My video card's fan is well away from the GPU, and non of of my motherboards have a fan anywhere except on the CPU. The last router I took apart used passive cooling for the processor.
No problem - you go build a full-size spinning metallic heat-sink powered by a magnetic field without a typical electric motor, and I'll gladly admit I was wrong. Until then, I'll stick with my assessment.
I mean, isn't it obvious that they just want him out of the way since he exposed some of their dirty little secrets, thus they created this whole sex crime charge to achieve that?
Yeah, the Swedes are pissed because he told the world what's really in their chocolate.
Use magnetic induction to do the spin and it pretty much can't fail. (Or at least, would be less prone to failure than existing designs, which should be all anyone cares about).
A magnet on top of your CPU? Sounds fun. Good way to relive your last LSD trip.
Why everything has to be all about money, money, money?
Because money is a representation of time and energy, and in a universe ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, everything is about time and energy.
Nothing in a "gift economy" is free. This is the same sort of reasoning used by proponents of socialism or communism: "oh, I like it when I get fre stuff!". How ignorant do you have to be in order to not realize that this is just another form of payment? A gift economy is based on the belief that if I give you what you want, you or someone else will give me what I want. Payment is implicit in the system - not everyone has to pay, but there have to be enough people paying in order to cover those who don't. It's the same as any financial system, except there's no need for an organized "welfare" or "unemployment" programs - the system inherently handles those issues by "taxing" those who provide the goods and services. And it suffers from the same problem as communism - namely, it encourages stagnation. It's workable on a small scale, within an isolated community (especially an online community) but tends to fall appart as soon as it's applied on a large scale.
"But PADDs were much more powerful than electronic note pads. "We realized that with the networking capabilities we had postulated for the ship, and given the [hypothetical] flexibility of the software, you should be able to fly the ship from the PADD," Okuda said."
I distinctly remember an episode where Wesley used a PADD to control a mini-tractor-beam / forcefield projector that he created. And wasn't there an episode where someone used a PADD to control the whole ship?
No citations, sorry, but I know for a fact that they did a lot more with them than just "something along the lines of a modern-day ereader".
I think you're overstating the "follow the money" factor. Sure, it's applicable sometimes, as in the Edison example, but:
1. It's certainly not the case in every such scare - for example, the cellphone "radiation" idjits - and I'd argue it's not even a factor in most.
and
2. Even when the initial fear is caused by intentional misinformation spread for personal profit, it very quickly takes on a life of it's own - for example, Andrew Wakefield. The anti-vax nuts don't care about profit, and the moral panic continues even though he's been exposed as a fraud.
No, I think the truth is much simpler: the vast majority of people are terrified of change, and the bigger the change, the more terrified they are. So going from a quil and an inkpot to a fountain-pen tends to cause relatively little fear, while going from a wax candle to a lightbulb powered by an electric generator tends to be a lot more frightening. They get even more terrified when it comes to their own bodies, so now we've got a large percentage of the population getting their panties in a bunch over GM foods, vaccines, and the medical system in general.
Thinking about the stupidity of our species always makes me think of Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
Re:In My Opinion, More So a Lack of Understanding
on
Technology and Moral Panic
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is that, for some people, "information" is seen as the enemy.... For a particularly tragic example, look at the American Tea Party - when presented with evidence that contradicts their views, they don't claim the evidence is wrong, but that evidence, logic and science are wrong.
I don't particularly like the tea party, but I gotta say I think you're completely out to lunch on this one. Every fringe group I've seen - from the 9/11 deniers, to the UFO nuts, to the Global Warming deniers (tea party) - ALL attempt to cloak themselves with the pretense of facts and science. Of course, they're completely wrong, and what they're doing doesn't come close to real science, but that's beside the point - I've yet to see any of these groups "claim that evidence, logic and science are wrong".
If I've missed something, please, I'd love to see some examples of your claim.
We wind up with the kind of booming middle class and first-world infrastructure we had during the 50's to 70's?
