A theoretically-valid answer to my explicit point, but, of course, purely speculation on your part whether it applies to him.
And, of course, not addressing the implicit point that any "golden age" lasted no more than a year and a half, and ended 12 years ago, so even if he was around, why the hell hasn't he gotten used to what Slashdot is by now?
I figured avoiding letter frequency wasn't secure enough; after all, you're still leaving word frequency clues. So I figured on a codebook that assigned each word in the English language a number of 64-bit integers in proportion to its frequency. (If "is" was 10,000 times more frequent than "anteport", then there would be 10,000 64-bit numbers assigned to "is" for every one assigned to "anteport".)
Implemented it with a rather restricted dictionary, then gave it up as a lot more bother than it was worth.
Oh, sure. The only reason they needed any delay is that Harlan Ellison was writing text for the game, and he wanted to spend a month finishing up The Last Dangerous Visions. So, as soon as he finishes that, Duke will be ready to go.
Oooh, cutting insight! Next you can explain to me that Internet searches aren't free, because somebody is paying for the hardware and bandwidth and engineers at Google and Bing and Yahoo! And the fates of AltaVista, Cuil, Infoseek, and others is proof that free search is doomed. Accordingly, since I value Internet search, I should join a paid subscription Internet indexing and search site.
Ahem. Now, back over at arguments worth actual attention, rather than derision and dismissal, the putative advantage of paying for the New York Times over relying on free sources was that its choice of stories to highlight was better than the choice of stories to highlight at the free sites. This actually might be a reason, but it doesn't hold up if Google News will separate the wheat from the chaff just as effectively for free.
It works for the rest of the Internet. So why not a process where WHATWG sits down and develops HTML, and then (the step not yet taken) have WHATWG submit chunks, as they become ready, to the IETF to be handled as standards-track RFCs?
Then, instead of single version numbers for paper standards that may not ever actually correspond to implemented reality, you get an evolving collection of RFCs documenting actual practice.
The price of a stock is always the price where the number of buyers equals the number of sellers. On a stock that does not pay dividends, it is accordingly always where half of stock traders (with a certain number of caveats that reduce to noise in the case of a well-known, widely-traded stock) think it's going to go up in price and half of stock traders think it's going to go down. Otherwise it would rise or lower in price in trading until you got back to the half-and-half position.
So, unless you believe you have actual knowledge and/or analytic abilities superior to the aggregate stock trader, you should expect the chance of Berkshire Hathaway rising to be precisely the same as its chance to fall. Which is to say, when you buy it, you're making a perfect 50-50 gamble that you will make or lose money.
Now, if you have such knowledge and/or abilities, hey, you can actually make money buying specific stocks, just like a guy who can count cards can actually make money gambling more heavily on certain blackjack hands than others. Everybody else at the table, though, is a sucker.
This equation changes for stocks that pay dividends. If you buy stocks (for the long term) that pay dividends, you make a return if the company continues to pay dividends. You can certainly suffer the opportunity cost of a lower-than-expected ROI, and there's always the risk of a company bankruptcy, but you're not taking a pure 50-50 bet on whether the price of the share will go up.
There's no such thing as a useless key; there's only a key you haven't properly remapped in order to exploit. (For Windows NT 4/2000/XP/Vista/7, hunt down use KeyTweak and the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.)
After all, if these documents were copyrighted, well, there would be all sorts of treaties and legal tools available to go after Wikileaks. And there isn't anything that really stops Congress from changing US copyright law to include all classified documents produced by the US Government.
Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, etc. are all still out there. Not quite as good as Google, but serviceable. The only way Google can keep its market share is by continuing to be better, because it's trivial to switch. There's no monopoly lock-in.
How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google?
Pretty fucking easy, actually
Yeah. Running down the list, there's only one of those I've used this week. That one is Google, and the only tricky bit there would be switching from GMail back to Thunderbird (or to Yahoo or Hotmail or something). A pain in the ass for a one-week switch, but pretty damn easy if I were doing it permanently.
