Sure we might lose mainstream music radio, but most of them are Clearchannel anyway.
Except that this will actually help the largest stations by killing off their smaller competitors who can't afford the new fees. If you think things are bad now, just wait until this bill gets passed.
How those laws are viewed largely depends on whether the viewer feels more strongly about bigotry or censorship; whether you see a greater evil in suppression of speech or unreasoning hatred.
Not necessarily. One who judges bigotry a "greater evil" than censorship might still believe that the latter is an inappropriate response to the former (perhaps because it would be ineffective, or because the ends don't justify the means).
I'd call censorship the greater evil, but despite that I'm ambivalent about this particular case. On the one hand, I do not think such a law ought to exist at all, on the other hand, I just can't muster any outrage at a neo-Nazi getting jailed.
Then you do not truly support freedom of speech. It is precisely these kinds of unpopular cases that need protection the most.
I suspect that it's cases like this that allow such laws to remain in effect - try to oppose the law on principle and you'll find yourself in the position of having to defend the bigots, something that even those most committed to free speech find repellent.
I do not find it repellent at all to defend those with distasteful beliefs. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", as Evelyn Beatrice Hall famously paraphrased Voltaire.
I think this is the first time the/. community is pretty much unanimous: guy got what he deserved
Bullshit. ITAR is a terrible law that accomplishes nothing at the expense of making it much harder/riskier for people in some fields to share information with each other (rocketry, for example). The idea that we can keep unclassified information from leaking out of the country this way in the era of the Internet is patently absurd.
RSS feeds simulate a "push" architecture. So when there's a new post on a blog you read, that post shows up automatically in that site's RSS feed, which you would view using an RSS reader (Firefox has one built-in, though it's not as good as a dedicated reader). Think of it like a service that automatically sends you an email when a site gets updated, except it's more convenient since most RSS readers have a keystroke for opening the corresponding URL, and other little niceties like that.
What version of rsync are you using? 3.x includes an incremental-recursion algorithm that avoids having to store the entire file tree in memory at once.
Rights are not something that exist in nature. They exist only because a large number of people believe they should, and are willing to assert their belief strongly enough to ensure the continued existence of those rights.
Bald assertion does not make this true, and it's far from universally accepted. The Founding Fathers of the United States apparently disagreed with you, for one:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Note that I'm not making an appeal to authority here, just pointing out that there are philosophies out there that would challenge your assertion.
This is a point that always seemed obvious to me: investing in technology never lowers anyone's standard of living.
What? Where do you think the money invested in technology comes from? Ultimately, it comes from people's savings, which is money not spent on current consumption. Investing more means saving more, which means a reduction in our current standard of living.
Moreover, there's no guarantee that investing in any specific technology will raise people's standard of living, even in the future. No matter how much we invest in, say, perpetual motion machines, our standard of living will never increase by much as a result-- certainly not by enough to compensate for all the money we invested in a bogus technology.
The sales pitch of The Cloud is that, and yes I've heard this, you can move VMs from one physical location to another with no downtime.
I'd be interested to know where you heard this. I don't recall Amazon ever making such claims (yes, I know you also mentioned EMC and VMWare in your original post, but this story is about Amazon after all).
I'm thinking critically because Amazon, EMC, VMWare, etc bill The Cloud as a mystical place where you throw your shit and then it's universally available 100%. Nothing bad happens in The Cloud.
No, they don't. You're either being disingenuous, or idiotic.
So what's the deal with having all copies of these VMs in one datacenter? That's not very The Cloud of them.
So you expect Amazon to somehow be running the same VM simultaneously on multiple machines? The point of EC2 is that you have machine images prepared in advance, which you can launch at any time to instantiate a new, ready-to-go VM. The VMs themselves are obviously still running on actual machines, which are (surprise!) still vulnerable to things like lightning strikes and other random hardware failures.
If a few minutes downtime when something like that happens is unacceptable, then you should be running multiple machines in different availability zones-- which is exactly what you'd be doing in a more traditional environment. EC2 just makes it easier to do this in a flexible way. Yes, you pay for that privilege, but it's clearly worth it to some people.
