The biggest breakthrough I see in this is the lessened need for shoes to be manufactured (to an extent) by hand. If Nike hops on the bandwagon, they could not only drive the push for better mass-production versions of rapid-prototyping machines like SLS printers, but also reduce the usage of child laborers. Next up: soccer balls.
Knew a guy who ran warez server out of his house (~20-30 gigs around 92-93, so pretty good for the day). He kept a couple giant magnets (I think speaker magnets from concert sized speakers) near by so he could just move the magnets/computers closer together in case of a raid.
I, too, like the idea of tracking, where students who are more intelligent/better-performers (not always the same thing) get pushed into higher tracks. The difficulty is the abuses that are caused within a tracking school: minorities (I'm hoping less and less), students whose parents don't care, and political reasons (Principal's kid, sports star that needs to be in college-prep track, etc.) cause students to be misplaced. These are things that manifest without tracking, but tracking will aggrevate it.
Also, the parents who ask that little Johnny be put into a higher track because "he really is smart, but doesn't test well", also tend to be the parents who will bitch and moan to keep him there when he fails. And teachers may let him, how many times have you caved in to something just to get someone to shut up?
Lastly, switching mid-stream becomes a pain: a general college-prep student may have been doing phenomenally in school for the last year because of some drastic change, but if they get bumped up to honors, they may miss a couple necessary classes or be unable to handle it (jump from Geometry to Calculus, Journalism to English Lit., etc.).
Not insurrmountable (sp?) issues, but non-trivial, especially when applied to a social context.
That's my rant; I'm probably wrong on details and missing some major points, but I at least want to add some more issues to think about.
Ahh, but the greatest subversive tracts are subtle enough to elude the Thought Police and inspire those inclined to think.
[Meetings of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons are held every Thursday at 7pm in the Red Lion Pub, just down the street from TPHQ.]
I think that the important thing is the distinction that pi is a *ratio*. Cir is a defined quantity, because you can have a Cir of 4, 5, 6.28..., etc. and it is a valid variable, but not a fixed constant. Pi, on the other hand, is the fixed constant associated with the variable dimensional descriptors (radius/diameter and circumference) and defines their interrelationship.
Okay, so I'm kinda talking out of my ass and using big words to cover it up, but I think it makes sense. (Maybe I should've been a philosophy major...)
In 1989 the WANK worm infected NASA's DECnet and spread from there to such exotic locales as HEPnet, EUROnet and couple other fun ones. The worm would infect a system by trying password == username (surprisingly successful) and a couple other basic attacks. Then it would look for a process name like wwdk_1234, where 1234 was just a random number string. The worm would look for this process and if it found it would terminate, otherwise it would set up shop.
What the heroic sysadmin did was rewrite teh code to look for a definite number and if not found it would kill that process and start its infection routine, effectively killing the actual worm and replacing it with the benign version.
The hacker later countered by simply looking for that process and killing it then running its infection routine, but for a while the counter-worm worked.
-Source: The Underground, by somebody, available online somewhere and in hardcopy. (Okay, so my memory isn't perfect.)
Let's not forget that console CPUs are generally optimized for that system. Even though an AMD or Intel can grease that in pure calcuation, the general instruction set of a computer isn't optimized for gaming (unfortunately).
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest breakthrough I see in this is the lessened need for shoes to be manufactured (to an extent) by hand. If Nike hops on the bandwagon, they could not only drive the push for better mass-production versions of rapid-prototyping machines like SLS printers, but also reduce the usage of child laborers. Next up: soccer balls.
Knew a guy who ran warez server out of his house (~20-30 gigs around 92-93, so pretty good for the day). He kept a couple giant magnets (I think speaker magnets from concert sized speakers) near by so he could just move the magnets/computers closer together in case of a raid.
Don't think he ever had to use them, tho.
Semi-tangential on the subject of tracking.
I, too, like the idea of tracking, where students who are more intelligent/better-performers (not always the same thing) get pushed into higher tracks. The difficulty is the abuses that are caused within a tracking school: minorities (I'm hoping less and less), students whose parents don't care, and political reasons (Principal's kid, sports star that needs to be in college-prep track, etc.) cause students to be misplaced. These are things that manifest without tracking, but tracking will aggrevate it.
Also, the parents who ask that little Johnny be put into a higher track because "he really is smart, but doesn't test well", also tend to be the parents who will bitch and moan to keep him there when he fails. And teachers may let him, how many times have you caved in to something just to get someone to shut up?
Lastly, switching mid-stream becomes a pain: a general college-prep student may have been doing phenomenally in school for the last year because of some drastic change, but if they get bumped up to honors, they may miss a couple necessary classes or be unable to handle it (jump from Geometry to Calculus, Journalism to English Lit., etc.).
Not insurrmountable (sp?) issues, but non-trivial, especially when applied to a social context.
That's my rant; I'm probably wrong on details and missing some major points, but I at least want to add some more issues to think about.
Ahh, but the greatest subversive tracts are subtle enough to elude the Thought Police and inspire those inclined to think.
[Meetings of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons are held every Thursday at 7pm in the Red Lion Pub, just down the street from TPHQ.]
I'm just concerned that Neal Stephenson wrote about an interactive _book_, but the real concern seems to be cheap TVs. sigh.
I think that the important thing is the distinction that pi is a *ratio*. Cir is a defined quantity, because you can have a Cir of 4, 5, 6.28..., etc. and it is a valid variable, but not a fixed constant. Pi, on the other hand, is the fixed constant associated with the variable dimensional descriptors (radius/diameter and circumference) and defines their interrelationship.
Okay, so I'm kinda talking out of my ass and using big words to cover it up, but I think it makes sense. (Maybe I should've been a philosophy major...)
In 1989 the WANK worm infected NASA's DECnet and spread from there to such exotic locales as HEPnet, EUROnet and couple other fun ones. The worm would infect a system by trying password == username (surprisingly successful) and a couple other basic attacks. Then it would look for a process name like wwdk_1234, where 1234 was just a random number string. The worm would look for this process and if it found it would terminate, otherwise it would set up shop. What the heroic sysadmin did was rewrite teh code to look for a definite number and if not found it would kill that process and start its infection routine, effectively killing the actual worm and replacing it with the benign version. The hacker later countered by simply looking for that process and killing it then running its infection routine, but for a while the counter-worm worked. -Source: The Underground, by somebody, available online somewhere and in hardcopy. (Okay, so my memory isn't perfect.)
Let's not forget that console CPUs are generally optimized for that system. Even though an AMD or Intel can grease that in pure calcuation, the general instruction set of a computer isn't optimized for gaming (unfortunately).
And what's this about using the GeForce???