I propose a targeted advertising system that tracks user's preferences based upon the stories they read most often. This would require placing another cookie on a users computer with a unique ID string....
And who gets access to this information about me? Slashdot? The advertiser? Both? Their "affiliates"? Anybody who cares to buy a targetted list?
That's my problem with targeted ad schemes: they all disclose personal information about me to people who have no business knowing it, at which point I lose control over it. I shut down everything that uses cookies and Javascript for this very reason.
The only privacy-respecting way to handle this is to let my information remain mine, on my computer. My browser would hold a list of my preferences. Each page would come with a list of ads, and each ad in the list would come tagged with a unique identifier and a set of product categories and associations (numbers between -1 and 1 which measure how well they fit; for example, Viagra gets -1 in the feminine hygiene category). My browser picks an ad and loads it through an anonymizing proxy which tells the banner-ad company what the referring page is (so the site owner can get credit) but not who I am. If I click "Never show me this ad again", I never see the ad again... but the information does not go beyond my own machine.
The exchange of information could go both ways. If the site requires ad revenue to survive it could require a cryptographically-signed "magic number" from the banner-ad company before it lets you beyond the main page. This number would identify the ad, not you (the ad company doesn't know who you are). This achieves accountability (in theory; spoofing to artifically run up ad counts would be possible, but it's just as possible today) while maintaining anonymity. --
if your room is dusty or smoke-filled, your computer is gonna try to filter all that out...
To be nit-picky, anything that has air moving past it is going to collect some of the particulate matter in the air, by impingement if nothing else (air turns the corner, dust mote can't make the curve). Calling this "trying" is, well, trying to anyone familiar with the pathetic fallacy.;)
"You try my patience, sir!"
"Don't mind if I do. You'll have to try mine sometime." -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
This is a better technology.
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 2
Well, since we have no far distant colonies or outposts in space to warrant such a slow moving transport type ship, why should we be concentrating on this technology.
You misunderstand several things:
Our current probes are already slow. They are limited by the kick that chemical-fuel boosters can give them, and then have to coast or run complicated gravity-assist trajectories to get to their targets (does VEEGA mean anything to you?). Solar sails can be much faster.
We can use solar sails on the missions we are doing now, to get more science out of them. Consider the NEAR mission. This mission is at an end because the NEAR craft is out of fuel. If it had only required fuel for small but rapid changes in velocity and instead relied on a solar sail for cruising thrust, it would be on its way to another rock. And then another, and another.
Because solar sails can produce thrust without expending any mass on a more or less indefinite basis, they are one of the big enabling technologies for real exploration and colonization of the solar system.
Clear enough?
[you're going to have to] build one heck of a large cargo vessel to hold all the resources needed to keep a human 'population' alive aboard such a slow moving starship for hundreds and thousands of years.
If the sails are laser-propelled, your cargo vessel could be both smaller and faster over long distances than anything which propels itself only with fuel it carries. Even without laser propulsion, the sails have many uses which do not involve hauling people around. These uses include propelling the probes to locate resources or other points of interest, and hauling the supply stockpiles for people to use when they arrive. The cargo travels by slow boat, the people travel by express. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
What does the zygote have that the two gametes did not have a moment before?
Human life. A soul. The right to live. Take your pick.... It is not legal to murder someone...
As I keep trying to tell you, you're assuming your conclusion. What is a soul, and how do you know (without reference to religion) that a zygote has one while the gametes do not? Who has a right to live in someone else's body? Why should birth be a right to be demanded by force of law, instead of a gift freely given? Murder is a strong word, but it also has a strict definition. Since murder is "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought", I wonder if you could give the legal names of some of these murder victims; with your claim of millions of victims I'm sure you could identify at least a few dozen. Et cetera.
Metabolism does not a human being make; neither does the oft-cited beating heart. A body stops being a human being under the law when it's brain-dead. A zygote has no brain, nor even any neurons. It can't think, feel, or even sense other than by reacting to chemicals at the cellular level. When you try to claim the label of "human being" for something so insignificant, you demean humanity.
Simply because a large proportion of zygotes die before birth has no bearing on my contention that life begins before such birth, indeed at conception.
It's simple. We're constructed to throw away most zygotes. I have not heard of a single holy book which says that menstrual periods should be mourned. Obviously God doesn't give a damn about zygotes, so why should we? Why are you venerating the worthless? More to the point, why are you insisting that people who do not share your religious convictions nevertheless follow your rules of conduct? That violates their right to freedom of religion.
What do you consider a human being? Just when, exactly, does a person become a person? I suggest that any answer besides "conception" bears serious problems.
It becomes a person when it is an independent entity which can think and feel. It stops being a person when it can no longer think and feel (ie. no longer has a functioning brain). What's the problem with that?
This is a cop-out. People tell other people how to deal with such important issues all the time and many such things are legislated.
Estimates were that illegal abortion into the late 60's was about 1.5 million per year. In 1973, Roe vs. Wade threw out most state laws banning abortion. Abortions are now about what, 1.2 million a year? Safety is way up, judging from the 7000 reported deaths (and how many unreported ones?) from illegal abortion from 1946-1972 compared to under 400 from legal abortion between 1973 and 1999 (see this page). Looks like legislation failed pretty miserably.
The "pro-life" movement is all about demanding public adherence to one particular ideal of piousness. If that's what you want, you can always go someplace where it's the law of the land; I suggest Afghanistan, or if you don't have the stomach for such required conformity you might try Iran. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Scramjet articles have been running around since the NASP and before. You can also tell that the author is a scientific illiterate, because he wrote the following:
But the Australian version of the engine, which will use the rush of air at high speeds to ignite pollution-free hydrogen...
