There's a natural synergy there, IMO. Nanotechnology offers us ways to study (and in some cases, alter) living systems in a way that's impossible with macroscopic methods; at the same time, living systems offer elegant models of molecular machinery that works, and does something useful, rather than being an interesting toy in the lab. In short, the answer to the question "nanotechnology or biotechnology?" is "both."
Yes, please do ask any Canadian or Swede how good their health care system is. What you'll probably hear is, "It's pretty damn good." Study the facts, not the propaganda.
You're probably wasting your time; I strongly suspect that the grandparent poster is an anti-Mac fanatic. You can show that sort tons o' data to prove that by every reasonable measure of usefulness for a laptop, including toughness, you get more for your money from Apple than from any Wintel vendor, and they still won't believe you.
The new wording is a masterpiece of fake balance. (Do they have Fox News writing their drafts for them?)
In the new draft, these are replaced with a more general description of how governments should "promote awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models... including proprietary, open-source and free software".
Um, no. Proprietary software vendors do just fine "promoting awareness" of their products on their own. If governments give equal weight to proprietary and free/OSS, in practice that means that governments will be shilling for M$ just as hard as M$'s own PR dept., and free/OSS providers will be out in the cold. I suspect this will be especially true in poor countries -- the ones who would benefit most from a push for free/OSS -- because, let's face it, that's where government workers are most susceptible to outright bribery.
And the 0.2 seconds become more and more insignificant in more interesting programs...
That's only true if the 0.2 second delay only happens once (or a few times) in the program. When that delay is inside a loop that executes a few hundred times... and there are hundreds of such loops in the program... suddenly you're sitting there wondering if your machine has crashed because it's taking so damn long to do anything.
Interestingly, they seem to have done it right with the "SupaDope Xbox playa" part. The Xbox ads are cool, and they've pulled in a lot of hardcore gamers who would otherwise have gone with a PlayStation or GameCube. And despite my general loathing of all things M$, I have to admit that the Xbox is one damn good game system.
But they did it by, as far as I can tell, disassociating themselves from the rest of the company. If you didn't know the Xbox was a M$ product, you'd be hard pressed to tell from any of the ads. I don't claim to know how the corporate structure works, but the impression I get is that Xbox Inc. is almost a separate company. That's probably the only way they could pull off any degree of cool -- as opposed to Apple's iPod and iTunes divisions, which make sure to remind you at every opportunity that they are, in fact, Apple.
Well, Coleman's a Minnesota Republican, which is about as conservative as, say, your typical Louisiana Democrat is liberal. If you see what I mean. Minnesota politics tend to be either leftist or libertarian, or some combination thereof; you don't find too many real right-wingers making it very far there.
Eeeurgh. I didn't mean that post to spark an argument of the merits of Hitler as opposed to Stalin. Both of them were so monstrously evil that it's pointless to argue about whether one of them was more or less evil than the other.
The reason the Western Allies favored the USSR over Germany was that they knew Stalin's evil was of a kind they could deal with, predict, and contain if necessary. The loony nihilism of the Nazis left no room for such options. Had Germany destroyed the USSR, there would have been no Cold War; most likely, there would have been a few years of tense "peace" while both they and the Allies recovered, followed by a WW3 fought largely with dirty fission bombs that would have been the greatest bloodbath in human history. The Cold War was not a good thing, but it was much, much better than the alternative.
My point -- and Churchill's point, in the line I quoted above -- is that when two evils are fighting each other, it is often necessary to choose one of them as a (temporary) ally. Right now, ICANN serves our interests more than VeriSign does. If VeriSign is eliminated, or even taken down a few pegs, that may no longer be the case, and then it will be time to re-evaluate.
"We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Bullshit. If you're paying for a dorm room, you have the right to any services that come with that payment. And since a lot of schools require that underclassmen live in the dorms, a lot of students can't just pick up and move.
Um... I don't think a rock "the size of a small house" would have burned all the way up, or even mostly burned up, on its way through the atmosphere. Isn't the lower limit on rocks that make it to the ground about 1 kg?
Ehhh, not quite, IIRC. Little rocks are meteoroids while they're floating around in space, meteors while they're in the atmosphere, and meteorites if and when they land. But asteroids are, of course Big Rocks (anyone know what the lower size limit is?) and I don't think that having them enter the Earth's atmosphere is a common enough occurrence for anyone to have come up for different terminology based on where they are in their descent...
