So, Say you're a "Sex Offender". You're required to register all your on-line account information with some agency... Say you decide to "relapse" into your wicked ways and do some sexual offending. Wouldn't you just not register that new on-line account? That is to say, it would be just as effective to simply require that sex offenders don't do any more sex offending ever again, right?
Bonus: Simply requiring sex offenders to stop performing sexually offensive acts would avoid the fairly brain dead Denial of Service that's now possible because they're letting deviants tell them which email addresses to black-list. "I hate that fucker, I'll just register their email under my sex-offender accounts; Screw you and your on line games! Ha ha!"
Meanwhile, those that wanted to move on and be good people are constantly reminded of their past mistakes. Thus, the frustrating on-line processes, exclusion from parts of society, and reinforcement that they can never be cured will increase the chances that those who channel anger through sexual offenses will do so again.
I know! Why don't we just make it illegal to do bad things! That'll stop all the crime! Also, if they don't do this for violence related criminals too, i.e., murderers then they're damned hypocrites. Killing humans is less heinous than Raping humans? WTF? Won't someone think of the Children!? I'd rather have a raped but still alive kid than a dead one...
SSH connections does not seem to be affected at this time.
Can you find a solution to your problem then?
*Jeopardy music*
Let's see what Tim has. You've written, "Don't do business in China", I'm sorry, we were looking for "SSH tunneling". Susan, you've written, "Port Changing Cron Job", no, that's incorrect as well. Yiu? You've written, "There is no Problem"... No, that's incorr--- Wait, the judges say we'll accept that answer, Yiu Wins!
As you approach that pinching point the increased resistance creates heat, you'd likely melt the wire if you pinched it down and it didn't stop the electron flow. Imagine the melted wire ends leaking electrically conductive puddles that then have hundreds of tiny contact points, not to mention ground. Could be very dangerous -- The wire busts and electrocutes people. Also, too many electrons flowing in too small a wire (or even between two small a path between conductive puddles) are how electrical fires start. The whole electrical code falls under the NFPA for this reason (National Fire Protection Agency).
Seriously why the focus on this one thing that some people think is bad for some other people?
Agreed, but didn't they already do this once? Think about it. If you ask everyone then eventually you'll find that everything on the Internet is offensive in some way to someone. They group all of this "offensive" content under one umbrella and opt you out of the Internet by default. If you want access to the Internet you have to opt in, and even pay for it!
The whole cycle is starting again. IMHO, it's just another way to increase the price of Internet access. Once everyone's paying the additional "opt it to everything" fee the process will start again.
The downside is that little folks like me have to jump through more hoops trying to provide their services in accordance with the laws, when we don't track you for advertising purposes anyway, (GEO-IP lookup to find you a good low latency server to play on), will simply end up frustrating you needlessly with "Enter Your Birthday" every page load or every time you start the program because: How the fuck else can we comply with a law that says we must not store underage kids info without parental consent except via cookies, and yet I'm trying not to track any needles data from anyone? Re-install, or clear your cache? "Enter Your Birthday" Oh, but wait, I can't even store you consent to the hard drive. What if you're playing a game, and then you let you kid use it? Now I have to ask your birthday EVERY TIME YOU CONNECT TO THE SERVER, or else I have to track the fuck out of you and require an online account -- Whelp, there goes your anonymity. This law essentially MANDATES COOKIES (or logins that use cookies) be applied to any visitor who is over 13, and would like to click any link on the site without seeing another "Enter Your Birthday" prompt. Every damn web host logs recent requests w/ IP address info: IP address give us your Geo DATA, some shared hosts don't have the ability to turn off this simple log -- In fact, your government wants them to keep such Geo Data saved so they can request logs! "DON'T TRACK KIDS! KEEP LOGS OF EVERYTHING THOUGH!" Well screw me...
URL Munging is just another form of cookie, same as browser fingerprinting, content cache IDs, etc. Don't like these? Then you shouldn't like these new rules, they're the only way I can comply with the new ridiculous regs without annoying the majority of users. The web was not designed to be stateful, but you want it to be, and yet you don't want any tracking... Damn, now these regs just mandated tracking MUST exist. I can't even provide a site that doesn't track you now. Without the IP (and thus "geo data" see also: load balancing) how can I even reply to a request to serve the page with the age form on it? The added frustrations are more work for me, and turn away traffic from legitimate services that aren't even advertising based, e.g. simply to run a forum and servers for my games. Meanwhile the big guys don't give a fuck and just write horrible invasive privacy policies that assume if you continue to use the site, you've gotten your parent's permission. See above poster who quotes the Instagram privacy policy which says just this.
