...the Prime Mover, by definition, is the Mover that doesn't need a Mover. That's why he's Prime, and not just A Mover.
Then, you have no infinite regression. You have finite regression to the Prime Mover.
And you've brilliantly mis-applied Occam's Razor by removing the one entity that's actually required, rather than any of the non-require intermediate Sub-Prime Movers.
There's a joke here about a crash in the Subprime market, but I don't know what it is.
OP is right, and he's optimistic about our defenses. Even the military practices "network security" at only a childish level. Most users have no clue how security works, and our military's network security training is horribly remiss.
And of course, the OP only outlined a few attacks that can be conducted from the safety of an office somewhere remotely. We face an enemy who isn't at all afraid to blow stuff up, even if it means the explosives are personally delivered. Anyone take a look at the physical security on a dam recently? Storage sites for nuclear waste? Ferries, busses, trains?
We are ripe for attack from a small team of well-funded and determined enemies, and we're not doing enough to prepare for it.
Granted, the two classic examples turn out to be not such classic examples as you'd like them to be.
But there are countless other examples. I once paid $300 for a 6' piece of wire. Sure, it was _exactly_ 6 feet, but the actual length wasn't critical. One of my sailors admitted to having fixed a broken computer (in a strategic weapons system, none less!) by purchasing the required part on eBay for about 10% of what the Supply System was charging for the part. (Yes, that system worked fine after the repair; had he not told me, I never would have suspected.) The specific example that any submarine officer will recognize is the Susse Chalet on the base in Groton, CT. Whoever signed their 20 year contract for "first rights to any transient personnel" should be shot -- that place is no longer required to operate in accordance with any of the normal market requirements. There was nothing in the contract that said "The minimum level of acceptable living conditions are:" but there was stuff in the contract describing the minimum level of payment given to the hotel, regardless of occupancy. The Susse has turned into a dump because it doesn't have to compete for it's business.
Don't get me started on the Defense Message System ("Boss, this baby is ugly."), DMS-Proxy ("Boss, the baby is ugly, but not it lives here..."), or even NMCI/EDS. I could get into the Navy's history of proprietary SATCOM, but that would take forever. Suffice it to say that we've managed to virtually master the art of buying into idiotic hype to the point of supporting industries that shouldn't exist.
OP is spot on. US Gov't has been taking similar precautions (and some more that strike me as bizarre and unlikely) to protect state secrets. For example, in the facility that I work in strictly prohibits anything with the capability to transmit RF, store digital information, or record analog information as digital. A modern cell phone with camera and USB port is in violation of all three. One facility that I visited allowed cell phones, as long as you turned it off _and_ removed the battery.
France is just getting on board with protecting their electronic emissions? Good for them, they're catching up to us.
Don't forget exponentially more expensive than naturally aspirated cars. Turbo lag, funny noises, sleepless nights caused by "coking" of various bits of hardware that cost more than your kid's braces, and only marginally enhanced reliability.
As to people who think that "turbo" is simply another word for "fast," I submit that the English language is dying in bits and pieces. You're saying "Yeah, let's just use 'turbo' to mean 'fast,' because they're the same thing." I'm saying "But turbo implies a specific kind of automotive forced induction, and has nothing to do with computers anyway." So the answer: if you must describe a computer component as fast, then by all means, use the applicable term: "Fast." If the marketing types insist on quantifying how fast it is with respect to other blazingly fast technologies, fine: "This is our latest memory offering, capable of data retrieval at blazingly fast speeds. We call it 3GB/nanosecond Memory."
(rant) Does anyone actually remember when "turbo" had a technical definition beyond "really fast?" Does anyone realize that, in the computing world, "turbo" is essentially meaningless? (Go ahead, demonstrate for me how you pressurize the incoming bitstream mix using the processor bitstream exhaust pressure...) Or has the influx of market-roids slapping a "turbo" badge on any slightly-faster-than-last-year's technology made this term utterly useless? (/rant)
This is true virtually everywhere I've lived in the last 10 years. I have the dubious good fortune right now of living in one of the few locations that has choice -- Cox or Verizon. Wow, that's like choosing between losing my left nut or my right. Behind door number 3, of course, lies the variety of so-called "alternatives": dial-up, satellite, bumming wireless from free hotspots...