Microsoft has (had) their own JVM but Sun always made their own Windows version. But Sun couldn't be bothered to made a Mac version?
You can buy, from Sun, Sun-branded systems that run Solaris on SPARC, Solaris on x86, Linux on x86, and Windows on x86. And Sun makes JVMs for those systems.
You can't buy Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, MVS, OS/400, z/OS, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64, or Reliant UNIX systems from Sun. And Sun does not make JVMs for those systems; they leave the JVMs to parties that want to support Java on those systems.
In our time, we view these organizations who are fighting to stop the spread of ideas the same way you might look at the mini-war caused by prohibition.
Mini-war? Is that what you call what's going on in Mexico in 2010?
Or, wait, is 2058 still so benighted that it's pretending prohibition ended in 1933, when only alcohol was removed from the list of mind-altering chemicals banned by the Progressives in the 1910s?
In twelve countries, sure, the title is "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of [Specific Place] and of Her other Realms and Territories . .."
In the UK, she's the slightly different "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen . .."
However, in Canada her title is "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen . .."
So, even Canadian law gives her billing as Queen of the UK first, with higher priority than her role as Queen of Canada. (Grenada does the same, but it puts the "Queen" between God and Of.)
Oh, another bit about the US not having parties like Europe understands them, and thus not being able to throw out the nuts--the US has primaries. For example, in Texas, the Democratic and Republican nominees for the Governor of Texas, US House, US Senate, Texas House, Texas Senate, and may other positions are chosen in primary elections.
How this works is:
1) Anybody who can manage to gather enough petition signatures to appear on the ballot can run for the nomination of the party. 2) Any voter in the state who wants to can vote in either party's primary (but not both at the same time). 3) The winner of the primary is the party nominee. Period.
So, the organized Texas Democratic Party? Can't keep people off the list of potential Democratic nominees, and doesn't control who gets to vote for the nominees. So how would you expel anybody? There's no party official who has the authority to say, "No, this candidate is a nut, so we're not going to let him run." As long as he can win the primary, he's the party nominee.
The party can, of course, refuse to fund his campaign. But he still shows up as the Republican on the ballot. And under the current Constitution, he can then get other people to finance his campaign, or fund it out of his own pocket.
I'm genuinely curious (I'm a foreigner), why would that be? I don't know enough about the US constitution to say anything about points 5-6, but 1-4 doesn't seem to be against it? Educate me:)
Sure.
On #1, the states, not the nation, are the basic political unit of the United States. The Federal Government's powers were all explicitly delegated to the Federal Government by the states; all powers not delegated to the Federal Government were retained by the states. And the list of powers given to the Federal Government were pretty few, even if over time they've been construed ever more broadly.
On #2, there are no parties able to exert discipline to throw out the "nutters". The Republican Party of Texas, the Republican National Committee, the Senate Republican Caucus, and the House Republican Caucus are all separate organizations in their legal existences and in their leadership. And it's the Republican Party of Texas that decides who is listed as a Republican on ballots in the state of Texas. If the Republicans in Texas decide they don't like the national Republican candidate for President, they can list someone else on the ballot. The national Republican candidate would then have to go through the usual procedure for independent candidates to get on the ballot in Texas, and would not be listed as a Republican on that ballot.
(By the way, calling back to #1, most election laws are written by the states, not the Federal Government.)
On #3, the Supreme Court has just thrown much milder restrictions out as unconstitutional. Imposing strict ones would require amending the Constitution. That, by the way, requires approval of a 2/3rds majority of each House of Congress and majority approval by both houses of the legislature in three quarters of the states, which is the same procedure you'd have to go through to accomplish #1. (There are some alternative procedures, but that's the basic one that's been used for 26 of the 27 amendments.)
On #4, well, see #2 and #3.