Hydrogen is not inherently pollution-free; hydrogen combustion easily creates nitrogen oxides due to the high temperature. Nitrogen oxides are one of the catalyst chemicals which destroy ozone.
On top of that, the article is so short on facts (not even any links to more information in the article body - don't these nitwits understand what hypertext is about?) that it's hardly worth reading. News for nerds? I think not. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
A new human life begins at conception. I doubt anyone would seriously argue that an unfertilized egg or a non-implanted sperm qualifies as an individual human life.
I fail to see how your argument invalidates my position or makes it "a mistake to say that life begins at conception."
It's a mistake because it assumes a difference where it is arguable at best. What does the zygote have that the two gametes did not have a moment before?
About 2/3 of all zygotes die naturally before birth under the best of circumstances; the average death rate has been estimated to be 3/4. I do not consider a unicellular lifeform with odds that poor to be a human being by any stretch of the imagination. It may someday become one (and achieve the status of "a citizen born or naturalized"), but potential is not actuality.
The easiest way out of this is to mind your own business. The people who agree with you will do things your way. The people who disagree with you will do things their way. If you feel you have to tell other people how to deal with some of the most important issues which will ever face them, you deserve to be told to fsck off. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Yes, there is a speed beyond which the human eye cannot track changes in briliance (ie ammount of light) fast enough. Basically nervous conections have a minimum recovery time between passing two nervous impulses - if i'm not mistaken, for neurons it's about 18 ms (i got this from my neural networks class some years ago).
So, even if the optic nerves were faster than this, the information couldn't get to the brain any faster.
You forgot that the retina isn't just a plane of pixels, it's also an image processor. It contains cells which detect edges and movement. You also forgot that your eye does not stare at one single place on the screen, it is almost always scanning to different spots.
Motion of the eye introduces the problem of stroboscopic effects. A refresh rate which is more than fast enough to be undetectable to a single detector cell your eye is quite a different matter if your eye is panning fast enough. Instead of seeing shapes and edges moving across the field of vision, bright areas in dark fields leave a string of bright dots on the retina while dark areas in bright fields do something similar to (but not exactly) the opposite. Motion-detector cells, which are evolved to deal with more or less constant illumination, don't work properly under such conditions. The motion cues and other little details which your eyes ought to have to aid their tracking across the page are subtly wrong. What this leads to I don't know, but I am aware of some research which showed that people's eyes take longer to scan to particular words on a printed page under flickering fluorescent light than under incandescent light (no word on what effect high-frequency electronic ballasts might have had).
So far as stroboscopic effects are concerned, there is little difference between 60 Hz and 85 Hz. You could eliminate this with long-persistence phospors, but nobody wants to watch their screen smear into an indecipherable blur every time something scrolls. Face it, the CRT is far from an optimal display interface to the human eye. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I think it is quite interesting to consider what will happen to space junk eventually, if we don't do anything about it first.
Essentially, it will form a ring system around the Earth first, somewhat similar to Saturns ring system, but not as big, of course. This will take several tens of thousands of years, and will occurs as a result of collisions between the objects tending to give them all the same vectors, eventually.
After another few tens of thousands of years, the ring will congeal into a spherical object - essentially another moon.
Three problems with that:
The decay time of a satellite in a 200 mile orbit is a few months or years. They are pulled into lower orbits by atmospheric drag, and eventually they re-enter. They are not going to stay up long enough to do much of anything.
If you are proposing that the junk form a ring by loss of energy in collisions, think again. A large amount of the total satellite mass is in polar-orbiting satellites, and some of them are in retrograde orbits. If you equalize their momentum vectors by inelastic collisions, they will lose much of their net velocity and angular momentum. Again, this is a one-way ticket to re-entry.
The self-gravitation of space junk is minuscule. Even with the addition of the ISS, there are only a few thousand tons of stuff in low earth orbit. This is not enough to accrete by gravitational forces. Tidal forces are much stronger, which would keep any loose aggregation of junk from compacting into a solid body.
The long and short of it is, if we stop launching stuff the problem will solve itself in a few years or tens of years, at least for LEO orbits. Go up a few hundred miles and the situation gets nastier; orbital velocities aren't that much lower, but the influence of air drag is greatly reduced. Space junk can build up there for a time scale of thousands of years. If we keep adding junk to those orbits we will eventually have to go to armored satellites or use something like the "laser broom" to knock stuff into lower orbits which will decay in a reasonable amount of time (hours to years). Another possibility is to get fancy with something to puff up Earth's atmosphere and really increase the drag on the high-level junk, helping to clear out everything that is not able to re-boost itself; something which increases the amount of solar UV or X-rays hitting the upper atmosphere by a large extent is one possibility. Space-junk protection systems are probably going to be an issue for most large space projects in the future. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Trying to get this law overturned in the courts is the wrong way to go about it. Don't bug the judges about this - bug Congress. They write the laws.
But they don't write the treaties (including the copyright treaties), and treaties have a force which overrides law. The only force which overrides treaty is the Constitution itself. There are only three ways to get rid of an onerous copyright treaty provision:
Re-negotiate the treaty to reduce the term of copyright (indeed, it takes a treaty change to allow the term to be reduced), then implement this change in law.
Have Congress withdraw the USA from the copyright treaty.