The frustration for a military member is particularly intense: you spend months out of the country making some god-forsaken place safe for democracy and capitalism, then return home to find that capitalism is dead here. When do we send troops to DC to make our own country safe for capitalism?
Is it possible that the fault lies not with the manufacturer, but at least partially with the consumer? We're willing to buy s***, so they'll keep selling it to us. Hospitals can't tolerate failure in their equipment, so they spend extra and get stuff that doesn't break so often. Banks can't afford to have ATMs that are as failure prone as automobiles, so they don't stand for cheap s*** there, either.
But sheeple are more than happy to spend money on a Kia or Hyundai, in full knowledge of the quality control issues because they read Consumer Reports, but it's cheap and gets good gas mileage, and has all kinds of neat features, right?
It's the US Navy. If there's a $5 solution commercially available, we can guarantee that it will cost $500, and be delivered 20% past deadline. We're also very good at signing contracts that won't expire until the technology that we've contracted has been obsolete for 20 years. No worries, finest Navy in the world, right here, boys.
Porsche's got some great technical ideas. For "the greatest engineers on earth," they've sure done some doozy's. Here's a short list:
Oil Lines on the outside of the body, down where you would ordinarily feel free to position a jack. I know that this has a lot to do with the original 2-liter engine cooling itself adequately with a fan, but of all the places they could have decided to put the most important artery of the car, this seems to have been the worst possible choice. Similarly, an oil cooler under the bumper, right out in front, is also a little peculiar, given the tendency of all nations on the planet to bound their roads with raised, concrete curbs.
No apparent jack stand points -- if you manage to get the car raised up without pinching a $500 piece of pipe, it's often anybody's guess where it's best to place the stands that are going to hold the thing up there. Considering that these cars were made to be worked on by their driver/owners (at least in the early days), you'd think a clearly indicated hoisting point would be in order.
Poor line of sight for speedometer, etc. Sure, I love the big, easy-to-read tach. But what other mass production car requires you to twist the gauges to crazy angles in order to see when you're driving anywhere in the neighborhood of the speed limit?
One idiot light does double duty as the parking brake indicator and oil pressure failure warning. I don't know how many models this is the case in, but jeez... The difference between one of these situations and the other is pretty significant.
Webasto gasoline-fueled heater, right next to the fuel tank. Okay, where do we put the (potential) molotov cocktail we've designed as a supplementary heater? How about next to 15 gallons of explosive fuel, which is up front, at bumper level, where head-on collisions are most likely to happen? I don't know of any problems resulting from this, ever, but it was a gutsy idea for the Weissach engineers to even think up.
Counter-intuitive climate control sliders. No other way to describe them. Top one is for fresh air blown in from under the windshield. Next one is, er... sometimes I can remember, and get it to work. Usually not. But three levers on the dash, and two more down between the seats? That was the plan? Turning on the defrost requires sliding at least four of them.
The 915 transaxle. Nuff said, right? I mean it's not exactly durable, and it's not exactly smooth. Sure, it's an old design, but I've had early-seventies Japanese cars that shifted a lot like late nineties Japanese cars. Transmissions have been around as long as there have been cars. What is so hard to figure out?
A heating system that can kill you if your exhaust is leaking, or can choke you if your engine leaks oil. It's another one of those moves necessitated by the lack of water cooling, I guess. And it almost makes you think changing coolant isn't such a bad idea. It's an idea that mixes the one clearly toxic byproduct of the car with the one part that sends stuff right into our lungs. It works fine, as a rule -- but again, who came up with the initial idea?
Thermal reactors heating up an air-cooled magnesium engine case. I know, it had to be done if they were going to sell cars in the U.S. But the longstanding reputation of the car for reliability and durability was undone by three model years of cars with engines that would cook themselves to death.
Torsion bars - a radical idea, in its day. But not the best idea, ever, or even the best idea for the 911.
