Yes, only "serve" their own saddistic tendencies and "protect" their job and friends.
'Stalking' !?-- What the elderly couple were following the cop around for days, intimidating him? Let me guess, the cop is scared for his life now, and cannot get up and go to work because of the tremendous fear he is experiencing...
The lesson this couple should learn (and everyone else for that matter) is the cops are not there to help you. Everyone needs to say that many times over. I have heard countless times how people confessed to crimes they did or did not commit because cops convinced them that they are somehow 'a friend' and are just trying 'to help'.
These people are living in an imaginary dream world, where justice and goodness prevails, the officials and police are righteous, honorible men, with integrity.
Based on the same predictions made by him, someone during the agricultural revolution would have said. "Wow, we can have all these crops and have extra too! In the next 100 years, we'll be flying like birds". The assumption, if you didn't catch it, is that progress is accelerating all the time, with a constant acceleration. What might in fact happen, is that there are just surges of progress (this is why they are called revolutions) but then progress plateaus.
At first, it was the agricultural revolution, before it was fairly quiet, afterwards, it was just improvement in farming.
Then came the industrial revolution, it was like farming applied to tools and machines. That has created another surge.
Then came the development of the computer, the information all of the sudden became more important than 'stuff'. That is very revolutionary and we don't realize it, perhaps, because we are 'living in it'. But looking at it from outside it is a completely mind blowing thing.
So now we are living probably at the end of another one of those progress surges. It is understandable if we make the mistake and assume that the rate of acceleration will stay just as rapid as it has been in the last 50 years.
But we are already hitting limits. Murphy's law is plateauing in the last couple of years. Otherwise you would not be seeing such a push to have multiple core. Intel and AMD would much rather have a 10GHz Pentium or Opteron, but it is not happening soon enough. The same is true with biology and other fields, we are hitting these invisible walls. That probably explains why String Theory became popular, despite a compeling lack of evidence. There are just certain limits that we don't have any idea how to overcome. So we might plateau for another century or two, improving what we have, mixing and matching, but without necessarily keep making giganting breakthroughs like some authors would like us to believe.
How many people do you think have gone and explored the whole earth to see, hear and experience _all_ that variety. Most people will live their whole lives in an area no bigger than a few hundred square kilometers. The majority of people on earth cannot take tranatlantic cruises, they just barely visit their states capital if so. Are those people depressed and ready to kill themselves? I doubt it.
I have watched National Geographic and Travel Channel and for all I know, Australia might as well be a conspiracy idea started by National Geographic to sell travel stories. If it really didn't exist, will I be terribly depressed and sad? -- Not at all!
The fallacy with that argument is that at that stage 'we' (or 'it' -- the slime;-) didn't have a choice. The bacteria is preprogrammed to survive. It couldn't understand the world, it doesn't have a power of introspection, it doesn't create models of self and the world and it doesn't ask questions like "what is my purpose in life?" in such a way that a potential answer would be "none" it would just decide to stay in the ocean.
we're a race of dreamers
The other side of the coin is that we are a race of thinkers as well. As a result we can ask the question "what is my purpose in life?" and the potential answer could be "none". Our evolved rational mind might be what will eventually kill us, because it will throw us into total dispair when faced with the vastness and emptiness of the universe. Perhaps we, with our nice big brains, are just a fluke of the evolutionary algorithm, a 'bug' that created creatures who knew too much and thus got too depressed to fight for their survival. Billions and billions of years ahead, I am quite convinced that bacteria will still be in the universe but I am not so sure that we will. (So let me go grab another Prozac, and another shot of rum).
Why bother crawling out of bed for that matter?
Well what's your answer to that? To go to work, to make more money, to buy a bigger car, to feel better about yourself, and have a little fun perhaps but still and end up dead, _exactly_ as dead as someone who never got out of bed.
How would you prevent the intermediate generations from feeling like they are meaningless
What prevents this particular generation of earth inhabitants from feeling meaningless? If you don't believe in any afterlife, then aren't we here on Earth only to father the next generation?
But, the grandparent point is still valid. Why should we care? Even if a meteorite will strike earth in 150 years, it does not matter to me personally. I will be gone by then.
