the intention of the voter, but the information on the ballot is far more important to the process. A ballot may contain several votes, one per contest (except for multiple-choice board races, ballot initiatives, etc.).
The job of both electronic voting and paper ballots is quickly and securely converting the ballot into a vote, while maintaining the physical record for what is essentially forensic analysis. The situations are almost opposite: with electronic voting, bits can be mangled and made not to match the physical record, if any, but with paper ballots the paper can be mangled, discarded, or destroyed before, during, or after the counting process. Both processes are subject to time shifting: we don't know when the bits in an EVS got there, nor do we know when the paper ballots were cast. All we have are the controls in place, so we can at least get to the reasonable doubt level with paper ballots, but not, as you say, with black box electronic ones.
What's needed is a hybrid, to avoid violating the security principle of Least Common Mechanism. If the electronic system creates a physical record of each ballot/vote, and sends the results in itself, then if each voter checks the physical record as it is created there is an extremely high likelihood that the vote tally will be accurate. If a paper ballot reader tallies the votes itself, there is already a physical record.
Either way, by separating the counting from the collection of ballots, you avoid Least Common Mechanism and force a tamperer to match any electronic tampering to physical tampering, which is a lot harder than doing one or the other. The physical ballots should be counted the same as always, and serve as the official ballot since they will be there for verification. It then doesn't really matter whether the voting machine is open or not.
Unrestricted population growth should be our goal not because we want growth, which is not in itself bad, but because the restrictions are worse than the growth. It's saying "I've got life, but you can't have it."
Humans have the right to procreate. Whether they do it well enough to suit us is irrelevant, because it isn't our call.
Let me put it bluntly: it'd be order of magnitude cheaper (now and in the future) to stuff people into cities floating on or udner the oceans than to move them off this rock.
That isn't blunt, or at least, it isn't much of a statement.
Didja happen to see that I said "such as by getting off this rock..."? To clarify, I am for any plan or technology that allows continued, sustainable population growth, and I reject any plan to artificially limit that growth. Even if the curve is exponential, it doesn't mean we can't sustain it.
If the people are hungry, figure a way they can feed themselves. If that means skyscraper farms, or floating farms over the 70% of the Earth that's covered in seawater, then that's what it means.
Yeah, the "environment impact of farming" on a typical farm, which is mostly covered with a stable ecosystem of plants and animals, is a lot lighter than the impact of a power-sucking, air-conditioned, steel-and-concrete skyscraper.
How about spending this money on ways to reduce the world's population growth? Lack of arable land is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Population growth is only a problem if your basis vectors are skewed. I look at population growth as the goal, and the lack of place to put the people as a problem to overcome, such as by getting off this rock before the big one hits. Try thinking that way, and tell me where it hurts.
There is so much wrong with your post that I can't find anything accurate in it at all. That it got marked insightful is amazing to me.
They are not spying on "everybody". Have you heard of anyone who has been spied on? Do you think the government could enforce secrecy perfectly on anything like "everybody"? But perhaps that's not persuasive. They could be monitoring "everybody" and not telling.
Why would they do that? What possible good would it do them, compared to the harm?
The FISA court is overseeing the spying program now. Feingold knows this, and is just trying to score cheap points.
Who have they "tortured to death"?
"Invade other countries for personal gain"? What, Haliburton? That's so stupid. They invaded Iraq because Iraq was run by a thug, a sociopath with expansionist tendencies. It looked to everyone that he was trying to resurrect his nuclear/biochem program. And he was training, and rewarding, terrorists. He isn't any more.
The only "outing" of a CIA agent was done by Joe Wilson, non-Bushie Dick Armitage, or both. All Scooter Libby did was get caught telling conflicting versions. If there had been more than that, Fitzgerald would still be digging.
The US Attorneys are low-level political appointees. If a cabinet secretary (a high-level political appointee) doesn't do what the President says, he gets fired. Per force, US Attorneys get fired for the same reasons.
Cozy with the Commies in China? How, by not starting a war with them?
