damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me? send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote, and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget..
We pause for a quick public service reminder: the ringing of a telephone does not generate the obligation to answer it. I have no trouble sitting next to a ringing telephone and ignoring it (in fact, I usually can't hear it because I've muted the ringer). I've noticed that this drives some people (like my wife, for instance) absolutely nuts. They say "How can you do that?". Hey man, it's easy; you just don't reach over and pick up the receiver. After a while, the caller gives up. And before you ask, my voicemail box has been full for years.
Once upon a time long, long ago, when Ma Bell still ruled the world and all telephones belonged to her, a service technician came to replace my home phone. All was well until he noticed that a shiny chrome non-standard toggle switch had been installed in its side.
"What is that?" he said, pointing at the offending switch with a trembling finger.
"Why, it is a toggle switch. It shuts off the circuit to that irritating bell, so I don't have to be bothered by it when I don't want to talk to people", I replied.
I'm afraid the man was truly outraged and confused; evidently he had never come across a user-modified telephone: "You...you can't do that! This phone belongs...it belongs to the Telephone Company!" he half shouted. I merely smiled benignly, hoping he wasn't going to summon the Telephone Police. Maybe there was no Telephone Police...but back in the days of Ma Bell, you couldn't be sure of that.
I've always saved e-mails (except those with jokes, or large attachments), and several times I've been able to dig up an e-mail to prove to my boss that I had already told him something. At least one even an e-mail a couple of years ago.
Yep...email is a great CYA.
Yes, I always made copies of all CYA-relevant email on a USB stick and took it home. Never know when you might need something like that. Even though my boss rarely, if ever, read my email (emails from other managers or his boss had a far higher priority than mine; besides, my writing was too complicated for him), these emails I sent him served to document that I was doing what he told me to, or had questions about his directives. (Didn't help: they moved my job to Malaysia, and declared me redundant. So the Doctor is now unemployed, and will likely remain so, due to his advanced age.)
I prefer email, at work, for most everything, due to being able to do it in batch mode. I can work....and when taking a break, then I go through emails.
This way, my concentration isn't being broken every few minutes by and IM coming in....or whatever when someone is trying to get you THEN.
I only generally use the phone if contact and action is urgent.....but email is nice for keeping records of conversations, as well as communicating in an asynchronous batch mode.
I agree completely. I don't understand why being interrupted every 30 seconds by someone who wants to ask you a question or give you something new to do is a great thing. Not if they want you concentrate on your work. Hmm. Perhaps that explains why managers would love messaging: nothing they do requires concentrated thinking.
What I have always loved about email is—as you pointed out—that it is asynchronous; you don't have to answer right away. Yet, it is still far quicker and less effort than sending paper mail. You can set email aside, and handle it when you are between tasks. You can't do that with telephone calls or IMs. Of course, emails also require that you set down your thoughts in an ordered manner, and adhere to grammatical and orthographic conventions reasonably well. Here in the U.S., the ability to do that is becoming increasingly rare. Only a minority of people know how to write in complete sentences, much less how to organize their thoughts using paragraph structure. Maybe literacy is out-dated in this social networking world...but the more I see of the future, the less I like it. Alas, the world makes ever less sense to the Doctor as time passes.
That seems like a sensible consideration...but it is never a consideration when decisions are made about where to build plants that make anything. It's kind of frightening to think of just how vulnerable we (who live in the U.S. and consume things manufactured elsewhere) are to events in the places where actual manufacturing is done these days. I mean...like China. Suppose China suddenly becomes politically unstable (again). Just about everything we buy will become unobtainable. Consider how many crucial parts that go into consumer goods are built in countries run by military juntas, democracies where a request for an election recount is usually filed with lead projectiles, and countries that are subject to frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc. etc. Frightening, isn't it?
But they have cheap labor, so the plants are built there. However, what drives the decision to build factories only in places where labor is cheap? Why, it's our own insistence on buying only goods that have the lowest price. Maybe the manufacturers shouldn't be criticized for applying the same standards we, the U.S. consumer, apply and actually impose on them. The safest place in the world to build factories is probably Nebraska. Far away from tidal waves, not known for its frequent earthquakes, a placid population...but they'd probably want more than $10 an hour. Would you want to buy a hard drive from Nebraska if the same thing is half the price, but imported from Thailand?
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
That's an interesting point—that SSD capacity is driven by Moore's law, but spinning disk drives are not. If that's true, you might think that SSDs would overtake spinning platters in a few years, wouldn't you? So platters would be out and SSDs would be the ubiquitous storage medium that hard drives are now. (I realize that this point is tangential to your main comment, and that you didn't actually assert it strongly. So I'm not really arguing with you—I just find the idea interesting, and wanted to spend a little time thinking about it.)
So when will solid state devices overtake mechanical hard drives? The first thing to consider is that while mechanical drives are not subject to Moore's Law, this technology has had an extraordinarily long life, marked by a pretty amazing growth in data capacity, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in size and power requirements, as well as an increase in I/O rates and a steep decline in prices. Being lazy, I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on the history of hard drives. It's a pretty amazing story.
When they were first invented at IBM in 1956, disk drives had a capacity of 5 Megabytes, and were the size of about 6 or 7 full-size refrigerators placed back-to-back. (See the Wikipedia image of this device.) About 10 years later, IBM's multi-platter drives were up to 29 Meg. This is not quite what you'd get from a device that follows Moore's law, of course: disk drives grew in capacity a factor of 6; Moore's law would have dictated that they increase by a factor of about 20 over the same 10 years.
However, the growth between 1970 and 1980 was more spectacular. In 1970, the biggest IBM "disk pack" had a capacity of 100 Meg. By 1980, we were up to 2.52 Gigabytes...a capacity increase of about 25 times—a growth in excess of Moore's law!. Significantly, the 1980 device was down to the size of a single refrigerator, and only cost $40,000.
The Wikipedia article has a graph that plots the growth in capacity of hard drives between 1980 and the present (2011). According to the graph, hard drives have increased in capacity at the rate of about 100 times every ten years. Wow.
Actually, I could have saved myself some time (and painful arithmetic) by just finding the article on Kryder's Law first. Mark Kryder published an article in Scientific American in 2005, in which he asserted that hard drive capacity doubles annually. From the article:
A PhysOrg.com article reports on a 2009 study by Mark Kryder.[4] According to the report, if hard drives continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-platter, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 terabytes(TB) and will cost about $40.
So maybe the answer to the question, "When will solid state devices replace disk drives?" is, "never"!
My own experiences incline me to be skeptical of claims that hard drives will be replaced any time soon by something totally different. Back in 1982, when I first decided to make my living "doing stuff with computers", I took a Data Processing 100 class at the local junior college (hey, tuition was cheap, as I was teaching Philosophy at the same institution). The textbook for the course asserted that while spinning platters were now the best method of online data storage (you put all the stuff you didn't absolutely need to ac
A more serious question occurred to me in response to the joke: Has the price of quantity purchases of hard drives skyrocketed like the retail prices? If Amazon or Google want to build another server farm, will they be paying much more than they would have paid a month ago? —If it's only the retail prices that have increased so drastically, then I'd see that as a sign that someone in the supply chain is just taking advantage of a chance to reap a windfall profit. Big purchasers naturally have more clout with suppliers than do individual buyers; if they thought they were being ripped off, they'd buy from another vendor, and no vendor wants to lose that kind of business—so no sensible vendor would jerk around a major customer by raising prices when they didn't have to. However, wholesale suppliers can't afford to sell huge quantities of drives at a loss, so if there truly is a general shortage of drives, they'd all have to raise prices for even the big buyers. Can anyone involved in purchasing large lots of hard drives supply any insight with regard to this question?
I don't think that developing a new moral code is either helpful or necessary; I'm not even convinced that it's possible. I don't think that our problem is a lack a of moral rules, nor that it can be solved by philosophers sitting around and thinking up better ones. I fear that our society has simply become one in which evil is tolerated and encouraged, and where the things that are valued are, in fact, worthless. To cite just one relatively trivial example, the adulation of "celebrities" is foolish and morally destructive. These "celebrities" (essentially, people who are famous for being well-known) are held up as examples. So silly people think that celebrities are important, and want to become like them. Yet the behavior of these "ideals" is often abominable (and, at best, mindless). What kind of society has ideals such as these? We've already discussed another example: the definition of "success" in our society, which amounts to "make more money, buy more toys, step on anyone who gets in your way, and live like there is no tomorrow."
From what you said earlier, it seemed to me that you think our old ethics have somehow become outdated. I don't think that's the case. What is outdated about "love thy neighbor?" Or, for that matter, "Love thy enemy?" Is forgiveness outdated? But you are clearly a thoughtful person; I don't think you meant to say this. I think perhaps you were lamenting the fact that it is more difficult to convince people to be good in these deteriorating times because our old educational methods—such as invoking God The Punisher— no longer work. There may be some truth in this—I suppose there are always people who behave well because they fear being punished. To that I say: we should never have relied on such methods in the first place! (No, I'm not silly enough to think that everyone will behave well if they are liberated from false God-derived fear: such people must, regrettably, be made to fear the lawful authorities.)
