Actually, it is sort-of useful to get an old supercomputer. If you have the space, cooling and power for it - it's a great development and teaching platform, as well as letting you do trials or smaller runs without taxing your allocation on the bigger, national/international HPC systems.
I recently had the pleasure of giving away about a third of our recently replaced HPC cluster to the physics department of the university I work for, and they were very very happy indeed. (in norwegian)
I do agree with the conclusions of TFA, although I think there are some holes and misunderstandings in it.. but, over the course of the last decade or so, any will whatsoever to offer guidance and help to "the entertainment industry" has vanished completely for me.
Reason? I've realized that this industry is not in the business of making content, but about _controlling_ content. They pay the creative people who make the content for the rights to control it, and through that ownership extract earnings. They are, effectively, a middle man who contribute nothing to the audience side of the equation, and their contribution to the creator side is merely as financiers and facilitators, a role I consider purely administrative.
I don't see why I should offer my experience and advice to them, unless they pay me to do so. I say let this industry rot if they can no longer operate successfully. And actively fight them, if they try to undermine the average citizen's freedoms in the process. Focus your funds and energy on supporting the creative people who actually make the art, encourage them to sell it to you directly, write to them and ask them as a fan to make it available to you in the form you want, so you an actually pay them without you or them being swindled by their pimps^Wdistributors.
While I agree with you that online-only play is one strategy that could work for a lot of games, I have to take issue with it or any other radical measures beeing seen as necessary for the PC games market 'to endure', as all the figures I can find seem to support my gut feeling that the PC gaming industry is bigger than it has ever been.
If there are companies that really feel that they struggle because people are downloading a copy rather than buying it in the officially provided format, then I humbly propose that those companies do some unbiased analysis of why people won't buy their packages. Could it be that people love the game, but hate the packaging?
Typing a long license number is the least problem when it comes to "copy protection".
The "CD-burning software stopping to work" issue you are mentioning was the StarForce protection scheme which basically replaced your cd/dvd driver with a modified one (without asking your consent or letting you know, ofcourse). This is a perfect example of the utter lack of respect for anyone or anything that a lot of proprietary software industry has for its clients. Far from being unique, this type of "copy protection" that actually sabotages the users operating environment is quite widespread.
I suspect that the decision makers who orders these sorts of things installed in their products are the least competent people to do so, since they are 100% management and 0% technical in their understanding of the problem. "People steal our games, so let's install some bear traps and landmines in them so people won't try to copy them". What they don't seem to want to face, is that all these traps are removed before the copying really starts. There is no method at present for avoiding your game being cracked and distributed, and in many, if not most cases, the paying customer gets a poorer product than the pirate, because of invasive and annoying copy protection schemes which invariably are ineffective against the warez scene anyway. The only reasonable way of insuring that most or all of your users are paying for the product is to make the game rely on online servers which have access to the payment details. You cannot have an offline/single player mode. You cannot have private servers. You cannot become so successful that people will bother to reverse engineer your protocol and write their own server software.
Having been an avid gamer for 25 years or so, I am convinced that the biggest selling titles are also the ones who are copied the most. I rarely, if ever, buy a game without trying it properly first. So my simple advice to games publishers is to keep sticking to the old serial number validation, and forget disc checks and other similar measures. They only cost you extra money and gets you nothing in return (other than hostility from your core demographic) Rather than make it hard for people to user and maintain their software, you should make it easy to pay and play, and don't force people to run unrelated software (like "EA Download Manager" or Steam or such 'agents'). The only logical way of dealing with this is to make it a hassle to crack the serial code validation, if you can, but not implent anything that will hinder the use of the product. Hope that people like your product enough that they want to buy it after trying it.
it seems every other week there is some big threat to the content industry, this week it's wow, next week it's piracy, week after that it's pirate ghosts or whatever, bottom line is the execs in these types of companies are very good at coming up with excuses for why they aren't making as much money as they've been telling their boards and shareholders they would.
If you want to compete with WoW, then make something better. Don't whine because noone wants to buy your outrageously priced plastic discs to play the next rehashed title for a couple of weeks before losing interest. Which, really, is the case with most of the stuff that comes out of said industries - it has little or no lasting appeal. Unlike WoW.
Probably because you have improper bios settings, maybe in the memory controller department? RTFA!
