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people might lock themselves in a safe environment for hundreds of years at a time.

Or they might assemble a fleet to assault the Undying Lands of the Uttermost West.

Tolkein's explorations aside, I suspect that, in a world of long-lived people, material wealth accumulates and a greater and greater fraction of human effort is devoted to the zero-sum game of power politics. You won't die, but you will lose.

Eh.. I'd argue differently.

IMHO, the next major revolution in OS design (and performance) will be from an exokernel architecture. For those who aren't familiar with them, it's a completely radical and different approach to kernel design, the main idea behind it is seperate protection from management. If you really think about it, who (I use that term loosely) would know better what resources, scheduling, etc an application will need - the kernel, or the application itself.

Traditional kernel design techniques give the (pretty much) the entire management of resources to the kernel itself and hide it behind a HAL (hardware abstraction layer), allowing the application little to zero say in the matter. Exokernels throw that idea out of the window, taking a completely opposite view on the issue. Once you give the power to the application, it opens a whole new world of OS design.

It's really quite interesting, for more information on different kernel designs you can check out the Microkernel entry at thefreedictionary.com

Here's another, more detailed description of the 1729 thing. I didn't understand that one, so I looked it up too.

It's one of the things I look for in great TV/movies - stuff that flies over your head the first time but that you catch as you get smarter (or waste more of your time).

some sort of non-MS (in other words, like the old-fashioned) BASIC

Woah there sailor! MS made one of the oldest versions of BASIC there is for the Altair computer! This is where they became famous before they were famous: They were highly critical of hobbiest programmers who freely shared their BASIC interpretter. MS wanted everyone to pay for their own copy. Some history man! Ye gods!

feel like a well hung man

As I said in my last interview. You can write nasty code in any language some just lend themselves more to it.

Oops. I said "comprehension". That's a complicated word. It requires understanding a large vocabulary. Perhaps I should have circumlocuted instead by saying "easy to understand"? We wouldn't want to have parsimony and nuance in our expressions...

At some point you have to pay for complexity. If you don't do it at the language level, you'll do it at the phrase, block, unit, or organizational level. How long to learn Brainfuck and how long to build a useful program in it?

So apart from some windy griping, only one coherent argument has been presented here to counteract Perl's dada/inclusiveness bent. That was the astute observation that the families of operators are bigger because the types are not explicit and therefore the operation must be explicit instead of relying on context to understand what "a op b" actually really means. However all is not necessarily ideal because now the type of operation disappears from the local context, hence the reason for such reviled ideas as Hungarianization ("aByteP op bByteP").

I find the most unsettling part of Perl is that I always thought scripting languages should be easy to learn: a limitation that makes them poorly suited to large or complex projects. And on the other end of the spectrum, an industrial-strength language should take years to learn properly but once mastered you can build the universe.

VALUE, common law. This term has two different meanings. It sometimes expresses the utility of an object, and some times the power of purchasing other good with it. The first may be called value in use, the latter value in exchange. 2. Value differs from price. The latter is applied to live cattle and animals; in a declaration, therefore, for taking cattle, they ought to be said to be of such a price; and in a declaration for taking dead chattels or those which never had life, it ought to lay them to be of such a value. 2 Lilly's Ab. 620. [1]

I think it's perfectly valid to say inquisitionists weren't "real" Christians any more than Russia's Liberal Democrats are real liberal or democrats. Of course they'll try to twist things around with convoluted logic, but their ideas and actions can't stand a minute of reasoned debate.

In the end all these debates boil down to meanings of key words, but I'm confident it's possible to capture the essence of "Christianity" or "Liberalism" to the extent that you can show they contradict these people's ideas and actions. Such actions and motives don't stem from their convictions, but from the fact that they are mentally ill, power-hungry, feeling marginalized, angry, they didn't get enough attention as kids or whatever.

Ideologies are power tools. If you were to start a war, you'd have to mobilize the masses. Pick one from: Democracy, Freedom, The Nation, The Flag, King and Country, God, Allah, Protect your family etc. If you have a secret agenda you take an accepted ideology and use it for your own purposes.

Lastly, I'm not sure how fruitful or even possible it is to try to compare the "value of religious convictions". Values stem from convictions and vice versa. If you are a Christian you're quite likely to end up thinking Christianity is better in line with your own Christian values than other religions, i.e. most "valuable". :)

What about DesqView which was released before Windows 1.0.

Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers!

Aspartame has no effect on the dopamine receptors. It breaks down rapidly in the body into two common amino acids, and those amino acids do not rise above physiologically normal levels. This is just another one of the nonsense uban legends about aspartame.

Lithium is not "normally used to treat conditions like" schizophrenia. It's used to treat bipolar disorders - something completely different. If your doctor can't tell the difference between schizophrenia and the manic phase of a bipolar disorder....

