Certainly, but if you find yourself trying to make a change to existing code, it will probably not be the last change you need to make. At least refactoring anything your change touches will make future changes easier to make.
Related note: the original poster doesn't say "refactoring" and he does say "Perl." Informative statements relating to these two facts:
Buy and read Martin Fowler's Refactoring. The examples are mostly Java, and he references the Group of Four's Design Patterns. "Retro-fitting," in which you probably plan to rewrite portions of code from scratch will break your app, your mind, and your budget. Learn what refactoring implies and entails.
Learn about design patterns in general, and consider how they might apply to your code. One description of a design pattern is "a target for refactoring."
(Donning asbestos) You might want to reconsider perl as the language of choice for a large scale application. I realize I'm posting this comment to a Perl system, but Perl hangs together like an immense kludge of a language. That said, you're probably stuck with it, and AFAIK, you may be forging new paths in programming for reusability by applying the above concepts to Perl. Good luck, and be sure you can trust your machete.
I was wondering if anyone shared my disappointment in MGS2? I've played it through once, had a moment of jaw dropping awe at a plot twist, but in the end, it's MGS1 redux (and admits as much) but it isn't any better. There's no great improvement, there's pretty much exactly four decent boss-fights (as opposed to more like ten or twelve in MGS1), it has entirely too many railroaded cinemas, and character development was disappointing. Technically excellent. The 'camera' simulation, that included a fogged lens, water dripping off the camera lens, bubbles getting trapped in the rim, etc. Everyone has more polygons, and can actually see expressions etc.
There are some gameplay aspects that make for a less challenging game. Being able to stick up guards makes silent kills too easy. Amongst other things, a stuck up guard will stand with hands up indefinately, which makes choking them trivial. I've been running through grabbing dogtags hoping for something more than just new items.
Ideally, I'd hope for either a significant plot switch (being able to kill Olga as Snake would be one example, or rescuing Emma, or even getting a different ending at the last minute), or a large extra plot realm (even the redone Shadow Moses mission, or VR missions or something.)
It comes down to I just felt like it fell a bit flat, and it needed more. Unless I missed some huge cool thing along the way...
Re:Information About Eclipse
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Java IDEs?
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One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT,
Not to overstep, but I think you mean "One slightly cool thing." I'd been wondering a little about the SWT thing, but then I saw that Eclipse was a Java based IDE, and I sort of panned it.
I spent a lot of time recently looking for a free/inexpensive Java IDE, because I still have issues with emacs and JDE, even if it does work nicely. Finally a broke down and learned to use it smoothly, because, unfortunately, it's the closest thing to useable for Java.
All the other inexpensive IDEs were either feature-sparse (and let me echo the complaints of "all it does is have some code templates") or dog slow (a fact I attribute to their use of Swing, which blows for editoring stuff) or both (and my opinion of/.er's is improved by the fact that none of the IDEs on that list have been so much as mentioned.)
If Eclipse is using a non-Swing environment, I'd expect a much better performance from it, and would be much more willing to give it a shot. Especially when the Transmogrify is designed to be integrated with any IDE that accepts Java plugins.
Woah, realization: does it matter if officials can be bought, if their price is obviously more than they're worth?
Yeah, ha ha, but seriously, what if it some economic drive could push the price of our representives higher than is worth paying. Is it worth paying 90,000,000,000 USD for a congressional amendment that will pay that back in a thousand years? Or more simply, why buy a judge for more than the dispute is worth?
Is it possible though to push those costs up in a reliable way, assuming that the human desire for justice and fair play is not always as strong as the human desire for personal enrichment (an assumption I don't think anyone around here is going to question.) First there's simple supply and demand: a judge's ruling (which I standardize on as the simple case) is a one time service. Very limited supply. Only the Supreme Court has a monopoly on rulings, and they can take away anything another judge gives you, which complicates the model a bit. Also note that there is an oportunity cost: a judge can only sell a case once, and the appearance of being bought might affect their ability to sell further rulings.
But what we want is for judges to rule as if the ruling hadn't been sold. Perhaps judges would be willing to sell their privacy, so that we can be sure that none of their personal gain is dishonest, but they make a tidy profit on the side? Hrm.
In meatspace, in the US, pornography (for instance) is not defined. It is specifically up to each community to determine what is pornographic. (I think if there were restrictions on displays of violence, they ought to be defined similarly.) IANAL, so I can't point to the specific USSC ruling, but it amounts to "I can't define art, but I know it when I see it."
This has always struck me as ideal. If you don't like how pornography is defined in your community, find a new one. There will always be a place for the puritans and the purient.
The Internet is great for that sort of thing. Whatever you want, you can find, from DADV to wwjd.org. Except that, lacking any boundaries at all, it's ridiculously easy to stumble into other communities, where you aren't a member, and aren't comfortable.