You might have to, for example, take the memclock down a notch (say to ddr333 instead of ddr400) and then increase the htt until the ram is running at a decent clock again. Memtest86+ is your friend.
Sure, in terms of heat and power consumption it can make sense. As well as in terms of interior design, as compared to 2 racks full of 1u boxes and interconnects. But there must surely be more factors in the total cost equation when getting such an odd-bird system, unless Orion is planning on having inexpensive first-class support for many years to come.
the Transmeta business raises big questions, where is that CPU going, what sort of compilers are provided and will your existing code run well?
the choice of OS raises some questions too, what sort of management framwork are they providing to make this cluster as easy to maintain as a single node computer?
And a big whatif is, you really need a close optimization for your particular CPU when running HPC applications. Companies like Intel and Portland Group are selling loads of expensive licenses for their proprietary linux/x86/x86_64 compilers to HPC sites, simply because they produce binaries more optimized than what gcc can do.
The commercial HPC apps usually come pre-compiled for various CPUs, but I can't recall ever seeing Transmeta mentioned. Maybe you could get some help if your software vendor or creator is still supporting the software, maybe you can't. Some apps are open-sourced, and sometimes you can get the source code for proprietary apps if you are an academic user or whatever, but what amount of work and computer expertise is needed to get the damn thing to compile?
My gut feeling says this server is a real one-off oddity, I'm not sure the Orion stockholders are going to be sleeping too well in the near future..
There would be no reason to have a powerful graphics card in such a system, the applications you would run on that kind of cluster return mostly return their results in the form of (mostly) plaintext, numbers. Forget running your OpenGL screensaver at supercomputer speed, HPC systems like this doesn't do that.
For kick-ass gaming and that lot, another class of clusters entirely are required, called "viz clusters" (viz for visualization). You basically have a number of computers with powerful graphics controllers hooked up to one display each, and the displays are then tiled.
Then you run an application capable of displaying on tiles, like Doom for instance, to divide the rendering of the individual tiles. So if you have say 6 high-end workstations and 6 video projectors running at 1280x1024, you could install a clustered linux and the required libraries and stuff on them, and play Doom in 3840x2048!
Although having 96 nodes in a single box makes it quite cute, from what I can interpret from the specs, you would get more bang for your $100K by getting what the beowulf crowd like to call MMCOTS (Mass-Market-Common-Off-The-Shelf, i.e. mass produced computers from Dell or the like), hooked toghether with a specialty high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect like Infiniband, Myrinet or SCI. Running a free beowulf cluster OS like for instance ROCKS would mean that a normal linux admin could maintain it quite effectively.
I expect this thing to be marketed towards scientists in small or medium businesses that aren't employing many/any IT staff, who use commercial computer models to do things like theoretical chemistry (Gaussian, ADF etc), bioinformatics (Phase, BLAS, Paralign etc), fluid dynamics, statistics, crypto, you name it. I don't expect to see any of these types of systems used in normal supercomputing sites, where people write their own (parallel) code and skilled staff maintain the cluster.
Just don't crtiticize 'blind faith' in religion while practicing blind faith in science,(which, btw, is in incredible flux).
Science will never answer the really important questions, and you are (as far as I'm concerned) dead on about people having to find out for themselves.
However, there comes a point where religion and faith stands in the way of truth, peace and understanding. It happens when people feel threatened because consensus reality or science seems to undermine something that person has invested his or her identity in, such as creationism.
Situations where scientific truths (or at least functional approximations) dispute the simplistic explanations that clergy and the likes make up in order to defend their product will continue as long as religion is interpreted deterministically.
Having a religion such as yours as a belief-system that divines right from wrong and provides comfort and security throgh answers to the really tough questions is fine, even good and useful. There is no denying the benfits of having a structure of parsing life, the universe and everything. I have such a system myself, although derived from very different sources. As do everyone, of any conviction.
Trouble ensues when people, organizations or states want to impose the answers from their diving onto others, whether as interpretations of significant texts or as words straight from the deitys' mouth. And it gets worse when simple answers are tailored to answer the tough questions.
Religion is for answering the questions science can't. And since science is answering new questions all the time, it is a recipie for disaster when religion is taken as literally as creationists do.
