Even employed IT workers should be, at least, a little worried as the average pay rate stands to plummet and their higher pay rates become a liability to job security.
But any such drop in workers' salaries will be balanced by higer compensation packages for the executives, so it all works out!
Re:Wikipedia article on the number is down too.
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 1
Wiki article deleted and locked down, eh? Hmmm, let's look at the April '07 protected list:
it's not that man's ancestor was an ape, it's that apes and man have a common ancestor that was neither ape nor man.
Well, I don't know... many of my ancestors are apes!
To be pedantic: humans are apes. So we could say that all apes -- including humans -- have a common ancestor, call it the ur-ape. (And that this ur-ape was not an ancestor of monkeys, baboons, or bears.) You could say gibbons and humans are evolved from an ancestor that was neither human nor gibbon.
I have a wireless network that I want the people of my community (or even someone in the bookstore next door) to be able to use. How do I indicate this? Do I need to set my SSID to be "Knock on No. 42 Adams St. and ask for Zaphod"?
My DSL just went down, and I need to visit my ISPs website and open a trouble ticket. I see that there are 7 networks available, with names like "Adam's World" and "Pete and Chris" (and of course "linksys"). How do I know which ones I can use?
What we need is an agreed-upon keyword I can use in the SSID indicating that visitors are welcome.
(What ever happened to sharing, and love thy neighbour? Do we not live in a society (and a very wealthy one at that)? Everyone should share their networks. Just a few simple precautions: port 25 is blocked on the wireless network, and there's a firewall between the wireless and wired networks. My DSL is fast enough that guests don't impact my "important" work on the wired network -- if it weren't, I'd use traffic shaping to throttle wireless guests.)
Of course minors don't have all the rights that an adult has, and that's how it should be. For instance, I have the right to enter into contracts, but minors do not. An adult cannot be compelled to attend school, but you bet a minor can. You do not have freedom of speech, religion, etc. when you're 10 and Mom says you either have to go to church with your family or stay in your room and do your homework.
(Of course there are also ridiculous restrictions we place on our children, but that's a problem in our implementation, not of the principle.)
Yeah, just like electric cars are stupid because there aren't batteries just lying around.
You got it right that the compressed air is just a storage medium, not a source of energy.
Which of these do you think it's easier to control emissions etc. on: a centrally located power plant maintained regularly and run by people whose job it is do that, or a car owned by a person of unknown ability and indifferent maintenance?
Do you really think that a hydrogen/fuel-cell/electric car will do "better" in an unindustrialized society? Does your "better" include ease and cost of maintenance?
Should I not be a public figure, or person of note, Then I OWN MY IMAGE and you need a release to publish.
This is not absolute. If you are out walking on the street you have no expectation of privacy; anyone can take your photograph without your permission. It's commercial use of your image that requires a model release form. If the image can be considered news-worthy, then no release is required for the photo to accompany the story, even though the press is a commercial entity and the story makes money for the paper.
The world you're advocating is a world where you can just walk around shooting other people...
Strawman argument.
It seems you are using physicalist in a technical sense not equivalent to empiricism or positivism. You say you are a "pure physicalist"; what does that mean? A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that physicalists believe "that there are no kinds of things other than physical things." Is that the case? Does your physicalism include the integers? Do you believe that the mind is a specific physical thing that's not the brain?
I'm a positivist. My world is simple: things have values that we give them. The "rightness" of stepping on or shooting something is exactly what we say it is. There is no intrinsic reason torturing puppies (or unlawful combatants) is wrong; we empathise with other living things and decide that torture is wrong. Cf the social contract and all that.
To go back to your original statement,
A society that doesn't appreciate some form of spirituality is pretty empty...
What is this "spirituality"? Is it "the things we talk about that cannot be physically measured"? If so, it doesn't seem to be a very useful term. When people say "spirituality" it's been my experience that they're talking about the supernatural -- deities, ghosts, ESP, and all that other crap. My life does not have any "spirituality" and I think it's a pretty full one.
I think that a society that is purely physicalist in its view of living things is...problematical. By those standards stomping on an alarm clock, a flower, and a puppy are all pretty much the same thing, because living things are no different from non-living things.
Non sequitur!
By this argument, believing that all matter is made up of the same atoms is "problematical".