Get the courts to rule that the extension of copyright retroactively, or for any duration beyond what is necessary to "promote progress in the useful arts", is un-Constitutional.
You tell me which one is most likely to succeed in a reasonable amount of time and with a sane budget. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
The government has offered no tenable theory as to how retrospective extension can promote the useful arts.
This is the entire Achilles' Heel of the indefinite-copyright advocates; the grant of copyright exists for a specific purpose, and may not be legitimately used for any other (including and especially to allow wealthy people to extract monopoly rents from the populace).
Intellectual property is a construct; in nature, the public domain rules all and any idea which becomes understood by the public becomes the property of all. The purpose of patent and copyright protection is to promote the publication of these ideas by allowing temporary monopoly use. Progress in the useful arts includes returning things to the public domain so that others can build upon them. One thing's for certain: letting one company have a monopoly on a mouse 70 years after "Steamboat Willie" was aired has no relationship to progress. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
The balancing factor is that it is more convient to the participant if we keep the info on file so we do not have to ask the same question again and again.
I think you misunderstood my point. You wouldn't be balancing anything, you would only ask the questions once at the time of registration. At that time you would separate the intrusive stuff from the contact data, figure out which bin (say, street block) it should go into, add it to the bin, and destroy the paper copy. Voila, no identifiable info. When someone comes into the pool who's from, say, the 300 block of Oak Street, your computer notes that the 300 block of Oak is 27% Black, 19% Hispanic, 15% oriental and 39% white, and adds those fractions to the attendance totals.
Someone could always go around and use the contact database to survey everyone who came through your doors, but this would require their effort and people could always tell them to get lost. It would not be a case of you turning over data; you wouldn't even have the data, so nobody could bother you about it. If your point is to keep the Feds happy with their stat data without becoming a lightning rod, that seems like a good way to achieve it. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I don't know what your requirements are, but if you are allowed to "statistically sample" your data you might want to pre-aggregate income, race and other data on some reasonable basis (geographically block-by-block or on some other criterion), then add tote up the average contribution from that statistical bin to your totals when someone from that block comes to the pool. This would allow you to destroy the personally identifiable information immediately after using it to update your statistics. Neither the government nor a lawsuit can force you to release what you do not have, and you cannot be held in contempt for failing to turn over information that you destroy in your normal course of business. This is likely to keep you out of trouble, because you cannot be harassed on the basis of data which do not exist.
Using a two-part form, with the contact info and home address on one part (to file) and the rest on the other (to destroy right after data entry) will address people's concerns. Your disclaimer may also get people thinking about privacy, and how much info the government has any business keeping. If you can turn the Fed's money into a chance to do some consciousness-raising, kudos to you! -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I'd say the most important reason why people do not code is asm is just that it is difficult.
Try again. Three biggest reasons not to even think about using assembler:
The compiler yields code of sufficient speed and compactness for the intended application.
Precise control of execution time is not required.
The additional difficulty of designing, coding, documenting and testing an assembly-language implementation is not warranted by the benefits; it is far cheaper to throw more CPU cycles at the problem than more man-hours.
I can write code that's tighter than an IRS auditor's asshole, and I'm damn proud of it. I still don't pretend that what I do is the way everything should be done. There is a time to throw hardware at the problem because hardware is cheaper than software, and that cut-off point in the PC world changes by half every 18 months. If you aren't in the PC world, your tradeoffs are different. That's life. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
There are hordes of devices and sub-devices (modules in larger devices) where a MB is the designer's wet dream. Look at your car. Going forward from the trunk, you might have a CD player in it with a micro with between 4K and 32K of program ROM in it. Beneath the driver's seat is a memory-seat controller module which runs in 8K of ROM and 224 bytes of RAM, plus a little EEPROM. In the front doors there are a pair of modules which read switch inputs, control the window, door lock and mirror motors, and read back status/failure information on all of them. The instrument cluster has several microcontrollers, the overhead console trip computer has another, the electronic climate control another (probably 32K for a sophisticated one), the body controller another one... The larger modules are increasingly programmed in C, but the smaller applications still have parts (if not the entirety) written in assembly code getting down and dirty with the metal.
Appliances may have teensy-weensy little microcontrollers in them. Some of them have as little as 256 bytes of program ROM. You aren't going to get much of a C program into that, but assembly can do quite a bit.
Okay, I'll quit the mine-is-smaller-than-yours code-size contest now.;) -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
I was talking about those leftists to whom those things are a foreign language. Does that include you? If so, you had no reason to be insulted, because it was accurate. If not, then you had no reason to be insulted because it was not about you. What's your problem?
You then imply that I'm a racist, even though leftist politics are totally against this.
I was pointing out a disconnect between your politics and the avowed goals of those politics. To desire a thing is to desire the means to that thing, and also the consequences of that thing; you cannot do just one thing.
People in the Far East have a right to work in the safe conditions with the same employment rights as those enjoyed by Western factory workers. This is not what they get.
You have this funny notion of rights. Before anyone had the knowledge and wealth (especially wealth) to create the safe conditions we now take for granted, who had a "right" to them? You are talking about a plant in a country where laws barely exist, where the roads may never have seen pavement and the electricity may work for 4 hours a day. You are talking about places where people live under kleptocracies which want huge cuts of anything profitable. The kind of plant you and I take for granted couldn't be built there, let alone operated and maintained. A company would go broke trying.
What I see is you and thousands of others crying that what those poor folks in Vietnam and El Salvador have isn't good enough for you, even though it's better than anything they had before. There's no recognition of the fact that you have to start somewhere, and that perfection is impossible but progress is always achievable. The insistence on perfection is indistinguishable in practice from demanding that nothing be done.