I think that neither moral rules nor judicial laws are really needed for a person to be ethical. Ethics does not, at least in my view, require a logical justification, nor does it require a set of either rules or laws. What kind of person has to riffle through a rule book before he can decide on a right action in the moral dilemma that he faces? I can't imagine anyone doing this—except maybe for an autist who is trying to stay out of trouble. Ethics is a matter of character; it has to do with the innate nature and quality of a person.
Being good is often hard, but it hasn't changed over the ages. To discover ethical guidance, look into yourself; read what is "written on your heart". Once you have done this, then the hardest part comes: doing what is right. No, it's not simple; no, all people will not agree on what is right in every instance. But just because it is not simple does not mean that it is false.
Thank you for your thoughtful remarks; you've made me think about these issues.
this is a profession now. Given the absence of any sense of morality among the most intelligent of our young people, money buys all the talent the criminals need. But these guys will work for anybody who has money. The TLAs of the government, for instance.
You treat this like it is evil, and also make the reasonable assumption that a TLA of some government is behind this. I don't see how those go together really, unless you think it is evil for a person to support his country. How is this any different from a person paid to operate a submarine, bomber, or tank? It looks the same to me.
I differentiate between America and the Homeland. I am a loyal patriotic American citizen; I support the Constitution, and insist that the government observe that document to the letter. As the regime currently in power in Washington has, on numerious occasions, chosen to act in flagrant disregard for the Constitution, citing as its reason the requirements of "Homeland security", I conclude that this regime—or at least parts of it—does not serve America, but is loyal to this newly created entity called the "Homeland". Naturally, I do not support the Homeland regime, as I regard it to be inimical to true American values and Constitutional law. Anyone who now serves in a position of authority in the United States of America, or who serves in the armed forces of that country, should be asking himself which of those two entities has a claim on his loyalty.
I'd noticed that too. Religion was once the source of our moral compass, but it is thoroughly discredited now, and no replacement has risen to the task. Leftism sort of tried with various Collectivist / Utilitarian approaches, but was doomed to fail by its Skepticist "No one can be certain of anything" ideological foundation.
Evolution hasn't prepared us for the post-religion era.
I have to disagree with what you say; I don't think that religion is a necessary prerequisite for morality. The relation between morality and religion is a complex one, and difficult to untangle—particularly because some religions, such as the Judaic and Muslim—have taken great pains to impose a legal code on their followers. This has led to the confused notion that you can't be good without also being religious, something that would be quite frightening if it were true. Consider the number of atheists, agnostics, and people with a very dim understanding of the faiths they profess to follow who inhabit the world. It would be far worse than it is if these were all completely lacking in any moral sense. No, one can be brought up as a kind, considerate, and conscientious man, even though he lacks any sort of deep faith. I think this is obvious; truly, have you never met such people?
It's also important to understand that not all faith regards moral laws as being of prime significance. Christianity, for one, is actually not a legalistic faith at all, in that it does not view the relationship of faith and law as being causational. I can demonstrate this by quoting from the New Testament. For example, those who haven't heard the Teaching may have a conscience:
Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness...
[Romans 2:14-16]
Or, more amusingly, faith does not make the devil good:
You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!" [James 2:19]
And it can go the other way: conscience can precede faith. The famous Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, became a Christian because of the revulsion he felt at the end of the Second World War when he learned in full of all the evils of that dreadful conflict. He asked himself about the source of this moral revulsion. Why did he feel appalled when he learned about the massacres and the concentration camps? Why did he feel that these things were evil? He reasoned that if there is evil, then there must be a contrast: good. How could you realize that you're in the dark if you had never seen light? Barth reasoned that his revulsion was the result of a moral sense that had been implanted in him by his maker—God. It's part of the firmware, you might say.
I think we're living in a society that is in the process of breaking down, and the increasing immorality we see around us is just one of the signs of this. You see, the firmware can be overwritten. It can be erased by peer pressure, by poor or inadequate guidance from parents and teachers, by cultural values reinforced in the "media". In fact, if you've ever raised children, you get to observe first-hand that the firmware isn't booted at birth: it is supposed to be triggered by growing up in a supportive environment that provides good examples, that reinforces good deeds, and corrects out-of-bounds behavior. This society no longer provides such an environment. And that will be fatal: massive bad behavior leads to complete social catalysis. There's a reason why the code was written that way.
The evidence points to a high level of sophistication. "The exploit used to infect victims with Duqu is incredibly well written, beautiful in a sense," Raiu said. "The Duqu authors are top-class exploit writers."
If I were the author(s) of this piece of malware, I'd get a real warm fuzzy feeling reading those words. So they're skillful. But they're also destructive jerks—yet the author of the piece has nothing to say about their character. Heck, they're celebrities, and that's all that matters any more.
Of course they're good. There is big money in writing malware; the nerd-lords of cybercrime can afford to hire the very best coders, and keep them knee-deep in twinkie wrappers. It's not script kiddies anymore (except those who are just practicing to get a real job writing serious malware, or maybe demonstrating the appropriate skills for potential employers); this is a profession now. Given the absence of any sense of morality among the most intelligent of our young people, money buys all the talent the criminals need. But these guys will work for anybody who has money. The TLAs of the government, for instance. Or non-governmental agencies with an interest in destruction. There is nothing more dangerous than smart people without a moral compass.
Sort of reminds me of Oppenheimer's comment about H-bomb technology as being "technically sweet".
That's the thing I don't get about people who say, essentially, that Prohibition didn't eliminate organized crime, so why end Prohibition II? It's not going to end organized crime, but it will end a lot of violence associated with the drug trade. It'll also end a lot of the traffic through US courts that tie lots of resources up unnecessarily. It'll end a lot of contention between the US and other countries. It'll reduce the need for new prisons and new prison staff. It'll reduce the burden on police force staffing. It'll reduce the amount of property stolen from citizens by police forces through civil asset forfeiture. The list goes on and on of the benefits. The marginal increase in publicly acknowledged drug use (which is not the same thing as an ACTUAL increase in total drug consumption) is a small price to pay for all the benefits.
Yep...you're so right, so reasonable. Except that you aren't considering the big picture, the cost-benefit analysis as calculated by the people who actually run the business.
You see, these benefits of ending drug prohibition you cited are not seen as such by very powerful interests in the U.S. They see it like this: The violence takes place in another country, so what's the problem? What you see as "tying up resources" they see as a way of getting resources. The U.S. taxpayers wouldn't be so willing to pay for all those prisons and narco police if there wasn't the "threat" of illegal drugs, right? Nor would U.S. citizens be so willing to ignore transgressions by drug enforcement agents against individual rights, not to mention those regrettable "wrong address" raids. Legalization of recreational drugs would dry up the funds for employment of all those extra police, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards, not to mention the purchase of very expensive toys by the para-military police forces that protect us against this "threat". It would reduce the power of our government.
Think of it like this: "drug law enforcement" is just part of the drug industry—the part that keeps the drug barons' profits high. As well as being an essential component of the drug suppliers' business model, drug prohibition is also a huge moneymaker for the U.S. government. Anything that keeps the government fat and happy and growing is fine by the government—and supported by both the major parties in this fine "democracy" of ours. As a whole, the drug smuggling—drug suppression cycle is so hugely profitable for so many people that it's not likely to be broken—unless maybe the U.S. goes broke, thus neatly de-funding both halves of the cycle. Almost makes you wish it would, eh?
There's a lot of nostalgia in these postings (and on many similar threads) for something about programming that has been lost. Some of the nostalgia is for how hard we had to hurt ourselves to do anything back then, but I don't think that's the whole of the story. Nor do I think this is about size per se. I think something has been lost since the good old days of programming, and it may be more than one thing. I think maybe something has gone wrong.
I taught myself C from the blue-and-white book. (Did you know it levitates, if read by candlelight?) I had one of the original Compaqs with 256K of memory and two floppy drives (hard drives were a year or so in the future). I used the Lattice C compiler. I remember that I set aside 64K as a RAM disk...I think I used it to compile, and that when I really got going, I was swapping out three floppies constantly (it helped to hold one in my teeth). WordStar was my program editor. Heck, I even wrote one of those Mandelbrot image generators that Scientific American published the algorithm for back in the (late?) 80s. The joke was that the Compaq had a small greyscale monitor (actually green-scale)—and the whole point was to create an image with lots of pretty colors, but heck I had fun doing it. It ran for a week to generate one image.