So, instead of the FTC stepping up and saying: Parents, if you have children, IT'S YOUR JOB TO POLICE THEM ONLINE (protip: your 13 year old kid will say they're 18 to view porn, or anything else they want), or consulting some actual technically inclined individuals for a solution (Mandatory compliance with DNT header w/ new value for Children? "DNT: 13" header perhaps? I could comply with that! I have all the data in the request header I need to comply!), they instead buckle to lazy paranoid parents and institute laws that DO NOT ACHIEVE WHAT THEY WANT because the wording is daft as fuck and drafted by morons.
They are "offset" because you only notice the portion between the camera and the planet; the rest of the shadowy part of the rings is dark on a dark background, so you can't see it.
No, they are not "offset". They are simply inverse. Look again. Measure if you like with the elliptical path tool in your image editor of choice. The light parts in the lighted rings correspond to the dark parts in the darker rings -- More matter in light = lighter, more matter blocking light = darker; The rings against the planet block its light. The rest of what you said is spot on though.
Hopefully, at some future point, we will evolve beyond such fables and things like this will be an archeological curiosity, and nothing more.
I thought that was the whole point of digitizing them? Look, even the US Constitution and things like Copyright Law have become worth nothing of value to any but archaeologists -- They need to be updated to remain relevant. The difference is that legal documents are ideas, they can be changed easily, but religions are based on beliefs that typically can't easily be changed without destroying the religion.
With a good solid reference to look back on, as time goes on the unchangable ideas become less relevant -- Some are worth 3/5ths of a man; Information Scarcity Laws; Homosexuality is evil. At some point new comers are too rational to believe in things that are so dissonant with reality. Without a solid record to reflect on anyone can change history and cling to the other tangential outmodded ideas longer.
It's already happening, many "believers" I've met, even priests, have told me they don't believe in everything that's in the religious texts -- They're quick to provide their own interpretations to match the times -- Much like the content industry says "a limited time" can mean copyright of three generations of humans, or how the Supreme Court says "congress shall make no law" doesn't apply to the Internet -- They can't do this forever. Not too many devout followers of Zeus around nowadays, eh? The same will happen to the other religions, they'll be taken just as serious as one who says they believe in ancient Greek / Roman gods. The same will happen to our laws as well. It's a law of natural selection: Anything that can not adapt to its environment becomes extinct; This applies to ideas as well as organisms.
"the dark side of Saturn" and "the far side of Saturn" are effectively equivalent.
if ( Dark Side == Far Side ) Mind = Blown;
For a moment there I thought I'd have to add one more viewing of Star Wars to the millions of billions of times I've seen it because I missed all the Gary Larson references.
we going to finally say no to these out-of-control children? Is it when they demand a collider that encircles the Earth for chasing the gimmeallyourcash-on? Just because it is science doesn't mean it has to be done and has to be done now. I suggest that finding out things about the Higgs boson and other exotics is a goal of such mindbending uselessness that it can very well be left for another century.
Says a fellow via a series of devices that directly benefited from quantum physics research...
When will the Internet be "fast enough", when will we ever have CPUs that are fast enough and power efficient enough. When will we have enough energy cheap enough? You are aware that the search for the Higgs is only one of many particle experiments, right? Look, just because you're content to settle for the way things are now, doesn't mean the folks who aren't must be too.
I've got one for you: Astronomers tell us that it's only a matter of time until another extinction level cosmic event. If you ask me, all of our war money should be diverted into science, energy and space programs, or else we're sure to face certain doom due to our inability to protect ourselves from the inevitable rock that's heading this way right now. We don't know the ramifications of studying physics in supercolliders, look at the Atom Bomb & nuclear power; We may unlock even more powerful secrets, eg: Economically viable fusion, or even quantum (antimatter) power.
To answer your question: We can finally say no to the "out of control children" once we can safely say that our descendants are safe from extinction. Humanity be damned, we're the only sentient life in this pocket of the Universe; That's a treasure worth preserving as priority #1. That means more research, and lots of it. Perhaps you've given up on the race? If the future's not for you, that's fine: Find a tar pit and die in it, you're hindering the herd, you're the useless one.
(hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies.
Are you even aware of how self contradictory you are? The atmosphere is very big. Nature causes the high energy collisions up there, but you never know where they'll occur and they happen so infrequently in a single spot that it would cost more to fly fleets of weather balloons and launch hundreds of detectors in space to capture the same number of collisions in the same amount of time. So instead the physicists outsmart Nature! They build their own high energy collision generator so they can cause a whole bunch of collisions in a single place and study them on demand. Or, are you saying that physicists should magically figure out how to cause distant supernovae to throw particles right when and where we want them?
In case you're still not following, what you've said is: There's got to be a better way for physicists to isolate phenomena and study them than in controlled environments! Let's not give the professionals the funds they say they need to do the job we want them to do, and instead hope they'll find some other way they just haven't figured out yet! (hint: if there was a better way, they'd gladly do it.) Do you avoid the car mechanic, and instead take your car to church to have it wished into working order again? That's about how insane you sound to me...