Your books of faith should be read to inspire you to act in accordance with what YOU believe is right and wrong, read to put things in perspective and to allow you to see through the eyes of someone else. Read it and interpret it yourself, and take the extra time to see if your initial gut reaction can possibly be flawed. If the face value is wrong. If the interpretation you subscribe will stay the same if you did a complete re-install, so to speak.
For the record: the short-short version of my views on faith: "Do what thou wilst", don't "do onto others".
It takes a few years of meditating on the implications of that tho.
I've obviously been too quick at pointing to them as believing in this particular piece of crud, I must have confused them with some other sect.
However, many of their practices and beliefs are highly questionable, if not downright destructive. YMMV between members and local groups, but there is no denying that the Watchtower org doctrines have major issues reality-wise. One ex-witness has gathered quite a lot of info here
Many of the monotheistic sects like mormons, jehovas witnesses and others of the evangelical (in the menaing of "interpreting the bible literally") persuasion claim that the earth is only a few thousand years old and "prove" this by tracing the genealogy of the bible from a person that can be more or less accurately placed on the timeline and all the way to Adam&Eve. 6000 years is a number that keeps turning up.
Discoveries like this and others facts that disprove their theories are not going to change their views, as they claim that god created the world at $time with everything, including fossils, geological features and other dateable items intact.
I can however assure you that they are NOT correct, as I know that the giant creator-wombat created the world out of a can of spam and some duct tape, with people, rocks, birds, the thoughts in your head, absolutely everything intact only 5 minutes ago. Go on, try to disprove it.
If my credit/debit card is charged and I don't contest the charge, the transaction is fine and everyone is happy.
Should I however notice that a charge has been made against my will or without my knowledge, I could simply demand that the issuer of my card either show documentation that it was indeed me that made the purchase (i.e. my signature on the bill or other irrefutable proof). If they were unable to document that it was me that made the purchase, the sole responsibility would rest on the card company to either sort it out with the vendor or pay up themselves.
There's a clause in the relevant law that states that if the cardholder showed "gross negligence" they would be responsible for up to ~$1000 (8K NOK) of the losses.
You would think that this opens up possible avenues for fraudsters, and it probably does, but they're bound to be more risky and less profitable than other ways to abuse credit cards. Visa, MC, AmEx and the others have a fundamentally insecure system, and any responsibility for fraud should be placed where it belongs; on the card companies and the fraudsters, not the cardholder.
Only if you live in a place where raunchy documents such as that EULA itself are legally binding.
Where I live, ink on paper is the only thing that would legally bind me to the terms of a contract. No click-through, no "by doing foo you agree to bar" etc.
Not that I would want to run IE (or anything else microsoft-esque) anyway; quite happy using the adware version of Opera.
Since genes consist of only 4 characters, A,C,G and T, its mathematically possible to compress to 25% of the original size but no more, iirc.
Which would be very useful, as genetic data tends to be very bulky. For instace, you might get 40gb or so of sequences weekly from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ that you want to use on your HPC cluster. Imagine if your cluster consists of 100 nodes on a 100Mbps network. That sure adds up the terabytes quickly.
I'd call that a pretty reckless attitude.. for all you know, a bomb might actually be on the plane, not necessarily carried onboard or checked in by a passenger.
It's not a safe assumption that the hijackers are planning to crash it into a building, however overwhelmingly likely that might seem to someone spending the last three years or so watching Fox. The 911 attacks were mostly unprecedented and very unlikely; most hijackings end in an entirely less lethal way. That might not be the case if kamikaze passengers attack the hijackers not knowing what the actual scenario is.
Sorry to say, but you're way off the mark. A well directed and adequately forceful blow to the head with a hard object such as the butt of a knife, the end of a maglite (a small 2x A-cell will do more than well), a cylinder of hardwood, metal &c small enough to fit on your keychain, or for that matter anything else that will fit well in your hand will quite easily cause the skull to crack, with subsequent hemorrhaging, coma and quite likely death. Thus, self-defence experts will often recommend keychain-bludgeons as safer, easier and more effective (not to mention fully legal) weapons to carry around as opposed to knives. Plus, the effect of such a blow is immediate. You don't have to wait for the victim to bleed to death. You've all read of people being murdered by $bignum stabs. The reason should be obvious.
Using the blade of a knife to kill with a single strike is a skill requiring much more practice and know-how than a hard and appropriately shaped blunt object as described.
And that is just one example of a deadly carry-on weapon not even the most suspicious security guard would raise their eyebrows at. There must be a thousand others.