On #5, the Senate is strictly apportioned by the Constitution as 2 Senators per state (going back to the states as basic units, Senators were originally appointed by the states themselves, not elected). To make the Senate more equally apportioned by population, you'd have to convince 2/3rds the Senate and 3/4ths the states to approve amending the Constitution to do that. The House is first apportioned among states by population (minimum 1 per state), then divided into equal-population districts within each state.
If you bought anything Sony after the 2005 rootkit incident, you volunteered to be screwed over. Write off the money you spent on the PS3 as paying for the lesson you could have had for free, but were too stupid to learn.
It is quite possible that, given how quickly life appeared on Earth, it was deliberately seeded here by intelligent aliens. This theory is, in principle, testable; if it is true, a concerted search of the galaxy should show evidence of these aliens. However, there is no serious effort spent by biologists working out the implications of this theory, because it is currently so untestable that it's a waste of time. There are speculations in popular books about it, but biologists are not busy drawing up dozens of rival specific alien seeder theories in great mathematical detail; they're dealing with other areas of biology.
In theoretical physics, however, an idea that's been around three decades and still not produced any testables is still taking up a whole bunch of time, attention, and journal space. It looks like theoretical physics has degenerated into a cul-de-sac of fruitless theological debate. Why? There are other important theoretical questions in physics that can be explored while you lobby for equipment (experimental or observational) that could actually test string theory/quantum loop gravity/etc., so why are you physicists spending so much effort on the grand unified theories in the meantime?
All they need to ship is for Harlan Ellison to finish the manual. Ellison's reported that it'll be done any day now; it's second on his to-do list, right after The Last Dangerous Visions.
Slashdot Mirror
A theoretically-valid answer to my explicit point, but, of course, purely speculation on your part whether it applies to him.
And, of course, not addressing the implicit point that any "golden age" lasted no more than a year and a half, and ended 12 years ago, so even if he was around, why the hell hasn't he gotten used to what Slashdot is by now?
Your UID suggests you joined long, long after 1999 (the year Jon Katz was added to Slashdot), so what "old days" are you talking about, exactly?
I figured avoiding letter frequency wasn't secure enough; after all, you're still leaving word frequency clues. So I figured on a codebook that assigned each word in the English language a number of 64-bit integers in proportion to its frequency. (If "is" was 10,000 times more frequent than "anteport", then there would be 10,000 64-bit numbers assigned to "is" for every one assigned to "anteport".)
Implemented it with a rather restricted dictionary, then gave it up as a lot more bother than it was worth.
Oh, sure. The only reason they needed any delay is that Harlan Ellison was writing text for the game, and he wanted to spend a month finishing up The Last Dangerous Visions. So, as soon as he finishes that, Duke will be ready to go.
Oooh, cutting insight! Next you can explain to me that Internet searches aren't free, because somebody is paying for the hardware and bandwidth and engineers at Google and Bing and Yahoo! And the fates of AltaVista, Cuil, Infoseek, and others is proof that free search is doomed. Accordingly, since I value Internet search, I should join a paid subscription Internet indexing and search site.
Ahem. Now, back over at arguments worth actual attention, rather than derision and dismissal, the putative advantage of paying for the New York Times over relying on free sources was that its choice of stories to highlight was better than the choice of stories to highlight at the free sites. This actually might be a reason, but it doesn't hold up if Google News will separate the wheat from the chaff just as effectively for free.
Right. Google News, disable Entertainment, use Greasemonkey to hide the video/fast flip/most shared junk. 100% free news, 100% Lindsay Lohan-free.
It works for the rest of the Internet. So why not a process where WHATWG sits down and develops HTML, and then (the step not yet taken) have WHATWG submit chunks, as they become ready, to the IETF to be handled as standards-track RFCs?
Then, instead of single version numbers for paper standards that may not ever actually correspond to implemented reality, you get an evolving collection of RFCs documenting actual practice.
Yes, it is gambling. Absolutely.
