What, what was before the big bang? The universe is like a tape in your VCR. What was before the beginning of the tape?
Humans tend to anthropomorphize everything we can't understand. A supreme being does not have to act like a human and does not need to be supernatural. I think God isthe same thing as the laws of physics. I find them the laws of physics and the Universe itself to be an awe-inspiring, humbling, powerful, consistent thing. Other people seem to have a hard time with this concept. Don't athropomorphize everything, and you may begin to comprehend some higher truths...
It isn't that journalists get things completely wrong -- it's that they get them close to correct, but not close enough to draw any accurate or useful conclusions.
Then they draw conclusions, or encourage their readers to do so.
As another poster pointed out, it's the "wet streets cause rain" effect...
Hmm.... "Yes, but does it run on Linux?" "Imagine a Beowulf cluster infected by this!" "Of course it runs on NetBSD!" "OpenBSD: only two vulnerabilities (that the FBI lets us talk about) in the default install since the beginning of the project!" "CIPAV: a security hole bigger than the goatse.cz guy can even comprehend!" "In Soviet Russia, CIPAV doesn't know it's running YOU!" " ' "CIPAV Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful" "FBI Spaghetti Monster: Touched by his stealthy appendage" "I can has CIPAVburger?" "Chuck Norris can wipe all CIPAV installations in a 100-mile radius just by flexing his biceps." "[cipav not needed]" "CIPAV? The FBI can suck my big hairy@*!~Q^NO CARRIER" "Any sufficiently advanced spying is indistinguishable from CIPAV." "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot CIPAVs" "i herd a rumor on the internet... that u liek CIPAV?" "oh hai i uninstalled ur CIPAV" "Every time you install CIPAV, God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens." " 'Click here for a guide to uninstalling CIPAV" dammit i got rickrolled... i just LOL'd" "mmmm... nothing like the taste of fr0sty cipav in the morning" " 'and it silently copies your pr0n to a government server in Virginia.' There. Fixed that for you." "I, for one, welcome our new CIPAV-wielding overlords." "The poll options all sucked, so I just voted for CIPAVboyNeal." "1) Deploy CIPAV. 2) ??? 3) Profit!" "Your ideas intrigues me, and I wish to subscribe to your CIPAV service." "CIPAV could be used as a tool for the War on Terror. This idea was developed by Shampoo." "No need for a CIPAV-proof tinfoil hat? You must be new here." "You are in a twisty little maze of law enforcement strategies, all alike." "I *prefer* CIPAV over the competition, you insensitive clod!" "In my day we didn't have drive-by downloads. Al Gore hadn't invented the intarwebz yet, and we had to push our snail mail through the tubes uphill both ways! We had to install CIPAV by hand, and REAL men did it by DEPOSITing the binary word by word --- Get off my damn lawn!" "If I had modpoints, I'd mod you -5, CIPAV fanboi" "There are four boxes to use in the prevention of CIPAV: OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, VMS. In that order. Starting now." "Quiet court approval? I don't believe in Imaginary Warrants." "I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but here are my thoughts on why CIPAV could be a Good Thing (TM)..." "I'm not worried about CIPAV. Only idiots use M$ Windoze. Just my 02c." "Does anyone want to post the IP address of that server? I wonder if the FBI has heard of slashdotting..." "The CIPAV drive-by download pages aren't even valid HTML!" "Just because the computers reporting data back to the CIPAV server are usually the same computers that have visited the CIPAV drive-by download sites doesn't necessarily mean the former is a result of the latter. Correlation is not causation." "CIPAV, CIPAV, egg, sausage, and CIPAV---that's not got much CIPAV in it" " 'I didn't RTFA or RTFS, what's CIPAV?' www.justfuckinggoogleit.com" " ' "This sounds really useful. I should install this on my computer so that I can help protect myself and my fellow citizens." dunno if you're just a troll, but do you even understand what cipav does?' *whoosh*"... i could go on and on, but then... tl;dr
You can't just group "the government" together as a unified entity in order to lay blame. The FBI was warning about the incredibly huge banking and mortgage crisis four or five YEARS ago. Bush reallocated a lot of the FBI workers who monitored banking and the economy to handle military intelligence instead during the terrorist situation of almost a decade ago. Of course, the bombings on the US in 2001 were several years in the past when the FBI was studying the banking issue, but GWB was still moving FBI work away from the economy toward national security. True, if the entire nation is at stake, the business economy takes a (very close, in a capitalist country) second place to national security, BUT, the resources were NEVER REALLOCATED. The FBI has been working on the lending problem for several years with both legs shackled, one arm chopped off, and several fingers on the remaining arm chopped off as well. It's not that our government didn't have departments aware of the coming problem and trying to prevent it or at least lessen the impact, but mismanagement by a misguided leader with too much power (what happened to checks and balances? what happened to the impeachment process?!?! GWB was impeached but it never carried through to a trial, and I don't understand why---even if the trial were to have cleared him of any wrongdoing since he was focused on national security, he still should have been brought to trial) resulted in a situation where most of the country was blindsighted (or is that blindsided? I've never been sure) to the issue.
Obama isn't some sort of savior; it is impressive that half-black man has finally assumed such a critical role that has only ever been held by white men. He really didn't seem to be "the lesser of two evils" during the election, either; he really seemed to be several steps above the competition. This doesn't mean that he's perfect. GWB left him with a giant, stinking pile of crap to clean up, and we can't expect any amazing changes rigth away. I don't think the stimulus and bailout approach has been handled very well (it has a few good points, but so did many of GWB's policies). Time will tell whether the current leadership matures to the point to impress the regions of the country that aren't deluded with the idea that Obama is some sort of second jesus.