One of the contrasts between the original C language and something like Java, or C++ is that C wasn't simple, but it was elegant. This is not a word you can even use in the same sentence with any of the names of the more recently developed languages. It's important to note that the relative modernity or antiquity of the language in question doesn't really have anything to do with it. For example, BASIC was never elegant, and there were software development environments that resembled straitjackets back in the 70s and 80s too: they were called "IBM shops". So why have we come full circle, and put the straitjackets back on programmers?
The answer I've gotten is that you simply can't have an artful programming environment when you're working on huge software projects: the demands of such projects require a strictly disciplined environment, and languages that take away all the sharp knives that coders could use to cut themselves—or others. Maybe that's so. But how many huge programming projects are successful? Why is there a constant flow of new languages and new programming methods (we could call them "fads")? Maybe people sense that we've gone wrong; if so, they may be looking in the wrong places for solutions.
How about just getting your government to make the TSA behave like most other western country's airport security? I've yet to see Canadian and European airport security turn up in a railway station and start frisking passengers.
I agree that the German security krewe that screwed with me aren't likely to show up at the Bahnhof by mistake, but this is an international show, Mr. Moore; you can buy your tickets with Euros, too!
On my last trip to Germany (last year), I made the mistake of bringing my reading light. The trip before that one, I had gotten an airplane seat with a broken light, and I wasn't going to suffer through another 10 hours of boredom if I could help it. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat modded LED headlamp: I had one headlamp that had an OK headband and mount, and another one with really neat optics and a broken mount. So I combined them. Unfortunately, aesthetics are not usually my prime concern when I make gadgets for myself—the thing has a largish lump of black epoxy on top where the wires come out. Yeah, it occurred to me that it might confuse people if I stuck this into my pocket, but I couldn't find anything else, and hey, it's obviously a flashlight. How much trouble can that cause?
And in fact, I got through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport just fine. None of the National Security Goons said a thing about it, even though I had my usual snarling match with the dumb f*cks. Ah, but on the way back through the Frankfurt airport, the guy running the carry-on X ray machine literally danced on his tippy-toes, holding my ugly duckling light up high in the air for all to see, calling for a "Sonderuntersuchung". Yep, special handling for the Doctor.
They took me to the Room For Bad Boys (at this point, a certain amount of Reality Skew had already set in, and I was getting junior high school flashbacks). What I thought was really weird is that none of these people understood why I would want a reading light. I tried to explain to them that reading was fun, but was met by looks of blank incomprehension. This was not some sort of language problem, as the Doctor's native language is German. (Well, OK, with a heavy Bavarian accent, but I think even these damn Prussians could understand me just fine!) They kept shining my light on the ceiling (after I showed them how to turn it on); I remember apologizing several times about how dim it was, and offering to change out the nearly dead batteries. Maybe this wasn't a smart thing to say to people who probably can't tell a flashlight from a Klingon phaser. But eventually, they gave me back my reading light, and let me go.
I had taken no more than three steps when I felt a hand on my arm. I was notified (in English) that I had been selected for a "special security check". It was like the scene you've seen in 50 movies where the prisoner is released, thinks the ordeal is over—and is instantly re-arrested by hard-faced guys wearing the 20th century's most snazzy uniforms with those jagged lightning bolt runes. There were at least five of these guys, and two of them were women. Evidently, this somewhat confused paunchy 60+ year old guy with the fuzzy white beard sent the danger meter into the red zone. The woman who was seated behind a desk said, "Empty your pockets please." (Further Reality Seepage ensues).
I can explain why I lost control. You see, I was wearing my Vest of Many Pockets, and every pocket was filled with things I considered interesting or useful (like reading lights, books, interesting rocks, you know, the usual stuff). I had a mental image of myself emptying out a nearly infinite multitude of pockets, drawing forth who knew what (I certainly had very little memory of what I had collected in the past weeks), a process that, with the accompanying explanations, would clearly consume months. I started laughing. I couldn't help it, I was bent over in paroxysms of laughter, holding on to Frau Schnipperschnapps' desk for support, for what seemed like an eternity. And maybe
How about just getting your government to make the TSA behave like most other western country's airport security? I've yet to see Canadian and European airport security turn up in a railway station and start frisking passengers.
I agree that the German security krewe that screwed with me aren't likely to show up at the Bahnhof by mistake, but this is an international show, Mr. Moore; you can buy your tickets with Euros, too!
On my last trip to Germany (last year), I made the mistake of bringing my reading light. The trip before that one, I had gotten an airplane seat with a broken light, and I wasn't going to suffer through another 10 hours of boredom if I could help it. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat modded LED headlamp: I had one headlamp that had an OK headband and mount, and another one with really neat optics and a broken mount. So I combined them. Unfortunately, aesthetics are not usually my prime concern when I make gadgets for myself—the thing has a largish lump of black epoxy on top where the wires come out. Yeah, it occurred to me that it might confuse people if I stuck this into my pocket, but I couldn't find anything else, and hey, it's obviously a flashlight. How much trouble can that cause?
And in fact, I got through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport just fine. None of the National Security Goons said a thing about it, even though I had my usual snarling match with the dumb f*cks. Ah, but on the way back through the Frankfurt airport, the guy running the carry-on X ray machine literally danced on his tippy-toes, holding my ugly duckling light up high in the air for all to see, calling for a "Sonderuntersuchung". Yep, special handling for the Doctor.
They took me to the Room For Bad Boys (at this point, a certain amount of Reality Skew had already set in, and I was getting junior high school flashbacks). What I thought was really weird is that none of these people understood why I would want a reading light. I tried to explain to them that reading was fun, but was met by looks of blank incomprehension. This was not some sort of language problem, as the Doctor's native language is German. (Well, OK, with a heavy Bavarian accent, but I think even these damn Prussians could understand me just fine!) They kept shining my light on the ceiling (after I showed them how to turn it on); I remember apologizing several times about how dim it was, and offering to change out the nearly dead batteries. Maybe this wasn't a smart thing to say to people who probably can't tell a flashlight from a Klingon phaser. But eventually, they gave me back my reading light, and let me go.
I had taken no more than three steps when I felt a hand on my arm. I was notified (in English) that I had been selected for a "special security check". It was like the scene you've seen in 50 movies where the prisoner is released, thinks the ordeal is over—and is instantly re-arrested by hard-faced guys wearing the 20th century's most snazzy uniforms with those jagged lightning bolt runes. There were at least five of these guys, and two of them were women. Evidently, this somewhat confused paunchy 60+ year old guy with the fuzzy white beard sent the danger meter into the red zone. The woman who was seated behind a desk said, "Empty your pockets please." Further Reality Seepage followed.
I can explain why I lost control. You see, I was wearing my Vest of Many Pockets, and every pocket was filled with things I considered interesting or useful (like reading lights, books, interesting rocks, you know, the usual stuff). I had a mental image of myself emptying out a nearly infinite multitude of pockets, drawing forth who knew what (I certainly had very little memory of what I had collected in the past weeks), a process that, with the accompanying explanations, would clearly consume months. I started laughing. I couldn't help it, I was bent over in paroxysms of laughter, holding on to Frau Schnipperschnapps' desk for support, for what seemed like a
So apparently Wired had the story in the first place, and now they have a second story reporting that the Air Force never knew about the problem until reading about it in their first story? There are two serious problems here.
Not if you bothered to read the article. Here is the first paragraph:
Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.
Some people in the Air Force knew, but they did not notify their own network security organization. If true, then that is irresponsible behavior by Air Force personnel, and something we should thank Wired for reporting.
Having said that, I also have to admit that I'm confused about who knew what, and who was denied information. The original Wired story speaks of efforts to eradicate the malware:
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
One can only hope that the new bunch of security people who just found out about the malware via the Wired article are more competent than the first ones, who leaked the information to Wired. Was the leak itself irresponsible? I truly can't tell: when incompetence in handling such deadly weapons reaches such empyrean altitudes...my mind boggles. Clearly, no one connected with this weapons system knows what they are doing, nor do they seem overly concerned.
Perhaps a bit of mental clouding is to be expected among individuals who run a weapon system "allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives"—apparently by killing them. Doublethink and duckspeak aren't conducive to organizational efficiency...but that's the price you have to pay to keep the terrorists from winning.
Yes, being in a place where news is happening, and then hearing or reading the media accounts of the events you witnessed can be a mentally dislocating experience: you just don't recognize the events that are portrayed in the news. I got to experience this back during the U. of Berkeley riots back in the 60s. I eventually found out why the reportage bore so little resemblance to reality: I listened in on a group of journalists at the end of a day of rioting. They were telling each other what had happened...establishing a consensus. Instead of each reporter giving his own viewpoint, you got consensus reality—as reported by ousiders who didn't know the people or the issues involved.
Humans body contains about 80% of water (out of body weight). It means, if person weights 100kg (about 200 pounds), he/she have about 80kg (about 176 pounds) of water... and it's equal amount of water in litres (80L). Now all math geeks, wake up: How much energy you need to _burn_/_vaporize_ 80L of water?
I'll rest my case.