After 7 centuries, the ark gets to its destination only to realize that because of buffer overrun bug in software, the landing craft refuses to deploy.
Do you not have any common sense, or are you just trolling?
'Normal' was clearly meant be 'what is considered normal'. Most civilized societies will consider killing as a lot more evil and _extraordinary_ than a husband having sex with their wife.
The fact that our human history is full of violence doesn't mean it's a good thing, and we should just run around the street with bazookas in our hands, as much as the frag-loving-teens on Slashdot would like the idea.
I meant normal as the idealized "normal", what everyone considers desirable. Yes, human history is a very much a violent history. But most would agree that violence is not "desirable".
I can see that, but isn't it a little too extreme?
The salaries that people take home are also a private matter, the medical conditions that they have is private, their religion is private, thier feeling towards their significant others are intimate. But, yet, that doesn't prevent those issues to be in the media. You see church services in the movies, you watch rich celebrities flaunt their money on TV, you watch people being cut up for plastic surgeries on Discovery Health Channel. It is not just that sex is private it is completely suppressed. The general message coming across is that 'sex is bad' and 'violence is accepted'.
I understand the concern of protecting children from sex, but then why not protect them from violence just as much. Sex might be a private thing but it is a _normal_ thing. Violence should not be taking place neither in public nor in private, it is abnormal. Humans should not be blowing each other up, it is _not_ a normal thing.
No offense, but I think that betrays a very eurocentric viewpoint.
None taken
I only spoke about Europe and U.S. because I live for a long time in both of those parts of the world. I didn't not try to be 'eurocentric', I don't think Europe is 'better' and 'U.S.' is worse. If I did, I would be living where it's 'better', trust me. I was just comparing attitudes and values. That's all. I cannot claim anything about Asia and Middle East, as I have not been there and did not extensively study their societies and cultures.
Bingo. Violent games are so popular probably because we live in a violent society. (I have mentioned this in another post already) I think American socity is very violent as a whole and it has a violent legacy. Traditionally violence won wars, conquered land and established domination. That is how this country came to be. It was a 'sink' for all the violent people. Here they could run 'wild' in the 'wild west'. American version of Christiany (puritanism) didn't mind violence at all. But when it came to sex, "OMG! The blazing maw of hell will immediatly swallow them if they masturbated"
This attitude persists. chilren grow up implicitly learning that 'violence is accepted'. Look at movie rating PG-13 can have people dismembering each other but as soon as a penis or a vulva pops up in there -- the rating gets changed to NC-17, no questions asked. What are young people to make of it?
By the time they want to play Quake and Doom, they are already violent! They just find a virtual release for it. Now that in an of itself may help normalize it or not, but I really doubt that it is the video games that caused Columbine and other such disasters. Video games are a product and product will exist on the market only if there is a demand for it. Children want to buy games to blow virtual people! It is just that we don't want to blame ourselves, our culture, our attitudes and our society (how can we, we are the most perfectestest and most awesomestest country in the world!), so instead we find a scape goat -- Those 'evil', 'magic' computers and their 'internets' and the video games.
You actually make a very good point. I have always wondered how come violence is so accepted in U.S. and sex is not. Is it the puritanical legacy?
Sex is something very common, a part of a _normal_ life. Violence is not! A 12 year old can see someone's head being blown off but 'Oh my god! Shield them from seeing someone's genitalia on TV."
I don't advocate showing pornography to children, but I think they should be able the see the statue of David. I just don't understand why for so long, violence was accepted, but sex was not.
If I had to choose one or the other, I would accept the display of sexuality to children than the display of violence.
I grew up in Eastern Europe, and I have to say that when coming to U.S. I was shocked of how sexually repressed this country it. There was a story in the news how a theatre changed the title of the 'Vagina Monologues' to the 'Hooha Monologues' -- WTF!?
A vagina is a 'hoohaa' now, because a grandmother didn't want to tell her granddaughter who is old enough to read what a vigina is? Well, what the hell is a hoohaa then?