Naw, that only happens when the world is in ruins, and everyone has a personal tax-shelter. If you can get the Germans to act up again, I'm sure you could restore the US to it's former glory.
It makes a difference. If we accept that acting against the natural environment qualifies as tool-use, then walking is an example of tool use, since you're using the ground in order to propel yourself. If your definition of tool use is that broad, you end up with all kinds of absurdities.
Well, the Santa that many people describe probably doesn't exist (due to a lack of evidence where there should be evidence). They may move the goalposts, but the one they previously described most likely does not exist
There is only One Santa, and Nicholas is His name.
Santa's meant to have a physical presence here on Earth, which can effectively be disproved.
Nonsense. You can only disprove it in the sense of 'we looked, and he wasn't there', but that's the same as saying 'hey, we went into the heavens, and didn't see god' (god was, originally, supposed to be literally in the sky). Believers just move the goalposts - there's no reason why believers in Santa can't do the same. You looked at the North Pole? Well, he's under the ice. You looked under the ice? Well, he's REALLY deep under the water there. You got a detailed map of the whole sea-floor and that entire chunk of ocean? Must be under the sea-floor.
The god thing has far too many loopholes to be refuted so easily.
Like I said, "the god thing" isn't unique in that. Talk to a conspiracy-theorist some time. As long as they can run around willy-nilly, jumping from claim to claim at random, and move goalposts any time they feel like it, you'll never be able to convince them that they're wrong. That doesn't mean we can't disprove their claims - it only means that any time we disprove one, they either ignore us, add a new twist, or just make up a whole new claim to prop up their original premise. Religion is no different; it's the worlds oldest conspiracy theory.
I think you can fairly distinguish different supernatural stories from each other, based on what claims are being made. Like leprechauns can be disproved if the assertion is that you can find them at the end of *any* rainbow, and you create a small rainbow in a lab, where both ends can be seen at once.
Yes, that's fair. Likewise, we can say that the christian god cannot possibly exist if he's claimed to be omnipotent, omni-present, and omni-benevolent. But, as you already acknowledged, there's always a loophole. Maybe the leprechaun at the end of your laboratory-created rainbow was just really really small. Or invisible. And maybe the christian god has "a plan" which is so moral that us mere mortals just can't understand it.
Yep, as long as you're free to just make shit up, there's always an excuse.
Again - the existence of these "loopholes" doesn't mean we have to reserve judgment. As long as we're not willing to say "enough you fucking lunatics!" we're just putting ourselves in the position of eternally having to dance for anyone who can come up with some new bullshit. I'm not a big fan of that. At some point you have to say "ok, we've disproved this, let's move on to something else".
Everyone agrees Santa doesn't exist. Some people still believe god exists.
What people do or don't agree on is completely irrelevant. If he's going to say that he has no factual knowledge of the existence/non-existence of gods, the only way to remain consistent is to say the same thing about everything for which we have no evidence, including (but not limited to) Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Leprechauns, Unicorns, and the little purple lizard which lives in your ass (hey, just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it's not there).
Mind you - I'm not saying there is or isn't any higher being or whatnot. But I'm certainly in no position to claim any factual knowledge of the existence or lack thereof of such a being.
That's a bit of a cop-out. You've already compared gods to Santa, so why would you then go back and try to take an impartial position? Would you, likewise, say that you are in no position to claim any factual knowledge of the existence, or lack thereof, of Santa Claus?
Actually, in case you are serious, he wasn't talking about a physical separation; he was talking about a separate domain with different legal rules, but the traffic running over the same physical infrastructure. And he never mentioned the 5th amendment.
The heart of the Internet model is, as the saying goes "a sphere", where every node has equal access to every other node
No, it's not, nor has it ever been. Such a network would be completely impractical, both from a technological/economic perspective, and from a security perspective.
Society as a whole (when weighted by money rather than head-count) keeps trying to reject that in favour of it being a fancy way to broadcast: a few large hosts running Wal-Mart-sized data centres, many clients on as dumb a terminal as possible.