"Extraordinary rendition" - Oh, you mean the terrorists. Good point. We should just let them blow up a city or two.
By definition a hole, as you suggest, has no mass. There might be Martian air (or whatever they have there) in the hole, but the hole itself is the absence of mass.
Perhaps everyone is being too charitable in assuming it's just a figure of speech. The kind of editorial sharpness you show in pointing out the aposite adjective is indeed admirable. We must have more of this kind of work on Slashdot, which has gotten too concerned with the content of the articles.
If the evidence is that giving triggers a similar part of the brain as food or sex, might it be that those who give are anticipating receiving food or sex? ----------- "Honey, take a look at this paycheck. Want it?"
"Sure. I made meatloaf. Mrs. Green called and they are having a garage sale at the school, to raise money for the dance. You know about the dance, the one I told you about last week when we were picking out the wallpaper for the kitchen. Mrs. Green says they should be able to open up the whole gym for the dance, unless the football team wins at State."
"It's a really big paycheck."
"Are you even listening to me? You don't care at all! All I am to you is a cook and bedwarmer. Why won't you...." ----------- [I don't remember my point.]
Thank you for your charity in not calling me stupid.
There is a huge difference between being totally shut down by a DDoS attack and being 90% shut down. If you are shut down, there is fear; if you are limping along, you become angry. In a fight, anger is better than fear.
Having multiple points of entry helps in the effort to stay up, no matter what the cause. The reason DDoS's work is that Internet connections are leveraged: a small number, usually one, address per resource. In the case of a network gateway, there is one address for lots of resources.
Now, if the goal of the botnetter is to take down one speciific host, there's not much to be done except switching hosts, and repeating until one of you gets tired.
But if the problem is defending a whole country, then it's the gateways that must be defended. That problem is very hard if you only have one gateway, since the botnets only have to be aimed at one address. But if you have multiple addresses, while it's more work for you, it's very much more work for the attacker.
Also, having multiple gateways to defend gives more information about the sources of the attack.
In effect, having multiple gateways changes the game from a many-on-one attack to a many-on-many attack, which makes it more likely that you will succeed at least in a limited way, which is the goal.
That a whole country could be DOS'd is evidence of someone doing a bad network install. The network should never be down.
Lots of companies have a root-and-branches approach to Internet connectivity, too, thinking that each site (or the whole corporate intranet) needs only one gateway to the outside. Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch the basket. For the family baked bean recipe confidentiality that's good, but for availability that's bad.
The "right" way to do it is to have multiple redundant shared trunks with neighbors. That word "shared" is scary to network administrators (or rather, to their pencil-pushing mentors). It means they'll have to carry outside traffic on their pipes (that's a metaphor, Senator), and that has risks: it costs money, and it has the potential to allow someone to see inside the network.
However, the rewards for sharing bandwidth are enormous: multiple ISPs mean allowing TCP/IP to do its job, routing traffic to avoid disasters like DOS attacks, hurricanes, and nuclear bombs. The ISPs and other bandwidth partners know they have an interest in helping to protect your network. The technical risks can be mitigated simply by routing and tunneling.
Is the above realistic? Nope. Not in a corporate environment, anyway. I'd be really surprised if anyone outside academia or pure ISP does shared trunking anymore.
But it can also happen at the leaf nodes: you and your neighbors share cable broadband and DSL connections, routing through wifi. That violates most subscriber agreements, but it's the way the protocols were designed to work. Your network should never be down.
Wal-Mart is ubiquitous. The other places are chumps by comparison. Wal-Mart has more upside. If the deal works, as you say, Dell could sell a lot of PCs.
Dell doesn't need the retailer to add value with service and support, since they do that themselves.
Dell has traditionally tailored their manufacturing to order. Now they get to see how many identical computers they can assemble and ship, by filling up a Wal-Mart warehouse or three.
That being the case, there may not be the kind of quality issues you hint at. Wal-Mart customers won't say, "Hey, I ordered four gigs of RAM, and all I got was one!" They'll just be buying what's in the box. So a whole class of initial quality problems is eliminated.