A great many people, (and I certainly don't think Slashdotters are immune) react to areas of the public Internet they don't like with anger, fear and loathing. I'm especially impressed by the irony of seeing these two sentiments in the same page (which is possibly the only justification for this Slashback):
Evil people want to eliminate that which they don't understand.
These tests are bogus! I encode things at far more than 128b/s!
I take away the feeling that on the one hand we recognize that the correct response to information for which one isn't the audience is to ignore it, but we still resent the idea that there is information for which we aren't the audience.
Much as we might despise them, the MPAA solved a similar problem to this decades ago with a nifty little idea called "self-regulation." Granted the movie rating system isn't very descriptive (the US TV ratings are much more descriptive; isn't it great to see if any Adult Content:Nudity is on?)
Yes, Safeweb is going at this in an utterly braindead way. But, rating based web regulation would cope with much of the "For The Children" acts facing the US and the world at large. It seems to me that either a rating system (technically already existant) needs to be generally adopted, and browsers support it by default, even treating Unrated paged as if they were Drugs-Sex-Dismemberment-Adult-Themes, and allowing a simple browser level config. (I can see it now, as part of the Internet Setup Wizard: "How do you feel about pornography?"), or it should be included in the next batch of web standards, with the default of "horribly awful" being specified.
The pressure, then (at the cost of the collective headache of web designers everywhere) is to rate your site appropriately, because unrated sites will have a smaller audience (similar to the reasoning that leads to websites supporting IE first). But a lax rating will lead to complaints, and so on. Besides, imagine google searches by rating. It's in my interest to describe my site appropriately, since it'll bring the audience that wants my services, (At google picture: "rating:porn=MAX").
In general, I tend to see ratings not as censorship, but as a screen, because it takes away the "for the kids" argument of censors. You can say "well, it can be rated unsuitable" and demonstrate that parents can protect their children using ratings, rather than censorship.
Then they have to admit that they want to force everyone to live by their values, and that's just not in the realm of acceptability these days.
The idea that flash animation is required to grab attention is based on a misunderstanding of the context. If I go to a commercial web site, chances are I've gone there on purpose to gather information. I do not need to be impressed. I do not need eye candy to keep me "stuck" to the site. I just want information.
My guess is that you, like me, neither watch broadcast television, nor miss it. However, many Americans (who are, let's face it, the primary audience for most web sites) don't have much patience for static information rich media. They need eye candy to keep them where they've gotten. And typically, they got there by accident, body-ad, gatoring or ham-fisted searching. There are deeper social issues than Flash-loving advertizers gone mad. The problem is mostly the generally short attention spans...
Take a simple example: Imagine you are sitting in a completely closed off room (some isolated test environment) and you are told that you need to press buttons (provided in the room) to get food and water. So you learn to press this button over here to get food and that button over there to get water, and so on. Now, the test environment changes and removes the buttons from your little room. Now, you must learn to perform certain actions to get food and water like raising your right hand for food and raising your left hand for water.
Sounds like House of Stairs, which was a decent read way back when. Basically an experiment in conditioning, but where the required behavior isn't demonstrated.
Would this change of approach be benificial to gaming?
No. I really don't think so. The PS2 has "analog" buttons already (read: pressure sensative), which is a strange enough change in gaming interaction. The game controller needs to be a non-item. The ideal is that you forget that there is an interface between you and the game, not that you can type a screenplay with to keys. To that end, the controller needs to be flexible, but incredibly intuitive. And you need to be able to use it in a number of ways, including resting it on your knee or table for fighting games, for instance.
A button finger combination thing just makes that more difficult.
It may be some time, but if judges don't grin and bear it, the arguments of employees in similar circumstances is going to be much stronger.
On the other hand, for the same reasons, it might take more courage (or more accurately, gall) to rule against an employee privacy case when the judge in question had fought monitoring of his own communications by his employer.
CS degree at my Uni required a seminar in computer ethics. One of the situations was that, as network admin, we'd been asked to deliver copies of an employee's email to a manager. Much discussion, but the punchline was that several legal cases had found in favor of the employer, because the machines that generated and transmitted the email were theirs, and it was their place to allow or withhold permission to listen in. As I recall, the precedent was set by company phone systems, where they own the desk station and the PBX.
If you memorize your civil rights, don't forget one. --Consolidated.
Frankly, US judges can complain all they want about their use of office communications equipment being monitored when they protect the rights of the rest of not to.
Legally, in the US, if you use a company computer to send email, that company has the right not only to read that email, but act on it. Your boss can bring up emails to boyfriends in reviews, and HR can fire you for posting contrary opinions to the web. As far as I'm aware, nothing prohibits identical behavior regarding phones, or even workplaces.
