Since (apparently) most slashdotters don't believe in God, I will make a God-less argument here.
Humans are (apparently) the product of some random occurence with no absolute direction or motivation. We just happened. Thatt bright idea in your head is just as random as the first random occurence that created the first cell, which unpredictably went on to create the human race.
There is no concept of ownership in the universe. It is a construct we create for order in society. Other animals fight for ownership, and the strongest one wins. Humans legislate.
So yes, even that idea in your head, once you let it out, doesn't belong to you anymore. Even that crappy song. There is no right or wrong involved here. In fact, in Darwinist terms, if someone can take your idea and spin millions with it, we should applaud them, and not you, because you are obviously too dense to recognize a good thing. Survival of the fittest huh.
I mean, people who actually design stuff, dream up ABS, create an airbag, the petrol engine, the transistor and so on are only given 17 years, and some whiny musician thinks he should be able to have it for eternity. Its ridiculous.
The gripes you have with the PS3 can be fixed with a firmware/software upgrade. The biggest issue the Nintendo will have is that is will need to replaced. As much as you hate Sony, they did make a powerful console (the PS2) and that console managed to hold its own against the XBOX and the Gamecube which came out much later. Longevity is quite important. I suppose the Wii is cheap enough to make and therefore they can replace it soon at not much cost to them, but it may annoy independent developers who do not want to have a new console to develop for all the time.
People also seem to forget that Sony can still maintain many exclusives because the PS2 is still out there, and still delivers quite stunning graphics for a 6 year old console. The PS3 can be eased in. It is an advantage that Sony can still leverage.
It depends on what you are calling 'nothing'. If by nothing you mean, nothing that is in this universe, then that avoids the real problem of where that something from which this universe came into being came from.
Nothing is like infinity, it makes less sense once you begin to to really think about it. It is a big a leap to say that something can come from nothing.
Apparently a cyclical universe also needs a beginning according to the second law of thermodynamics. So that theory does not preclude the universe from needing a beginning.
Besides, there are a lot of theories about why even relativity may not be correct which are largely outside the mainstream right now, but who is to say one day they won't be accepted as fact. And then a few hundred years later also be discarded in favour of a newer theory. And the cycle will go on. I, for one, think science probably explains enough of the world right now for us to make reasonable hypotheses about how matter interacts in the universe, but we may have to discard a lot of what we know right now in the future. And I believe it will still be very far from being accurate, but passable for the needs of the time.
I just started a new job, and it is very different from what I have been doing before. I need to engage with others , ask questions and so on. It would be very difficult if every time I needed something explained to me, I had to knock on someone's door.
Although, our open plan office is rather spacious, and does not feel crowded at all, so it may not be representative of the average experience, but I am very sceptical that the average office job would be better done in private offices. We already know what people can get up to in their cubicles.
You are assuming trying to influence others is bad. Influencing each other is what humans do. It is why we advance as a species. If we stopped influencing each other, kids wouldn't want to be pilots, or doctors or whatever. Guys wouldn't chat up girls. (you are trying to influence her to sleep with you)
And people wouldn't want to entertain your point of view. Agreeing to be influenced is a very human trait. Influence is a good thing. It can be used badly (recruiting terrorists) or in a good way (counselling someone out of drug addiction). But so can anything else actually, so that isn't really saying much.
I must call BS on this one.
If you follow the story of Jesus' life as presented in the gospels (I mean read and understand - or try to understand- the story), then you know that it would be next to impossible for the people to get the documents that can prove that. I mean, how much from that time actually survives to this day. Christianity became as organised long after the events contained in the bible happened.
Basically, it leads to the following argument.
The people who wrote the gospels lied. Admittedly, 3 of the gospels are rather similar which shows that there was perhaps a common influence for the writings. But why would 4 people write a story about the same man, albeit with the details slightly different, who never existed.
Why would no one ever claim, and present proof that the story was false. 200 years is a long time.
The argument that there are documents that could prove otherwise, but these documents are suppressed by some powerful people, certainly appeals to people who would consider Dan Brown's book a statement of fact. Its always a conspiracy theory's best argument. That certain people are so good at concealing the evidence that you will never find it. so the absence of evidence becomes the evidence itself.
