The punishment of stoning was also given specifically to men in numerous other circumstances too. Equal-opportunity, so to speak.:-)
And that would be a tu quoque fallacy. The fact that it also promotes violence against men does not mean it does not promote violence against women, so under this law it would be banned anyway. My point stands.
The only violent texts that would be allowed would be the ones that promote violence exclusively against men, pretty unfair is you ask me.
An easier test, assuming you can turn back while travelling on a wormhole would be to send a probe into a black hole, and once it is past the event horizon, have it turn around and return. If it goes in and then out, it is a wormhole (since it has no event horizon). No need to wait a few million years.
If it doesn't, it was a black hole and you've made some probe spaghetti instead.
I know how a buffer solution works. I've leant about them in high school. That does not change the problem, it simply shows it is more difficult than it seems.
We've added some extra amount of CO2 (x) to the atmosphere. If we want to revert the process we should remove the same amount x. It doesn't matter if the CO2 went into the ocean or into a magic bag.
The only difference the buffer makes is that you cannot simple pretend that in order to reduce y% you just have to calculate how many molecules that y% represent and take them and expect everything to be ok, because the ocean in this case will replenish them until it reaches an equilibrium. On the other hand, it means that we managed to put more CO2 into the system than it seems just looking at the atmosphere without cooking ourselves in the process.
Size is not the difference between software and chemistry buffers (I can make a 1:100 buffer), but the equilibrium it has with the environment. As it fills up, the conditions of the outside remain close, but not the same. If we take enough CO2 from the atmosphere, the ocean will replenish it, but not to the original level, because the equilibrium has changed.
As for your joke: I consider windows (and software in general) more like a gas. It expands to fill all the space available, no matter what size of hard disk you've got.
But you would have emptied part of the buffer in the process. If you keep removing CO2 from the air, eventually the buffer will be empty (I'm not saying that we want to do that). The point is that by emptying the buffer a little, you should reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere (making the climate a little colder) and having an extra place to store an excess of CO2 should an accidental release happen (so a second industrial revolution in 1000 years changes the climate from pre-industrial to late 20th century instead of late 20th to venus).
If google wants to build a new network for gamers (let's call it gamenet), they're free to do so. In that case I don't expect it to be connected to the Internet, and I would certainly expect some quality of service that allow a smooth game.
However I wouldn't expect to be able to send anything into it (only game data), and I would expect it to prioritize packets in order to make a good gaming experience (e.g. FPS first, then realtime board games, then non-realtime). I would also assume I could sue them if they do not make a decent priorization (including the case when they decide to downgrade my favorite FPS because they didn't pay "premium access").
That net, however, would be VERY DIFFERENT from Internet (when I'm expected to send whatever I want on a best-effort basis).
Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment -- that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:
But the ownership is secure.
They build a new pipe. The rules are that you pay $x/Mbyte. So, duplicating the capacity will let you make twice the amount of money you made last year (in the case of flat rate, it is seen as being capable of selling to twice the customers than last year).
The point of net neutrality is not whether you're going to charge me for downloading warez or whatever. The point is why should you charge more for downloading from TPB instead of yourtelcowarez.com service. After all, the pipes don't care (for the argument's sake, let's assume both sites are equally far away).
Obviously there is a problem of oversold bandwidth, and now that people is starting to use it, they bitch about it. Basically they want to raise prices without saying so (pay $5 to telcowarez.com subscription + ISP subscription = ISP subscription + make TPB pay $5 for "premium content" = ISP subscription + make me pay $5 for "TPB premium content access" = telco makes 5 extra bucks).
The problem is that they'll overdo it and they will eventually demand $5 for each site. That kind of Internet would definitely suck.
There's a bunch of other trends where the/. community seems to be completely brainwashed into a single homogeneous position that they repeat often enough to convince themselves that its true. DRM being just one such example. Whatever happened to intelligent geeks evaluating stuff at merit?
In what way might DRM benefit me that would make me consider it a good thing?
You might not know how an internal combustion engine works, but you certainly have trained to use a car and have a license.
Even if you know almost nothing a about your car, you certainly know when something wrong is with your engine. I've seen people do things with computers that would roughly be equivalent to driving with the engine on fire. Not only people don't bother to learn the most basic things about computers, they also ignore any problems they see and keep going like nothing is happening.
Using a computer is definitely harder than using an engine, since it can do many more things. Yet people use them without even basic training or maintenance.