But, at any rate, the government really didn't "cause" the problems that lead to the economic meltdown, per se. The FBI had been warning the Bush administration for a LONG time of the coming problem. Banking regulation changes designed to "promote capitalism" (as if unchecked greed has really done anyone much good--not advocating communism, but there is definitely a sane middle ground) accelerated the crisis, and maybe not instituting those changes would have heavily mitigated and delayed the issue. We can only guess, despite our best models; there is no reality to measure other than our one (see David Lewis's work about rigorous logical analyses to scenarios not part of our own world (properly a subset of philosophical 'metaphysics,' but I'm avoiding that word because of the new-agey connotations associated with it---nothing against new age ideas, they are quite inyeresting from psychological and spiritual perspectives, but that does not mean they are rigorous or even comparable to traditional philosophical metaphysics!)), so we can never really know what possibilties could have been realized.
However, at any rate, please get off of your anti-liberal high horse. Insulting liberals does nothing to help improve the world as it stands. Likewise, insulting conservatives does nothing to improve the world as it stands...
You are welcome to criticize liberals (just as I have criticized most conservatives and some liberals by expressing my prior opinions), but, tossing insults about waxing poets does not promote any helpful thought.... waxing poets... somehow, now all I can think of is women who remove their leg hair via wax, and that really isn't jiving with my above points, at all...
[ Warning: I'm only mildly familiar with the technologies mentioned herein, and have worked with them at the technical level very little. Forgive any terminology errors, but please do correct them, as well as misconceptions and mistakes of all kinds; there's no point spreading misinformation about systems that are already very slow to be adopted. ]
Once all backbone routing and major website servers support IPv6 out-of-the-box, all of the old IPv4-only machines can be NAT'd during the (long, painful) migration period until they are eventually replaced. Sure, NAT makes things more complicated and can be more of a PITA for security and logging, and it arguably breaks DNS in subtle, frustrating ways, but there are already working systems out there.
Everybody with a linksys/dlink/etc gateway to stick multiple PCs on a single outside IPv4 address is already using sophisticated NAT-like mechanisms; when's the last time you had a masquerading problem that couldn't be easily fixed?. Using a hashing algorithm to do IPv4-to-IPv6 NAT actually breaks fewer application-layer protocols, though at the expense of requiring DNS hacks...
Correct. And, perhaps the determinates include that humans must have arguments and discussions about free will.;)
God* AKA the standard model AKA 3+1-manifold AKA math (okay, hush, I know Platonic realism is a form of transcendentalism) has a wacky sense of humor, indeed. "Ha! And they'll be forced to debate free will forever and ever! Man, I love making up weird reality TV show plots to watch."
* immanence may or may not be bliss but it sure beats transcendentalism (or transeunce, depending on context...) either way !!
RMS is not the same as Peak voltage. RMS is a notational convenience used to talk about the equivalent power dissipation in Ohmic devices compared to DC.
AC is a fascinating (albeit somewhat confusing) subject. For many circuits, you can use phasor analysis to make reactive and resistive loads easier to work with, but solid state devices have I-V characteristics that make the whole thing more complicated...
I would suggest finding an old tube oscilloscope (one that does X-Y) at a hamfest, getting a low-voltage regulated AC/DC bench supply and a signal generator off of eBay, and playing with a handful of various PN junctions (Si diodes, Ge diodes, LEDs) and non-polarized electrolytic caps (like the ones used in audio applications) and various inductors (and don't forget some current-limiting resistors for those semiconductors)!
AC is tricky, but it becomes more intuitive when you start experimenting with it a lot:)
I bother because I don't write an entire set of things off just for having bad experiences with a few members of the set. Anecdotes are not examples of correlation except by coincidence.
Some video game articles on slashdot have intrigued me. I've read about a handful of open-source games that I have tried and enjoyed, but to which I have not become addicted. (I don't automatically discount closed-source games, but knowing that very few games will give me much playing time, I very rarely spend money on a game).
It's closed-minded to conclude that one can never enjoy games if one has only played a handful of games from only a few genres, so I still read game articles if I think they might hold my interest. I don't want to shut myself up in a remote cave.
The idea of looking random words up in the manual is to ensure the player has a copy of the manual; presumably, it takes a good bit more work to duplicate the game software and its manual rather than solely the game software.
This concept of making duplication significantly more difficult is still used. Ever had a game require that the original CD be in the CD-ROM drive while playing? I know The Sims II had this, and I have heard of many other modern games that use the same tactic. Making a copyright infringer jump through the additional hoop of duplicating the manual or providing a database of its contents is still akin to making a copyright infringer jump through the additional hoop of precisely duplicating the install media or using a low-level driver to emulate a virtual CD-ROM.
You make a good point by bringing up the concept of balancing short-term and long-term benefits (and consequences). I have some thoughts on how this concept plays into the philosphy of government.
You mention an obvious short-term benefit from what your personal expenditure destination would be. Human life is obviously valuable from the standpoint of providing a labor supply, to speak nothing of the ethics involved, so not subjecting your health to a carbon monoxide risk is obviously important, for you and anybody in a similar situation. Most steps taken to improve health and safety have long-term benefits as well, and in your example of furnace replacement, might have energy savings in the long term.
My thoughts follow. I do not intend for my words to be incendiary, though I know they shall appear as such to some, like any opinion ever spoken by a human. Also, I'm being lazy hereafter and writing 'you' when the correct designator should be 'one'; my opinion is a reply to the parent comment but not criticism directed toward its author.