Right - people want functionality. They don't want every person to write their own version of facebook - they want a large service which everyone can access. Money has nothing to do with it - it's about usefulness.
Efforts to democratize information flow are opposed as either unserious utopianism or outright crime. (They can't seem to find a statute forbidding Wikileaks that doesn't forbid the Times, but from the rhetoric, you'd never guess.)
Complete nonsense, of course, supported by nothing other than your personal ideological biases.
When Hayden says that "users" 4th-amendment rights would be abrogated, he isn't thinking of all the users, not the big ones.
He's speaking about anonymity, dumbass. There would be no anonymity on the secure part of the net, by design. How exactly do "The Big Ones" get around that, and why would they want to? Have you put any thought into this?
...which really is the sole source of what passes for MainStreamMedia in the US, ever report that the organization which vets, or does the background checks for the TSA, is Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater USA???
Yeah, those goddamn MainStreamMedia refuse to publish bullshit that you just pulled out of your ass! Imagine that!
Whoever modded you "interesting" should be shot for being fatally credulous.
Terrorism itself is not the final goal, but it is an intermediate one.
Pah. So is having a good poop in the morning.
Given that the American public now lives in fear, often assuming everything abnormal is a serious threat, I'd say that anyone looking to cause terror in the United States has met that particular goal.
The public is always living in fear of something or other. So now we have a new boogyman, and the stranger-danger twits will take a break for a while so they can focus on harassing Abdul. Oh noes!
If your definition of 'success' is scaring the general public... well, you'd have to have some serious self esteem issues in order to aim that low. Might as well claim success because you had a good poop this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
My video card's fan is well away from the GPU, and non of of my motherboards have a fan anywhere except on the CPU. The last router I took apart used passive cooling for the processor.
No problem - you go build a full-size spinning metallic heat-sink powered by a magnetic field without a typical electric motor, and I'll gladly admit I was wrong. Until then, I'll stick with my assessment.
I mean, isn't it obvious that they just want him out of the way since he exposed some of their dirty little secrets, thus they created this whole sex crime charge to achieve that?
Yeah, the Swedes are pissed because he told the world what's really in their chocolate.
There's a wee bit of a difference between a magnet that's several inches away from your CPU, and one that's less than an inch away.
Use magnetic induction to do the spin and it pretty much can't fail. (Or at least, would be less prone to failure than existing designs, which should be all anyone cares about).
A magnet on top of your CPU? Sounds fun. Good way to relive your last LSD trip.
Why everything has to be all about money, money, money?
Because money is a representation of time and energy, and in a universe ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, everything is about time and energy.
But you know what - you are surrounded by people giving things for free. Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
Nothing in a "gift economy" is free. This is the same sort of reasoning used by proponents of socialism or communism: "oh, I like it when I get fre stuff!". How ignorant do you have to be in order to not realize that this is just another form of payment? A gift economy is based on the belief that if I give you what you want, you or someone else will give me what I want. Payment is implicit in the system - not everyone has to pay, but there have to be enough people paying in order to cover those who don't. It's the same as any financial system, except there's no need for an organized "welfare" or "unemployment" programs - the system inherently handles those issues by "taxing" those who provide the goods and services. And it suffers from the same problem as communism - namely, it encourages stagnation. It's workable on a small scale, within an isolated community (especially an online community) but tends to fall appart as soon as it's applied on a large scale.
TANSTAAFL
You're right - I was remembering something else:
"But PADDs were much more powerful than electronic note pads. "We realized that with the networking capabilities we had postulated for the ship, and given the [hypothetical] flexibility of the software, you should be able to fly the ship from the PADD," Okuda said."
Also, the Star Trek TNG Technical manual talks about the same thing.
I distinctly remember an episode where Wesley used a PADD to control a mini-tractor-beam / forcefield projector that he created. And wasn't there an episode where someone used a PADD to control the whole ship?
No citations, sorry, but I know for a fact that they did a lot more with them than just "something along the lines of a modern-day ereader".