There is a reason why there are so many substitute words for female genitalia in English (hoohaa, pussy, box, coochie, hole, snatch, slot, nooch, fanny -- just a couple I could thin of right now.) This is direct result of sexual repression.
Also, a couple of years ago, when 'March of the Penguins' was in the movie theatres, I was watching it with my wife and there was couple with their young (6-7 year old ) daughter. There is a scene in the movie when the penguins are mating. They were not showing close up of genitals or anything like that. The mother got up, yanked the daughter by her hand and dragged her out. The girl didn't quite understand what to make of her mother's reaction, she got scared and started crying. Then they came back later, just in time to watch the penguin baby chicks die because their parents couldn't take care of them. I thought, 'how sad', that poor girl...
At the same time. This is one of the most violent countries in the world. It is not because of the guns, it's irrelevant, people own guns in other countries but the don't necessarily shoot each ther with them.
And then there is the problem with violent video games. Children in Europe play violent video games. I love Doom, Quake and all of the other ones. But those children do not go and shoot each other as much as the American children. It is as if we cannot simply blaim ourselves, and our culture for disasters like Columbine, we have to blaim video games, or some other things that we can all point a finger to.
Sorry for the rant. Hey if Linus can have a nice 'healhty' rant at the GNOME desktop, so can I at the American society;)
I think you are right. Most people are not geeks. All the geeks need to repeat that mantra many times. It if very hard to understand others and put yourself in their shoes. If Linux is ever to be succesful it has to be accepted by the majority of 'idiots'. What Linus and KDE want is to have GNU/Linux become an OS only for the geeks like themselves. Who just need to configure every single aspect of every little application out there. They (and me too, I'll admit) spend hours and hours playing with the control panels and the screensaver to get it 'just right'. I used to be an avid KDE user. I hated GNOME with a passion. It was 'too' restrictive for me. But up until had configured my KDE so much that I wanted to go back and change something. I would take me a very long time to find that one setting that I changed that I wanted to revert back. Eventually I just deleted the customized settings and used only the defaults. Now, I was using KDE but I was staying awasy from 1000! of it's configurations.
Then I tried Ubuntu once and I was surprized at how much I liked it now. The same GNOME that I hated, now worked great. I stopped worrying about all those infinetly large space of KDE configurations and was able to just use my desktop. At times I would get frustrated with it, just like Linus did, but then I would get used to it. I have become convinced that 'less is more'.
Apple, who has invested more than any other company in UI research, has proven this to be true. Geeks like me laughed at the stupid Apple with their one-button mouse. But somehow Apple ended up being touted as the king of usability, there is a good reason for that.
I like Linus, and I understand his frustration. But he also needs to understand the mindset of a regular (=idiot) user. He lives in the kernel world and GNOME needs to live in the Desktop world. Linus' users are geeks who know what ioctl() is and GNOME users want to write a monthly report paper. They will never agree. They just need to understand each other and work together.
Unfortunately that is not how the pirated software economy works.
You see, if you don't have broadbad so you can download GPL Linux ISOs, then you have to go buy it. The open-air makeshift tech-markets in ex-Soviet Union countries (and I am sure in Asia too) will sell you DVDs and CDs with any software that you'll ever need. And it all costs the same = price of the cd + extra. So Ubuntu might cost $2/disk, but so will Microsoft Office, Windows XP, Maya, and all the latest software and games, will probably all cost $2/disk or so. Because most of the world uses Microsoft, when I go to the market I will spend my $2 to buy whatever most people use. I could buy some exotic Linux distribution, but then I couldn't play my music, play games, and finally when I learn how to use it, I couldn't use it anywhere else, because, guess what, everyone is running MS.
You see when Gates went to Romania, Basescu's comment about Romania's IT being built on top of MS's pirated software was a complement. Of all the thousands of Romanians that MS employs, a lot of them had their first encounter with Windows at home, by running pirated software. That is true all over the world. The best thing that MS could ever do for OSS is to actually crack down on the illegal users of Windows! Even send them to Siberia if they had to. When hacker kids like me, couldn't get their toys for free, and will be afraid of beint sent to Siberia just for playing with some OS, then Linux will truly win. The geeks who use Linux will grow up, will end up at different companies, will eventually be in a position to make software purchasing decision and guess what they will ask for -- Linux support of course.