While Israel has been in numerous wars, they've never initiated a war
They started the six day war.
Granted, they were under blockade, and the situation was so awful that it would have started anyway. But you can't deny their (very successful) maneuver to catch the egyptian airforce on the ground started the six day war.
If you're going to follow Moseic law, you'd better follow all of it. Not interested in becoming a Jew? Then you might be interested to know the rules changed about 2k years ago
But whether or not what says in the bible are the current rules is not being analized here. The point is that the part cited does promote violence against women. The hypothetical "Current rules for christians" (or whatever) would not be banned (I hope). But the text cited by the GP poster would certainly be. If being a set of valid rules to follow was part of the argument, then (as an example, since it can be extended to any text/image) the bible should be banned only if the user is christian, since a christian would consider it rules, while should be allowed to non christians, since a non christian would consider it a fairy tale, and not a model to follow (and the same applies to other religions or other influential texts).
The GP poster made a reductio ad absurdum argument, possibly considering that the idiot pushing this bill was not thinking of banning the bible.
What you just described is not terrorism, it's sabotage. Cutting the west coast from the rest of the Internet would not cause terror, just annoyance. I'd say as a terrorist target the Internet ranks pretty low.
I think the PP should have been modded insighful instead of funny.
IIRC, a few years ago the laws regarding cryptography in France were even worse than the ones in the US (crypto = munitions, remember?). Strong crypto was forbidden, unless you got a license to use it (think banks and such). I don't know the current situation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the sticks were functioning as designed.
Then again, people make stupid design mistakes and this could just be an example.
Great, just what we need - hardware suppliers being encouraged to release buggy versions in the guise of fully working products.
Let's face it. Since the invention of the winmodem, hardware quality has been getting worse and worse. What you say is happening right now. Maybe not in CPUs, but lots of types of hardware already follow that idea. At least with phoenix I'd have a chance of getting that junk patched.
FYI, have a tyan tiger, so I'm a victim of a.0 release of AMD's new 760MPX chipset, complete without USB ports and faulty AGP system, and I'm also the (not) proud owner of a HP Laserjet 1022, that hangs whenever I send multiple jobs (or even a single not too complex one). You can imagine how much I esteem those two design teams (and the managers who decided to make an early release).
More like an exception handler for the CPU. The chip monitors certain signals, when the chip detects a combination that knows is going to fail (say, you're about to hit the FDIV bug on a pentium), it takes control and either arranges things so no error happens or corrects the mistake.
It is really a patch for hardware (unlike microcode changes, they would change the way the processor operates directly). This could fix problems in the microcode interpreter, or a RISC processor (incurring a performance penalty).
Content neutrality is a different sort of beast. There are sound technical reasons for not having content neutrality because the technical requirements of different sorts of traffic are different.
You have the means of marking the priorities of packages. You should use them. Since anything above network level is (theoretically) none of the ISP's business, it should be the only means of signalling priorities.
You might want YOUR VoIP to have priority over YOUR file download, but you should remember that:
1)I might have something even more important that VoIP, so I wouldn't want VoIP given preference over that.
2) Internet is a "best effort" network. If you want guaranteed phone service, you should use a separate network for that (the PSTN).
In other words, if you want your VoIP prioritized, you should use the IP TOS bits, not have a blanket policy (at the ISP) giving VoIP traffic priority.
Seriously, who in their right mind would want to integrate aspects of Windows?
Think like the SAMBA guys. They want to interoperate with windows, not integrate aspects of it into other platforms. That capability is always a plus, at least it makes a transition out of windows smooth.
If your problem is really with the wireless lan, I think the answer is simple:
QUIT USING 802.11 AND GET A WIRED LAN.
If your computer room is anything like mine, it is completely immobile, and a wireless lan is the wrong tool for the job.
You shouldn't use a technology just for its sake. You should use the right tool for the right job. Using a wireless network when everybody does too is like using a hub with everyone in your neighbourhood connected to it. In fact, wireless lans have serious trouble operating under such circumstances (its throughput is proportional to the thoughput of the slowest station, because the slowest ones turns into a (physical) bandwidth hog).
Get your stationary machines off the air, at least you won't have to endure that problem on desktops. If you can, get your neighbours to do the same. Leave only the mobile machines on wireless. Even if you can't convince anyone, at least your problem will be only on your mobile hosts.
