That is why I will walk to the somberly walk to the polls with head bowed and pull the lever for McCain. My head and heart are with Bob Barr, but there is reality to contend with.
A vote for a republicrat is a vote for republicrats. Your vote will show that you support Obama and his party (the republicrats).
just hope that whichever candidate wins realizes that he does not have a "mandate" from the people to implement every policy idea, and swing far to the extreme positions of his party. This is going to be a very close race
I am so sorry, but that's where you're wrong. Look at the polls, and you'll see a lot of evidence that there's going to be a landslide. Alas, there will be claims of having a mandate.
Almost nobody who votes for a candidate agrees with him on every single point
Yes, but one of the campaigns is using the "unity, unity, unity" mind control technique. If he wins, it's because the people have vaguely chosen "unity." People can then interpret that to mean what they want it to mean, and one of the interpretations is that 100% of America agrees that that candidate is infallible.
No one knows how to bend the economy in certain directions, they just take stabs in the dark and hope for the best.
And that is exactly why I'm voting against Obama and McCain. They're both running on an arrogant "I will fix the economy" platform. I'm voting for someone whose platform is more like, "I will try to stop the government from doing obvious harm to the economy, or if I can't do that, I'll at least veto Congress' attempts to further harm the economy." That's an honest and achievable goal.
Of course, my goal of electing such people, probably isn't so achievable.;) Most of my fellow Americans want a planned economy, since the Soviet system demonstrated such strength and utterly crushed America to finally end the cold war. I don't quite understand their argument, but that's what it is.
Actually, I see this as Google doing something stupid and utterly useless to 99% of users, and then Microsoft following them and wasting their time also doing something equally stupid and useless.
But oh well. You must be that 1% who doesn't see online word processing as dumb. For you people, yeah, hooray, Microsoft got something right.
Now it's time for network effects. Send us links to your online word processing so that the rest of us will be forced to use it. Then the marketshare will be 2%. Then 4%. And so on.
I wouldn't rely on that argument to keep this from happening in the future. They could have some private third party generate the hashes and then the government could look through the hash list. Or it's not hard to imagine a filesystem with some high-level call that returns the hash given an inode, so that they aren't looking at the file; the system is. Such a call could even return a stored answer that was calculated when the file was written instead of when they call it, so that no actual file reading happens at the time the government looks at the computer.
Instead of looking at it as "they have to read the file to generate the hash," I'd look at it as "the hash is a form of representation of the file." If they're picking through your hashes, they're picking through your hashes.
With electricity you have a 50% loss during the coal-to-current conversion. Then another 10% loss in transmission. 10% loss in the motor and almost 40% loss in the chemical battery. The end result is that the EV1's tailpipe (located at the central plant) spews out as much pollution as a gasoline-powered 50mpg Prius or Civic, and *more* pollution than a 66mpg Insight.
Not too bad for a car on the market 9-12 years ago when the Prius and Insight weren't even on the market. I wonder what an EV1 with a modern battery and (hopefully Japanese) motor would be like.
WTF does Chernobyl have to do with nuclear power? Chernobyl's problems are more a condemnation of communism and irresponsible government, than anything else. Stop voting commie if you don't want things like that to happen again.
NO. 2 very fundamental problems with nuclear : 1/not 100% safe (99.999 is NOT GOOD ENOUGH!) 2/offloading our waste onto future generations.
So what if it has the same problems as the currently most popular energy sources (coal and oil)? At least it has the problem to a lesser degree. Nuclear waste may get out, but coal waste always does.
What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?
Deal with it by remembering that it exists, and accepting it. Faking the time of day is just a way of pretending that it isn't happening, virtualizing the seasons away. Ignoring or virtualizing-away nature isn't always necessarily bad, but in this case it comes with cost and dubious gain.
The best system to replace it? Doing nothing is better than doing anything.
What makes me sad is that I always thought it'd be harder to 'control' the internet, but it seems they'll do it sooner or later.
