I stand corrected on Shaw -- I was relying on memory, and the line seems to fit Franklin's image.
On the following:
setting an appropriate penalty for an action isn't stating that that's your price for accepting that action.
If you mean, "GP can claim that the fine in this case should be no more than $1K, without saying that's his or society's price for accepting that action", I strenuously disagree. It is the perpetrator of the offense that does the 'accepting' in those situations. Cases like this are exposed in the press all the time -- the corporate fines that are too low to prevent malfeasance; the DUI penalties that are too lax to keep someone from drinking and driving again...
I want these penalties to be high, because freedom of speech is sacred. Any erosion anywhere makes it easier to erode these rights somewhere else. And I sure as hell wouldn't want someone thinking they can get away with restricting my or my children's freedom of speech for only $1K.
As a sort of sociological experiment on this -- I remember reading about a day-care center that had problems with parents picking up their kids late. In an effort to reduce the practice, they instituted a $5 fine for each time a child was picked up late. They were astonished to find that the late pickups actually increased, because the $5 figure had clearly established the 'price of guilt' -- rather than a vague shame about abusing the system, the parents got off scot free after paying $5.
Unfortunately our legal system is tilted towards monetary penalties -- they need to be set high enough to avoid creating the same effect.
...with two followups taking me seriously, and one 'Informative' mod, I was thinking I was going to have to give up sarcasm completely, and switch to slapstick.
--
"I see how it is - the fat man makes a pun and everyone wets themselves; I..." -- no, wait, that's somebody else's sig.
And i suppose if I had a "broken" gun in my basement and you broke in and stole it, then tried to use it and injured yourself, you could sue me right?
...believe it or not, this is essentially true. A lawyer friend of mine (in NJ) tells me that if you booby-trap your house against thieves, a thief breaks in, and is injured, he can sue you and has some chance of winning. I forget what the actual liability is (it's not 'unsafe working conditions' or something urban-legend-sounding like that), but there are grounds for a suit.
If enticing the electrons to move to a lower orbit releases energy, it's going to require energy input to make them return to a normal orbit. If and when the atoms "collapse", the reaction will be endothermic, not exothermic - you'll cool the surrounding matter, not cook it.
Quick! We must begin a crash program to create hydrinos in order to reverse global warming!
The "looking over your shoulder" problem is more difficult to deal with than you might think. More than once I've had issues with users stalking up behind me and reading my screen before I even knew they were there.
Sun used to give away stick-on convex mirrors as promos -- I assume they were to stick on the upper corner of your monitor to alert you to stealth shoulder surfers.
You can get an equivalent tool in most auto-supply stores -- the kind you're supposed to stick in a corner of your side mirrors to give you a wider field of view. Once it's on your monitor, any movement in it (signaling an approaching surfer) catches your attention.
Re:part 2- not trolling, just a little frustrated
on
OpenBSD 3.8 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent. [...] I want to quickly download, install, poke around.
Have I got a tip for you. Here's a provider of free OpenBSD accounts you can SSH to:
All you have to do is send in an email request explaining that you want to learn about OpenBSD, and they'll set you up with a free account. (It may take a day or two; that's the price you pay for a free shell). Enjoy!
I don't do mail order. If its not in a bookshop then as far as I'm
concerned its not out there.
I know what you mean. I don't do that newfangled Internet stuff - if I can't type it up on my Leading Edge D and send it in to a BBS, it's not really communication.
I, for one, dream of the day when a handsome, leather-bound set of Wikipaedia articles will sit on a shelf in my parlor next to the Victrola... now THAT would be progress!
Personally, I think you should get a sense of humor
I have a sense of humor, yet the post I was replying to was about as funny as it was respectful. If anything, he should get +5 for trying.
Actually, the point is that questions like "are you available" aren't funny at all: it is degrading.
Wow, what an insufferable dingbat you are. Long-winded PC corrections of obvious harmless humor? You must be an undergrad with a more-feminist-than-thou complex.
Let me break it down for you -- if it wasn't humor, if the guy was actually trying to pick her up, the guy who wrote the 5, simple, rather-funny-in-context words, "what are you doing later?" wouldn't have posted AC! got it?
When you're a few years older, you'll understand that men and women occasionally joke about such things, everyone knows it's humor, a joke about the cliche-ness of the line itself in that context -- not a boorish pickup line as you seem to think.
Why should there be a necessary expiring of information, anyway? Can you imagine if every bit of information from more than 80 years ago suddenly disappeared? Imagine what we'd lose.
