It's the same kind of lame thinking that leads to crap in more traditional sports as well, from squeezing another guy's testicles in a football pile so he lets go of the ball to milkshaking in horseracing and everything in between.
Good sportmanship will always be an ideal to uphold and strive toward.
Oddly enough using whole word samples sounds worse unless you have a very small number of phrases you'll be using. Because we run our words together it becomes extremely stilted if each word is pronounced in isolation (try it out loud yourself).
Speech production is one of those things that can only be done well in very constrained situations. Any kind of variability or complexity and it becomes extremely difficult.
The thought actually crossed my mind. Each year it becomes more and more troublesome to own a large, legally obtained media collection and use it the way you want. I'm seriously tempted to just chuck it all and be done with it. Already I've stopped buying new stuff for the most part, each DVD or CD is now a potential landmine that can screw up your computer. Makes me so mad.
I don't see anything in TFA about coercion... where did that part come from?
It's implied by the nature of the situation. Which is why it's prohibited. You might easily compare it to a statutory rape scenario. Are there people under 16 who can make sound judgements about whether to engage in sex? Probably, but in order to protect those who aren't we have made an arbitrary cutoff and whether the person was "willing" or not doesn't enter the equation, they are just off limits period.
A person who works in a lab cannot reasonably be expected to be free from improper pressures that could influence a decision to participate. So to protect them we don't allow it.
>>Why does slashdot give time to cranks who purport to have achieve[d] something revolutionary, but really have no idea what they're talking about?
It depends on whether you view the slashdot readership as passive or active. On average slashdotters are smarter than your average bear, who better to suss out the truth of who is a crank or to pick up the kernal of a good idea and run with it? I know personally I've had several insights (sometimes from material in an unrelated endeavor) that I've been able to pick up from the boards and run with them in my own work.
The one area I would agree with you though is I also wish the summaries given on the main page were more critical and less prone to reporting everything as fait accompli and with baited breath. If for no other reason that you then have to wade through hundreds of posts ranting about trivial criticisms and metaposting.
To have even a shred of a point Google would have to be slipping in search and advert income. This last quarter they blew away *everyone's* expectations for revenue growth and their search results continue to be the gold standard.
If every endeavor that ever met with failure at the hands of someone in the past became off limits, imagine where we'd be. Sure it may indicate that more of the same might not be a good idea, but I have yet to see "more of the same" in any of Google's many new projects.
Not uncommon to get that kind of reaction when the group is threatened, especially when you view membership in that group as a core part of who you are and what you are about.
What if someone tomorrow invented a new computer that never required programmers, you just told it what you wanted and it would do it. People who aren't programmers would think it's great, a lot of programmers who do it for a slave job would be overjoyed, and a lot of the hard core programmers who enjoy it and are really good at it would bemoan what would be lost and would champion all the benefits that derive from programming (think old timer assemblers and their rants about newer languages that do most of the heavy lifting for you).
The thing to remember of course is that transitions don't last forever. Subcultures die out every year and the world keeps turning.
That's a pretty long list of constraints. You can always cook up a situation where something would be difficult, the real question is whether there is any other solution that would do better in a comparable situation. For example in your scenario, if the friend instead has Open Office and you are bringing a MS document with features utilized such that it won't open in open office, what is your solution there? Go to store and buy a $500 software suite and install it? Hardly a better situation.
The only time natural selection isn't occuring is when all genes have an equal probability of being reproduced in the next generation. Any difference, no matter how slight, is natural selection in action.
And it is a misconception that when everyone reproduces that evolution has stopped. Decreases in selective pressure just increase variability within the population, as more mutations are able to survive.
Pretty much the only way to halt evolution is to destroy all life.
I suspect the reason these ways of thinking are so common is because so many people think evolution has some sort of end goal that we're moving towards.
"And yet gun makers cannot be sued when their products are used in crimes, despite the fact that guns have no use other than shooting people?"
Shooting someone is sometimes a crime and sometimes not. Whether it is or not depends wholly on the actions of the gun owner. (There is some merit to cases that have been brought against manufacturers where due to their lax controls and inventory oversight it would be reasonable to presume guns are being diverted to the black market for sale to criminals.)
As difficult as you may find it, shooting someone isn't always a crime. The law recognizes a legitimate right to defend oneself against deadly threat.
This software, unlike firearms, does not depend solely on the buyer to find illegimate use, rather by its very nature and design is illegal in purpose and action. Additionally, the software maker directly participated in each criminal use by including functionality that reported the information collected back to himself as well as the buyer.