Christianity started among the Jews, and then spread to the rest of the world. Amazingly the Jews do not really question whether Jesus really existed. They wouldn't have a reason to cover that up. They certainly were more powerful than the small Christian group at that time, and if there was evidence that it was a sham, why would they not present it. Were they part of the conspiracy as well.
Statistically, you cannot keep such a big secret, well, as secret. Sorry, Jesus' existence is historical fact. Period.
Now if you want to argue if he was who or what He claimed he was, then that is the subject of another argument. But arguing whether or not he really existed sounds a little desperate.
Actually, you do not need to use a rescue cd. At the grub screen press a, and add a 3 at the end of the line for the kernel you want to boot and it will go into runlevel 3.
Having less children also presents another problem. It leads to a top heavy population structure. The replacement rate for the USA should be around 2.11 babies per woman. Less than that and you disrupt more than a few assumptions made with regards the economy, especially with regards to debt to future generations. The moment you have less people in future generations to shoulder that debt, the more they have to pay, and the less they will want to.
In fact, I hazard to say that It would require much stricter policies especially with regards the budget deficit. They may be forced to balance this out.
This top heavy poulation problem is already present in countries like Japan, which is why they have some of the problems they face nowadays.
When everyone register to vote. They are given a voting number. At the polling station, there go to the booth and they enter their number and possibly present some verifiable ID. They get a ballot and place it in a "ballot marking machine" and they choose the option for their candidate. The ballot machine makes the required mark for the chosen candidate, say barcode plus an 'X' next to the name. There is a shredder right there if they made the mark on the wrong candidate. (We are talking Americans here). Shredding the ballot paper enables them to get a new ballot. They then insert this vote card in the 'ballot box' which has a slot to place the card in. The design should obviously make sure that they cannot place the ballot the wrong way, or that this should not matter.
There you have it. "Electronic" voting system which actually reduces the chance of spoilt ballots and leaves a paper trail.
As an added bonus, since vote counting can be done by the machine receiving the ballots, this can be updated real time, and allow people to mobilise their voters if need be, ike in the Florida 2000 case.
You get 2 opposing countries say China and the US ia a war. Each country has an army of geeks engaged in what I can only describe as the biggest frag match ever. aAnd the only thing of note is tha you win the war if you have the highest score at the end of the day. Either side will probably be unwilling to declare victory in any case because face it, what geek would want to stop getting paid for participating in the largest and most realistic online game ever.
The one thing I like about Japan's stagnation is that there is no poverty there. It is amazing that in a country as rich as the USA, 12% of the people there live in poverty. Guess what, that is the same as in China.
In USA when the economy suffers, it is mostly the poor on whom it is taken out on. They lose insurance, they lose their jobs and so on. In Japan, they stop growing but guess what, they are not really sweating it. They value different things. Americans value riches and expensive cars. The Japanese actually do get by with Toyotas. Witness how the Lexus brand ws only recently introduced in Japan after being in USA and Europe for the past 20 odd years. And it is owned wholly by a Japanese company. Because the Japanese do not have such big brand mentality, they will be buy a Toyota for the equivalent of $80,000. Americans will have none of that.
USAs GPD per Capita is inflated by the very rich. Japan has one of the smallest, if not the smallest Gini coefficients in the world. There is much more even wealth distribution than in USA. The USA is a country full of individuals, but Japan is more of a community.
In many ways Japan is far ahead of the USA. They still produce higher quality goods than USA and indeed just about every other country.
Previously, such gaps opened up with increses in clock speed. The P4 picked up when they ramped it up. It had good 'scalability' if you will. But given that they are not going to increasing clock speeds, this would seem to counter the benefit in that way. however, a higher fsb speed might give them better performance when they pair cores together, so we may see gains there. So this could be a rollout to get people ready for the dual cores.
I think if you have data that is so valuable that you do not want it to be seen at all, just destroy the damn hard-drive. Or give it to Saddam to put as part of the payload when doing his nuclear test. Oops, he doesn't have any nuclear weapons. Try Iran then.