But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
Then, due to the sheer amount of frustration at the lack of bacterial extinctions requiring massive detonations, Dexter's entire head exploded in aneurysm causing what can only be described as a minor "Earth Shattering kaboom!"
Here Lies Dexter Herbivore "It's the little things that count."
Sigh, it's 2012 and when I write a piece of software now, I'm still not sure it will run everywhere.
When were you ever sure of that?
Since the 1980's when I learned C, would have said 70's, but I wasn't alive then. My C "hello world" program I wrote in 1986 on a hand me down 80286 still compiles and runs just fine on x86, x86-64, Power PC, Itanium, ARM, MIPS -- You know what? Show me a processor without a C compiler so it WON'T run on, that would be a much shorter list... That's just one example. My 1990's era hash table implementation is only now under threat of replacement because C++11 finally has one, but for over two decades my code has been operating flawlessly without modification, given I use the correct compiler flag. It's not like old C standards die.
Native applications are anything but a guarantee other people will be able to run them, they are strictly bound to the same exact device they were written for...Meanwhile, web applications run on anything from a PC to a phone
I can see that you know absolutely nothing at all. You are now aware that there are OSs that run on anything from a PC to a phone thanks to cross platform native languages like C. Indeed the "native applications" that are supposedly "strictly bound to the same exact device" are the very ones that are enabling you to run your "web applications... on anything from a PC to a phone". Thanks for wasting yours and others time -- me? My (native) code's compiling -- Note: that's a one time cost per platform, not compiled each page load like your "web apps". Native code saves electricity, and is thus more green than web apps. :-P
This hardly seems like it's worth NASA's effort. You already know that the loons won't be convinced by it. A press release consisting of the single word "NO" is all it should really take.
Where were you on 12/12/12? I'm not a "loon", but you're fucking retarded if you don't think we're practically blind to space. We get really detailed images of very small pieces of the sky, or very low res images of the big picture, but no where near the resolution we need to be able to say nothing's going to hit us within the next few weeks. NASA and the US Armed Forces need to swap budgets before I even consider your statements as partially knowledgeable. Back to 12/12/12... This is actually what happened:
"According to NASA, a pair of asteroids — one just over three miles wide — passed Earth Tuesday and early Wednesday, avoiding a potentially cataclysmic impact with our home planet. 2012 XE5, estimated at 50-165 feet across, was discovered just days earlier, missing our planet by only 139,500 miles, or slightly more than half the distance to the moon...."
Granted the larger 3 mile wide one was well known to exist, but really, something 150ft across shouldn't be popping up on our radar just a few days before it would hit us -- ESPECIALLY not something that's passing twice as close as our moon. That doesn't bode well for assertions that we're sure no big rock is hurling towards us, indeed, I'd say it casts a plausible shadow of doubt well within the realm of possibility.
I'm no end of the world in 2012 nutter, but I do think our #1 prime directive should be getting some of our eggs out of this one basket -- self sustaining colonies off-world. Unlike you, I think the propaganda campaign by NASA is actually shooting themselves in the foot. I'd be drumming up the fact that we're practically blind, and that we really don't know for sure if a big ass rock really could hit us, maybe not tomorrow or next week, but in a few years, a decade? No one can say for sure, but we do know IT WILL HAPPEN, and when it does if we're not ready already then we are doomed. That's the angle I'd be pushing to get more space funding -- It's far more ethical than downplaying end of the Earth scenarios (occurring ~1wk away) when you think about it: It's the survival of our species and/or all life on Earth I'm talking about.
For fuck's sake, man! Learn you some basic Astronomy! There's a proto-planet ~the mass of Pluto called Eris that's been whirling around our Sun for eons at an odd orbit and it was only just discovered in 2005. THAT'S why Pluto's not a planet anymore... We'd have to admit that we DIDN'T SEE A PLANET SIZED ROCK right in our back-yard...
Eris, is the most massive body known to orbit the Sun after the eight planets:[i] It's the most massive orbiting beyond the planet Neptune, and the most massive known dwarf planet. It is estimated to be 2326 (±12) km in diameter, and 27% more massive than Pluto, or about 0.27% of the Earth's mass.
Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory-based team...
Pretty fucking huge to have not seen it until just 7 years ago, eh smart guy?
What if Eris would have been on a collision course with Earth? We'd have been kicking ourselves for the over 30 years we've wasted NOT trying to colonize space. Funding man, this 2012 thing was a great opportunity to harvest some good ol' panic for cash! We may not be able to stop a proto-planet, but if we get us some asteroids
As someone who recently did a bunch of HTML5 code for a multi-platform app, your use of "write-once, run-everywhere" amuses me.
More like "write once, then rewrite once per OS and browser version, avoid any advanced features, and run (almost) everywhere but don't expect it to work or look the same". YMMV.