Rather than siting down for a minute and actually, you know, thinking about something, or heaven forbid talking to someone who has thought about it, politicians and bureaucrats just up and make laws. It's sort of like Slashdot, except the rule is "legislate first, then maybe think" instead of "post frist;-, think second".
The most important difference between broadband and not broadband is Always On (or, as we Mediacom customers say, "Sometimes On"). The definition ought to be stated in terms of connect latency: how much difference is there between the time it takes to establish the first connection of a particular online session and the average connection time during a session? If the first is no different than the average, you have broadband.
The next most important attribute is Quality of Service:
How often is the thing down (or, as we Mediacom customers say, "what time of day is it mostly useable")?
(more generally): What is the real expected speed?
Is my bandwidth shared with a horde of 9-year-olds playing the latest Britney video
(or their dads, playing certain other videos)?
Does it feel like dialup, since I'm not sure when I will need to reconnect?
The top speed of that connection, and the uplink and downlink speed difference, is important, but less so. Caching, prefetch, and P2P techniques mean that as long as you have anything faster than 9600bps, if it's always on you will have essentially the same online experience as someone with a 2Mbps connection.
Now, with regard to live video audio as a substitute for broadcast media, the faster the better. And 2Mbps is not enough, and is certainly not a magic threshhold, given the QoS concerns above.
Just because a bit or a million bits of a CD or DVD is unreadable does not necessarily make the entire contents unreadable. CDs broken in half can be taped or even glued back together, and with a little patience most of the data can be recovered. Avoid this situation:-|.
Sometimes I've not been able to recover disks that have been damaged beyond a certain point. But I've never lost a CD because it got wet, or had one become unplayable because it warped. I keep backup tapes in a water-resistant container (or in a bank vault).
And with digital media, as others have noted, I'm not limited to one archival copy.
DRM is a red herring, as encrypting archive copies of sensitive material is a feature of digital media, not a flaw. DRM is only tangentially related to media stability, since any encryption you would use to protect archives would be have high fault tolerance and recovery. And if you've done your job and made duplicates of anything you'd get fired for losing, having an encrypted backup be damaged is no different than having an unencrypted one damaged. Either way, DRM on backups doesn't matter for recoverability.
The studies show that the genetically superior corn protects against rootworm, allowing farmers to produce more grain from the same amount of land and fertilizer, with lower pesticide use. It is in fact much better for the environment than incorporating pesticide in the soil, with attendant runoff. Genes don't end up in rivers.
And what if the studies do show that the corn is harmful to rats if they're fed it exclusively? Neither humans nor cows are raised exclusively on corn, so rat studies have to show a big difference in rat health before any action is taken on them. And maybe it's just me, but I don't particularly like rats, so I'd say being unhealthy for rats would be a plus, not a minus for this corn.
I am surprised that Greenpeace doesn't claim Monsanto is competing unfairly since, through natural selection, rats will do better eating its competitors' brands.
What's more, while I find Greenpeace's analysis off-base, their concern for the world's dwindling rat population is touching. Perhaps Monsanto could compromise with Greenpeace by marketing this corn as diet food for overweight rodents.
Slashdot Mirror
This ambiguity comes from this This (and all Thises). These Thises should know better than to be named for a demonstrative pronoun like "this".
This is another example of misnominy, the practice of naming people in really unfortunate ways. Movie stars started this trend by naming their kids after fruit and physical abstractions ("Apple", "River", "Moon", etc.) Now it's spreading to scientists and cooks.
Someone, please stop the insanity! For the children!
My chemistry is a bit rusty.
... hmmm, not sure how that would work. Still as a simple monochrome writing tablet that both you and a computer could read, it would be cool.
On the other hand, since the method appears to rely on physically moving the particles to adjust to different wavelengths of light, there is an inherent lag time. It would be great for slow-moving but not permanent displays like billboards, airport schedules, and clocks.
But what about using it for an input device? If you had a pen that could generate electromagnetic force at a variable frequency
The problem isn't black-box electronic voting, or paper ballots with dimpled chads, or any of the hypothetical situations you can conjure. One aspect of the problem is trust. We must not trust any one entity, whether Diebold or Fred and Ethel the election judges, to count the votes.