By the way, you might want to check if that's really all of your problems, WRT54G are known to have problems under high loads (like constant bittorrent traffic). It tries to track too many connections until it runs out of table space and then nothing can get to it (or through it). The symptoms match, when I do that to mine, I have to reset it once every two or three days.
I couldn't RTFA, it seems slashdotted, but this is basically a buoy that transmit its position and the direction of the signal from the submarine.
Since the buoy is fixed (I assume), there is no need for it to receive GPS signals, since it knows its position. This system is more like a VOR equivalent for submarines instead of planes (using sound instead of radio). The only thing in common with GPS is that it's a navigation device and some parts of the algorithm used.
If I were on a military sub I wouldn't use it, though. Using that system requires emitting a sonar pulse that would reveal the sub's location to hostiles. I'd do it just like the real GPS does, with the buoy transmitting timestamps and positions and let the computers on board sort everything out passively. Then again, inertial systems can't be that bad if they are being used, so maybe the whole system is not worth implementing.
If you want to be strict, the SI defines the "tera" prefix as 10^12, so 1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes.
If you want to use the binary values, you might as well use the correct "tebi" prefix. NIST says you should, and it looks like the IEC, IEEE and BIPM agree.
I can claim exactly the opposite experience once. Cloud cover all day, and at the last moment there was just a partial break in the cover, just enough to observe the eclipse.
I don't recall the IEEE saying anything about the "shortage" of computer specialists. Maybe I missed it, maybe the other posters are mistaking the IEEE with the Rand Corporation.
I think you should read the paper RAND wrote. It describes exactly what everyone is talking about in this thread.
"Finishing" the patent would - or should - require at least one real or paper implementation.
The interesting bit is that I designed a very similar device (in paper) a couple of years ago. It was a black box that would first accept some keys at startup, then take some encrypted data (encrypted with the key mentioned above) as input and the encrypted key of a client and if would decrypt the data and then reencrypt it with the client's key (all without revealing the master keys loaded at startup) to be sent to the client's printer, that has a crypto engine itself. Then it would get printed locally. Our device was not supposed to accept any dongles or such, though.
We would use that device in order to secure PINs valid for a certain amount of pre-paid phone time. The idea was to prevent evesdropping even on compromised machines.
I can't give you any docs since I'm still under NDA, but the device has been built purely on software. But the original specs were for a hardware box, the idea was to use a PC connected only via serial cables to the server.
I don't mean to say directly that it would be impossible to teach sciences on a TC. My point is more subtle, it's that TCs and certain things (like programming languages) don't mix well, because the latter can subvert the former (converting the TC into a GPC).
And I've never thought you were a fan of trusted computing, it's pretty clear that we only disagree on certain economic aspects only.
Slashdot Mirror
And that would be a tu quoque fallacy. The fact that it also promotes violence against men does not mean it does not promote violence against women, so under this law it would be banned anyway. My point stands.
The only violent texts that would be allowed would be the ones that promote violence exclusively against men, pretty unfair is you ask me.
An easier test, assuming you can turn back while travelling on a wormhole would be to send a probe into a black hole, and once it is past the event horizon, have it turn around and return. If it goes in and then out, it is a wormhole (since it has no event horizon). No need to wait a few million years.
If it doesn't, it was a black hole and you've made some probe spaghetti instead.
I know how a buffer solution works. I've leant about them in high school.
That does not change the problem, it simply shows it is more difficult than it seems.
We've added some extra amount of CO2 (x) to the atmosphere. If we want to revert the process we should remove the same amount x. It doesn't matter if the CO2 went into the ocean or into a magic bag.
The only difference the buffer makes is that you cannot simple pretend that in order to reduce y% you just have to calculate how many molecules that y% represent and take them and expect everything to be ok, because the ocean in this case will replenish them until it reaches an equilibrium. On the other hand, it means that we managed to put more CO2 into the system than it seems just looking at the atmosphere without cooking ourselves in the process.
Size is not the difference between software and chemistry buffers (I can make a 1:100 buffer), but the equilibrium it has with the environment. As it fills up, the conditions of the outside remain close, but not the same. If we take enough CO2 from the atmosphere, the ocean will replenish it, but not to the original level, because the equilibrium has changed.
As for your joke: I consider windows (and software in general) more like a gas. It expands to fill all the space available, no matter what size of hard disk you've got.