Why not ban billboards, especially those which feature next to nude women advertising some soap. It hink that is a real distraction. In fact, stop all roadside advertising, outlaw loud systems while driving. As soon as the car is moving, the volume on the stereo should go down to a level where the driver should be able to hear everything going on around him, and maybe have a system that lowers it further when it starts raining.
Also have bright lights outlawed, and have autodipping mandatory. Hate idiots who leave their lights at full brightness on the road.
I run Fedora, and this is equally applicable to any Linux version, but there is a search tool used by linux and probably other *nices called slocate. It has a database and you can prune paths from the databse so that it never indexes those. Whilst people may wish that there be good defaults, it can not be a problem of the maker of the software if you do not take into concern that this software may have a bad side.
Maybe people need to actually take 5 minutes to read about a piece of software before they install it. You, know, like people do when they buy a microwave. You do not randomly start pushing buttons. You learn what it does, an if you can how it does it. Same here. People need to know what they want to use it for, what they would like it not to do, and how they can prevent it being accessed by the wrong people.
Seriously, you cannot have power without any potential problems if you are talking software. If the search tool did not enable search through everything a user could access anyway, then it would be pointless, because the whole premise of searching involves finding things in places you may not think of looking for them in the first place.
If you are sufficiently paranoid about security, you have a great many options. You could set your browser cache to size 0, you could delete cookies everytime you closed the browser, you delete history when you end each session. You do not store email on an unencrypted volume. Download axcrypt or something similar and encyrpt everything you need to keep from other prying eyes.
Do not blame Google's search tool for exposing the severe weakness in your security. You secure the computer and the search tool allows you to find anything that is unsecured. And this is not supposed to be an epiphanyeither!
Well unencumbered AAC's are just about the only things you can make from your cds with te AAC encoder. No funny DRM there.
WMA should die unless a free player at least in released for non Microsoft platforms. No, turboLinux licensing windowsmedia does not count.
I am OK with mp3, but vorbis is better. Wish there were more vorbis portables.
There are no benefits to it whatsoever, as I am sure all these companies have regexes running on the output from google and whatever to locate any whiff of stolen code.
But the logic seem to make sense superficially when certain people claim that open source software is full of stolen code.
Probably quite hard without breaking things. If you do not want your email read, then make sure it can't be read by the google search, or any other way. You do not try to obscure the fact that the information is there. It is almost like complaining that when it indexed your HD, it allowed your girlfriend to find the porn you had hidden in C:\Windows\system32. If you do not want that data to be indexed, then secure it directly. there is a little app called axcrypt (axcrypt.sf.net) that can protect your files individually with a license key or a passphrase. It wouldn't be well designed if it didn't allow you to find the stuff you had even forgotten was there.
The biggest problem might not be that far from the cotton itself. You see, you cannot make cotton that is 100% insect resistant, (as in resists all insects). What you will invariably get is cotton that resists most of the insects, but some insects in the same species, but a different strain if you will, will become the major part of the population, so that over time, the cotton 'loses' its resistance. What is happening is that you are unwittingly selecting the strongest survivors in the insect population in the name of eradicating the insect problem.
There is also the problem of what happens further down the chain, but its not as immediate as the growing resistance problem. So you now force yourself to stay ahead of the curve because what is happening is that the insects are becoming more resistant to whatever genes you put into the cotton. This is not a hypothetical problem. It is already happening.
Another example is malaria treatment with chloroquine. Chloroquine was once the wonder drug, but after a while, it became ineffective so much that it is no longer used, and malaria is still a problem. so every time you play around with something that involves a population with strains that might or might not respond to your treatments (and in this case making cotton insect resistant is a treatment), you are either playing lottery by hoping to eradicate the problem before it comes back to bite you in the a$$, (difficult) or you hope that the odds are good that you end up with a lesser problem than you had, but the flipside is that the problem could be worse than the one you started with.
Are you willing to let some people driven by a desire for profit make that choice for you.
