Ehhh, not really. First and most importantly, you don't pay the post office to deliver mail to you -- the sender pays. Spam is therefore like someone sending you junk mail COD. How long do you think that would last?
Second, it's worth remembering that junk mail actually saves you money. Everyone bitches about the cost of stamps (with some justification) but the fact is that, at least in the US, the Postal Service is largely subsidized by junk mail. Without it, the cost of first-class mail would be considerably higher. So, if spammers had to pay my ISP to send me stuff, and I got a discount on my bill because of it, I wouldn't be nearly so hostile... At a guess, charging one cent per spam message would probably pay my entire ISP bill and then some.
XSD is not a "language" any more than XML is. XSLT I suppose can be considered one.
...
It's akin to those Costco salespeople who tell me that the "shweet" HP computer over there has 20GB of "RAM". It looks a bit dumb given the target audience.
Um... you do know what the "L" in "XML" stands for, right?
XML is a language. So is HTML. So is SQL. Just because a language isn't Turing-complete doesn't make it not a language.
Actually, I agree with you that XSD isn't a language -- it's a specific set of rules for using a language, XML; it would be better to call it a grammar. But saying "___ isn't a language" because ___ doesn't do everything C does is as silly as the "MySQL isn't a database (management system)" crap that floats around here every so often.
I think the target audience is sophisticated to understand the difference between a language that's Turing-complete and one that isn't, and also to know that markup languages are still languages by any reasonable definition of the word.
Eventually... who the hell knows? We may learn something that will have direct medical applications. Or we just have more data to file away in the ever-increasing store of human knowledge, and a century or three from now someone will come along and say, "Hey, I can use this."
I'm all for applied scientific research (I ought to be, considering I work in biotech.) I'm also all for pure scientific research, since, a) more knowledge is never a bad thing -- yes, I will happily defend that statement against the "things man was not meant to know" crowd -- and b) most of the useful technology we have today was based on what was, at one time, pure science without any obvious application.
Benjamin Franklin watched the Montgolfier brothers' first balloon go up. When someone else asked him of what use he thought such a thing might be, he replied, "Of what possible use, sir, is a new-born babe?" Exactly.
Yep. When New York adopts a rule stating that evolution must be considered a controversial theory, the parent poster can make all ths cracks about dumb Yankees he wants. Until then...
Midhsipmen fall under the UCMJ too, of course; I suspect the parent poster was using "soldiers" in the generic sense to mean "people in the military." This may not be strictly correct, but the problem is there's no good one-word description to cover soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.
In any case, the parent poster is wrong in one important respect -- the UCMJ doesn't replace the Constitution, because no US law replaces the Constitution; it is the supreme law of the land. Soldiers (etc.) do have Constitutional rights like everyone else. The right to protection against unreasonable search and seizure exists in the military.
So what's the difference? "Unreasonable." That word is interpreted much, much more narrowly in military law than in civilian law. It's very unlikely that the Navy would go into a regular officer's quarters, or even into enlisted barracks (or whatever the Navy calls them) and search people's computers for MP3's. But midshipmen fall under a different set of rules. The service academies are kind of like four-year basic training. While people are at the academy, the military considers it entirely "reasonable" to search their computers, and I doubt any military or civilian judge would disagree.
November 2002 (#4744043) Alter Relationship (User #571372 Info) I'm not a softeare developer, I'm a GIMP artist, so I'm allowed to use a Celeron-600 powered laptop.:p
Looks like S&M tendencies of nerds also show up in other forms than just downloading hentai pr0n.. Graphics work with a laptop ??!!
:)
It's interesting -- a good friend of mine who's a graphic designer uses a laptop for all his work. (Granted, it's an Apple TiBook with an enormous screen, not an older PC laptop. But still.) I asked him why he did it, since we work at a company that would happily provide him with a faster desktop system with a big monitor. Turns out he likes a laptop for the same reason I do: it doesn't get in the way. When I'm coding or writing, I find a desktop intrusive -- I'm too aware of the machine, and that makes it harder, to a small but significant degree, to concentrate on the work itself. Apparently he has the same experience.
Now, my work is largely text-based, not visual (I do maintain a Web site, but it's very simple; its main purpose is to act as a front-end to the company database, and I think of myself more as a DBA than a Web developer these days.) So it makes sense that I'd want to "fall through the screen" and concentrate on the code, not on the machine I'm using. It was interesting, if a bit surprising, to hear that at least some artists think the same way.