Or do you believe that "life" isn't just atoms and molecules, but requires a Special Someone to breathe life into what used to just be plain ol' matter?
I guess we should ban libraries too since the artist is not getting "his fair share."
I guess you haven't been following the shenanigans of Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers: "We have a very serious issue with librarians." "If everyone gets a free copy," she says, "the publisher and the writer and others involved in making the book go unpaid."
Unless, of course, demonstrating such a 'gift' resulted them in, oh, being burned at the stake as a witch, treated as the weird person up the street, or merely made it uncomfortable to be around people.
For your statement to be correct, everyone who had "ESP" would be so persecuted. That's a bogus claim.
If I had this superpower, and I saw that others with this power were being persecuted, I would keep quiet and only use my powers for selfish gain. Winning at poker or the stock market of course, but who here wouldn't also use it to get babes? And there's your evolutionary fitness right there. If a heritable trait confers a reproductive advantage it becomes common in the population.
The simple fact is that all this mumbo jumbo (whether ESP, alien kidnappings, or the magical power of crystals) is just that -- anecdotal crap with no basis in reality.
... Everybody has rights in a civil society. the rights of the police to try and get the ones who voilate others rights
You're confusing rights with duties and responsibilities. A police officer has certain rights from being a human; but it's their job and duty to go after lawbreakers.
A policeman on duty is an agent of the state and has more restrictions than a private citizen. We train them, pay them, and give them guns; so we hold them to a higher standard than Joe Blow.
Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, i.e. on top of a volcano -- which means there's a lot of heat very close to the surface. In the middle of a continental mass -- say Colorado -- you have to go much deeper to get to usable heat and it may not be feasible.
(But there is a giant volcano under Yellowstone. Hey, maybe that's Cheney's energy plan!)
So is it your claim that India is one of those places that have this "true level of hunger", where "there simply isn't enough food"? On what basis do you make this claim?
You'll find that hunger in India has the usual causes: unscrupulous businessmen and government officials beholden to them. (Hmmm, sound familiar?)
And, to bring this back on topic, do you seriously believe that unless you've solved problem A you can't work on problem B? In other words, as long as there are starving children in India, India can't work on, say, computers.
If you replace a million sensors with one sensor, for the same sort of exposure you'll need a million times the time. (Or, since the claim for the device is that you don't need to sample everything since you're compressing with JPEG, let's say half a million times.)
But we want the entire frame to be captured in "the same instant" (or you'll see strange artifacts from moving objects).
Let's say we want an exposure of about 1/100s. So, can these micro-mirrors switch at a 5x10^7/s rate (20 nanoseconds)? Since the mirror has to be stable for the interval, the switching time needs to be a fraction of that. So, can these bacterium-sized physical mirrors switch in 10ns?
... although in a computer age (base 2), the imperial system is actually more "computer-friendly," as our system of halves and doubles actually makes more computer sense.
Fiddlesticks! There is no programming language where the fraction is a common type. (Or have you switched over to binary in your day-to-day speech, because we're in the computer age?)
The problem with that however is that most of my customers accept
neither apologies nor amputated limbs.
For those, you just need a different kind of customer!
Whoever you're working for, happy monkeying around with their systems. Why I even envy you.
That was a long time ago. I was only an apprentice-BOFH; sure it was a lot of fun and I got to really learn Unix, and in all flavours (VAXen, Suns, Sequent Symmetry, AT&T 3B5, HP-UX, etc.), but I think being a sysadmin is the worst kind of job: people only notice you when things are fucked up. I don't envy sysadmins.
So you actually !rm from history and then take whatever you got coming like a man?
That's right. And I build my own computers too. Starting from refining the ores.
Actually I don't use history substitution, just command-line editing -- ^Rrm to bring back the last rm, and hit return. If there's a "-rf" on the line the alarm goes off and I examine the command before hitting return; if not -- well, that's why we have backups, and the few hours of work I just lost is just a valuable lesson in the use of power tools. At least with our power tools we don't lose fingers.
(I learned my lessons being the lowest grunt on the totem pole (aka tape monkey). When I screwed up and needed to restore something from the backups, I'd be the one doing the shit-work. Very liberating to be able to screw up and not have someone yell at you.)