A dipstick that easily falls into the oil tank. Happens a lot. Some cars had a screen to prevent it. But when you combine the fact that every component of the oil-checking process is counter-intuitive and at odds with virtually every other car ever manufactured and a dash-based oil level gauge that is hardly ever useful when you're sitting in front of the dash, since you've got to stop, on a level surface, once the car has warmed up to 190 degrees, in order to use it. And even then the rule of thum
Please don't think that signs saying "Don't take pictures here" or "Cameras forbidden" are uniquely American in any way. The rest of the world sees fit to ban cameras in all kinds of interesting places. Why, if you set up a tripod in front of St. Peter's Basilica, the guards will come over and stop you, and they're very serious people. Further, you'll have to remind me where in the Constitution it says "The government shall make no law respecting the Citizen's Right to use their camera," a statement I find highly unlikely given that the first cameras didn't even exist until more than a hundred years after the Constitution was written.
This whole attitude of "American sucks" is so frustratingly ignorant. It's like you have never been out of the country, have no perspective on what's going on in the rest of the world, and take all of your information from other Slashdot posters.
I work for one right now, and I'm glad I'm leaving. Yesterday's chair-tossing foaming-at-the-mouth red-faced obscenity filled rant was about a 10 cent price hike on his favorite chips in the vending machine. The rest of the staff heard him 200 feet down the hall through closed doors while he was on the telephone, "politely explaining" to some poor chap over at the vendor that his prices were unfair.
First, individual certs are a great idea, as long as they're free. For the vast majority of military users, however, it simply doesn't make any sense. I mean, 99.9% of the e-mail that I send and receive has two attributes that make the above phishing test a little silly. 1) My writing is my writing, and my people know what it looks like. My orders are my orders, and my people recognize them. If I said something out of character, I expect them to question that. 2) Anything relaxed enough to send via e-mail can be backed up by a phone call. If I'm at a terminal with e-mail, I have a phone. Even if an "order" seems a little fishy, you can back it up by voice just to make sure.
Second, an "order" given by e-mail doesn't carry anything like the weight that a verbal or written order does. Technically, an orders violation is an orders violation is an orders violation, but practically, the defense for an e-mail orders violation is a lot stronger than a written (and signed, and witnessed) orders violation. Anyone who uses the excuse "I thought that the e-mail from my Colonel asking for my credit card numbers was a little strange, but I didn't question authority because I was afraid of breaking the rules" is just an idiot.
If you don't look for something, your odds of finding it go way down. Simply announcing that creationist research is all flawed and that they have no research publications is frightfully akin to placing your hands over your ears and yelling "I can't hear you!"
That's one of the things that really bugs me about the evolution camp. "Lookit thuh fossils! Lookit thuh fossils," they chatter, happily spewing forth this nonsense as if there was some record of evolution neatly laid out in the fossils. Sadly, precious few of the people who extol the important of the fossil record in support of evolution have actually bothered to look at it. Had they done so, they'd probably find themselves much less excited about pointing other people to it as evidence of their misbegotten faith. You see, the fossil record doesn't support evolution at all. Quite the contrary -- the closest you can get to supporting evolution with fossils is the frightfully stupid theory we call "punctuated equilibrium," an idea shunned by even the most devout evolutionists. Phillip E. Johnson's "Darwin on Trial" (no, he's not a Christian) examines that issue in detail, among others.
The other great problem with the evolution camp is the refusal to recognize that atheism is a religion just like any other. Belief in no god is equally unprovable, equally untenable from a scientific standpoint, and therefore equally religious. Unfortunately, they place themselves on some kind of scientific high-ground, as if they had already disproved the existence of god scientifically. They beat up on any and all religions on the grounds that anyone who hasn't spotted the self-apparent non-existence of god as an idiot -- while providing no evidence to support their wild claims. They foist off their atheism in schools to the exclusion of all else, citing "the Constitutional separation of church and state" as some kind of battle cry, most never learning that the Constitution doesn't even contain that expression, and none admitting that atheism is just as religious as anything else.
Now that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard. If I have a computer program, and I tell it to loop infinitely doing exactly the same thing, that's exactly what it will do. It has no free will. It does what I tell it to, and nothing more. It will not "inevitably over vast millenia" decide to do something else.
