I run win2K as well, and since Vista came out I've been noticing an increasing number of programs that don't support win2k (for no good reason that I can see). It's extremely frustrating. I just tried to update iTunes from 7.0 to 7.5 and, apparently, in one of the point releases they dropped support for my operating system! iTunes checks for updates every time I open it, but I can't actually run the update so it looks like I will be nagged forever. New games are doing the same thing, usually requiring XP SP2 even though even though I meet minimum hardware spec and can run the latest DirectX version (not counting 10, but who would?).
I suppose the devs think they can ignore win2k just because it's [Windows n-2] now, and it's getting damn frustrating for me.
10 times as many people die, every single year from Septicemia. Ever hear of it?
Nitpick: I think septicemia is a bad example. I'm no doctor, but I have worked with them and iirc septicemia is the technical term for 'got fucked up real bad by some kind of infection'. It's a triumph of modern medicine that so few people die from it. I think you were looking for an example of a rarely heard of illness, but using the technical name for 'an infection' is as misleading as talking about how few people know about fatal hypothermia compared to those who know about 'freezing to death'.
The original three movies use strong archetypal characters, a la Joseph Campbell, in fact Lucas gave him credit for the style of the characters. The farmer, the princess, the scoundrel and the evil lord. The prequels throw that all away for some reason and the stories are weaker for it.
Also, in episode 4 Obi Wan tells Han that he could learn to use the force. Han refuses because that's just not what his archetype does. He is only destined to not be a jedi because his character cannot make that choice.
Oh, and one more thing. I've just been reading the Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and they're full of stories about peasants becoming rulers of the land.
In principle I agree with you, but I think there is the same problem with focussing on immorality as there is on illegality. Standards of morality differ, and what's worse is that when something is 'immoral' people get much angrier than when something is illegal.
Prostitution, for example, varies widely in whether it is considered illegal or immoral. I would be appalled if supposedly secure communications could be seized because they contained evidence of consensual sex for money.
The only position I find tenable is that secure communication must be considered a right of free people. Yes, that means that the murderers, child molesters and terrorists will have it too, but the alternative is that nobody has secure communication.
Certainly there are technological solutions, such as proper use of encryption. But because of cases like this I would like to legal and social support for the right, such as laws making communications that were 'reasonably believed to be secure' inadmissable as evidence. I would also love to hear a group like the NRA saying that the right to secure communication is as essential as the right to bear arms. It certainly is in my mind.
the NSA has every reason to deny others effective cryptographic tools
Well actually, the NSA wants other countries to have bad cryptographic tools, the USA to have good cryptographic tools, or best of all, everyone to have cryptographic tools that only the NSA can break. This algorithm sounds like the latter, since as Schneier said it uses a set of magic number parameters and there are some more magic numbers which constitute a back door. The back door is hard to calculate from the known magic numbers, but could plausibly have been determined during development of both sets of numbers by the NSA boys.
I wonder if there would be any use in having an encryption scheme that was widely known to be breakable only by the NSA.
Put another way, there are some actions so heinous that pretty much any punishment is justifiable.
Most people would disagree. The purpose of punishment is to prevent re-offending, deter others from offending, and if possible to make reparation to the victim. Rape, torture and mutilation do not serve any purposes other than petty vengeance and spreading fear, and if you're the kind of person who thinks they can be justified you might be right at home working for those Big Names you mentioned.
Hand counting does not take days or weeks. New Zealand counts ballots by hand and the counting is generally finished by midnight on polling day. I know there are European countries that do the same thing, see any of the other dozen posts from perplexed slashdotters in countries where votes are hand counted. There is also TV coverage of the vote counting progress, makes for a good night of drinking;)
The number of ballot counters is very easily scaled with the number of ballots, and to swing the count in a particular direction would require massive systemic corruption rather than some dude with a shell script.
The quoted text is almost insightful, but it still devolves into "if he knows that I know that he knows..."
Perhaps the US was tracking the Chinese sub all along, but is now going to destroy a couple of careers just to make it look like the sub was not detected due to human error. What are a couple of careers measured against misinforming the enemy?
Or, perhaps the Chinese sub should have been detected if it was actually following but was instead using a cheap trick like sitting on the bottom until the carrier group came past, then surfacing to give the false impression that it was super stealthy and had been following all along.
Those are just a couple of possibilities off the top of my head, and (hard as it is to believe) I'm sure there are even smarter people than me working for US and Chinese military intelligence.
