Last I checked, plants (especially lone beans) don't have a brain or a central nervous system capable of feeling pain or terror;
I'd love to see your complete theory of life, then. Plants remain still quite poorly understood; they live at a different rate from us, so it's hard to notice.
Contrast that the very real terror cattle experience as they are slaughtered, especially when someone fucks up and doesn't get a clean kill.
Why are you so sure that's any more real? Because the way they act looks more like the way humans do?
it's an honorable one as long as they don't spend the rest of their life rubbing it in our faces.
Isn't that just what the poster up above was doing? (And quit saying "torture", words have meanings.)
You're reading too much into the big number on the top; self-reported happiness is a funny thing. The survey acknowledges that their big percentage has stabilised for the US, western Europe and Japan - which suggests any differences between those three are more likely to be cultural factors affecting the reporting rather than objective differences. Meanwhile you have twice as many people unable to afford basic necessities.
(That said, Europe is rating much lower than I expected there, and less than my impression had been (not entirely surprising, since my own nation seems to be doing much better than the EU average). Looking at it in detail, western europe is dragged down by the south end (Spain, Italy and in particular Portugal), which I'd somewhat forgotten about. So I would be very interested to see the comparison you're suggesting, rich northwestern european countries with rich coastal US states)
Bad logic. What would it continue, because it's worked "OK" in the past? False identification of future performance with past performance. The EU did OK post-WW2, during Internet bubble, during worldwide credit bubble, etc... Do you think that means that entitlement policies will _always_ work?
Of course I can't claim it will always work - but it's worked in a wide range of conditions, and I certainly see no grounds to claim it will collapse within five years, as the GP seemed to be doing.
As the EU and the world increases in population (poor people breed like rabbits), per-capita productivity will go down.
Poor people breed a lot, contented people in developed countries don't. Many EU countries are only maintaining a stable population through immigration. So I'm not worried about your malthusian explosion.
Agreed. The socialist policies we've implemented will be our doom, as will the military adventurism of the neocons.
The wars are a big part of it, but your insistence on private enterprise is costing you - a lot of money (and people's time and effort) is being wasted on inefficient healthcare, badly organised education and research, utilities etc.
Of course it's not a cure-all, but the US really would be better off - both financially and, more importantly, in terms of the welfare of its people - if it would shift to the left a little.
Why is this insightful? European social democracies have been sitting there, giving their citizens a better quality of life than the US, for decades, and there's no reason at all to assume it won't continue. (Given how your national debt's going, the US should be more worried about where it will be in five years.)
I'm not a mathematician, could someone explain why this is surprising in terms that a computer programmer or biologist could follow?
It's not at all surprising; it just means the primes behave a bit like random numbers, which we've already been showing in far more interesting ways (e.g. Ben Green's recent result that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions (sequences of equally-spaced numbers) in the primes). I'd be amazed if this is actually a new result.
And I would advice every one to do this. I enjoy building my computers from parts.
If you enjoy it then fair enough. I do the same thing sometimes when it comes to making clothes, sewing my own and taking far longer over it than the cost saving over just buying from the supermarket. But treat that as what it is, a hobby that you are in some sense "wasting" your time on. If you don't enjoy it (and there will be people who don't, not everyone is the same), there is no point building your own computer any more; it's not worth it financially.
Both are priced at $999; the Macbook has a Core 2 Duo at 2 GHz and 2GB of DDR3, whereas the XPS has a Core 2 Duo at 2.2GHz and 4GB of DDR2. The Macbook would clearly be faster, as the twofold increase in memory bandwidth from using DDR3 far outweighs a 10% bump in CPU clock.
Hardly. The higher latency of DDR3 means the real-world performance gain is minimal - wheras having twice the memory will give real, noticeable performance improvements.
That would force people doing that to make frequent updates to their software with genuine improvements, which is hardly the worst way things could go.
Ubuntu could "make" Firefox less stable simply by poorly managing underlying infrastructure. It's not in their interest to do so, obviously, but if it were to happen, and they didn't make sure to properly test a new release using enough scenarios, then when Firefox crashes it would make Firefox look bad (unless users figure out that it was fine when it was running on the previous version of Ubuntu).
There's something else we get for it, too. Most of our recent technological advances have been engineering breakthroughs. There has been little advancement of actual understanding by comparison.
If you're trying to contrast this against history it's simply wrong. Of course most advancement is, always has been and always will be in engineering rather than in the fundamentals - but the rate at which fundamental physics has developed has been nothing short of astonishing by historical standards.
In my personal (unqualified) opinion, the medical industry has its own version of this. We're getting better and better at modifying the system, at obtaining desired results by the introduction of chemicals, without increasing our understanding of what disease actually is, how it originates, and how it can be prevented.