I may be wrong on this last point, but I think that employers can use surveilance equipment to monitor their employees activities without their knowledge. The best case is that the policy of surveilance must be made clear.
Judges is the US have defended this behavior for years now, and the computer (and phone) related argument is that the equipment belongs to the employer, and activies on them is in their purvue to observe. Let them be watched. I see no reason a judge should get any fairer treatment than the rest of us.
Re:And it goes marching on
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Shirky On P2P
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if DHCP and DNS is configured properly, the client can update the DNS server
However, that relies on DN clients respecting the cache limits described by a DNS. My experience is that under Windows, not only does the OS cache DNS information without regard for caching hints, so does Explorer.
I for one appreciate the anti-MS content at Slashdot, for a few reasons. (I'm not pleased that my exclude-michael filter isn't working, and am wondering if he's doing something sneaky...)
First, I despise almost all of Microsoft's products. Their design philosophy (credo 1: get it out the door toot sweet, credo 2: the user knows nothing) sets my teeth on edge, and the more I use and code for (and with) MS products, the more I find not to like. So, I enjoy membership in a like-minded community.
Second, in order to stem the profusion of Microsoft products in my workplace, I need to be able to argue against their purchase, with facts. For this purpose, both counter-Microsoft articles, and support of other software vendors comes in handy. I find these data invaluable.
Third, if you don't like Microsoft related articles (and, face it, no Microsoft news at Slashdot is good news (and, IMO, no good Microsoft news is true)) you can go to your user preferences and turn them off. It's not hard. Do it now, you'll be glad you did.
It's been my unfortunate experience, when representing friends and clients, that broadband providers know pretty much zippo about their equipment. Their own installs baffle them, which I think is just wonky.
I think it comes from most broadbanders being former telco and catv providers, who sort of know their basic telephone and cable TV wiring (although, the more hands on experience I have with company installed lines, the less I believe that). The upshot is that while they know the First Rule of Incompetent Tech Support: Never Admit Ignorance, they do not understand their own equipment.
Example conversation:
"Hi, I've got a machine here that works fine in a local network, but I try to replace the old computer on your link with it and it doesn't get pings back. Narrowed the problem down to some flaky management of ARP caching on your router."
"You have a router? That's not allowed."
"No, you have a router, and it needs the ARP cache cleared for my IP."
"We don't have ARP."
"Do you know what ARP is?"
"Yes. We don't have it."
Now, it's just possible that they're using some bizarre hardware layer networking, that doesn't use the address resolution protocol, but I doubt it. Fixed the problem with their network from the client end. Viva la Linux. Viva el Tux.
Taco, there's this nifty util called ispell, specially designed so that's it's interactive mode works with other code neatly. Whether or not it's built into slash already, it ought to be, and at least editor stuff should go through it before it posts. Crimeny.
As for bits of paper used for voting, has the idea of ballot stuffing not occured to anyone? Granted, punched chads may or may not have any protection against ballot stuffing (like printing a serial number at the moment of punch, or whatnot) but writing a number on a piece of paper, or checked boxes on a sheet of paper seems too prone to abuse to really be considered.
Sometimes, an expediant avenue of information transfer is through a human being.
Sometimes, that human being acknowledges the fact that transfering the information may have consequences to their own person.
If, however, that person has no other reason to prevent the information flow, and they can evade the consequences, they may transfer the information.
Anonymity is an excellent evasion for most specified consequences of information transfer.
Therefore, if somebody knows something, and they can propigate those data, but will only do so if they can escape retribution (for example) for the propigation, and they reasonably can conceal their identity, then anonymity serves the flow of information.
In the long view, the datum of a person's identity is usually much smaller that the data they with to convey. People are screwy, and they mandate this sort of information for information sacrifice.
Furthermore, anonymity lifted once discourages future human data avenues from transmitting in the future, since they have a reason to expect that the anonymity is a farce.
In a similar way, priviledge of information encourages it's freedom, since the priviledged party can adjudicate the transmittal of collatoral information that might never have flowed overwise.
Lastly, strict adherence to the "All Information wants to be perfectly free" credo doesn't typify white hat anything. A white hat cracker doesn't distribute your credit card data, out of respect for personal property.
"Information wants to be free" is more properly an axiom than a motto, IMO, anyway. It describes how data behaves; sometimes it's behavior is desirable (for instance, new product releases, security hole updates) and sometimes it is not desirable (any data-based security mechanism), and when it is desired, you get it free, otherwise, be prepared for vigilance.
Don't feel sorry for the shmuck who blows an extra grand on a Mac to get it a month before a MacWorld Expo. Be sorry for the mid-sized businesses that shelled out 50 large for WebObjects only to have the price drop to $700 at a MWE. Talk about obsolecence and opportunity costs.