Read Acceptable Electronic Voting. Here is an excerpt:
The job of both electronic voting and paper ballots is quickly and securely converting the ballot into a vote, while maintaining the physical record for what is essentially forensic analysis. The situations are almost opposite: with electronic voting, bits can be mangled and made not to match the physical record, if any, but with paper ballots the paper can be mangled, discarded, or destroyed before, during, or after the counting process. Both processes are subject to time shifting: we don't know when the bits in an EVS got there, nor do we know when the paper ballots were cast. All we have are the controls in place, so we can at least get to the reasonable doubt level with paper ballots, but not, as you say, with black box electronic ones.
What's needed is a hybrid, to avoid violating the security principle of Least Common Mechanism. If the electronic system creates a physical record of each ballot/vote, and sends the results in itself, then if each voter checks the physical record as it is created there is an extremely high likelihood that the vote tally will be accurate. If a paper ballot reader tallies the votes itself, there is already a physical record.
Either way, by separating the counting from the collection of ballots, you avoid Least Common Mechanism and force a tamperer to match any electronic tampering to physical tampering, which is a lot harder than doing one or the other. The physical ballots should be counted the same as always, and serve as the official ballot since they will be there for verification. It then doesn't really matter whether the voting machine is open or not.
Parasite? Go ahead and feel guilty for living. I don't.
I want the human race to dominate the universe.
Unrestricted population growth should be our goal not because we want growth, which is not in itself bad, but because the restrictions are worse than the growth. It's saying "I've got life, but you can't have it."
Humans have the right to procreate. Whether they do it well enough to suit us is irrelevant, because it isn't our call.
Wow. Of those 7, I agree only with 1 and 3, and those only by acceptance, not insistence.
But it's still better to work on how best to keep the boat afloat, rather than telling anyone they need to swim ashore.
Let me put it bluntly: it'd be order of magnitude cheaper (now and in the future) to stuff people into cities floating on or udner the oceans than to move them off this rock.
That isn't blunt, or at least, it isn't much of a statement.
Didja happen to see that I said "such as by getting off this rock..."? To clarify, I am for any plan or technology that allows continued, sustainable population growth, and I reject any plan to artificially limit that growth. Even if the curve is exponential, it doesn't mean we can't sustain it.
If the people are hungry, figure a way they can feed themselves. If that means skyscraper farms, or floating farms over the 70% of the Earth that's covered in seawater, then that's what it means.
Which paranoid and dangerous assumptions were those?
Yeah, the "environment impact of farming" on a typical farm, which is mostly covered with a stable ecosystem of plants and animals, is a lot lighter than the impact of a power-sucking, air-conditioned, steel-and-concrete skyscraper.
How about spending this money on ways to reduce the world's population growth? Lack of arable land is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Population growth is only a problem if your basis vectors are skewed. I look at population growth as the goal, and the lack of place to put the people as a problem to overcome, such as by getting off this rock before the big one hits. Try thinking that way, and tell me where it hurts.
I mean, these synthetics have got to be smart enough to run for Congress, or do other jobs humans won't do.
There is so much wrong with your post that I can't find anything accurate in it at all. That it got marked insightful is amazing to me.
They are not spying on "everybody". Have you heard of anyone who has been spied on? Do you think the government could enforce secrecy perfectly on anything like "everybody"? But perhaps that's not persuasive. They could be monitoring "everybody" and not telling.
Why would they do that? What possible good would it do them, compared to the harm?
The FISA court is overseeing the spying program now. Feingold knows this, and is just trying to score cheap points.
Who have they "tortured to death"?
"Invade other countries for personal gain"? What, Haliburton? That's so stupid. They invaded Iraq because Iraq was run by a thug, a sociopath with expansionist tendencies. It looked to everyone that he was trying to resurrect his nuclear/biochem program. And he was training, and rewarding, terrorists. He isn't any more.