Work before rest. According to the Wikipedia article on water content of the human body, the average is under 60%:
Guyton's Textbook of Medical Physiology states that "the total amount of water in a man of average weight (70 kilograms) is approximately 40 litres, averaging 57 percent of his total body weight. In a newborn infant, this may be as high as 75 percent of the body weight, but it progressively decreases from birth to old age, most of the decrease occurring during the first 10 years of life. Also, obesity decreases the percentage of water in the body, sometimes to as low as 45 percent".
Your objection might be fundamentally correct, if you're arguing that there's not enough energy in the average person's body fat to boil away the water, but we should start by working with the correct figures
I see no problem with calling this "spontaneous human combustion", if by SHC you mean "this guy burned up and we can't prove how it happened." The coroner didn't posit a supernatural explanation; he's basically saying he's got a bunch of ashes, and can't explain it. Nothing wrong with that; better to admit you don't know than to make up a "rational" explanation.
As far as hypotheses go, the "wicking effect" seems to make the most sense to me, also. The victim is either unconscious due to alcohol consumption, or drops dead of a heart attack; there's usually not enough of a body left to determine the state of the victim just before he combusted. Then he drops a cigarette, falls too close to a fireplace, or whatever...and it's crispy critter time.
For what it's worth, it's fairly easy to demonstrate the combustive power of body fat. They used to sell grills that were essentially a ten gallon metal garbage can. You wadded up a couple of sheets of newspaper, put the paper into the can and lit it. Then you put the steak on the grill across the top of the "can". Works wonderfully--the fat drippings are more than enough to cook the steak; in fact,. you have to take it off the grill or it'll get too crispy. Hmm...wonder what happens if you just wrap the steak in wadded up newspaper? *rationalizes that the sacrifice of a $10/pound steak is justified by Science...*
will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content
Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc.... I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.
Isn't that the heart of the problem? Everyone wants to sell media, but they all want to sell it in a proprietary format through proprietary channels so that they can control the media you buy. It's like having to buy paper books printed in such a way that you have to wear special decoding glasses to read—and of course, you can only buy the books from the glasses vendor, because other vendor's books won't be properly decoded. This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format. The format itself could be something pretty simple: XHTML with user-customizeable styles, and maybe PNG graphics.
ICANN does not assign domain names but TLDs. The.kz TLD was assigned to some government body in Kazakhstan and Google paid that body (not ICANN) to get their google.kz domain.
Moreover, paying for that google.kz doesn't mean it is owned by Google, only merely assigned. I am quite sure the national registrar retains full rights over the domain itself (just like the government still owns the passport, while you and me are only passport "holders").
Basically the Kazakhstan government can do whatever they want about.kz domains and Google decided not to comply (assuming the consequences, obviously).
Amazing what I learn by posting my mistaken opinions on this forum! I kinda wish the learning process was more dignified...oh well, better than not learning at all.
You're right about how assigning domain names works—"registrars" accredited by ICANN actually assign individual domain names within top-level domains to which they have access. Here is the info from ICANN about registrar accreditation. In my defense, I do believe that, once upon a time, back in the ancient days, ICANN actually assigned all the domain names. But there weren't many domains back then. And they all belonged to us Americans...
The.kz domain is actually registered to:
Association of IT Companies of Kazakhstan
6/5 Kabanbai Batyra
Office 3
Astana AST 010000
Kazakhstan
To get more info about the AoITCoK, I had to go to the IANA (which is actually run by ICANN...isn't this fun?). I found this interesting report from 2005 about the management of the.kz domain:
The Association is a non-profit, and organizes activities regarding the Information Technology
needs of Kazakhstan. It was established in April 2004 and as of November 2004 incorporated
32 companies including software companies, system integrators, Internet providers,
telecommunications companies, and others involved in the sector.
KazNIC is a member of the Association, and has been subcontracted by the Association to
continue providing services for the ccTLD.
In 2004 the Kazakhstan Government chose to take a more active role in the management of
the ccTLD, and during meetings with Mr. Gusev it was agreed that the Government would be
given control of the domain...
From reading this, you'd think that the AoITCoK pretty much has the ICANN/IANAsanctioned right to assign and govern the.kz domain name. But then there's this bit:
The GAC Principles serve as "best practices" to guide governments in assuming proper roles
with respect to the Internet's naming system, which the GAC has observed is a public resource
to be administered in the public interest. In general, they recognize that each government has
the ultimate responsibility within its territory for its national public-policy objectives, but also that
ICANN has the responsibility for ensuring that the Internet domain-name system continues to
provide an effective and interoperable global naming system.
So the "GAC principles" (Government Advisory Committee) somewhat limit the powers of national governments, should it conflict with the "effective and interoperable global naming system". Also, what does it mean to "control" a TLD? As far as I know, it means you can issue rights to domain names within that TLD, and that's about it. It's not clear you can revoke the rights to those domain names, once you've issued them, unless a time limit was part of the agreement. Domain names aren't like passports, which are, by long-standing practice and tradition, internationally recognized legal documents owned by the issuing governments. They're more like radio station frequencies or cal
Perhaps you're joking...but the whole article sounds like it's April 1 come early (or late, depending on which way you age). Domain names are assigned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). If you pay them your money, you get to use the domain name, and there's no laws I know of that say you can't set up your server wherever you want. The mucky muck of Kazakhstan might own Kazakhstan, but he doesn't own the "google.kz" domain name...presumably, Google does. Because, presumably, Google got to ICANN first with their $20 to pay for "google.kz". What's he going to do if Google refuses to put up a Kazakh server? Hold his breath until he explodes? Pound his shoe on the table?
Yeah, I agree it's not much of a news story...the only thing interesting about it is that it sounds as though Google runs the internet, and is responsible for dealing with the bruised egos of all the world's governments...oh wait...
Why does everyone have to bring up the Constitution in cases like this?? Please show me where in the constitution is says anything about recording police behavior, let alone cell phone cameras.
Not that I don't agree that the whole thing is disgusting and I hope the police get everything they deserve (though I doubt it). But this is a case of assault, destruction of property, harrassment, wrongful arrest - and possibly excessive use of force on both the witnesses and the victim. But these are just common crimes committed by criminals (yes, cops can be criminals, too), not "Constitutional violations". When you overuse it like that, it starts to lose meaning...
The problem is that these crimes were committed by the police. Unless a local prosecutor indicts those uniformed hooligans, they will not face any punishment for their illegal actions. (They may be sued in civil courts, but this does not punish the perpetrators, but the local tax payers, who will pay the judgment.) It is unusual for a local authority to indict members of its own police force. In such a case, the U.S. Constitution can indeed provide an avenue for obtaining justice.
As originally written, the Constitution limits the powers of the Federal Government, it says nothing about limiting the powers of State governments—or of the Miami police. However, the U.S. Constitution has, in practice, been broadened so as to apply against State or local authorities who violate the civil rights of individual U.S. citizens. Supreme Court decisions have held that the guarantees provided in the Bill of Rights apply to all U.S. citizens, and protect them against excesses committed by local authorities. Regardless of how you view this "non literal" interpretation of the Constitution, a Federal prosecutor could indict the police in question for violating the civil rights of the victim. This may be the only way of making these "police officers" pay for what they did.
I'd prefer if invoking the Constituiton wasn't necessary, and the local citizenry reined in their own police. If I lived there, I'd sure be upset at how my police are behaving. But it might turn out to be the only way to get any justice at all.
I may not agree with what he said, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it. In other words, it's a threat to free speech
You are a clueless idiot. You may not agree, but you'll defend to your death my right to say it. In other words, you're a clueless idiot.
Not so. He's willing to protect your right to call him a clueless idiot unto death (damned generous, I say!), but it does not follow from this that he's a clueless idiot. It is true only that you evidently think he's a clueless idiot. Your claim may or may not be true, but we will have to await a conclusive deductive proof to assess its truth value.
There are no modern nuclear reactors running commercially in the United States.
And that's the problem - the United States is not part of any "modern nuclear age.". We're stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, design-wise - retrofits really don't substitute.
Correct. Other countries are not so afraid to try newer technologies. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on pebble bed nuclear reactors:
By 2050, China plans to deploy as much as 300 gigawatts of reactors of which PBMRs will be a major component. If PBMRs are successful, there may be a substantial number of reactors deployed. This may be the largest planned nuclear power deployment in history.
At least they won't be freezing to death in the dark any time soon.
What burns me is that I'm being denied a service by SOE that I am paying for. As an Everquest player, I hardly count...but I get charged a monthly fee to play this game. Sony has said nothing about a payment moratorium, so I assume they're going to keep charging me. When I try to log in, I get a message that I have been disconnected from their server, and a link to their "support" website that basically tells me that the service is down, and that hasn't changed in over a week.
