Game publishers, consumers, and even the reviewers themselves have been going on about the shortcomings of the current system for quite a while now. Yet we never see any alternatives being proposed. I say to the article writer, "Yes, I agree that the current system sucks. But what is your alternative?"
You're making the dangerous assumption that government workers are more competent and less subject to being corrupted by power than the rest of us. Fact is, government employees make mistakes. They have emotions like any other human being. And you're saying that they should be given the power to torture?
Let me spell this out clearly. They *ARE WRONG*. We *ARE RIGHT*. So we being in the right, have to stop those who are in the wrong. Even if it means going to war. Even if it means using torture to get information that will prevent the deaths of those who *ARE RIGHT* by those who *ARE WRONG*.
That's pretty funny, because that's exactly what Hitler's attitude was when he invaded Poland. Germans == Aryans == RIGHT. Poles == Slavs == WRONG. Aryans need more land (Lebensraum). Slavs have land. Therefore it is okay for the Aryans to take land from the Slavs.
The problem is that the prisoner often doesn't know precisely when the attack will take place. What happens then is that, under torture, he will give precise information because the interviewer wants precise information, not because the information is accurate.
Something like this:
CIA: When will the attack take place?
Enemy: I don't know, sometime next week.
CIA: That's not good enough!! <punch>
Enemy: Okay! Okay! The attack will take place next Wednesday!
CIA: Still not good enough! <punch>
Enemy: At 5:00 pm!
The point is that the enemy may only be a supplier or arms dealer who doesn't actually know when the attack will take place, but will pretend to in order to make the torture stop. That's the problem with torture - its not that people won't tell you what they know, its that people will tell you stuff that they don't know.
The point the grandparent is trying to make is that you don't gain accurate information by torturing. You gain accurate information by sitting the person down, confronting them with evidence and playing mind games with them. There's no evidence that we have gained anything of value from torture or "torture-light". However, in World War 2, we gained valuable intelligence from German POWs by the technique described above. WW2 was a wartime situation as well. American lives would be lost if timely information was not got from captured prisoners. Yet, in that situation, our government did not torture, recognizing that its quicker and more effective to reason with prisoners than to subject them to pain.
I can also point you to what the North Vietnamese did to American POWs in the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese had the same attitude you do - pain == information. However, as many American POWs will attest, extreme pain either forces the prisoner to clam up in defiance, or say whatever they perceive the torture wants to hear. The one thing pain didn't deliver was accurate information.
Really, if anyone is authoritarian in the United States, it is the American left wing. We right wingers are just a bunch of rednecks that would just as soon not have a federal government at all.
Your portion of the right wing, perhaps. The right wing in the USA is split between the libertarians (those who want no federal government) and the neoconservatives (people like Cheney and Rudy). While the libertarians want a lower federal budget and less government, the neocons want more government power, in the name of "fighting terrorism" and "defending the homeland". These people have entered into an alliance with the third major faction on the right - the Christian Fundamentalists, who want power to turn the US into a Christian Saudi Arabia. So, while you say that you want less government, I don't think you can speak for all conservatives in the USA.
What? Are you pissed off that there is a military prison for detaining people that want to kill every last person in the US? Or are you pissed off about those 'pictures'?
Man--I'd be pissed off too. Some soldiers take some odd pictures of naked Iraqi men...
Of course what pisses me off more is the Iraqis that *VIDEO TAPE* our citizens getting their heads slowly cut off while they are screaming and gurgling, and dying. Those pictures suddenly pale in comparison.
While I agree with most of your points, I must say that the one of the important things distinguishing us from the barbarians attacking us is that we don't torture, while they do. Incidents like Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture memos undermine that important distinction and begin to lower our society to the same level as our enemies.
Right. The issue is that, with the lifetimes of modern media being not that long, we might get to a point where even if you were around in 2100 there might not be any legal copies of LotR to break the encryption on. That's where the issue about breaking encryption for the purposes of personal archiving comes in.
