Do you think you would have ever heard about these protesters if they weren't wearing hazmat suits?
Protesting is nothing but advertising. Advertising is about getting and holding attention long enough for a message to stick. Sensationalism sells. About the only thing that sells better is sex.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal, that they have certain rights..." Along with "creator", >another word disappeared - "inalienable". Because once we don't believe in God, and that He gave us these rights, then >we just have them because... well, because we decided that we have them. And that means that we (or the majority of "we") >can decide that we don't have them. The rights aren't inalienable any more. > >When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
I believe in God, but I don't buy it.
First of all, the only reason the word "inalienable" disappeared with the word "God" is because you chose to omit it. One could just as easily argue that right is right (and rights are rights) regardless of whether or not there is a god. I bet you there are a hundred different religions that are radically different in their interpretaton of god and religion and yet are consistent in what is considered moral behavior. Since they can't all be right, how would it be that all of the wrong practioners have secured the idea of "right" and "rights"?
Also, let's face it - no matter what god was in vogue at any point in history, MEN, with agendas, and NOT a god, have constantly been trying to tell other men what rights they think their god conveys unto other men. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, it's clear that in many cases the dictation has merely been to further an agenda, and not to secure rights for others.
>Its time for the encryption phones to start appearing on the market.
I agree. And moreover, like I've been saying, it's time to just start encrypting everything. Email. Web surfing. P2P. The whole damn kit and kaboodle needs to be encrypted, so that it becomes a waste of time to try and pick out the "good stuff" whizzing by on the internet.
If you have probable cause to go after a/specific stream/ of data, no doubt the NSA or someone can crack it. But this wholesale sifting of anything and everything needs to stop.
If all data were sent encrypted, this would not be a problem - it would be just like the US postal mail today - too much effort to try and intercept/all/ mail - but with enough effort and suspicion, you can still get at/some/ mail.
>Not at all. This is not even fragmentation. You forgot that this is FOSS here. >All these distros are compatible.
I've got a BS in Computer Science, and I didn't know that. I haven't done much with Unix in about 10 years, back when I played with HP-UX. Since that time, I've been vaguely aware of all these distributions of Linux, but didn't know what differentiated them, what made one a better choice than another, or that they were all "compatible".
How would your average PC user know?
>Nobody does that. Mandriva will present you Mandriva commercial offerings >and nothing else. Go check their website if you don't believe me. Yes, >what you are saying is stupid, you just have to realise it.
No, you have misunderstood what he was saying. He was not claiming that any one company will present 50 different choices. Obviously if you go to Red Hat's web site you are most likely going to be presented with the Red Hat distribution.
He was saying that the user is presented with many many choices of distributions, presented by "the world". The "you" in his sentence was not anyone in particular.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." - Alexander Tyler
I would think everyone, especially those against pr0n, would want to confine all pr0n, as much as possible, into one neat little box, where it could be easily filtered out.
I would think everyone, especially those for pr0n, would want to confine all pr0n, as much as possible, into one neat little box, where it could be easily found.
Steve
I agree - why no decentralization of energy?
on
"H-Prize" Announced
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· Score: 3, Interesting
>Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking >at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.
Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?
What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.
From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.
Steve
The environment doesn't vote (n/t)
on
"H-Prize" Announced
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Here we have yet another pipeline owner trying to control what data can flow through their pipes.
This is just like the other pipeline owners who are trying to control the speed of different things passing through their pipes and for a fee you get better speed.
The pipeline owners need to get wise really quick to the fact that we are paying them for only one thing - a pipe of some certain size. They have no business whatsoever doing anything to what is flowing through that pipe.
If they can't figure it out, we are going to need government intervention to help them figure it out.
Content providers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Consumers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Bandwidth purchasers should be able to use what they are paying for - period.
If the pipeline owners are not making enough money because people are using what they are paying for, then they need to raise their prices.
I don't have a problem with different tiers of service offerings. I have this already at home - there are two or three levels of speed I could pay my ISP for. I imagine Google has similar options.
The inconsistency here is that the pipeline owners charge for tiers of service, but they don't guarantee any level of service - it's "best effort". If they want to start charging for specific levels of service and holding people's feet to the fire, then it better go both ways. If I'm paying for the "gold" level of service I better get it.