What could they do instead? Well, I don't see why they couldn't at least bring up the game, with a warning to change our passwords. If they can't do that, then I'd like to know the reason why. Or I would like the opportunity to unsubscribe from their non-existent services. I'd say that SOE's reaction to this debacle is something like a man who's been stung by a swarm of bees, and then thinks it will help if he douses his house with gasoline and lights everything on fire.
Possibly their databases are so messed up that they can't collect their monthly payments? Hey, I bet that's not the case! I'll have to watch my credit card account to see if they make charges. Along with those other strange transactions that have started to pop up. Did I really buy a yacht in Singapore? Damn.
I haven't been able to log into EQ in days. Clearly, this "Anonymous" is a terrorist organization that seeks to strike at core American values. Seal Team Six is on the way.
Ooops...does this mean I've blown my anonymity? Guess I'll just have to confiscate/.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's really important, someone will call....
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me? send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote, and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget..
We pause for a quick public service reminder: the ringing of a telephone does not generate the obligation to answer it. I have no trouble sitting next to a ringing telephone and ignoring it (in fact, I usually can't hear it because I've muted the ringer). I've noticed that this drives some people (like my wife, for instance) absolutely nuts. They say "How can you do that?". Hey man, it's easy; you just don't reach over and pick up the receiver. After a while, the caller gives up. And before you ask, my voicemail box has been full for years.
Once upon a time long, long ago, when Ma Bell still ruled the world and all telephones belonged to her, a service technician came to replace my home phone. All was well until he noticed that a shiny chrome non-standard toggle switch had been installed in its side.
"What is that ?" he said, pointing at the offending switch with a trembling finger.
"Why, it is a toggle switch. It shuts off the circuit to that irritating bell, so I don't have to be bothered by it when I don't want to talk to people", I replied.
I'm afraid the man was truly outraged and confused; evidently he had never come across a user-modified telephone: "You...you can't do that! This phone belongs...it belongs to the Telephone Company!" he half shouted. I merely smiled benignly, hoping he wasn't going to summon the Telephone Police. Maybe there was no Telephone Police...but back in the days of Ma Bell, you couldn't be sure of that.
I've always saved e-mails (except those with jokes, or large attachments), and several times I've been able to dig up an e-mail to prove to my boss that I had already told him something. At least one even an e-mail a couple of years ago.
Yep...email is a great CYA.
Yes, I always made copies of all CYA-relevant email on a USB stick and took it home. Never know when you might need something like that. Even though my boss rarely, if ever, read my email (emails from other managers or his boss had a far higher priority than mine; besides, my writing was too complicated for him), these emails I sent him served to document that I was doing what he told me to, or had questions about his directives. (Didn't help: they moved my job to Malaysia, and declared me redundant. So the Doctor is now unemployed, and will likely remain so, due to his advanced age.)
I prefer email, at work, for most everything, due to being able to do it in batch mode. I can work....and when taking a break, then I go through emails.
This way, my concentration isn't being broken every few minutes by and IM coming in....or whatever when someone is trying to get you THEN.
I only generally use the phone if contact and action is urgent.....but email is nice for keeping records of conversations, as well as communicating in an asynchronous batch mode.
I agree completely. I don't understand why being interrupted every 30 seconds by someone who wants to ask you a question or give you something new to do is a great thing. Not if they want you concentrate on your work. Hmm. Perhaps that explains why managers would love messaging: nothing they do requires concentrated thinking.
What I have always loved about email is—as you pointed out—that it is asynchronous; you don't have to answer right away. Yet, it is still far quicker and less effort than sending paper mail. You can set email aside, and handle it when you are between tasks. You can't do that with telephone calls or IMs. Of course, emails also require that you set down your thoughts in an ordered manner, and adhere to grammatical and orthographic conventions reasonably well. Here in the U.S., the ability to do that is becoming increasingly rare. Only a minority of people know how to write in complete sentences, much less how to organize their thoughts using paragraph structure. Maybe literacy is out-dated in this social networking world...but the more I see of the future, the less I like it. Alas, the world makes ever less sense to the Doctor as time passes.
That seems like a sensible consideration...but it is never a consideration when decisions are made about where to build plants that make anything. It's kind of frightening to think of just how vulnerable we (who live in the U.S. and consume things manufactured elsewhere) are to events in the places where actual manufacturing is done these days. I mean...like China. Suppose China suddenly becomes politically unstable (again). Just about everything we buy will become unobtainable. Consider how many crucial parts that go into consumer goods are built in countries run by military juntas, democracies where a request for an election recount is usually filed with lead projectiles, and countries that are subject to frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc. etc. Frightening, isn't it?
But they have cheap labor, so the plants are built there. However, what drives the decision to build factories only in places where labor is cheap? Why, it's our own insistence on buying only goods that have the lowest price. Maybe the manufacturers shouldn't be criticized for applying the same standards we, the U.S. consumer, apply and actually impose on them. The safest place in the world to build factories is probably Nebraska. Far away from tidal waves, not known for its frequent earthquakes, a placid population...but they'd probably want more than $10 an hour. Would you want to buy a hard drive from Nebraska if the same thing is half the price, but imported from Thailand?
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
That's an interesting point—that SSD capacity is driven by Moore's law, but spinning disk drives are not. If that's true, you might think that SSDs would overtake spinning platters in a few years, wouldn't you? So platters would be out and SSDs would be the ubiquitous storage medium that hard drives are now. (I realize that this point is tangential to your main comment, and that you didn't actually assert it strongly. So I'm not really arguing with you—I just find the idea interesting, and wanted to spend a little time thinking about it.)
So when will solid state devices overtake mechanical hard drives? The first thing to consider is that while mechanical drives are not subject to Moore's Law, this technology has had an extraordinarily long life, marked by a pretty amazing growth in data capacity, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in size and power requirements, as well as an increase in I/O rates and a steep decline in prices. Being lazy, I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on the history of hard drives. It's a pretty amazing story.
When they were first invented at IBM in 1956, disk drives had a capacity of 5 Megabytes, and were the size of about 6 or 7 full-size refrigerators placed back-to-back. (See the Wikipedia image of this device.) About 10 years later, IBM's multi-platter drives were up to 29 Meg. This is not quite what you'd get from a device that follows Moore's law, of course: disk drives grew in capacity a factor of 6; Moore's law would have dictated that they increase by a factor of about 20 over the same 10 years.
However, the growth between 1970 and 1980 was more spectacular. In 1970, the biggest IBM "disk pack" had a capacity of 100 Meg. By 1980, we were up to 2.52 Gigabytes...a capacity increase of about 25 times—a growth in excess of Moore's law!. Significantly, the 1980 device was down to the size of a single refrigerator, and only cost $40,000.
The Wikipedia article has a graph that plots the growth in capacity of hard drives between 1980 and the present (2011). According to the graph, hard drives have increased in capacity at the rate of about 100 times every ten years. Wow.
Actually, I could have saved myself some time (and painful arithmetic) by just finding the article on Kryder's Law first. Mark Kryder published an article in Scientific American in 2005, in which he asserted that hard drive capacity doubles annually. From the article:
So maybe the answer to the question, "When will solid state devices replace disk drives?" is, "never"!
My own experiences incline me to be skeptical of claims that hard drives will be replaced any time soon by something totally different. Back in 1982, when I first decided to make my living "doing stuff with computers", I took a Data Processing 100 class at the local junior college (hey, tuition was cheap, as I was teaching Philosophy at the same institution). The textbook for the course asserted that while spinning platters were now the best method of online data storage (you put all the stuff you didn't absolutely need to ac
A more serious question occurred to me in response to the joke: Has the price of quantity purchases of hard drives skyrocketed like the retail prices? If Amazon or Google want to build another server farm, will they be paying much more than they would have paid a month ago? —If it's only the retail prices that have increased so drastically, then I'd see that as a sign that someone in the supply chain is just taking advantage of a chance to reap a windfall profit. Big purchasers naturally have more clout with suppliers than do individual buyers; if they thought they were being ripped off, they'd buy from another vendor, and no vendor wants to lose that kind of business—so no sensible vendor would jerk around a major customer by raising prices when they didn't have to. However, wholesale suppliers can't afford to sell huge quantities of drives at a loss, so if there truly is a general shortage of drives, they'd all have to raise prices for even the big buyers. Can anyone involved in purchasing large lots of hard drives supply any insight with regard to this question?
I don't think that developing a new moral code is either helpful or necessary; I'm not even convinced that it's possible. I don't think that our problem is a lack a of moral rules, nor that it can be solved by philosophers sitting around and thinking up better ones. I fear that our society has simply become one in which evil is tolerated and encouraged, and where the things that are valued are, in fact, worthless. To cite just one relatively trivial example, the adulation of "celebrities" is foolish and morally destructive. These "celebrities" (essentially, people who are famous for being well-known) are held up as examples. So silly people think that celebrities are important, and want to become like them. Yet the behavior of these "ideals" is often abominable (and, at best, mindless). What kind of society has ideals such as these? We've already discussed another example: the definition of "success" in our society, which amounts to "make more money, buy more toys, step on anyone who gets in your way, and live like there is no tomorrow."