The Chinese is one of the most repressive around and yet instead of trying to change this through subtle application of economic pressure, it's a free-for-all and to hell with the Tibetans and those who were massacred in Tiananamen Square....
I own and wear a "Democracy for China" T-shirt, that I bought with my own money. So there. (I also own and wear a button which says "The Second Amendment isn't about hunting. It's about Tienanmen Square." Chew on that for a while.) But I don't see the point in letting a French or Belgian company profit from their governments' refusal to join a sanctions regime against human-rights abusers. If they are going to undercut the viability of sanctions as a tool to advance human rights, they shouldn't have the field to themselves. That's just rewarding them for their lack of morals. I'm all for sanctions, and everyone in the Western democracies joining them. I'm also for cutting the legs out from under those who prevent this from happening.
I've seen many more leftists harassed for expressing their views than rightists.
And have you ever seen them given official immunity for blatant acts of vandalism? I refer you to this page about the University of Pennsylvania, which includes this thumbnail sketch of the incident in question:
-----
In 1993 a guest conservative columnist for a university-recognized student publication, the Daily Pennsylvanian, wrote an editorial critical of the university's hate-speech code, admissions policies that favored minorities, and over-the-top multiculturalism. A group of black students accused the writer of racial harassment, but the charge was dropped by the administration when the journalist pointed out an official university policy that expressly forbade investigation of students for opinions published in school papers. In retaliation for the dismissal of charges, a group calling itself "The Black Community'' stole an entire pressrun of the newspaper. Even after the students proudly confessed to vandalism, Hackney refused to discipline them. ''After the event, the number of reported newspaper thefts on campuses quadrupled,'' says an alumnus. "There was no question that Hackney's unwillingness to punish the students was a green light to copycat cases of newspaper thefts around the country. The message at Penn was clear: if an article insults you, feel free to steal and destroy the paper.'' -----
Right-wing demagogues and vandals get prosecuted, left-wing demagogues and vandals get plaudits. Where's the balance?
PC has not gone too far.
From the same page on U-Penn:
-----
Then there was the so-called water buffalo incident. In January of 1993 a group of female African-American students were chanting and making other noises outside a dormitory where several students were studying and sleeping. It was around midnight, and the students in the dorm, disturbed by the noise, gathered at the windows to shout at the women to be quiet. Eventually police were called. Based on the complaints of the students outside, the police interrogated dormitory resident Eden Jacobowitz, who admitted to shouting "Shut up, you water buffalo.'' The Judicial Inquiry Office of the university charged Jacobowitz with racial harassment under the hate-speech code. -----
If that isn't too far for you, you've got a serious problem with your eyesight, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Take a look at this commentary for the POV of an avowed leftist who taught in Nicaragua under the Sandidistas; he happens to agree with me on the pernicious nature of Political Correctness, deconstructionism and the notion of social construction. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
(And real education includes learning about mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics and all that "hard stuff" which is obviously a foreign language to so many leftists. They'd prefer to label it "bourgeois" or "not part of their way of knowing" and ignore it.)
Yes, all leftists are stupid and lazy. Way to make an argument. Just because we don't fall for the bull that money is the only thing that matters in life.
I almost forgot to say that too many leftists like to substitute tactics for winning arguments (including the Big Lie and the straw man) for facts and logical analysis. (You went for the straw-man, which reminded me.) There's a large number of people out there who have just substituted leftist dogma for religious dogma, and are otherwise no different from any believer in The One Truth (as they see it).
Deconstructionism and Political Correctness are both leftist inventions. There are legions of tales of students in universities who are afraid to contradict the PC party line in their classes because of the harassment they'd experience. That's oppression.
Did I mention the number of apparently-serious leftist rants which display complete ignorance of little matters like the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The number of English and Poli Sci majors out there who think that you can get something for nothing by agitating the legislature or running a plebiscite is amazing.
what we object to is profits before anything else. Such as Nike transferring it's manufacturing to Far-Eastern sweatshops, or McDonnell-Douglas selling arms to the Chinese that are then used in the oppression of it's people.
(Add grammar to that list of deficiencies... the possessive pronoun "its" has no apostrophe.) What's wrong with moving work to plants in El Salvador or Vietnam? Don't people with brown skins and slanted eyes have a right to take a job making stuff for North American consumers? If they had anything better, you'd expect they'd take it; saying that Nike or whoever is doing them wrong when there are so many eager takers is equivalent to telling those people that they should starve while someone in the USA (who has much better prospects and almost certainly will not go hungry regardless) should do unskilled work.
Ditto this thing about MacDac etc. If the French are willing to sell oppressive crap to the Chinese, we might as well undercut them. Why let them profit from undermining the pressure that trade sanctions can put on human-rights violators?
Anyway leftists are much more respectful of people's rights to behave.
Are they now? Isn't it lefist students on various campuses who persistently violate the free-speech rights of people with whom they disagree, by heckling their speakers out of auditoria and destroying print runs of their newspapers? I'm not talking about protests against people's actions, I'm talking about trying to keep them from having their views heard. That's respect? Or is it some PC re-definition, where it's contempt if it's done to you, but respect if you do it to others?
That's what I keep hearing about the political left. I have no sympathy for it or any of its adherents until they give their views and actions the same level of criticism they aim at others. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
A mathematician named Klein
Said "The Moebius strip is divine!