My mother was a psychiatric social worker who dealt with the chronically mentally ill at around the time "Tab" came out.

Tab never had aspartame in it. Tab was sweetened with saccharin. Saccharin doesn't interfere with dopamine reactions, either.

Heck, even MAOIs don't interact with aspartame and saccharin.

(Remember, it's not nice to invite your Parnate or Nardil patients to a "Wine and Cheese" or "Beer and Pizza" party. Can you say "The patient's diastolic was over 300 mm Hg before he died?" I knew you could!)

I'm sorry, but the post I am replying to pretty much demonstrates why asking for psych info on slashdot ain't a good idea.

A quick blurb..
"A "grassroots" action or campaign is one that is started spontaneously, and is largely sustained, by private persons, as opposed to politicians, corporations, or public relations firms; a "grassroots" campaign comes about because of the popular feelings of some mass of people, as opposed to being the creature of the powerful.

"Astroturfing", then, is a campaign crafted by politicians or spin-doctors, but in such a way as to appear it's the result of popular feeling rather than crafty manipulation by political or corporate elites".

"baseball, baseball game, ball - a ball game played with a bat and ball between two teams of 9 players; teams take turns at bat trying to score run; "he played baseball in high school"; "there was a baseball game on every empy lot"; "there was a desire for National League ball in the area"; "play ball!"

Ok.. If you don't know what baseball is, raise your hand and Tommy will come over and hit you on the head with a tackhammer because you are a RETARD!

Today it does... But think about when it first appeared... The .mod (.s3m, .xm, etc) format was a bridge between .mid and .wav formats... in MIDI, you have a pure music score, and you rely on the local hardware to decode the song and make it sound realistic. A Waveform is pure audio output, with no track structure to indicate which instrument is supposed to play when, it's just an amalgum of all the frequencies together. Back in 1987 only the Amiga had multivoice sound, and you didn't have all this fancy on-board sound banks. You were supposed to buy a dedicated card for MIDI, or external hardware. Later for IBM PCs, your joystick port was expected to serially connect to a MIDI device that could play the music... which is why it's also called a Roland MPU-401 port.

The Module format allows you to create a song in pseudo-sheet music form, while it also stores the audio samples for the tracks in the file itself... The song sounds just as good on an 8-bit audio card without a MIDI decoder, as it does on today's 32-bit cards with practically a symphony of samples in ROM. Yes, you were limited to music beats in 1/64th of a measure, and Yes, early .mod formats were 4 voices (now 64), but Modules still fill a niche.

Ah, information. We can see from this history that the SoundBlaster had their own form of synthesized music in 1989 (OPL2), and didn't support General MIDI until SoundBlaster 16 in 1992.

I really love this stuff and I'm just finishing my master's in music technology (go figure..). This isn't the first time I've seen CA in music. I know for sure of a cell examples in Max/MSP, PD (Pure Data), and Common Music.

I don't see any real benefits for doing this kind of task in java. It's very nice having another option, but are there any reasons to use this software over the other very good options? I am much more excited about the possibilities with ChucK.

No, not responsible for their actions, responsible for creating the circumstances which allowed them to commit the crime. It's called criminal negligence: "recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences)"

In other words, you have a certain responsibility to ensure reasonable safety when you are in control of property that can forseeably cause harm, such as a loaded gun or an open pool.

The point is the reasonableness. Leaving a loaded gun lying around a house is not reasonably responsible because people do have visitors and do get burglarized. Stating that burglary is illegal isn't an excuse to not knowing that people do get burglarized. In other words, it is forseeable. Same with kids falling in an open pool and drowning.

This doesn't carry to things such as knives for several reasons: they are far more difficult to accidently harm someone, they are very commonly used around the house and require easy access, and they are so commonly available that a criminal could have gotten one, or any sharp object, anywhere legally. In other words, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect people to lock up their knives.

As for an open network connection, that would probably fall into the forseeable category. If you knew you left it open and you are aware that people hack into these things to do illegal activeity, it is forseeable that it could be used for illegal activity. You might not get charged with commiting the actual illegal activity if you can demonstrate that it probably was someone else, but you probably could still be charged with negligence. (Keeping in mind IANAL.) If you accidently left the network open or didn't know about network security, you might not get charged.

the nation's gone absolutely ape-shit

...and obviously not Minix, the immediate ancestor of Linux.

Or Idris or Coherent.

Without claiming to be any kind of kernel guru I believe that the Minix and Linux kernels are so different that it is not useful to call Minix the immediate ancestor of Linux.

The Linux kernel is a "monolithic" kernel. The Minix kernel is more like Hurd, or QNX, with a "microkernel", and tasks communicate via message passing. Minix was written as a teaching tool, aimed to run on an 8088. So it had performance limiting bottle-necks. IIRC the file system task could only handle a single file system request at a time.