Take home message: If you write software and don't wish to be held responsible for illicit use, insure that no illegal functionality originates in your software, but must depend entirely on the actions of the buyer. IOW if all it takes to break the law is click on an item in a drop down menu, you're ****ed.
>>Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter [wikipedia.org]" , not "one of the four phases".
You might have a point if they had said what you said they did, but they didn't. They referred to four states of matter. As explained in the very article you link to people often confuse state with phase, but they are not the same thing.
"A plasma torch moving at mach 2+ is still a plasma torch."
Nice armchair logic. So when is a plasma torch no longer a plasma torch? When it no longer has the characteristics of a plasma torch. If you divide the energy output by the distance it covers while going mach 2 you get a really small amount of energy per square inch that doesn't last hardly any time at all for any given patch. Could you construct something that would still cause damage? Sure, but that would be orders of magnitude greater than the jet mounted laser described here.
This is the same reason you can whisk your fingers over an open flame and not feel anything but slight warmth. Hold it there for a second though and your skin will start to blister and burn.
But of course your suggested speed of mach2 is only if it happens to be shooting straight down, any angle and the speed of the laser on whatever it hits will be much slower, although the increased distance mitigates the slower speed for the most part.
Look at population flows. Do more people emmigrate to countries with freer markets than to countries with more restrictive markets than their country of origin?
There's your proof.
As far as is it better than any other possibility one might devise, that's spurious. Who cares if it is the best of all possible systems, the question is an absurdity. All we care is whether it is better than all the systems that have been tried previously or been seriously proposed.
If you think an altruistic share and share alike society would be better, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. I'm sure a large group of like minded individuals could live quite prosperously, but who are you going to get to join you? And that's where the real world intervenes, you end up having to force people to share with you, which is when all the nasty stuff begins.
I don't know, I've had about 15 drives over the past 10 years and about 8 or 9 of them were Maxtor, the only ones that died on me were IBM and Fujitsu ones, never had problems with any of the Maxtors.
But this is one of those issues where it's ridiculous to put much stock in anything other than comprehensive reliability studies because when you lose a hard disk its impact goes from serious inconvenience to your life is fucked for the next year so people remember which drives did them bad lol. Lots of drives fail and so whenever you get the topic going, all those stories come out, and as you can see already on this thread all the major manufacturers are getting dinged by at least someone who had a bad experience(s).
I'm not saying that some brands aren't much better than others, I'm just saying you're not going to get at that information by talking to only one or two people.
On one level you are completely correct. The potential issue here is when you consider the bigger picture.
If I have bone cancer and my legs hurt, I can take an aspirin and feel better today. But it allows me to ignore the pain that is indicative of a much more serious problem that if not taken care of will negatively impact me months or years down the road.
Similarly, some people view local mitigation efforts this way. To the extent that they remove the immediate problem they allow people to ignore the bigger picture and delay the actions that need to be taken (often expensive and effortful, just like chemotherapy) that are needed to resolve the problem long term and avoid the big nasty consequences later on.
If the person was seeing a doctor and had a serious treatment plan scheduled, there'd be no problem at all taking an aspirin. But if you see the person not taking any of those steps, can you understand why a bystander might consider taking the aspirin a bad thing?
they disolve enough to cohere with the other strips, so as long as you aren't dealing with paper that has a high clay content (glossy like magazine paper or photos) then you won't be able to pull the pieces apart, after you press out the water you have in effect a block of paper
And prove what exactly? That if you want to spend years of your life on something that you won't get any financial return on and few people will play, develop a class A title for Linux exclusively?
I'm not saying there's no one out there that will take up the gauntlet, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
And in that time PC game titles have seriously declined in both in quanitity and quality relative to console game titles. The question now is will this slide continue? Have we reached the inflection point? (The point where the average console game is better than the average PC game. How much shelf space is dedicated to console games versus PC games.)
In my opinion, being on the cusp of three new consoles we are now at the inflection point and while PC gaming will always be around in some form, however small, the days of dominance technically and in mindshare are behind us.
Don't worry though, people still listen to 8 tracks and enjoy themselves, people still write on typewriters and get the job done. Plenty of people continue with their chosen technology well beyond its "death" so I'm sure in 20 there will still be people playing games on PCs, but they will be few and far between in comparison to people using a specialized console of one sort or another.