The only way that any un-ordered event would ever happen is if I allowed my program to make up its own mind to do random things. That, by definition, is free will.
ID is nothing more than a sham to try to work around that pesky "separation of search and state" thing that our forefathers were bright enough to put into that pesky "Constitution."
--Our forefathers didn't put "separation of church and state" into the Constitution. SOCAS was actually in a set of completely independent letters written by one of the framers. The idea never actually made it into the document. Nice try.
It comes back to the whole "build a better idiot," principle, though. I mean, I have people come to me complaining that their computers don't work, and they don't know why.
"What is the error message?" I don't know, something about how it won't work. "What did you change?" Nothing. "Nothing? It just stopped working?" Just stopped working, can't explain it.
Come to find out they logged in as Admin, deleted a bunch of files and registry keys, shut down, removed old hardware and installed new hardware, and then completely mind-dumped the whole experience.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that on my boat the only UNIX boxes were HPUX. We had one guy on board who really knew HPUX, and he wasn't me. Everyone else was terrified of the computers.
(sigh) I think overcoming that terror is the first important step.
No, the funniest part is that anyone could point to the evolution of a document as evidence that life evolved. Or maybe that's pathetic; tough to tell.
I'm betting that's a logical OR clause. I'm also betting that, virtually everyone who uses AIM will download updates. So uh... yeah, that applies to any user of AIM. Good try, though.
Even drivers who do their best to obey all the posted signs occasionally exceed the speed limit. Imagine if every time you drifted up to 20 in that 15 zone, your insurance rates doubled. What about passing somebody -- will the insurance company's computers be smart enough to understand that you were legally overtaking a vehicle travelling slower than the limit, or will they just "e-ticket" you? What if the limit changes -- posted limit goes up 5mph, but the various computers tracking your speed don't get the update for two months, during which time your insurance rates are going through the roof because of your daily speeding violation?
It should be obvious that any system that remotely monitors your speed to determine driving habits is fundamentally broken.
Both Canon and Nikon made about 10 million manual 35mm cameras, back in the day. Canon's A-1, AE-1, or similar have absolutley no features, but make great beginner's tools. Typically they start at about $100 for a "just usable" condition up to a little over $200 for "like new." Lenses run from about $20 for a 50mm to over $500 for a good condition wide angle lense. Best of luck.
FWIW, "photo.net" runs a lot more photography related stories than Slashdot. It always blows me away when Slashdot runs photography stuff, because the exact same issues are discussed (except in more detail, by people who know what they're talking about) over at photo.net.
For a full discussion on this topic, try a photo.net search for the "film vs digital debate." It keeps popping up, and the photographers are a lot more adequately suited to argue it than us geeks.
That said, I am a photographer, so let me summarize the debate briefly. Aside from the silliness ("Digital isn't photography!" "Film is obsolete!!") from both sides, the central issue is the quality of the final product. Clearly, for many applications, digital makes significantly more sense. Obviously any web-based service, as well as virtually all major publications, and a great many quick-turn-around studio applications make good use of digital.
Film, on the other hand, still holds tenuously to the market of photographers who enjoy photography for the sake of photography. While digital is unarguably easier, and at the high end shares similar quality with average 35mm films, it has several major weaknesses. First, in color applications, saturation and dynamic range are typically still wrong. Great strides have been made, however, so most normal people can't tell the difference anymore.
The great bastion of film-based photography, Black and White, is still incomparably better than the digital equivalent. Nothing compares to a print made from the 4x5" negative made using a Korean War Era press camera. The rich, full tonality and smooth gradation are impossible to match digitally. The complete lack of grain is also quite notable -- no matter how good the camera, short of printing on a dye sublimation printer, there will always be some semblance of digital remaining in the prints. However, with the massive 4x5" negs, grain totally disappears, leaving an ultra-smooth, incredibly rich photograph.
So the bottom line -- digital is gaining more and more advantages over film every day. Film still has the financial advantage, and still holds B&W, especially in the medium and large formats.
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The only thing to fear is .... uh ... fear itself?
...the Prime Mover, by definition, is the Mover that doesn't need a Mover. That's why he's Prime, and not just A Mover.