You have to remember that people are not given equal educational opportunities, cannot change their systems of behavioral response instantaneously, and have a finite capacity for gathering information from their environment. (As hyperbole, you could summarize this: people are ignorant, stubborn, and won't listen.) In an economically-ideal world, we would all be born with vast depth of wisdom, respond quickly to changes in our environments, and be able to research and communicate to whatever extent is necessary as to understand the decisions we face.
Your use of the money would be helpful to both yourself and others, as death and disability remove able-bodied individuals from the labor pool. However, not everyone thinks carefully about how to spend money.
There's a very good reason we aren't a direct democracy, letting every able citizen vote on every issue, but rather a representative democracy, requiring citizens to instead choose qualified individuals to make most important decisions for us. Most humans are not well-versed on the many facets of life; in fact, this is arguably good, since we can choose to devote our resources to becoming experts at specific, narrow fields (division of labor). Being able to spend more time learning what interests you instead of having to learn a little about everything comes at the price of not knowing much about many things, obviously.
It would be nice if we could trust the media to give provide wisdom and minimally-biased, accurate news, with the right balance between local affairs and national and international affiars, and the right balance between human interest stories and information concerning the well-being of society, so as to inform and educate the public. However, the vast majority media relies on sensationalism and the mingling of opinions with facts so as to sell papers and increase viewership of their programming and subsequently the included advertisements, all to ensure that can stay in business and make a profit.
Putting the media in the hands of the government is no better, as it's just another self-serving source.
Ultimaetly, the population at lrage is probably never going to be in a position to always make wise decisions so as to balance the short term and long term. Our present strategy of having advisors keep our elected officials informed about the short-term and long-term effects of any issues at hand and on the ball in terms staying well-informed and making a good effort to use critical thinking is better solution but far from perfect.
There's too much appointing of these advisors in ways such that the public has no direct control. Even the process of getting appointees reviewed by congressional committees and oversight and watchdog groups is flawed due to some of the wily processes by which the committee members are chosen and the self-serving interests of the watchdog groups.
However, the more compex the selection of advisors becomes, the more inefficien
Didn't RTFA, so I think I'm actually interpreting the question a little differently than intended. However, what spoils a game for me is often copy protection... NPC: Yes, the next thing in your quest will be the Sword of Gryntwer. Player: Can you tell me about the Sword of Gryntwer? NPC: Oh, it is a most interesting tale. However, I am old and my memory is poor. Maybe you can help me remember by ENTERING THE 22ND, 37TH, AND 51ST WORDS BELOW THE HEADING "HOW TO INSTALL UNDER WINDOWS NT" IN THE "CREATIX'S CALL OF THE HEMLOCK" INSTRUCTION MANUAL: (Game freezes, and you can't click on anything until entering the words RESTART FLOPPY COOKIES)
Re:Nope. Never.
on
Daemon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's one of the funnier short-anecdote-type jokes I've seen lately. Of course, as one squid to another, I would have expected no less.;) (consider yourself friended!)
[Back to the concept at hand...] Any good fiction writer researches any part of the background material he doesn't understand well. Period. I read Michael Crichton's _Next_ recently (about genetic research and its ethical implications), and although the pacing seemed uneven (a few times, I had no trouble putting the book down *g*), I was impressed with the level of research he put into it. [semi-spoiler warning: I'm not spoiling the plot here, but I'm spoiling the 'end' of the book. If you're a big Crichton fan and have not yet read _Next_, you may want to skip the rest of my post.]
There's an appendix containing a bibliography of his source material and another appendix where he speaks to the reader (i.e., a non-fiction essay) about some of the privacy concerns (et al) he has about genetic research. Most of the news clippings inserted to help the story along are actually real, as he explains in the end. This actually adds an extra dimension to the novel, as you reflect back on the technicalities upon which the plotline is based while you looking at the appendices.
For most stories, the suspension of disbelief is critical, and having the author come out from behind the curtain at the end and tell you how everything worked can take away from the enjoyment, but for stories whose plotlines revolve largely around technicality and detail (probably the kind of stories a lot of slashdot readers prefer, anyway---I can't tell you how many times I've re-read Asimov's Robot stories and pondered the elements of logic that play out), it does add something really neat.
When you pay attention to detail and are familiar with the subject at hand, the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying fiction can only come about when the writer has done good research or is already an expert.
For the people who have ridiculously loud subwoofers, installed in such a way as to cause outlandish vibrations, rattlings, and resonances, all of which annoy bystanders *and* decrease the sound quality to passengers of the vehicle (what's the point in volume when the bass drum comes out sounding like someone is kicking a steel trash can?), or who have modified their engine/catalytic-converter/muffler/exhaust-piping to make their cars make obnoxiously loud buzzing noises (I guess to sound like a motorcycle?), not realizing (or perhaps not caring) that they might be causing more environmental contamination than the average car, not to mention that, in both cases, the sound pollution at night interferes with the natural wildlife (and, if you like to eat food, which I think most humans do, you probably have a vested interest in limiting the impact that humans have on the surrounding environment) on some roads, you could probably come up with a few messages, especially for the car owners who clearly are putting a lot of money into the "coolness" level of their vehicle, such as, "Nice car. Too bad you couldn't afford to get the muffler fixed, though."
[Yep, grammar nazis, go to town!] [Also, I didn't proof-read this to make sure I didn't somehow say something idiotically offensive, so if this seems like flamebait or trolling, it's not intentional.]