In this instance, the control is given, not taken. Nobody makes us use a DNS that is ultimately under central (i.e. coercible) control. People choose (though most do it unwittingly) to give power to ICANN to resolve names, and ICANN is unable to resist governments. If you choose otherwise, you can live in an independent (but much smaller) world. It's the trade off of joining society, and you can still opt out, if you want to live a pioneer's life.
The Middle East and its people have been shit on for a couple of millennia
Irrelevant, since no middle eastern person happens to be thousands of years old.
All over the world, people spend their whole lives being shit on, and hardly react at all. (e.g. Americans 230 years ago took up arms over trifles that are routinely tolerated today.) The middle easterner has no more (or less, I'll grant you) to be angry about than the average citizen of the world. Everyone is covered in shit.
There's something else going on with the middle east, beyond "merely" being shit on.
He might have.. at least taken a moment to explain that he'd watched it, and wasn't any kind of threat
Good grief. They KNEW he wasn't any kind of threat. What would be the pointing in explaining anything? And why should a person EXPECT to be abused like that, except for having heard anecdotes like this one?
He could have done better, but he didn't do anything wrong -- except that he forgot to hate and distrust The Man.
Suppose some day HE sees something suspicious that he probably ought to report. What is the smartest thing to do? Nothing.
How many people are going to try a browser because "it is faster?"
Remember when browsers were considered I/O-bound apps, anyway? A 386 is fast enough to run a browser, and we should be complaining about our 28.8Kbps modems being the limiting factor. But nooo.... here we are talking about the speed of an internet client app. What a strange world we live in.
The rage on the FISA act was in a full storm, Obama voted for it, storm went away and now no one talks about it.
The storm went away because the vote happened and it became too late to do anything. The criticism remains; it's just the advocacy that has stopped (because that war is over and the people have lost). Obama will lose some votes over this. Some incumbent congresscritters will lose too, although the bank bailout kind of overshadows the FISA thing.
The thing about executive privilege is: would you vote for anyone who uses it? That's the kind of "get out of jail free" card that might work but also makes someone stink.
Forget about FOIA-type laws a minute. A public official is conducting public business secretly, such that the public won't have any ability to oversee or review it, nor be able to check out how much kickbacks (if any) she's getting for passing policies that benefit some particular private party's interests. It's opaque government, and is less likely to serve the public than transparent government is.
It gets worse: Palin is a member of the party that, for good or bad, happens to be labeled as "conservative." Her strongest base is going to be the people who distrust government the most. A democrat politician can more easily get away with this kind of crap without infuriating their government-loving base, than a repub can. Look what happened to Bush: everybody hates him now (for a lot of reasons, but this is one of them).
If you oppose a Republican candidate, then exposing this kind of behavior is a really slick move and will turn some heads. People who think she's just an honest hockey mom are now going to be wondering what sort of deals she's making, along with the likes of Senator Stevens. McCain's making anti-earmarks a high-profile part of his platform, and here's his VP trying to hide who she (in an official government role!) is talking with, and about what. Ouch.
Executive privilege is not a trigger you want to pull, if you're trying to get elected.
While I'm sure clever AI programs has successfully mastered mimicking the basic semantics of normal dictionary words, cultural references will be another level above that and require exponentially more memory and computation/analysis to properly simulate.
If the AI can learn, then there's nothing unusual about having culture being one of the things it can learn. Plug a TV tuner into it, and give it something to watch. Or feed it web pages, perhaps even Slashdot itself.
If you're paying for the electricity on a human's life-support equipment, you have the right to turn it off, too. But beware that someone might charge you with murder. I'm not quite sure how other people's situations turn into obligations on our parts, but there are a lot of people that do think it happens.
The Ultra Hal example in TFA disappoints me. C'mon, adding deliberate "typos" to trick people into thinking you're more likely to be human? I would call that "cheating" in that it misses the point of the Turing Test. It just rubs me the wrong way, like it's so cheap and superficial.