Then, you have no infinite regression. You have finite regression to the Prime Mover.
And you've brilliantly mis-applied Occam's Razor by removing the one entity that's actually required, rather than any of the non-require intermediate Sub-Prime Movers.
There's a joke here about a crash in the Subprime market, but I don't know what it is.
OP is right, and he's optimistic about our defenses. Even the military practices "network security" at only a childish level. Most users have no clue how security works, and our military's network security training is horribly remiss.
And of course, the OP only outlined a few attacks that can be conducted from the safety of an office somewhere remotely. We face an enemy who isn't at all afraid to blow stuff up, even if it means the explosives are personally delivered. Anyone take a look at the physical security on a dam recently? Storage sites for nuclear waste? Ferries, busses, trains?
We are ripe for attack from a small team of well-funded and determined enemies, and we're not doing enough to prepare for it.
Granted, the two classic examples turn out to be not such classic examples as you'd like them to be.
But there are countless other examples. I once paid $300 for a 6' piece of wire. Sure, it was _exactly_ 6 feet, but the actual length wasn't critical. One of my sailors admitted to having fixed a broken computer (in a strategic weapons system, none less!) by purchasing the required part on eBay for about 10% of what the Supply System was charging for the part. (Yes, that system worked fine after the repair; had he not told me, I never would have suspected.) The specific example that any submarine officer will recognize is the Susse Chalet on the base in Groton, CT. Whoever signed their 20 year contract for "first rights to any transient personnel" should be shot -- that place is no longer required to operate in accordance with any of the normal market requirements. There was nothing in the contract that said "The minimum level of acceptable living conditions are:" but there was stuff in the contract describing the minimum level of payment given to the hotel, regardless of occupancy. The Susse has turned into a dump because it doesn't have to compete for it's business.
Don't get me started on the Defense Message System ("Boss, this baby is ugly."), DMS-Proxy ("Boss, the baby is ugly, but not it lives here..."), or even NMCI/EDS. I could get into the Navy's history of proprietary SATCOM, but that would take forever. Suffice it to say that we've managed to virtually master the art of buying into idiotic hype to the point of supporting industries that shouldn't exist.
OP is spot on. US Gov't has been taking similar precautions (and some more that strike me as bizarre and unlikely) to protect state secrets. For example, in the facility that I work in strictly prohibits anything with the capability to transmit RF, store digital information, or record analog information as digital. A modern cell phone with camera and USB port is in violation of all three. One facility that I visited allowed cell phones, as long as you turned it off _and_ removed the battery.
France is just getting on board with protecting their electronic emissions? Good for them, they're catching up to us.
Don't forget exponentially more expensive than naturally aspirated cars. Turbo lag, funny noises, sleepless nights caused by "coking" of various bits of hardware that cost more than your kid's braces, and only marginally enhanced reliability.
As to people who think that "turbo" is simply another word for "fast," I submit that the English language is dying in bits and pieces. You're saying "Yeah, let's just use 'turbo' to mean 'fast,' because they're the same thing." I'm saying "But turbo implies a specific kind of automotive forced induction, and has nothing to do with computers anyway." So the answer: if you must describe a computer component as fast, then by all means, use the applicable term: "Fast." If the marketing types insist on quantifying how fast it is with respect to other blazingly fast technologies, fine: "This is our latest memory offering, capable of data retrieval at blazingly fast speeds. We call it 3GB/nanosecond Memory."
(rant)
Does anyone actually remember when "turbo" had a technical definition beyond "really fast?" Does anyone realize that, in the computing world, "turbo" is essentially meaningless? (Go ahead, demonstrate for me how you pressurize the incoming bitstream mix using the processor bitstream exhaust pressure...) Or has the influx of market-roids slapping a "turbo" badge on any slightly-faster-than-last-year's technology made this term utterly useless?
(/rant)
This is true virtually everywhere I've lived in the last 10 years. I have the dubious good fortune right now of living in one of the few locations that has choice -- Cox or Verizon. Wow, that's like choosing between losing my left nut or my right. Behind door number 3, of course, lies the variety of so-called "alternatives": dial-up, satellite, bumming wireless from free hotspots ...
