Ignore this part of my post - it's just to pad the time spent writing this comment out to 20s so/. accepts it without me getting bored just sitting around and counting the seconds by on my watch which really is an exce
God you are one fucking ignorant shit. Since Hume people have been questioning causality and since Hume many have considered causality as 'invented' as integers. It's got nothing to do with your so-called 'french fags'. One the one hand you criticise chains and then use them in your talk of partial chains. You aren't even fucking self-consistent you fat dick. And you're fucking impolite too - probably because you learnt your manners in the same gutter as your philosophy while you were taking up the ass for money.
If you have something to hide, the problem is not with people fiding out, it is with the reason you desire to hide it
This is a strange statement. You've just plucked it out of the air and stated it without any kind of corroboration. To me and most other people it seems completely bogus. How have you arrived at it?
Why does the big bang have to have a cause? The idea of a chain of events, each causing the next in the sequence, is a bit passé these days. If you ask for a cause for the first event you quickly lead to an infinite regress. What's the problem with there being a first event without cause? I hope you don't think that because most events have causes they all do. That's a bit like thinking that all integers are non-zero because most of them are.
...the use of the operators <<< and >>> to mean ternary left and right shift, ie.
x <<< 3 is (usually) x*3
and x >>> 3 is (usually) x/3.
The representation of negative numbers is interesting but there is a 3's complement scheme that works. Eg.....22222222222 is -1 (like the 3-adics). So -1 <<< 3 would be.....222220, ie. -3. So everything works out fine.
Oh please! Are you telling me that Bush has some talents? Are you serious? Someone whose preferred rhetorical device is tautology (that's when he can actually manage to strings his words together into something approximating correct grammatical form). No. Politicians are an ignorant bunch and Bush is the most ignorant of them all. They manage to keep their jobs because they hire advisors and delegate work.
If you believe that politicians don't have any useful skills, why haven't you run circles around all of them...
WTF are you talking about? My job is more interesting and better paid than almost all US or UK government positions, say (far lower than many company CEOs for example). Of course I don't make all the bribe money that politicians do but I'd rather work on my job than spend the time schmoozing.
It's designed to help lobby politicians. Politicians, who only take up that job because they don't actually have any useful skills, are easily scared by dabblers in black arts like computer programming. It's very easy to whip up a fervor among this largely ignorant set of people making out that by writing code geeks are committing a great sin. Hell, if M$ and the media companies keep this up there may actually come a time when it's illegal for unlicensed individuals to write software on the grounds that you could use that to copy software, 'hack' computers and encrypt communications.
So if you were NASA's next director, what would you do with the agency?
I'd find another scam to keep the money rolling in as the "Life on Mars" story is wearing a bit thin.
"Warp drives are just around the corner" would be a good one - especially if you can convince the defence guys that phasers photon torpedoes would come out of the same research.
Maybe NASA could go religious. Maybe they could start publishing stories about how they can find evidence of God in the stars. Maybe his name is etched on a planet somewhere if only they could launch a big enough telescope to see it. Or some weird anomaly in the distribution of planets that would make it easy for Jesus to travel from one to the next saving alien souls. That would guarantee lots of money from those gullible Americans. He he...maybe they could launch a mission to demonstrate that the universe is in fact only 5732 years, 3 months and 21 days old. Divert a bit of money from those wacky Creationists.
But please, please, please. Drop the "Life on Mars" stories!
A monopoly isn't a total loss for the consumer. Microsoft can squash competition but in doing so the ideas those dead companies had do survive in MS products. However capitalism is about optimality. Capitalism is a great system for distributing resources and it's good at achieving optima. But there are some situations where it fails and one of those is a monopolistic market. With MS we are a long way from an optimum. There's nothing like a good bit of competition to lower prices and really speed up technological development. This situation simply doesn't exist in the case of MS.
So while MS's policies might be a plus for the consumer I'd personally like to see an even bigger plus.
I have found myself using most of the features in XP
This is a rare thing. I never bet. But today I will. I bet this is a false statement. I suspect you couldn't even list half of the features in XP. I suspect Bill Gates couldn't. So I doubt you have used 'most features'. Windows is big. Really BIG. But that's irrelevant.
The black holes would evaporate if Hawking radiation is for real. The first physical test of whether or not Hawking radiation really takes place would be observing mini black holes made in an accelerator...
What you say is tantamount to an urban myth. The funny thing is that it's one of those urban myths that shouldn't have got anywhere because it completely obviously false.