Still, it's deadly, I agree, but you kill one person with a mag lite, the rest of the passengers will rush you and you're done.
Seeing another human being brutally and swiftly killed by a person acting in a highly intimidating manner will be enough to scare most anyone out of any action, especially your average tourist-types on a crowded, stressful and uncomfortable place like an airplane, but even a person trained for such circumstances might well be incapacitated by their own psychological response.
In behavioural psychology, it's well known that human beings act in a very predictable manner in unfamiliar or stressful situations; probably as similar to the rest of the group as possible. Observe, for instance, what happens if someone is lying motionless, possibly ill or dead, on a street corner with lots of people walking by. In many cases it will take forever for anyone to actually stop and see what's going on, simply because no-one else is doing it. Once one person stops to check, more people will stop by and offer their help almost immediately.
While a very few might actually have the clarity of mind to consider taking such action, in most cases no-one would be the first to get up out of the chair and try something simply on account of their instinct. In fact, I'm willing to bet you a pint that a lot of people seing a scene as described above would swear to their chosen deity that the person was not in fact wielding a flashlight but a nightstick, knife or even a gun. Simply because their brains' panic-button would be well and truly pushed and their fear-response would render them incapable of calm deliberation.
Hijacking an airplane is not a matter of firepower. And as for random civilians acting to subdue or inhume percieved threats, it's not the kind of security you would want to count on.
Rather, it's a comfortable self-decieving thought that might tickle certain patriotic nerves when the meme of the "heroes" that "stood up and fought" for "what's right". Practically speaking, most people would be scared way too s**tless to remember their birthday, much less take effective action.
Not to mention the fact that such an action would more than likely aggrevate the situation further in the face of a well organised gang of hijackers. Most hijacked airplanes land safely with few or no casualties, not least due to the fact that the hijackers aren't forced into desperate measures.
I understand completely, however, that people who have watched too much CNN and too many hollywood action movies would like to fancy themselves a mean mofo, partaking in selfless heroics against terrorists. Only problem is, that's just your ego talking. Your ego will go remarkably quiet in the face of a chaotic and life-threatening situation.
PS: Please let me know if I've made any further wordcraftling. I appreciate your attentlyness.
Last time I flew eu->usa I moved through four airports' worth of security checks, had a rest and then made a domestic US flight. I was stopped (ie, taken out of line) a grand total of seven times on that trip. Embarrasments include removing boots and belt, identifying the locations of my piercings to the not-very-amused guy with the handheld metal detector, and being asked to open my bags at several locations, leaving the contents in plain sight of anyone passing by.
They even confiscated my 5cm nail scissors. On the way OUT of the airport.
When I flew back to the EU though, the attendant that checked in my luggage just asked "Do you have any weapons or bombs in your luggage?" and I replied "Nope!" and that was mostly that. Apparently, hijackers are only interrested in flights into or within the US.
For some reason or other, items such as nail files and scissors, screwdrivers, your trusty leatherman, even pieces of common cutlery only suited for cutting butter are stricly verboten to carry onto commercial airliners. However, what sort of security is this supposed to provide?
I just flew from the UK two nights ago, and in the tax-free area after the security control, you are able to purchase D-cell maglites. As those in the know would tell you, the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle. Applied to the head of the adversary it is more likely to be deadly than the blade applied to the torso. Same thing with a maglite or any other object of similar hardlyness for that matter.
A highly motivated would-be hijacker could easily find similar makeshift weaponry that would be just as effective as knives or nail-files. In fact, the easiest of all would be simple social engineering; i.e. claiming that there was a bomb onboard and that an unidentified accomplice would set it off if certain conditions are not met would probably allow a hijacker to meet his requirements with little or no danger of being apprehended before the plane was airborne.
So why are we being hassled to such a ridiculous extent in airports? Probably so that most passengers will be lulled into a sense of security as well as making the task of airline hijacking seem much more complicated to the casual hijacker seeking escape from a hostile regime, political attention, quick cash, or some other common reason. The dedicated terrorist would likely find a way around anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is sort-of useful to get an old supercomputer. If you have the space, cooling and power for it - it's a great development and teaching platform, as well as letting you do trials or smaller runs without taxing your allocation on the bigger, national/international HPC systems.