Hmmm. My first thought when I see "evisa.com" is "Oh, another made-up company name." (Avaya, Agilent, etc.) My first thought when I see "eVisa" (or, for that matter, "e-Visa") is "government program to allow people to apply for visas over the net." That it's private rather than government doesn't substantially change that interpretation. If I were looking for visa help, I'd be happy to find a company that could provide it.
And you know, like most Americans, I pay for a good half the shit I buy by credit card -- more like 90% if you count using my debit card as well -- and both my credit and debit cards say "Visa" on them. And yet that is waaay down on the list of things I think of.
I I want to contact Visa over the net, I'll go to visa.com, not evisa.com or e-visa.com or whatever. You wouldn't go to eford.com to look at cars, would you?
Excepting monopolies, you have the ability to switch to another candy store, and to avoid using that dentist. But you can't arrest either one of them. If you're concerned about privacy, make sure you have a signed contract with the other party ensuring that certain information will not be disclosed.
Excepting monopolies -- like Qwest. Well, okay, cell phone services don't have the same monopolies that land-line phone companies do... but there aren't that many of them (certainly fewer than there are candy stores) and generally you can't service from them without signing long-term contracts, and if they all follow the same horrible business practices you don't have a meaningful choice anyway.
Oh, BTW: candy store owners have the right to gossip, maybe, but dentists and other medical professionals certainly don't. Any dentist or other provider of medical care who gossips about his patients is breaking the law.
And if you're unhappy about that candy-store merchant, think about it this way: candy at that store might be cheaper than the one down the street which doesn't sell your information. If the information-selling business is particularly lucrative, the candy might become practically free.
You're kidding, right? Do you really believe Verizon, or anyone else, is going to lower their prices based on the revenues from selling your information? They're going to keep the money for themselves. That's the way it works, and you're naive to the point of insanity if you believe otherwise.
Have you used Mac OS X? (Particularly in it current incarnation?) It's... a really, really good OS. That's why a lot of geeks use it. Good UI + Unix power is appealing to a lot of people.
How is this bad for Linux? This is called healthy competition. Until Mac OS X, there really was no good UI for a desktop Unix-y OS. Linux desktops have improved dramatically since OS X was released, at least partly due to the fact that the developers have OS X as a benchmark of how good a Unix desktop can be. (Granted, they'd be improving even faster if so many developers weren't trying to clone the awful Windows interface, but that's another matter...) And Apple is engaging in a frutiful give-and-take with the Open Source world. Microsoft has never done anything like this, and never will.
Mac OS X and Linux are good for each other. More Unix-y OS users out there to provide a market, more developers writing software that can be ported to each other's platforms, more people getting the idea that Unix is not something scary and dangerous...
If Apple ever has 90% market share -- hell, if Apple ever has 50% market share -- you'll have something to worry about. Right now, Linux and OS X are natural allies.
Sure, you always have the right to question. But that doesn't mean the question makes sense. If I'm walking down the street, and some whacko street preacher tells me I'm immoral for walking down the street, I don't stop to debate him; I just go around him and keep walking.
Okay, fair enough; Einstein had serious doubts about the morality of atomic weapons -- and so did Oppenheimer, who had a lot more to do with the actual building of the bomb than Einstein did. But those were moral doubts about the applications of the science, not the research itself. No one told Fermi, when he was building his first atomic pile, that he must stop immediately because There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
There are two basic approaches to medical research. The first is the "shotgun" approach -- throw a bunch of chemicals at a disease and find one that stops the disease process without killing the patient. This approach has led to some great successes over the last century or so, but the problem is, as far as we can tell, we've just about discovered everything we're going to discover by this method. The easy stuff has been done.
The other approach, the molecular approach, is to figure out how life works -- and, of great interest from the medical applications point of view, how it goes wrong -- from the ground up, and try to use that knowledge to build new treatments. That's what these guys are doing. I can almost guarantee you that when a cure for cancer or AIDS is found, it will come from this approach.
No, you're the only one to whom it seems incredibly foolish. Well, okay, you and a bunch of other fools.
As I said in another post, no one raises these objections with physics, or chemistry, or math, despite things like, oh, say, the atomic bomb. All scientific research is potentially dangerous. But stopping research because of some vague fear, or some pseudo-philosophical-religious claptrap like "some things are better off left alone" (what things exactly? Be specific) would leave us in the Dark Ages.
Jellyfish don't do scientific research. No jellyfish has ever built an atomic bomb, or engineered a dangerous virus, true. But would you rather be a jellyfish, or a human being?