Making sure the potential aggressor is aware of the risk so that he refrains from aggression. (See Iran)
I was going to make a joke about how that was why Iran let the US know about their nuclear programme, but then I thought perhaps that was what you meant already... I am unhappy to live in this kind of world.
It seems that you and I think along the same lines, but I'm less optimistic. The question is: when all the farmers' kids can go to college, will we have college-level jobs available for all of them? If not, then who will support them?
Oh, and regardless of immigration laws I think that over the long term globalisation will redistribute money from rich countries to poor countries so that cheap immigrant labour will no longer be an option.
Your points are all correct, but that's not why leisure time isn't increased with automation. Consider the simplified view that there are two types of people: wage workers and infrastructure owners. Wage workers trade their time for money. Infrastructure owners employ the wage workers to use their infrastructure to create value; they are shareholders and landowners and other sorts of wealthy layabouts;)
Automation benefits the infrastructure owners because they can produce more value with fewer employees. The wage workers who are replaced by automation are SOL because they have no stake in the increased value being produced (except that the whole trade system benefits from improved efficiency and presumably lower prices). The wage workers need to find someone else to provide labour to (and competition between them will keep wages at a level which gives an acceptable lifestyle for full time work), or starve in the street. Starving in the street is not usually considered leisure time although there are similarities;)
The crux of the matter is that the number of positions for wage workers does not necessarily increase as automation does, and only the most exceptional wage workers will ever become wealthy by working for someone else. Unemployment, the other name for leisure time, will increase and while wage workers will be SOL infrastructure owners will be able to subsist off their investments.
I am not an economist, but this is my understanding and I am interested in hearing counter arguments. Based on this, I aspire to own my own home, be debt free and have a modest income from investment. That way if I end up unemployed I can shrug my shoulders and call it leisure time.
>>Maybe human beings are just porn's way of making more porn.
In case any of our dear readers don't recognise the quote, I believe the GP is ripping off Richard Dawkins whose gene-centred theory of evolution can be paraphrased as "Human beings are just genes' way of making more genes". This is top grade geek humour.
I look forward to reading the full paper in the next edition of Nature (or at least looking at the pictures).
When was the last time we had a pandemic of any kind?
Fairly often actually if you don't nitpick the line between the pan- and epi- varieties; see wikipedia, as usual. Most of them aren't that scary though. You're correct that the 1918 flu was the last really serious one if you don't count AIDS which is a somewhat different beast. It used to be that if a disease was too swiftly deadly it wouldn't spread very far because all the hosts would die, but modern air travel has changed the game. Diseases like SARS and the H5N1 flu strain would be horrendous if they were easily transmissable, and it's entirely appropriate to make plans against losing a percentage of the population.
One of the rovers (Spirit?) has blown a motor on a front wheel. As a result, it's normal mode of travel is now backwards. Also as a result, it tends to drag a groove in the Martian soil. In a recent transit, they were taking photographs of where they'd been and realized that the dragging wheel had exposed a different layer of soil, significantly different from the surface layer. Had the wheel not been dragging, they never would have discovered this.
I don't suppose you have a web link for that? It's one of my favourite stories about the rovers, but last time I looked I couldn't find a suitable page to reference.
The conspiracy is deeper than you suspect. The Galapagos Islands also contain the closest penguin colonies to Redmond. I leave you to draw your own conclusions...
Not to nitpick, but there's no "The Patriot Act". What everyone means by it is the USAPATRIOT Act, USAPATRIOT being the initialism of the cumbersome name deliberately chosen to spell USAPATRIOT. There's nothing patriotic about it, and the naming scam insults the intelligence of the nation with the implicit assumption that people will think "but it's called the Patriot act! How could it be wrong?"
The State of California wouldn't let them film it on any of their highways because they said the script for that sequence was unfilmable, and it was guaranteed to kill people in the process.
Just from interest, do you have a source for that? iirc The Matrix was mostly filmed in Sydney, and I don't know why they would have tried to film the highway scene in California unless they were looking for random existing freeways.
Right, Left, Rebulican, Democrat...we are all AMERICANS.
Except for all those slashdotters (like me) who aren't. Of course, the rest of the world has a well known liberal bias...
But I digress. As an outsider, your two parties look like a single party that is split on pro/anti abortion and a few other 'gut feeling' issues that don't really have anything to do with how the country is run. I don't envy your political climate.