I recently had the pleasure of giving away about a third of our recently replaced HPC cluster to the physics department of the university I work for, and they were very very happy indeed. (in norwegian)
I do agree with the conclusions of TFA, although I think there are some holes and misunderstandings in it.. but, over the course of the last decade or so, any will whatsoever to offer guidance and help to "the entertainment industry" has vanished completely for me.
Reason? I've realized that this industry is not in the business of making content, but about _controlling_ content. They pay the creative people who make the content for the rights to control it, and through that ownership extract earnings. They are, effectively, a middle man who contribute nothing to the audience side of the equation, and their contribution to the creator side is merely as financiers and facilitators, a role I consider purely administrative.
I don't see why I should offer my experience and advice to them, unless they pay me to do so. I say let this industry rot if they can no longer operate successfully. And actively fight them, if they try to undermine the average citizen's freedoms in the process. Focus your funds and energy on supporting the creative people who actually make the art, encourage them to sell it to you directly, write to them and ask them as a fan to make it available to you in the form you want, so you an actually pay them without you or them being swindled by their pimps^Wdistributors.
[...] I hope this way that PC gaming will endure.
While I agree with you that online-only play is one strategy that could work for a lot of games, I have to take issue with it or any other radical measures beeing seen as necessary for the PC games market 'to endure', as all the figures I can find seem to support my gut feeling that the PC gaming industry is bigger than it has ever been.
If there are companies that really feel that they struggle because people are downloading a copy rather than buying it in the officially provided format, then I humbly propose that those companies do some unbiased analysis of why people won't buy their packages. Could it be that people love the game, but hate the packaging?
Typing a long license number is the least problem when it comes to "copy protection".
The "CD-burning software stopping to work" issue you are mentioning was the StarForce protection scheme which basically replaced your cd/dvd driver with a modified one (without asking your consent or letting you know, ofcourse). This is a perfect example of the utter lack of respect for anyone or anything that a lot of proprietary software industry has for its clients. Far from being unique, this type of "copy protection" that actually sabotages the users operating environment is quite widespread.
I suspect that the decision makers who orders these sorts of things installed in their products are the least competent people to do so, since they are 100% management and 0% technical in their understanding of the problem. "People steal our games, so let's install some bear traps and landmines in them so people won't try to copy them". What they don't seem to want to face, is that all these traps are removed before the copying really starts. There is no method at present for avoiding your game being cracked and distributed, and in many, if not most cases, the paying customer gets a poorer product than the pirate, because of invasive and annoying copy protection schemes which invariably are ineffective against the warez scene anyway. The only reasonable way of insuring that most or all of your users are paying for the product is to make the game rely on online servers which have access to the payment details. You cannot have an offline/single player mode. You cannot have private servers. You cannot become so successful that people will bother to reverse engineer your protocol and write their own server software.
Having been an avid gamer for 25 years or so, I am convinced that the biggest selling titles are also the ones who are copied the most. I rarely, if ever, buy a game without trying it properly first. So my simple advice to games publishers is to keep sticking to the old serial number validation, and forget disc checks and other similar measures. They only cost you extra money and gets you nothing in return (other than hostility from your core demographic) Rather than make it hard for people to user and maintain their software, you should make it easy to pay and play, and don't force people to run unrelated software (like "EA Download Manager" or Steam or such 'agents'). The only logical way of dealing with this is to make it a hassle to crack the serial code validation, if you can, but not implent anything that will hinder the use of the product. Hope that people like your product enough that they want to buy it after trying it.
it seems every other week there is some big threat to the content industry, this week it's wow, next week it's piracy, week after that it's pirate ghosts or whatever, bottom line is the execs in these types of companies are very good at coming up with excuses for why they aren't making as much money as they've been telling their boards and shareholders they would.
If you want to compete with WoW, then make something better. Don't whine because noone wants to buy your outrageously priced plastic discs to play the next rehashed title for a couple of weeks before losing interest. Which, really, is the case with most of the stuff that comes out of said industries - it has little or no lasting appeal. Unlike WoW.
Probably because you have improper bios settings, maybe in the memory controller department? RTFA!
You might have to, for example, take the memclock down a notch (say to ddr333 instead of ddr400) and then increase the htt until the ram is running at a decent clock again. Memtest86+ is your friend.