That's weeds evolving to deal with Roundup pesticide. I'm talking about the fact that Roundup-ready corn, which is the genetically modified organism in this instance, will be pushed out by native species if we stop applying Roundup. We didn't genetically engineer the weeds to be resistant, just as we didn't engineer antibiotic resistant tuberculosis or insecticide resistant mosquitoes.
I just realized something, despite all this debate on GE and GMOs nothing has really been said about any need for GMOs, the fact is is they are not needed.
The fact is, GMOs are the logical extension of the green revolution that has been in progress from the '60s. Industrial farming is the only reason fewer people starve today than in 1960. To continue these gains, we need GMO crops that allow us to utilize otherwise unarable land.
You cannot feed 6 billion people through organic, non-GMO farming.
Again, what do you mean by "kinks". There's no rule that says that evolution has to be "progressive" (whatever that means in this context) or that evolution has to result in organisms that are helpful to the survival of homo sapiens. What genetic engineering does is introduce a new source of mutations. These mutations, in addition to rigorous selective breeding programs, are supposed to push organisms to become easier to cultivate, more disease resistant, etc.
If a GMO escapes into the wild, then most likely it will be wiped out by the native species. GMOs are pushed by selective breeding to be dependent on humans for survival. That dependence makes them ill-equipped to survive in the wild, where there is no steady supply of herbicide and insecticide applied to kill off all competition. If the GMO does happen to survive, then c'est la evolution, I guess.
Yea and possibly create something undesirable quickly instead of letting nature tkae it's tyme to see if any problems will be created.
What do you mean "problems"? Do you mean poisons? Plenty of "unengineered" organisms secrete poisons.
Yea, while nature does propagate mutations it doesn't insert fish genes into tomatoes.
And how is that more dangerous than making new alleles from scratch? That's exactly what happens when mutations occur in the wild. Genetic engineering simply introduces a new source of mutation. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it, just like there's nothing inherently good or bad about solar radiation.
Why is it so hard for people to understand there's a hugh difference between selective breeding and inserting a foreign gene into a species that does not have it?
Maybe because the difference really isn't that big. Mutation introduces genetic changes all the time. Its just that, now we can introduce desirable mutations ourselves, rather than going out and trying to stumble across an instance where nature has introduced the mutation for us (through UV radiation or whatnot).
With this in mind, most gamers spend ~$40+ a month to keep on gaming.
That depends on the game and the gamer. For a lot of people who don't have hours and hours to play a game continuously, it may take more than a couple of months to beat the game. For example, it took me several months to beat Final Fantasy 10, simply because I didn't have the time or the inclination to put more than a couple hours of play into it per day.
Your analysis also ignores replay value and free online play. To return to Final Fantasy, once you beat the game, you can start a new game, and go through and try to find all the side quests and secret items. Also, for some games, such as Halo, Super Smash, CounterStrike, Warcraft III, etc, the main appeal these days isn't the single player campaign. Its the multiplayer experience.
Finally, one can "beat" MMORPGs, as well. You'll always have the power-levelers who max out their characters within a week. What's in it for them? Mostly set-piece PVP battles. I don't think that games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest present new content every month.
Because of the above reasons, your assertion that non-MMO gamers pay $40 per month to get the same experience that MMO gamers get for $15 is simply untrue.
There's a huge different between a civilian gun on Mythbusters and a fully automatic, auto-aiming 35mm cannon firing high explosive projectiles. The soldiers could have been inside a tank, and it still wouldn't have helped.
Kids these days like "old-style" games just fine. I have a little brother whose first experience with games was the PS2. His current favorite game: SuperBomberman on the SNES emulator.
But then I realized, how do you find out when you've built in hidden single points of failure?
That's why you test. The buildup of humidity indicates a failure in the test program for the ISS. It seems they figured the dehumidifier would work, or, if it broke, it'd be replaced in a timely fashion. No one tested the scenario of what would happen if the dehumidifier worked intermittently, or broke for an extended period of time.