I only use absolute paths with "rm -rf". Using an absolute path means you can recall it from the history and re-execute it, no matter what the current directory happens to be. At the same time I want to reduce the number of keys I have to type.
(cd/tmp ; rm -r -f dir)
Also, those commands are in a sub-shell. I use sub-shells sparingly, because any changes you make in the environment in a sub-shell do not propagate back to the caller. I have suffered many hours of trying to figure out why the damn variable "kept getting reset" when it was set in a sub-shell. But I suppose it makes sense to use two "pay attention!" operations together.
Many years of being a sysadmin put in place a low-level reflex so that every time my eyes see "rm -rf " I immediately step back, reset, and think about the arguments and environment. That is the one command that I cannot hit <enter> on reflexively. (Individual files I do accidentally delete by accident, just no "-rf".)
If you're ever in an environment where you have a large number of hosts that you login to -- you're a sysadmin, or working on clusters -- you'll learn you cannot always rely on crutches like aliasing rm etc. with "-i". You have to pay attention and reflect before you hit CR.
Many, many years ago I worked in an auto body shop. The owner of the shop had a simple rule, it didn't matter what went into the repair job. For all he cared you could fill a hole in a quarter panel with moldy donuts and used up steel wool pads, just as long as the end result appeared completely professional to the customer.
An apt analogy. Micros**t products are like a car made of moldy donuts and used up steel wool pads that looks good.
It's nice if my car looks good, but there other things that are a little more important -- for instance the car should work and it shouldn't just blow up when I'm trying to get to work. (Not that it should blow up when I'm heading for the mountains.)
As others point out, the technique has been used for many years.
It's not even a real solution. The article says:
From the incoming query it sees that Alice is currently registered at the IP address 1.1.1.1 and a quick test reveals that her audio data *always comes from* UDP port 1414 [emphasis mine].
Really, always? Why do you know this? Because you tested it with your one client and the particular version of the one OS you use?
That's the problem with this technique: it might work for some or even most NAT implementations but it cannot always work. Because NAT means that the source address and port of all outgoing packets is re-written. The NAT box is not required to follow any pattern in how it assigns the source port numbers for NAT'ed packets; in fact a good NAT box should not allow the ports it uses to be guessed. Of course the OpenBSD packet filter chooses outbound port numbers in a random (cryptographically strong if you have the appropriate hardware) manner, and this technique will not work if one of the packet filters is OpenBSD. (I don't know much about the other packet filters.)
Sure, for a freebie like Skype, who cares if if the thing only works "most" of the time? But this is not a solution, it's just relying on undocumented behaviour of some NAT implementations.
Thank god there's never been an ass bomber, think what we'd have to go through!
I used to think that if I ever wanted to do something nice for my fellow travellers, I'd get on an airplane and try to light an obvious looking fuse on my pants. Voila! All pants must henceforth be taken off and sent through the X-Ray Machine! Surely that would make them see this "security theatre" for the farce it is, and institute some real security, the non-glamorous kind.
I realized I was too optimistic when the Kip Hawley Is An Idiot story broke. Even the TSA themselves know that they're nothing but a farce!
Slashdot Mirror
You need ear training. No need to buy an expensive tool for that, here's a flash program to practice intervals:
Interval Trainer (Yes, it works under Linux.)
The site has a bunch of other flash tools, but I think the interval trainer is the most useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protected_t itles/April_2007/List
And there it is, right at the top of the page.
Well, I don't know... many of my ancestors are apes!
To be pedantic: humans are apes. So we could say that all apes -- including humans -- have a common ancestor, call it the ur-ape. (And that this ur-ape was not an ancestor of monkeys, baboons, or bears.) You could say gibbons and humans are evolved from an ancestor that was neither human nor gibbon.
How?
I have a wireless network that I want the people of my community (or even someone in the bookstore next door) to be able to use. How do I indicate this? Do I need to set my SSID to be "Knock on No. 42 Adams St. and ask for Zaphod"?
My DSL just went down, and I need to visit my ISPs website and open a trouble ticket. I see that there are 7 networks available, with names like "Adam's World" and "Pete and Chris" (and of course "linksys"). How do I know which ones I can use?
What we need is an agreed-upon keyword I can use in the SSID indicating that visitors are welcome.