The only "outing" of a CIA agent was done by Joe Wilson, non-Bushie Dick Armitage, or both. All Scooter Libby did was get caught telling conflicting versions. If there had been more than that, Fitzgerald would still be digging.
The US Attorneys are low-level political appointees. If a cabinet secretary (a high-level political appointee) doesn't do what the President says, he gets fired. Per force, US Attorneys get fired for the same reasons.
Cozy with the Commies in China? How, by not starting a war with them?
"Extraordinary rendition" - Oh, you mean the terrorists. Good point. We should just let them blow up a city or two.
Inapposite, not "aposite". Note to self: you're a moron.
By definition a hole, as you suggest, has no mass. There might be Martian air (or whatever they have there) in the hole, but the hole itself is the absence of mass.
Perhaps everyone is being too charitable in assuming it's just a figure of speech. The kind of editorial sharpness you show in pointing out the aposite adjective is indeed admirable. We must have more of this kind of work on Slashdot, which has gotten too concerned with the content of the articles.
If the evidence is that giving triggers a similar part of the brain as food or sex, might it be that those who give are anticipating receiving food or sex?
...."
-----------
"Honey, take a look at this paycheck. Want it?"
"Sure. I made meatloaf. Mrs. Green called and they are having a garage sale at the school, to raise money for the dance. You know about the dance, the one I told you about last week when we were picking out the wallpaper for the kitchen. Mrs. Green says they should be able to open up the whole gym for the dance, unless the football team wins at State."
"It's a really big paycheck."
"Are you even listening to me? You don't care at all! All I am to you is a cook and bedwarmer. Why won't you
-----------
[I don't remember my point.]
The first "D" stands for "Distributed."
Thank you for your charity in not calling me stupid.
There is a huge difference between being totally shut down by a DDoS attack and being 90% shut down. If you are shut down, there is fear; if you are limping along, you become angry. In a fight, anger is better than fear.
Having multiple points of entry helps in the effort to stay up, no matter what the cause. The reason DDoS's work is that Internet connections are leveraged: a small number, usually one, address per resource. In the case of a network gateway, there is one address for lots of resources.
Now, if the goal of the botnetter is to take down one speciific host, there's not much to be done except switching hosts, and repeating until one of you gets tired.
But if the problem is defending a whole country, then it's the gateways that must be defended. That problem is very hard if you only have one gateway, since the botnets only have to be aimed at one address. But if you have multiple addresses, while it's more work for you, it's very much more work for the attacker.
Also, having multiple gateways to defend gives more information about the sources of the attack.
In effect, having multiple gateways changes the game from a many-on-one attack to a many-on-many attack, which makes it more likely that you will succeed at least in a limited way, which is the goal.
That a whole country could be DOS'd is evidence of someone doing a bad network install. The network should never be down.
Lots of companies have a root-and-branches approach to Internet connectivity, too, thinking that each site (or the whole corporate intranet) needs only one gateway to the outside. Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch the basket. For the family baked bean recipe confidentiality that's good, but for availability that's bad.
The "right" way to do it is to have multiple redundant shared trunks with neighbors. That word "shared" is scary to network administrators (or rather, to their pencil-pushing mentors). It means they'll have to carry outside traffic on their pipes (that's a metaphor, Senator), and that has risks: it costs money, and it has the potential to allow someone to see inside the network.
However, the rewards for sharing bandwidth are enormous: multiple ISPs mean allowing TCP/IP to do its job, routing traffic to avoid disasters like DOS attacks, hurricanes, and nuclear bombs. The ISPs and other bandwidth partners know they have an interest in helping to protect your network. The technical risks can be mitigated simply by routing and tunneling.
Is the above realistic? Nope. Not in a corporate environment, anyway. I'd be really surprised if anyone outside academia or pure ISP does shared trunking anymore.
But it can also happen at the leaf nodes: you and your neighbors share cable broadband and DSL connections, routing through wifi. That violates most subscriber agreements, but it's the way the protocols were designed to work. Your network should never be down.
Never.