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Since (apparently) most slashdotters don't believe in God, I will make a God-less argument here. Humans are (apparently) the product of some random occurence with no absolute direction or motivation. We just happened. Thatt bright idea in your head is just as random as the first random occurence that created the first cell, which unpredictably went on to create the human race. There is no concept of ownership in the universe. It is a construct we create for order in society. Other animals fight for ownership, and the strongest one wins. Humans legislate. So yes, even that idea in your head, once you let it out, doesn't belong to you anymore. Even that crappy song. There is no right or wrong involved here. In fact, in Darwinist terms, if someone can take your idea and spin millions with it, we should applaud them, and not you, because you are obviously too dense to recognize a good thing. Survival of the fittest huh. I mean, people who actually design stuff, dream up ABS, create an airbag, the petrol engine, the transistor and so on are only given 17 years, and some whiny musician thinks he should be able to have it for eternity. Its ridiculous.
The gripes you have with the PS3 can be fixed with a firmware/software upgrade. The biggest issue the Nintendo will have is that is will need to replaced. As much as you hate Sony, they did make a powerful console (the PS2) and that console managed to hold its own against the XBOX and the Gamecube which came out much later. Longevity is quite important. I suppose the Wii is cheap enough to make and therefore they can replace it soon at not much cost to them, but it may annoy independent developers who do not want to have a new console to develop for all the time.
People also seem to forget that Sony can still maintain many exclusives because the PS2 is still out there, and still delivers quite stunning graphics for a 6 year old console. The PS3 can be eased in. It is an advantage that Sony can still leverage.
It depends on what you are calling 'nothing'. If by nothing you mean, nothing that is in this universe, then that avoids the real problem of where that something from which this universe came into being came from. Nothing is like infinity, it makes less sense once you begin to to really think about it. It is a big a leap to say that something can come from nothing. Apparently a cyclical universe also needs a beginning according to the second law of thermodynamics. So that theory does not preclude the universe from needing a beginning. Besides, there are a lot of theories about why even relativity may not be correct which are largely outside the mainstream right now, but who is to say one day they won't be accepted as fact. And then a few hundred years later also be discarded in favour of a newer theory. And the cycle will go on. I, for one, think science probably explains enough of the world right now for us to make reasonable hypotheses about how matter interacts in the universe, but we may have to discard a lot of what we know right now in the future. And I believe it will still be very far from being accurate, but passable for the needs of the time.
I just started a new job, and it is very different from what I have been doing before. I need to engage with others , ask questions and so on. It would be very difficult if every time I needed something explained to me, I had to knock on someone's door.
Although, our open plan office is rather spacious, and does not feel crowded at all, so it may not be representative of the average experience, but I am very sceptical that the average office job would be better done in private offices. We already know what people can get up to in their cubicles.
You are assuming trying to influence others is bad. Influencing each other is what humans do. It is why we advance as a species. If we stopped influencing each other, kids wouldn't want to be pilots, or doctors or whatever. Guys wouldn't chat up girls. (you are trying to influence her to sleep with you) And people wouldn't want to entertain your point of view. Agreeing to be influenced is a very human trait. Influence is a good thing. It can be used badly (recruiting terrorists) or in a good way (counselling someone out of drug addiction). But so can anything else actually, so that isn't really saying much.
Wait. Here is an analogy. Apt I believe.
Guy meets girls. Warms up to girl, and asks her to marry him. One condition though. Guy girls to never sleep with anyone, ever again.
Question. Is guy forcing to stop sleeping with other men?
Or is he asking her to make a choice?
I must call BS on this one. If you follow the story of Jesus' life as presented in the gospels (I mean read and understand - or try to understand- the story), then you know that it would be next to impossible for the people to get the documents that can prove that. I mean, how much from that time actually survives to this day. Christianity became as organised long after the events contained in the bible happened. Basically, it leads to the following argument. The people who wrote the gospels lied. Admittedly, 3 of the gospels are rather similar which shows that there was perhaps a common influence for the writings. But why would 4 people write a story about the same man, albeit with the details slightly different, who never existed. Why would no one ever claim, and present proof that the story was false. 200 years is a long time. The argument that there are documents that could prove otherwise, but these documents are suppressed by some powerful people, certainly appeals to people who would consider Dan Brown's book a statement of fact. Its always a conspiracy theory's best argument. That certain people are so good at concealing the evidence that you will never find it. so the absence of evidence becomes the evidence itself. Christianity started among the Jews, and then spread to the rest of the world. Amazingly the Jews do not really question whether Jesus really existed. They wouldn't have a reason to cover that up. They certainly were more powerful than the small Christian group at that time, and if there was evidence that it was a sham, why would they not present it. Were they part of the conspiracy as well. Statistically, you cannot keep such a big secret, well, as secret. Sorry, Jesus' existence is historical fact. Period. Now if you want to argue if he was who or what He claimed he was, then that is the subject of another argument. But arguing whether or not he really existed sounds a little desperate.