I will not pay the same price as a regular DVD for an inferior product. First of all, the downloaded version should cost less because there is no physical item to be manufactured. Second of all, it should be functionally equivalent to a DVD. Instead, it is functionally inferior to a DVD, thus it should, again, cost less than a DVD.
Since it seems security devices are always being compromised, I'd hate to have to cut myself open every time one of these things had been likewise compromised.
I agree - an RFID watch would be much better - perhaps an RFID watch that can identify the person wearing it biometrically, even.
I don't really give two shits about how much it costs a business to do business.
I only care about one thing: How much does the product cost/me/?
It is absurd that if a piece of media on a CD costs $1 in one country that it should cost $2 in another.
This, of course, is why the media cartels love region codes - so they can control how much different parts of the world have to pay for their products. It's all about squeezing each market for as much as it will bear. Sorry, Charlie, for digital data, there is only one market - the world.
This is the other edge of the double-edged sword of globalization. Corporations are reaping the benefits of manufacturing wherever it is cheapest. Consumers deserve to be able to SHOP wherever it is cheapest.
When I came through the CS program at Georgia Southern back in the early 1990s, they were still using Pascal to teach programming, even though C was one of the premier languages at the time. They finally did switch to using C to teach programming, after I had already gone through the programming classes.
Traditional universities have two major problems: 1) they tie up well voer 50% of your curriculum with "liberal arts" BS that does not contribute to your technical skill sets, which is primarily what an employer is interested in. 2) They are very slow to keep up with evolving technologies.
I looked at the ITT/DeVry/AIT coursework and it looked very cutting-edge, with very little "fluff".
The only reason the government hasn't done such things is because it is technically difficult to do.
Believe me, if they could do it with the ease you can monitor electronic traffic they would have been doing it from day one.
I still would not be surprised in the least if there are giant mail sorting machines at the major processing places that use ultrasound, MRI, or radar of some kind to scan letters in envelopes and be able to "read" them layer by layer through OCR.
>I'd imagine that access to the Guide Plus (now TV Guide On Screen [gemstartvguide.com]) listings is not actually free, >that consumer electronics manufacturers pay royalties to Gemstar for use of related patents and know-how with the >condition that advertisements in the service shall be displayed without modification. Makers of MythTV boxes are >unlikely to be large enough to be able to negotiate with Gemstar.
My ATI TV Wonder tuner card in my PC supports the Guide+ service and it's rudimentary DVR feature makes use of it. I'm surprised some enterprising young hacker hasn't built a MythTV around it., EULAs be damned.
>If you are not willing to subscribe to the DVR manufacturer's TV listings service, >then are you willing to subscribe to TV Guide magazine (also a service) and key >in your own TV listings?
This information is already provided by many content providers for free. I get Guide+ program listings on my TV sets and on my computer for free. There is no need to subscribe to a service to get a program listing, nor shoult there be. If the content provider wants me to watch their content, they need to provide a way for me to alter my schedule to watch or record it. It is in the content providers' best interest to provide free scheduling information.
The grandparent is right - a DVR is a product, not a service. The only "challenge" here is it's hard to create an unending revenue stream from a product, hence the desire to try and market it as a service.
>Then again, perhaps it would be better to dump the human out of the loop >altogether and rely on AI to determine if an item of luggage warrants further >attention... but these days it's still cheaper to use people to do it and pay >them peanuts at the same time...
So how many peanuts do you think those people will get when your AI replaces them?
Maybe, in fact, the laws of physics are in a state of flux, and, perhaps, have been since the beginning of time. Perhaps the change was rapid in the first billionths of a second of the birth of the universe, and since then the rate of change has been growing slower and slower as the universe expands?
Perhaps the things we have assumed are constant merely/seem/ constant because they change so slowly?
Slashdot Mirror
Beliefs not based on logic cannot be swayed by logic
Steve
Do you think you would have ever heard about these protesters if they weren't wearing hazmat suits?
Protesting is nothing but advertising. Advertising is about getting and holding attention long enough for a message to stick. Sensationalism sells. About the only thing that sells better is sex.
Next time they should try naked chicks.
Steve
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal, that they have certain rights..." Along with "creator",
>another word disappeared - "inalienable". Because once we don't believe in God, and that He gave us these rights, then
>we just have them because... well, because we decided that we have them. And that means that we (or the majority of "we")
>can decide that we don't have them. The rights aren't inalienable any more.