Yep. The same can be said about Java, and I presume, any product that claims to be "write once, run anywhere" -- Write Once Debug Everywhere is more like it, and when I consider that, I might as well be writing cross platform native code which is write once, Debug on 3 to 5 platforms vs write for the web and test on 3 to 5 platforms times three to seven browsers... ~20 testing environments vs ~4.
If you are like me, the proud owner of a Radeon card...
I have several GPUs that I test with. I've never been more proud than when I've fixed my own code to work around a tricky bug in the proprietary Radeon driver, so that some folks with that card could still use my software. That's because I'm proud of myself for my dedication to end users, not because of some name brand on a piece of abandoned hardware... So, no, I'm not like you; Unless you're just proud in general, not in relation to the GPU you own.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to work around many other GPU vendor driver bugs over the years, from Voodoo to GeForce. My point is this: Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. I swear we were all much better off with software rasterizers. At least then the devs could Actually FIX BUGS, rather than tell users to upgrade a driver or that they're just SoL. Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
Well, good luck to them. If dead online services have taught me anything it's that "MySpace" should really be named "TheirSpace" until it works in a decentralized way like Diaspora (or better), where the users can host their own nodes, then I'm not interested. I still can't see what benefit any new "social network" has over Lurking a few mailing lists & IRC rooms I'm interested in, with RSS for web sites I'm interested in. Sharing photos? IRC p2p transfer, a personal/family blog, email, or one of the various free image hosting sites if you must.
Oh, but celebrities and advertising! Everyone's using it! Everything's publicly stored forever! These are not benefits, IMO.
Hosting applications on Linux does not make them ecure.
It depends on the application. For instance: If you've got a bad case of the MS vendor-lock-in, then the option of hosting on Linux may very well be an eCure.
It's a hold over from that horrible Hungarian Notation that Win32 coders are famously stuck with (hint: Win32 is still used on 64bit systems, 32 apparently means "not 16 bit").
Careful not to confuse the L prefix here with Long; In this context it means Local.
...Dexter may be a local creation of a group responsible...
Some of his views are very debatable, but he is still a reasonably accomplished engineer. He may not be bringing about the revolution he wants, but he should be able to recognise good directions to spend resources to achieve more immediate goals.
Much like the more folks use the web, the more money Google makes: The longer people live, the more they can use the web, the more money Google can make...
Whatever the motivation, I think this is one of the strengths of the scientific method and thus, one of the reasons for its success: we aren't quick to publishing until it is just right, and therefore, perhaps our best approximation of the "truth" we can muster.
On the other hand: What if you did publish your work early and often, not as concerned with slowly and deliberately ensuring everything is just right before spreading the information -- Not keeping quiet just so that you can be the one with the badge of "1st"? Why, then worldwide cooperation could kick in. Perhaps other interested parties would help you prove or disprove the results much more quickly. Thus, accelerating the speed of scientific progress. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's wrong to not publish things that you aren't absolutely sure about, just that what you're doing seems really strange to me. Have you questioned your information dissemination methods? A good scientist would... Why, there could have been times that you were wrong about being wrong, i.e. made a discovery but never known it too... Perhaps it's time to re-think the system of publishing altogether?
To me, the pressure to publish and have a reputation as the first discoverer should be secondary to doing science. It's sad to fund only those who produce results -- a few minds among billions, all in the same global culture, all presented with the same essential problems, it's a lottery, just chance that you'll have an idea before someone else does. Some are sure to fail, but the more trying the more gets discovered sooner. Why there are times when multiple separate teams compete to find the same answers, a few will "win" by reaching the goal first, but this is slower than cooperating and reaching the results together sooner.
I see this common trend among Humans, the drive to be "first" for no real good reason. I mean, if you drive like a bat out of hell in rush hour traffic you get to the destination a few seconds, or maybe a minute or two earlier, yet humans risk their lives just for that. It's the same as the risk you take in not publishing failures -- There are no doubt others who may needlessly follow the same flawed hypotheses who's time you could save.
It's all Completely Illogical, and resistant to change in the face of better methods -- Yet you call yourselves scientists. I'll never understand your race.
And in-court sworn testimony from the person who signed-off on the calibration and the calibration of that calibration instrument, all the way back to NIST.
Why should we have such high expectation of traffic ticketing equipment when we don't even do that for Breathalyzers?
In fact, you can get held in contempt of court for using such an 'outrageous' defense, distracting the court and inciting disorder.
There's multiple editors approving stories, but the real kicker is that they don't even use Slashdot's search function before posting an article. I mean, for FSM's sake people, that's why it exists!
Slashdot Mirror
So, Say you're a "Sex Offender". You're required to register all your on-line account information with some agency... Say you decide to "relapse" into your wicked ways and do some sexual offending. Wouldn't you just not register that new on-line account? That is to say, it would be just as effective to simply require that sex offenders don't do any more sex offending ever again, right?