...it is possible that the star has already gone super-nova (type II) and the resulting light from the blast has not yet reached us.
No, no, no. There is no absolute frame of reference for time, so you cannot say that something has "already" happened elsewhere if we are not in the event's light cone.
The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.
The term "anarchism" literally means "without rulers". As I said, this is the only defining characteristic of anarchism, and free-market anarchism certainly qualifies.
Now, it may be that the term "anarchism" is being re-defined through common usage, but I would submit that until its advocates can actually agree on some other definition, we have no choice but to continue using the original one.
The main thing that makes anarchism different from, say, libertarianism, is that anarchists are against private property.
Some types of anarchism may reject private property, but the only defining characteristic of anarchism in general is opposition to the existence of the state (i.e. no government). See, for example, free-market anarchism.
Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to ask you to back that up. The fact that the government was involved with the creation of the internet does not imply that it could not have existed otherwise.
The rest of your argument is basically one big "correlation implies causation" fallacy.
"Force of law" means that men with guns will come for you if you break the rules. I will take a hundred monopolists over one man with a gun pointed at me.
I've been using pipelining with Firefox for years, and I've never noticed any problems with it. And in any case, it's not likely to break your banking session unless you also turn on network.http.pipelining.ssl.
We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.
Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar. Now where have I heard such claims before?
...machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.
-Herbert Simon, 1965
Within a generation... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.
-Marvin Minsky, 1967
Would you be willing to bet, say, an ounce of gold on your prediction?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure we might lose mainstream music radio, but most of them are Clearchannel anyway.
Except that this will actually help the largest stations by killing off their smaller competitors who can't afford the new fees. If you think things are bad now, just wait until this bill gets passed.
How those laws are viewed largely depends on whether the viewer feels more strongly about bigotry or censorship; whether you see a greater evil in suppression of speech or unreasoning hatred.
Not necessarily. One who judges bigotry a "greater evil" than censorship might still believe that the latter is an inappropriate response to the former (perhaps because it would be ineffective, or because the ends don't justify the means).
I'd call censorship the greater evil, but despite that I'm ambivalent about this particular case. On the one hand, I do not think such a law ought to exist at all, on the other hand, I just can't muster any outrage at a neo-Nazi getting jailed.
Then you do not truly support freedom of speech. It is precisely these kinds of unpopular cases that need protection the most.
I suspect that it's cases like this that allow such laws to remain in effect - try to oppose the law on principle and you'll find yourself in the position of having to defend the bigots, something that even those most committed to free speech find repellent.
I do not find it repellent at all to defend those with distasteful beliefs. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", as Evelyn Beatrice Hall famously paraphrased Voltaire.
I think this is the first time the /. community is pretty much unanimous: guy got what he deserved
Bullshit. ITAR is a terrible law that accomplishes nothing at the expense of making it much harder/riskier for people in some fields to share information with each other (rocketry, for example). The idea that we can keep unclassified information from leaking out of the country this way in the era of the Internet is patently absurd.
RSS feeds simulate a "push" architecture. So when there's a new post on a blog you read, that post shows up automatically in that site's RSS feed, which you would view using an RSS reader (Firefox has one built-in, though it's not as good as a dedicated reader). Think of it like a service that automatically sends you an email when a site gets updated, except it's more convenient since most RSS readers have a keystroke for opening the corresponding URL, and other little niceties like that.
What version of rsync are you using? 3.x includes an incremental-recursion algorithm that avoids having to store the entire file tree in memory at once.
Rights are not something that exist in nature. They exist only because a large number of people believe they should, and are willing to assert their belief strongly enough to ensure the continued existence of those rights.
Bald assertion does not make this true, and it's far from universally accepted. The Founding Fathers of the United States apparently disagreed with you, for one:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Note that I'm not making an appeal to authority here, just pointing out that there are philosophies out there that would challenge your assertion.
...many German politicians swore up and down that they had excercised the Ghost of Hitler.
Why would they want to do that? Do ghosts even need exercise?
This is a point that always seemed obvious to me: investing in technology never lowers anyone's standard of living.