I've bought several cars and never once trused the dealer.
bullshit, there are levels of trust, did you trust the dealer to give you the car in exchange for the money? did you trust that the dealer would still be there in a week if you needed warranty service? did you trust the dealer to be selling you the make and model of car you expected with factory parts?
that doesn't mean you trusted the dealer enough to believe every word that was coming out of his/her mouth or that he/she was giving you the best deal possible, but you trusted the person enough to make the purchase
Pray that your superior genes and sheer luck preserve you from such injuries, they destroy your world.
They have so far. I have yet to set fire to myself using gasoline filled glass swords.
On a more serious note, whether I am sympathetic to their pain and suffering now is immaterial, it will not lessen nor increase the pain they feel in their beds across the pond.
Mocking them for their stupidity and widely distributing knowledge of the consequences of such foolishness however has the small chance of imprinting a bit of restraint and wisdom on other likeminded fools who might be spared a similar fate.
Don't confuse your weak-kneed compassion with wisdom or foresight.
I can't speak to other cells, but the neurons in your brain and the nerve cells in your spinal column are all you've got. They do not regenerate. I suspect that there are other cell complexes in other organs that are probably one-timers as well (ova for instance).
That was the common consensus ten years ago but the last few years has seen that turned upside down.
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
You are the people with the motivation because you are the ones who will benefit from a more positive definition.
So quit pissing into the wind and just come up with a neologism for the positive aspects (old aspects) of the term hacker.
If you're a masochist then keep on trying to convince people who won't benefit one way or the other to change their behavior.
Then they throw your ass in jail when you don't have the tax stamp on your hard drive that's in the MP3 player you're listening to in public.
I'm not saying it's something you couldn't get away with, but just see tax stamps on cigarrettes, lots of people try to avoid the insane taxes the gov puts on them, and lots of people go to jail for smuggling untaxed packs or for buying them.
The sad part is the costs associated with administering a tax like this soaks up most of the revenue it generates. Total freaking waste, and just makes people pissed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same kind of lame thinking that leads to crap in more traditional sports as well, from squeezing another guy's testicles in a football pile so he lets go of the ball to milkshaking in horseracing and everything in between.
Good sportmanship will always be an ideal to uphold and strive toward.
Oddly enough using whole word samples sounds worse unless you have a very small number of phrases you'll be using. Because we run our words together it becomes extremely stilted if each word is pronounced in isolation (try it out loud yourself).
Speech production is one of those things that can only be done well in very constrained situations. Any kind of variability or complexity and it becomes extremely difficult.
Here's a link to a site with a drawing of the ape, and he looks just like you guessed, a big fat barrel of a gorilla.
http://www.physorg.com/news7950.html
The thought actually crossed my mind. Each year it becomes more and more troublesome to own a large, legally obtained media collection and use it the way you want. I'm seriously tempted to just chuck it all and be done with it. Already I've stopped buying new stuff for the most part, each DVD or CD is now a potential landmine that can screw up your computer. Makes me so mad.
I don't see anything in TFA about coercion ... where did that part come from?
It's implied by the nature of the situation. Which is why it's prohibited. You might easily compare it to a statutory rape scenario. Are there people under 16 who can make sound judgements about whether to engage in sex? Probably, but in order to protect those who aren't we have made an arbitrary cutoff and whether the person was "willing" or not doesn't enter the equation, they are just off limits period.
A person who works in a lab cannot reasonably be expected to be free from improper pressures that could influence a decision to participate. So to protect them we don't allow it.
>>Why does slashdot give time to cranks who purport to have achieve[d] something revolutionary, but really have no idea what they're talking about?
It depends on whether you view the slashdot readership as passive or active. On average slashdotters are smarter than your average bear, who better to suss out the truth of who is a crank or to pick up the kernal of a good idea and run with it? I know personally I've had several insights (sometimes from material in an unrelated endeavor) that I've been able to pick up from the boards and run with them in my own work.
The one area I would agree with you though is I also wish the summaries given on the main page were more critical and less prone to reporting everything as fait accompli and with baited breath. If for no other reason that you then have to wade through hundreds of posts ranting about trivial criticisms and metaposting.
To have even a shred of a point Google would have to be slipping in search and advert income. This last quarter they blew away *everyone's* expectations for revenue growth and their search results continue to be the gold standard.