" but most tend to linger around in an eccentric orbit, trying to escape but never managing to achieve enough velocity. "
You know, the adult children are nice to have around at first, but you're right, it *is* awkward. After a while, though, you get jealous of the other older couples "complaining" about an empty nest.;)
Oh, c'mon, pins in the fingers, knives in the bac, that's nothing!! You know what's always sounded entertaining? Toenail removal.:) Not a bondage thing, but, I'm a little disappointed that this doesn't trepan the skull. *grin* Trepanning has always sounded like an interesting first step towards a wetware port of embedded Linux and/or an Internet implant, no?
Yes, yes, but you could be more precise. Here, let me help: Since slashdot (in the US) has nonspecifically allowed a user (who appears to be in the US) to post a link to thepiratebay (in the netherlands) providing a mirror of a tool created (by students in the netherlands seemingly otherwise unaffiliated with thepiratebay) for the alleged purpose of allowing a user to automatically alter the appearance of the online catalog of (US) media vendor amazon to include links to thepiratebay, a website that offers a service which tracks data sets (torrents) that allow said user to obtain, in whole or in part, providing said user has the appropriate third-party software, a copyrighted work for which the user may not have this sort of reproduction right, via an international, dynamic, online peering network whose members are represented in the aforementioned torrents,... (wait for it)... then the slashdot editors could be served with a second-degree charge (first-degree is elsewhere) of Conspiracy to Piss Off Amazon.
And, they could get a count of conspiracy to contribute to patent infringement as well as their own count of patent infringement, since the offending comment allows any firefox user (what about us poor dillo users?) to download the plug-in with only One-Click (TM).
[You know how you can get Windows Explorer to open things with a single-click instead of a double-click? Shouldn't web browsers have the reverse of that as the default (you have to double-click to do anything) just to be safe? And, hey, does anybody know any mechanics who can mod my car so I have to turn the ignition twice to start the car? I don't want Amazon to come after me for having a car that starts with just one turn of the key! I mean, I just have to turn the key once, and my car automatically starts the engine and chooses my last credit card, errr, last radio station, and my default shipping address, I mean, um, my default gear ratio for starting from a dead stop. *g*]
What worries me about the premise/write-up (no, didn't rtfa) is that it sounds a lot like "humans tend to do X, so !X is unnatural and therefore you don't deserve it." Cannibalism and incest are things that humans tend to do when left to their own devices, but that doesn't mean they're the best way for things to be.
Are humans not allowed to make progress? Sure, things that are completely unnatural for us can be awkward until being refined. There are lots of modern things that we haven't had throughout the vast majority of human history... should we abandon modern medicine and go back to indiscriminate use of leeches?
I almost universally tend to agree that speculation about ID adds nothing to the knowledge of our own universe. Whether there is any interesting (though perhaps of no practical value, notwithstanding fruitful linguistic consequences of David Lewis's many-worlds modal realism (a distinct beast from the quantum many-worlds interpretation and cosmological multiverse theories, be careful here!)) information to be garnered from philosophical exploration of any members of the general class of things that we can never actually determine by observation and measurement of the natural world is another question outside of the scope of this discussion. (It's a lot more than just theology, if you've never checked into it; for example, one of the more interesting modern developments in ontology is Saul Kripke's lectures on the subject.)
However, humans have a natural propensity for spirituality, and it does seem to make them happy. I don't see any point in deceiving yourself about the nature of the universe by pursuing many of the popular theological fallacies currently prevailing, but certain types of panentheism are rather fun (see Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon for an introduction to lots of things outside of the modern major religions; also, many slashdotters or Douglas Adams readers would probably enjoy the Principia Discordia as reading material).
To use an arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head analogy (likely needing solid refinement in order to avoid easy refutation (exercise for the interested reader?)): Humans have to eat food. We could just take a handful of vitamins and supplements with a bucket of flavorless carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and fiber in the proper proportions, but I think most people find exercising their senses in the process of eating to be far more enjoyable. We don't have to deceive ourselves about what foods are detrimental to us in the process of receiving the natural enjoyment of eating, so I don't see a similar situation can't exist with spirituality (note, spirituality can be a very different thing from organized religion if one so chooses).
The tendency for humans to come up with the "I can't explain it, therefore God did it" argument time and again has many possible origins. Brain systems that evolved to do one thing often have other odd effects in situations very different from those in which they evolved (I linked to the 3rd page in that atricle, but the rest of it is also relevant and informative). There's a lot of interesting speculation among neurologists on the various direct evolutionary advantages of animism for our ancient ancestors, and we've all heard the somewhat misunderstood Karl Marx quote about religion and opium. Human culture tends to be memetic, with its own form of "DNA" for concepts and ideas. It's no surprise that the phenomenon is still so persistent, especially when people will stubbornly cling on to ideas (beyond the point of healthy promotion of short-term stability required for any idea to mature; rather, into the territory of irrational tenacity), finding curious ways to interpret reality so they don't have to re-evaluate their own beliefs nor find solutions to their own problems rather than hoping some mysterious, transcendental, benevolent thingamagod is going to fix everything for them.
[Grammar nazis: go to town! I don't feel like fixing my run-on sentences or horrible paragraph structures right now, but you're welcome to do so. *g*]
Slashdot Mirror
What, what was before the big bang? The universe is like a tape in your VCR. What was before the beginning of the tape?
Humans tend to anthropomorphize everything we can't understand. A supreme being does not have to act like a human and does not need to be supernatural. I think God isthe same thing as the laws of physics. I find them the laws of physics and the Universe itself to be an awe-inspiring, humbling, powerful, consistent thing. Other people seem to have a hard time with this concept. Don't athropomorphize everything, and you may begin to comprehend some higher truths...
It isn't that journalists get things completely wrong -- it's that they get them close to correct, but not close enough to draw any accurate or useful conclusions.
Then they draw conclusions, or encourage their readers to do so.