You might have a while a longer to sleep then. Because just having the same number of neurons as the brain doesn't mean that you'll have a brain. It is like saying that as long as we can have the four nucleotides from DNA (A,C,T,G) and all the amino acids we'll just throw them together and we'll have biological organisms.
The brain, does not start a blank slate, it is already pre-programmed to do many things and it is that wiring of neurons and their initial states that need to be decoded.
In addition to that, every cell in the brain, just like any other living cell, is so complicated that we cannot even simulate one cell very well. It is believed that there is more to neurons than just pure on/off output switching after they get up to a certain potential. Neurotransmitter concentration as well aother chemicals around the neurons will play a role in their behavior. Now imagine simulating that for hundreds of billions of cells.
By the way the most amazing thing about the human brain is not just it's capacity for thought, emotions, imagination and other such stuff but also the _efficiency_ of it all. The brain runs at a steady temperature of 37'C and consumes less than 100W of energy. Compare that to your computer's CPU that would heat up to 100'C doing nothing than just adding numbers.
...the conversation started on the theoretical limits of computation.
Mr. Coward, in case you have not read the article, the conversation actually is about AMD's new processor, which is a real processor. That processor will generate some amount of heat... real heat, not theoretical heat.
A few years ago people would've...
What are you referring to? I never mentioned OOP, relativity, or satalites (sic) in my post.
To be fair, I suspect that the resulting information from the computation itself carries... well... information.
You are a coward but at least you are fair, that's good to know. A fair coward is better than a regular, run-of-the-mill coward, at least in my book. Yes, information carries information. Do you want a Nobel prize for that? O perhaps an honorary PhD degree?
All good computer scientists know information has a direct corolation (sic) to entropy
And even better computer scientists know how to spell, or at least use a spell checker.
It seems like you need to listen to your own advice and : quit pointlessly spewing shit at people who have useful things to say.
By thinking really hard about it not closing...ok here is my contribution... thinking...thinking...oops, well that didn't work, I guess the whole affair all these years was just a sink for funding that could have been used elsewhere!
And how exactly is your reversible computing going to reduce the resistance of millions and millions of conductors to 0. You are confusing a theoretical issue relating to computer science (and very relevant to quantum computing) with a practical problem of a CPU design. Just moving information around _without_ deleting it will generate heat.
Or did you actually think that those "stupid" CPU designers for all this years, battling with heat dissipation, never thought of, oh.. simply replacing the nand gates with reversible Fredkin and Toffoli gates and 'poof' magically all the heat issues are gone, processors will run @ hundreds of GHz, the wold's electrical power consumption will go down and the geeks won't be able to boast about their huge ass sinks anymore...
That is because there wasn't adequate screening. Most astronauts come to NASA from a military background, and military people are not known for their love of psychologists. You regular Joe Military Go-Getter will never sit in a psychologist's office and tell them that they are afraid of spiders or had naughty thoughts about their co-workers. Now, the astronauts feel that way and the NASA administration feels the same, because many of them, if not all, have also been in the military. That is why the procedures are never implemented.
I think that this should prompt for a better screening not just for astronauts but also for all the military personnel and police forces as well. In general any profession that will result in having an immediate responsibility for human life, should have extensive screening.
If your house is an architectural masterpiece of some sort, you could go after these people when they try to sell the picture of your house and make a profit off of it. But you still cannot stop them from taking a picture of it from a public street.
Also, you would be surprised to know that they can take your picture, the picture of your children, your car and so on when you are in a public place. In other words you could go and take a pictures of people walking down the street and piss them off but that doesn't mean it will be illegal, you'll also probably get your arse kicked.
I'm sure those police think of themselves as being by and large decent people trying to do a job.
I agree with that. Even if you went to Hitler or Stalin and asked them what they thought of themselves they would probably say that they are 'nice decent people'. I have no doubt, most hardened criminals would probably say the same. The pain of living while being convinced that they are horrible horrible sadistic person would probably either drive the person insane or cognitive dissonance would force them to justify the behaviors somehow by adjusting the beliefs to think of themselves as 'nice, decent people'.