I've always coded my HTML a coupla years behind the bleeding edge, and I don't have too many problems.
Yes, that's exactly the solution. There is a very large subset of HTML, including much of XHTML/DHTML/CSS/$INSERT_BUZZWORD_HERE, which works just fine in any reasonably recent version of Netscape/Mozilla, IE, Opera, Konqueror/Safari, etc. And frankly, if you're trying to do something outside this subset, you're probably designing a crappy, irritating, overly complex website anyway.
That doesn't concern me at all. If US and UK gov't computers get 0wNz0R3d 8Y c41N33z h4X0rZ, then maybe that will be the call they need to wake the fuck up and realize how insecure Microsoft software is, and switch to a better alternative. And as for whatever potential damage will be done, honestly, it's not likely to be any worse than what the George & Tony Show is already doing.
I seem to recall this being a Congress issu, not the responsibility of the Executive Branch. Due to the ferver of nationalism that swept much of the nation (especially lawmakers), the bill passed with a huge margin. It's not the president's responsibility to be a dictator. If it were, we wouldn't need a congress anyhow. Stop blaming what other branches of the government do on the president. *smacks parent poster around with an 8th grade history book*
Relying on 8th-grade history books for an understanding of actual politics is about as naive as... well, the typical 8th-grader.
Yes, that story came to mind when I was writing that post.;) I didn't mention it because I find it irritating when people cite fiction in support of real-world arguments -- e.g., "Of course [HOT TOPIC IN BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH] is dangerous! Didn't you see [THAT MOVIE WHERE A [HTIBR] EXPERIMENT GOT OUT OF HAND AND ALMOST DESTROYED THE WORLD]?!?" But it is true that good cautionary fiction can illuminate the dangers of the real world, and I think "The Last Article" falls into that category.
Actually, I got out of the service just as they were phasing in Tricare. I thought it looked like a boondoggle then, and nothing I've heard since has changed my mind. And why was it such a boondoggle? Well, maybe because they were taking a government program that worked and trying to half-way (and half-ass) replace it with a privatized system...
Civil disobedience only works if you're dealing with essentially rational people; the assumption is that even if the law itself makes no sense, the people enforcing it can eventally be made to see reason. Otherwise, it's hopeless.
When Hitler was coming to power in Germany, lots of German journalists thought that if they made enough noise, their fellow citizens would come to their aid and stop the Nazis before things got really bad. Those journalists died in the camps. Ditto for those Russians who believed the Revolution's promises of equality and freedom, and protested when Lenin started breaking those promises in rather dramatic fashion.
Civil disobedience is an American tradition because, for most of American history, the assumption of rationality has been true. I'm not at all sure that's still the case.
1. Most corporate executives are known for giving preferred treatment to people with ties.
2. From working in the private healthcare industry, I can tell you that it has a huge overhead and a good chunk of your insurance premiums are wasted.
3. There are a large number of hypochondriacs who abuse every health care system at everyone else's expense.
I've worked in Federal government health care, city government health care, and private health care. The quality of service, overall, was about the same in all three. But IMO, overall efficiency declined in the order I've listed them.
Yes. Another example of this is the way Diebold is trying to (mis)use copyright law to keep Black Box Voting from revealing Diebold's plot to commit election fraud on a massive scale. Bev Harris says, bitterly and accurately, that this is equivalent to a bank robber drawing up plans for a job, and then claiming that the cops can't use those plans as evidence because they're his IP.
In short, no civil confidentiality regulation should be allowed to interfere in a matter of criminal law. I believe that in most cases, the laws are actually written this way -- e.g., whistleblowers get explicit legal protection -- but I suspect that most people either don't know this, or feel (perhaps rightly) that regardless of what the law says, their employers will throw an army of lawyers at them to make sure they lose the judgement.
Yes, exactly. It's like when some small town becomes The Murder Capitol Of The US!!! because they have one grisly, high-profile mass killing, and their per-capita murder rate shoots up above Chicago's and DC's. When the numbers are as small as they are (in the hundreds of thousands for Windows 2003, as opposed to the tens of millions for both IIS and Apache generally) it doesn't take much to create some impressive percentages.
