More likely then not, this was the brainchild of some idiot in marketing,...
I think there was a lot more to it than that. The brainchild of some idiot in marketing doesn't magically end up in the firmware of several of their products! It has to pass through a lot of departments and be approved by a lot of people who should know better.
I'm curious why this had to be tested in India and Morocco. I don't know if it's the case here, but I get really sick of things being tested in far away places, apparently because the lives of the people who live there are not valued as high as those of westerners. Remember Mururoa?
Wow, what an original post. I'm sure Wil hasn't read the exact same post a thousand times at least. You can't be much of a Star Trek fan either, and don't pretend that was a typo, the o is all the way on the other side of the keyboard...
Oddly, for other kinds of books the US is usually much cheaper. I live in the Netherlands and when I buy English language novels or computer text books I usually buy them from Amazon, since they usually cost about half to three quarters (even including shipping) of what I would have to pay to buy them locally...
Do I really need another watered down screed on half-understood principals of Eastern philosophy crammed down my throat to become a better UNIX programmer? Most of the concepts that books like this borrow from Zen are so painfully obvious that it really serves as little more than padding for a poorly thought-out thesis which would only populate about 50 pages (at best) if not for the endless ramblings about holistic thinking.
And of course, you've actually read his book to be able to offer us this razor sharp analysis?
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
More to the point, nobody knows what it takes for intelligence to emerge. Perhaps intelligence is self-organizing, like life, and a sufficiently massive and complex system and some small trigger are enough. And/or perhaps a whole different class of intelligence will emerge. There's no way to tell since we only have a sample of one...
You may be a very good illustration of the problem. While you concede that there may different kinds of gods, you do seem to take for granted that there is one. The indoctrination that is the daily reciting of the pledge appears to have worked in that respect.
You say: "..., it becomes routine, and virtually no thought is probably given by a child." That is exactly the problem! The child doesn't give it any thought, instead it takes it for granted. You say: "... it might be a good thing to give schoolchildren a few moments to think about potentially more important things...," but that is only assuming that the pledge talks about importants things. You seem to take that for granted and that may very well be (partly) because you had to recite it each day during your most impressionable years.
(Before anyone flames me, I am of course aware that the reality is by no means this simple, but I'm just trying to make a point.)
Jason Kottke links to suggestions that the Nokia phones detect batteries which aren't made by Nokia, and when it detects on, it puts the phone in maximum-current-draw mode to try to encourage the user to buy a Nokia battery,...
Yes, they do. I'm a software engineer, and I see all of them daily at my place of work. A lot of programmers just don't give a damn. They don't try to write buggy code, it's just that they can't be bothered to spend the extra energy it takes to write good (safe, maintainable, reusable, scalable) code. They're lazy and sloppy, it's very frustrating to have to work with them (especially when you have to fix their bugs) and there seem to be a lot of them.
I like to think that I'm in category 4 myself, although of course it's more probable that I'm a category 3...
I entered the characters directly from the keyboard into Mozilla on a Windows 2000 machine. Windows and Mozilla are pretty good with international characters, internally they were probably Unicode all the way. I trust Mozilla to submit them to the webserver correctly, no matter which character set was used (and a small test I did bears that out).
Wow, that's pretty sad. None of them survived! Not a single one! Slashdot displays typical American arrogance and ignorance by discarding accents and changing characters to alternatives that are not equivalent or just plain wrong.
I was going to include a table here showing what some of the worst mistakes Slashdot makes are (I mean, changing a ringel-S, which is an alternative to a double S, to a B?!?!), but it wouldn't pass the lameness filter! It told me to "use fewer 'junk' characters"! So accents, currency signs, international punctuation, etc. are considered "lame" and "junk" by Slashdot?! I mean, how fucking arrogant can you get!
Most PC keyboards outside of the US have the Alt Graph (or Alt Gr) key. It's used to access all kinds of international characters. On my keyboard (I'm in the Netherlands), I can type the following characters with it: 1/41/23/4''xaae(R)uuiooaBdoae(C)nc
When I typed it, there were 36 special characters (accented characters, the Euro sign and other currency signs, international alphabet and punctuation characters, etc.) following that colon, I'm curious to see how many of them will survive Slashdot's US-centric character handling code...
Slashdot Mirror
More likely then not, this was the brainchild of some idiot in marketing, ...
I think there was a lot more to it than that. The brainchild of some idiot in marketing doesn't magically end up in the firmware of several of their products! It has to pass through a lot of departments and be approved by a lot of people who should know better.
Name one place within the United States you could hit with a missile that'd break our backs like knocking out our main power supply.
Any big power station in the north-east? Or California?
What if an angry country figures out a way to fire a missile up there?
Yeah, cos that's much easier than firing a missile into America... :-)
What is the point?
Ideally:
I'm curious why this had to be tested in India and Morocco. I don't know if it's the case here, but I get really sick of things being tested in far away places, apparently because the lives of the people who live there are not valued as high as those of westerners. Remember Mururoa?