Bonus: Simply requiring sex offenders to stop performing sexually offensive acts would avoid the fairly brain dead Denial of Service that's now possible because they're letting deviants tell them which email addresses to black-list.
"I hate that fucker, I'll just register their email under my sex-offender accounts; Screw you and your on line games! Ha ha!"
Meanwhile, those that wanted to move on and be good people are constantly reminded of their past mistakes. Thus, the frustrating on-line processes, exclusion from parts of society, and reinforcement that they can never be cured will increase the chances that those who channel anger through sexual offenses will do so again.
I know! Why don't we just make it illegal to do bad things! That'll stop all the crime! Also, if they don't do this for violence related criminals too, i.e., murderers then they're damned hypocrites. Killing humans is less heinous than Raping humans? WTF? Won't someone think of the Children!? I'd rather have a raped but still alive kid than a dead one...
SSH connections does not seem to be affected at this time.
Can you find a solution to your problem then?
*Jeopardy music*
Let's see what Tim has. You've written, "Don't do business in China", I'm sorry, we were looking for "SSH tunneling". Susan, you've written, "Port Changing Cron Job", no, that's incorrect as well. Yiu? You've written, "There is no Problem"... No, that's incorr--- Wait, the judges say we'll accept that answer, Yiu Wins!
That and he made his millions ripping off Infiniminer.
As you approach that pinching point the increased resistance creates heat, you'd likely melt the wire if you pinched it down and it didn't stop the electron flow. Imagine the melted wire ends leaking electrically conductive puddles that then have hundreds of tiny contact points, not to mention ground. Could be very dangerous -- The wire busts and electrocutes people. Also, too many electrons flowing in too small a wire (or even between two small a path between conductive puddles) are how electrical fires start. The whole electrical code falls under the NFPA for this reason (National Fire Protection Agency).
Seriously why the focus on this one thing that some people think is bad for some other people?
Agreed, but didn't they already do this once? Think about it. If you ask everyone then eventually you'll find that everything on the Internet is offensive in some way to someone. They group all of this "offensive" content under one umbrella and opt you out of the Internet by default. If you want access to the Internet you have to opt in, and even pay for it!
The whole cycle is starting again. IMHO, it's just another way to increase the price of Internet access. Once everyone's paying the additional "opt it to everything" fee the process will start again.
The downside is that little folks like me have to jump through more hoops trying to provide their services in accordance with the laws, when we don't track you for advertising purposes anyway, (GEO-IP lookup to find you a good low latency server to play on), will simply end up frustrating you needlessly with "Enter Your Birthday" every page load or every time you start the program because: How the fuck else can we comply with a law that says we must not store underage kids info without parental consent except via cookies, and yet I'm trying not to track any needles data from anyone? Re-install, or clear your cache? "Enter Your Birthday" Oh, but wait, I can't even store you consent to the hard drive. What if you're playing a game, and then you let you kid use it? Now I have to ask your birthday EVERY TIME YOU CONNECT TO THE SERVER, or else I have to track the fuck out of you and require an online account -- Whelp, there goes your anonymity. This law essentially MANDATES COOKIES (or logins that use cookies) be applied to any visitor who is over 13, and would like to click any link on the site without seeing another "Enter Your Birthday" prompt. Every damn web host logs recent requests w/ IP address info: IP address give us your Geo DATA, some shared hosts don't have the ability to turn off this simple log -- In fact, your government wants them to keep such Geo Data saved so they can request logs! "DON'T TRACK KIDS! KEEP LOGS OF EVERYTHING THOUGH!" Well screw me...
URL Munging is just another form of cookie, same as browser fingerprinting, content cache IDs, etc. Don't like these? Then you shouldn't like these new rules, they're the only way I can comply with the new ridiculous regs without annoying the majority of users. The web was not designed to be stateful, but you want it to be, and yet you don't want any tracking... Damn, now these regs just mandated tracking MUST exist. I can't even provide a site that doesn't track you now. Without the IP (and thus "geo data" see also: load balancing) how can I even reply to a request to serve the page with the age form on it? The added frustrations are more work for me, and turn away traffic from legitimate services that aren't even advertising based, e.g. simply to run a forum and servers for my games. Meanwhile the big guys don't give a fuck and just write horrible invasive privacy policies that assume if you continue to use the site, you've gotten your parent's permission. See above poster who quotes the Instagram privacy policy which says just this.
So, instead of the FTC stepping up and saying: Parents, if you have children, IT'S YOUR JOB TO POLICE THEM ONLINE (protip: your 13 year old kid will say they're 18 to view porn, or anything else they want), or consulting some actual technically inclined individuals for a solution (Mandatory compliance with DNT header w/ new value for Children? "DNT: 13" header perhaps? I could comply with that! I have all the data in the request header I need to comply!), they instead buckle to lazy paranoid parents and institute laws that DO NOT ACHIEVE WHAT THEY WANT because the wording is daft as fuck and drafted by morons.