If every endeavor that ever met with failure at the hands of someone in the past became off limits, imagine where we'd be. Sure it may indicate that more of the same might not be a good idea, but I have yet to see "more of the same" in any of Google's many new projects.
Not uncommon to get that kind of reaction when the group is threatened, especially when you view membership in that group as a core part of who you are and what you are about.
What if someone tomorrow invented a new computer that never required programmers, you just told it what you wanted and it would do it. People who aren't programmers would think it's great, a lot of programmers who do it for a slave job would be overjoyed, and a lot of the hard core programmers who enjoy it and are really good at it would bemoan what would be lost and would champion all the benefits that derive from programming (think old timer assemblers and their rants about newer languages that do most of the heavy lifting for you).
The thing to remember of course is that transitions don't last forever. Subcultures die out every year and the world keeps turning.
That's a pretty long list of constraints. You can always cook up a situation where something would be difficult, the real question is whether there is any other solution that would do better in a comparable situation. For example in your scenario, if the friend instead has Open Office and you are bringing a MS document with features utilized such that it won't open in open office, what is your solution there? Go to store and buy a $500 software suite and install it? Hardly a better situation.
The only time natural selection isn't occuring is when all genes have an equal probability of being reproduced in the next generation. Any difference, no matter how slight, is natural selection in action.
And it is a misconception that when everyone reproduces that evolution has stopped. Decreases in selective pressure just increase variability within the population, as more mutations are able to survive.
Pretty much the only way to halt evolution is to destroy all life.
I suspect the reason these ways of thinking are so common is because so many people think evolution has some sort of end goal that we're moving towards.
Oops you're right, I read that too hastily, sorry.
"And yet gun makers cannot be sued when their products are used in crimes, despite the fact that guns have no use other than shooting people?"
Shooting someone is sometimes a crime and sometimes not. Whether it is or not depends wholly on the actions of the gun owner. (There is some merit to cases that have been brought against manufacturers where due to their lax controls and inventory oversight it would be reasonable to presume guns are being diverted to the black market for sale to criminals.)
As difficult as you may find it, shooting someone isn't always a crime. The law recognizes a legitimate right to defend oneself against deadly threat.
This software, unlike firearms, does not depend solely on the buyer to find illegimate use, rather by its very nature and design is illegal in purpose and action. Additionally, the software maker directly participated in each criminal use by including functionality that reported the information collected back to himself as well as the buyer.
Take home message: If you write software and don't wish to be held responsible for illicit use, insure that no illegal functionality originates in your software, but must depend entirely on the actions of the buyer. IOW if all it takes to break the law is click on an item in a drop down menu, you're ****ed.
>>Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter [wikipedia.org]" , not "one of the four phases".
You might have a point if they had said what you said they did, but they didn't. They referred to four states of matter. As explained in the very article you link to people often confuse state with phase, but they are not the same thing.
"A plasma torch moving at mach 2+ is still a plasma torch."
Nice armchair logic. So when is a plasma torch no longer a plasma torch? When it no longer has the characteristics of a plasma torch. If you divide the energy output by the distance it covers while going mach 2 you get a really small amount of energy per square inch that doesn't last hardly any time at all for any given patch. Could you construct something that would still cause damage? Sure, but that would be orders of magnitude greater than the jet mounted laser described here.
This is the same reason you can whisk your fingers over an open flame and not feel anything but slight warmth. Hold it there for a second though and your skin will start to blister and burn.
But of course your suggested speed of mach2 is only if it happens to be shooting straight down, any angle and the speed of the laser on whatever it hits will be much slower, although the increased distance mitigates the slower speed for the most part.
Look at population flows. Do more people emmigrate to countries with freer markets than to countries with more restrictive markets than their country of origin?
There's your proof.
As far as is it better than any other possibility one might devise, that's spurious. Who cares if it is the best of all possible systems, the question is an absurdity. All we care is whether it is better than all the systems that have been tried previously or been seriously proposed.
If you think an altruistic share and share alike society would be better, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. I'm sure a large group of like minded individuals could live quite prosperously, but who are you going to get to join you? And that's where the real world intervenes, you end up having to force people to share with you, which is when all the nasty stuff begins.
I don't know, I've had about 15 drives over the past 10 years and about 8 or 9 of them were Maxtor, the only ones that died on me were IBM and Fujitsu ones, never had problems with any of the Maxtors.