Last time I attended a hydrogen balloon explosion it was about 1m across. The bang was audible across many miles and it was fucking dangerous. (It certainly brought the police running and some fast talking was needed). This balloon wasn't made from solid rocket fuel but rubber. It's not hard to guess what might happen if you multiply this by a few million and suspend a bunch of people from its underside.
Of course the colour of the flame was influenced largely by the colour of the skin burning. Haven't you ever thrown metal filings into a flame? It only takes a tiny amount to produce a brilliant colour. A gigantic bag made of just about any material and containing hydrogen in an environment where static is possible would be dangerous.
Whether hydrogen is safer than propane is irrelevant. I wouldn't strap myself to the underside of a very large balloon filled with that gas either.
If something gets in the way of its task, it has a right to remove that "thing" so it can perform correctly
Extending the concept of 'rights' to a program. Now you're getting scary. By your logic if I want to clean my house and buy vacuum cleaner X then that infers (sic) I want to clean my house even if it means X eating my carpet.
Are you really so naive that you don't understand what 'disables' means? It means 'upgrading' WMP so that it can't do stuff that it did before. It means reducing your ability to do stuff that you could do before. It means, for example, removing the option to disable Digital Rights Management. And given the wording of the contract it might easily mean deinstalling drivers preventing other applications ripping CDs say. Can't you see that? MS want to have a monopoly on the movement of digital data such as music. In order to do this they need you to have less, not more. It's part of a larger program by several industries to remove your ability to do stuff. Why don't you look at that EULA again. Does it say "disable software that might interfere with the functioning of WMP". Of course not. It says "disable software". When you sign that contract you sign away infinitely more that what is needed to get WMP to work.
Yes, you're right. This is still capitalism. But I think that capitalism has changed in meaning over the years.
There are, as far as I can see, (at least) two ways to view things like constitutional rights. Either they exist because they are basic 'natural' human rights that exist for their own sake - or they are a means to an end. For example I think property rights are a good thing not just because individual people want to have them for themselves. They are also good because private property and the right to trade it gives an economy where people try to maximise their utilities and the net result seems to produce a far better (by many standards) allocation of resources than, say, a command or feudal economy.
The reason we have things like intellectual property rights is similar - it encourages innovation and it means that everyone as a whole can get to use intellectual property to the advantage of lots of people.
But it seems to me that we've shifted towards the former view more. Companies aren't interested in innovation etc. They are interested in protecting their 'rights' (whatever the 'right' of an abstract entity means). I believe we have lost sight of the reason for having a capitalist economy in the first place. So in a sense I think that practises like EULAs are turning us away from what capitalist economies are meant to be for.
In a capitalist economy I can try selling product X to A and B but if I overcharge A and not B then A can get B to buy it and then buy it off B. This keeps prices in check. This is one of the key elements of a capitalist economy that makes it work so efficiently for both buyer and seller. It seems to me that EULAs put much more of the power into the hands of the seller than the buyer and we actually lose many of the great benefits of capitalism.
IMHO one of the great things about ebay is that it brings capitalism to the masses. Millions of people all over the world can now now make their lives more efficient (in an economic sense) by trading even the most trivial things that they own. It's a grand bazaar where everyone profits. So it's not surprising that we see EULAs in conflict with the philosophy of ebay.
EULAs are anti-capitalist. They are the product of a lobby economy - one where people who bribe politicians get to determine where resources in an economy should go.
Every day I get about 10,000 attempts by various people to execute CMD.EXE on my server (a FreeBSD box!) and so compromise it. I consider each of these attempts to be an attack. Can I sue these attackers? If not can they be tried in a criminal court? If not can I sue the morons who are negligent enough to run a server with known and well publicised bugs without patching. Surely someone can be sued here. Anyone out there a lawyer?
People should take responsibility for their actions without the threat of the law hanging over them.
It's tempting to ask the proverbial "Are you on crack?" The reason we have laws is that people will act so as to maximise whatever it is that they like to maximise (number of chicks laid, status, $$$, chance of going to heaven etc.) Different people have different things they are trying to maximise. So in order to deal with conflicts arising we have laws that change the landscape so that otherwise desirable actions now carry a penalty. It's got nothing to do with people taking responsibility for anything. It's about leading people towards a society where everyone can coexist a bit better with everyone else. If there are a lot of laws it's a result of there being millions of people all maximising different things in a complex society. What's the problem? If we were all clones then maybe we'd all have the same desires and we wouldn't need laws. But society is a lot richer than that.
You seem to imagine you're living in some fairy tale land where everyone is 'responsible for their own actions' which I'm sure is just shorthand for saying that they do whatever you think it is that you think they should be doing.