The price of a stock is always the price where the number of buyers equals the number of sellers. On a stock that does not pay dividends, it is accordingly always where half of stock traders (with a certain number of caveats that reduce to noise in the case of a well-known, widely-traded stock) think it's going to go up in price and half of stock traders think it's going to go down. Otherwise it would rise or lower in price in trading until you got back to the half-and-half position.
So, unless you believe you have actual knowledge and/or analytic abilities superior to the aggregate stock trader, you should expect the chance of Berkshire Hathaway rising to be precisely the same as its chance to fall. Which is to say, when you buy it, you're making a perfect 50-50 gamble that you will make or lose money.
Now, if you have such knowledge and/or abilities, hey, you can actually make money buying specific stocks, just like a guy who can count cards can actually make money gambling more heavily on certain blackjack hands than others. Everybody else at the table, though, is a sucker.
This equation changes for stocks that pay dividends. If you buy stocks (for the long term) that pay dividends, you make a return if the company continues to pay dividends. You can certainly suffer the opportunity cost of a lower-than-expected ROI, and there's always the risk of a company bankruptcy, but you're not taking a pure 50-50 bet on whether the price of the share will go up.
Menu-shift-4, menu-0, menu-x, menu-shift-x, and shift-tab.
There's no such thing as a useless key; there's only a key you haven't properly remapped in order to exploit. (For Windows NT 4/2000/XP/Vista/7, hunt down use KeyTweak and the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.)
After all, if these documents were copyrighted, well, there would be all sorts of treaties and legal tools available to go after Wikileaks. And there isn't anything that really stops Congress from changing US copyright law to include all classified documents produced by the US Government.
Remember to ID by rows.
Wasn't that hard for J.P Morgan.
Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, etc. are all still out there. Not quite as good as Google, but serviceable. The only way Google can keep its market share is by continuing to be better, because it's trivial to switch. There's no monopoly lock-in.
How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google?
Pretty fucking easy, actually
Yeah. Running down the list, there's only one of those I've used this week. That one is Google, and the only tricky bit there would be switching from GMail back to Thunderbird (or to Yahoo or Hotmail or something). A pain in the ass for a one-week switch, but pretty damn easy if I were doing it permanently.
Just wait for them to buy MySpace.
Microsoft has (had) their own JVM but Sun always made their own Windows version. But Sun couldn't be bothered to made a Mac version?
You can buy, from Sun, Sun-branded systems that run Solaris on SPARC, Solaris on x86, Linux on x86, and Windows on x86. And Sun makes JVMs for those systems.
You can't buy Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, MVS, OS/400, z/OS, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64, or Reliant UNIX systems from Sun. And Sun does not make JVMs for those systems; they leave the JVMs to parties that want to support Java on those systems.
In our time, we view these organizations who are fighting to stop the spread of ideas the same way you might look at the mini-war caused by prohibition.
Mini-war? Is that what you call what's going on in Mexico in 2010?
Or, wait, is 2058 still so benighted that it's pretending prohibition ended in 1933, when only alcohol was removed from the list of mind-altering chemicals banned by the Progressives in the 1910s?
In twelve countries, sure, the title is "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of [Specific Place] and of Her other Realms and Territories . . ."
In the UK, she's the slightly different "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen . . ."
However, in Canada her title is "Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen . . ."
So, even Canadian law gives her billing as Queen of the UK first, with higher priority than her role as Queen of Canada. (Grenada does the same, but it puts the "Queen" between God and Of.)
Oh, another bit about the US not having parties like Europe understands them, and thus not being able to throw out the nuts--the US has primaries. For example, in Texas, the Democratic and Republican nominees for the Governor of Texas, US House, US Senate, Texas House, Texas Senate, and may other positions are chosen in primary elections.
How this works is:
1) Anybody who can manage to gather enough petition signatures to appear on the ballot can run for the nomination of the party.
2) Any voter in the state who wants to can vote in either party's primary (but not both at the same time).