Again, yes, the "engineering" approach of trying a known chemical and seeing what it does advances much faster than the theory - but that's not to say the fundamental work has stagnated. We genuinely do know a lot more about disease than we used to.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in psychiatry.
In more ways than one. While the state of fundamental understanding in psychiatry is particularly poor, we have seen a lot of genuine progress.
My evidence for this is very simple: if we understood these things, we should have a population that is getting healthier. Instead, we have a population that increasingly depends on medications because it is becoming sicker.
And where's your evidence for that? Life expectancy is continuing to rise (we're expecting a "fast food bump", but that's hardly the fault of medicine, and I don't believe it's happened yet), and the fact that a condition is being treated doesn't mean it didn't exist before - e.g. PTSD is often described as a modern invention, but if one looks at contemporary descriptions of WWII soldiers, one can see a lot of very similar symptoms - they simply didn't get treated. It's hard to appreciate how much better our general quality of life is than that of even 50 years ago, because we adjust to what we're used to.
Not solving the wider problem, but often you can access such sites by changing user-agent to googlebot ("Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)").
The reason it doesn't make sense to concatenate against the possibility of one or the other being broken is that breaking a hash is rarely an all-or-nothing thing - none of the recent published attacks have been "one can find a collision instantly", they're "one can find a collision in 2^96 attempts when it should take 2^128". Suppose you've gone for two 128-bit hashes, and your opponents are capable of 2^64 attempts. Now, you lose if attacks are found that reduce both your 128-bit hashes down to effectively 64-bits - unlikely, yes. But if you went for a single 256-bit hash, you don't lose until there's an attack which reduces it to an effective 64 bits - and if you look at the history of attacks on hash functions, you'll see that's actually much less likely than getting 64-bit attacks on two different hashes.
Really stupid question (not a cryptographer), but is there anything wrong with using multiple hash algorithms (hopefully none derived from one another)?
Yes, there is a lot wrong with it. I would go into detail but you can find good explanations in any of the past, say, twenty stories posted here about hash algorithms.
Surely breaking two or more hashes simultaneously would be far harder?
No; not by enough to make it worthwhile, possibly not at all. E.g. if you're willing to use 256 bytes of hash, you're much better off using SHA-256 than two 128-byte hashes.
You've probably noticed that we haven't had any really major jumps in the clock speeds of consumer processors since about 2002. Intel originally thought they'd be able to scale the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture to about 10GHz, bu they ran into a frequency ceiling at about 4GHz.
Netburst almost certainly could be clocked up that high. The reasons for abandoning it weren't technical, at least on the clockspeed end (having the worst performace-per-watt by far at a point when people started caring about it bit them rather) - the P4s simply weren't selling.
To you, the iPod is a fashion statement because you were happy with the MP3 players that came before the iPod. To most people, those were unusable, bulky pieces of crap.
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors. As for the interface, well, maybe there are people who really do find that stupid wheel-thing easier to use, but there are dozens of players doing that now. So why is the ipod the one that sells? Fashion, plain and simple.
You were happy with cell phones before the iPhone came out. Most people hated their cell phones and used them only for the most basic things.
Oh, come on. Compare doing any task you can think of on a near-contemporary, say the Razr. It's barely any different, and certainly not any harder. Nope, I'm not buying it. Fashion.
You really are serious about this, aren't you? I thought you were serious until I read this. So how is the surround support in MP3
The point is not the surround support in MP3, the point is when you're looking to upgrade from MP3, a few years down the line. At which point your obvious options are AC3 or later AAC (lots of surround support, along with hardware decoders), WMA (took a while, but good surround support now), maybe RealAudio (who cares, not I), or ogg (rather poor surround support). At which point you're going to go with AAC.
Oh fuck off. There have been filesystems which tried that, you know, and there's a reason that they failed; to someone who tries to actually use the damn things rather than sitting around theorising, the filename is the *only* appropriate place for metadata.
It's hardly anthropomorphic to describe nature as self correcting. Life on earth survived for what, like a billion years without modern man fucking it up? Pretty much a model for sustainability if you ask me.
Life as a whole survived, sure, but there were changes and extinctions, just as there are now. It's sustainable only in the way that everything is.
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now. Or, they can use their brains and make Twitter into a solid, consistent business model and make many more millions over the course of years or decades.
Sure, maybe, if they get lucky. But it'll take work and there's no guarantee. In their position I'd take the millions, buy the yacht and move to the Bahamas - it's not like there's much to do with 3 billion that you can't do with 750 million, and there's a significant risk of losing it all.
If they could profit by doing this, they would have done so already. So they won't do that.
2. Switch to a cheaper supplier..hurting that supplier...causing them to lay off people.
So you see inefficient competitors being forced out of the market as a bad thing? Also, see 1.