RSA encryption is basically this: raising one large number to the power of another modulo a third number. That's all there is to it. You can implement RSA in one line of Mathematica code.
To me it's very scary that this might be outlawed. Will we have to outlaw multiplcation modulo an integer? Maybe we'll have to set a limit on how large the numbers will be so that you're only allowed to do this with small numbers. Maybe you'd be allowed to use large numbers if you're a licensed mathematical researcher. Maybe you'd be allowed to multiply large numbers but not be allowed to send the results by email. But well encrypted data is indistinguishable from noise. Does that mean we need to make it illegal to send noise by email? But of course we can smuggle noise-like data through techniques like steganography - eg. by hiding data in the low order bits of images. Does that mean we would no longer be able to send noisy images by email - we'd have to filter them nice and smoothly first.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore this part of my post - it's just to pad the time spent writing this comment out to 20s so
God you are one fucking ignorant shit. Since Hume people have been questioning causality and since Hume many have considered causality as 'invented' as integers. It's got nothing to do with your so-called 'french fags'. One the one hand you criticise chains and then use them in your talk of partial chains. You aren't even fucking self-consistent you fat dick. And you're fucking impolite too - probably because you learnt your manners in the same gutter as your philosophy while you were taking up the ass for money.
This is a strange statement. You've just plucked it out of the air and stated it without any kind of corroboration. To me and most other people it seems completely bogus. How have you arrived at it?
...hushdot.org or something. Or maybe someone can spawn another website with that name for all the quiet PC articles.
Why does the big bang have to have a cause? The idea of a chain of events, each causing the next in the sequence, is a bit passé these days. If you ask for a cause for the first event you quickly lead to an infinite regress. What's the problem with there being a first event without cause? I hope you don't think that because most events have causes they all do. That's a bit like thinking that all integers are non-zero because most of them are.
I'm just an idiot and you can have the patent.
x <<< 3 is (usually) x*3
and x >>> 3 is (usually) x/3.
The representation of negative numbers is interesting but there is a 3's complement scheme that works. Eg.
You should see a doctor. Your bladder and bowels should be able to hold stuff for longer than that.
WTF are you talking about? My job is more interesting and better paid than almost all US or UK government positions, say (far lower than many company CEOs for example). Of course I don't make all the bribe money that politicians do but I'd rather work on my job than spend the time schmoozing.
It's designed to help lobby politicians. Politicians, who only take up that job because they don't actually have any useful skills, are easily scared by dabblers in black arts like computer programming. It's very easy to whip up a fervor among this largely ignorant set of people making out that by writing code geeks are committing a great sin. Hell, if M$ and the media companies keep this up there may actually come a time when it's illegal for unlicensed individuals to write software on the grounds that you could use that to copy software, 'hack' computers and encrypt communications.
I'd find another scam to keep the money rolling in as the "Life on Mars" story is wearing a bit thin.
"Warp drives are just around the corner" would be a good one - especially if you can convince the defence guys that phasers photon torpedoes would come out of the same research.
Maybe NASA could go religious. Maybe they could start publishing stories about how they can find evidence of God in the stars. Maybe his name is etched on a planet somewhere if only they could launch a big enough telescope to see it. Or some weird anomaly in the distribution of planets that would make it easy for Jesus to travel from one to the next saving alien souls. That would guarantee lots of money from those gullible Americans. He he...maybe they could launch a mission to demonstrate that the universe is in fact only 5732 years, 3 months and 21 days old. Divert a bit of money from those wacky Creationists.
But please, please, please. Drop the "Life on Mars" stories!
In the US DMV's will issue cards even if you can't or won't drive. See this or that
So while MS's policies might be a plus for the consumer I'd personally like to see an even bigger plus.
This is a rare thing. I never bet. But today I will. I bet this is a false statement. I suspect you couldn't even list half of the features in XP. I suspect Bill Gates couldn't. So I doubt you have used 'most features'. Windows is big. Really BIG. But that's irrelevant.
If you think an ape had an IQ of 85 then you must have an IQ lower than that.
No, you don't get it. Odyssey was a Mars mission.
'Not all benefits are material' does not imply 'there are no material benefits'.
The black holes would evaporate if Hawking radiation is for real. The first physical test of whether or not Hawking radiation really takes place would be observing mini black holes made in an accelerator...
Not all benefits are material.
Last time I attended a hydrogen balloon explosion it was about 1m across. The bang was audible across many miles and it was fucking dangerous. (It certainly brought the police running and some fast talking was needed). This balloon wasn't made from solid rocket fuel but rubber. It's not hard to guess what might happen if you multiply this by a few million and suspend a bunch of people from its underside.