Sure, in terms of heat and power consumption it can make sense. As well as in terms of interior design, as compared to 2 racks full of 1u boxes and interconnects. But there must surely be more factors in the total cost equation when getting such an odd-bird system, unless Orion is planning on having inexpensive first-class support for many years to come.
the Transmeta business raises big questions, where is that CPU going, what sort of compilers are provided and will your existing code run well?
the choice of OS raises some questions too, what sort of management framwork are they providing to make this cluster as easy to maintain as a single node computer?
And a big whatif is, you really need a close optimization for your particular CPU when running HPC applications. Companies like Intel and Portland Group are selling loads of expensive licenses for their proprietary linux/x86/x86_64 compilers to HPC sites, simply because they produce binaries more optimized than what gcc can do.
The commercial HPC apps usually come pre-compiled for various CPUs, but I can't recall ever seeing Transmeta mentioned. Maybe you could get some help if your software vendor or creator is still supporting the software, maybe you can't. Some apps are open-sourced, and sometimes you can get the source code for proprietary apps if you are an academic user or whatever, but what amount of work and computer expertise is needed to get the damn thing to compile?
My gut feeling says this server is a real one-off oddity, I'm not sure the Orion stockholders are going to be sleeping too well in the near future..
There would be no reason to have a powerful graphics card in such a system, the applications you would run on that kind of cluster return mostly return their results in the form of (mostly) plaintext, numbers. Forget running your OpenGL screensaver at supercomputer speed, HPC systems like this doesn't do that.
For kick-ass gaming and that lot, another class of clusters entirely are required, called "viz clusters" (viz for visualization). You basically have a number of computers with powerful graphics controllers hooked up to one display each, and the displays are then tiled.
Then you run an application capable of displaying on tiles, like Doom for instance, to divide the rendering of the individual tiles. So if you have say 6 high-end workstations and 6 video projectors running at 1280x1024, you could install a clustered linux and the required libraries and stuff on them, and play Doom in 3840x2048!
Although having 96 nodes in a single box makes it quite cute, from what I can interpret from the specs, you would get more bang for your $100K by getting what the beowulf crowd like to call MMCOTS (Mass-Market-Common-Off-The-Shelf, i.e. mass produced computers from Dell or the like), hooked toghether with a specialty high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect like Infiniband, Myrinet or SCI. Running a free beowulf cluster OS like for instance ROCKS would mean that a normal linux admin could maintain it quite effectively.
I expect this thing to be marketed towards scientists in small or medium businesses that aren't employing many/any IT staff, who use commercial computer models to do things like theoretical chemistry (Gaussian, ADF etc), bioinformatics (Phase, BLAS, Paralign etc), fluid dynamics, statistics, crypto, you name it. I don't expect to see any of these types of systems used in normal supercomputing sites, where people write their own (parallel) code and skilled staff maintain the cluster.
So when will it start showing on torrentocracy ?
Science will never answer the really important questions, and you are (as far as I'm concerned) dead on about people having to find out for themselves.
However, there comes a point where religion and faith stands in the way of truth, peace and understanding. It happens when people feel threatened because consensus reality or science seems to undermine something that person has invested his or her identity in, such as creationism.
Situations where scientific truths (or at least functional approximations) dispute the simplistic explanations that clergy and the likes make up in order to defend their product will continue as long as religion is interpreted deterministically.
Having a religion such as yours as a belief-system that divines right from wrong and provides comfort and security throgh answers to the really tough questions is fine, even good and useful. There is no denying the benfits of having a structure of parsing life, the universe and everything. I have such a system myself, although derived from very different sources. As do everyone, of any conviction.
Trouble ensues when people, organizations or states want to impose the answers from their diving onto others, whether as interpretations of significant texts or as words straight from the deitys' mouth. And it gets worse when simple answers are tailored to answer the tough questions.
Religion is for answering the questions science can't. And since science is answering new questions all the time, it is a recipie for disaster when religion is taken as literally as creationists do.
Your books of faith should be read to inspire you to act in accordance with what YOU believe is right and wrong, read to put things in perspective and to allow you to see through the eyes of someone else. Read it and interpret it yourself, and take the extra time to see if your initial gut reaction can possibly be flawed. If the face value is wrong. If the interpretation you subscribe will stay the same if you did a complete re-install, so to speak.
For the record: the short-short version of my views on faith: "Do what thou wilst", don't "do onto others".