I know full well that a full copy doesn't equal a full lost sale, but then, I really don't understand the claim of people downloading it to see if it is good before going to the theaters. Why do people go to the theaters if you've already seen it?
Because there are some movies -- actually a lot of movies -- that are more enjoyable in the theater than on TV. Big, SFX-filled sci-fi movies, of course. Gorgeously done fantasies like LOTR. Landscape-heavy Westerns and road movies. Action movies. Period pieces. And, for that matter, even "serious" stuff (using the definition of "serious" that says: no spaceships, no magic, not set in the future or more than a century in the past, no car chases, and weapons are seen rarely if at all) that relies on good cinematography.
In short, any movie that's worth making as a movie at all.
Come on, haven't you ever seen a movie in the theater more than once? Or seen a movie on TV and thought, "Damn, I wish I hadn't missed this when it was in the theater?" Or watched a movie on TV that you liked when you saw it in the theater and thought, "There's something missing here, seeing it on the small screen?" Seeing movies in the theater is simply a different experience from watching them at home, no matter how nice your TV.
You're right, of course. But it is an article of faith among the entertainment cartel that 1 copied file == 1 lost sale. Just as the RIAA is unwilling to consider the idea that file-sharing might actually help sales of good music (people do go out and buy albums after hearing a couple of good MP3's off those albums; but the albums they buy are more likely to be from obscure bands rather than whatever insipid Top 40 pap is currently getting all the advertising bucks) the MPAA is unwilling to consider the idea that a movie made to be seen in the the theater (as the LOTR films definitely are) might, if first seen on a pirated DVD, actually help draw people into the theater to see it. This is not a rational cost-benefit analysis on their part; it's a matter of paranoid ideology. The long, sad history of how paranoid ideologues react when confronted by sweet reason does nothing to convince me that they'll change their minds any time soon.
Actually, it's not just the entertainment industry that think this way. How many times do we hear M$ et al. claiming "Software piracy cost us $XX billion in lost sales last year," as though everyone who burned a copy of an Office CD would otherwise have gone out and bought the damn thing for full price? At least in the software industry it's a little wink-wink nudge-nudge, though; e.g., Adobe knows full well that all the Photoshop copies out there are training the next generation of Adobe customers. But the entertainment folks are dead serious in their wacko worldview.
To be fair, it's probably easier to write unreadable but still useful code in Perl than in any other language (and I'd say Java is second) while Python does strongly encourage code that has, at the very least, a logical and easily understandable form. (You can still obfuscate it with bad variable names and the like, of course.) PHP is somewhere in the middle, IMO.
But yeah -- it is entirely possible to write well-documented, well-organized Perl that other people (or you, well after you wrote it) can read, as you say. Actually, IMO, it's easier to write the code this way, once you get into the habit. Organizing the code well on screen helps you organize the thought processes in your head. Some programmers (and I do think that Perl programmers are particularly prone to this) seem to take a childlike delight in writing unreadable code. I maintain that people who do this deliberately are bad programmers, no matter how impressive their other skills may be.
Ouch. Okay, you've got a point. Guess I typed that post before I'd had my first cup of coffee.;)
But I stand by my position that fucking with people's computers is a Bad Thing, and deserves a serious response. And asking for help to come up with new ways to do it changes someone from "asshole" to "pathetic asshole."
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There's a natural synergy there, IMO. Nanotechnology offers us ways to study (and in some cases, alter) living systems in a way that's impossible with macroscopic methods; at the same time, living systems offer elegant models of molecular machinery that works, and does something useful, rather than being an interesting toy in the lab. In short, the answer to the question "nanotechnology or biotechnology?" is "both."
Yes, please do ask any Canadian or Swede how good their health care system is. What you'll probably hear is, "It's pretty damn good." Study the facts, not the propaganda.
You're probably wasting your time; I strongly suspect that the grandparent poster is an anti-Mac fanatic. You can show that sort tons o' data to prove that by every reasonable measure of usefulness for a laptop, including toughness, you get more for your money from Apple than from any Wintel vendor, and they still won't believe you.
Too bad. It was a nice idea while it lasted.
Interestingly, they seem to have done it right with the "SupaDope Xbox playa" part. The Xbox ads are cool, and they've pulled in a lot of hardcore gamers who would otherwise have gone with a PlayStation or GameCube. And despite my general loathing of all things M$, I have to admit that the Xbox is one damn good game system.