However, I do find modern day constitution worship somewhat ironic. The law is not always right, and the constitution is no different.
It has a provision for amendments. To me, that means there's no excuse for government doing things illegally. If the imperfections of the law are congress' and the president's excuse for disobeying the law, then can I use that excuse too?
On the other hand, life is listed among the unalienable rights of man in the declaration of independence.
Laws aside, government does not have the power or ability to grant immortality. It's a nice idea, but there's no way to even come close. Every attempt to even try, is 100% likely to fail. I'm in favor of striving for difficult but noble causes, but this is just too much.
Slashdot Mirror
A vote for a republicrat is a vote for republicrats. Your vote will show that you support Obama and his party (the republicrats).
I am so sorry, but that's where you're wrong. Look at the polls, and you'll see a lot of evidence that there's going to be a landslide. Alas, there will be claims of having a mandate.
Yes, but one of the campaigns is using the "unity, unity, unity" mind control technique. If he wins, it's because the people have vaguely chosen "unity." People can then interpret that to mean what they want it to mean, and one of the interpretations is that 100% of America agrees that that candidate is infallible.
And that is exactly why I'm voting against Obama and McCain. They're both running on an arrogant "I will fix the economy" platform. I'm voting for someone whose platform is more like, "I will try to stop the government from doing obvious harm to the economy, or if I can't do that, I'll at least veto Congress' attempts to further harm the economy." That's an honest and achievable goal.
Of course, my goal of electing such people, probably isn't so achievable. ;) Most of my fellow Americans want a planned economy, since the Soviet system demonstrated such strength and utterly crushed America to finally end the cold war. I don't quite understand their argument, but that's what it is.
Actually, I see this as Google doing something stupid and utterly useless to 99% of users, and then Microsoft following them and wasting their time also doing something equally stupid and useless.
But oh well. You must be that 1% who doesn't see online word processing as dumb. For you people, yeah, hooray, Microsoft got something right.
Now it's time for network effects. Send us links to your online word processing so that the rest of us will be forced to use it. Then the marketshare will be 2%. Then 4%. And so on.
I wouldn't rely on that argument to keep this from happening in the future. They could have some private third party generate the hashes and then the government could look through the hash list. Or it's not hard to imagine a filesystem with some high-level call that returns the hash given an inode, so that they aren't looking at the file; the system is. Such a call could even return a stored answer that was calculated when the file was written instead of when they call it, so that no actual file reading happens at the time the government looks at the computer.
Instead of looking at it as "they have to read the file to generate the hash," I'd look at it as "the hash is a form of representation of the file." If they're picking through your hashes, they're picking through your hashes.
Not too bad for a car on the market 9-12 years ago when the Prius and Insight weren't even on the market. I wonder what an EV1 with a modern battery and (hopefully Japanese) motor would be like.
WTF does Chernobyl have to do with nuclear power? Chernobyl's problems are more a condemnation of communism and irresponsible government, than anything else. Stop voting commie if you don't want things like that to happen again.
So what if it has the same problems as the currently most popular energy sources (coal and oil)? At least it has the problem to a lesser degree. Nuclear waste may get out, but coal waste always does.
Deal with it by remembering that it exists, and accepting it. Faking the time of day is just a way of pretending that it isn't happening, virtualizing the seasons away. Ignoring or virtualizing-away nature isn't always necessarily bad, but in this case it comes with cost and dubious gain.
The best system to replace it? Doing nothing is better than doing anything.
Truckers run scamless scamming companies.
In this instance, the control is given, not taken. Nobody makes us use a DNS that is ultimately under central (i.e. coercible) control. People choose (though most do it unwittingly) to give power to ICANN to resolve names, and ICANN is unable to resist governments. If you choose otherwise, you can live in an independent (but much smaller) world. It's the trade off of joining society, and you can still opt out, if you want to live a pioneer's life.
Irrelevant, since no middle eastern person happens to be thousands of years old.