But at the same time I disagree that people are basically bad. Yes, there are a social subgroups that have a large accumulation of sadists and cops and will have a much higher concentration of sick people who will harm others just 'cause. And trust me the cops here in U.S. are saints compared to their counterparts in Russia. I have been at a police station there once and heard the scaries howling cries of a the teenager being tortured across the hall, it was something out of a horror movie...
So I lived under communism and have seen all their shit and I can tell you that even in the Slashdot's proverbial "Soviet Russia" people were still basically good most of the time. Most people didn't lie, cheat and steal, my parents are an example, they worked in their jobs, we had our state assigned apartment, I don't remember us doing anything evil, we did not bribe anyone, we just lived our lives. But some did lie, cheat and steal, and it was enough to send the whole system down the drain.
I general think that people are too hard to categorize. There is a continuum from totally_evil to extra_nice. Everyone is in between and where they are is always changing. A lot of it is in response to external stimuli. You would be surprised but psychologists would say that there is not that much difference between a hero and villain. It is just a matter of where they are and what is happening at the time with them. Yes, the police are not that far from the criminals according to their average personality. And I am not surprised when police act like criminals once it an while, just like I would not be surprised if the neighbors of some known serial killer would say that 'he was such a nice young man' -- they would be telling the truth, sometimes he/she would be a nice person!
Oh, even better anyone should be able to create their own religions as they please. We can have the/. Church of the Almighty Comander Taco, then we can all be ministers, somehow copyright our forum discussions and find a way not to pay taxes. We'll also sue or hack anyone who makes fun of us...
Slashdot Mirror
'Stalking' !?-- What the elderly couple were following the cop around for days, intimidating him? Let me guess, the cop is scared for his life now, and cannot get up and go to work because of the tremendous fear he is experiencing...
The lesson this couple should learn (and everyone else for that matter) is the cops are not there to help you. Everyone needs to say that many times over. I have heard countless times how people confessed to crimes they did or did not commit because cops convinced them that they are somehow 'a friend' and are just trying 'to help'.
These people are living in an imaginary dream world, where justice and goodness prevails, the officials and police are righteous, honorible men, with integrity.
Based on the same predictions made by him, someone during the agricultural revolution would have said. "Wow, we can have all these crops and have extra too! In the next 100 years, we'll be flying like birds". The assumption, if you didn't catch it, is that progress is accelerating all the time, with a constant acceleration. What might in fact happen, is that there are just surges of progress (this is why they are called revolutions) but then progress plateaus.
At first, it was the agricultural revolution, before it was fairly quiet, afterwards, it was just improvement in farming.
Then came the industrial revolution, it was like farming applied to tools and machines. That has created another surge.
Then came the development of the computer, the information all of the sudden became more important than 'stuff'. That is very revolutionary and we don't realize it, perhaps, because we are 'living in it'. But looking at it from outside it is a completely mind blowing thing.
So now we are living probably at the end of another one of those progress surges. It is understandable if we make the mistake and assume that the rate of acceleration will stay just as rapid as it has been in the last 50 years.
But we are already hitting limits. Murphy's law is plateauing in the last couple of years. Otherwise you would not be seeing such a push to have multiple core. Intel and AMD would much rather have a 10GHz Pentium or Opteron, but it is not happening soon enough. The same is true with biology and other fields, we are hitting these invisible walls. That probably explains why String Theory became popular, despite a compeling lack of evidence. There are just certain limits that we don't have any idea how to overcome. So we might plateau for another century or two, improving what we have, mixing and matching, but without necessarily keep making giganting breakthroughs like some authors would like us to believe.
I have watched National Geographic and Travel Channel and for all I know, Australia might as well be a conspiracy idea started by National Geographic to sell travel stories. If it really didn't exist, will I be terribly depressed and sad? -- Not at all!
