nitpick
last line of article..
divide by zero is either infinity or if you're silicon and count in binary, usually an error or undefined.
135 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2007
Bullshit flag set.
Relevance flag cleared.
.
curiosity flag...set
damn... This means i probably will get drawn into reading it. You see. the OP either got it wright (but my BS flag set immediately, reading him talking thu' his method of interpretation). The paper may welll be dodgy, but so may be the reporting of saidpaper.
Till I get that paper and criticlly analyse,
I offer you a thought experiment.I would suggest that mind altering sutbstaces are literrally what they are. They get neurons going in one particular way. This just a hypothesis - the more your brain likes going a certain way, its' morel likely to want to reinforce this.
What I believe is these devices bet it THC or even trance music , heavy metal etc.. tehy do change your brains subtly. I have a belief exposure to excess may make such changes more lasting.
In other words becareful what you bomb your brain with as you do this consciously or unconciously (TV adds etc)
To the person who instigated this lame project,
I hope you are reading this. Kudos on your intentions - stamping out child pr0n and abuse etc... These are all very noble. But you fail at thinking it thru'.
This is stupid, for the myriad reasons mentioned.
1. IMPLEMENTATION
Netbooks with no optical drives (do you think even if usb optical drives were supplied the overworked people at customs could figure out how to boot the machine or mount it in a reasonably decent practical timeframe).
machines with non-standard OS's - as above. Who's to say that linux live CD will work.
Encryption
Non x86 machines. as above. They do exist. I swear.
What happens if the scan process mucks up your hard drive?
These are all issues I believe that limit this invasive and potentially damaging (to your data) means of 'scanning'.
**** How slow do you expect queues at customs to go?
**** How much grief will it cause the average innocent Joe Q Public travelling with a laptop?
This is just it, dear sir, I hope you are reading this, I don't think you bloody well understand the situation.
Plus it really will not catch the people really smuggling stuff like that as I would expect they would not carry it on their hard drives in the first place.
2. PRIVACY
Your noble intentions are muddied by invasion into privacy of the individual
Where does one draw the line?
You travel, you get everything potentially private at risk of being copied by the customs. Journals, corporate data, personal information. Identity theft anyone?
The implications are staggering.
Slippery slope argument as this is, one could argue along the lines of the philosophy your approach entails, scanning HEADS (consciousnesses, souls whatever) were it technically feasible or possible, would not be beneath you.
So I suggest, dear sir, dear brilliant innovator, you go examine your own @#@$ head before you come up with some lame-brained scheme like this.
Do not con the unwitting powers-that-be ie Customs that this is a SOLUTION for all the above reasons.
Make no mistake.
This is a PROBLEM.
Ponder upon:
1. Gun laws
2. Risk assessment and appropriateness of punitive measures.
3. The stretched prison system (what part of the world is there where this does not exist).
My thoughts:
1. Banning guns altogether would make scenarios like this less likely - but not inevitable - as knives etc still do exist and frankly it would be quite senseless banning kitchen utensils. Some common sense should still prevail. Shooting sprees in countries where guns are banned _are_ less likely.
2. There should be some sort of risk profiling of convicted criminals
3. There could be other punitive/corrective measures which could be more effective than just plain prison but I am no criminal psychologist
Looks like it will be fun. My concerns are basically hardware/driver related. Hopefully I might be able to run a stock debian on it without any major renovation.
I don't know if we'll have or want to recompile stuff for this new chip to minimize the certain performance drop. It'll mean new compilers. I'm not sure in-order execution is really the way to go for an x86 though in all fairness.
... but I guess it saves die area and power consumption. This is the fundamental reason why a lowly in-order pentium III or celeron will spank the atom at benchmarks (cache-misses will hurt) but... I expect it should be quite usable, when you think about old 486's running linux with x...
...Large corporations and companies are usually impersonal and at times evil... trying to get back at whomever offended this guy the way he did (if true) is far worse. There could have been other ways. Nuking the payroll computers for one. Involving innocents is totally unwarranted.
Shame on him and credit goes to the law this time. Well deserved.
The critters involved in innsmouth were decidedly piscean, not cetacean, ffs.
Dolphins and whales are our allies in our struggle against this Ctulthu menace. Kill all tentacled and scaly oily fishy scum.
Don't piss our cetacean colleagues off or they'll just leave.
You all know what happened the last time they left with nothing more than a 'so long and thanks for all the fish'...
Who here does not lament the demise of the PowerPC architecture from the desktop?
Why oh why did IBM abandon ppc64?
It would seem (at least for the moment) we're stuck with IA-32/AMD64/EM64T for the forseable future, at least on desktops.
If there's anyway to end this domination now let's do it. I still live in somewhat despondent hope that one day there will be multicore ppc64's (or even cell derivatives) cheaply available for desktops. BSD/Linux whatever.
And no, the ps3 at the moment just ain't good enough.
Flying cars are not a good idea when you think about it.
If people can't be trusted to drive simple cars which are a lot easier to control and do not fall out of the sky when they lose power...
What about flying cars?
I vote no flying cars till if and when we get anti-gravity technology like those cars in that film "Fifth Element".
And even then, our wonderful friends in the US may deem them too much of a potential terrorist risk.
You may be slow at releases, slow to check out new whizz bang thingies, but heck, you're not getting paid for it, and you're doing it out of your own time, and with the laudable goal of stability.
In hindsight, there are always
(a) Good decisions
(b) Bad decisions
(c) Safe decisions
I think you should be applauded for mainly doing (c).
And yes, I run Debian stable. I admit I am not good enough to roll my own linux and satisfy myself with its stability.
But possibly, and probably like most other people who run Debian, I also run something else for messing. Lolz.
Best of both worlds, really
That's who we are ... wtf are you doing here reading crap like this?
Anyways I couldn't agree more with Brent's last comment.
Now's the time to look around and see.
GNU/Linux / FreeBSD are likely to remain the only 'free' platforms, but we should wait and see if M$ will give us an OS that sucks less and also see how Mac OS X develops. (leopard sucks way less than vista, agreed?)
I hate DRM personally speaking and I don't like the direction these 2 commercial OS's are heading but I have a nasty feeling I am going to have to work 'with them' and not stand alone in isolation in FOSS land.
Unless linux or BSD really zomgwtfpwnz0rs in the rest in terms of market share.. which I personally wouldn't mind.... but again is a situation that hardly seems hardly likely ....... except perhaps in China.... wait for the dragon lolz...
zomg, these days with large capacious machines and multicores you can virtualize and/or multiboot.
Do yourself a favour and have a look at what the other side has to offer. Heck, you can even make a dell boot leopard. Sorta... but I'd recommend tiger instead.
(I accept however Vista is a piece of cR4P that's best stuffed back up M$'s arse. One day however we'll get a decent direct X 10 OS to game on, but I reckon vista ain't it. And apple does incredibly stupid stupid things, I won't go into because there are WAY too many to list. )
L2diversify. Open your minds. Look around. Who knows. may make you more $$$