Indeed. The more sophisticated ID arguments acknowledge evolution within species (dogs, for instance), but argue that evolution alone couldn't have produced different species, or the range or species we see in the world given the age of the earth (even if they're not sticking to 6000 years;)
It's the kind of argument that works well against the man-on-the-street, who hasn't heard of things like ring species, so there's a heads up for you:)
One of my pet peeves is people who 'don't believe in evolution'. Evolution is a fact, you can replicate it in the lab or just look at the family pets or the produce section at the supermarket to see the results of evolution. The only sensible argument is whether or not evolution by means of natural selection is solely responsible for the rich variety of life which exists on earth.
Nitpick: evolution is not directional. Species don't evolve to be 'better' or 'more advanced', they evolve to suit their environment. By most criteria, the most successful strategy for a species is to be single celled.
Not that I disagree with your point - but you should describe success as being at the top of the food chain, or more robust in the face of change, or something other than 'more highly evolved' since evolution doesn't have height.
I'm glad to see that you're not wussing out and taking your philosophy half way;)
Only individuals benefit from trade. The American people go without so that we can trade?
But surely you wouldn't say that trading the national corn surplus for central american bananas (which were then distributed to the people) would be robbing the people? What if there was no surplus of steel, but you could trade some of it for timber which was in extremely short supply? Surely these are ideal trading situations, regardless of your political leanings.
Utility is for the rich- and 75% of America is not. Let's try feeding everybody a balanced diet, and having a roof over everybody's head first.
A noble goal, but trade (foreign or otherwise) should make that easier not harder. I think you're assuming a pre-existing mis-distribution of wealth which is not relevant to the theoretical question of whether foreign trade is good or not.
Efficiency doesn't matter as much as security does
Concur.
As long as we have a single homeless person in the United States, we have failed at national defense.
Doesn't matter where the exports are going to- exports are a waste of resources we could be using right here in America.
Not necessarily, or even often, true. Exports aren't wasted resources, they should be traded for other useful resources such that both parties benefit. Trading should result in increased utility for both parties.
And of course importing cheap foreign goods will destroy any local production capacity for those goods - but that's just because it's inefficient to produce locally. However, any goods required for national defense should definitely be the subject of trade protectionism in case trading partners turn hostile and cut off the import supply.
Slashdot Mirror
I run win2K as well, and since Vista came out I've been noticing an increasing number of programs that don't support win2k (for no good reason that I can see). It's extremely frustrating. I just tried to update iTunes from 7.0 to 7.5 and, apparently, in one of the point releases they dropped support for my operating system! iTunes checks for updates every time I open it, but I can't actually run the update so it looks like I will be nagged forever. New games are doing the same thing, usually requiring XP SP2 even though even though I meet minimum hardware spec and can run the latest DirectX version (not counting 10, but who would?).
I suppose the devs think they can ignore win2k just because it's [Windows n-2] now, and it's getting damn frustrating for me.
10 times as many people die, every single year from Septicemia. Ever hear of it?
Nitpick: I think septicemia is a bad example. I'm no doctor, but I have worked with them and iirc septicemia is the technical term for 'got fucked up real bad by some kind of infection'. It's a triumph of modern medicine that so few people die from it. I think you were looking for an example of a rarely heard of illness, but using the technical name for 'an infection' is as misleading as talking about how few people know about fatal hypothermia compared to those who know about 'freezing to death'.
The original three movies use strong archetypal characters, a la Joseph Campbell, in fact Lucas gave him credit for the style of the characters. The farmer, the princess, the scoundrel and the evil lord. The prequels throw that all away for some reason and the stories are weaker for it.
Also, in episode 4 Obi Wan tells Han that he could learn to use the force. Han refuses because that's just not what his archetype does. He is only destined to not be a jedi because his character cannot make that choice.
Oh, and one more thing. I've just been reading the Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and they're full of stories about peasants becoming rulers of the land.
In principle I agree with you, but I think there is the same problem with focussing on immorality as there is on illegality. Standards of morality differ, and what's worse is that when something is 'immoral' people get much angrier than when something is illegal.
Prostitution, for example, varies widely in whether it is considered illegal or immoral. I would be appalled if supposedly secure communications could be seized because they contained evidence of consensual sex for money.
The only position I find tenable is that secure communication must be considered a right of free people. Yes, that means that the murderers, child molesters and terrorists will have it too, but the alternative is that nobody has secure communication.