What? Where do you think the money invested in technology comes from? Ultimately, it comes from people's savings, which is money not spent on current consumption. Investing more means saving more, which means a reduction in our current standard of living.
Moreover, there's no guarantee that investing in any specific technology will raise people's standard of living, even in the future. No matter how much we invest in, say, perpetual motion machines, our standard of living will never increase by much as a result-- certainly not by enough to compensate for all the money we invested in a bogus technology.
The sales pitch of The Cloud is that, and yes I've heard this, you can move VMs from one physical location to another with no downtime.
I'd be interested to know where you heard this. I don't recall Amazon ever making such claims (yes, I know you also mentioned EMC and VMWare in your original post, but this story is about Amazon after all).
Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from failure scenarios.
you can protect your applications from failure of a single location
If you look closely, you may be able to discern a difference between the previous two statements and the following:
...The Cloud [is] a mystical place where you throw your shit and then it's universally available 100%. Nothing bad happens in The Cloud.
Can you guess which statement was not made by Amazon?
I'm thinking critically because Amazon, EMC, VMWare, etc bill The Cloud as a mystical place where you throw your shit and then it's universally available 100%. Nothing bad happens in The Cloud.
No, they don't. You're either being disingenuous, or idiotic.
So what's the deal with having all copies of these VMs in one datacenter? That's not very The Cloud of them.
So you expect Amazon to somehow be running the same VM simultaneously on multiple machines? The point of EC2 is that you have machine images prepared in advance, which you can launch at any time to instantiate a new, ready-to-go VM. The VMs themselves are obviously still running on actual machines, which are (surprise!) still vulnerable to things like lightning strikes and other random hardware failures.
If a few minutes downtime when something like that happens is unacceptable, then you should be running multiple machines in different availability zones-- which is exactly what you'd be doing in a more traditional environment. EC2 just makes it easier to do this in a flexible way. Yes, you pay for that privilege, but it's clearly worth it to some people.
...it is possible that the star has already gone super-nova (type II) and the resulting light from the blast has not yet reached us.
No, no, no. There is no absolute frame of reference for time, so you cannot say that something has "already" happened elsewhere if we are not in the event's light cone.
The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.
Why not just turn off images then?
This is Japan we're talking about. I'd be surprised if more than a handful of students couldn't already do this.
However, reference counting doesn't work for the very reason you state, and therefore GCs don't do it that way.
Good GCs don't do (only) reference counting. Perl's does, for one, and Perl suffers from exactly those kinds of memory leaks.
The term "anarchism" literally means "without rulers". As I said, this is the only defining characteristic of anarchism, and free-market anarchism certainly qualifies.
Now, it may be that the term "anarchism" is being re-defined through common usage, but I would submit that until its advocates can actually agree on some other definition, we have no choice but to continue using the original one.
The main thing that makes anarchism different from, say, libertarianism, is that anarchists are against private property.
Some types of anarchism may reject private property, but the only defining characteristic of anarchism in general is opposition to the existence of the state (i.e. no government). See, for example, free-market anarchism.
Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to ask you to back that up. The fact that the government was involved with the creation of the internet does not imply that it could not have existed otherwise.
The rest of your argument is basically one big "correlation implies causation" fallacy.
"Force of law" means that men with guns will come for you if you break the rules. I will take a hundred monopolists over one man with a gun pointed at me.
Huh. That makes... very little sense to me, but I shouldn't have assumed. Sorry.
I've been using pipelining with Firefox for years, and I've never noticed any problems with it. And in any case, it's not likely to break your banking session unless you also turn on network.http.pipelining.ssl.
You're very clever, young man, but it's noises all the way down.
What a sad, sad outlook on life.
We're not on the cusp of sentient AI, but my honest opinion is that we're probably only a bit over a decade from it. Certainly no more than 2 decades from it.
Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar. Now where have I heard such claims before?
...machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.
-Herbert Simon, 1965
Within a generation... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.
-Marvin Minsky, 1967
Would you be willing to bet, say, an ounce of gold on your prediction?
I assume that by "advance faster" you mean "waste more resources"?