They are "offset" because you only notice the portion between the camera and the planet; the rest of the shadowy part of the rings is dark on a dark background, so you can't see it.
No, they are not "offset". They are simply inverse. Look again. Measure if you like with the elliptical path tool in your image editor of choice. The light parts in the lighted rings correspond to the dark parts in the darker rings -- More matter in light = lighter, more matter blocking light = darker; The rings against the planet block its light. The rest of what you said is spot on though.
Hopefully, at some future point, we will evolve beyond such fables and things like this will be an archeological curiosity, and nothing more.
I thought that was the whole point of digitizing them? Look, even the US Constitution and things like Copyright Law have become worth nothing of value to any but archaeologists -- They need to be updated to remain relevant. The difference is that legal documents are ideas, they can be changed easily, but religions are based on beliefs that typically can't easily be changed without destroying the religion.
With a good solid reference to look back on, as time goes on the unchangable ideas become less relevant -- Some are worth 3/5ths of a man; Information Scarcity Laws; Homosexuality is evil. At some point new comers are too rational to believe in things that are so dissonant with reality. Without a solid record to reflect on anyone can change history and cling to the other tangential outmodded ideas longer.
It's already happening, many "believers" I've met, even priests, have told me they don't believe in everything that's in the religious texts -- They're quick to provide their own interpretations to match the times -- Much like the content industry says "a limited time" can mean copyright of three generations of humans, or how the Supreme Court says "congress shall make no law" doesn't apply to the Internet -- They can't do this forever. Not too many devout followers of Zeus around nowadays, eh? The same will happen to the other religions, they'll be taken just as serious as one who says they believe in ancient Greek / Roman gods. The same will happen to our laws as well. It's a law of natural selection: Anything that can not adapt to its environment becomes extinct; This applies to ideas as well as organisms.
Larry Wall won the IOCCC - twice.
That just makes him incomprehensible in two languages.
Three, if you include English. If only I could be that incomprehensible...
You've got a good start. You don't "include" English; You: use English; in Perl.
"the dark side of Saturn" and "the far side of Saturn" are effectively equivalent.
if ( Dark Side == Far Side ) Mind = Blown;
For a moment there I thought I'd have to add one more viewing of Star Wars to the millions of billions of times I've seen it because I missed all the Gary Larson references.
we going to finally say no to these out-of-control children? Is it when they demand a collider that encircles the Earth for chasing the gimmeallyourcash-on? Just because it is science doesn't mean it has to be done and has to be done now. I suggest that finding out things about the Higgs boson and other exotics is a goal of such mindbending uselessness that it can very well be left for another century.
Says a fellow via a series of devices that directly benefited from quantum physics research...
When will the Internet be "fast enough", when will we ever have CPUs that are fast enough and power efficient enough. When will we have enough energy cheap enough? You are aware that the search for the Higgs is only one of many particle experiments, right? Look, just because you're content to settle for the way things are now, doesn't mean the folks who aren't must be too.
I've got one for you: Astronomers tell us that it's only a matter of time until another extinction level cosmic event. If you ask me, all of our war money should be diverted into science, energy and space programs, or else we're sure to face certain doom due to our inability to protect ourselves from the inevitable rock that's heading this way right now. We don't know the ramifications of studying physics in supercolliders, look at the Atom Bomb & nuclear power; We may unlock even more powerful secrets, eg: Economically viable fusion, or even quantum (antimatter) power.
To answer your question: We can finally say no to the "out of control children" once we can safely say that our descendants are safe from extinction. Humanity be damned, we're the only sentient life in this pocket of the Universe; That's a treasure worth preserving as priority #1. That means more research, and lots of it. Perhaps you've given up on the race? If the future's not for you, that's fine: Find a tar pit and die in it, you're hindering the herd, you're the useless one.
(hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies.
Are you even aware of how self contradictory you are? The atmosphere is very big. Nature causes the high energy collisions up there, but you never know where they'll occur and they happen so infrequently in a single spot that it would cost more to fly fleets of weather balloons and launch hundreds of detectors in space to capture the same number of collisions in the same amount of time. So instead the physicists outsmart Nature! They build their own high energy collision generator so they can cause a whole bunch of collisions in a single place and study them on demand. Or, are you saying that physicists should magically figure out how to cause distant supernovae to throw particles right when and where we want them?
In case you're still not following, what you've said is: There's got to be a better way for physicists to isolate phenomena and study them than in controlled environments! Let's not give the professionals the funds they say they need to do the job we want them to do, and instead hope they'll find some other way they just haven't figured out yet! (hint: if there was a better way, they'd gladly do it.) Do you avoid the car mechanic, and instead take your car to church to have it wished into working order again? That's about how insane you sound to me...