Your boss is not paying for support. Try actually getting paid for support, like next day or same day response, then see if it is as competitive.
Actually, you do not need to use a rescue cd. At the grub screen press a, and add a 3 at the end of the line for the kernel you want to boot and it will go into runlevel 3.
There is such a cd. I believe it is called the rescue cd.
Having less children also presents another problem. It leads to a top heavy population structure. The replacement rate for the USA should be around 2.11 babies per woman. Less than that and you disrupt more than a few assumptions made with regards the economy, especially with regards to debt to future generations. The moment you have less people in future generations to shoulder that debt, the more they have to pay, and the less they will want to. In fact, I hazard to say that It would require much stricter policies especially with regards the budget deficit. They may be forced to balance this out. This top heavy poulation problem is already present in countries like Japan, which is why they have some of the problems they face nowadays.
Here is my little non-patented idea.
When everyone register to vote. They are given a voting number. At the polling station, there go to the booth and they enter their number and possibly present some verifiable ID. They get a ballot and place it in a "ballot marking machine" and they choose the option for their candidate. The ballot machine makes the required mark for the chosen candidate, say barcode plus an 'X' next to the name. There is a shredder right there if they made the mark on the wrong candidate. (We are talking Americans here). Shredding the ballot paper enables them to get a new ballot. They then insert this vote card in the 'ballot box' which has a slot to place the card in. The design should obviously make sure that they cannot place the ballot the wrong way, or that this should not matter.
There you have it. "Electronic" voting system which actually reduces the chance of spoilt ballots and leaves a paper trail.
As an added bonus, since vote counting can be done by the machine receiving the ballots, this can be updated real time, and allow people to mobilise their voters if need be, ike in the Florida 2000 case.
You get 2 opposing countries say China and the US ia a war. Each country has an army of geeks engaged in what I can only describe as the biggest frag match ever. aAnd the only thing of note is tha you win the war if you have the highest score at the end of the day. Either side will probably be unwilling to declare victory in any case because face it, what geek would want to stop getting paid for participating in the largest and most realistic online game ever.
The one thing I like about Japan's stagnation is that there is no poverty there. It is amazing that in a country as rich as the USA, 12% of the people there live in poverty. Guess what, that is the same as in China.
In USA when the economy suffers, it is mostly the poor on whom it is taken out on. They lose insurance, they lose their jobs and so on. In Japan, they stop growing but guess what, they are not really sweating it. They value different things. Americans value riches and expensive cars. The Japanese actually do get by with Toyotas. Witness how the Lexus brand ws only recently introduced in Japan after being in USA and Europe for the past 20 odd years. And it is owned wholly by a Japanese company. Because the Japanese do not have such big brand mentality, they will be buy a Toyota for the equivalent of $80,000. Americans will have none of that.
USAs GPD per Capita is inflated by the very rich. Japan has one of the smallest, if not the smallest Gini coefficients in the world. There is much more even wealth distribution than in USA. The USA is a country full of individuals, but Japan is more of a community.
In many ways Japan is far ahead of the USA. They still produce higher quality goods than USA and indeed just about every other country.
Previously, such gaps opened up with increses in clock speed. The P4 picked up when they ramped it up. It had good 'scalability' if you will. But given that they are not going to increasing clock speeds, this would seem to counter the benefit in that way. however, a higher fsb speed might give them better performance when they pair cores together, so we may see gains there. So this could be a rollout to get people ready for the dual cores.
I think if you have data that is so valuable that you do not want it to be seen at all, just destroy the damn hard-drive. Or give it to Saddam to put as part of the payload when doing his nuclear test. Oops, he doesn't have any nuclear weapons. Try Iran then.