Hear, hear! I'm reminded of TFA of a day or two ago about resistance to Black Death conferring resistance to HIV. Public records (birth and death) over 400 years old were used to establish family trees of BD survivors who stayed in the community and had descendants still in the community. Without those accessible public records, this medical research would have been impossible. This is exactly what MA is trying to avoid.
Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?
I don't think I or the government have any say over that life or are responsible for any sort of protection of it until it is naturally detached from the mother. Until then, it's her call.
I'm basically pro-choice, but I find statements like this a bit hard-edged. I'm morally uncomfortable with the concept of (alleged) Chinese-style abortions (i.e., late third trimester, possibly days before natural delivery would have occurred) that this seems to permit.
The detached-from-the-mother standard has the procedural virtue that it is unambiguous compared to the other standards (but still seems to allow 'abortion' after the baby is born, but before the umbilical is cut and the placenta is delivered!). However, it increases the moral ambiguity for me. Does anybody get my point, or have I just opened myself up for flaming?
On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation. In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon)
Ok, class, welcome to Philosophy of Mind 201. As your homework for tonight, come up with 3 examples demonstrating that:
free will is not the same as consciousness
free will is not the same as self-awareness
consciousness is not the same as self-awareness
Your examples may include both biological and non-biological constructs, however you choose to define those terms.
This sound a little narrow to me: a file-format that is accessable in the indefinate future is in the interests of everyone. The government primarily exists to serve the population, although they should endeavour to treat thier workers well.
The trade off is potentially all of our futures as against what is in practice a short-term hold-back for a few.
This reminds me of the public-toilet debacle that NYC faces every few years -- someone gets the bright idea of installing those fabulous, automated, self-cleaning public toilet kiosks they have in Paris and many other European cities in NYC. The project goes along for a while, accumulating enthusiastic support, and then is shot down because they're not wheelchair-accessible. So because we're afraid of a situation where 'wheelchair users won't have anywhere to pee!', we stay in a situation where nobody has anywhere to pee.
To bring it back to the topic, with the money saved on MS Office licenses, MA could easily hire a temp whose job it was to do nothing but open OpenDocument docs in OO and resave them in a Word format for the blind workers.
Of course, we're also forgetting that by the time this article falls off the/. homepage, there will probably be workable text readers for the blind available in Linux and FreeBSD releases...
These things are horribly over-engineered. Not that it is a bad thing they are proving so resilliant, but we're now at 8x the "designed" life span. In my mind, that means they could have probably built it half as robust and still been outstanding pieces of machinery(and alot less expensive).
Wow, you take things very literally. A few points:
1. 'Robustness' isn't linear...
2. it isn't even well-defined.
3. It's an estimate, influenced by past experience, inducting over many designs - not a function of dollars spent in any predictable sense.
It might be interesting to work out the mean active useful life (estimated and actual) of all the Mars missions -- Opportunity and Spirit may just be bringing the actual mean back to the estimated mean, after all the mishaps with the other probes.
The corporation I work for has PWC as their Sarbanes-Oxley auditor. As soon as someone did this, the first question asked by them would be "Where is the Infrastructure Control Review? Security Control Review? Whats the access control procedure? Where was the process?!" Particularly for something as significant as a firewall.
IAASOA (I am a Sarbanes-Oxley auditor). The above only applies if the FW is protecting financial systems. The only issue here might be change management as it affects access to the internal network; it doesn't sound like he's running any A/R, Payroll,G/L, A/P systems here. And since he ended up just adding OpenBSD in front of the CheckPoint, he's still got his CheckPoint based controls in place.
Mod Parent Up... I agree with everything you said. I'm a Catholic, pretty much non-practicing at this point. I guess I'm not surprised that Jack Chick thinks that calling Catholics "Christian" is insulting to real Christians -- but is calling Methodists Christian insulting to Baptists?
What amuses me most is that the same people who will happily cooperate politically with Catholics to oppose abortion or support school vouchers will then drive home, turn on their radios, and listen to some fundie wingnut explain that the Pope is the antichrist or the whore of babylon.
"Christian" is one of those 'coded' terms in current American English. Everyone understands that when a public figure uses the word, he is referring to Protestants only, with Evangelicals in the forefront. The word excludes Catholics, Unitarians, and Quakers at the very least, and probably a few more denominations as well. It is more of a political identifier now, like "Reagan Democrat" or "soccer mom".