Remember finding out about child abuse on Gont, and why wizards from Roke avoided girls, in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu?
First, it's weird that you chose a Le Guin book as your first example. The Wizard of Earthsea wasn't exactly one of my childhood favorites, and besides, Le Guin gets odder with every book.
Remember when all the kids got killed, and Aslan turned into Jesus, in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle?
Man, if you're only getting the Christian alegory of the Narnia books, you did read them young. Frankly, that was the bigger betrayal by Lewis, in my opinion. I'd always loved the Narnia books, especially everyone's introduction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But when I re-read them at 18, Aslan as Christ drips so thickly that it's just sickening. Now I can't read any of them. Pah.
Remember when Bilbo Baggins turned into an old, evil monster (if only for a moment) in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- and then the "sequel" to that had no hobbits, only elf genealogy and linguistics?
This example is getting better. The Hobbit is much more of a kid's book. There's enough there for an adult to enjoy, but there's nothing tricky going on. Part of the evil of the One Ring is that just wanting it taints you, and kindly, good natured burglar that he is, it's the more tragic that Bilbo has been tainted. And face it, the Silmarilion details events leading up to the beginning of the Age that Rings describes the end of. So, first, it's not a "sequel," or even a prequel, really, but more like a history, or a mythic lay, which is how it reads.
If it's not what you expected -- that is, what you extrapolated from the first movie(s) or book(s) -- you're not going to like it. We build cosy little worlds from the "original" stories, then hate it when the author intrudes.
Ultimately, it's the author's right to do or say anything with the world he imagines. As as audience we can comment, criticize, or even extrapolate. But ultimately it's impossible for the author to "intrude." His is the authoritative word, as it were.
Regarding Star Wars, the first trilogy began simply, even shallowly (and the lead was similarly poorly acted - forget Jar Jar, Jake Lloyd sucks balls), but built into a much more complex and satisfying story over the course of the trilogy. Empire used to be my least favorite of the three, but it improves the most with age.
I've been hoping this first trilogy would turn out about the same, and it certainly has started out about the same point. Clones will be where the trilogy stands or falls, in that it can make up for Jar Jar and Lil' Anakin, Wunderkind, or it can leave Episode III with nowhere left to go.
And, I for one would stand by the title. It's a space opera for cryin' out loud. The first one is called The Phantom Menace, you know? Eesh.
About 6 months ago I bought a shoulder sling (intended for a NATO gun holster, but whatever), attached a PockIts (leatherman cum maglight, plus other stuff, pocket). Then I built a quick release holster for my Palm and hooked my cell phone to the other side. I wear a shirt over it, and manage not to make a fashion statement of my tech-goodies.
I was most amused to find the eHolster , that'll cost three to four times what my rig did.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. I agree with you up until the second last paragraph.
Think for just a moment more and it ought to be clear. Alice has at this point decided that she trusts Carol, but lacks Carol's key. A key signed by Bob (a trusted signer) as belonging to Carol is as good as one from Carol herself. The distinction to make is between Carol and a key purportedly Carol's.
A good theory is one that can be proven wrong. Meaning: it's better to pose a proposition whose truth value can be demonstrated than one which can't. For instance "I have five dollars in my pocket" is therefore a better theory than "An undetectable, immaterial entity created and controls everything," since I can prove or disprove the former, while I can't do anything more than discuss the latter. That's what your professor meant.
As for physical theories, physicists don't claim to know everything, or that all that they think they know is so; but they do claim that physical theories do explain empirical data well. The physics presented is pretty solid, and it would take a very unlikely revolution in our understanding of matter and energy to alter the conclusions presented.
I have to say, of all the questions I felt like asking when I first read the Ganymede documentation, and white papers, and presentations (I came upon Ganymede at 0.9, and it was, I'll admit, fascinating), is why not have used JINI for a lot of this.
I understand that the answer is that, when GASH needed extension, JINI wasn't a twinkle in Bill Joy's eye, but the degree to which JINI could improve and extend the parts of Ganymede that it would be applicable to is incredible.
JINI's gotten almost no press, and it seems like it's worth discussing. For instance, JINI provides an Attributes class that would go a long way to improving the weird hash hack that underlies the Ganymede data model. JavaSpaces perfectly provide the data management fascility, and with a little work can be made to buffer a database. JINI includes a transaction engine that can be used to drive a very flexible set of transaction properties on any class that implements an extra interface. And, finally, not only does it allow the application to scale, components can be simply added to the system without having to be integrated by hand.
On the other hand, it's still using RMI, but last I checked, there were free solutions for securing RMI, so I dubious about how much of an issue that is.
