Perhaps we can send some folks from the BSA and RIAA over there to educate the Somalis about actual, real piracy. Might help the Somalis to stop confusing holding hostages captured on the high seas for ransom with the only True piracy: copyright infringement.

Insightful, not funny. I've heard a saying about the Chinese and what they eat that (paraphrased) goes something like this: "The Chinese will eat anything that flies except a flag, anything with legs except a table, anything in water except the laundry." Oh, and throw in snakes and worms and other things without legs, too.

Ah, Dec RSX-11M. . . I remember that one, too, but don't seem to remember that particular aspect of all the various structures RSX-11 used; it's been a while. I remember that the OS took almost all day to load and configure and that it came on a stack of 8" floppys which really were kind of floppy.

Slashdot: now a free treasure hunt with every story !

As I said, I already read it.

Majority rule? Only? Really?

Have you read any of the letters sent among the political theorists who drafted, wrote, signed and criticized the constitution? They specifically mention the problems of majority rule, which is called a simple democracy (presumably also a pun, on "simple as in stupid").
Here's a few quick quote/lesson:

"A simple democracy is the devil's own government."
- Dr. Jedediah Morse

I guess the discussion ends here - your conception of democracy might conceivably have been accepted as valid in ancient Athens (if people had not heard about Plato). Today, and at the time of the framing of the constitution, it is and was ludicrous.

PS: Since we're exchanging links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

The summary is just a very misleading slashvert, it makes it seem like one original copy is for sale. It is just some document that has been declassified and is now being published in a hardcover book...

All it will prove is that these machines are hard to hack for outsiders. But the number one threat is that of insiders; mainly the government in place (who has most to lose in an election) and corrupt programmers at the company making the voting computers.

NO mod points right now, but I'd give you a +5 informative. . .

How about calling the negative karmic particle a "less"-on since calling it a "mor"-on give it too much credit. . .

Something must be wrong, I can't find dilithium in this new representation...

The next step from saying that journalists are functionally equivalent to terrorists, is to say that by exposing information the government wants hidden they are helping terrorists. Then they are practically terrorists.

In the room cleaning example, you may have reduced the entropy in your room by ordering it, but you have still increased the overall entropy of the Universe. While cleaning the room, your body turned (ordered) food into (unordered) heat at a rate faster than if you had not been doing anything. The garbage can is less ordered. etc. Anything you do to make one thing more orderly will reduce the local entropy of that thing, but will increase the total entropy of the Universe. In the case of a black hole, you take something ordered (i.e. whatever fell into the black hole had *some* structure; it was matter made of atoms, or it was light made of photons vibrating at specific frequencies, etc.), and you remove that order from the Universe. eventually, that matter and energy renters the universe as random heat (i.e. Hawking radiation). So black holes essentially destroy information and order, which is the very definition of increasing entropy.

H. Beam Piper Paula E. Downing. May not be in print. May not even be in libraries.

I deal with a browser-based CMMS system at work that has this fault. One would hope for the cost of the purchase of software, hardware and the annual maintenance (not cheap) that the developers would make sure the system has something as basic as record locking, notification that the record is in use, or both. After all, it's a front end of a relatively sophisticated database. And databases have been around a while and for the most part are thoroughly understood. The first package we had: V2.0; the current package V4.0. Guess what? No record locking. And no luck with the vendor. They are very nice and seem to be attentive to bug reports, but still no record locking. The CMMS system is better than most for our application and is easy to learn and use. It's this one thing that's the pisser. We've learned to save work very, very frequently. And you're right, there's nothing quite as annoying as losing 15 minutes or more of work. Just gone. Just a information box saying, in effect, "So Sorry, record in use, entries not saved". Really wish you were on that dev team.

Where's the "funny" for this one, mods?