Still, the point remains that its cost was largely due to its novelty.
You mean ... kinda like gold?
I think you're overstating the "follow the money" factor. Sure, it's applicable sometimes, as in the Edison example, but:
1. It's certainly not the case in every such scare - for example, the cellphone "radiation" idjits - and I'd argue it's not even a factor in most.
and
2. Even when the initial fear is caused by intentional misinformation spread for personal profit, it very quickly takes on a life of it's own - for example, Andrew Wakefield. The anti-vax nuts don't care about profit, and the moral panic continues even though he's been exposed as a fraud.
No, I think the truth is much simpler: the vast majority of people are terrified of change, and the bigger the change, the more terrified they are. So going from a quil and an inkpot to a fountain-pen tends to cause relatively little fear, while going from a wax candle to a lightbulb powered by an electric generator tends to be a lot more frightening. They get even more terrified when it comes to their own bodies, so now we've got a large percentage of the population getting their panties in a bunch over GM foods, vaccines, and the medical system in general.
Thinking about the stupidity of our species always makes me think of Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
The problem is that, for some people, "information" is seen as the enemy .... For a particularly tragic example, look at the American Tea Party - when presented with evidence that contradicts their views, they don't claim the evidence is wrong, but that evidence, logic and science are wrong.
I don't particularly like the tea party, but I gotta say I think you're completely out to lunch on this one. Every fringe group I've seen - from the 9/11 deniers, to the UFO nuts, to the Global Warming deniers (tea party) - ALL attempt to cloak themselves with the pretense of facts and science. Of course, they're completely wrong, and what they're doing doesn't come close to real science, but that's beside the point - I've yet to see any of these groups "claim that evidence, logic and science are wrong".
If I've missed something, please, I'd love to see some examples of your claim.
"Fact". You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
We wind up with the kind of booming middle class and first-world infrastructure we had during the 50's to 70's?
Naw, that only happens when the world is in ruins, and everyone has a personal tax-shelter. If you can get the Germans to act up again, I'm sure you could restore the US to it's former glory.
It makes a difference. If we accept that acting against the natural environment qualifies as tool-use, then walking is an example of tool use, since you're using the ground in order to propel yourself. If your definition of tool use is that broad, you end up with all kinds of absurdities.
Well, the Santa that many people describe probably doesn't exist (due to a lack of evidence where there should be evidence). They may move the goalposts, but the one they previously described most likely does not exist
There is only One Santa, and Nicholas is His name.
Santa's meant to have a physical presence here on Earth, which can effectively be disproved.
Nonsense. You can only disprove it in the sense of 'we looked, and he wasn't there', but that's the same as saying 'hey, we went into the heavens, and didn't see god' (god was, originally, supposed to be literally in the sky). Believers just move the goalposts - there's no reason why believers in Santa can't do the same. You looked at the North Pole? Well, he's under the ice. You looked under the ice? Well, he's REALLY deep under the water there. You got a detailed map of the whole sea-floor and that entire chunk of ocean? Must be under the sea-floor.
The god thing has far too many loopholes to be refuted so easily.
Like I said, "the god thing" isn't unique in that. Talk to a conspiracy-theorist some time. As long as they can run around willy-nilly, jumping from claim to claim at random, and move goalposts any time they feel like it, you'll never be able to convince them that they're wrong. That doesn't mean we can't disprove their claims - it only means that any time we disprove one, they either ignore us, add a new twist, or just make up a whole new claim to prop up their original premise. Religion is no different; it's the worlds oldest conspiracy theory.
I think you can fairly distinguish different supernatural stories from each other, based on what claims are being made. Like leprechauns can be disproved if the assertion is that you can find them at the end of *any* rainbow, and you create a small rainbow in a lab, where both ends can be seen at once.
Yes, that's fair. Likewise, we can say that the christian god cannot possibly exist if he's claimed to be omnipotent, omni-present, and omni-benevolent. But, as you already acknowledged, there's always a loophole. Maybe the leprechaun at the end of your laboratory-created rainbow was just really really small. Or invisible. And maybe the christian god has "a plan" which is so moral that us mere mortals just can't understand it.