Wal-Mart is ubiquitous. The other places are chumps by comparison. Wal-Mart has more upside. If the deal works, as you say, Dell could sell a lot of PCs.
Dell doesn't need the retailer to add value with service and support, since they do that themselves.
Dell has traditionally tailored their manufacturing to order. Now they get to see how many identical computers they can assemble and ship, by filling up a Wal-Mart warehouse or three.
That being the case, there may not be the kind of quality issues you hint at. Wal-Mart customers won't say, "Hey, I ordered four gigs of RAM, and all I got was one!" They'll just be buying what's in the box. So a whole class of initial quality problems is eliminated.
HP said it was just a poor company from across the border, here to make profits Americans won't make.
The Feds decided it was too much hassle, made a speech, and let them go.
Rather than siting down for a minute and actually, you know, thinking about something, or heaven forbid talking to someone who has thought about it, politicians and bureaucrats just up and make laws. It's sort of like Slashdot, except the rule is "legislate first, then maybe think" instead of "post frist ;-, think second".
The most important difference between broadband and not broadband is Always On (or, as we Mediacom customers say, "Sometimes On"). The definition ought to be stated in terms of connect latency: how much difference is there between the time it takes to establish the first connection of a particular online session and the average connection time during a session? If the first is no different than the average, you have broadband.
The next most important attribute is Quality of Service:
The top speed of that connection, and the uplink and downlink speed difference, is important, but less so. Caching, prefetch, and P2P techniques mean that as long as you have anything faster than 9600bps, if it's always on you will have essentially the same online experience as someone with a 2Mbps connection.
Now, with regard to live video audio as a substitute for broadcast media, the faster the better. And 2Mbps is not enough, and is certainly not a magic threshhold, given the QoS concerns above.
Is Microsoft a monster, or just a bogeyman?
We all have to eat Monsanto brand corn.
This will have the added benefit of preventing athlete's foot.
Just because a bit or a million bits of a CD or DVD is unreadable does not necessarily make the entire contents unreadable. CDs broken in half can be taped or even glued back together, and with a little patience most of the data can be recovered. Avoid this situation :-|.
Sometimes I've not been able to recover disks that have been damaged beyond a certain point. But I've never lost a CD because it got wet, or had one become unplayable because it warped. I keep backup tapes in a water-resistant container (or in a bank vault).
And with digital media, as others have noted, I'm not limited to one archival copy.
DRM is a red herring, as encrypting archive copies of sensitive material is a feature of digital media, not a flaw. DRM is only tangentially related to media stability, since any encryption you would use to protect archives would be have high fault tolerance and recovery. And if you've done your job and made duplicates of anything you'd get fired for losing, having an encrypted backup be damaged is no different than having an unencrypted one damaged. Either way, DRM on backups doesn't matter for recoverability.
Actually, she didn't have the savvy to flush her cache.
Actually, she'd have done much better to degauss her hard drive after the dirty deed.
Actually, she'd have done much better not to have killed anyone in the first place.
As a detective friend of mine once said, "Yer criminals'r mostly stupid - it's why they're criminals."
The studies show that the genetically superior corn protects against rootworm, allowing farmers to produce more grain from the same amount of land and fertilizer, with lower pesticide use. It is in fact much better for the environment than incorporating pesticide in the soil, with attendant runoff. Genes don't end up in rivers.
And what if the studies do show that the corn is harmful to rats if they're fed it exclusively? Neither humans nor cows are raised exclusively on corn, so rat studies have to show a big difference in rat health before any action is taken on them. And maybe it's just me, but I don't particularly like rats, so I'd say being unhealthy for rats would be a plus, not a minus for this corn.
I am surprised that Greenpeace doesn't claim Monsanto is competing unfairly since, through natural selection, rats will do better eating its competitors' brands.
What's more, while I find Greenpeace's analysis off-base, their concern for the world's dwindling rat population is touching. Perhaps Monsanto could compromise with Greenpeace by marketing this corn as diet food for overweight rodents.
"will last until the people discover they can vote themselves free bread."
Having grown fat on free bread, the people will now vote themselves free information.
Just saying.