But it makes me wonder about Xenix - the one Microsoft owned, for a while. Guess that didn't exist, either.

Microsoft liscensed Xenix. They didn't own it. I used a version of Xenix in the early 80s. The Xenix I used was clearly just a rebranded version 7.

They are talking about the Global Warming Potential of the gas. Global Warming Potential is based on infrared adsorption spectra of the gas in question. What that statement means, is that methane adsorbs 21 times as much energy in the infrared spectrum as CO2. The amount of thermal energy trapped in the atmosphere by methane is 21 times that of CO2.

As for the ozone layer part, I have to agree that that seems to be a confused writer.

The metric system is a misfeature. There are two things one wants to do with numbers, count things and measure things. For counting, thanks to the fingers, 10 is a natural base. For measuring, you often want to break things into equal parts, half, third, quarter, etc. The smallest natural base to make this easier is 12. So, most ancient systems used 10 for counting and 12 for measure.

The metric system was a product of the Age of Reason, which had as its basic premise that they were smarter than everybody before them. They decided to unify the two systems and chose 10 as the unifying base. This is backwards. For measuring, the ability to divide evenly is critical, counting can be done in any base. The logical choice would be to use 12 for everything, but that would really mess things up, so they changed the measure instead.

For its intended use, scientific measure, any base will work since you usually aren't dividing those up and it scales well. For day-to-day stuff, though, metric sucks.

Philosophy of science (especially "The Justification of Scientific Statements")

Scientific Method (especially "Scientific Method and the practice of science" and "Philosophical Issues")

Dogma

Dogmatic

Agnosticism vs. atheism

That's all I'm going to say, because our philosophies are so far apart that this would be an endless and fruitless discussion. At least through /.

Did you even read what I wrote?

First off, you're not a libertarian.

Sure I am. I'm currently a minarchist libertarian, but learning towards anarchist, also known as anarcho-capitalist.

There's more than one kind of libertarian, you know. Those who, like me, disagree with intellectual property laws are still a minority within the movement, but we are a significant minority. Here's a good discussion of the issue. Here's some more perspective. Saying libertarians are all agreed on the issue and that I'm not a libertarian because of my position on this is a misrepresentation. As Eric Raymond says, the non-coercion principle is about the only thing all libertarians agree on.

Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights (that's a tenent of Libertariansim)

You're dismissing an entire branch of libertarianism, there. Anarcho-libertarians do not believe a basic government is needed, at all, or believe that government itself should be demonopolized (allowing a choice between any number of independent governments in a geographic area, or starting your own). Now, most of the ones I hear from still seem to believe in intellectual property, but I'm at a loss as to how intellectual property law is to be enforced in anarchy.

Furthermore, as I said in my post (did you read it?), I do not believe "intellectual property" is a property right. Nowhere in our legal code is it acknowledged as a right; it is a gift from the public encoded in the Constitution NOT because people have an "inherent right" to their ideas, but in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. (Did you read the Constitution?)

Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit.

Where did I say that? Strawman, or else you're reading somebody else's post.

I don't code for free, but I don't produce proprietary software, either. Something like 70% or more of the coding industry is not jobs for software makers like Microsoft or your favorite game company but coding custom software that is only of interest to one particular company. This will never go away; intellectual property laws have zero bearing on whether this kind of work needs to be done or not. Furthermore, removing the government-monopoly grant of intellectual property would radically change the software industry but not destroy it. Free software is demonstrating that. We are slowly approaching the point where, even with the protection of the government grant of exclusive rights "for a time," proprietary software will be unable to compete on price, features, performance, or TCO with Free software. That's the point of the whole article from Tocqueville! They see Free software as a neutron bomb that will "kill" the industry. What it will do is not kill it, but change it forever. There will still be money to be made in Free software. And even if not, people still have the right to give their "intellectual property" away for free, so this change is going to happen anyway.

How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?

I do not believe anyone has a right to a profit at any particular business model, nor do I believe anyone has an exclusive right to an idea they have originated, thus I do not propose protecting these alleged "rights." (I do, of course, believe in protecting all the same rights for everybody, so they'd have the same basic rights as you and me.)

Meanwhile, it's not impossible to make money selling Free software. Why don't you do some reading some time?

so all software development is in the hands of people who happen to have the time and mone

Here is a nice clickable overview:

History of computers

R = Ron Rivest
S = Adi Shamir
A = Len Adleman

Next question: how the heck do you control the spin of individual baryons in a nucleus?

It's spelled (and promounced) Sampo. Learn vowel harmony, you insensitive clod!