But they did it by, as far as I can tell, disassociating themselves from the rest of the company. If you didn't know the Xbox was a M$ product, you'd be hard pressed to tell from any of the ads. I don't claim to know how the corporate structure works, but the impression I get is that Xbox Inc. is almost a separate company. That's probably the only way they could pull off any degree of cool -- as opposed to Apple's iPod and iTunes divisions, which make sure to remind you at every opportunity that they are, in fact, Apple.
Well, Coleman's a Minnesota Republican, which is about as conservative as, say, your typical Louisiana Democrat is liberal. If you see what I mean. Minnesota politics tend to be either leftist or libertarian, or some combination thereof; you don't find too many real right-wingers making it very far there.
Eeeurgh. I didn't mean that post to spark an argument of the merits of Hitler as opposed to Stalin. Both of them were so monstrously evil that it's pointless to argue about whether one of them was more or less evil than the other.
The reason the Western Allies favored the USSR over Germany was that they knew Stalin's evil was of a kind they could deal with, predict, and contain if necessary. The loony nihilism of the Nazis left no room for such options. Had Germany destroyed the USSR, there would have been no Cold War; most likely, there would have been a few years of tense "peace" while both they and the Allies recovered, followed by a WW3 fought largely with dirty fission bombs that would have been the greatest bloodbath in human history. The Cold War was not a good thing, but it was much, much better than the alternative.
My point -- and Churchill's point, in the line I quoted above -- is that when two evils are fighting each other, it is often necessary to choose one of them as a (temporary) ally. Right now, ICANN serves our interests more than VeriSign does. If VeriSign is eliminated, or even taken down a few pegs, that may no longer be the case, and then it will be time to re-evaluate.
"We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Bullshit. If you're paying for a dorm room, you have the right to any services that come with that payment. And since a lot of schools require that underclassmen live in the dorms, a lot of students can't just pick up and move.
Hitler vs. Stalin: sometimes you've got to choose a side.
"If Hitler invaded Hell, I should at least give the Devil a favorable mention in the House of Commons."
Um ... I don't think a rock "the size of a small house" would have burned all the way up, or even mostly burned up, on its way through the atmosphere. Isn't the lower limit on rocks that make it to the ground about 1 kg?
Ehhh, not quite, IIRC. Little rocks are meteoroids while they're floating around in space, meteors while they're in the atmosphere, and meteorites if and when they land. But asteroids are, of course Big Rocks (anyone know what the lower size limit is?) and I don't think that having them enter the Earth's atmosphere is a common enough occurrence for anyone to have come up for different terminology based on where they are in their descent ...
That doesn't concern me at all. If US and UK gov't computers get 0wNz0R3d 8Y c41N33z h4X0rZ, then maybe that will be the call they need to wake the fuck up and realize how insecure Microsoft software is, and switch to a better alternative. And as for whatever potential damage will be done, honestly, it's not likely to be any worse than what the George & Tony Show is already doing.
Yes, that story came to mind when I was writing that post. ;) I didn't mention it because I find it irritating when people cite fiction in support of real-world arguments -- e.g., "Of course [HOT TOPIC IN BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH] is dangerous! Didn't you see [THAT MOVIE WHERE A [HTIBR] EXPERIMENT GOT OUT OF HAND AND ALMOST DESTROYED THE WORLD]?!?" But it is true that good cautionary fiction can illuminate the dangers of the real world, and I think "The Last Article" falls into that category.
Actually, I got out of the service just as they were phasing in Tricare. I thought it looked like a boondoggle then, and nothing I've heard since has changed my mind. And why was it such a boondoggle? Well, maybe because they were taking a government program that worked and trying to half-way (and half-ass) replace it with a privatized system ...
Civil disobedience only works if you're dealing with essentially rational people; the assumption is that even if the law itself makes no sense, the people enforcing it can eventally be made to see reason. Otherwise, it's hopeless.
When Hitler was coming to power in Germany, lots of German journalists thought that if they made enough noise, their fellow citizens would come to their aid and stop the Nazis before things got really bad. Those journalists died in the camps. Ditto for those Russians who believed the Revolution's promises of equality and freedom, and protested when Lenin started breaking those promises in rather dramatic fashion.