The downside to this is that, although I reviewed the Ganymede code briefly, I could give a great estimate of how much code would be reused with a JINI rewrite (although it could be quite incremental) and I wonder if it would be almost easier to start from scratch.
On the whole, though, Ganymede is most impressive. You've done a man's job, sir!
Because flourescent lighting is annoying in terms of flicker and color temperature, it would be a brilliant notion to replace them with superior alternatives.
However, to supplant flourescent lights, any solution must be superior in terms of the benefits building owners perceive: lower energy costs, and longer bulb life. Note that while pricey sockets is a damper to adoption, flourescent lighting costs a packet to install already, so over time a better solution is possible. The ideal is a matching form factor.
So, that in mind, possible solutions include
Hi output led array. Long lasting, power effecient, color output tunable. Might even be able to build LED "tubes" to replace existing flourescents, but they'd have to incorporate heavy and expensive power conditioning.
Bioluminescence. This is a little silly, since presumably you'd need to feed the luminases, so presumably it doesn't fit into the existing grid, but if you were willing to set up a cetralized glucose feed, the cost benefit is certainly there, although I'd be surprised if you could balance the color output.
One of the other benifits to organic circuitry of any kind (OLEDs included) is that they can be applied chemically, i.e. without heat. Upshot of that is that the substrate doesn't have to be glass. Say goodbye to the single most fragile part of any portable device, down to your HP RPN calculator. And since heat resistance isn't a factor, the substrate could be made flexible, and roll up, for instance. Now the screen can be much larger than the input devices. OLED has so many applications, if they can just their act together, it's staggering.
Don't get too excited. No light based display is going to be the visual analog of CDs. This is for the good and complete reason that a light based color spectrum would have to include at least some negative values to encompass the entire visible color space. There's an RGB scheme proposed by, IIRC, the IEEE, that includes negative green light to produce the entire range.
It should be immediately apparent that this isn't on the order of "the human eye can resolve down to a 120/th of a degree at the center of focus" limit on resolution, since, AFAIK, back row at IMAX beats that limit. Resolution is simply (hah) a matter of getting your pixels small enough, or whatever. But you can't solve the negative light problem; how do you emit darkness?
Sure, it's nice to be getting closer to that color space, but don't get too excited; we're a long way yet from either a pigment and light hybrid, or an new color emulation system. Probably direct nervous stimulation would be easier. (More secure too: let's hope it's harder to Van Eck your eyeballs than a monitor.)
Slashdot Mirror
Related note: the original poster doesn't say "refactoring" and he does say "Perl." Informative statements relating to these two facts:
There are some gameplay aspects that make for a less challenging game. Being able to stick up guards makes silent kills too easy. Amongst other things, a stuck up guard will stand with hands up indefinately, which makes choking them trivial. I've been running through grabbing dogtags hoping for something more than just new items.
Ideally, I'd hope for either a significant plot switch (being able to kill Olga as Snake would be one example, or rescuing Emma, or even getting a different ending at the last minute), or a large extra plot realm (even the redone Shadow Moses mission, or VR missions or something.)
It comes down to I just felt like it fell a bit flat, and it needed more. Unless I missed some huge cool thing along the way...
Not to overstep, but I think you mean "One slightly cool thing." I'd been wondering a little about the SWT thing, but then I saw that Eclipse was a Java based IDE, and I sort of panned it.
I spent a lot of time recently looking for a free/inexpensive Java IDE, because I still have issues with emacs and JDE, even if it does work nicely. Finally a broke down and learned to use it smoothly, because, unfortunately, it's the closest thing to useable for Java.
All the other inexpensive IDEs were either feature-sparse (and let me echo the complaints of "all it does is have some code templates") or dog slow (a fact I attribute to their use of Swing, which blows for editoring stuff) or both (and my opinion of /.er's is improved by the fact that none of the IDEs on that list have been so much as mentioned.)
If Eclipse is using a non-Swing environment, I'd expect a much better performance from it, and would be much more willing to give it a shot. Especially when the Transmogrify is designed to be integrated with any IDE that accepts Java plugins.
Yeah, ha ha, but seriously, what if it some economic drive could push the price of our representives higher than is worth paying. Is it worth paying 90,000,000,000 USD for a congressional amendment that will pay that back in a thousand years? Or more simply, why buy a judge for more than the dispute is worth?
Is it possible though to push those costs up in a reliable way, assuming that the human desire for justice and fair play is not always as strong as the human desire for personal enrichment (an assumption I don't think anyone around here is going to question.) First there's simple supply and demand: a judge's ruling (which I standardize on as the simple case) is a one time service. Very limited supply. Only the Supreme Court has a monopoly on rulings, and they can take away anything another judge gives you, which complicates the model a bit. Also note that there is an oportunity cost: a judge can only sell a case once, and the appearance of being bought might affect their ability to sell further rulings.