From what you said earlier, it seemed to me that you think our old ethics have somehow become outdated. I don't think that's the case. What is outdated about "love thy neighbor?" Or, for that matter, "Love thy enemy?" Is forgiveness outdated? But you are clearly a thoughtful person; I don't think you meant to say this. I think perhaps you were lamenting the fact that it is more difficult to convince people to be good in these deteriorating times because our old educational methods—such as invoking God The Punisher— no longer work. There may be some truth in this—I suppose there are always people who behave well because they fear being punished. To that I say: we should never have relied on such methods in the first place! (No, I'm not silly enough to think that everyone will behave well if they are liberated from false God-derived fear: such people must, regrettably, be made to fear the lawful authorities.)
I think that neither moral rules nor judicial laws are really needed for a person to be ethical. Ethics does not, at least in my view, require a logical justification, nor does it require a set of either rules or laws. What kind of person has to riffle through a rule book before he can decide on a right action in the moral dilemma that he faces? I can't imagine anyone doing this—except maybe for an autist who is trying to stay out of trouble. Ethics is a matter of character; it has to do with the innate nature and quality of a person.
Being good is often hard, but it hasn't changed over the ages. To discover ethical guidance, look into yourself; read what is "written on your heart". Once you have done this, then the hardest part comes: doing what is right. No, it's not simple; no, all people will not agree on what is right in every instance. But just because it is not simple does not mean that it is false.
Thank you for your thoughtful remarks; you've made me think about these issues.
this is a profession now. Given the absence of any sense of morality among the most intelligent of our young people, money buys all the talent the criminals need. But these guys will work for anybody who has money. The TLAs of the government, for instance.
You treat this like it is evil, and also make the reasonable assumption that a TLA of some government is behind this. I don't see how those go together really, unless you think it is evil for a person to support his country. How is this any different from a person paid to operate a submarine, bomber, or tank? It looks the same to me.
I differentiate between America and the Homeland. I am a loyal patriotic American citizen; I support the Constitution, and insist that the government observe that document to the letter. As the regime currently in power in Washington has, on numerious occasions, chosen to act in flagrant disregard for the Constitution, citing as its reason the requirements of "Homeland security", I conclude that this regime—or at least parts of it—does not serve America, but is loyal to this newly created entity called the "Homeland". Naturally, I do not support the Homeland regime, as I regard it to be inimical to true American values and Constitutional law. Anyone who now serves in a position of authority in the United States of America, or who serves in the armed forces of that country, should be asking himself which of those two entities has a claim on his loyalty.
I'd noticed that too. Religion was once the source of our moral compass, but it is thoroughly discredited now, and no replacement has risen to the task. Leftism sort of tried with various Collectivist / Utilitarian approaches, but was doomed to fail by its Skepticist "No one can be certain of anything" ideological foundation.
Evolution hasn't prepared us for the post-religion era.
I have to disagree with what you say; I don't think that religion is a necessary prerequisite for morality. The relation between morality and religion is a complex one, and difficult to untangle—particularly because some religions, such as the Judaic and Muslim—have taken great pains to impose a legal code on their followers. This has led to the confused notion that you can't be good without also being religious, something that would be quite frightening if it were true. Consider the number of atheists, agnostics, and people with a very dim understanding of the faiths they profess to follow who inhabit the world. It would be far worse than it is if these were all completely lacking in any moral sense. No, one can be brought up as a kind, considerate, and conscientious man, even though he lacks any sort of deep faith. I think this is obvious; truly, have you never met such people?
It's also important to understand that not all faith regards moral laws as being of prime significance. Christianity, for one, is actually not a legalistic faith at all, in that it does not view the relationship of faith and law as being causational. I can demonstrate this by quoting from the New Testament. For example, those who haven't heard the Teaching may have a conscience:
Or, more amusingly, faith does not make the devil good:
And it can go the other way: conscience can precede faith. The famous Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, became a Christian because of the revulsion he felt at the end of the Second World War when he learned in full of all the evils of that dreadful conflict. He asked himself about the source of this moral revulsion. Why did he feel appalled when he learned about the massacres and the concentration camps? Why did he feel that these things were evil? He reasoned that if there is evil, then there must be a contrast: good. How could you realize that you're in the dark if you had never seen light? Barth reasoned that his revulsion was the result of a moral sense that had been implanted in him by his maker—God. It's part of the firmware, you might say.
I think we're living in a society that is in the process of breaking down, and the increasing immorality we see around us is just one of the signs of this. You see, the firmware can be overwritten. It can be erased by peer pressure, by poor or inadequate guidance from parents and teachers, by cultural values reinforced in the "media". In fact, if you've ever raised children, you get to observe first-hand that the firmware isn't booted at birth: it is supposed to be triggered by growing up in a supportive environment that provides good examples, that reinforces good deeds, and corrects out-of-bounds behavior. This society no longer provides such an environment. And that will be fatal: massive bad behavior leads to complete social catalysis. There's a reason why the code was written that way.
From the article:
If I were the author(s) of this piece of malware, I'd get a real warm fuzzy feeling reading those words. So they're skillful. But they're also destructive jerks—yet the author of the piece has nothing to say about their character. Heck, they're celebrities, and that's all that matters any more.
Of course they're good. There is big money in writing malware; the nerd-lords of cybercrime can afford to hire the very best coders, and keep them knee-deep in twinkie wrappers. It's not script kiddies anymore (except those who are just practicing to get a real job writing serious malware, or maybe demonstrating the appropriate skills for potential employers); this is a profession now. Given the absence of any sense of morality among the most intelligent of our young people, money buys all the talent the criminals need. But these guys will work for anybody who has money. The TLAs of the government, for instance. Or non-governmental agencies with an interest in destruction. There is nothing more dangerous than smart people without a moral compass.
Sort of reminds me of Oppenheimer's comment about H-bomb technology as being "technically sweet".
That's the thing I don't get about people who say, essentially, that Prohibition didn't eliminate organized crime, so why end Prohibition II? It's not going to end organized crime, but it will end a lot of violence associated with the drug trade. It'll also end a lot of the traffic through US courts that tie lots of resources up unnecessarily. It'll end a lot of contention between the US and other countries. It'll reduce the need for new prisons and new prison staff. It'll reduce the burden on police force staffing. It'll reduce the amount of property stolen from citizens by police forces through civil asset forfeiture. The list goes on and on of the benefits. The marginal increase in publicly acknowledged drug use (which is not the same thing as an ACTUAL increase in total drug consumption) is a small price to pay for all the benefits.
Yep...you're so right, so reasonable. Except that you aren't considering the big picture, the cost-benefit analysis as calculated by the people who actually run the business.
You see, these benefits of ending drug prohibition you cited are not seen as such by very powerful interests in the U.S. They see it like this: The violence takes place in another country, so what's the problem? What you see as "tying up resources" they see as a way of getting resources. The U.S. taxpayers wouldn't be so willing to pay for all those prisons and narco police if there wasn't the "threat" of illegal drugs, right? Nor would U.S. citizens be so willing to ignore transgressions by drug enforcement agents against individual rights, not to mention those regrettable "wrong address" raids. Legalization of recreational drugs would dry up the funds for employment of all those extra police, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards, not to mention the purchase of very expensive toys by the para-military police forces that protect us against this "threat". It would reduce the power of our government.
Think of it like this: "drug law enforcement" is just part of the drug industry—the part that keeps the drug barons' profits high. As well as being an essential component of the drug suppliers' business model, drug prohibition is also a huge moneymaker for the U.S. government. Anything that keeps the government fat and happy and growing is fine by the government—and supported by both the major parties in this fine "democracy" of ours. As a whole, the drug smuggling—drug suppression cycle is so hugely profitable for so many people that it's not likely to be broken—unless maybe the U.S. goes broke, thus neatly de-funding both halves of the cycle. Almost makes you wish it would, eh?
There's a lot of nostalgia in these postings (and on many similar threads) for something about programming that has been lost. Some of the nostalgia is for how hard we had to hurt ourselves to do anything back then, but I don't think that's the whole of the story. Nor do I think this is about size per se. I think something has been lost since the good old days of programming, and it may be more than one thing. I think maybe something has gone wrong.
I taught myself C from the blue-and-white book. (Did you know it levitates, if read by candlelight?) I had one of the original Compaqs with 256K of memory and two floppy drives (hard drives were a year or so in the future). I used the Lattice C compiler. I remember that I set aside 64K as a RAM disk...I think I used it to compile, and that when I really got going, I was swapping out three floppies constantly (it helped to hold one in my teeth). WordStar was my program editor. Heck, I even wrote one of those Mandelbrot image generators that Scientific American published the algorithm for back in the (late?) 80s. The joke was that the Compaq had a small greyscale monitor (actually green-scale)—and the whole point was to create an image with lots of pretty colors, but heck I had fun doing it. It ran for a week to generate one image.