Certainly there are technological solutions, such as proper use of encryption. But because of cases like this I would like to legal and social support for the right, such as laws making communications that were 'reasonably believed to be secure' inadmissable as evidence. I would also love to hear a group like the NRA saying that the right to secure communication is as essential as the right to bear arms. It certainly is in my mind.
the NSA has every reason to deny others effective cryptographic tools
Well actually, the NSA wants other countries to have bad cryptographic tools, the USA to have good cryptographic tools, or best of all, everyone to have cryptographic tools that only the NSA can break. This algorithm sounds like the latter, since as Schneier said it uses a set of magic number parameters and there are some more magic numbers which constitute a back door. The back door is hard to calculate from the known magic numbers, but could plausibly have been determined during development of both sets of numbers by the NSA boys.
I wonder if there would be any use in having an encryption scheme that was widely known to be breakable only by the NSA.
Put another way, there are some actions so heinous that pretty much any punishment is justifiable.
Most people would disagree. The purpose of punishment is to prevent re-offending, deter others from offending, and if possible to make reparation to the victim. Rape, torture and mutilation do not serve any purposes other than petty vengeance and spreading fear, and if you're the kind of person who thinks they can be justified you might be right at home working for those Big Names you mentioned.
Hand counting does not take days or weeks. New Zealand counts ballots by hand and the counting is generally finished by midnight on polling day. I know there are European countries that do the same thing, see any of the other dozen posts from perplexed slashdotters in countries where votes are hand counted. There is also TV coverage of the vote counting progress, makes for a good night of drinking ;)
The number of ballot counters is very easily scaled with the number of ballots, and to swing the count in a particular direction would require massive systemic corruption rather than some dude with a shell script.
The quoted text is almost insightful, but it still devolves into "if he knows that I know that he knows..."
Perhaps the US was tracking the Chinese sub all along, but is now going to destroy a couple of careers just to make it look like the sub was not detected due to human error. What are a couple of careers measured against misinforming the enemy?
Or, perhaps the Chinese sub should have been detected if it was actually following but was instead using a cheap trick like sitting on the bottom until the carrier group came past, then surfacing to give the false impression that it was super stealthy and had been following all along.
Those are just a couple of possibilities off the top of my head, and (hard as it is to believe) I'm sure there are even smarter people than me working for US and Chinese military intelligence.
Making sure the potential aggressor is aware of the risk so that he refrains from aggression. (See Iran)
I was going to make a joke about how that was why Iran let the US know about their nuclear programme, but then I thought perhaps that was what you meant already... I am unhappy to live in this kind of world.
It seems that you and I think along the same lines, but I'm less optimistic. The question is: when all the farmers' kids can go to college, will we have college-level jobs available for all of them? If not, then who will support them?
Oh, and regardless of immigration laws I think that over the long term globalisation will redistribute money from rich countries to poor countries so that cheap immigrant labour will no longer be an option.
Your points are all correct, but that's not why leisure time isn't increased with automation. Consider the simplified view that there are two types of people: wage workers and infrastructure owners. Wage workers trade their time for money. Infrastructure owners employ the wage workers to use their infrastructure to create value; they are shareholders and landowners and other sorts of wealthy layabouts ;)
;)
Automation benefits the infrastructure owners because they can produce more value with fewer employees. The wage workers who are replaced by automation are SOL because they have no stake in the increased value being produced (except that the whole trade system benefits from improved efficiency and presumably lower prices). The wage workers need to find someone else to provide labour to (and competition between them will keep wages at a level which gives an acceptable lifestyle for full time work), or starve in the street. Starving in the street is not usually considered leisure time although there are similarities
The crux of the matter is that the number of positions for wage workers does not necessarily increase as automation does, and only the most exceptional wage workers will ever become wealthy by working for someone else. Unemployment, the other name for leisure time, will increase and while wage workers will be SOL infrastructure owners will be able to subsist off their investments.
I am not an economist, but this is my understanding and I am interested in hearing counter arguments. Based on this, I aspire to own my own home, be debt free and have a modest income from investment. That way if I end up unemployed I can shrug my shoulders and call it leisure time.
maybe once Nintendo gets around to releasing the WiiWii...
;)
Offtopic here, but I can't help thinking that the Wii+1 should be known as the counter-revolution, at least while it's in development
>>Maybe human beings are just porn's way of making more porn.
In case any of our dear readers don't recognise the quote, I believe the GP is ripping off Richard Dawkins whose gene-centred theory of evolution can be paraphrased as "Human beings are just genes' way of making more genes". This is top grade geek humour.