The frustration for a military member is particularly intense: you spend months out of the country making some god-forsaken place safe for democracy and capitalism, then return home to find that capitalism is dead here. When do we send troops to DC to make our own country safe for capitalism?
Is it possible that the fault lies not with the manufacturer, but at least partially with the consumer? We're willing to buy s***, so they'll keep selling it to us. Hospitals can't tolerate failure in their equipment, so they spend extra and get stuff that doesn't break so often. Banks can't afford to have ATMs that are as failure prone as automobiles, so they don't stand for cheap s*** there, either.
But sheeple are more than happy to spend money on a Kia or Hyundai, in full knowledge of the quality control issues because they read Consumer Reports, but it's cheap and gets good gas mileage, and has all kinds of neat features, right?
Cars are junk because we, the consumers, buy it.
It's the US Navy. If there's a $5 solution commercially available, we can guarantee that it will cost $500, and be delivered 20% past deadline. We're also very good at signing contracts that won't expire until the technology that we've contracted has been obsolete for 20 years. No worries, finest Navy in the world, right here, boys.
Porsche's got some great technical ideas. For "the greatest engineers on earth," they've sure done some doozy's. Here's a short list:
Oil Lines on the outside of the body, down where you would ordinarily feel free to position a jack. I know that this has a lot to do with the original 2-liter engine cooling itself adequately with a fan, but of all the places they could have decided to put the most important artery of the car, this seems to have been the worst possible choice. Similarly, an oil cooler under the bumper, right out in front, is also a little peculiar, given the tendency of all nations on the planet to bound their roads with raised, concrete curbs.
No apparent jack stand points -- if you manage to get the car raised up without pinching a $500 piece of pipe, it's often anybody's guess where it's best to place the stands that are going to hold the thing up there. Considering that these cars were made to be worked on by their driver/owners (at least in the early days), you'd think a clearly indicated hoisting point would be in order.
Poor line of sight for speedometer, etc. Sure, I love the big, easy-to-read tach. But what other mass production car requires you to twist the gauges to crazy angles in order to see when you're driving anywhere in the neighborhood of the speed limit?
One idiot light does double duty as the parking brake indicator and oil pressure failure warning. I don't know how many models this is the case in, but jeez... The difference between one of these situations and the other is pretty significant.
Webasto gasoline-fueled heater, right next to the fuel tank. Okay, where do we put the (potential) molotov cocktail we've designed as a supplementary heater? How about next to 15 gallons of explosive fuel, which is up front, at bumper level, where head-on collisions are most likely to happen? I don't know of any problems resulting from this, ever, but it was a gutsy idea for the Weissach engineers to even think up.
Counter-intuitive climate control sliders. No other way to describe them. Top one is for fresh air blown in from under the windshield. Next one is, er... sometimes I can remember, and get it to work. Usually not. But three levers on the dash, and two more down between the seats? That was the plan? Turning on the defrost requires sliding at least four of them.
The 915 transaxle. Nuff said, right? I mean it's not exactly durable, and it's not exactly smooth. Sure, it's an old design, but I've had early-seventies Japanese cars that shifted a lot like late nineties Japanese cars. Transmissions have been around as long as there have been cars. What is so hard to figure out?
A heating system that can kill you if your exhaust is leaking, or can choke you if your engine leaks oil. It's another one of those moves necessitated by the lack of water cooling, I guess. And it almost makes you think changing coolant isn't such a bad idea. It's an idea that mixes the one clearly toxic byproduct of the car with the one part that sends stuff right into our lungs. It works fine, as a rule -- but again, who came up with the initial idea?
Thermal reactors heating up an air-cooled magnesium engine case. I know, it had to be done if they were going to sell cars in the U.S. But the longstanding reputation of the car for reliability and durability was undone by three model years of cars with engines that would cook themselves to death.
Torsion bars - a radical idea, in its day. But not the best idea, ever, or even the best idea for the 911.