As another poster pointed out, it's the "wet streets cause rain" effect...
Hmm.... "Yes, but does it run on Linux?" ..." ... i could go on and on, but then... tl;dr
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster infected by this!"
"Of course it runs on NetBSD!"
"OpenBSD: only two vulnerabilities (that the FBI lets us talk about) in the default install since the beginning of the project!"
"CIPAV: a security hole bigger than the goatse.cz guy can even comprehend!"
"In Soviet Russia, CIPAV doesn't know it's running YOU!"
" ' "CIPAV Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful"
"FBI Spaghetti Monster: Touched by his stealthy appendage"
"I can has CIPAVburger?"
"Chuck Norris can wipe all CIPAV installations in a 100-mile radius just by flexing his biceps."
"[cipav not needed]"
"CIPAV? The FBI can suck my big hairy@*!~Q^NO CARRIER"
"Any sufficiently advanced spying is indistinguishable from CIPAV."
"Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot CIPAVs"
"i herd a rumor on the internet... that u liek CIPAV?"
"oh hai i uninstalled ur CIPAV"
"Every time you install CIPAV, God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens."
" 'Click here for a guide to uninstalling CIPAV" dammit i got rickrolled... i just LOL'd"
"mmmm... nothing like the taste of fr0sty cipav in the morning"
" 'and it silently copies your pr0n to a government server in Virginia.' There. Fixed that for you."
"I, for one, welcome our new CIPAV-wielding overlords."
"The poll options all sucked, so I just voted for CIPAVboyNeal."
"1) Deploy CIPAV. 2) ??? 3) Profit!"
"Your ideas intrigues me, and I wish to subscribe to your CIPAV service."
"CIPAV could be used as a tool for the War on Terror. This idea was developed by Shampoo."
"No need for a CIPAV-proof tinfoil hat? You must be new here."
"You are in a twisty little maze of law enforcement strategies, all alike."
"I *prefer* CIPAV over the competition, you insensitive clod!"
"In my day we didn't have drive-by downloads. Al Gore hadn't invented the intarwebz yet, and we had to push our snail mail through the tubes uphill both ways! We had to install CIPAV by hand, and REAL men did it by DEPOSITing the binary word by word --- Get off my damn lawn!"
"If I had modpoints, I'd mod you -5, CIPAV fanboi"
"There are four boxes to use in the prevention of CIPAV: OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, VMS. In that order. Starting now."
"Quiet court approval? I don't believe in Imaginary Warrants."
"I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but here are my thoughts on why CIPAV could be a Good Thing (TM)
"I'm not worried about CIPAV. Only idiots use M$ Windoze. Just my 02c."
"Does anyone want to post the IP address of that server? I wonder if the FBI has heard of slashdotting..."
"The CIPAV drive-by download pages aren't even valid HTML!"
"Just because the computers reporting data back to the CIPAV server are usually the same computers that have visited the CIPAV drive-by download sites doesn't necessarily mean the former is a result of the latter. Correlation is not causation."
"CIPAV, CIPAV, egg, sausage, and CIPAV---that's not got much CIPAV in it"
" 'I didn't RTFA or RTFS, what's CIPAV?' www.justfuckinggoogleit.com"
" ' "This sounds really useful. I should install this on my computer so that I can help protect myself and my fellow citizens." dunno if you're just a troll, but do you even understand what cipav does?' *whoosh*"
I thought this was obvious? Doesn't PHORM stand for Privacy Heinously Obliterated for Rogue Marketing?
Wait, I think my conscience is interfering with accurate perception of reality to discourage nightmares... dammit, why does this happen so often.....
You can't just group "the government" together as a unified entity in order to lay blame. The FBI was warning about the incredibly huge banking and mortgage crisis four or five YEARS ago. Bush reallocated a lot of the FBI workers who monitored banking and the economy to handle military intelligence instead during the terrorist situation of almost a decade ago. Of course, the bombings on the US in 2001 were several years in the past when the FBI was studying the banking issue, but GWB was still moving FBI work away from the economy toward national security. True, if the entire nation is at stake, the business economy takes a (very close, in a capitalist country) second place to national security, BUT, the resources were NEVER REALLOCATED. The FBI has been working on the lending problem for several years with both legs shackled, one arm chopped off, and several fingers on the remaining arm chopped off as well. It's not that our government didn't have departments aware of the coming problem and trying to prevent it or at least lessen the impact, but mismanagement by a misguided leader with too much power (what happened to checks and balances? what happened to the impeachment process?!?! GWB was impeached but it never carried through to a trial, and I don't understand why---even if the trial were to have cleared him of any wrongdoing since he was focused on national security, he still should have been brought to trial) resulted in a situation where most of the country was blindsighted (or is that blindsided? I've never been sure) to the issue.
Obama isn't some sort of savior; it is impressive that half-black man has finally assumed such a critical role that has only ever been held by white men. He really didn't seem to be "the lesser of two evils" during the election, either; he really seemed to be several steps above the competition. This doesn't mean that he's perfect. GWB left him with a giant, stinking pile of crap to clean up, and we can't expect any amazing changes rigth away. I don't think the stimulus and bailout approach has been handled very well (it has a few good points, but so did many of GWB's policies). Time will tell whether the current leadership matures to the point to impress the regions of the country that aren't deluded with the idea that Obama is some sort of second jesus.