If NASA is relying on the system to protect its astronauts, then it becomes NASA's responsibility to ensure that system failure will not compromise astronaut safety, regardless of whether the component was manufactured by Russia or the US.
On a historical note, its exactly that kind of tunnel vision that led to the Apollo 1 disaster. NASA relied on its contractors to meet specifications, and didn't properly inspect the results. Maybe NASA needs to start inspecting the Russians as rigorously as it inspects its own contractors.
That's precisely what I said. The condensation affected all three computers equally, when they should have been independent from one another. The actual mechanism of the effect doesn't take away from the fact that a "redundant" system was brought down at a single point of failure.
Are you really suggesting that NASA left the safety of its astronauts to a bunch of black box systems? NASA knew what the design of the power connectors was. They chose not to raise any concerns. Therefore, NASA does share part of the blame. Through their lack of oversight they let their Russian partners design an inadequate system.
I think NASA should have learned this lesson by now. After all, the Challenger disaster showed this principle as well. In that case, the same cold temperature that weakened the primary seal on the solid rocket booster weakened the secondary as well, sapping its ability to provide redundant backup. In this case, the same condensation affected all three computers equally.
Its troubling to see them taking shortcuts on safety and redundancy, when such measures have resulted in loss of life before. How hard would it have been to have had three shut-off cables?
There is a similar case in the US. Look up the World-Wildlife-Fund vs. World-Wrestling-Federation. Both organizations have WWF as their initials, and as I remember, World Wrestling Federation was forced to give up the WWF trademark.
Not too clear on the details of the case, but maybe someone else can fill in more details.
The purpose of the pamphlets was to get people out into the streets - to march and protest Britain's injustices. This movement says that blogging is an end in itself; that writing about some injustice on the Internet will somehow magically make the injustice go away. If they were calling for bloggers to organize some kind of protest movement (much like the Committees of Correspondence organized protest against the British) that'd be different.
Given that most processors shutdown to prevent thermal damage at around that temperature, I'd think not. The shtudown threshold of a P4 (one of the hotter running chips of late) was around 78C, I'd think that 80C is a bit high.
That said, I do think that 40C is a pretty low bar to pass. Given that my P4 idles at around 48-50C, I'm surprised that they consider 40C to be an "average" test environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Game publishers, consumers, and even the reviewers themselves have been going on about the shortcomings of the current system for quite a while now. Yet we never see any alternatives being proposed. I say to the article writer, "Yes, I agree that the current system sucks. But what is your alternative?"
Not if the content was programmed to only play in the presence of the smart card.
You're making the dangerous assumption that government workers are more competent and less subject to being corrupted by power than the rest of us. Fact is, government employees make mistakes. They have emotions like any other human being. And you're saying that they should be given the power to torture?
Let me spell this out clearly. They *ARE WRONG*. We *ARE RIGHT*. So we being in the right, have to stop those who are in the wrong. Even if it means going to war. Even if it means using torture to get information that will prevent the deaths of those who *ARE RIGHT* by those who *ARE WRONG*.
That's pretty funny, because that's exactly what Hitler's attitude was when he invaded Poland. Germans == Aryans == RIGHT. Poles == Slavs == WRONG. Aryans need more land (Lebensraum). Slavs have land. Therefore it is okay for the Aryans to take land from the Slavs.
The problem is that the prisoner often doesn't know precisely when the attack will take place. What happens then is that, under torture, he will give precise information because the interviewer wants precise information, not because the information is accurate.
Something like this:
The point is that the enemy may only be a supplier or arms dealer who doesn't actually know when the attack will take place, but will pretend to in order to make the torture stop. That's the problem with torture - its not that people won't tell you what they know, its that people will tell you stuff that they don't know.
The point the grandparent is trying to make is that you don't gain accurate information by torturing. You gain accurate information by sitting the person down, confronting them with evidence and playing mind games with them. There's no evidence that we have gained anything of value from torture or "torture-light". However, in World War 2, we gained valuable intelligence from German POWs by the technique described above. WW2 was a wartime situation as well. American lives would be lost if timely information was not got from captured prisoners. Yet, in that situation, our government did not torture, recognizing that its quicker and more effective to reason with prisoners than to subject them to pain.