But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
Then, due to the sheer amount of frustration at the lack of bacterial extinctions requiring massive detonations, Dexter's entire head exploded in aneurysm causing what can only be described as a minor "Earth Shattering kaboom!"
Here Lies Dexter Herbivore
"It's the little things that count."
When were you ever sure of that?
Since the 1980's when I learned C, would have said 70's, but I wasn't alive then. My C "hello world" program I wrote in 1986 on a hand me down 80286 still compiles and runs just fine on x86, x86-64, Power PC, Itanium, ARM, MIPS -- You know what? Show me a processor without a C compiler so it WON'T run on, that would be a much shorter list... That's just one example. My 1990's era hash table implementation is only now under threat of replacement because C++11 finally has one, but for over two decades my code has been operating flawlessly without modification, given I use the correct compiler flag. It's not like old C standards die.
Native applications are anything but a guarantee other people will be able to run them, they are strictly bound to the same exact device they were written for...Meanwhile, web applications run on anything from a PC to a phone
I can see that you know absolutely nothing at all. You are now aware that there are OSs that run on anything from a PC to a phone thanks to cross platform native languages like C. Indeed the "native applications" that are supposedly "strictly bound to the same exact device" are the very ones that are enabling you to run your "web applications ... on anything from a PC to a phone". Thanks for wasting yours and others time -- me? My (native) code's compiling -- Note: that's a one time cost per platform, not compiled each page load like your "web apps". Native code saves electricity, and is thus more green than web apps.
:-P
This hardly seems like it's worth NASA's effort. You already know that the loons won't be convinced by it. A press release consisting of the single word "NO" is all it should really take.
Where were you on 12/12/12? I'm not a "loon", but you're fucking retarded if you don't think we're practically blind to space. We get really detailed images of very small pieces of the sky, or very low res images of the big picture, but no where near the resolution we need to be able to say nothing's going to hit us within the next few weeks. NASA and the US Armed Forces need to swap budgets before I even consider your statements as partially knowledgeable. Back to 12/12/12... This is actually what happened:
FTFA: Earth Avoids Collisions With Pair of Asteroids
"According to NASA, a pair of asteroids — one just over three miles wide — passed Earth Tuesday and early Wednesday, avoiding a potentially cataclysmic impact with our home planet. 2012 XE5, estimated at 50-165 feet across, was discovered just days earlier, missing our planet by only 139,500 miles, or slightly more than half the distance to the moon. ..."
Granted the larger 3 mile wide one was well known to exist, but really, something 150ft across shouldn't be popping up on our radar just a few days before it would hit us -- ESPECIALLY not something that's passing twice as close as our moon. That doesn't bode well for assertions that we're sure no big rock is hurling towards us, indeed, I'd say it casts a plausible shadow of doubt well within the realm of possibility.
I'm no end of the world in 2012 nutter, but I do think our #1 prime directive should be getting some of our eggs out of this one basket -- self sustaining colonies off-world. Unlike you, I think the propaganda campaign by NASA is actually shooting themselves in the foot. I'd be drumming up the fact that we're practically blind, and that we really don't know for sure if a big ass rock really could hit us, maybe not tomorrow or next week, but in a few years, a decade? No one can say for sure, but we do know IT WILL HAPPEN, and when it does if we're not ready already then we are doomed. That's the angle I'd be pushing to get more space funding -- It's far more ethical than downplaying end of the Earth scenarios (occurring ~1wk away) when you think about it: It's the survival of our species and/or all life on Earth I'm talking about.
For fuck's sake, man! Learn you some basic Astronomy! There's a proto-planet ~the mass of Pluto called Eris that's been whirling around our Sun for eons at an odd orbit and it was only just discovered in 2005. THAT'S why Pluto's not a planet anymore... We'd have to admit that we DIDN'T SEE A PLANET SIZED ROCK right in our back-yard...
FTWA:
Eris, is the most massive body known to orbit the Sun after the eight planets:[i] It's the most massive orbiting beyond the planet Neptune, and the most massive known dwarf planet. It is estimated to be 2326 (±12) km in diameter, and 27% more massive than Pluto, or about 0.27% of the Earth's mass.
Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory-based team ...
Pretty fucking huge to have not seen it until just 7 years ago, eh smart guy?
What if Eris would have been on a collision course with Earth? We'd have been kicking ourselves for the over 30 years we've wasted NOT trying to colonize space. Funding man, this 2012 thing was a great opportunity to harvest some good ol' panic for cash! We may not be able to stop a proto-planet, but if we get us some asteroids
As someone who recently did a bunch of HTML5 code for a multi-platform app, your use of "write-once, run-everywhere" amuses me. More like "write once, then rewrite once per OS and browser version, avoid any advanced features, and run (almost) everywhere but don't expect it to work or look the same". YMMV.
