One of the previous times that Raspberry Pis came up in conversation around here I heard of a guy who set up a Hadoop cluster running on a number of Pis.
It's possible, and educational, but the throughput is simply not significant to justify.
Sure, they're cheap. But putting a bunch next to each other won't give you all the processing power you've ever dreamed of.
So you think they'll evolve a little and then their evolution will just stop?
Well you're getting better, I guess.
You started out saying that:
that information wasn't really obtained at any expense
It's not a drop in the ocean; it's a non-impact
And now you're onto:
If you say, "People died because the mexicans got these particular guns", you are almost certainly wrong.
That's at least... you know... something.
Along the way there, you tried to veer off onto side topics like the nature of deterrents, and how cops are above the law. You also had a couple of shitty examples. Hookers, hackers, and gang-bangs? Dude.
But ultimately, you've got a contradiction in your argument that you just can't seem to fathom. I don't think I'm going to have any luck showing it to you. Good luck with that.
Except you're confused about the negative impact of the two examples.
In your hacking example, the negative aspect to it is "damaging service, stealing sensitive information,". Which doesn't happen in scenario #3 because it's done by "professionals" who are presumably above that sort of thing.
In the selling arms to mexican cartels example, the negative aspect is selling arms to Mexican cartels. Who then go and shoot people. And that is happening whether nor not it's cops doing the selling.
Here, lemme show you. Let's say we were to take your hacking example and apply it to the issue at hand:
Scenario 1: Selling arms to mexican cartels isn't illegal. Result: Prices bottom out on weapons, the mexican cartels are well armed, and lots of people are shot
Scenario 2: Selling arms to mexican cartels is illegal. Result: What we have now. People that sell arms to mexican cartels are put in prison. When we find them. Presumably this drives up the cost of arming the cartels and makes life harder for them and in turn makes illegal drugs more expensive and less prevalent. If you believe in that whole free market thing at least, and believe the war on drugs has a prayer of working.
Scenario 3: Like scenario #2, but cops have an exception. Result: Just like #2, but quantifiably worse for every weapon that the cops sell. Because each one is going directly towards the negative impact.
Unlike your hacking example, where the negative aspect is a side-effect of people learning about network security, the negative aspect is EXACTLY what the police were doing. They are DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTING TO THE PROBLEM.
No, that's how it USED to be. "They want a degree, any degree, it shows that you can learn" is why we have so many liberal arts majors and why
These days companies don't want to teach you anything. They don't care if you can learn. They want to hire you, use you, and them dump you the moment that it's convenient. Teaching costs money. And there are plenty of educated workers overseas wanting in.
And hey, I think it's a reasonable request that the university that you just paid tens of thousands of dollars to give you some marketable skills. If you ask them to at least.
But if he already has the capabilities to crank out some code then he has value that companies want. Maybe a bullshit degree will open a couple doors that wouldn't otherwise be closed to him. But don't lend credit to the lie of the liberal arts degree.
Until then we can focus on colonizing our own bloody solar system.
30. Thirty generations. And they're worried about inbreeding. Because of the population cap that a closed environment like a colony ship would impose.
As for needing diversity when you get there. No. That's not quite right. Once there you can develop diversity. Or, you WILL develop diversity unless everyone stays in the same place for some reason. Do you think "staying healthy" is the same as "staying homo sapian"? Because that ain't gonna happen. Place humans on different planets and I guarantee that we will experience our species splitting in two, assuming we live long enough.
uuuuuugggghhhh, "heat death". Yep. That there's a good show of my thinkatude.
The acceptable time span roughly goes from now until the head death of the universe.
Five hundred people picked at random today from the human population would not probably represent all of human genetic diversity . . . If you're going to seed a planet for its entire future, you want to have as much genetic diversity as possible, because that diversity is your insurance policy for adaptation to new conditions
when it comes to preserving genetic variation
Except that's not the goal.
If you're talking about colonizing another star system (presumably this is way the fuck after we colonize mars, the moon, IO, Titan, Venus, Murcury, and whatever else we feel like) then little things like genetic diversity upon reaching the target are of little concern.