To get back on-topic, I went to a Catholic high school. While I agree that the restriction is nuts, you have to understand the atmosphere of such a school. Not only is it not like public school, it's even very different from a private secular school. Parents sign to admit their kids, and they're putting the school in charge of the child's moral development. From the school's viewpoint, telling kids "don't post in blogs" is much like telling them "don't do drugs" (also a kind of restriction on what they do outside of class).
Wacky stories from my school:
1. At a time when keeping boy's hair short was a major concern, one guy was suspended after shaving his head in the hope he could lower his swim-meet times. He was later readmitted- but made to wear a wig.
2. When Monty Python's "Life of Brian" came out, they made an officer of the student government go on the school's closed-circuit TV station (used for morning announcements) and deliver an essay attacking the film as anti-Christian and telling us we shouldn't watch it.
3. And yet... when it was revealed that the "Motorcycle Man" from the Village People was a graduate of our school (because his promoters sent the school a letter) they posted the letter on a glassed-in bulletin board, and played Village people music before the morning announcements for a week... just to shame us by association.
They're just weird, and want to run your life -- but the parents ask them to.
I love the Onion, but doesn't anybody else find it a bit lame that they're just using the standard presidential seal? I mean, with all the graphic-arts talent they have to draw on, they could have had some fun coming up with a 'slightly altered' seal they could use, and then the feds wouldn't be able to say squat.
If the Ramones
could throw together their own version, certainly the Onion could!
This is the puzzle I was going to submit. The version I heard used the term "pan balance" (think 'scales of justice') and "cannonballs".
FWIW, I can certify that this is a 'real' puzzle (no word/mind games or other trix, just pure logic) that admits an exact solution.
It helps if you think of the cannonballs as having numbers painted on them.
CORRECTION to the original version: It is always possible, using only 3 weighings, to determine not only which cannonball is the 'odd man out', but also whether it is heavier or lighter than the others. Hard to believe, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Acceleration due to the gravity of earth is 10 m/s^2, and you have an asteroid doing 550 times as much? Sounds like an error ...
On the following:
If you mean, "GP can claim that the fine in this case should be no more than $1K, without saying that's his or society's price for accepting that action", I strenuously disagree. It is the perpetrator of the offense that does the 'accepting' in those situations. Cases like this are exposed in the press all the time -- the corporate fines that are too low to prevent malfeasance; the DUI penalties that are too lax to keep someone from drinking and driving again...
I want these penalties to be high, because freedom of speech is sacred. Any erosion anywhere makes it easier to erode these rights somewhere else. And I sure as hell wouldn't want someone thinking they can get away with restricting my or my children's freedom of speech for only $1K.
As a sort of sociological experiment on this -- I remember reading about a day-care center that had problems with parents picking up their kids late. In an effort to reduce the practice, they instituted a $5 fine for each time a child was picked up late. They were astonished to find that the late pickups actually increased, because the $5 figure had clearly established the 'price of guilt' -- rather than a vague shame about abusing the system, the parents got off scot free after paying $5.
Unfortunately our legal system is tilted towards monetary penalties -- they need to be set high enough to avoid creating the same effect.
Ok, fine, how little will you accept to have your free-speech rights violated?
...
...
Oh, that little?
Maybe you just don't have all that much worth saying, then?
As Ben Franklin said, "Madam, we've already established what you are; now, we are just haggling over price."
...with two followups taking me seriously, and one 'Informative' mod, I was thinking I was going to have to give up sarcasm completely, and switch to slapstick.
..." -- no, wait, that's somebody else's sig.
--
"I see how it is - the fat man makes a pun and everyone wets themselves; I
That would be very risky for Linus to do. He'd get sued for copyright infringement by the estate of John Cage.
There are also people out there who prefer to read /. without having to wade through all the karma whoring....
You can get an equivalent tool in most auto-supply stores -- the kind you're supposed to stick in a corner of your side mirrors to give you a wider field of view. Once it's on your monitor, any movement in it (signaling an approaching surfer) catches your attention.
http://www.metawire.org/about.php
All you have to do is send in an email request explaining that you want to learn about OpenBSD, and they'll set you up with a free account. (It may take a day or two; that's the price you pay for a free shell). Enjoy!
I, for one, dream of the day when a handsome, leather-bound set of Wikipaedia articles will sit on a shelf in my parlor next to the Victrola... now THAT would be progress!
Let me break it down for you -- if it wasn't humor, if the guy was actually trying to pick her up, the guy who wrote the 5, simple, rather-funny-in-context words, "what are you doing later?" wouldn't have posted AC! got it?