But what we want is for judges to rule as if the ruling hadn't been sold. Perhaps judges would be willing to sell their privacy, so that we can be sure that none of their personal gain is dishonest, but they make a tidy profit on the side? Hrm.
This has always struck me as ideal. If you don't like how pornography is defined in your community, find a new one. There will always be a place for the puritans and the purient.
The Internet is great for that sort of thing. Whatever you want, you can find, from DADV to wwjd.org. Except that, lacking any boundaries at all, it's ridiculously easy to stumble into other communities, where you aren't a member, and aren't comfortable.
A great many people, (and I certainly don't think Slashdotters are immune) react to areas of the public Internet they don't like with anger, fear and loathing. I'm especially impressed by the irony of seeing these two sentiments in the same page (which is possibly the only justification for this Slashback):
- Evil people want to eliminate that which they don't understand.
- These tests are bogus! I encode things at far more than 128b/s!
I take away the feeling that on the one hand we recognize that the correct response to information for which one isn't the audience is to ignore it, but we still resent the idea that there is information for which we aren't the audience.Much as we might despise them, the MPAA solved a similar problem to this decades ago with a nifty little idea called "self-regulation." Granted the movie rating system isn't very descriptive (the US TV ratings are much more descriptive; isn't it great to see if any Adult Content:Nudity is on?)
Yes, Safeweb is going at this in an utterly braindead way. But, rating based web regulation would cope with much of the "For The Children" acts facing the US and the world at large. It seems to me that either a rating system (technically already existant) needs to be generally adopted, and browsers support it by default, even treating Unrated paged as if they were Drugs-Sex-Dismemberment-Adult-Themes, and allowing a simple browser level config. (I can see it now, as part of the Internet Setup Wizard: "How do you feel about pornography?"), or it should be included in the next batch of web standards, with the default of "horribly awful" being specified.
The pressure, then (at the cost of the collective headache of web designers everywhere) is to rate your site appropriately, because unrated sites will have a smaller audience (similar to the reasoning that leads to websites supporting IE first). But a lax rating will lead to complaints, and so on. Besides, imagine google searches by rating. It's in my interest to describe my site appropriately, since it'll bring the audience that wants my services, (At google picture: "rating:porn=MAX"). In general, I tend to see ratings not as censorship, but as a screen, because it takes away the "for the kids" argument of censors. You can say "well, it can be rated unsuitable" and demonstrate that parents can protect their children using ratings, rather than censorship.
Then they have to admit that they want to force everyone to live by their values, and that's just not in the realm of acceptability these days.
My guess is that you, like me, neither watch broadcast television, nor miss it. However, many Americans (who are, let's face it, the primary audience for most web sites) don't have much patience for static information rich media. They need eye candy to keep them where they've gotten. And typically, they got there by accident, body-ad, gatoring or ham-fisted searching. There are deeper social issues than Flash-loving advertizers gone mad. The problem is mostly the generally short attention spans...
What was I talking about?
Sounds like House of Stairs, which was a decent read way back when. Basically an experiment in conditioning, but where the required behavior isn't demonstrated.
Would this change of approach be benificial to gaming? No. I really don't think so. The PS2 has "analog" buttons already (read: pressure sensative), which is a strange enough change in gaming interaction. The game controller needs to be a non-item. The ideal is that you forget that there is an interface between you and the game, not that you can type a screenplay with to keys. To that end, the controller needs to be flexible, but incredibly intuitive. And you need to be able to use it in a number of ways, including resting it on your knee or table for fighting games, for instance.
A button finger combination thing just makes that more difficult.
It may be some time, but if judges don't grin and bear it, the arguments of employees in similar circumstances is going to be much stronger.
On the other hand, for the same reasons, it might take more courage (or more accurately, gall) to rule against an employee privacy case when the judge in question had fought monitoring of his own communications by his employer.
CS degree at my Uni required a seminar in computer ethics. One of the situations was that, as network admin, we'd been asked to deliver copies of an employee's email to a manager. Much discussion, but the punchline was that several legal cases had found in favor of the employer, because the machines that generated and transmitted the email were theirs, and it was their place to allow or withhold permission to listen in. As I recall, the precedent was set by company phone systems, where they own the desk station and the PBX.
If you memorize your civil rights, don't forget one. --Consolidated.
Legally, in the US, if you use a company computer to send email, that company has the right not only to read that email, but act on it. Your boss can bring up emails to boyfriends in reviews, and HR can fire you for posting contrary opinions to the web. As far as I'm aware, nothing prohibits identical behavior regarding phones, or even workplaces.
I may be wrong on this last point, but I think that employers can use surveilance equipment to monitor their employees activities without their knowledge. The best case is that the policy of surveilance must be made clear.