It takes a few years of meditating on the implications of that tho.
Neither can it disprove Santa Claus. That does not make either's existence more likely.
Science would never try to disprove a deity, because no scientific method could do so.
Assumptions are made by people, after the science.
Assumptions are to science what fear of heights is to gravity.
Sometimes assumptions are productive, sometimes destructive.
In the case of assuming all science that threatens your religion is buff, I contend that is destructive without exception.
If your system of belief was worth it's salt, it would not be threatened by new scientific discoveries.
I've obviously been too quick at pointing to them as believing in this particular piece of crud, I must have confused them with some other sect.
However, many of their practices and beliefs are highly questionable, if not downright destructive. YMMV between members and local groups, but there is no denying that the Watchtower org doctrines have major issues reality-wise. One ex-witness has gathered quite a lot of info here
Many of the monotheistic sects like mormons, jehovas witnesses and others of the evangelical (in the menaing of "interpreting the bible literally") persuasion claim that the earth is only a few thousand years old and "prove" this by tracing the genealogy of the bible from a person that can be more or less accurately placed on the timeline and all the way to Adam&Eve. 6000 years is a number that keeps turning up.
Discoveries like this and others facts that disprove their theories are not going to change their views, as they claim that god created the world at $time with everything, including fossils, geological features and other dateable items intact.
I can however assure you that they are NOT correct, as I know that the giant creator-wombat created the world out of a can of spam and some duct tape, with people, rocks, birds, the thoughts in your head, absolutely everything intact only 5 minutes ago. Go on, try to disprove it.
If my credit/debit card is charged and I don't contest the charge, the transaction is fine and everyone is happy.
Should I however notice that a charge has been made against my will or without my knowledge, I could simply demand that the issuer of my card either show documentation that it was indeed me that made the purchase (i.e. my signature on the bill or other irrefutable proof). If they were unable to document that it was me that made the purchase, the sole responsibility would rest on the card company to either sort it out with the vendor or pay up themselves.
There's a clause in the relevant law that states that if the cardholder showed "gross negligence" they would be responsible for up to ~$1000 (8K NOK) of the losses.
You would think that this opens up possible avenues for fraudsters, and it probably does, but they're bound to be more risky and less profitable than other ways to abuse credit cards. Visa, MC, AmEx and the others have a fundamentally insecure system, and any responsibility for fraud should be placed where it belongs; on the card companies and the fraudsters, not the cardholder.
"E.g. running it under WINE would be illegal"
Only if you live in a place where raunchy documents such as that EULA itself are legally binding.
Where I live, ink on paper is the only thing that would legally bind me to the terms of a contract. No click-through, no "by doing foo you agree to bar" etc.
Not that I would want to run IE (or anything else microsoft-esque) anyway; quite happy using the adware version of Opera.
Since genes consist of only 4 characters, A,C,G and T, its mathematically possible to compress to 25% of the original size but no more, iirc.
Which would be very useful, as genetic data tends to be very bulky. For instace, you might get 40gb or so of sequences weekly from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ that you want to use on your HPC cluster. Imagine if your cluster consists of 100 nodes on a 100Mbps network. That sure adds up the terabytes quickly.
I'd call that a pretty reckless attitude.. for all you know, a bomb might actually be on the plane, not necessarily carried onboard or checked in by a passenger.
It's not a safe assumption that the hijackers are planning to crash it into a building, however overwhelmingly likely that might seem to someone spending the last three years or so watching Fox. The 911 attacks were mostly unprecedented and very unlikely; most hijackings end in an entirely less lethal way. That might not be the case if kamikaze passengers attack the hijackers not knowing what the actual scenario is.
Sorry to say, but you're way off the mark. A well directed and adequately forceful blow to the head with a hard object such as the butt of a knife, the end of a maglite (a small 2x A-cell will do more than well), a cylinder of hardwood, metal &c small enough to fit on your keychain, or for that matter anything else that will fit well in your hand will quite easily cause the skull to crack, with subsequent hemorrhaging, coma and quite likely death. Thus, self-defence experts will often recommend keychain-bludgeons as safer, easier and more effective (not to mention fully legal) weapons to carry around as opposed to knives. Plus, the effect of such a blow is immediate. You don't have to wait for the victim to bleed to death. You've all read of people being murdered by $bignum stabs. The reason should be obvious.