No, you care about GETTING THERE with enough wits about you that you can continue to function, and set up something to expand your capabilities.
The fight is not to keep the diversity we see on earth circa 2000, but rather the fight is against inbreeding from making everyone retarded to the point where they can no longer function.
Once you get there, and establish colonies, food supply, and your ecosphere can expand past the mothership, you can breed like rabbits and let nature take it's course to overcome whatever detrimental effects that being cooped up in a closed space for 30 generations might have had.
Or every generation could be a fucking clone while on the way there. Seriously, this is colonizing ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM. This is WAY OUT THERE. It's science fiction. Just what the hell were you planning of propelling this ship with for 30 years?
Hell, taking the long view, just spreading ANY form of sustainable life is a viable goal for this sort of project. At this scale, "humans" are transient things.
Yo. I run Xubuntu. Could never swallow Unity. If I wasn't so lazy I'd try Arch.
Could probably dual boot if I wanted to. It's been years since I bothered with that.
Don't get me wrong, I also have a laptop running Win7. Gotta game on something. And I'm too damn lazy to putz about with WINE constantly. But Xubuntu does everything I want it to other than run Starcraft.
you need intelligence agencies.
That's reasonable.
You need to protect yourself from enemies foreign and domestic.
Well, sure, but that's what the army and police are for. That's a really big umbrella that intelligence agencies happen to fall under.
You need to be able to be able to spy on other governments to find out their ulterior motives,
What? No, not really. First off, it's illegal. A dickish move that would turn those "other governments" into enemies rather than allies. Second, not everyone has ulterior motives. Third, you can usually figure out a nation's motives by plain old research. No need for spying. Lastly, there's a long history of spy networks being subverted and feeding false information up the chain. The spies can hurt your intelligence capabilities.
and you need to be able to conduct covert operations instead of engaging in full out wars.
So it's one or the other eh? No actually, how about we don't do either?
Covert missions aren't all that bad. It's the clandestine missions that are just plain wrong. It's an open secret that the CIA routinely breaks laws. Murder, assasinations, drug trade, blackmail, and... shit dude, have you looked at their influence with the Contras? a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Alleged_CIA_involvement">Afghanistan mujhideen? They trained a bunch of people how to be terrorists, funded them, and armed them.
Intelligence agencies are important, but they can get the job done without doing this sort of shit.
And if they can't? Those aren't the sort of jobs our nation should be doing.
You named your ship what?
"She's one of ours, sir!"
You're flying around on the SS She's one of ours, sir!...
"Yeah, we figure it'll give us a couple rounds of confusion on their bridge."
Players. Never underestimate the amount of sheer crazy brilliance that players will occasionally pull off.
Yes, they can be owned by people in China. People who solely have access to said bitcoins. The Bitcoins can be considered "in China".
And yes, they need to be smuggled out. If China decrees that anyone trading Bitcoins for money is a criminal, then you can't simply exchange your bitcoins for Renminbi. If China comes down really hard, ASKING for someone to trade money for Bitcoins could be illegal. This would, presumably, convince normal people to simply no longer deal with Bitcoins.
Maybe. Just maybe, someone outside of China would want those Bitcoins because we don't live in such a tyrannical state (yet). But since trading them is illegal, they have to be smuggled. ie, exchanged to someone outside of China hopefully without the authorities noticing/caring, because doing so is illegal.
Whoa there. Important nuance you're missing.
The internet is, was, and hopefully will operate with network neutrality in place. The networks interacted in a (mostly) neutral way when it came to exchanging data.
What you're talking about is legislature, rules, or regulation enforcing network neutrality.
It's far more accurate to say that if every home had a choice of a dozen ISPs, there would be no ISP that didn't operate under NN principles or else they would simply go out of business.
There have been a few examples of corporations trying to break network neutrality. ESPN360.com trying to hustle ISPs for money is one. ISPs trying to hustle Netflix for money is another. And they're rat bastards for doing so. But by and far we HAVE network neutrality. And we sure as shit want to keep it. Without it the Internet becomes significantly less awesome than it is today.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