The fallacy with that argument is that at that stage 'we' (or 'it' -- the slime ;-) didn't have a choice. The bacteria is preprogrammed to survive. It couldn't understand the world, it doesn't have a power of introspection, it doesn't create models of self and the world and it doesn't ask questions like "what is my purpose in life?" in such a way that a potential answer would be "none" it would just decide to stay in the ocean.
we're a race of dreamers
The other side of the coin is that we are a race of thinkers as well. As a result we can ask the question "what is my purpose in life?" and the potential answer could be "none". Our evolved rational mind might be what will eventually kill us, because it will throw us into total dispair when faced with the vastness and emptiness of the universe. Perhaps we, with our nice big brains, are just a fluke of the evolutionary algorithm, a 'bug' that created creatures who knew too much and thus got too depressed to fight for their survival. Billions and billions of years ahead, I am quite convinced that bacteria will still be in the universe but I am not so sure that we will. (So let me go grab another Prozac, and another shot of rum).
Why bother crawling out of bed for that matter?
Well what's your answer to that? To go to work, to make more money, to buy a bigger car, to feel better about yourself, and have a little fun perhaps but still and end up dead, _exactly_ as dead as someone who never got out of bed.
How would you prevent the intermediate generations from feeling like they are meaningless
What prevents this particular generation of earth inhabitants from feeling meaningless? If you don't believe in any afterlife, then aren't we here on Earth only to father the next generation?
But, the grandparent point is still valid. Why should we care? Even if a meteorite will strike earth in 150 years, it does not matter to me personally. I will be gone by then.
Doh!
'Normal' was clearly meant be 'what is considered normal'. Most civilized societies will consider killing as a lot more evil and _extraordinary_ than a husband having sex with their wife.
The fact that our human history is full of violence doesn't mean it's a good thing, and we should just run around the street with bazookas in our hands, as much as the frag-loving-teens on Slashdot would like the idea.
I meant normal as the idealized "normal", what everyone considers desirable. Yes, human history is a very much a violent history. But most would agree that violence is not "desirable".
The salaries that people take home are also a private matter, the medical conditions that they have is private, their religion is private, thier feeling towards their significant others are intimate. But, yet, that doesn't prevent those issues to be in the media. You see church services in the movies, you watch rich celebrities flaunt their money on TV, you watch people being cut up for plastic surgeries on Discovery Health Channel. It is not just that sex is private it is completely suppressed. The general message coming across is that 'sex is bad' and 'violence is accepted'.
I understand the concern of protecting children from sex, but then why not protect them from violence just as much. Sex might be a private thing but it is a _normal_ thing. Violence should not be taking place neither in public nor in private, it is abnormal. Humans should not be blowing each other up, it is _not_ a normal thing.
None taken
I only spoke about Europe and U.S. because I live for a long time in both of those parts of the world. I didn't not try to be 'eurocentric', I don't think Europe is 'better' and 'U.S.' is worse. If I did, I would be living where it's 'better', trust me. I was just comparing attitudes and values. That's all. I cannot claim anything about Asia and Middle East, as I have not been there and did not extensively study their societies and cultures.
This attitude persists. chilren grow up implicitly learning that 'violence is accepted'. Look at movie rating PG-13 can have people dismembering each other but as soon as a penis or a vulva pops up in there -- the rating gets changed to NC-17, no questions asked. What are young people to make of it?
By the time they want to play Quake and Doom, they are already violent! They just find a virtual release for it. Now that in an of itself may help normalize it or not, but I really doubt that it is the video games that caused Columbine and other such disasters. Video games are a product and product will exist on the market only if there is a demand for it. Children want to buy games to blow virtual people! It is just that we don't want to blame ourselves, our culture, our attitudes and our society (how can we, we are the most perfectestest and most awesomestest country in the world!), so instead we find a scape goat -- Those 'evil', 'magic' computers and their 'internets' and the video games.
Sex is something very common, a part of a _normal_ life. Violence is not! A 12 year old can see someone's head being blown off but 'Oh my god! Shield them from seeing someone's genitalia on TV."
I don't advocate showing pornography to children, but I think they should be able the see the statue of David. I just don't understand why for so long, violence was accepted, but sex was not.
If I had to choose one or the other, I would accept the display of sexuality to children than the display of violence.