And if you glue
The edges of two
You'll get a weird bottle like mine." -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
The rabid anti-left sentiment of some people amazes me, as if believing in human rights over profits was something to be ashamed of.
Profits are necessary to create jobs, and the jobs do more good in the first place than any amount of charity which could be enabled by diverting said profits (and the capital formation they enable).
When someone believes that the person who's making a profit has thereby violated some third party's human rights by virtue of keeping the profits for capital formation instead of donating them to Some Worthy Cause, that someone is only for those human rights they agree with (and if you don't see that agenda in much of the anti-corporate agenda, have your eyes checked). Kind of like the Religious Right in the mirror.
Real respect for rights is exclusively about respecting the right of others to do things you don't like. (And real education includes learning about mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics and all that "hard stuff" which is obviously a foreign language to so many leftists. They'd prefer to label it "bourgeois" or "not part of their way of knowing" and ignore it.) -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Also, if you generate enough complaints, you may end up on a spammer's list of a different type - the list of addresses to avoid mailing because they file complaints.
You're asking me to believe that the kind of people who mine Usenet postings and weblogs like Slashdot looking for strings with "@" signs in them are going to share lists of people who file complaints?
You're further asking me to believe that the kind of people who make their money by selling lists of N million addresses to spammers care how aggressive the people at the other end of these addresses are about pursuing spammers?
Don't make me laugh.
My solution works to get the people who collect and sell e-mail addresses as well as the spammers who use them. If a small number of people can bankrupt the scum who harvest these addresses, even if they don't spam themselves (but especially if they sell them) it would be a huge blow to the spammers. Spammers and the scum who trawl for addresses for them probably don't make $100,000 a year; ten hits in that million-addy database and they've gone to Chapter 7 bankruptcy and lost everything except their home, their car (below a certain value) and some personal property. That's the first time. You can only declare bankruptcy once every 7 years. The second time, these bozos would lose everything else.
That's the kind of penalty I want to be able to lay on spammers. I want to take away everything that they were trying to get by spamming. More to the point, I want to be able to put so many column-inches of "poor spammer" stories in the newspaper that only a complete idiot would even think of trying to spam ever again. No matter how many complaints you file or ISP accounts you get revoked, you're not going to be able to equal the legal and financial impact of willful copyright violation. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
While I agree somewhat about cigarettes (they are addictive, and one of the biggest causes of death in modern society) and baseball caps (in too many places they are used as gang identification signs), I have to note two things:
There's an hour between the time he gets picked up at the bus stop until first class - so he took his walkman. Confiscated the second he got off the bus.
What are you supposed to do with your time, especially on a bouncing, jerking bus? Sit and be bored out of your skull? What's the reason for confiscating a walkman if it isn't interfering with classwork?
I asked the secretary "this isn't one of those places they throw you out of for taking an asprin, is it?" I was joking - expecting the logical answer "of course not", but received "Oh, they're very serious about drugs here. Yes, he will be suspended if they catch him with anything."
Great, just great. If a student has some injury, or aches or a fever from a bug, they have the choice of living with the pain and distraction (however much it hurts their studies) or being suspended. Suspended for exercising a right adults take for granted and exercise (to their own benefit and nobody's harm) daily. Told to accept second-class citizenship or get the hell out.
That kind of radical-control-for-its-own-sake is nothing short of abuse.
... when you raid the house and find homemade bombs, maps of the school, and lists of people to "take out," I think there's enough certaintly to assume someone is dangerous.
When you abuse and dehumanize someone with ridiculous rules like the above and outrageous sanctions for trivial violations, it's not surprising that occasionally some will want to get some of their own back. Unfortunately, the people who suffer (either from the rules or the reactions to them) are rarely the ones responsible for the problem. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Griping to spammers' ISPs sometimes has the effect of cutting off their access temporarily. Other than that, it's just like a game of whack-a-mole; another one pops up and you're no better off than before.
I am looking for a way to use other laws against spammers. Because government will not act, we need a law or laws which give a private right of action against the spammer. I am considering copyright law. If I can copyright and register my e-mail address and prohibit unauthorized duplication (for instance, incorporation into a database or sale) that would give me a right of action against anyone who duplicated it. The copyright laws do not require you to prove damages, they award statutory damages (over $10,000 IIRC) if you can prove even one violation.
Suppose that a hundred people get together and do this. A spammer offers a list of e-mail addresses for $149; that's $1.49 per participant, and we buy the list. On it we find ten of our own e-mail addresses. We go after the spammer for $100,000+ in statutory damages, bankrupting the spammer. Because copyright is international in scope we can go after spammers anywhere, from California to Cyprus.
What do you think? Are there any copyright lawyers out there who can say whether or not a "work" as small as an e-mail address can be copyrighted? -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
It would be much easier on your own time if you had a pre-recorded monologue that you could just play into their answering system after getting the mailbox. Record once, consume their time N many times... kind of like a spam-back. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Simple. Collective action can be undermined by a sufficiently large minority of people who do not think about their long-term benefit. If the people vote as government, the majority can make law which applies to everyone and keep the minority from lubricating the slippery slope.
In theory, that is. In practice government has its own pitfalls, but this is not to deny that it also has its legitimate and beneficial uses. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
... the threat of a suitcase nuke is hundreds of times more likely than a nation being stupid enough to lob one at us via ICBM....