One of the contrasts between the original C language and something like Java, or C++ is that C wasn't simple, but it was elegant. This is not a word you can even use in the same sentence with any of the names of the more recently developed languages. It's important to note that the relative modernity or antiquity of the language in question doesn't really have anything to do with it. For example, BASIC was never elegant, and there were software development environments that resembled straitjackets back in the 70s and 80s too: they were called "IBM shops". So why have we come full circle, and put the straitjackets back on programmers?
The answer I've gotten is that you simply can't have an artful programming environment when you're working on huge software projects: the demands of such projects require a strictly disciplined environment, and languages that take away all the sharp knives that coders could use to cut themselves—or others. Maybe that's so. But how many huge programming projects are successful? Why is there a constant flow of new languages and new programming methods (we could call them "fads")? Maybe people sense that we've gone wrong; if so, they may be looking in the wrong places for solutions.
How about just getting your government to make the TSA behave like most other western country's airport security? I've yet to see Canadian and European airport security turn up in a railway station and start frisking passengers.
I agree that the German security krewe that screwed with me aren't likely to show up at the Bahnhof by mistake, but this is an international show, Mr. Moore; you can buy your tickets with Euros, too!
On my last trip to Germany (last year), I made the mistake of bringing my reading light. The trip before that one, I had gotten an airplane seat with a broken light, and I wasn't going to suffer through another 10 hours of boredom if I could help it. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat modded LED headlamp: I had one headlamp that had an OK headband and mount, and another one with really neat optics and a broken mount. So I combined them. Unfortunately, aesthetics are not usually my prime concern when I make gadgets for myself—the thing has a largish lump of black epoxy on top where the wires come out. Yeah, it occurred to me that it might confuse people if I stuck this into my pocket, but I couldn't find anything else, and hey, it's obviously a flashlight. How much trouble can that cause?
And in fact, I got through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport just fine. None of the National Security Goons said a thing about it, even though I had my usual snarling match with the dumb f*cks. Ah, but on the way back through the Frankfurt airport, the guy running the carry-on X ray machine literally danced on his tippy-toes, holding my ugly duckling light up high in the air for all to see, calling for a "Sonderuntersuchung". Yep, special handling for the Doctor.
They took me to the Room For Bad Boys (at this point, a certain amount of Reality Skew had already set in, and I was getting junior high school flashbacks). What I thought was really weird is that none of these people understood why I would want a reading light. I tried to explain to them that reading was fun, but was met by looks of blank incomprehension. This was not some sort of language problem, as the Doctor's native language is German. (Well, OK, with a heavy Bavarian accent, but I think even these damn Prussians could understand me just fine!) They kept shining my light on the ceiling (after I showed them how to turn it on); I remember apologizing several times about how dim it was, and offering to change out the nearly dead batteries. Maybe this wasn't a smart thing to say to people who probably can't tell a flashlight from a Klingon phaser. But eventually, they gave me back my reading light, and let me go.
I had taken no more than three steps when I felt a hand on my arm. I was notified (in English) that I had been selected for a "special security check". It was like the scene you've seen in 50 movies where the prisoner is released, thinks the ordeal is over—and is instantly re-arrested by hard-faced guys wearing the 20th century's most snazzy uniforms with those jagged lightning bolt runes. There were at least five of these guys, and two of them were women. Evidently, this somewhat confused paunchy 60+ year old guy with the fuzzy white beard sent the danger meter into the red zone. The woman who was seated behind a desk said, "Empty your pockets please." (Further Reality Seepage ensues).
I can explain why I lost control. You see, I was wearing my Vest of Many Pockets, and every pocket was filled with things I considered interesting or useful (like reading lights, books, interesting rocks, you know, the usual stuff). I had a mental image of myself emptying out a nearly infinite multitude of pockets, drawing forth who knew what (I certainly had very little memory of what I had collected in the past weeks), a process that, with the accompanying explanations, would clearly consume months. I started laughing. I couldn't help it, I was bent over in paroxysms of laughter, holding on to Frau Schnipperschnapps' desk for support, for what seemed like an eternity. And maybe
How about just getting your government to make the TSA behave like most other western country's airport security? I've yet to see Canadian and European airport security turn up in a railway station and start frisking passengers.
I agree that the German security krewe that screwed with me aren't likely to show up at the Bahnhof by mistake, but this is an international show, Mr. Moore; you can buy your tickets with Euros, too!
On my last trip to Germany (last year), I made the mistake of bringing my reading light. The trip before that one, I had gotten an airplane seat with a broken light, and I wasn't going to suffer through another 10 hours of boredom if I could help it. Unfortunately, this is a somewhat modded LED headlamp: I had one headlamp that had an OK headband and mount, and another one with really neat optics and a broken mount. So I combined them. Unfortunately, aesthetics are not usually my prime concern when I make gadgets for myself—the thing has a largish lump of black epoxy on top where the wires come out. Yeah, it occurred to me that it might confuse people if I stuck this into my pocket, but I couldn't find anything else, and hey, it's obviously a flashlight. How much trouble can that cause?
And in fact, I got through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport just fine. None of the National Security Goons said a thing about it, even though I had my usual snarling match with the dumb f*cks. Ah, but on the way back through the Frankfurt airport, the guy running the carry-on X ray machine literally danced on his tippy-toes, holding my ugly duckling light up high in the air for all to see, calling for a "Sonderuntersuchung". Yep, special handling for the Doctor.
They took me to the Room For Bad Boys (at this point, a certain amount of Reality Skew had already set in, and I was getting junior high school flashbacks). What I thought was really weird is that none of these people understood why I would want a reading light. I tried to explain to them that reading was fun, but was met by looks of blank incomprehension. This was not some sort of language problem, as the Doctor's native language is German. (Well, OK, with a heavy Bavarian accent, but I think even these damn Prussians could understand me just fine!) They kept shining my light on the ceiling (after I showed them how to turn it on); I remember apologizing several times about how dim it was, and offering to change out the nearly dead batteries. Maybe this wasn't a smart thing to say to people who probably can't tell a flashlight from a Klingon phaser. But eventually, they gave me back my reading light, and let me go.
I had taken no more than three steps when I felt a hand on my arm. I was notified (in English) that I had been selected for a "special security check". It was like the scene you've seen in 50 movies where the prisoner is released, thinks the ordeal is over—and is instantly re-arrested by hard-faced guys wearing the 20th century's most snazzy uniforms with those jagged lightning bolt runes. There were at least five of these guys, and two of them were women. Evidently, this somewhat confused paunchy 60+ year old guy with the fuzzy white beard sent the danger meter into the red zone. The woman who was seated behind a desk said, "Empty your pockets please." Further Reality Seepage followed.
I can explain why I lost control. You see, I was wearing my Vest of Many Pockets, and every pocket was filled with things I considered interesting or useful (like reading lights, books, interesting rocks, you know, the usual stuff). I had a mental image of myself emptying out a nearly infinite multitude of pockets, drawing forth who knew what (I certainly had very little memory of what I had collected in the past weeks), a process that, with the accompanying explanations, would clearly consume months. I started laughing. I couldn't help it, I was bent over in paroxysms of laughter, holding on to Frau Schnipperschnapps' desk for support, for what seemed like a
So apparently Wired had the story in the first place, and now they have a second story reporting that the Air Force never knew about the problem until reading about it in their first story? There are two serious problems here.
Not if you bothered to read the article. Here is the first paragraph:
Some people in the Air Force knew, but they did not notify their own network security organization. If true, then that is irresponsible behavior by Air Force personnel, and something we should thank Wired for reporting.
Having said that, I also have to admit that I'm confused about who knew what, and who was denied information. The original Wired story speaks of efforts to eradicate the malware:
One can only hope that the new bunch of security people who just found out about the malware via the Wired article are more competent than the first ones, who leaked the information to Wired. Was the leak itself irresponsible? I truly can't tell: when incompetence in handling such deadly weapons reaches such empyrean altitudes ...my mind boggles. Clearly, no one connected with this weapons system knows what they are doing, nor do they seem overly concerned.
Perhaps a bit of mental clouding is to be expected among individuals who run a weapon system "allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives"—apparently by killing them. Doublethink and duckspeak aren't conducive to organizational efficiency...but that's the price you have to pay to keep the terrorists from winning.
Yes, being in a place where news is happening, and then hearing or reading the media accounts of the events you witnessed can be a mentally dislocating experience: you just don't recognize the events that are portrayed in the news. I got to experience this back during the U. of Berkeley riots back in the 60s. I eventually found out why the reportage bore so little resemblance to reality: I listened in on a group of journalists at the end of a day of rioting. They were telling each other what had happened...establishing a consensus. Instead of each reporter giving his own viewpoint, you got consensus reality—as reported by ousiders who didn't know the people or the issues involved.