But you would have emptied part of the buffer in the process. If you keep removing CO2 from the air, eventually the buffer will be empty (I'm not saying that we want to do that). The point is that by emptying the buffer a little, you should reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere (making the climate a little colder) and having an extra place to store an excess of CO2 should an accidental release happen (so a second industrial revolution in 1000 years changes the climate from pre-industrial to late 20th century instead of late 20th to venus).
If google wants to build a new network for gamers (let's call it gamenet), they're free to do so. In that case I don't expect it to be connected to the Internet, and I would certainly expect some quality of service that allow a smooth game.
However I wouldn't expect to be able to send anything into it (only game data), and I would expect it to prioritize packets in order to make a good gaming experience (e.g. FPS first, then realtime board games, then non-realtime). I would also assume I could sue them if they do not make a decent priorization (including the case when they decide to downgrade my favorite FPS because they didn't pay "premium access").
That net, however, would be VERY DIFFERENT from Internet (when I'm expected to send whatever I want on a best-effort basis).
But the ownership is secure.
They build a new pipe. The rules are that you pay $x/Mbyte. So, duplicating the capacity will let you make twice the amount of money you made last year (in the case of flat rate, it is seen as being capable of selling to twice the customers than last year).
The point of net neutrality is not whether you're going to charge me for downloading warez or whatever. The point is why should you charge more for downloading from TPB instead of yourtelcowarez.com service. After all, the pipes don't care (for the argument's sake, let's assume both sites are equally far away).
Obviously there is a problem of oversold bandwidth, and now that people is starting to use it, they bitch about it. Basically they want to raise prices without saying so (pay $5 to telcowarez.com subscription + ISP subscription = ISP subscription + make TPB pay $5 for "premium content" = ISP subscription + make me pay $5 for "TPB premium content access" = telco makes 5 extra bucks).
The problem is that they'll overdo it and they will eventually demand $5 for each site. That kind of Internet would definitely suck.
In what way might DRM benefit me that would make me consider it a good thing?
You might not know how an internal combustion engine works, but you certainly have trained to use a car and have a license.
Even if you know almost nothing a about your car, you certainly know when something wrong is with your engine. I've seen people do things with computers that would roughly be equivalent to driving with the engine on fire. Not only people don't bother to learn the most basic things about computers, they also ignore any problems they see and keep going like nothing is happening.
Using a computer is definitely harder than using an engine, since it can do many more things. Yet people use them without even basic training or maintenance.
They started the six day war.
Granted, they were under blockade, and the situation was so awful that it would have started anyway. But you can't deny their (very successful) maneuver to catch the egyptian airforce on the ground started the six day war.
But whether or not what says in the bible are the current rules is not being analized here. The point is that the part cited does promote violence against women. The hypothetical "Current rules for christians" (or whatever) would not be banned (I hope). But the text cited by the GP poster would certainly be. If being a set of valid rules to follow was part of the argument, then (as an example, since it can be extended to any text/image) the bible should be banned only if the user is christian, since a christian would consider it rules, while should be allowed to non christians, since a non christian would consider it a fairy tale, and not a model to follow (and the same applies to other religions or other influential texts).
The GP poster made a reductio ad absurdum argument, possibly considering that the idiot pushing this bill was not thinking of banning the bible.
What you just described is not terrorism, it's sabotage.
Cutting the west coast from the rest of the Internet would not cause terror, just annoyance. I'd say as a terrorist target the Internet ranks pretty low.
I think the PP should have been modded insighful instead of funny.
IIRC, a few years ago the laws regarding cryptography in France were even worse than the ones in the US (crypto = munitions, remember?). Strong crypto was forbidden, unless you got a license to use it (think banks and such). I don't know the current situation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the sticks were functioning as designed.
Then again, people make stupid design mistakes and this could just be an example.
Let's face it. Since the invention of the winmodem, hardware quality has been getting worse and worse. What you say is happening right now. Maybe not in CPUs, but lots of types of hardware already follow that idea. At least with phoenix I'd have a chance of getting that junk patched.
FYI, have a tyan tiger, so I'm a victim of a
More like an exception handler for the CPU.
The chip monitors certain signals, when the chip detects a combination that knows is going to fail (say, you're about to hit the FDIV bug on a pentium), it takes control and either arranges things so no error happens or corrects the mistake.
It is really a patch for hardware (unlike microcode changes, they would change the way the processor operates directly). This could fix problems in the microcode interpreter, or a RISC processor (incurring a performance penalty).
You have the means of marking the priorities of packages. You should use them. Since anything above network level is (theoretically) none of the ISP's business, it should be the only means of signalling priorities.