I don't think so, for several reasons. Suitcase nukes are rather advanced devices. A uranium bomb can be done easily with a mortar-type imploder. A plutonium bomb requires a spherical shell implosion to assemble the supercritical mass, else it doesn't come together fast enough to avoid a fizzle. Suitcase nukes are even more compact, and require more extreme compression (to reduce the critical mass), tampers, neutron reflectors and neutron sources to start the reaction at the proper time. I don't know all the details, but they may also require plutonium of superior purity. I'm not at all worried about any of the freshly-nuclear nations of the world being able to hide a testing program well enough to be able to develop a working suitcase nuke; seismometry and inspection programs are already a serious obstacle and are unlikely to get any easier to evade.
I'm not worried about Saddam Hussein doing this either. He's got a lot of the world tired of keeping sanctions against him, but the instant he blew a nuke there would be armies rolling through his country again and this time they wouldn't stop until they could bring his head back on a spear. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
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That's my problem with targeted ad schemes: they all disclose personal information about me to people who have no business knowing it, at which point I lose control over it. I shut down everything that uses cookies and Javascript for this very reason.
The only privacy-respecting way to handle this is to let my information remain mine, on my computer. My browser would hold a list of my preferences. Each page would come with a list of ads, and each ad in the list would come tagged with a unique identifier and a set of product categories and associations (numbers between -1 and 1 which measure how well they fit; for example, Viagra gets -1 in the feminine hygiene category). My browser picks an ad and loads it through an anonymizing proxy which tells the banner-ad company what the referring page is (so the site owner can get credit) but not who I am. If I click "Never show me this ad again", I never see the ad again... but the information does not go beyond my own machine.
The exchange of information could go both ways. If the site requires ad revenue to survive it could require a cryptographically-signed "magic number" from the banner-ad company before it lets you beyond the main page. This number would identify the ad, not you (the ad company doesn't know who you are). This achieves accountability (in theory; spoofing to artifically run up ad counts would be possible, but it's just as possible today) while maintaining anonymity.
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- Our current probes are already slow. They are limited by the kick that chemical-fuel boosters can give them, and then have to coast or run complicated gravity-assist trajectories to get to their targets (does VEEGA mean anything to you?). Solar sails can be much faster.
- We can use solar sails on the missions we are doing now, to get more science out of them. Consider the NEAR mission. This mission is at an end because the NEAR craft is out of fuel. If it had only required fuel for small but rapid changes in velocity and instead relied on a solar sail for cruising thrust, it would be on its way to another rock. And then another, and another.
- Because solar sails can produce thrust without expending any mass on a more or less indefinite basis, they are one of the big enabling technologies for real exploration and colonization of the solar system.
Clear enough? If the sails are laser-propelled, your cargo vessel could be both smaller and faster over long distances than anything which propels itself only with fuel it carries. Even without laser propulsion, the sails have many uses which do not involve hauling people around. These uses include propelling the probes to locate resources or other points of interest, and hauling the supply stockpiles for people to use when they arrive. The cargo travels by slow boat, the people travel by express.--
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Metabolism does not a human being make; neither does the oft-cited beating heart. A body stops being a human being under the law when it's brain-dead. A zygote has no brain, nor even any neurons. It can't think, feel, or even sense other than by reacting to chemicals at the cellular level. When you try to claim the label of "human being" for something so insignificant, you demean humanity.
It's simple. We're constructed to throw away most zygotes. I have not heard of a single holy book which says that menstrual periods should be mourned. Obviously God doesn't give a damn about zygotes, so why should we? Why are you venerating the worthless? More to the point, why are you insisting that people who do not share your religious convictions nevertheless follow your rules of conduct? That violates their right to freedom of religion. It becomes a person when it is an independent entity which can think and feel. It stops being a person when it can no longer think and feel (ie. no longer has a functioning brain). What's the problem with that? Estimates were that illegal abortion into the late 60's was about 1.5 million per year. In 1973, Roe vs. Wade threw out most state laws banning abortion. Abortions are now about what, 1.2 million a year? Safety is way up, judging from the 7000 reported deaths (and how many unreported ones?) from illegal abortion from 1946-1972 compared to under 400 from legal abortion between 1973 and 1999 (see this page). Looks like legislation failed pretty miserably.The "pro-life" movement is all about demanding public adherence to one particular ideal of piousness. If that's what you want, you can always go someplace where it's the law of the land; I suggest Afghanistan, or if you don't have the stomach for such required conformity you might try Iran.
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On top of that, the article is so short on facts (not even any links to more information in the article body - don't these nitwits understand what hypertext is about?) that it's hardly worth reading. News for nerds? I think not.
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About 2/3 of all zygotes die naturally before birth under the best of circumstances; the average death rate has been estimated to be 3/4. I do not consider a unicellular lifeform with odds that poor to be a human being by any stretch of the imagination. It may someday become one (and achieve the status of "a citizen born or naturalized"), but potential is not actuality.
The easiest way out of this is to mind your own business. The people who agree with you will do things your way. The people who disagree with you will do things their way. If you feel you have to tell other people how to deal with some of the most important issues which will ever face them, you deserve to be told to fsck off.
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Motion of the eye introduces the problem of stroboscopic effects. A refresh rate which is more than fast enough to be undetectable to a single detector cell your eye is quite a different matter if your eye is panning fast enough. Instead of seeing shapes and edges moving across the field of vision, bright areas in dark fields leave a string of bright dots on the retina while dark areas in bright fields do something similar to (but not exactly) the opposite. Motion-detector cells, which are evolved to deal with more or less constant illumination, don't work properly under such conditions. The motion cues and other little details which your eyes ought to have to aid their tracking across the page are subtly wrong. What this leads to I don't know, but I am aware of some research which showed that people's eyes take longer to scan to particular words on a printed page under flickering fluorescent light than under incandescent light (no word on what effect high-frequency electronic ballasts might have had).