I grew up in Eastern Europe, and I have to say that when coming to U.S. I was shocked of how sexually repressed this country it. There was a story in the news how a theatre changed the title of the 'Vagina Monologues' to the 'Hooha Monologues' -- WTF!?
A vagina is a 'hoohaa' now, because a grandmother didn't want to tell her granddaughter who is old enough to read what a vigina is? Well, what the hell is a hoohaa then?
There is a reason why there are so many substitute words for female genitalia in English (hoohaa, pussy, box, coochie, hole, snatch, slot, nooch, fanny -- just a couple I could thin of right now.) This is direct result of sexual repression.
Also, a couple of years ago, when 'March of the Penguins' was in the movie theatres, I was watching it with my wife and there was couple with their young (6-7 year old ) daughter. There is a scene in the movie when the penguins are mating. They were not showing close up of genitals or anything like that. The mother got up, yanked the daughter by her hand and dragged her out. The girl didn't quite understand what to make of her mother's reaction, she got scared and started crying. Then they came back later, just in time to watch the penguin baby chicks die because their parents couldn't take care of them. I thought, 'how sad', that poor girl...
At the same time. This is one of the most violent countries in the world. It is not because of the guns, it's irrelevant, people own guns in other countries but the don't necessarily shoot each ther with them.
And then there is the problem with violent video games. Children in Europe play violent video games. I love Doom, Quake and all of the other ones. But those children do not go and shoot each other as much as the American children. It is as if we cannot simply blaim ourselves, and our culture for disasters like Columbine, we have to blaim video games, or some other things that we can all point a finger to.
Sorry for the rant. Hey if Linus can have a nice 'healhty' rant at the GNOME desktop, so can I at the American society
Then I tried Ubuntu once and I was surprized at how much I liked it now. The same GNOME that I hated, now worked great. I stopped worrying about all those infinetly large space of KDE configurations and was able to just use my desktop. At times I would get frustrated with it, just like Linus did, but then I would get used to it. I have become convinced that 'less is more'.
Apple, who has invested more than any other company in UI research, has proven this to be true. Geeks like me laughed at the stupid Apple with their one-button mouse. But somehow Apple ended up being touted as the king of usability, there is a good reason for that.
I like Linus, and I understand his frustration. But he also needs to understand the mindset of a regular (=idiot) user. He lives in the kernel world and GNOME needs to live in the Desktop world. Linus' users are geeks who know what ioctl() is and GNOME users want to write a monthly report paper. They will never agree. They just need to understand each other and work together.
You see when Gates went to Romania, Basescu's comment about Romania's IT being built on top of MS's pirated software was a complement. Of all the thousands of Romanians that MS employs, a lot of them had their first encounter with Windows at home, by running pirated software. That is true all over the world. The best thing that MS could ever do for OSS is to actually crack down on the illegal users of Windows! Even send them to Siberia if they had to. When hacker kids like me, couldn't get their toys for free, and will be afraid of beint sent to Siberia just for playing with some OS, then Linux will truly win. The geeks who use Linux will grow up, will end up at different companies, will eventually be in a position to make software purchasing decision and guess what they will ask for -- Linux support of course.
The brain, does not start a blank slate, it is already pre-programmed to do many things and it is that wiring of neurons and their initial states that need to be decoded.
In addition to that, every cell in the brain, just like any other living cell, is so complicated that we cannot even simulate one cell very well. It is believed that there is more to neurons than just pure on/off output switching after they get up to a certain potential. Neurotransmitter concentration as well aother chemicals around the neurons will play a role in their behavior. Now imagine simulating that for hundreds of billions of cells.
By the way the most amazing thing about the human brain is not just it's capacity for thought, emotions, imagination and other such stuff but also the _efficiency_ of it all. The brain runs at a steady temperature of 37'C and consumes less than 100W of energy. Compare that to your computer's CPU that would heat up to 100'C doing nothing than just adding numbers.
Yes they did, but perhaps if the lab didn't exist all those donations _might_ have gone into some useful research like cancer or some other disease.