Judges is the US have defended this behavior for years now, and the computer (and phone) related argument is that the equipment belongs to the employer, and activies on them is in their purvue to observe. Let them be watched. I see no reason a judge should get any fairer treatment than the rest of us.
However, that relies on DN clients respecting the cache limits described by a DNS. My experience is that under Windows, not only does the OS cache DNS information without regard for caching hints, so does Explorer.
First, I despise almost all of Microsoft's products. Their design philosophy (credo 1: get it out the door toot sweet, credo 2: the user knows nothing) sets my teeth on edge, and the more I use and code for (and with) MS products, the more I find not to like. So, I enjoy membership in a like-minded community.
Second, in order to stem the profusion of Microsoft products in my workplace, I need to be able to argue against their purchase, with facts. For this purpose, both counter-Microsoft articles, and support of other software vendors comes in handy. I find these data invaluable.
Third, if you don't like Microsoft related articles (and, face it, no Microsoft news at Slashdot is good news (and, IMO, no good Microsoft news is true)) you can go to your user preferences and turn them off. It's not hard. Do it now, you'll be glad you did.
I think it comes from most broadbanders being former telco and catv providers, who sort of know their basic telephone and cable TV wiring (although, the more hands on experience I have with company installed lines, the less I believe that). The upshot is that while they know the First Rule of Incompetent Tech Support: Never Admit Ignorance, they do not understand their own equipment.
Example conversation:
"Hi, I've got a machine here that works fine in a local network, but I try to replace the old computer on your link with it and it doesn't get pings back. Narrowed the problem down to some flaky management of ARP caching on your router."
"You have a router? That's not allowed."
"No, you have a router, and it needs the ARP cache cleared for my IP."
"We don't have ARP."
"Do you know what ARP is?"
"Yes. We don't have it."
Now, it's just possible that they're using some bizarre hardware layer networking, that doesn't use the address resolution protocol, but I doubt it. Fixed the problem with their network from the client end. Viva la Linux. Viva el Tux.
Taco, there's this nifty util called ispell, specially designed so that's it's interactive mode works with other code neatly. Whether or not it's built into slash already, it ought to be, and at least editor stuff should go through it before it posts. Crimeny.
As for bits of paper used for voting, has the idea of ballot stuffing not occured to anyone? Granted, punched chads may or may not have any protection against ballot stuffing (like printing a serial number at the moment of punch, or whatnot) but writing a number on a piece of paper, or checked boxes on a sheet of paper seems too prone to abuse to really be considered.
- Sometimes, an expediant avenue of information transfer is through a human being.
- Sometimes, that human being acknowledges the fact that transfering the information may have consequences to their own person.
- If, however, that person has no other reason to prevent the information flow, and they can evade the consequences, they may transfer the information.
- Anonymity is an excellent evasion for most specified consequences of information transfer.
- Therefore, if somebody knows something, and they can propigate those data, but will only do so if they can escape retribution (for example) for the propigation, and they reasonably can conceal their identity, then anonymity serves the flow of information.
In the long view, the datum of a person's identity is usually much smaller that the data they with to convey. People are screwy, and they mandate this sort of information for information sacrifice.Furthermore, anonymity lifted once discourages future human data avenues from transmitting in the future, since they have a reason to expect that the anonymity is a farce.
In a similar way, priviledge of information encourages it's freedom, since the priviledged party can adjudicate the transmittal of collatoral information that might never have flowed overwise.
Lastly, strict adherence to the "All Information wants to be perfectly free" credo doesn't typify white hat anything. A white hat cracker doesn't distribute your credit card data, out of respect for personal property.
"Information wants to be free" is more properly an axiom than a motto, IMO, anyway. It describes how data behaves; sometimes it's behavior is desirable (for instance, new product releases, security hole updates) and sometimes it is not desirable (any data-based security mechanism), and when it is desired, you get it free, otherwise, be prepared for vigilance.
Ouch.
Remember finding out about child abuse on Gont, and why wizards from Roke avoided girls, in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu?
First, it's weird that you chose a Le Guin book as your first example. The Wizard of Earthsea wasn't exactly one of my childhood favorites, and besides, Le Guin gets odder with every book.
Remember when all the kids got killed, and Aslan turned into Jesus, in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle?
Man, if you're only getting the Christian alegory of the Narnia books, you did read them young. Frankly, that was the bigger betrayal by Lewis, in my opinion. I'd always loved the Narnia books, especially everyone's introduction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But when I re-read them at 18, Aslan as Christ drips so thickly that it's just sickening. Now I can't read any of them. Pah.
Remember when Bilbo Baggins turned into an old, evil monster (if only for a moment) in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- and then the "sequel" to that had no hobbits, only elf genealogy and linguistics?