3. Raise prices (on consumers)
See 1.
4. Cut shareholder dividends
Bingo. That's where this is really getting money from. But shareholder dividends don't go to "consumers", as you seem to think - they go to shareholders. And while yes, there are things like granny's retirement fund holding shares in these companies, the largest ultimate shareholders are the rich, using them to gain income but only pay a 15% capital gains tax.
Yes, a tax on businesses is effectively a tax on shareholders. But shareholders as a group can and should bear a greater proportion of the tax burden (relative to workers paying a tax on their labour) than they currently do.
And that's without going into any of the motivating changes in corporate behaviour through these taxes that others have mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see your complete theory of life, then. Plants remain still quite poorly understood; they live at a different rate from us, so it's hard to notice.
Contrast that the very real terror cattle experience as they are slaughtered, especially when someone fucks up and doesn't get a clean kill.
Why are you so sure that's any more real? Because the way they act looks more like the way humans do?
it's an honorable one as long as they don't spend the rest of their life rubbing it in our faces.
Isn't that just what the poster up above was doing? (And quit saying "torture", words have meanings.)
You're reading too much into the big number on the top; self-reported happiness is a funny thing. The survey acknowledges that their big percentage has stabilised for the US, western Europe and Japan - which suggests any differences between those three are more likely to be cultural factors affecting the reporting rather than objective differences. Meanwhile you have twice as many people unable to afford basic necessities.
(That said, Europe is rating much lower than I expected there, and less than my impression had been (not entirely surprising, since my own nation seems to be doing much better than the EU average). Looking at it in detail, western europe is dragged down by the south end (Spain, Italy and in particular Portugal), which I'd somewhat forgotten about. So I would be very interested to see the comparison you're suggesting, rich northwestern european countries with rich coastal US states)
Bad logic. What would it continue, because it's worked "OK" in the past? False identification of future performance with past performance. The EU did OK post-WW2, during Internet bubble, during worldwide credit bubble, etc... Do you think that means that entitlement policies will _always_ work?
Of course I can't claim it will always work - but it's worked in a wide range of conditions, and I certainly see no grounds to claim it will collapse within five years, as the GP seemed to be doing.
As the EU and the world increases in population (poor people breed like rabbits), per-capita productivity will go down.
Poor people breed a lot, contented people in developed countries don't. Many EU countries are only maintaining a stable population through immigration. So I'm not worried about your malthusian explosion.
Agreed. The socialist policies we've implemented will be our doom, as will the military adventurism of the neocons.
The wars are a big part of it, but your insistence on private enterprise is costing you - a lot of money (and people's time and effort) is being wasted on inefficient healthcare, badly organised education and research, utilities etc.
Of course it's not a cure-all, but the US really would be better off - both financially and, more importantly, in terms of the welfare of its people - if it would shift to the left a little.
Why is this insightful? European social democracies have been sitting there, giving their citizens a better quality of life than the US, for decades, and there's no reason at all to assume it won't continue. (Given how your national debt's going, the US should be more worried about where it will be in five years.)
It's not at all surprising; it just means the primes behave a bit like random numbers, which we've already been showing in far more interesting ways (e.g. Ben Green's recent result that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions (sequences of equally-spaced numbers) in the primes). I'd be amazed if this is actually a new result.
Were you living under a rock for the second half of the nineties? They were.
Uh, the claim was that NT 3.1 "includes open-source code".
If you enjoy it then fair enough. I do the same thing sometimes when it comes to making clothes, sewing my own and taking far longer over it than the cost saving over just buying from the supermarket. But treat that as what it is, a hobby that you are in some sense "wasting" your time on. If you don't enjoy it (and there will be people who don't, not everyone is the same), there is no point building your own computer any more; it's not worth it financially.
Hardly. The higher latency of DDR3 means the real-world performance gain is minimal - wheras having twice the memory will give real, noticeable performance improvements.
That would force people doing that to make frequent updates to their software with genuine improvements, which is hardly the worst way things could go.
And they're already doing that with KDE.
If you're trying to contrast this against history it's simply wrong. Of course most advancement is, always has been and always will be in engineering rather than in the fundamentals - but the rate at which fundamental physics has developed has been nothing short of astonishing by historical standards.
In my personal (unqualified) opinion, the medical industry has its own version of this. We're getting better and better at modifying the system, at obtaining desired results by the introduction of chemicals, without increasing our understanding of what disease actually is, how it originates, and how it can be prevented.
Again, yes, the "engineering" approach of trying a known chemical and seeing what it does advances much faster than the theory - but that's not to say the fundamental work has stagnated. We genuinely do know a lot more about disease than we used to.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in psychiatry.