So far as stroboscopic effects are concerned, there is little difference between 60 Hz and 85 Hz. You could eliminate this with long-persistence phospors, but nobody wants to watch their screen smear into an indecipherable blur every time something scrolls. Face it, the CRT is far from an optimal display interface to the human eye.
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- The decay time of a satellite in a 200 mile orbit is a few months or years. They are pulled into lower orbits by atmospheric drag, and eventually they re-enter. They are not going to stay up long enough to do much of anything.
- If you are proposing that the junk form a ring by loss of energy in collisions, think again. A large amount of the total satellite mass is in polar-orbiting satellites, and some of them are in retrograde orbits. If you equalize their momentum vectors by inelastic collisions, they will lose much of their net velocity and angular momentum. Again, this is a one-way ticket to re-entry.
- The self-gravitation of space junk is minuscule. Even with the addition of the ISS, there are only a few thousand tons of stuff in low earth orbit. This is not enough to accrete by gravitational forces. Tidal forces are much stronger, which would keep any loose aggregation of junk from compacting into a solid body.
The long and short of it is, if we stop launching stuff the problem will solve itself in a few years or tens of years, at least for LEO orbits. Go up a few hundred miles and the situation gets nastier; orbital velocities aren't that much lower, but the influence of air drag is greatly reduced. Space junk can build up there for a time scale of thousands of years. If we keep adding junk to those orbits we will eventually have to go to armored satellites or use something like the "laser broom" to knock stuff into lower orbits which will decay in a reasonable amount of time (hours to years). Another possibility is to get fancy with something to puff up Earth's atmosphere and really increase the drag on the high-level junk, helping to clear out everything that is not able to re-boost itself; something which increases the amount of solar UV or X-rays hitting the upper atmosphere by a large extent is one possibility. Space-junk protection systems are probably going to be an issue for most large space projects in the future.--
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- Re-negotiate the treaty to reduce the term of copyright (indeed, it takes a treaty change to allow the term to be reduced), then implement this change in law.
- Have Congress withdraw the USA from the copyright treaty.
- Get the courts to rule that the extension of copyright retroactively, or for any duration beyond what is necessary to "promote progress in the useful arts", is un-Constitutional.
You tell me which one is most likely to succeed in a reasonable amount of time and with a sane budget.--
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Intellectual property is a construct; in nature, the public domain rules all and any idea which becomes understood by the public becomes the property of all. The purpose of patent and copyright protection is to promote the publication of these ideas by allowing temporary monopoly use. Progress in the useful arts includes returning things to the public domain so that others can build upon them. One thing's for certain: letting one company have a monopoly on a mouse 70 years after "Steamboat Willie" was aired has no relationship to progress.
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Someone could always go around and use the contact database to survey everyone who came through your doors, but this would require their effort and people could always tell them to get lost. It would not be a case of you turning over data; you wouldn't even have the data, so nobody could bother you about it. If your point is to keep the Feds happy with their stat data without becoming a lightning rod, that seems like a good way to achieve it.
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Using a two-part form, with the contact info and home address on one part (to file) and the rest on the other (to destroy right after data entry) will address people's concerns. Your disclaimer may also get people thinking about privacy, and how much info the government has any business keeping. If you can turn the Fed's money into a chance to do some consciousness-raising, kudos to you!
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- The compiler yields code of sufficient speed and compactness for the intended application.
- Precise control of execution time is not required.
- The additional difficulty of designing, coding, documenting and testing an assembly-language implementation is not warranted by the benefits; it is far cheaper to throw more CPU cycles at the problem than more man-hours.
I can write code that's tighter than an IRS auditor's asshole, and I'm damn proud of it. I still don't pretend that what I do is the way everything should be done. There is a time to throw hardware at the problem because hardware is cheaper than software, and that cut-off point in the PC world changes by half every 18 months. If you aren't in the PC world, your tradeoffs are different. That's life.--
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Appliances may have teensy-weensy little microcontrollers in them. Some of them have as little as 256 bytes of program ROM. You aren't going to get much of a C program into that, but assembly can do quite a bit.
Okay, I'll quit the mine-is-smaller-than-yours code-size contest now. ;)
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What I see is you and thousands of others crying that what those poor folks in Vietnam and El Salvador have isn't good enough for you, even though it's better than anything they had before. There's no recognition of the fact that you have to start somewhere, and that perfection is impossible but progress is always achievable. The insistence on perfection is indistinguishable in practice from demanding that nothing be done.
I own and wear a "Democracy for China" T-shirt, that I bought with my own money. So there. (I also own and wear a button which says "The Second Amendment isn't about hunting. It's about Tienanmen Square." Chew on that for a while.) But I don't see the point in letting a French or Belgian company profit from their governments' refusal to join a sanctions regime against human-rights abusers. If they are going to undercut the viability of sanctions as a tool to advance human rights, they shouldn't have the field to themselves. That's just rewarding them for their lack of morals. I'm all for sanctions, and everyone in the Western democracies joining them. I'm also for cutting the legs out from under those who prevent this from happening. And have you ever seen them given official immunity for blatant acts of vandalism? I refer you to this page about the University of Pennsylvania, which includes this thumbnail sketch of the incident in question: Right-wing demagogues and vandals get prosecuted, left-wing demagogues and vandals get plaudits. Where's the balance? From the same page on U-Penn: If that isn't too far for you, you've got a serious problem with your eyesight, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Take a look at this commentary for the POV of an avowed leftist who taught in Nicaragua under the Sandidistas; he happens to agree with me on the pernicious nature of Political Correctness, deconstructionism and the notion of social construction.--
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Deconstructionism and Political Correctness are both leftist inventions. There are legions of tales of students in universities who are afraid to contradict the PC party line in their classes because of the harassment they'd experience. That's oppression.