When you're a few years older, you'll understand that men and women occasionally joke about such things, everyone knows it's humor, a joke about the cliche-ness of the line itself in that context -- not a boorish pickup line as you seem to think.
which would make the men more ... dense. gotcha.
Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?
Thought not.
The detached-from-the-mother standard has the procedural virtue that it is unambiguous compared to the other standards (but still seems to allow 'abortion' after the baby is born, but before the umbilical is cut and the placenta is delivered!). However, it increases the moral ambiguity for me. Does anybody get my point, or have I just opened myself up for flaming?
- free will is not the same as consciousness
- free will is not the same as self-awareness
- consciousness is not the same as self-awareness
Your examples may include both biological and non-biological constructs, however you choose to define those terms.To bring it back to the topic, with the money saved on MS Office licenses, MA could easily hire a temp whose job it was to do nothing but open OpenDocument docs in OO and resave them in a Word format for the blind workers.
Of course, we're also forgetting that by the time this article falls off the
Wow, you take things very literally. A few points:
1. 'Robustness' isn't linear...
2. it isn't even well-defined.
3. It's an estimate, influenced by past experience, inducting over many designs - not a function of dollars spent in any predictable sense.
It might be interesting to work out the mean active useful life (estimated and actual) of all the Mars missions -- Opportunity and Spirit may just be bringing the actual mean back to the estimated mean, after all the mishaps with the other probes.
IAASOA (I am a Sarbanes-Oxley auditor). The above only applies if the FW is protecting financial systems. The only issue here might be change management as it affects access to the internal network; it doesn't sound like he's running any A/R, Payroll,G/L, A/P systems here. And since he ended up just adding OpenBSD in front of the CheckPoint, he's still got his CheckPoint based controls in place.
Mod Parent Up... I agree with everything you said. I'm a Catholic, pretty much non-practicing at this point. I guess I'm not surprised that Jack Chick thinks that calling Catholics "Christian" is insulting to real Christians -- but is calling Methodists Christian insulting to Baptists?
... when it was revealed that the "Motorcycle Man" from the Village People was a graduate of our school (because his promoters sent the school a letter) they posted the letter on a glassed-in bulletin board, and played Village people music before the morning announcements for a week ... just to shame us by association.
What amuses me most is that the same people who will happily cooperate politically with Catholics to oppose abortion or support school vouchers will then drive home, turn on their radios, and listen to some fundie wingnut explain that the Pope is the antichrist or the whore of babylon.
"Christian" is one of those 'coded' terms in current American English. Everyone understands that when a public figure uses the word, he is referring to Protestants only, with Evangelicals in the forefront. The word excludes Catholics, Unitarians, and Quakers at the very least, and probably a few more denominations as well. It is more of a political identifier now, like "Reagan Democrat" or "soccer mom".
To get back on-topic, I went to a Catholic high school. While I agree that the restriction is nuts, you have to understand the atmosphere of such a school. Not only is it not like public school, it's even very different from a private secular school. Parents sign to admit their kids, and they're putting the school in charge of the child's moral development. From the school's viewpoint, telling kids "don't post in blogs" is much like telling them "don't do drugs" (also a kind of restriction on what they do outside of class).
Wacky stories from my school:
1. At a time when keeping boy's hair short was a major concern, one guy was suspended after shaving his head in the hope he could lower his swim-meet times. He was later readmitted- but made to wear a wig.
2. When Monty Python's "Life of Brian" came out, they made an officer of the student government go on the school's closed-circuit TV station (used for morning announcements) and deliver an essay attacking the film as anti-Christian and telling us we shouldn't watch it.
3. And yet
They're just weird, and want to run your life -- but the parents ask them to.
I love the Onion, but doesn't anybody else find it a bit lame that they're just using the standard presidential seal? I mean, with all the graphic-arts talent they have to draw on, they could have had some fun coming up with a 'slightly altered' seal they could use, and then the feds wouldn't be able to say squat.
If the Ramones could throw together their own version, certainly the Onion could!
MOD PARENT UP -INTERESTING
This is the puzzle I was going to submit. The version I heard used the term "pan balance" (think 'scales of justice') and "cannonballs".
FWIW, I can certify that this is a 'real' puzzle (no word/mind games or other trix, just pure logic) that admits an exact solution.
It helps if you think of the cannonballs as having numbers painted on them.
CORRECTION to the original version: It is always possible, using only 3 weighings, to determine not only which cannonball is the 'odd man out', but also whether it is heavier or lighter than the others. Hard to believe, but true.
Have fun!