The project raises philosophical, ethical and practical questions. For instance, if a man-made organism proved able to survive and reproduce only under a narrow range of laboratory conditions, could it really be considered life? More broadly, do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms?
Why the hell not? I am so fucking sick of people invoking morality (or "ethics;" IMO it's a distinction without a difference, but that's a whole 'nother argument) as an argument against biological research. No one ever brings these arguments up in chemistry, or physics, or math -- despite the demonstrated ability of, e.g., a bunch of physicists working with a few chemists and mathematicians to come up with a device that can fry an entire city in a fraction of a second. But when it comes to biology, people get squeamish because... well, because we've had the idea implanted in our heads, at least since Frankenstein, that cutting-edge biological research is somehow "playing God." Any time you hear anyone saying there are "ethical concerns" with biological research, that's what they're talking about, even if they're too mealy-mouthed to admit it.
Frankenstein was a story. It was fiction. And so was Jurassic Park, and so was Gattaca. I won't comment on the Bible here, although my view of that book is probably pretty clear from the context... And none of it, none of it, justifies putting up roadblocks to research that will, almost certainly, in the not-too-distant future, save lives.
Gross product vs. federal funds is a meaningless comparison. The poster wasn't arguing that GA (or any other state) receives more federal funding than the total amount of money the state generates; he's arguing, correctly, that it gets more from the federal government than it puts in. Every federal dollar spent in any state comes from tax revenues, and it turns out that Georgians aren't paying their share of those taxes.
Ironically, this is true of many Republican states in the South and West (including Colorado, where I live) which like to brag about their individualism and committment to small government -- and not true of the Democratic states in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
So if I read the article right, what they're saying is that because only X meteors of a given size hit Earth in a given period, only Y meteors of a much bigger size will hit Earth in a much longer period? How do they know that Y has any relation at all to X?
Um... according to the article, it's already in use for many applications: precise machining, removing cheap defects, LASIK surgery. If you're asking, "When can I get a femtosecond laser at home to carve cool designs on my cat," that might be a different story.
I was thinking that. In fact, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if even people who know they're drinking decaf get a bit of a rush for the simple reason that the idea "cup of coffee" = "waking up" is very deeply embedded in our culture. This may be even more true of people who switched from regular to decaf -- there's a Pavlovian response to the taste of coffee. I drink regular, but I know I get a "waking up" rush from my first cup of coffee in the morning almost immediately, well before the caffeine has had any chance to circulate through my system.
Gore received more of the popular vote than Bush -- i.e., more Americans voted for Gore than for Bush. This is not in dispute even by the most ardent Republicans, except those with very short memories.
The disputed part is who received more votes in Florida, since under the Electoral College system the popular vote doesn't much matter. And I, and a whole bunch of other people, remain convinced that Gore received more votes in Florida as well as in the country as a whole, and that it took some serious legal machinations on the part of the Republican Party to cover that up. Ultimately, the vote that decided the 2000 election was one in Washington DC, and the electorate in that vote was nine people who split 5-4.
Slashdot Mirror
"All portions of the Bill of Rights shall be held to apply without reservation to the use of electronic devices."
Really. That's it. That would solve 99% of the problems Slashdotters (including myself) bitch about.
When Kleenex(tm) is outlawed ...
Well, you know the rest.
Ehhh, not really. First and most importantly, you don't pay the post office to deliver mail to you -- the sender pays. Spam is therefore like someone sending you junk mail COD. How long do you think that would last?
... At a guess, charging one cent per spam message would probably pay my entire ISP bill and then some.
Second, it's worth remembering that junk mail actually saves you money. Everyone bitches about the cost of stamps (with some justification) but the fact is that, at least in the US, the Postal Service is largely subsidized by junk mail. Without it, the cost of first-class mail would be considerably higher. So, if spammers had to pay my ISP to send me stuff, and I got a discount on my bill because of it, I wouldn't be nearly so hostile
XML is a language. So is HTML. So is SQL. Just because a language isn't Turing-complete doesn't make it not a language.
Actually, I agree with you that XSD isn't a language -- it's a specific set of rules for using a language, XML; it would be better to call it a grammar. But saying "___ isn't a language" because ___ doesn't do everything C does is as silly as the "MySQL isn't a database (management system)" crap that floats around here every so often.
I think the target audience is sophisticated to understand the difference between a language that's Turing-complete and one that isn't, and also to know that markup languages are still languages by any reasonable definition of the word.