(What ever happened to sharing, and love thy neighbour? Do we not live in a society (and a very wealthy one at that)? Everyone should share their networks. Just a few simple precautions: port 25 is blocked on the wireless network, and there's a firewall between the wireless and wired networks. My DSL is fast enough that guests don't impact my "important" work on the wired network -- if it weren't, I'd use traffic shaping to throttle wireless guests.)
Of course minors don't have all the rights that an adult has, and that's how it should be. For instance, I have the right to enter into contracts, but minors do not. An adult cannot be compelled to attend school, but you bet a minor can. You do not have freedom of speech, religion, etc. when you're 10 and Mom says you either have to go to church with your family or stay in your room and do your homework.
(Of course there are also ridiculous restrictions we place on our children, but that's a problem in our implementation, not of the principle.)
Yeah, just like electric cars are stupid because there aren't batteries just lying around.
You got it right that the compressed air is just a storage medium, not a source of energy.
Which of these do you think it's easier to control emissions etc. on: a centrally located power plant maintained regularly and run by people whose job it is do that, or a car owned by a person of unknown ability and indifferent maintenance?
Do you really think that a hydrogen/fuel-cell/electric car will do "better" in an unindustrialized society? Does your "better" include ease and cost of maintenance?
Then your overhead is 100%. They promise an overhead of 14%.
There are much better error correction schemes than "duplicate the data" -- look up Reed-Solomon.
Strawman argument.
It seems you are using physicalist in a technical sense not equivalent to empiricism or positivism. You say you are a "pure physicalist"; what does that mean? A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that physicalists believe "that there are no kinds of things other than physical things." Is that the case? Does your physicalism include the integers? Do you believe that the mind is a specific physical thing that's not the brain?
I'm a positivist. My world is simple: things have values that we give them. The "rightness" of stepping on or shooting something is exactly what we say it is. There is no intrinsic reason torturing puppies (or unlawful combatants) is wrong; we empathise with other living things and decide that torture is wrong. Cf the social contract and all that.
To go back to your original statement,
What is this "spirituality"? Is it "the things we talk about that cannot be physically measured"? If so, it doesn't seem to be a very useful term. When people say "spirituality" it's been my experience that they're talking about the supernatural -- deities, ghosts, ESP, and all that other crap. My life does not have any "spirituality" and I think it's a pretty full one.Being called stupid no longer upsets me.
Non sequitur!
By this argument, believing that all matter is made up of the same atoms is "problematical".
Or do you believe that "life" isn't just atoms and molecules, but requires a Special Someone to breathe life into what used to just be plain ol' matter?
I guess you haven't been following the shenanigans of Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers: "We have a very serious issue with librarians." "If everyone gets a free copy," she says, "the publisher and the writer and others involved in making the book go unpaid."
You mean a coincidence?
If I flip a coin a thousand times, and there's an unbroken sequence of 42 heads in there, do I have superpowers?
What if I tell you that last night I had a dream that I would flip 42 heads in a row?
"Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp"---out of the blue."
For your statement to be correct, everyone who had "ESP" would be so persecuted. That's a bogus claim.
If I had this superpower, and I saw that others with this power were being persecuted, I would keep quiet and only use my powers for selfish gain. Winning at poker or the stock market of course, but who here wouldn't also use it to get babes? And there's your evolutionary fitness right there. If a heritable trait confers a reproductive advantage it becomes common in the population.
The simple fact is that all this mumbo jumbo (whether ESP, alien kidnappings, or the magical power of crystals) is just that -- anecdotal crap with no basis in reality.
You're confusing rights with duties and responsibilities. A police officer has certain rights from being a human; but it's their job and duty to go after lawbreakers.
A policeman on duty is an agent of the state and has more restrictions than a private citizen. We train them, pay them, and give them guns; so we hold them to a higher standard than Joe Blow.
Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, i.e. on top of a volcano -- which means there's a lot of heat very close to the surface. In the middle of a continental mass -- say Colorado -- you have to go much deeper to get to usable heat and it may not be feasible.
(But there is a giant volcano under Yellowstone. Hey, maybe that's Cheney's energy plan!)
So is it your claim that India is one of those places that have this "true level of hunger", where "there simply isn't enough food"? On what basis do you make this claim?