Civil disobedience is an American tradition because, for most of American history, the assumption of rationality has been true. I'm not at all sure that's still the case.
1. Most corporate executives are known for giving preferred treatment to people with ties.
2. From working in the private healthcare industry, I can tell you that it has a huge overhead and a good chunk of your insurance premiums are wasted.
3. There are a large number of hypochondriacs who abuse every health care system at everyone else's expense.
I've worked in Federal government health care, city government health care, and private health care. The quality of service, overall, was about the same in all three. But IMO, overall efficiency declined in the order I've listed them.
Yes. Another example of this is the way Diebold is trying to (mis)use copyright law to keep Black Box Voting from revealing Diebold's plot to commit election fraud on a massive scale. Bev Harris says, bitterly and accurately, that this is equivalent to a bank robber drawing up plans for a job, and then claiming that the cops can't use those plans as evidence because they're his IP.
In short, no civil confidentiality regulation should be allowed to interfere in a matter of criminal law. I believe that in most cases, the laws are actually written this way -- e.g., whistleblowers get explicit legal protection -- but I suspect that most people either don't know this, or feel (perhaps rightly) that regardless of what the law says, their employers will throw an army of lawyers at them to make sure they lose the judgement.
Yes, exactly. It's like when some small town becomes The Murder Capitol Of The US!!! because they have one grisly, high-profile mass killing, and their per-capita murder rate shoots up above Chicago's and DC's. When the numbers are as small as they are (in the hundreds of thousands for Windows 2003, as opposed to the tens of millions for both IIS and Apache generally) it doesn't take much to create some impressive percentages.
In short, any movie that's worth making as a movie at all.
Come on, haven't you ever seen a movie in the theater more than once? Or seen a movie on TV and thought, "Damn, I wish I hadn't missed this when it was in the theater?" Or watched a movie on TV that you liked when you saw it in the theater and thought, "There's something missing here, seeing it on the small screen?" Seeing movies in the theater is simply a different experience from watching them at home, no matter how nice your TV.
You're right, of course. But it is an article of faith among the entertainment cartel that 1 copied file == 1 lost sale. Just as the RIAA is unwilling to consider the idea that file-sharing might actually help sales of good music (people do go out and buy albums after hearing a couple of good MP3's off those albums; but the albums they buy are more likely to be from obscure bands rather than whatever insipid Top 40 pap is currently getting all the advertising bucks) the MPAA is unwilling to consider the idea that a movie made to be seen in the the theater (as the LOTR films definitely are) might, if first seen on a pirated DVD, actually help draw people into the theater to see it. This is not a rational cost-benefit analysis on their part; it's a matter of paranoid ideology. The long, sad history of how paranoid ideologues react when confronted by sweet reason does nothing to convince me that they'll change their minds any time soon.
Actually, it's not just the entertainment industry that think this way. How many times do we hear M$ et al. claiming "Software piracy cost us $XX billion in lost sales last year," as though everyone who burned a copy of an Office CD would otherwise have gone out and bought the damn thing for full price? At least in the software industry it's a little wink-wink nudge-nudge, though; e.g., Adobe knows full well that all the Photoshop copies out there are training the next generation of Adobe customers. But the entertainment folks are dead serious in their wacko worldview.
To be fair, it's probably easier to write unreadable but still useful code in Perl than in any other language (and I'd say Java is second) while Python does strongly encourage code that has, at the very least, a logical and easily understandable form. (You can still obfuscate it with bad variable names and the like, of course.) PHP is somewhere in the middle, IMO.
But yeah -- it is entirely possible to write well-documented, well-organized Perl that other people (or you, well after you wrote it) can read, as you say. Actually, IMO, it's easier to write the code this way, once you get into the habit. Organizing the code well on screen helps you organize the thought processes in your head. Some programmers (and I do think that Perl programmers are particularly prone to this) seem to take a childlike delight in writing unreadable code. I maintain that people who do this deliberately are bad programmers, no matter how impressive their other skills may be.
Ouch. Okay, you've got a point. Guess I typed that post before I'd had my first cup of coffee. ;)
But I stand by my position that fucking with people's computers is a Bad Thing, and deserves a serious response. And asking for help to come up with new ways to do it changes someone from "asshole" to "pathetic asshole."