But, at any rate, the government really didn't "cause" the problems that lead to the economic meltdown, per se. The FBI had been warning the Bush administration for a LONG time of the coming problem. Banking regulation changes designed to "promote capitalism" (as if unchecked greed has really done anyone much good--not advocating communism, but there is definitely a sane middle ground) accelerated the crisis, and maybe not instituting those changes would have heavily mitigated and delayed the issue. We can only guess, despite our best models; there is no reality to measure other than our one (see David Lewis's work about rigorous logical analyses to scenarios not part of our own world (properly a subset of philosophical 'metaphysics,' but I'm avoiding that word because of the new-agey connotations associated with it---nothing against new age ideas, they are quite inyeresting from psychological and spiritual perspectives, but that does not mean they are rigorous or even comparable to traditional philosophical metaphysics!)), so we can never really know what possibilties could have been realized.
However, at any rate, please get off of your anti-liberal high horse. Insulting liberals does nothing to help improve the world as it stands. Likewise, insulting conservatives does nothing to improve the world as it stands...
You are welcome to criticize liberals (just as I have criticized most conservatives and some liberals by expressing my prior opinions), but, tossing insults about waxing poets does not promote any helpful thought. ... waxing poets... somehow, now all I can think of is women who remove their leg hair via wax, and that really isn't jiving with my above points, at all...
$ /usr/games/bsd/nethole
** You are in a maze of twisty little distorted images, all alike.
** You have been eaten by an event horizon.
$ # dammit
[ Warning: I'm only mildly familiar with the technologies mentioned herein, and have worked with them at the technical level very little. Forgive any terminology errors, but please do correct them, as well as misconceptions and mistakes of all kinds; there's no point spreading misinformation about systems that are already very slow to be adopted. ]
That's not entirely true. You *can* use IPv4-only systems to reach IPv6-only systems in some special cases, but it is a kludge... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_translation_mechanisms and http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2767 for more info.
Once all backbone routing and major website servers support IPv6 out-of-the-box, all of the old IPv4-only machines can be NAT'd during the (long, painful) migration period until they are eventually replaced. Sure, NAT makes things more complicated and can be more of a PITA for security and logging, and it arguably breaks DNS in subtle, frustrating ways, but there are already working systems out there.
Everybody with a linksys/dlink/etc gateway to stick multiple PCs on a single outside IPv4 address is already using sophisticated NAT-like mechanisms; when's the last time you had a masquerading problem that couldn't be easily fixed?. Using a hashing algorithm to do IPv4-to-IPv6 NAT actually breaks fewer application-layer protocols, though at the expense of requiring DNS hacks...
I heard it was going to be implemented right after the "Achievement of having zero achievements at all points in time".
Correct. And, perhaps the determinates include that humans must have arguments and discussions about free will. ;)
God* AKA the standard model AKA 3+1-manifold AKA math (okay, hush, I know Platonic realism is a form of transcendentalism) has a wacky sense of humor, indeed. "Ha! And they'll be forced to debate free will forever and ever! Man, I love making up weird reality TV show plots to watch."
* immanence may or may not be bliss but it sure beats transcendentalism (or transeunce, depending on context...) either way !!
RMS is not the same as Peak voltage. RMS is a notational convenience used to talk about the equivalent power dissipation in Ohmic devices compared to DC.
See the original poster's diagram at http://bayimg.com/image/eanfjaabn.jpg for what happens from rectifying AC.
AC is a fascinating (albeit somewhat confusing) subject. For many circuits, you can use phasor analysis to make reactive and resistive loads easier to work with, but solid state devices have I-V characteristics that make the whole thing more complicated...
I would suggest finding an old tube oscilloscope (one that does X-Y) at a hamfest, getting a low-voltage regulated AC/DC bench supply and a signal generator off of eBay, and playing with a handful of various PN junctions (Si diodes, Ge diodes, LEDs) and non-polarized electrolytic caps (like the ones used in audio applications) and various inductors (and don't forget some current-limiting resistors for those semiconductors)!
AC is tricky, but it becomes more intuitive when you start experimenting with it a lot :)
I bother because I don't write an entire set of things off just for having bad experiences with a few members of the set. Anecdotes are not examples of correlation except by coincidence.
Some video game articles on slashdot have intrigued me. I've read about a handful of open-source games that I have tried and enjoyed, but to which I have not become addicted. (I don't automatically discount closed-source games, but knowing that very few games will give me much playing time, I very rarely spend money on a game).
It's closed-minded to conclude that one can never enjoy games if one has only played a handful of games from only a few genres, so I still read game articles if I think they might hold my interest. I don't want to shut myself up in a remote cave.
The idea of looking random words up in the manual is to ensure the player has a copy of the manual; presumably, it takes a good bit more work to duplicate the game software and its manual rather than solely the game software.
This concept of making duplication significantly more difficult is still used. Ever had a game require that the original CD be in the CD-ROM drive while playing? I know The Sims II had this, and I have heard of many other modern games that use the same tactic. Making a copyright infringer jump through the additional hoop of duplicating the manual or providing a database of its contents is still akin to making a copyright infringer jump through the additional hoop of precisely duplicating the install media or using a low-level driver to emulate a virtual CD-ROM.
You make a good point by bringing up the concept of balancing short-term and long-term benefits (and consequences). I have some thoughts on how this concept plays into the philosphy of government.
You mention an obvious short-term benefit from what your personal expenditure destination would be. Human life is obviously valuable from the standpoint of providing a labor supply, to speak nothing of the ethics involved, so not subjecting your health to a carbon monoxide risk is obviously important, for you and anybody in a similar situation. Most steps taken to improve health and safety have long-term benefits as well, and in your example of furnace replacement, might have energy savings in the long term.
My thoughts follow. I do not intend for my words to be incendiary, though I know they shall appear as such to some, like any opinion ever spoken by a human. Also, I'm being lazy hereafter and writing 'you' when the correct designator should be 'one'; my opinion is a reply to the parent comment but not criticism directed toward its author.