I look forward to reading the full paper in the next edition of Nature (or at least looking at the pictures).
When was the last time we had a pandemic of any kind?
Fairly often actually if you don't nitpick the line between the pan- and epi- varieties; see wikipedia, as usual. Most of them aren't that scary though. You're correct that the 1918 flu was the last really serious one if you don't count AIDS which is a somewhat different beast. It used to be that if a disease was too swiftly deadly it wouldn't spread very far because all the hosts would die, but modern air travel has changed the game. Diseases like SARS and the H5N1 flu strain would be horrendous if they were easily transmissable, and it's entirely appropriate to make plans against losing a percentage of the population.
I don't suppose you have a web link for that? It's one of my favourite stories about the rovers, but last time I looked I couldn't find a suitable page to reference.
The conspiracy is deeper than you suspect. The Galapagos Islands also contain the closest penguin colonies to Redmond. I leave you to draw your own conclusions...
.. and then you drag the Enemy into the trash can.
I don't understand... why do you want to eject the enemy from the CD drive?
Not to nitpick, but there's no "The Patriot Act". What everyone means by it is the USAPATRIOT Act, USAPATRIOT being the initialism of the cumbersome name deliberately chosen to spell USAPATRIOT. There's nothing patriotic about it, and the naming scam insults the intelligence of the nation with the implicit assumption that people will think "but it's called the Patriot act! How could it be wrong?"
Hey, thanks. That was informative.
The State of California wouldn't let them film it on any of their highways because they said the script for that sequence was unfilmable, and it was guaranteed to kill people in the process.
Just from interest, do you have a source for that? iirc The Matrix was mostly filmed in Sydney, and I don't know why they would have tried to film the highway scene in California unless they were looking for random existing freeways.
Right, Left, Rebulican, Democrat...we are all AMERICANS.
Except for all those slashdotters (like me) who aren't. Of course, the rest of the world has a well known liberal bias...
But I digress. As an outsider, your two parties look like a single party that is split on pro/anti abortion and a few other 'gut feeling' issues that don't really have anything to do with how the country is run. I don't envy your political climate.
Indeed. The more sophisticated ID arguments acknowledge evolution within species (dogs, for instance), but argue that evolution alone couldn't have produced different species, or the range or species we see in the world given the age of the earth (even if they're not sticking to 6000 years ;)
:)
It's the kind of argument that works well against the man-on-the-street, who hasn't heard of things like ring species, so there's a heads up for you
One of my pet peeves is people who 'don't believe in evolution'. Evolution is a fact, you can replicate it in the lab or just look at the family pets or the produce section at the supermarket to see the results of evolution. The only sensible argument is whether or not evolution by means of natural selection is solely responsible for the rich variety of life which exists on earth.
Nitpick: evolution is not directional. Species don't evolve to be 'better' or 'more advanced', they evolve to suit their environment. By most criteria, the most successful strategy for a species is to be single celled.
Not that I disagree with your point - but you should describe success as being at the top of the food chain, or more robust in the face of change, or something other than 'more highly evolved' since evolution doesn't have height.
I'm glad to see that you're not wussing out and taking your philosophy half way ;)
Only individuals benefit from trade. The American people go without so that we can trade?
But surely you wouldn't say that trading the national corn surplus for central american bananas (which were then distributed to the people) would be robbing the people? What if there was no surplus of steel, but you could trade some of it for timber which was in extremely short supply? Surely these are ideal trading situations, regardless of your political leanings.
Utility is for the rich- and 75% of America is not. Let's try feeding everybody a balanced diet, and having a roof over everybody's head first.
A noble goal, but trade (foreign or otherwise) should make that easier not harder. I think you're assuming a pre-existing mis-distribution of wealth which is not relevant to the theoretical question of whether foreign trade is good or not.
Efficiency doesn't matter as much as security does
Concur.
As long as we have a single homeless person in the United States, we have failed at national defense.
Concur again.
Doesn't matter where the exports are going to- exports are a waste of resources we could be using right here in America.
Not necessarily, or even often, true. Exports aren't wasted resources, they should be traded for other useful resources such that both parties benefit. Trading should result in increased utility for both parties.
And of course importing cheap foreign goods will destroy any local production capacity for those goods - but that's just because it's inefficient to produce locally. However, any goods required for national defense should definitely be the subject of trade protectionism in case trading partners turn hostile and cut off the import supply.