Of course the colour of the flame was influenced largely by the colour of the skin burning. Haven't you ever thrown metal filings into a flame? It only takes a tiny amount to produce a brilliant colour. A gigantic bag made of just about any material and containing hydrogen in an environment where static is possible would be dangerous.
Whether hydrogen is safer than propane is irrelevant. I wouldn't strap myself to the underside of a very large balloon filled with that gas either.
Extending the concept of 'rights' to a program. Now you're getting scary. By your logic if I want to clean my house and buy vacuum cleaner X then that infers (sic) I want to clean my house even if it means X eating my carpet.
Are you really so naive that you don't understand what 'disables' means? It means 'upgrading' WMP so that it can't do stuff that it did before. It means reducing your ability to do stuff that you could do before. It means, for example, removing the option to disable Digital Rights Management. And given the wording of the contract it might easily mean deinstalling drivers preventing other applications ripping CDs say. Can't you see that? MS want to have a monopoly on the movement of digital data such as music. In order to do this they need you to have less, not more. It's part of a larger program by several industries to remove your ability to do stuff. Why don't you look at that EULA again. Does it say "disable software that might interfere with the functioning of WMP". Of course not. It says "disable software". When you sign that contract you sign away infinitely more that what is needed to get WMP to work.
There are, as far as I can see, (at least) two ways to view things like constitutional rights. Either they exist because they are basic 'natural' human rights that exist for their own sake - or they are a means to an end. For example I think property rights are a good thing not just because individual people want to have them for themselves. They are also good because private property and the right to trade it gives an economy where people try to maximise their utilities and the net result seems to produce a far better (by many standards) allocation of resources than, say, a command or feudal economy.
The reason we have things like intellectual property rights is similar - it encourages innovation and it means that everyone as a whole can get to use intellectual property to the advantage of lots of people.
But it seems to me that we've shifted towards the former view more. Companies aren't interested in innovation etc. They are interested in protecting their 'rights' (whatever the 'right' of an abstract entity means). I believe we have lost sight of the reason for having a capitalist economy in the first place. So in a sense I think that practises like EULAs are turning us away from what capitalist economies are meant to be for.
IMHO one of the great things about ebay is that it brings capitalism to the masses. Millions of people all over the world can now now make their lives more efficient (in an economic sense) by trading even the most trivial things that they own. It's a grand bazaar where everyone profits. So it's not surprising that we see EULAs in conflict with the philosophy of ebay.
EULAs are anti-capitalist. They are the product of a lobby economy - one where people who bribe politicians get to determine where resources in an economy should go.
Every day I get about 10,000 attempts by various people to execute CMD.EXE on my server (a FreeBSD box!) and so compromise it. I consider each of these attempts to be an attack. Can I sue these attackers? If not can they be tried in a criminal court? If not can I sue the morons who are negligent enough to run a server with known and well publicised bugs without patching. Surely someone can be sued here. Anyone out there a lawyer?
It's tempting to ask the proverbial "Are you on crack?" The reason we have laws is that people will act so as to maximise whatever it is that they like to maximise (number of chicks laid, status, $$$, chance of going to heaven etc.) Different people have different things they are trying to maximise. So in order to deal with conflicts arising we have laws that change the landscape so that otherwise desirable actions now carry a penalty. It's got nothing to do with people taking responsibility for anything. It's about leading people towards a society where everyone can coexist a bit better with everyone else. If there are a lot of laws it's a result of there being millions of people all maximising different things in a complex society. What's the problem? If we were all clones then maybe we'd all have the same desires and we wouldn't need laws. But society is a lot richer than that.
You seem to imagine you're living in some fairy tale land where everyone is 'responsible for their own actions' which I'm sure is just shorthand for saying that they do whatever you think it is that you think they should be doing.
To me it's very scary that this might be outlawed. Will we have to outlaw multiplcation modulo an integer? Maybe we'll have to set a limit on how large the numbers will be so that you're only allowed to do this with small numbers. Maybe you'd be allowed to use large numbers if you're a licensed mathematical researcher. Maybe you'd be allowed to multiply large numbers but not be allowed to send the results by email. But well encrypted data is indistinguishable from noise. Does that mean we need to make it illegal to send noise by email? But of course we can smuggle noise-like data through techniques like steganography - eg. by hiding data in the low order bits of images. Does that mean we would no longer be able to send noisy images by email - we'd have to filter them nice and smoothly first.
Where does it end?