Why not ban billboards, especially those which feature next to nude women advertising some soap. It hink that is a real distraction. In fact, stop all roadside advertising, outlaw loud systems while driving. As soon as the car is moving, the volume on the stereo should go down to a level where the driver should be able to hear everything going on around him, and maybe have a system that lowers it further when it starts raining. Also have bright lights outlawed, and have autodipping mandatory. Hate idiots who leave their lights at full brightness on the road.
In other news, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated in the battle of Waterloo.
I run Fedora, and this is equally applicable to any Linux version, but there is a search tool used by linux and probably other *nices called slocate. It has a database and you can prune paths from the databse so that it never indexes those. Whilst people may wish that there be good defaults, it can not be a problem of the maker of the software if you do not take into concern that this software may have a bad side.
Maybe people need to actually take 5 minutes to read about a piece of software before they install it. You, know, like people do when they buy a microwave. You do not randomly start pushing buttons. You learn what it does, an if you can how it does it. Same here. People need to know what they want to use it for, what they would like it not to do, and how they can prevent it being accessed by the wrong people.
So it is configurable. If you are sufficiently paranoid, you can make sure it is not cached. Who would have thought.
Seriously, you cannot have power without any potential problems if you are talking software. If the search tool did not enable search through everything a user could access anyway, then it would be pointless, because the whole premise of searching involves finding things in places you may not think of looking for them in the first place.
If you are sufficiently paranoid about security, you have a great many options. You could set your browser cache to size 0, you could delete cookies everytime you closed the browser, you delete history when you end each session. You do not store email on an unencrypted volume. Download axcrypt or something similar and encyrpt everything you need to keep from other prying eyes.
Do not blame Google's search tool for exposing the severe weakness in your security. You secure the computer and the search tool allows you to find anything that is unsecured. And this is not supposed to be an epiphanyeither!
Well unencumbered AAC's are just about the only things you can make from your cds with te AAC encoder. No funny DRM there. WMA should die unless a free player at least in released for non Microsoft platforms. No, turboLinux licensing windowsmedia does not count. I am OK with mp3, but vorbis is better. Wish there were more vorbis portables.
There are no benefits to it whatsoever, as I am sure all these companies have regexes running on the output from google and whatever to locate any whiff of stolen code. But the logic seem to make sense superficially when certain people claim that open source software is full of stolen code.
Probably quite hard without breaking things. If you do not want your email read, then make sure it can't be read by the google search, or any other way. You do not try to obscure the fact that the information is there. It is almost like complaining that when it indexed your HD, it allowed your girlfriend to find the porn you had hidden in C:\Windows\system32. If you do not want that data to be indexed, then secure it directly. there is a little app called axcrypt (axcrypt.sf.net) that can protect your files individually with a license key or a passphrase. It wouldn't be well designed if it didn't allow you to find the stuff you had even forgotten was there.
The biggest problem might not be that far from the cotton itself. You see, you cannot make cotton that is 100% insect resistant, (as in resists all insects). What you will invariably get is cotton that resists most of the insects, but some insects in the same species, but a different strain if you will, will become the major part of the population, so that over time, the cotton 'loses' its resistance. What is happening is that you are unwittingly selecting the strongest survivors in the insect population in the name of eradicating the insect problem.
There is also the problem of what happens further down the chain, but its not as immediate as the growing resistance problem. So you now force yourself to stay ahead of the curve because what is happening is that the insects are becoming more resistant to whatever genes you put into the cotton. This is not a hypothetical problem. It is already happening.
Another example is malaria treatment with chloroquine. Chloroquine was once the wonder drug, but after a while, it became ineffective so much that it is no longer used, and malaria is still a problem. so every time you play around with something that involves a population with strains that might or might not respond to your treatments (and in this case making cotton insect resistant is a treatment), you are either playing lottery by hoping to eradicate the problem before it comes back to bite you in the a$$, (difficult) or you hope that the odds are good that you end up with a lesser problem than you had, but the flipside is that the problem could be worse than the one you started with.
Are you willing to let some people driven by a desire for profit make that choice for you.