Right now, the goal is just to know. That's it.
... who the hell knows? We may learn something that will have direct medical applications. Or we just have more data to file away in the ever-increasing store of human knowledge, and a century or three from now someone will come along and say, "Hey, I can use this."
Eventually
I'm all for applied scientific research (I ought to be, considering I work in biotech.) I'm also all for pure scientific research, since, a) more knowledge is never a bad thing -- yes, I will happily defend that statement against the "things man was not meant to know" crowd -- and b) most of the useful technology we have today was based on what was, at one time, pure science without any obvious application.
Benjamin Franklin watched the Montgolfier brothers' first balloon go up. When someone else asked him of what use he thought such a thing might be, he replied, "Of what possible use, sir, is a new-born babe?" Exactly.
Yep. When New York adopts a rule stating that evolution must be considered a controversial theory, the parent poster can make all ths cracks about dumb Yankees he wants. Until then ...
Midhsipmen fall under the UCMJ too, of course; I suspect the parent poster was using "soldiers" in the generic sense to mean "people in the military." This may not be strictly correct, but the problem is there's no good one-word description to cover soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.
In any case, the parent poster is wrong in one important respect -- the UCMJ doesn't replace the Constitution, because no US law replaces the Constitution; it is the supreme law of the land. Soldiers (etc.) do have Constitutional rights like everyone else. The right to protection against unreasonable search and seizure exists in the military.
So what's the difference? "Unreasonable." That word is interpreted much, much more narrowly in military law than in civilian law. It's very unlikely that the Navy would go into a regular officer's quarters, or even into enlisted barracks (or whatever the Navy calls them) and search people's computers for MP3's. But midshipmen fall under a different set of rules. The service academies are kind of like four-year basic training. While people are at the academy, the military considers it entirely "reasonable" to search their computers, and I doubt any military or civilian judge would disagree.
It's interesting -- a good friend of mine who's a graphic designer uses a laptop for all his work. (Granted, it's an Apple TiBook with an enormous screen, not an older PC laptop. But still.) I asked him why he did it, since we work at a company that would happily provide him with a faster desktop system with a big monitor. Turns out he likes a laptop for the same reason I do: it doesn't get in the way. When I'm coding or writing, I find a desktop intrusive -- I'm too aware of the machine, and that makes it harder, to a small but significant degree, to concentrate on the work itself. Apparently he has the same experience.
Now, my work is largely text-based, not visual (I do maintain a Web site, but it's very simple; its main purpose is to act as a front-end to the company database, and I think of myself more as a DBA than a Web developer these days.) So it makes sense that I'd want to "fall through the screen" and concentrate on the code, not on the machine I'm using. It was interesting, if a bit surprising, to hear that at least some artists think the same way.
Hmmm. My first thought when I see "evisa.com" is "Oh, another made-up company name." (Avaya, Agilent, etc.) My first thought when I see "eVisa" (or, for that matter, "e-Visa") is "government program to allow people to apply for visas over the net." That it's private rather than government doesn't substantially change that interpretation. If I were looking for visa help, I'd be happy to find a company that could provide it.
And you know, like most Americans, I pay for a good half the shit I buy by credit card -- more like 90% if you count using my debit card as well -- and both my credit and debit cards say "Visa" on them. And yet that is waaay down on the list of things I think of.
I I want to contact Visa over the net, I'll go to visa.com, not evisa.com or e-visa.com or whatever. You wouldn't go to eford.com to look at cars, would you?
Oh, BTW: candy store owners have the right to gossip, maybe, but dentists and other medical professionals certainly don't. Any dentist or other provider of medical care who gossips about his patients is breaking the law.You're kidding, right? Do you really believe Verizon, or anyone else, is going to lower their prices based on the revenues from selling your information? They're going to keep the money for themselves. That's the way it works, and you're naive to the point of insanity if you believe otherwise.
I wasn't using it as a plural noun. It's an adjective: "like or related to Unix." Thus covering Linux, BSD (including OS X) etc.
I would have just said "Unix OS" but I didn't want a bunch of "Linux/BSD/OS X isn't One True Unix" flames.
Have you used Mac OS X? (Particularly in it current incarnation?) It's ... a really, really good OS. That's why a lot of geeks use it. Good UI + Unix power is appealing to a lot of people.
...) And Apple is engaging in a frutiful give-and-take with the Open Source world. Microsoft has never done anything like this, and never will.
...