You'll find that hunger in India has the usual causes: unscrupulous businessmen and government officials beholden to them. (Hmmm, sound familiar?)
And, to bring this back on topic, do you seriously believe that unless you've solved problem A you can't work on problem B? In other words, as long as there are starving children in India, India can't work on, say, computers.
If you replace a million sensors with one sensor, for the same sort of exposure you'll need a million times the time. (Or, since the claim for the device is that you don't need to sample everything since you're compressing with JPEG, let's say half a million times.)
But we want the entire frame to be captured in "the same instant" (or you'll see strange artifacts from moving objects).
Let's say we want an exposure of about 1/100s. So, can these micro-mirrors switch at a 5x10^7/s rate (20 nanoseconds)? Since the mirror has to be stable for the interval, the switching time needs to be a fraction of that. So, can these bacterium-sized physical mirrors switch in 10ns?
Fiddlesticks! There is no programming language where the fraction is a common type. (Or have you switched over to binary in your day-to-day speech, because we're in the computer age?)
That's right. And I build my own computers too. Starting from refining the ores.
Actually I don't use history substitution, just command-line editing -- ^Rrm to bring back the last rm, and hit return. If there's a "-rf" on the line the alarm goes off and I examine the command before hitting return; if not -- well, that's why we have backups, and the few hours of work I just lost is just a valuable lesson in the use of power tools. At least with our power tools we don't lose fingers.
(I learned my lessons being the lowest grunt on the totem pole (aka tape monkey). When I screwed up and needed to restore something from the backups, I'd be the one doing the shit-work. Very liberating to be able to screw up and not have someone yell at you.)
I only use absolute paths with "rm -rf". Using an absolute path means you can recall it from the history and re-execute it, no matter what the current directory happens to be. At the same time I want to reduce the number of keys I have to type.
Also, those commands are in a sub-shell. I use sub-shells sparingly, because any changes you make in the environment in a sub-shell do not propagate back to the caller. I have suffered many hours of trying to figure out why the damn variable "kept getting reset" when it was set in a sub-shell. But I suppose it makes sense to use two "pay attention!" operations together.
Many years of being a sysadmin put in place a low-level reflex so that every time my eyes see "rm -rf " I immediately step back, reset, and think about the arguments and environment. That is the one command that I cannot hit <enter> on reflexively. (Individual files I do accidentally delete by accident, just no "-rf".)
If you're ever in an environment where you have a large number of hosts that you login to -- you're a sysadmin, or working on clusters -- you'll learn you cannot always rely on crutches like aliasing rm etc. with "-i". You have to pay attention and reflect before you hit CR.
An apt analogy. Micros**t products are like a car made of moldy donuts and used up steel wool pads that looks good.
It's nice if my car looks good, but there other things that are a little more important -- for instance the car should work and it shouldn't just blow up when I'm trying to get to work. (Not that it should blow up when I'm heading for the mountains.)
As others point out, the technique has been used for many years.
It's not even a real solution. The article says:
Really, always? Why do you know this? Because you tested it with your one client and the particular version of the one OS you use?
That's the problem with this technique: it might work for some or even most NAT implementations but it cannot always work. Because NAT means that the source address and port of all outgoing packets is re-written. The NAT box is not required to follow any pattern in how it assigns the source port numbers for NAT'ed packets; in fact a good NAT box should not allow the ports it uses to be guessed. Of course the OpenBSD packet filter chooses outbound port numbers in a random (cryptographically strong if you have the appropriate hardware) manner, and this technique will not work if one of the packet filters is OpenBSD. (I don't know much about the other packet filters.)
Sure, for a freebie like Skype, who cares if if the thing only works "most" of the time? But this is not a solution, it's just relying on undocumented behaviour of some NAT implementations.
I used to think that if I ever wanted to do something nice for my fellow travellers, I'd get on an airplane and try to light an obvious looking fuse on my pants. Voila! All pants must henceforth be taken off and sent through the X-Ray Machine! Surely that would make them see this "security theatre" for the farce it is, and institute some real security, the non-glamorous kind.
I realized I was too optimistic when the Kip Hawley Is An Idiot story broke. Even the TSA themselves know that they're nothing but a farce!