You have to remember that people are not given equal educational opportunities, cannot change their systems of behavioral response instantaneously, and have a finite capacity for gathering information from their environment. (As hyperbole, you could summarize this: people are ignorant, stubborn, and won't listen.) In an economically-ideal world, we would all be born with vast depth of wisdom, respond quickly to changes in our environments, and be able to research and communicate to whatever extent is necessary as to understand the decisions we face.
Your use of the money would be helpful to both yourself and others, as death and disability remove able-bodied individuals from the labor pool. However, not everyone thinks carefully about how to spend money.
There's a very good reason we aren't a direct democracy, letting every able citizen vote on every issue, but rather a representative democracy, requiring citizens to instead choose qualified individuals to make most important decisions for us. Most humans are not well-versed on the many facets of life; in fact, this is arguably good, since we can choose to devote our resources to becoming experts at specific, narrow fields (division of labor). Being able to spend more time learning what interests you instead of having to learn a little about everything comes at the price of not knowing much about many things, obviously.
It would be nice if we could trust the media to give provide wisdom and minimally-biased, accurate news, with the right balance between local affairs and national and international affiars, and the right balance between human interest stories and information concerning the well-being of society, so as to inform and educate the public. However, the vast majority media relies on sensationalism and the mingling of opinions with facts so as to sell papers and increase viewership of their programming and subsequently the included advertisements, all to ensure that can stay in business and make a profit.
Putting the media in the hands of the government is no better, as it's just another self-serving source.
Ultimaetly, the population at lrage is probably never going to be in a position to always make wise decisions so as to balance the short term and long term. Our present strategy of having advisors keep our elected officials informed about the short-term and long-term effects of any issues at hand and on the ball in terms staying well-informed and making a good effort to use critical thinking is better solution but far from perfect.
There's too much appointing of these advisors in ways such that the public has no direct control. Even the process of getting appointees reviewed by congressional committees and oversight and watchdog groups is flawed due to some of the wily processes by which the committee members are chosen and the self-serving interests of the watchdog groups.
However, the more compex the selection of advisors becomes, the more inefficien
Didn't RTFA, so I think I'm actually interpreting the question a little differently than intended. However, what spoils a game for me is often copy protection...
NPC: Yes, the next thing in your quest will be the Sword of Gryntwer.
Player: Can you tell me about the Sword of Gryntwer?
NPC: Oh, it is a most interesting tale. However, I am old and my memory is poor. Maybe you can help me remember by ENTERING THE 22ND, 37TH, AND 51ST WORDS BELOW THE HEADING "HOW TO INSTALL UNDER WINDOWS NT" IN THE "CREATIX'S CALL OF THE HEMLOCK" INSTRUCTION MANUAL:
(Game freezes, and you can't click on anything until entering the words RESTART FLOPPY COOKIES)
Yep, if you believe the product literature ;)
That's one of the funnier short-anecdote-type jokes I've seen lately. Of course, as one squid to another, I would have expected no less. ;) (consider yourself friended!)
[Back to the concept at hand...] Any good fiction writer researches any part of the background material he doesn't understand well. Period. I read Michael Crichton's _Next_ recently (about genetic research and its ethical implications), and although the pacing seemed uneven (a few times, I had no trouble putting the book down *g*), I was impressed with the level of research he put into it. [semi-spoiler warning: I'm not spoiling the plot here, but I'm spoiling the 'end' of the book. If you're a big Crichton fan and have not yet read _Next_, you may want to skip the rest of my post.]
There's an appendix containing a bibliography of his source material and another appendix where he speaks to the reader (i.e., a non-fiction essay) about some of the privacy concerns (et al) he has about genetic research. Most of the news clippings inserted to help the story along are actually real, as he explains in the end. This actually adds an extra dimension to the novel, as you reflect back on the technicalities upon which the plotline is based while you looking at the appendices.
For most stories, the suspension of disbelief is critical, and having the author come out from behind the curtain at the end and tell you how everything worked can take away from the enjoyment, but for stories whose plotlines revolve largely around technicality and detail (probably the kind of stories a lot of slashdot readers prefer, anyway---I can't tell you how many times I've re-read Asimov's Robot stories and pondered the elements of logic that play out), it does add something really neat.
When you pay attention to detail and are familiar with the subject at hand, the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying fiction can only come about when the writer has done good research or is already an expert.
Nope, the correct answer was Mormon. Haven't you *ever* watched South Park?
For the people who have ridiculously loud subwoofers, installed in such a way as to cause outlandish vibrations, rattlings, and resonances, all of which annoy bystanders *and* decrease the sound quality to passengers of the vehicle (what's the point in volume when the bass drum comes out sounding like someone is kicking a steel trash can?), or who have modified their engine/catalytic-converter/muffler/exhaust-piping to make their cars make obnoxiously loud buzzing noises (I guess to sound like a motorcycle?), not realizing (or perhaps not caring) that they might be causing more environmental contamination than the average car, not to mention that, in both cases, the sound pollution at night interferes with the natural wildlife (and, if you like to eat food, which I think most humans do, you probably have a vested interest in limiting the impact that humans have on the surrounding environment) on some roads, you could probably come up with a few messages, especially for the car owners who clearly are putting a lot of money into the "coolness" level of their vehicle, such as, "Nice car. Too bad you couldn't afford to get the muffler fixed, though."
[Yep, grammar nazis, go to town!]
[Also, I didn't proof-read this to make sure I didn't somehow say something idiotically offensive, so if this seems like flamebait or trolling, it's not intentional.]