This example is getting better. The Hobbit is much more of a kid's book. There's enough there for an adult to enjoy, but there's nothing tricky going on. Part of the evil of the One Ring is that just wanting it taints you, and kindly, good natured burglar that he is, it's the more tragic that Bilbo has been tainted. And face it, the Silmarilion details events leading up to the beginning of the Age that Rings describes the end of. So, first, it's not a "sequel," or even a prequel, really, but more like a history, or a mythic lay, which is how it reads.
If it's not what you expected -- that is, what you extrapolated from the first movie(s) or book(s) -- you're not going to like it. We build cosy little worlds from the "original" stories, then hate it when the author intrudes.
Ultimately, it's the author's right to do or say anything with the world he imagines. As as audience we can comment, criticize, or even extrapolate. But ultimately it's impossible for the author to "intrude." His is the authoritative word, as it were.
Regarding Star Wars, the first trilogy began simply, even shallowly (and the lead was similarly poorly acted - forget Jar Jar, Jake Lloyd sucks balls), but built into a much more complex and satisfying story over the course of the trilogy. Empire used to be my least favorite of the three, but it improves the most with age.
I've been hoping this first trilogy would turn out about the same, and it certainly has started out about the same point. Clones will be where the trilogy stands or falls, in that it can make up for Jar Jar and Lil' Anakin, Wunderkind, or it can leave Episode III with nowhere left to go.
And, I for one would stand by the title. It's a space opera for cryin' out loud. The first one is called The Phantom Menace, you know? Eesh.
I was most amused to find the eHolster , that'll cost three to four times what my rig did.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. I agree with you up until the second last paragraph. Think for just a moment more and it ought to be clear. Alice has at this point decided that she trusts Carol, but lacks Carol's key. A key signed by Bob (a trusted signer) as belonging to Carol is as good as one from Carol herself. The distinction to make is between Carol and a key purportedly Carol's.
As for physical theories, physicists don't claim to know everything, or that all that they think they know is so; but they do claim that physical theories do explain empirical data well. The physics presented is pretty solid, and it would take a very unlikely revolution in our understanding of matter and energy to alter the conclusions presented.
I understand that the answer is that, when GASH needed extension, JINI wasn't a twinkle in Bill Joy's eye, but the degree to which JINI could improve and extend the parts of Ganymede that it would be applicable to is incredible.
JINI's gotten almost no press, and it seems like it's worth discussing. For instance, JINI provides an Attributes class that would go a long way to improving the weird hash hack that underlies the Ganymede data model. JavaSpaces perfectly provide the data management fascility, and with a little work can be made to buffer a database. JINI includes a transaction engine that can be used to drive a very flexible set of transaction properties on any class that implements an extra interface. And, finally, not only does it allow the application to scale, components can be simply added to the system without having to be integrated by hand.
On the other hand, it's still using RMI, but last I checked, there were free solutions for securing RMI, so I dubious about how much of an issue that is.
The downside to this is that, although I reviewed the Ganymede code briefly, I could give a great estimate of how much code would be reused with a JINI rewrite (although it could be quite incremental) and I wonder if it would be almost easier to start from scratch.
On the whole, though, Ganymede is most impressive. You've done a man's job, sir!
Because flourescent lighting is annoying in terms of flicker and color temperature, it would be a brilliant notion to replace them with superior alternatives.
However, to supplant flourescent lights, any solution must be superior in terms of the benefits building owners perceive: lower energy costs, and longer bulb life. Note that while pricey sockets is a damper to adoption, flourescent lighting costs a packet to install already, so over time a better solution is possible. The ideal is a matching form factor.
So, that in mind, possible solutions include
One of the other benifits to organic circuitry of any kind (OLEDs included) is that they can be applied chemically, i.e. without heat. Upshot of that is that the substrate doesn't have to be glass. Say goodbye to the single most fragile part of any portable device, down to your HP RPN calculator. And since heat resistance isn't a factor, the substrate could be made flexible, and roll up, for instance. Now the screen can be much larger than the input devices. OLED has so many applications, if they can just their act together, it's staggering.
It should be immediately apparent that this isn't on the order of "the human eye can resolve down to a 120/th of a degree at the center of focus" limit on resolution, since, AFAIK, back row at IMAX beats that limit. Resolution is simply (hah) a matter of getting your pixels small enough, or whatever. But you can't solve the negative light problem; how do you emit darkness?
Sure, it's nice to be getting closer to that color space, but don't get too excited; we're a long way yet from either a pigment and light hybrid, or an new color emulation system. Probably direct nervous stimulation would be easier. (More secure too: let's hope it's harder to Van Eck your eyeballs than a monitor.)