I can also point you to what the North Vietnamese did to American POWs in the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese had the same attitude you do - pain == information. However, as many American POWs will attest, extreme pain either forces the prisoner to clam up in defiance, or say whatever they perceive the torture wants to hear. The one thing pain didn't deliver was accurate information.
Your portion of the right wing, perhaps. The right wing in the USA is split between the libertarians (those who want no federal government) and the neoconservatives (people like Cheney and Rudy). While the libertarians want a lower federal budget and less government, the neocons want more government power, in the name of "fighting terrorism" and "defending the homeland". These people have entered into an alliance with the third major faction on the right - the Christian Fundamentalists, who want power to turn the US into a Christian Saudi Arabia. So, while you say that you want less government, I don't think you can speak for all conservatives in the USA.
While I agree with most of your points, I must say that the one of the important things distinguishing us from the barbarians attacking us is that we don't torture, while they do. Incidents like Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture memos undermine that important distinction and begin to lower our society to the same level as our enemies.
Right. The issue is that, with the lifetimes of modern media being not that long, we might get to a point where even if you were around in 2100 there might not be any legal copies of LotR to break the encryption on. That's where the issue about breaking encryption for the purposes of personal archiving comes in.
Then superweeds resistant to Roundup don't exist?
That's weeds evolving to deal with Roundup pesticide. I'm talking about the fact that Roundup-ready corn, which is the genetically modified organism in this instance, will be pushed out by native species if we stop applying Roundup. We didn't genetically engineer the weeds to be resistant, just as we didn't engineer antibiotic resistant tuberculosis or insecticide resistant mosquitoes.
I just realized something, despite all this debate on GE and GMOs nothing has really been said about any need for GMOs, the fact is is they are not needed.
The fact is, GMOs are the logical extension of the green revolution that has been in progress from the '60s. Industrial farming is the only reason fewer people starve today than in 1960. To continue these gains, we need GMO crops that allow us to utilize otherwise unarable land.
You cannot feed 6 billion people through organic, non-GMO farming.
Again, what do you mean by "kinks". There's no rule that says that evolution has to be "progressive" (whatever that means in this context) or that evolution has to result in organisms that are helpful to the survival of homo sapiens. What genetic engineering does is introduce a new source of mutations. These mutations, in addition to rigorous selective breeding programs, are supposed to push organisms to become easier to cultivate, more disease resistant, etc.
If a GMO escapes into the wild, then most likely it will be wiped out by the native species. GMOs are pushed by selective breeding to be dependent on humans for survival. That dependence makes them ill-equipped to survive in the wild, where there is no steady supply of herbicide and insecticide applied to kill off all competition. If the GMO does happen to survive, then c'est la evolution, I guess.
Yea and possibly create something undesirable quickly instead of letting nature tkae it's tyme to see if any problems will be created.
What do you mean "problems"? Do you mean poisons? Plenty of "unengineered" organisms secrete poisons.
Yea, while nature does propagate mutations it doesn't insert fish genes into tomatoes.
And how is that more dangerous than making new alleles from scratch? That's exactly what happens when mutations occur in the wild. Genetic engineering simply introduces a new source of mutation. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it, just like there's nothing inherently good or bad about solar radiation.
Why is it so hard for people to understand there's a hugh difference between selective breeding and inserting a foreign gene into a species that does not have it?
Maybe because the difference really isn't that big. Mutation introduces genetic changes all the time. Its just that, now we can introduce desirable mutations ourselves, rather than going out and trying to stumble across an instance where nature has introduced the mutation for us (through UV radiation or whatnot).
With this in mind, most gamers spend ~$40+ a month to keep on gaming.