All over the world, people spend their whole lives being shit on, and hardly react at all. (e.g. Americans 230 years ago took up arms over trifles that are routinely tolerated today.) The middle easterner has no more (or less, I'll grant you) to be angry about than the average citizen of the world. Everyone is covered in shit.
There's something else going on with the middle east, beyond "merely" being shit on.
Good grief. They KNEW he wasn't any kind of threat. What would be the pointing in explaining anything? And why should a person EXPECT to be abused like that, except for having heard anecdotes like this one?
He could have done better, but he didn't do anything wrong -- except that he forgot to hate and distrust The Man.
Suppose some day HE sees something suspicious that he probably ought to report. What is the smartest thing to do? Nothing.
Remember when browsers were considered I/O-bound apps, anyway? A 386 is fast enough to run a browser, and we should be complaining about our 28.8Kbps modems being the limiting factor. But nooo.... here we are talking about the speed of an internet client app. What a strange world we live in.
Every version of Windows has more bugs than every other version Windows. Wind0ze $uxx that much!!!1
If you can afford to spend billions of (today's) dollars building these ships, you can afford to send 'em out with a few wowzabytes of random pad.
Obama's strongest opponent also voted for the bailout. That's a net wash if you ignore the third parties (and most voters do).
If the bailout had been more partisan, it would have had a staggering effect on the election.
The storm went away because the vote happened and it became too late to do anything. The criticism remains; it's just the advocacy that has stopped (because that war is over and the people have lost). Obama will lose some votes over this. Some incumbent congresscritters will lose too, although the bank bailout kind of overshadows the FISA thing.
The thing about executive privilege is: would you vote for anyone who uses it? That's the kind of "get out of jail free" card that might work but also makes someone stink.
Forget about FOIA-type laws a minute. A public official is conducting public business secretly, such that the public won't have any ability to oversee or review it, nor be able to check out how much kickbacks (if any) she's getting for passing policies that benefit some particular private party's interests. It's opaque government, and is less likely to serve the public than transparent government is.
It gets worse: Palin is a member of the party that, for good or bad, happens to be labeled as "conservative." Her strongest base is going to be the people who distrust government the most. A democrat politician can more easily get away with this kind of crap without infuriating their government-loving base, than a repub can. Look what happened to Bush: everybody hates him now (for a lot of reasons, but this is one of them).
If you oppose a Republican candidate, then exposing this kind of behavior is a really slick move and will turn some heads. People who think she's just an honest hockey mom are now going to be wondering what sort of deals she's making, along with the likes of Senator Stevens. McCain's making anti-earmarks a high-profile part of his platform, and here's his VP trying to hide who she (in an official government role!) is talking with, and about what. Ouch.
Executive privilege is not a trigger you want to pull, if you're trying to get elected.
I like to understand up without seventeen clams.
Michael Palin can be pretty witty. Yes, I think he could pass.
If the AI can learn, then there's nothing unusual about having culture being one of the things it can learn. Plug a TV tuner into it, and give it something to watch. Or feed it web pages, perhaps even Slashdot itself.
If you're paying for the electricity on a human's life-support equipment, you have the right to turn it off, too. But beware that someone might charge you with murder. I'm not quite sure how other people's situations turn into obligations on our parts, but there are a lot of people that do think it happens.
The Ultra Hal example in TFA disappoints me. C'mon, adding deliberate "typos" to trick people into thinking you're more likely to be human? I would call that "cheating" in that it misses the point of the Turing Test. It just rubs me the wrong way, like it's so cheap and superficial.
It has a provision for amendments. To me, that means there's no excuse for government doing things illegally. If the imperfections of the law are congress' and the president's excuse for disobeying the law, then can I use that excuse too?
Laws aside, government does not have the power or ability to grant immortality. It's a nice idea, but there's no way to even come close. Every attempt to even try, is 100% likely to fail. I'm in favor of striving for difficult but noble causes, but this is just too much.