A dipstick that easily falls into the oil tank. Happens a lot. Some cars had a screen to prevent it. But when you combine the fact that every component of the oil-checking process is counter-intuitive and at odds with virtually every other car ever manufactured and a dash-based oil level gauge that is hardly ever useful when you're sitting in front of the dash, since you've got to stop, on a level surface, once the car has warmed up to 190 degrees, in order to use it. And even then the rule of thum
Please don't think that signs saying "Don't take pictures here" or "Cameras forbidden" are uniquely American in any way. The rest of the world sees fit to ban cameras in all kinds of interesting places. Why, if you set up a tripod in front of St. Peter's Basilica, the guards will come over and stop you, and they're very serious people. Further, you'll have to remind me where in the Constitution it says "The government shall make no law respecting the Citizen's Right to use their camera," a statement I find highly unlikely given that the first cameras didn't even exist until more than a hundred years after the Constitution was written.
This whole attitude of "American sucks" is so frustratingly ignorant. It's like you have never been out of the country, have no perspective on what's going on in the rest of the world, and take all of your information from other Slashdot posters.
I work for one right now, and I'm glad I'm leaving. Yesterday's chair-tossing foaming-at-the-mouth red-faced obscenity filled rant was about a 10 cent price hike on his favorite chips in the vending machine. The rest of the staff heard him 200 feet down the hall through closed doors while he was on the telephone, "politely explaining" to some poor chap over at the vendor that his prices were unfair.
First, individual certs are a great idea, as long as they're free. For the vast majority of military users, however, it simply doesn't make any sense. I mean, 99.9% of the e-mail that I send and receive has two attributes that make the above phishing test a little silly. 1) My writing is my writing, and my people know what it looks like. My orders are my orders, and my people recognize them. If I said something out of character, I expect them to question that. 2) Anything relaxed enough to send via e-mail can be backed up by a phone call. If I'm at a terminal with e-mail, I have a phone. Even if an "order" seems a little fishy, you can back it up by voice just to make sure.
Second, an "order" given by e-mail doesn't carry anything like the weight that a verbal or written order does. Technically, an orders violation is an orders violation is an orders violation, but practically, the defense for an e-mail orders violation is a lot stronger than a written (and signed, and witnessed) orders violation. Anyone who uses the excuse "I thought that the e-mail from my Colonel asking for my credit card numbers was a little strange, but I didn't question authority because I was afraid of breaking the rules" is just an idiot.
If you don't look for something, your odds of finding it go way down. Simply announcing that creationist research is all flawed and that they have no research publications is frightfully akin to placing your hands over your ears and yelling "I can't hear you!"
Yes, good question, what about all these fossils?
That's one of the things that really bugs me about the evolution camp. "Lookit thuh fossils! Lookit thuh fossils," they chatter, happily spewing forth this nonsense as if there was some record of evolution neatly laid out in the fossils. Sadly, precious few of the people who extol the important of the fossil record in support of evolution have actually bothered to look at it. Had they done so, they'd probably find themselves much less excited about pointing other people to it as evidence of their misbegotten faith. You see, the fossil record doesn't support evolution at all. Quite the contrary -- the closest you can get to supporting evolution with fossils is the frightfully stupid theory we call "punctuated equilibrium," an idea shunned by even the most devout evolutionists. Phillip E. Johnson's "Darwin on Trial" (no, he's not a Christian) examines that issue in detail, among others.
The other great problem with the evolution camp is the refusal to recognize that atheism is a religion just like any other. Belief in no god is equally unprovable, equally untenable from a scientific standpoint, and therefore equally religious. Unfortunately, they place themselves on some kind of scientific high-ground, as if they had already disproved the existence of god scientifically. They beat up on any and all religions on the grounds that anyone who hasn't spotted the self-apparent non-existence of god as an idiot -- while providing no evidence to support their wild claims. They foist off their atheism in schools to the exclusion of all else, citing "the Constitutional separation of church and state" as some kind of battle cry, most never learning that the Constitution doesn't even contain that expression, and none admitting that atheism is just as religious as anything else.
(rolls eyes) What nonsense.
Now that's about the silliest thing I've ever heard. If I have a computer program, and I tell it to loop infinitely doing exactly the same thing, that's exactly what it will do. It has no free will. It does what I tell it to, and nothing more. It will not "inevitably over vast millenia" decide to do something else.