You might want YOUR VoIP to have priority over YOUR file download, but you should remember that:
1)I might have something even more important that VoIP, so I wouldn't want VoIP given preference over that.
2) Internet is a "best effort" network. If you want guaranteed phone service, you should use a separate network for that (the PSTN).
In other words, if you want your VoIP prioritized, you should use the IP TOS bits, not have a blanket policy (at the ISP) giving VoIP traffic priority.
Think like the SAMBA guys.
They want to interoperate with windows, not integrate aspects of it into other platforms. That capability is always a plus, at least it makes a transition out of windows smooth.
If your problem is really with the wireless lan, I think the answer is simple:
QUIT USING 802.11 AND GET A WIRED LAN.
If your computer room is anything like mine, it is completely immobile, and a wireless lan is the wrong tool for the job.
You shouldn't use a technology just for its sake. You should use the right tool for the right job. Using a wireless network when everybody does too is like using a hub with everyone in your neighbourhood connected to it. In fact, wireless lans have serious trouble operating under such circumstances (its throughput is proportional to the thoughput of the slowest station, because the slowest ones turns into a (physical) bandwidth hog).
Get your stationary machines off the air, at least you won't have to endure that problem on desktops. If you can, get your neighbours to do the same. Leave only the mobile machines on wireless. Even if you can't convince anyone, at least your problem will be only on your mobile hosts.
By the way, you might want to check if that's really all of your problems, WRT54G are known to have problems under high loads (like constant bittorrent traffic). It tries to track too many connections until it runs out of table space and then nothing can get to it (or through it). The symptoms match, when I do that to mine, I have to reset it once every two or three days.
I couldn't RTFA, it seems slashdotted, but this is basically a buoy that transmit its position and the direction of the signal from the submarine.
Since the buoy is fixed (I assume), there is no need for it to receive GPS signals, since it knows its position. This system is more like a VOR equivalent for submarines instead of planes (using sound instead of radio). The only thing in common with GPS is that it's a navigation device and some parts of the algorithm used.
If I were on a military sub I wouldn't use it, though. Using that system requires emitting a sonar pulse that would reveal the sub's location to hostiles. I'd do it just like the real GPS does, with the buoy transmitting timestamps and positions and let the computers on board sort everything out passively. Then again, inertial systems can't be that bad if they are being used, so maybe the whole system is not worth implementing.
I think you mean Windows Vista PE (pirated edition).
It'll be available soon for download from an online distributor near you!
If you want to be strict, the SI defines the "tera" prefix as 10^12, so 1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes.
If you want to use the binary values, you might as well use the correct "tebi" prefix. NIST says you should, and it looks like the IEC, IEEE and BIPM agree.
Hah. Murphy in action.
I can claim exactly the opposite experience once.
Cloud cover all day, and at the last moment there was just a partial break in the cover, just enough to observe the eclipse.
Simply beautiful.
I don't recall the IEEE saying anything about the "shortage" of computer specialists. Maybe I missed it, maybe the other posters are mistaking the IEEE with the Rand Corporation.
I think you should read the paper RAND wrote. It describes exactly what everyone is talking about in this thread.
Learn to use the right tool for the right job, people!
Wasting a gmail account for that will only end up making all semi-decent accounts unavailable, just like hotmail.
Mailinator is the right tool for that, remember it.
(and don't forget to leave a copy of the account details on bugmenot, too)
The interesting bit is that I designed a very similar device (in paper) a couple of years ago. It was a black box that would first accept some keys at startup, then take some encrypted data (encrypted with the key mentioned above) as input and the encrypted key of a client and if would decrypt the data and then reencrypt it with the client's key (all without revealing the master keys loaded at startup) to be sent to the client's printer, that has a crypto engine itself. Then it would get printed locally. Our device was not supposed to accept any dongles or such, though.
We would use that device in order to secure PINs valid for a certain amount of pre-paid phone time. The idea was to prevent evesdropping even on compromised machines.
I can't give you any docs since I'm still under NDA, but the device has been built purely on software. But the original specs were for a hardware box, the idea was to use a PC connected only via serial cables to the server.
I don't mean to say directly that it would be impossible to teach sciences on a TC. My point is more subtle, it's that TCs and certain things (like programming languages) don't mix well, because the latter can subvert the former (converting the TC into a GPC).
And I've never thought you were a fan of trusted computing, it's pretty clear that we only disagree on certain economic aspects only.