How is this bad for Linux? This is called healthy competition. Until Mac OS X, there really was no good UI for a desktop Unix-y OS. Linux desktops have improved dramatically since OS X was released, at least partly due to the fact that the developers have OS X as a benchmark of how good a Unix desktop can be. (Granted, they'd be improving even faster if so many developers weren't trying to clone the awful Windows interface, but that's another matter
Mac OS X and Linux are good for each other. More Unix-y OS users out there to provide a market, more developers writing software that can be ported to each other's platforms, more people getting the idea that Unix is not something scary and dangerous
If Apple ever has 90% market share -- hell, if Apple ever has 50% market share -- you'll have something to worry about. Right now, Linux and OS X are natural allies.
Sure, you always have the right to question. But that doesn't mean the question makes sense. If I'm walking down the street, and some whacko street preacher tells me I'm immoral for walking down the street, I don't stop to debate him; I just go around him and keep walking.
Okay, fair enough; Einstein had serious doubts about the morality of atomic weapons -- and so did Oppenheimer, who had a lot more to do with the actual building of the bomb than Einstein did. But those were moral doubts about the applications of the science, not the research itself. No one told Fermi, when he was building his first atomic pile, that he must stop immediately because There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
There are two basic approaches to medical research. The first is the "shotgun" approach -- throw a bunch of chemicals at a disease and find one that stops the disease process without killing the patient. This approach has led to some great successes over the last century or so, but the problem is, as far as we can tell, we've just about discovered everything we're going to discover by this method. The easy stuff has been done.
The other approach, the molecular approach, is to figure out how life works -- and, of great interest from the medical applications point of view, how it goes wrong -- from the ground up, and try to use that knowledge to build new treatments. That's what these guys are doing. I can almost guarantee you that when a cure for cancer or AIDS is found, it will come from this approach.
No, you're the only one to whom it seems incredibly foolish. Well, okay, you and a bunch of other fools.
As I said in another post, no one raises these objections with physics, or chemistry, or math, despite things like, oh, say, the atomic bomb. All scientific research is potentially dangerous. But stopping research because of some vague fear, or some pseudo-philosophical-religious claptrap like "some things are better off left alone" (what things exactly? Be specific) would leave us in the Dark Ages.
Jellyfish don't do scientific research. No jellyfish has ever built an atomic bomb, or engineered a dangerous virus, true. But would you rather be a jellyfish, or a human being?
Frankenstein was a story. It was fiction. And so was Jurassic Park, and so was Gattaca. I won't comment on the Bible here, although my view of that book is probably pretty clear from the context
So ... how much profit does a road make?
Gross product vs. federal funds is a meaningless comparison. The poster wasn't arguing that GA (or any other state) receives more federal funding than the total amount of money the state generates; he's arguing, correctly, that it gets more from the federal government than it puts in. Every federal dollar spent in any state comes from tax revenues, and it turns out that Georgians aren't paying their share of those taxes.
Ironically, this is true of many Republican states in the South and West (including Colorado, where I live) which like to brag about their individualism and committment to small government -- and not true of the Democratic states in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Okay, that actually helps a lot. I appreciate the effort you put into the ASCII art. Have fun at the Bond film. ;)
So if I read the article right, what they're saying is that because only X meteors of a given size hit Earth in a given period, only Y meteors of a much bigger size will hit Earth in a much longer period? How do they know that Y has any relation at all to X?
Um ... according to the article, it's already in use for many applications: precise machining, removing cheap defects, LASIK surgery. If you're asking, "When can I get a femtosecond laser at home to carve cool designs on my cat," that might be a different story.
I was thinking that. In fact, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if even people who know they're drinking decaf get a bit of a rush for the simple reason that the idea "cup of coffee" = "waking up" is very deeply embedded in our culture. This may be even more true of people who switched from regular to decaf -- there's a Pavlovian response to the taste of coffee. I drink regular, but I know I get a "waking up" rush from my first cup of coffee in the morning almost immediately, well before the caffeine has had any chance to circulate through my system.
Gore received more of the popular vote than Bush -- i.e., more Americans voted for Gore than for Bush. This is not in dispute even by the most ardent Republicans, except those with very short memories.
The disputed part is who received more votes in Florida, since under the Electoral College system the popular vote doesn't much matter. And I, and a whole bunch of other people, remain convinced that Gore received more votes in Florida as well as in the country as a whole, and that it took some serious legal machinations on the part of the Republican Party to cover that up. Ultimately, the vote that decided the 2000 election was one in Washington DC, and the electorate in that vote was nine people who split 5-4.