That depends on the game and the gamer. For a lot of people who don't have hours and hours to play a game continuously, it may take more than a couple of months to beat the game. For example, it took me several months to beat Final Fantasy 10, simply because I didn't have the time or the inclination to put more than a couple hours of play into it per day.
Your analysis also ignores replay value and free online play. To return to Final Fantasy, once you beat the game, you can start a new game, and go through and try to find all the side quests and secret items. Also, for some games, such as Halo, Super Smash, CounterStrike, Warcraft III, etc, the main appeal these days isn't the single player campaign. Its the multiplayer experience.
Finally, one can "beat" MMORPGs, as well. You'll always have the power-levelers who max out their characters within a week. What's in it for them? Mostly set-piece PVP battles. I don't think that games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest present new content every month.
Because of the above reasons, your assertion that non-MMO gamers pay $40 per month to get the same experience that MMO gamers get for $15 is simply untrue.
There's a huge different between a civilian gun on Mythbusters and a fully automatic, auto-aiming 35mm cannon firing high explosive projectiles. The soldiers could have been inside a tank, and it still wouldn't have helped.
Hear! Hear!
My company uses ClearCase, and it combines the worst aspects of text-based config files and graphical, menu-based systems.
Kids these days like "old-style" games just fine. I have a little brother whose first experience with games was the PS2. His current favorite game: SuperBomberman on the SNES emulator.
But then I realized, how do you find out when you've built in hidden single points of failure?
That's why you test. The buildup of humidity indicates a failure in the test program for the ISS. It seems they figured the dehumidifier would work, or, if it broke, it'd be replaced in a timely fashion. No one tested the scenario of what would happen if the dehumidifier worked intermittently, or broke for an extended period of time.
If NASA is relying on the system to protect its astronauts, then it becomes NASA's responsibility to ensure that system failure will not compromise astronaut safety, regardless of whether the component was manufactured by Russia or the US.
On a historical note, its exactly that kind of tunnel vision that led to the Apollo 1 disaster. NASA relied on its contractors to meet specifications, and didn't properly inspect the results. Maybe NASA needs to start inspecting the Russians as rigorously as it inspects its own contractors.
That's precisely what I said. The condensation affected all three computers equally, when they should have been independent from one another. The actual mechanism of the effect doesn't take away from the fact that a "redundant" system was brought down at a single point of failure.
Are you really suggesting that NASA left the safety of its astronauts to a bunch of black box systems? NASA knew what the design of the power connectors was. They chose not to raise any concerns. Therefore, NASA does share part of the blame. Through their lack of oversight they let their Russian partners design an inadequate system.
I think NASA should have learned this lesson by now. After all, the Challenger disaster showed this principle as well. In that case, the same cold temperature that weakened the primary seal on the solid rocket booster weakened the secondary as well, sapping its ability to provide redundant backup. In this case, the same condensation affected all three computers equally.
Its troubling to see them taking shortcuts on safety and redundancy, when such measures have resulted in loss of life before. How hard would it have been to have had three shut-off cables?
There is a similar case in the US. Look up the World-Wildlife-Fund vs. World-Wrestling-Federation. Both organizations have WWF as their initials, and as I remember, World Wrestling Federation was forced to give up the WWF trademark.
Not too clear on the details of the case, but maybe someone else can fill in more details.
Given the lack of oxygen, you'd have a hard time lighting a cigarette anyway.
The purpose of the pamphlets was to get people out into the streets - to march and protest Britain's injustices. This movement says that blogging is an end in itself; that writing about some injustice on the Internet will somehow magically make the injustice go away. If they were calling for bloggers to organize some kind of protest movement (much like the Committees of Correspondence organized protest against the British) that'd be different.
Doesnt my laptop pull in 80 deg C?
Given that most processors shutdown to prevent thermal damage at around that temperature, I'd think not. The shtudown threshold of a P4 (one of the hotter running chips of late) was around 78C, I'd think that 80C is a bit high.
That said, I do think that 40C is a pretty low bar to pass. Given that my P4 idles at around 48-50C, I'm surprised that they consider 40C to be an "average" test environment.