Mr. Coward, in case you have not read the article, the conversation actually is about AMD's new processor, which is a real processor. That processor will generate some amount of heat ... real heat, not theoretical heat.
A few years ago people would've ...
What are you referring to? I never mentioned OOP, relativity, or satalites (sic) in my post.
To be fair, I suspect that the resulting information from the computation itself carries... well... information.
You are a coward but at least you are fair, that's good to know. A fair coward is better than a regular, run-of-the-mill coward, at least in my book. Yes, information carries information. Do you want a Nobel prize for that? O perhaps an honorary PhD degree?
All good computer scientists know information has a direct corolation (sic) to entropy
And even better computer scientists know how to spell, or at least use a spell checker.
It seems like you need to listen to your own advice and : quit pointlessly spewing shit at people who have useful things to say.
Or did you actually think that those "stupid" CPU designers for all this years, battling with heat dissipation, never thought of, oh.. simply replacing the nand gates with reversible Fredkin and Toffoli gates and 'poof' magically all the heat issues are gone, processors will run @ hundreds of GHz, the wold's electrical power consumption will go down and the geeks won't be able to boast about their huge ass sinks anymore...
That is because there wasn't adequate screening. Most astronauts come to NASA from a military background, and military people are not known for their love of psychologists. You regular Joe Military Go-Getter will never sit in a psychologist's office and tell them that they are afraid of spiders or had naughty thoughts about their co-workers. Now, the astronauts feel that way and the NASA administration feels the same, because many of them, if not all, have also been in the military. That is why the procedures are never implemented.
I think that this should prompt for a better screening not just for astronauts but also for all the military personnel and police forces as well. In general any profession that will result in having an immediate responsibility for human life, should have extensive screening.
Wow, if you told her that she would probably look at you very ... surprised...!
Also, you would be surprised to know that they can take your picture, the picture of your children, your car and so on when you are in a public place. In other words you could go and take a pictures of people walking down the street and piss them off but that doesn't mean it will be illegal, you'll also probably get your arse kicked.
Please see Photographer's Rights pamphlet here: http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf
Google Cache:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HdiLDCYdmdwJ: www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf+photograp hy+ask+permission+public+place&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2& gl=us
I agree with that. Even if you went to Hitler or Stalin and asked them what they thought of themselves they would probably say that they are 'nice decent people'. I have no doubt, most hardened criminals would probably say the same. The pain of living while being convinced that they are horrible horrible sadistic person would probably either drive the person insane or cognitive dissonance would force them to justify the behaviors somehow by adjusting the beliefs to think of themselves as 'nice, decent people'.
But at the same time I disagree that people are basically bad. Yes, there are a social subgroups that have a large accumulation of sadists and cops and will have a much higher concentration of sick people who will harm others just 'cause. And trust me the cops here in U.S. are saints compared to their counterparts in Russia. I have been at a police station there once and heard the scaries howling cries of a the teenager being tortured across the hall, it was something out of a horror movie...
So I lived under communism and have seen all their shit and I can tell you that even in the Slashdot's proverbial "Soviet Russia" people were still basically good most of the time. Most people didn't lie, cheat and steal, my parents are an example, they worked in their jobs, we had our state assigned apartment, I don't remember us doing anything evil, we did not bribe anyone, we just lived our lives. But some did lie, cheat and steal, and it was enough to send the whole system down the drain.
I general think that people are too hard to categorize. There is a continuum from totally_evil to extra_nice. Everyone is in between and where they are is always changing. A lot of it is in response to external stimuli. You would be surprised but psychologists would say that there is not that much difference between a hero and villain. It is just a matter of where they are and what is happening at the time with them. Yes, the police are not that far from the criminals according to their average personality. And I am not surprised when police act like criminals once it an while, just like I would not be surprised if the neighbors of some known serial killer would say that 'he was such a nice young man' -- they would be telling the truth, sometimes he/she would be a nice person!
Oh, even better anyone should be able to create their own religions as they please. We can have the /. Church of the Almighty Comander Taco, then we can all be ministers, somehow copyright our forum discussions and find a way not to pay taxes. We'll also sue or hack anyone who makes fun of us...