Humans body contains about 80% of water (out of body weight). It means, if person weights 100kg (about 200 pounds), he/she have about 80kg (about 176 pounds) of water... and it's equal amount of water in litres (80L). Now all math geeks, wake up: How much energy you need to _burn_/_vaporize_ 80L of water?
I'll rest my case.
Work before rest. According to the Wikipedia article on water content of the human body, the average is under 60%:
Your objection might be fundamentally correct, if you're arguing that there's not enough energy in the average person's body fat to boil away the water, but we should start by working with the correct figures
I see no problem with calling this "spontaneous human combustion", if by SHC you mean "this guy burned up and we can't prove how it happened." The coroner didn't posit a supernatural explanation; he's basically saying he's got a bunch of ashes, and can't explain it. Nothing wrong with that; better to admit you don't know than to make up a "rational" explanation.
As far as hypotheses go, the "wicking effect" seems to make the most sense to me, also. The victim is either unconscious due to alcohol consumption, or drops dead of a heart attack; there's usually not enough of a body left to determine the state of the victim just before he combusted. Then he drops a cigarette, falls too close to a fireplace, or whatever...and it's crispy critter time.
For what it's worth, it's fairly easy to demonstrate the combustive power of body fat. They used to sell grills that were essentially a ten gallon metal garbage can. You wadded up a couple of sheets of newspaper, put the paper into the can and lit it. Then you put the steak on the grill across the top of the "can". Works wonderfully--the fat drippings are more than enough to cook the steak; in fact,. you have to take it off the grill or it'll get too crispy. Hmm...wonder what happens if you just wrap the steak in wadded up newspaper? *rationalizes that the sacrifice of a $10/pound steak is justified by Science...*
will tether closely to its music, movie and digital book content
Before purchase, I thought I'd use my ipad for that, because that's what marketing said; After purchase, I never do. Its an absolutely killer email reader, a fantastic web browser, great pdf reader (manuals, etc). I play games on it occasionally. Avadon etc. ... I'm going to avoid advertisements about how this is the 50th media format I should buy a full collection of Beetles music on, or how I should re-purchase my complete DVD collection (again) for their new gadget, because that simply didn't work out as an interest for me on my current tablet.
Isn't that the heart of the problem? Everyone wants to sell media, but they all want to sell it in a proprietary format through proprietary channels so that they can control the media you buy. It's like having to buy paper books printed in such a way that you have to wear special decoding glasses to read—and of course, you can only buy the books from the glasses vendor, because other vendor's books won't be properly decoded. This is stupid, and I'm not switching to e-books until a reasonably wide selection of books is available in an open format from diverse vendors, and there is a selection of e-book readers (or tablet PCs or whatever you want to call them) available that will work with this format. The format itself could be something pretty simple: XHTML with user-customizeable styles, and maybe PNG graphics.
ICANN does not assign domain names but TLDs. The .kz TLD was assigned to some government body in Kazakhstan and Google paid that body (not ICANN) to get their google.kz domain.
Moreover, paying for that google.kz doesn't mean it is owned by Google, only merely assigned. I am quite sure the national registrar retains full rights over the domain itself (just like the government still owns the passport, while you and me are only passport "holders").
Basically the Kazakhstan government can do whatever they want about .kz domains and Google decided not to comply (assuming the consequences, obviously).
Amazing what I learn by posting my mistaken opinions on this forum! I kinda wish the learning process was more dignified...oh well, better than not learning at all.
You're right about how assigning domain names works—"registrars" accredited by ICANN actually assign individual domain names within top-level domains to which they have access. Here is the info from ICANN about registrar accreditation. In my defense, I do believe that, once upon a time, back in the ancient days, ICANN actually assigned all the domain names. But there weren't many domains back then. And they all belonged to us Americans...
The .kz domain is actually registered to:
To get more info about the AoITCoK, I had to go to the IANA (which is actually run by ICANN...isn't this fun?). I found this interesting report from 2005 about the management of the .kz domain:
From reading this, you'd think that the AoITCoK pretty much has the ICANN/IANAsanctioned right to assign and govern the .kz domain name. But then there's this bit:
So the "GAC principles" (Government Advisory Committee) somewhat limit the powers of national governments, should it conflict with the "effective and interoperable global naming system". Also, what does it mean to "control" a TLD? As far as I know, it means you can issue rights to domain names within that TLD, and that's about it. It's not clear you can revoke the rights to those domain names, once you've issued them, unless a time limit was part of the agreement. Domain names aren't like passports, which are, by long-standing practice and tradition, internationally recognized legal documents owned by the issuing governments. They're more like radio station frequencies or cal
Perhaps you're joking...but the whole article sounds like it's April 1 come early (or late, depending on which way you age). Domain names are assigned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). If you pay them your money, you get to use the domain name, and there's no laws I know of that say you can't set up your server wherever you want. The mucky muck of Kazakhstan might own Kazakhstan, but he doesn't own the "google.kz" domain name...presumably, Google does. Because, presumably, Google got to ICANN first with their $20 to pay for "google.kz". What's he going to do if Google refuses to put up a Kazakh server? Hold his breath until he explodes? Pound his shoe on the table?
Yeah, I agree it's not much of a news story...the only thing interesting about it is that it sounds as though Google runs the internet, and is responsible for dealing with the bruised egos of all the world's governments...oh wait...
Why does everyone have to bring up the Constitution in cases like this?? Please show me where in the constitution is says anything about recording police behavior, let alone cell phone cameras.
Not that I don't agree that the whole thing is disgusting and I hope the police get everything they deserve (though I doubt it). But this is a case of assault, destruction of property, harrassment, wrongful arrest - and possibly excessive use of force on both the witnesses and the victim. But these are just common crimes committed by criminals (yes, cops can be criminals, too), not "Constitutional violations". When you overuse it like that, it starts to lose meaning...
The problem is that these crimes were committed by the police. Unless a local prosecutor indicts those uniformed hooligans, they will not face any punishment for their illegal actions. (They may be sued in civil courts, but this does not punish the perpetrators, but the local tax payers, who will pay the judgment.) It is unusual for a local authority to indict members of its own police force. In such a case, the U.S. Constitution can indeed provide an avenue for obtaining justice.
As originally written, the Constitution limits the powers of the Federal Government, it says nothing about limiting the powers of State governments—or of the Miami police. However, the U.S. Constitution has, in practice, been broadened so as to apply against State or local authorities who violate the civil rights of individual U.S. citizens. Supreme Court decisions have held that the guarantees provided in the Bill of Rights apply to all U.S. citizens, and protect them against excesses committed by local authorities. Regardless of how you view this "non literal" interpretation of the Constitution, a Federal prosecutor could indict the police in question for violating the civil rights of the victim. This may be the only way of making these "police officers" pay for what they did.
I'd prefer if invoking the Constituiton wasn't necessary, and the local citizenry reined in their own police. If I lived there, I'd sure be upset at how my police are behaving. But it might turn out to be the only way to get any justice at all.
I may not agree with what he said, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it. In other words, it's a threat to free speech
You are a clueless idiot. You may not agree, but you'll defend to your death my right to say it. In other words, you're a clueless idiot.
Not so. He's willing to protect your right to call him a clueless idiot unto death (damned generous, I say!), but it does not follow from this that he's a clueless idiot. It is true only that you evidently think he's a clueless idiot. Your claim may or may not be true, but we will have to await a conclusive deductive proof to assess its truth value.
There are no modern nuclear reactors running commercially in the United States. And that's the problem - the United States is not part of any "modern nuclear age.". We're stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, design-wise - retrofits really don't substitute.
Correct. Other countries are not so afraid to try newer technologies. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on pebble bed nuclear reactors:
At least they won't be freezing to death in the dark any time soon.
What burns me is that I'm being denied a service by SOE that I am paying for. As an Everquest player, I hardly count...but I get charged a monthly fee to play this game. Sony has said nothing about a payment moratorium, so I assume they're going to keep charging me. When I try to log in, I get a message that I have been disconnected from their server, and a link to their "support" website that basically tells me that the service is down, and that hasn't changed in over a week.
What could they do instead? Well, I don't see why they couldn't at least bring up the game, with a warning to change our passwords. If they can't do that, then I'd like to know the reason why. Or I would like the opportunity to unsubscribe from their non-existent services. I'd say that SOE's reaction to this debacle is something like a man who's been stung by a swarm of bees, and then thinks it will help if he douses his house with gasoline and lights everything on fire.
Possibly their databases are so messed up that they can't collect their monthly payments? Hey, I bet that's not the case! I'll have to watch my credit card account to see if they make charges. Along with those other strange transactions that have started to pop up. Did I really buy a yacht in Singapore? Damn.
I haven't been able to log into EQ in days. Clearly, this "Anonymous" is a terrorist organization that seeks to strike at core American values. Seal Team Six is on the way.
Ooops...does this mean I've blown my anonymity? Guess I'll just have to confiscate /.