Wow, what an original post. I'm sure Wil hasn't read the exact same post a thousand times at least. You can't be much of a Star Trek fan either, and don't pretend that was a typo, the o is all the way on the other side of the keyboard...
Oddly, for other kinds of books the US is usually much cheaper. I live in the Netherlands and when I buy English language novels or computer text books I usually buy them from Amazon, since they usually cost about half to three quarters (even including shipping) of what I would have to pay to buy them locally...
but France was right
It's also very telling that Germany is at the bottom of the list, while they were just as against the war as France was!
Do I really need another watered down screed on half-understood principals of Eastern philosophy crammed down my throat to become a better UNIX programmer? Most of the concepts that books like this borrow from Zen are so painfully obvious that it really serves as little more than padding for a poorly thought-out thesis which would only populate about 50 pages (at best) if not for the endless ramblings about holistic thinking.
And of course, you've actually read his book to be able to offer us this razor sharp analysis?
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
More to the point, nobody knows what it takes for intelligence to emerge. Perhaps intelligence is self-organizing, like life, and a sufficiently massive and complex system and some small trigger are enough. And/or perhaps a whole different class of intelligence will emerge. There's no way to tell since we only have a sample of one...
You may be a very good illustration of the problem. While you concede that there may different kinds of gods, you do seem to take for granted that there is one. The indoctrination that is the daily reciting of the pledge appears to have worked in that respect.
You say: "..., it becomes routine, and virtually no thought is probably given by a child." That is exactly the problem! The child doesn't give it any thought, instead it takes it for granted. You say: "... it might be a good thing to give schoolchildren a few moments to think about potentially more important things ...," but that is only assuming that the pledge talks about importants things. You seem to take that for granted and that may very well be (partly) because you had to recite it each day during your most impressionable years.
(Before anyone flames me, I am of course aware that the reality is by no means this simple, but I'm just trying to make a point.)
True C64ers know what the ";" did at the end of line 10.
The same as in BASICA? (Yeah, BASICA. My dad worked at IBM.)
I know we have plenty of reasons to bash SCO, but I must testify that anything that can last 17 years with little or no maintence is worth keeping.
Don't forget that the SCO we're bashing is a different company!
Jason Kottke links to suggestions that the Nokia phones detect batteries which aren't made by Nokia, and when it detects on, it puts the phone in maximum-current-draw mode to try to encourage the user to buy a Nokia battery, ...
The second exploding phone had a Nokia battery...
Yes, they do. I'm a software engineer, and I see all of them daily at my place of work. A lot of programmers just don't give a damn. They don't try to write buggy code, it's just that they can't be bothered to spend the extra energy it takes to write good (safe, maintainable, reusable, scalable) code. They're lazy and sloppy, it's very frustrating to have to work with them (especially when you have to fix their bugs) and there seem to be a lot of them.
I like to think that I'm in category 4 myself, although of course it's more probable that I'm a category 3...
I entered the characters directly from the keyboard into Mozilla on a Windows 2000 machine. Windows and Mozilla are pretty good with international characters, internally they were probably Unicode all the way. I trust Mozilla to submit them to the webserver correctly, no matter which character set was used (and a small test I did bears that out).
Wow, that's pretty sad. None of them survived! Not a single one! Slashdot displays typical American arrogance and ignorance by discarding accents and changing characters to alternatives that are not equivalent or just plain wrong.
I was going to include a table here showing what some of the worst mistakes Slashdot makes are (I mean, changing a ringel-S, which is an alternative to a double S, to a B?!?!), but it wouldn't pass the lameness filter! It told me to "use fewer 'junk' characters"! So accents, currency signs, international punctuation, etc. are considered "lame" and "junk" by Slashdot?! I mean, how fucking arrogant can you get!
Most PC keyboards outside of the US have the Alt Graph (or Alt Gr) key. It's used to access all kinds of international characters. On my keyboard (I'm in the Netherlands), I can type the following characters with it: 1/41/23/4''xaae(R)uuiooaBdoae(C)nc
When I typed it, there were 36 special characters (accented characters, the Euro sign and other currency signs, international alphabet and punctuation characters, etc.) following that colon, I'm curious to see how many of them will survive Slashdot's US-centric character handling code...
The later use came about because it is the only sequence that cannot be hijacked.
I remember being able to write BASIC (!!!) programs that hijacked it...
It's 3x10^8 m/s
That's just the dumbed down Hollywood version. In the book it clearly states that it's 299792458 m/s.
Is inevitability the word with the highest syllables to length ratio?
Why you'd like to use the GSM for data is beyond me.
Because it's all that's available?
> "Fifty million Americans can't be wrong."
No, of course not. Not like 50 million Americans still believe in frikkin' astrology or anything.
Or in God...
What's that from / referencing?
Oh yeah, now I know where they meant...