Using the blade of a knife to kill with a single strike is a skill requiring much more practice and know-how than a hard and appropriately shaped blunt object as described.
And that is just one example of a deadly carry-on weapon not even the most suspicious security guard would raise their eyebrows at. There must be a thousand others.
Still, it's deadly, I agree, but you kill one person with a mag lite, the rest of the passengers will rush you and you're done.
Seeing another human being brutally and swiftly killed by a person acting in a highly intimidating manner will be enough to scare most anyone out of any action, especially your average tourist-types on a crowded, stressful and uncomfortable place like an airplane, but even a person trained for such circumstances might well be incapacitated by their own psychological response.
In behavioural psychology, it's well known that human beings act in a very predictable manner in unfamiliar or stressful situations; probably as similar to the rest of the group as possible. Observe, for instance, what happens if someone is lying motionless, possibly ill or dead, on a street corner with lots of people walking by. In many cases it will take forever for anyone to actually stop and see what's going on, simply because no-one else is doing it. Once one person stops to check, more people will stop by and offer their help almost immediately.
While a very few might actually have the clarity of mind to consider taking such action, in most cases no-one would be the first to get up out of the chair and try something simply on account of their instinct. In fact, I'm willing to bet you a pint that a lot of people seing a scene as described above would swear to their chosen deity that the person was not in fact wielding a flashlight but a nightstick, knife or even a gun. Simply because their brains' panic-button would be well and truly pushed and their fear-response would render them incapable of calm deliberation.
Hijacking an airplane is not a matter of firepower. And as for random civilians acting to subdue or inhume percieved threats, it's not the kind of security you would want to count on.
Rather, it's a comfortable self-decieving thought that might tickle certain patriotic nerves when the meme of the "heroes" that "stood up and fought" for "what's right". Practically speaking, most people would be scared way too s**tless to remember their birthday, much less take effective action.
Not to mention the fact that such an action would more than likely aggrevate the situation further in the face of a well organised gang of hijackers. Most hijacked airplanes land safely with few or no casualties, not least due to the fact that the hijackers aren't forced into desperate measures.
I understand completely, however, that people who have watched too much CNN and too many hollywood action movies would like to fancy themselves a mean mofo, partaking in selfless heroics against terrorists. Only problem is, that's just your ego talking. Your ego will go remarkably quiet in the face of a chaotic and life-threatening situation.
PS: Please let me know if I've made any further wordcraftling. I appreciate your attentlyness.
Last time I flew eu->usa I moved through four airports' worth of security checks, had a rest and then made a domestic US flight. I was stopped (ie, taken out of line) a grand total of seven times on that trip. Embarrasments include removing boots and belt, identifying the locations of my piercings to the not-very-amused guy with the handheld metal detector, and being asked to open my bags at several locations, leaving the contents in plain sight of anyone passing by.
They even confiscated my 5cm nail scissors. On the way OUT of the airport.
When I flew back to the EU though, the attendant that checked in my luggage just asked "Do you have any weapons or bombs in your luggage?" and I replied "Nope!" and that was mostly that. Apparently, hijackers are only interrested in flights into or within the US.
For some reason or other, items such as nail files and scissors, screwdrivers, your trusty leatherman, even pieces of common cutlery only suited for cutting butter are stricly verboten to carry onto commercial airliners. However, what sort of security is this supposed to provide?
I just flew from the UK two nights ago, and in the tax-free area after the security control, you are able to purchase D-cell maglites. As those in the know would tell you, the most dangerous part of a knife for use in close combat is not the blade, but the handle. Applied to the head of the adversary it is more likely to be deadly than the blade applied to the torso. Same thing with a maglite or any other object of similar hardlyness for that matter.
A highly motivated would-be hijacker could easily find similar makeshift weaponry that would be just as effective as knives or nail-files. In fact, the easiest of all would be simple social engineering; i.e. claiming that there was a bomb onboard and that an unidentified accomplice would set it off if certain conditions are not met would probably allow a hijacker to meet his requirements with little or no danger of being apprehended before the plane was airborne.
So why are we being hassled to such a ridiculous extent in airports? Probably so that most passengers will be lulled into a sense of security as well as making the task of airline hijacking seem much more complicated to the casual hijacker seeking escape from a hostile regime, political attention, quick cash, or some other common reason. The dedicated terrorist would likely find a way around anyway.