" but most tend to linger around in an eccentric orbit, trying to escape but never managing to achieve enough velocity. "
You know, the adult children are nice to have around at first, but you're right, it *is* awkward. After a while, though, you get jealous of the other older couples "complaining" about an empty nest. ;)
A help-israel-win botnet is an interesting idea, but... err... what about when it's (inevitably) hijacked?
(Or is the hijack-resistant Storm open-source now? *g*)
8*2^40/(5*365.24*86400) ~= 55747.8 bits/sec avg
Hey man, 56k modems were never that bad! (pedantic: note the limitation to something like 52kb in the US)
Oh, c'mon, pins in the fingers, knives in the bac, that's nothing!! You know what's always sounded entertaining? Toenail removal. :)
Not a bondage thing, but, I'm a little disappointed that this doesn't trepan the skull. *grin* Trepanning has always sounded like an interesting first step towards a wetware port of embedded Linux and/or an Internet implant, no?
-os
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/ Multi-pointer X server. Next question!
Yes, yes, but you could be more precise. Here, let me help: ... (wait for it) ... then the slashdot editors could be served with a second-degree charge (first-degree is elsewhere) of Conspiracy to Piss Off Amazon.
Since slashdot (in the US) has nonspecifically allowed a user (who appears to be in the US) to post a link to thepiratebay (in the netherlands) providing a mirror of a tool created (by students in the netherlands seemingly otherwise unaffiliated with thepiratebay) for the alleged purpose of allowing a user to automatically alter the appearance of the online catalog of (US) media vendor amazon to include links to thepiratebay, a website that offers a service which tracks data sets (torrents) that allow said user to obtain, in whole or in part, providing said user has the appropriate third-party software, a copyrighted work for which the user may not have this sort of reproduction right, via an international, dynamic, online peering network whose members are represented in the aforementioned torrents,
And, they could get a count of conspiracy to contribute to patent infringement as well as their own count of patent infringement, since the offending comment allows any firefox user (what about us poor dillo users?) to download the plug-in with only One-Click (TM).
[You know how you can get Windows Explorer to open things with a single-click instead of a double-click? Shouldn't web browsers have the reverse of that as the default (you have to double-click to do anything) just to be safe? And, hey, does anybody know any mechanics who can mod my car so I have to turn the ignition twice to start the car? I don't want Amazon to come after me for having a car that starts with just one turn of the key! I mean, I just have to turn the key once, and my car automatically starts the engine and chooses my last credit card, errr, last radio station, and my default shipping address, I mean, um, my default gear ratio for starting from a dead stop. *g*]
What worries me about the premise/write-up (no, didn't rtfa) is that it sounds a lot like "humans tend to do X, so !X is unnatural and therefore you don't deserve it." Cannibalism and incest are things that humans tend to do when left to their own devices, but that doesn't mean they're the best way for things to be.
Are humans not allowed to make progress? Sure, things that are completely unnatural for us can be awkward until being refined. There are lots of modern things that we haven't had throughout the vast majority of human history... should we abandon modern medicine and go back to indiscriminate use of leeches?
I almost universally tend to agree that speculation about ID adds nothing to the knowledge of our own universe. Whether there is any interesting (though perhaps of no practical value, notwithstanding fruitful linguistic consequences of David Lewis's many-worlds modal realism (a distinct beast from the quantum many-worlds interpretation and cosmological multiverse theories, be careful here!)) information to be garnered from philosophical exploration of any members of the general class of things that we can never actually determine by observation and measurement of the natural world is another question outside of the scope of this discussion. (It's a lot more than just theology, if you've never checked into it; for example, one of the more interesting modern developments in ontology is Saul Kripke's lectures on the subject.)
However, humans have a natural propensity for spirituality, and it does seem to make them happy. I don't see any point in deceiving yourself about the nature of the universe by pursuing many of the popular theological fallacies currently prevailing, but certain types of panentheism are rather fun (see Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon for an introduction to lots of things outside of the modern major religions; also, many slashdotters or Douglas Adams readers would probably enjoy the Principia Discordia as reading material).
To use an arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head analogy (likely needing solid refinement in order to avoid easy refutation (exercise for the interested reader?)): Humans have to eat food. We could just take a handful of vitamins and supplements with a bucket of flavorless carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and fiber in the proper proportions, but I think most people find exercising their senses in the process of eating to be far more enjoyable. We don't have to deceive ourselves about what foods are detrimental to us in the process of receiving the natural enjoyment of eating, so I don't see a similar situation can't exist with spirituality (note, spirituality can be a very different thing from organized religion if one so chooses).
The tendency for humans to come up with the "I can't explain it, therefore God did it" argument time and again has many possible origins. Brain systems that evolved to do one thing often have other odd effects in situations very different from those in which they evolved (I linked to the 3rd page in that atricle, but the rest of it is also relevant and informative). There's a lot of interesting speculation among neurologists on the various direct evolutionary advantages of animism for our ancient ancestors, and we've all heard the somewhat misunderstood Karl Marx quote about religion and opium. Human culture tends to be memetic, with its own form of "DNA" for concepts and ideas. It's no surprise that the phenomenon is still so persistent, especially when people will stubbornly cling on to ideas (beyond the point of healthy promotion of short-term stability required for any idea to mature; rather, into the territory of irrational tenacity), finding curious ways to interpret reality so they don't have to re-evaluate their own beliefs nor find solutions to their own problems rather than hoping some mysterious, transcendental, benevolent thingamagod is going to fix everything for them.
[Grammar nazis: go to town! I don't feel like fixing my run-on sentences or horrible paragraph structures right now, but you're welcome to do so. *g*]