Yep, as long as you're free to just make shit up, there's always an excuse.
Again - the existence of these "loopholes" doesn't mean we have to reserve judgment. As long as we're not willing to say "enough you fucking lunatics!" we're just putting ourselves in the position of eternally having to dance for anyone who can come up with some new bullshit. I'm not a big fan of that. At some point you have to say "ok, we've disproved this, let's move on to something else".
Everyone agrees Santa doesn't exist. Some people still believe god exists.
What people do or don't agree on is completely irrelevant. If he's going to say that he has no factual knowledge of the existence/non-existence of gods, the only way to remain consistent is to say the same thing about everything for which we have no evidence, including (but not limited to) Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Leprechauns, Unicorns, and the little purple lizard which lives in your ass (hey, just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it's not there).
"Clippy Returns" would be an excellent title for a horror film.
Mind you - I'm not saying there is or isn't any higher being or whatnot. But I'm certainly in no position to claim any factual knowledge of the existence or lack thereof of such a being.
That's a bit of a cop-out. You've already compared gods to Santa, so why would you then go back and try to take an impartial position? Would you, likewise, say that you are in no position to claim any factual knowledge of the existence, or lack thereof, of Santa Claus?
Actually, in case you are serious, he wasn't talking about a physical separation; he was talking about a separate domain with different legal rules, but the traffic running over the same physical infrastructure. And he never mentioned the 5th amendment.
Comprende, pendejo?
you mean... like some kind of internal network? with some sort of DMZ that separates it from the rest of the interweb?
No, that's not at all (not even close) what he was talking about.
The heart of the Internet model is, as the saying goes "a sphere", where every node has equal access to every other node
No, it's not, nor has it ever been. Such a network would be completely impractical, both from a technological/economic perspective, and from a security perspective.
Society as a whole (when weighted by money rather than head-count) keeps trying to reject that in favour of it being a fancy way to broadcast: a few large hosts running Wal-Mart-sized data centres, many clients on as dumb a terminal as possible.
Right - people want functionality. They don't want every person to write their own version of facebook - they want a large service which everyone can access. Money has nothing to do with it - it's about usefulness.
Efforts to democratize information flow are opposed as either unserious utopianism or outright crime. (They can't seem to find a statute forbidding Wikileaks that doesn't forbid the Times, but from the rhetoric, you'd never guess.)
Complete nonsense, of course, supported by nothing other than your personal ideological biases.
When Hayden says that "users" 4th-amendment rights would be abrogated, he isn't thinking of all the users, not the big ones.
He's speaking about anonymity, dumbass. There would be no anonymity on the secure part of the net, by design. How exactly do "The Big Ones" get around that, and why would they want to? Have you put any thought into this?
Stop being such a whiny cunt.
Oh, and stop lying, too.
...which really is the sole source of what passes for MainStreamMedia in the US, ever report that the organization which vets, or does the background checks for the TSA, is Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater USA???
Yeah, those goddamn MainStreamMedia refuse to publish bullshit that you just pulled out of your ass! Imagine that!
Whoever modded you "interesting" should be shot for being fatally credulous.
Maybe not having a poverty rate of over 16% would be a way?
Sounds good: we'll redefine poverty to mean "anyone who earns less than $10 a day", and crime will disappear overnight. Right?
Terrorism itself is not the final goal, but it is an intermediate one.
Pah. So is having a good poop in the morning.
Given that the American public now lives in fear, often assuming everything abnormal is a serious threat, I'd say that anyone looking to cause terror in the United States has met that particular goal.
The public is always living in fear of something or other. So now we have a new boogyman, and the stranger-danger twits will take a break for a while so they can focus on harassing Abdul. Oh noes!
If your definition of 'success' is scaring the general public ... well, you'd have to have some serious self esteem issues in order to aim that low. Might as well claim success because you had a good poop this morning.