The only way that any un-ordered event would ever happen is if I allowed my program to make up its own mind to do random things. That, by definition, is free will.
ID is nothing more than a sham to try to work around that pesky "separation of search and state" thing that our forefathers were bright enough to put into that pesky "Constitution."
--Our forefathers didn't put "separation of church and state" into the Constitution. SOCAS was actually in a set of completely independent letters written by one of the framers. The idea never actually made it into the document. Nice try.
It comes back to the whole "build a better idiot," principle, though. I mean, I have people come to me complaining that their computers don't work, and they don't know why.
"What is the error message?"
I don't know, something about how it won't work.
"What did you change?"
Nothing.
"Nothing? It just stopped working?"
Just stopped working, can't explain it.
Come to find out they logged in as Admin, deleted a bunch of files and registry keys, shut down, removed old hardware and installed new hardware, and then completely mind-dumped the whole experience.
Am I the only one with users like this?
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that on my boat the only UNIX boxes were HPUX. We had one guy on board who really knew HPUX, and he wasn't me. Everyone else was terrified of the computers.
(sigh) I think overcoming that terror is the first important step.
No, the funniest part is that anyone could point to the evolution of a document as evidence that life evolved. Or maybe that's pathetic; tough to tell.
I'm betting that's a logical OR clause. I'm also betting that, virtually everyone who uses AIM will download updates. So uh ... yeah, that applies to any user of AIM. Good try, though.
Even drivers who do their best to obey all the posted signs occasionally exceed the speed limit. Imagine if every time you drifted up to 20 in that 15 zone, your insurance rates doubled. What about passing somebody -- will the insurance company's computers be smart enough to understand that you were legally overtaking a vehicle travelling slower than the limit, or will they just "e-ticket" you? What if the limit changes -- posted limit goes up 5mph, but the various computers tracking your speed don't get the update for two months, during which time your insurance rates are going through the roof because of your daily speeding violation?
It should be obvious that any system that remotely monitors your speed to determine driving habits is fundamentally broken.
Dan
Both Canon and Nikon made about 10 million manual 35mm cameras, back in the day. Canon's A-1, AE-1, or similar have absolutley no features, but make great beginner's tools. Typically they start at about $100 for a "just usable" condition up to a little over $200 for "like new." Lenses run from about $20 for a 50mm to over $500 for a good condition wide angle lense. Best of luck.
FWIW, "photo.net" runs a lot more photography related stories than Slashdot. It always blows me away when Slashdot runs photography stuff, because the exact same issues are discussed (except in more detail, by people who know what they're talking about) over at photo.net.
Have fun with your new hobby,
Dan
For a full discussion on this topic, try a photo.net search for the "film vs digital debate." It keeps popping up, and the photographers are a lot more adequately suited to argue it than us geeks.
That said, I am a photographer, so let me summarize the debate briefly. Aside from the silliness ("Digital isn't photography!" "Film is obsolete!!") from both sides, the central issue is the quality of the final product. Clearly, for many applications, digital makes significantly more sense. Obviously any web-based service, as well as virtually all major publications, and a great many quick-turn-around studio applications make good use of digital.
Film, on the other hand, still holds tenuously to the market of photographers who enjoy photography for the sake of photography. While digital is unarguably easier, and at the high end shares similar quality with average 35mm films, it has several major weaknesses. First, in color applications, saturation and dynamic range are typically still wrong. Great strides have been made, however, so most normal people can't tell the difference anymore.
The great bastion of film-based photography, Black and White, is still incomparably better than the digital equivalent. Nothing compares to a print made from the 4x5" negative made using a Korean War Era press camera. The rich, full tonality and smooth gradation are impossible to match digitally. The complete lack of grain is also quite notable -- no matter how good the camera, short of printing on a dye sublimation printer, there will always be some semblance of digital remaining in the prints. However, with the massive 4x5" negs, grain totally disappears, leaving an ultra-smooth, incredibly rich photograph.
So the bottom line -- digital is gaining more and more advantages over film every day. Film still has the financial advantage, and still holds B&W, especially in the medium and large formats.