But this is one of those issues where it's ridiculous to put much stock in anything other than comprehensive reliability studies because when you lose a hard disk its impact goes from serious inconvenience to your life is fucked for the next year so people remember which drives did them bad lol. Lots of drives fail and so whenever you get the topic going, all those stories come out, and as you can see already on this thread all the major manufacturers are getting dinged by at least someone who had a bad experience(s).
I'm not saying that some brands aren't much better than others, I'm just saying you're not going to get at that information by talking to only one or two people.
On one level you are completely correct. The potential issue here is when you consider the bigger picture.
If I have bone cancer and my legs hurt, I can take an aspirin and feel better today. But it allows me to ignore the pain that is indicative of a much more serious problem that if not taken care of will negatively impact me months or years down the road.
Similarly, some people view local mitigation efforts this way. To the extent that they remove the immediate problem they allow people to ignore the bigger picture and delay the actions that need to be taken (often expensive and effortful, just like chemotherapy) that are needed to resolve the problem long term and avoid the big nasty consequences later on.
If the person was seeing a doctor and had a serious treatment plan scheduled, there'd be no problem at all taking an aspirin. But if you see the person not taking any of those steps, can you understand why a bystander might consider taking the aspirin a bad thing?
they disolve enough to cohere with the other strips, so as long as you aren't dealing with paper that has a high clay content (glossy like magazine paper or photos) then you won't be able to pull the pieces apart, after you press out the water you have in effect a block of paper
And prove what exactly? That if you want to spend years of your life on something that you won't get any financial return on and few people will play, develop a class A title for Linux exclusively?
I'm not saying there's no one out there that will take up the gauntlet, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
And in that time PC game titles have seriously declined in both in quanitity and quality relative to console game titles. The question now is will this slide continue? Have we reached the inflection point? (The point where the average console game is better than the average PC game. How much shelf space is dedicated to console games versus PC games.)
In my opinion, being on the cusp of three new consoles we are now at the inflection point and while PC gaming will always be around in some form, however small, the days of dominance technically and in mindshare are behind us.
Don't worry though, people still listen to 8 tracks and enjoy themselves, people still write on typewriters and get the job done. Plenty of people continue with their chosen technology well beyond its "death" so I'm sure in 20 there will still be people playing games on PCs, but they will be few and far between in comparison to people using a specialized console of one sort or another.
I've bought several cars and never once trused the dealer.
bullshit, there are levels of trust, did you trust the dealer to give you the car in exchange for the money? did you trust that the dealer would still be there in a week if you needed warranty service? did you trust the dealer to be selling you the make and model of car you expected with factory parts?
that doesn't mean you trusted the dealer enough to believe every word that was coming out of his/her mouth or that he/she was giving you the best deal possible, but you trusted the person enough to make the purchase
Pray that your superior genes and sheer luck preserve you from such injuries, they destroy your world.
They have so far. I have yet to set fire to myself using gasoline filled glass swords.
On a more serious note, whether I am sympathetic to their pain and suffering now is immaterial, it will not lessen nor increase the pain they feel in their beds across the pond.
Mocking them for their stupidity and widely distributing knowledge of the consequences of such foolishness however has the small chance of imprinting a bit of restraint and wisdom on other likeminded fools who might be spared a similar fate.
Don't confuse your weak-kneed compassion with wisdom or foresight.
I can't speak to other cells, but the neurons in your brain and the nerve cells in your spinal column are all you've got. They do not regenerate. I suspect that there are other cell complexes in other organs that are probably one-timers as well (ova for instance).
1 /Wall.html
That was the common consensus ten years ago but the last few years has seen that turned upside down.
For example with neurons:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web
and ova:
http://pharyngula.org/comments/484_0_1_0_C/
I think you would be 100% more successful if you as a group decide to call yourselves something else and abandon the term hacker for what it has become.
You are the people with the motivation because you are the ones who will benefit from a more positive definition.
So quit pissing into the wind and just come up with a neologism for the positive aspects (old aspects) of the term hacker.
If you're a masochist then keep on trying to convince people who won't benefit one way or the other to change their behavior.
Then they throw your ass in jail when you don't have the tax stamp on your hard drive that's in the MP3 player you're listening to in public.
I'm not saying it's something you couldn't get away with, but just see tax stamps on cigarrettes, lots of people try to avoid the insane taxes the gov puts on them, and lots of people go to jail for smuggling untaxed packs or for buying them.
The sad part is the costs associated with administering a tax like this soaks up most of the revenue it generates. Total freaking waste, and just makes people pissed.