3) The winner of the primary is the party nominee. Period.
So, the organized Texas Democratic Party? Can't keep people off the list of potential Democratic nominees, and doesn't control who gets to vote for the nominees. So how would you expel anybody? There's no party official who has the authority to say, "No, this candidate is a nut, so we're not going to let him run." As long as he can win the primary, he's the party nominee.
The party can, of course, refuse to fund his campaign. But he still shows up as the Republican on the ballot. And under the current Constitution, he can then get other people to finance his campaign, or fund it out of his own pocket.
I'm genuinely curious (I'm a foreigner), why would that be? I don't know enough about the US constitution to say anything about points 5-6, but 1-4 doesn't seem to be against it? Educate me :)
Sure.
On #1, the states, not the nation, are the basic political unit of the United States. The Federal Government's powers were all explicitly delegated to the Federal Government by the states; all powers not delegated to the Federal Government were retained by the states. And the list of powers given to the Federal Government were pretty few, even if over time they've been construed ever more broadly.
On #2, there are no parties able to exert discipline to throw out the "nutters". The Republican Party of Texas, the Republican National Committee, the Senate Republican Caucus, and the House Republican Caucus are all separate organizations in their legal existences and in their leadership. And it's the Republican Party of Texas that decides who is listed as a Republican on ballots in the state of Texas. If the Republicans in Texas decide they don't like the national Republican candidate for President, they can list someone else on the ballot. The national Republican candidate would then have to go through the usual procedure for independent candidates to get on the ballot in Texas, and would not be listed as a Republican on that ballot.
(By the way, calling back to #1, most election laws are written by the states, not the Federal Government.)
On #3, the Supreme Court has just thrown much milder restrictions out as unconstitutional. Imposing strict ones would require amending the Constitution. That, by the way, requires approval of a 2/3rds majority of each House of Congress and majority approval by both houses of the legislature in three quarters of the states, which is the same procedure you'd have to go through to accomplish #1. (There are some alternative procedures, but that's the basic one that's been used for 26 of the 27 amendments.)
On #4, well, see #2 and #3.
On #5, the Senate is strictly apportioned by the Constitution as 2 Senators per state (going back to the states as basic units, Senators were originally appointed by the states themselves, not elected). To make the Senate more equally apportioned by population, you'd have to convince 2/3rds the Senate and 3/4ths the states to approve amending the Constitution to do that. The House is first apportioned among states by population (minimum 1 per state), then divided into equal-population districts within each state.
On #6, see #3.
Here's the guy with the 4-digit number saying that the person with the 5-digit number has no business talking about ID numbers.
If you bought anything Sony after the 2005 rootkit incident, you volunteered to be screwed over. Write off the money you spent on the PS3 as paying for the lesson you could have had for free, but were too stupid to learn.
Here's what it looks like from the outside:
It is quite possible that, given how quickly life appeared on Earth, it was deliberately seeded here by intelligent aliens. This theory is, in principle, testable; if it is true, a concerted search of the galaxy should show evidence of these aliens. However, there is no serious effort spent by biologists working out the implications of this theory, because it is currently so untestable that it's a waste of time. There are speculations in popular books about it, but biologists are not busy drawing up dozens of rival specific alien seeder theories in great mathematical detail; they're dealing with other areas of biology.
In theoretical physics, however, an idea that's been around three decades and still not produced any testables is still taking up a whole bunch of time, attention, and journal space. It looks like theoretical physics has degenerated into a cul-de-sac of fruitless theological debate. Why? There are other important theoretical questions in physics that can be explored while you lobby for equipment (experimental or observational) that could actually test string theory/quantum loop gravity/etc., so why are you physicists spending so much effort on the grand unified theories in the meantime?
All they need to ship is for Harlan Ellison to finish the manual. Ellison's reported that it'll be done any day now; it's second on his to-do list, right after The Last Dangerous Visions.