Yep. The same can be said about Java, and I presume, any product that claims to be "write once, run anywhere" -- Write Once Debug Everywhere is more like it, and when I consider that, I might as well be writing cross platform native code which is write once, Debug on 3 to 5 platforms vs write for the web and test on 3 to 5 platforms times three to seven browsers... ~20 testing environments vs ~4.
Geocities.
If you are like me, the proud owner of a Radeon card...
I have several GPUs that I test with. I've never been more proud than when I've fixed my own code to work around a tricky bug in the proprietary Radeon driver, so that some folks with that card could still use my software. That's because I'm proud of myself for my dedication to end users, not because of some name brand on a piece of abandoned hardware... So, no, I'm not like you; Unless you're just proud in general, not in relation to the GPU you own.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to work around many other GPU vendor driver bugs over the years, from Voodoo to GeForce. My point is this: Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. I swear we were all much better off with software rasterizers. At least then the devs could Actually FIX BUGS, rather than tell users to upgrade a driver or that they're just SoL. Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
Well, good luck to them. If dead online services have taught me anything it's that "MySpace" should really be named "TheirSpace" until it works in a decentralized way like Diaspora (or better), where the users can host their own nodes, then I'm not interested. I still can't see what benefit any new "social network" has over Lurking a few mailing lists & IRC rooms I'm interested in, with RSS for web sites I'm interested in. Sharing photos? IRC p2p transfer, a personal/family blog, email, or one of the various free image hosting sites if you must.
Oh, but celebrities and advertising! Everyone's using it! Everything's publicly stored forever! These are not benefits, IMO.
Hosting applications on Linux does not make them ecure.
It depends on the application. For instance: If you've got a bad case of the MS vendor-lock-in, then the option of hosting on Linux may very well be an eCure.
Lcreation what's that?
It's a hold over from that horrible Hungarian Notation that Win32 coders are famously stuck with (hint: Win32 is still used on 64bit systems, 32 apparently means "not 16 bit").
Careful not to confuse the L prefix here with Long; In this context it means Local.
Some of his views are very debatable, but he is still a reasonably accomplished engineer. He may not be bringing about the revolution he wants, but he should be able to recognise good directions to spend resources to achieve more immediate goals.
Much like the more folks use the web, the more money Google makes: The longer people live, the more they can use the web, the more money Google can make...
Whatever the motivation, I think this is one of the strengths of the scientific method and thus, one of the reasons for its success: we aren't quick to publishing until it is just right, and therefore, perhaps our best approximation of the "truth" we can muster.
On the other hand: What if you did publish your work early and often, not as concerned with slowly and deliberately ensuring everything is just right before spreading the information -- Not keeping quiet just so that you can be the one with the badge of "1st"? Why, then worldwide cooperation could kick in. Perhaps other interested parties would help you prove or disprove the results much more quickly. Thus, accelerating the speed of scientific progress. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's wrong to not publish things that you aren't absolutely sure about, just that what you're doing seems really strange to me. Have you questioned your information dissemination methods? A good scientist would... Why, there could have been times that you were wrong about being wrong, i.e. made a discovery but never known it too... Perhaps it's time to re-think the system of publishing altogether?
To me, the pressure to publish and have a reputation as the first discoverer should be secondary to doing science. It's sad to fund only those who produce results -- a few minds among billions, all in the same global culture, all presented with the same essential problems, it's a lottery, just chance that you'll have an idea before someone else does. Some are sure to fail, but the more trying the more gets discovered sooner. Why there are times when multiple separate teams compete to find the same answers, a few will "win" by reaching the goal first, but this is slower than cooperating and reaching the results together sooner.
I see this common trend among Humans, the drive to be "first" for no real good reason. I mean, if you drive like a bat out of hell in rush hour traffic you get to the destination a few seconds, or maybe a minute or two earlier, yet humans risk their lives just for that. It's the same as the risk you take in not publishing failures -- There are no doubt others who may needlessly follow the same flawed hypotheses who's time you could save.
It's all Completely Illogical, and resistant to change in the face of better methods -- Yet you call yourselves scientists. I'll never understand your race.
can't provide recent calibration test records.
And in-court sworn testimony from the person who signed-off on the calibration and the calibration of that calibration instrument, all the way back to NIST.
Why should we have such high expectation of traffic ticketing equipment when we don't even do that for Breathalyzers?
In fact, you can get held in contempt of court for using such an 'outrageous' defense, distracting the court and inciting disorder.
Not even Slashdot Editors read Slashdot anymore.
There's multiple editors approving stories, but the real kicker is that they don't even use Slashdot's search function before posting an article. I mean, for FSM's sake people, that's why it exists!