Did I mention the number of apparently-serious leftist rants which display complete ignorance of little matters like the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The number of English and Poli Sci majors out there who think that you can get something for nothing by agitating the legislature or running a plebiscite is amazing.
(Add grammar to that list of deficiencies... the possessive pronoun "its" has no apostrophe.) What's wrong with moving work to plants in El Salvador or Vietnam? Don't people with brown skins and slanted eyes have a right to take a job making stuff for North American consumers? If they had anything better, you'd expect they'd take it; saying that Nike or whoever is doing them wrong when there are so many eager takers is equivalent to telling those people that they should starve while someone in the USA (who has much better prospects and almost certainly will not go hungry regardless) should do unskilled work.Ditto this thing about MacDac etc. If the French are willing to sell oppressive crap to the Chinese, we might as well undercut them. Why let them profit from undermining the pressure that trade sanctions can put on human-rights violators?
Are they now? Isn't it lefist students on various campuses who persistently violate the free-speech rights of people with whom they disagree, by heckling their speakers out of auditoria and destroying print runs of their newspapers? I'm not talking about protests against people's actions, I'm talking about trying to keep them from having their views heard. That's respect? Or is it some PC re-definition, where it's contempt if it's done to you, but respect if you do it to others?That's what I keep hearing about the political left. I have no sympathy for it or any of its adherents until they give their views and actions the same level of criticism they aim at others.
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A mathematician named Klein
Said "The Moebius strip is divine!
And if you glue
The edges of two
You'll get a weird bottle like mine."
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When someone believes that the person who's making a profit has thereby violated some third party's human rights by virtue of keeping the profits for capital formation instead of donating them to Some Worthy Cause, that someone is only for those human rights they agree with (and if you don't see that agenda in much of the anti-corporate agenda, have your eyes checked). Kind of like the Religious Right in the mirror.
Real respect for rights is exclusively about respecting the right of others to do things you don't like. (And real education includes learning about mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics and all that "hard stuff" which is obviously a foreign language to so many leftists. They'd prefer to label it "bourgeois" or "not part of their way of knowing" and ignore it.)
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Next time, cite the full and exact URL!
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You're further asking me to believe that the kind of people who make their money by selling lists of N million addresses to spammers care how aggressive the people at the other end of these addresses are about pursuing spammers?
Don't make me laugh.
My solution works to get the people who collect and sell e-mail addresses as well as the spammers who use them. If a small number of people can bankrupt the scum who harvest these addresses, even if they don't spam themselves (but especially if they sell them) it would be a huge blow to the spammers. Spammers and the scum who trawl for addresses for them probably don't make $100,000 a year; ten hits in that million-addy database and they've gone to Chapter 7 bankruptcy and lost everything except their home, their car (below a certain value) and some personal property. That's the first time. You can only declare bankruptcy once every 7 years. The second time, these bozos would lose everything else.
That's the kind of penalty I want to be able to lay on spammers. I want to take away everything that they were trying to get by spamming. More to the point, I want to be able to put so many column-inches of "poor spammer" stories in the newspaper that only a complete idiot would even think of trying to spam ever again. No matter how many complaints you file or ISP accounts you get revoked, you're not going to be able to equal the legal and financial impact of willful copyright violation.
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That kind of radical-control-for-its-own-sake is nothing short of abuse.
When you abuse and dehumanize someone with ridiculous rules like the above and outrageous sanctions for trivial violations, it's not surprising that occasionally some will want to get some of their own back. Unfortunately, the people who suffer (either from the rules or the reactions to them) are rarely the ones responsible for the problem.--
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I am looking for a way to use other laws against spammers. Because government will not act, we need a law or laws which give a private right of action against the spammer. I am considering copyright law. If I can copyright and register my e-mail address and prohibit unauthorized duplication (for instance, incorporation into a database or sale) that would give me a right of action against anyone who duplicated it. The copyright laws do not require you to prove damages, they award statutory damages (over $10,000 IIRC) if you can prove even one violation.
Suppose that a hundred people get together and do this. A spammer offers a list of e-mail addresses for $149; that's $1.49 per participant, and we buy the list. On it we find ten of our own e-mail addresses. We go after the spammer for $100,000+ in statutory damages, bankrupting the spammer. Because copyright is international in scope we can go after spammers anywhere, from California to Cyprus.
What do you think? Are there any copyright lawyers out there who can say whether or not a "work" as small as an e-mail address can be copyrighted?
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It would be much easier on your own time if you had a pre-recorded monologue that you could just play into their answering system after getting the mailbox. Record once, consume their time N many times... kind of like a spam-back.
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In theory, that is. In practice government has its own pitfalls, but this is not to deny that it also has its legitimate and beneficial uses.
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I'm not worried about Saddam Hussein doing this either. He's got a lot of the world tired of keeping sanctions against him, but the instant he blew a nuke there would be armies rolling through his country again and this time they wouldn't stop until they could bring his head back on a spear.
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