In more ways than one. While the state of fundamental understanding in psychiatry is particularly poor, we have seen a lot of genuine progress.
My evidence for this is very simple: if we understood these things, we should have a population that is getting healthier. Instead, we have a population that increasingly depends on medications because it is becoming sicker.
And where's your evidence for that? Life expectancy is continuing to rise (we're expecting a "fast food bump", but that's hardly the fault of medicine, and I don't believe it's happened yet), and the fact that a condition is being treated doesn't mean it didn't exist before - e.g. PTSD is often described as a modern invention, but if one looks at contemporary descriptions of WWII soldiers, one can see a lot of very similar symptoms - they simply didn't get treated. It's hard to appreciate how much better our general quality of life is than that of even 50 years ago, because we adjust to what we're used to.
Not solving the wider problem, but often you can access such sites by changing user-agent to googlebot ("Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)").
The reason it doesn't make sense to concatenate against the possibility of one or the other being broken is that breaking a hash is rarely an all-or-nothing thing - none of the recent published attacks have been "one can find a collision instantly", they're "one can find a collision in 2^96 attempts when it should take 2^128". Suppose you've gone for two 128-bit hashes, and your opponents are capable of 2^64 attempts. Now, you lose if attacks are found that reduce both your 128-bit hashes down to effectively 64-bits - unlikely, yes. But if you went for a single 256-bit hash, you don't lose until there's an attack which reduces it to an effective 64 bits - and if you look at the history of attacks on hash functions, you'll see that's actually much less likely than getting 64-bit attacks on two different hashes.
Look it up - seriously, just look at any previous thread about hashes. (I used to have a particularly good post bookmarked, but I've lost it)
I know. It's still wrong.
Yes, there is a lot wrong with it. I would go into detail but you can find good explanations in any of the past, say, twenty stories posted here about hash algorithms.
Surely breaking two or more hashes simultaneously would be far harder?
No; not by enough to make it worthwhile, possibly not at all. E.g. if you're willing to use 256 bytes of hash, you're much better off using SHA-256 than two 128-byte hashes.
There's a video on tom's hardware - but bear in mind this was done by completely removing the heatsink/fan/etc. assembly.
Netburst almost certainly could be clocked up that high. The reasons for abandoning it weren't technical, at least on the clockspeed end (having the worst performace-per-watt by far at a point when people started caring about it bit them rather) - the P4s simply weren't selling.
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors. As for the interface, well, maybe there are people who really do find that stupid wheel-thing easier to use, but there are dozens of players doing that now. So why is the ipod the one that sells? Fashion, plain and simple.
You were happy with cell phones before the iPhone came out. Most people hated their cell phones and used them only for the most basic things.
Oh, come on. Compare doing any task you can think of on a near-contemporary, say the Razr. It's barely any different, and certainly not any harder. Nope, I'm not buying it. Fashion.
The point is not the surround support in MP3, the point is when you're looking to upgrade from MP3, a few years down the line. At which point your obvious options are AC3 or later AAC (lots of surround support, along with hardware decoders), WMA (took a while, but good surround support now), maybe RealAudio (who cares, not I), or ogg (rather poor surround support). At which point you're going to go with AAC.
Reading comprehension, it's useful.
Oh fuck off. There have been filesystems which tried that, you know, and there's a reason that they failed; to someone who tries to actually use the damn things rather than sitting around theorising, the filename is the *only* appropriate place for metadata.
Life as a whole survived, sure, but there were changes and extinctions, just as there are now. It's sustainable only in the way that everything is.
Could we maybe wait until such restrictions are actually, you know, announced, before bashing MS for them?
Sure, maybe, if they get lucky. But it'll take work and there's no guarantee. In their position I'd take the millions, buy the yacht and move to the Bahamas - it's not like there's much to do with 3 billion that you can't do with 750 million, and there's a significant risk of losing it all.
If they could profit by doing this, they would have done so already. So they won't do that.
2. Switch to a cheaper supplier..hurting that supplier...causing them to lay off people.
So you see inefficient competitors being forced out of the market as a bad thing? Also, see 1.
3. Raise prices (on consumers)
See 1.
4. Cut shareholder dividends
Bingo. That's where this is really getting money from. But shareholder dividends don't go to "consumers", as you seem to think - they go to shareholders. And while yes, there are things like granny's retirement fund holding shares in these companies, the largest ultimate shareholders are the rich, using them to gain income but only pay a 15% capital gains tax.
Yes, a tax on businesses is effectively a tax on shareholders. But shareholders as a group can and should bear a greater proportion of the tax burden (relative to workers paying a tax on their labour) than they currently do.
And that's without going into any of the motivating changes in corporate behaviour through these taxes that others have mentioned.