>
>When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
I believe in God, but I don't buy it.
First of all, the only reason the word "inalienable" disappeared with the word "God" is because you chose to omit it. One could just as easily argue that right is right (and rights are rights) regardless of whether or not there is a god. I bet you there are a hundred different religions that are radically different in their interpretaton of god and religion and yet are consistent in what is considered moral behavior. Since they can't all be right, how would it be that all of the wrong practioners have secured the idea of "right" and "rights"?
Also, let's face it - no matter what god was in vogue at any point in history, MEN, with agendas, and NOT a god, have constantly been trying to tell other men what rights they think their god conveys unto other men. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, it's clear that in many cases the dictation has merely been to further an agenda, and not to secure rights for others.
Rights erode because of apathy, nothing more.
Steve
>Its time for the encryption phones to start appearing on the market.
/specific stream/ of data, no doubt the NSA or someone can crack it. But this wholesale sifting of anything and everything needs to stop.
I agree. And moreover, like I've been saying, it's time to just start encrypting everything. Email. Web surfing. P2P. The whole damn kit and kaboodle needs to be encrypted, so that it becomes a waste of time to try and pick out the "good stuff" whizzing by on the internet.
If you have probable cause to go after a
Steve
>We aren't under the constant threat of global annihilation like we used to be.
Actually, you've just grown acclimated to it. It's still there, same as it always was.
Steve
If all data were sent encrypted, this would not be a problem - it would be just like the US postal mail today - too much effort to try and intercept /all/ mail - but with enough effort and suspicion, you can still get at /some/ mail.
Steve
>Not at all. This is not even fragmentation. You forgot that this is FOSS here.
>All these distros are compatible.
I've got a BS in Computer Science, and I didn't know that. I haven't done much with Unix in about 10 years, back when I played with HP-UX. Since that time, I've been vaguely aware of all these distributions of Linux, but didn't know what differentiated them, what made one a better choice than another, or that they were all "compatible".
How would your average PC user know?
>Nobody does that. Mandriva will present you Mandriva commercial offerings
>and nothing else. Go check their website if you don't believe me. Yes,
>what you are saying is stupid, you just have to realise it.
No, you have misunderstood what he was saying. He was not claiming that any one company will present 50 different choices. Obviously if you go to Red Hat's web site you are most likely going to be presented with the Red Hat distribution.
He was saying that the user is presented with many many choices of distributions, presented by "the world". The "you" in his sentence was not anyone in particular.
Steve
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." - Alexander Tyler
Steve
Hey, that's pretty spiff stuff. My dad was heavily involved with the Wankel engine for racing. Can't wait to show this to him.
Steve
I would think everyone, especially those against pr0n, would want to confine all pr0n, as much as possible, into one neat little box, where it could be easily filtered out.
I would think everyone, especially those for pr0n, would want to confine all pr0n, as much as possible, into one neat little box, where it could be easily found.
Steve
>Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking
>at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.
Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?
What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.
Lately I've been doing a lot of googling on biodiesel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel ), ethanol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol ), and even wood gas generators (pyrolysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis )
From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.
Steve
n/t
Here we have yet another pipeline owner trying to control what data can flow through their pipes.
This is just like the other pipeline owners who are trying to control the speed of different things passing through their pipes and for a fee you get better speed.
The pipeline owners need to get wise really quick to the fact that we are paying them for only one thing - a pipe of some certain size. They have no business whatsoever doing anything to what is flowing through that pipe.
If they can't figure it out, we are going to need government intervention to help them figure it out.
Steve
Basically, what I'm saying is, I don't mind if the pipeline owners want to charge end users different rates for a spigot on their end of the pipe.
But once data is IN THE PIPELINE, all data should be routed equally.
Steve
Content providers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Consumers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Bandwidth purchasers should be able to use what they are paying for - period.
If the pipeline owners are not making enough money because people are using what they are paying for, then they need to raise their prices.
I don't have a problem with different tiers of service offerings. I have this already at home - there are two or three levels of speed I could pay my ISP for. I imagine Google has similar options.