IBM's System/38, AS/400 and iSeries computers use exception processing for all errors in all languages on the box. If you don't trap errors, the job will stop and force you to deal with them when they arise. 1978. The Free Dictionary

• 
  SALE, contracts. An agreement by which one of the contracting parties, called the seller, gives a thing and passes the title to it, in exchange for a certain price in current money, to the other party, who is called the buyer or purchaser, who, on his part, agrees to pay such price. Pard. Dr. Com. n. 6; Noy's Max. ch. 42; Shep. Touch. 244; 2 Kent, Com. 363; Poth. Vente, n. 1; 1 Duverg. Dr. Civ. Fr. n. 7.
  
  LICENSE, contracts. A right given by some competent authority to do an act, which without such authority would be illegal. The instrument or writing which secures this right, is also called a license. Vide Ayl. Parerg, 353; 15 Vin. Ab. 92; Ang. Wat. Co. 61, 85.
  

• 
  SALE, contracts. An agreement by which one of the contracting parties, called the seller, gives a thing and passes the title to it, in exchange for a certain price in current money, to the other party, who is called the buyer or purchaser, who, on his part, agrees to pay such price. Pard. Dr. Com. n. 6; Noy's Max. ch. 42; Shep. Touch. 244; 2 Kent, Com. 363; Poth. Vente, n. 1; 1 Duverg. Dr. Civ. Fr. n. 7.
  
  LICENSE, contracts. A right given by some competent authority to do an act, which without such authority would be illegal. The instrument or writing which secures this right, is also called a license. Vide Ayl. Parerg, 353; 15 Vin. Ab. 92; Ang. Wat. Co. 61, 85.
  

WARNING: Spelling Nazi attack follows

I agree, playing the baddies can be fun, but am I missing something? Where was the Golem in LOTR?

JPEG2000 appears to be both patent-unencumbered and a more useful/effective standard

Actually, that statement bay actually be incorrect and may have undeclared and obscure submarine patents involved. That could explain why The GIMP, Mozilla, nor Opera support it.

...but a thing that would convince me of the human impact is climate archeology showing a tight correlation between co2 and average temperature.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/bonobo

Bzz. Wrong on both counts. Last time meter was defined in a way you describe was in 1795.

Meter is a measure of distance. Bit is a measure of information. Both have definitions.

Your not knowing this foundation of Informatics -- despite it being offered and discussed elsewhere in this very thread perfectly illustrates my original point (moderated off-topic by now).

[Your stubborn insistence on "1 or 0" (what happened to "left or right", "black or white", then?), coupled with calling me "Jackass" point at several personality flaws too, but that's really off-topic]

Try the 6th meaning in this page, for example...

are not inherently fast or slow - implementations are fast or slow, not languages

can be both dynamic and have good performance

can be cross-platform without swallowing POSIX whole

can have multiple inheritance without damaging your brain

can be object-oriented without being object-obsessed

If you like, you can quit as soon as you understand how static scoping and closures work - at least that way you will avoid the primary mistake in pretty much every recent scripting language.

There is a small risk you will become a SmugLispWeenie by doing this, so be forwarned.

Definition of doddle

Noun 1. doddle - an easy task

Don't you mean Certifiable professionals?

With US 52.8 billion dollars in the bank...

You do realise that a US billion (a thousand million) is alot smaller than a European billion (a million million), right?

"As Wal-Mart, we do not discriminate against anyone, including women," said Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for communications.

She noted that when Wal-Mart posted notices companywide in January inviting workers to apply to become management trainees, only 43 percent of those who expressed interest were women.

(emphasis mine)

13-16 hour days molding, assembling, and painting toys, 7 days a week; 20 hour days in the peak season.

A whole 13 hours at Christmas? And here I am working at my shop doing 24 hour days. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. They have it good. But hey, just pretend nobody is working long hours at Christmas in North America, the wool over your eyes will keep you warm.

Workers are paid 13 cents/hour wages in China: the minimum wage is 31 cents.

Incorrect. There is no minimum wage in China. However, individual Chinese cities have elected to enact minimum wage standards.

The minimum wage in Shenyang, for example, is 320 yuan monthly, or 8 cents per hour if your above numbers are true.

But that's ok. Don't let the truth cloud your rhetoric.

There is no health or safety enforcement: constant headaches and nausea from chemical fumes, indoor temperatures above 100 degrees F, rampant repetitive stress disorder, no protective clothing available.

That's not unusual for any Chinese factory. It's not unusual for any developing nation. It is unfortunate and my heart bleeds for them. But denying them employment and money will only serve to exacerbate such problems through death and pestilence.

Most employees are young women or teenage girls.

It is unfortunate that in most rural areas choices are diffcult and it is believed in such areas that men are more suited to farm work than women. This leads to women working in such factories to support the financial aspect of such families.

Suppliers have to open their accounting books to Wal-Mart executives so they can cut "unnecessary expenses" like unionized worke