The inconsistency here is that the pipeline owners charge for tiers of service, but they don't guarantee any level of service - it's "best effort". If they want to start charging for specific levels of service and holding people's feet to the fire, then it better go both ways. If I'm paying for the "gold" level of service I better get it.
Steve
I will not pay the same price as a regular DVD for an inferior product. First of all, the downloaded version should cost less because there is no physical item to be manufactured. Second of all, it should be functionally equivalent to a DVD. Instead, it is functionally inferior to a DVD, thus it should, again, cost less than a DVD.
Steve
Since it seems security devices are always being compromised, I'd hate to have to cut myself open every time one of these things had been likewise compromised.
I agree - an RFID watch would be much better - perhaps an RFID watch that can identify the person wearing it biometrically, even.
Steve
I don't really give two shits about how much it costs a business to do business.
/me/?
I only care about one thing: How much does the product cost
It is absurd that if a piece of media on a CD costs $1 in one country that it should cost $2 in another.
This, of course, is why the media cartels love region codes - so they can control how much different parts of the world have to pay for their products. It's all about squeezing each market for as much as it will bear. Sorry, Charlie, for digital data, there is only one market - the world.
This is the other edge of the double-edged sword of globalization. Corporations are reaping the benefits of manufacturing wherever it is cheapest. Consumers deserve to be able to SHOP wherever it is cheapest.
Steve
When I came through the CS program at Georgia Southern back in the early 1990s, they were still using Pascal to teach programming, even though C was one of the premier languages at the time. They finally did switch to using C to teach programming, after I had already gone through the programming classes.
Traditional universities have two major problems: 1) they tie up well voer 50% of your curriculum with "liberal arts" BS that does not contribute to your technical skill sets, which is primarily what an employer is interested in. 2) They are very slow to keep up with evolving technologies.
I looked at the ITT/DeVry/AIT coursework and it looked very cutting-edge, with very little "fluff".
Steve
The only reason the government hasn't done such things is because it is technically difficult to do.
Believe me, if they could do it with the ease you can monitor electronic traffic they would have been doing it from day one.
I still would not be surprised in the least if there are giant mail sorting machines at the major processing places that use ultrasound, MRI, or radar of some kind to scan letters in envelopes and be able to "read" them layer by layer through OCR.
Steve
>I'd imagine that access to the Guide Plus (now TV Guide On Screen [gemstartvguide.com]) listings is not actually free,
>that consumer electronics manufacturers pay royalties to Gemstar for use of related patents and know-how with the
>condition that advertisements in the service shall be displayed without modification. Makers of MythTV boxes are
>unlikely to be large enough to be able to negotiate with Gemstar.
My ATI TV Wonder tuner card in my PC supports the Guide+ service and it's rudimentary DVR feature makes use of it. I'm surprised some enterprising young hacker hasn't built a MythTV around it., EULAs be damned.
Steve
>If you are not willing to subscribe to the DVR manufacturer's TV listings service,
>then are you willing to subscribe to TV Guide magazine (also a service) and key
>in your own TV listings?
This information is already provided by many content providers for free. I get Guide+ program listings on my TV sets and on my computer for free. There is no need to subscribe to a service to get a program listing, nor shoult there be. If the content provider wants me to watch their content, they need to provide a way for me to alter my schedule to watch or record it. It is in the content providers' best interest to provide free scheduling information.
The grandparent is right - a DVR is a product, not a service. The only "challenge" here is it's hard to create an unending revenue stream from a product, hence the desire to try and market it as a service.
Steve
>Then again, perhaps it would be better to dump the human out of the loop
>altogether and rely on AI to determine if an item of luggage warrants further
>attention... but these days it's still cheaper to use people to do it and pay
>them peanuts at the same time...
So how many peanuts do you think those people will get when your AI replaces them?
Steve
I'm wondering the same thing myself.
/seem/ constant because they change so slowly?
Maybe, in fact, the laws of physics are in a state of flux, and, perhaps, have been since the beginning of time. Perhaps the change was rapid in the first billionths of a second of the birth of the universe, and since then the rate of change has been growing slower and slower as the universe expands?
Perhaps the things we have assumed are constant merely
Steve
Pardon my ignorance, but the only reason I run Windows at home is for games, like Call of Duty.
Does this virtualization stuff mean I can now switch to Linux and run a virtualized Windows session on it to play my Windows-based games?
Steve