I for one would find it very useful, for embedding things like sexagesimal numerals, e.g http://autonomyseries.com/autonomy-canon/community-standard-sexagesimal/ right now uses an aging wordpress plugin to display sexagesimal.ttf glyphs. Being able to embed "@font=sexagesimal.ttf" (or whatever the syntax is) would be very handy, but not if we're forced to convert our ttfs to Microsoft's worthless alternative format.
As for Microsoft's pathetic excuse that someone, somewhere might violate a copyright at some point in time my response is: so what? Just because someone, somewhere might violate someone's asinine copyright on a particular implementation of the alphabet's 26 letters, doesn't mean monopolists like Microsoft have any business throwing roadblocks in the way of the rest of us, who design our own fonts and want to be able to display and distribute them simply, seamlessly, and painlessly in standard, open formats. This isn't about protecting copyrights on fonts, its about Microsoft making sure IE isn't quite compatible with every other browser, and making sure we have to use their tools if we want anything to work on their dominant platform (and, if history is anything to judge by, eventually buy a license to do so). It's about muscling in on web standards to the detriment of everyone else, and I for one am fed up with it. I'm delighted Firefox, Opera, and Apple are embracing this. Hopefully they'll do the same with ogg-vorbis and other open standards, so we can have a complete web stack (including fonts and multimedia) that is unencumbered by American software patents, Microsoft (or anyone else's) proprietaryisms, sometimes-expensive licensing of third party products, and proprietary formats that only run on one or two widespread platforms.
[...] - Built-in SIRF StarIII Chipset, excellent for fixing the position even at a weak signal status. - Built-in GSM/GPRS module, supports 2-frequency GSM 900/1800 MHz, working in Europe (not in America). [...]
(emphesis mine)
Since he wanted to track goods shipping from Chicago to California (i.e. in America), this device wouldn't have worked for him at all. US GSM carriers use different frequencies than Europe (which is why those of us using cell phones in both places need Quad-band phones). Now there may well be a North American variant of this device that would work (I don't have time to dig it up if it exists), but the links as shown do not provide a viable alternative for task.
Has anyone actually found the damn report? As another pointed out, google search is so polluted with 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that googling the report is singulary unrevealing (or perhaps more accurately: multiplicatively unrevealing). Unlike other snarky comments here, I wouldn't be surprised if this kid's observations weren't dead on. I'm unsurprised twitter is considered passe, I'm unsurprised that teenagers are finding better ways to chat than SMS messages pecked out on a cell phone number pad, and I'm unsurprised that teenagers are abandoning television and print media as primary information sources, given how often those expensive and slow media forms have been shown to be inaccurate, overtly deceptive, and (worst of all for a young person) utterly out of touch with the zeitgeist of the moment.
About the only surprise in the captions is that young people are using gaming consoles more than other media for chatting, but that may be down to me not being a gamer. In any event, I'd like to read the report before passing judgement, and particularly befor joining the jaded, knee-jerk reaction of "the kid's clueless, we shouldn't listen" mantra that seems to have become so common on slashdot (and makes us all sound like cranky old men, even more out of touch with the world's current trends than the Old Media).
Very well said. As others have said, if I had mod points today I'd have used one of them here.
I had similiar misconceptions about management (and about big companies vs. small companies, etc.). Now I find myself in management, managing teams and projects that span the globe from Tokyo to London to New York and various and sundry places in between, and I discover that a) not only do I like it, but b) I'm surprisingly good at it and c) your tech skills don't atrophy, they grow. Even if you're not hacking shell scripts, java code, or kernel compiles in detail, you're managing people who are, evaluating competing technical solutions to meet business needs, estimating deadlines, composing proposals, developing, managing, and adhering to budgets, researching new technical solutions and staying abreast of the field in a much wider context.
Less specialization, but by no means less technical application or knowledge. If anything, as a manager, you need to stay even more abreast of new developments, and certainly a wider range of technologies, than when you're a specialized techie, whether its a developer, sysadmin, or architect...and you'll need your technical knowledge to differentiate between buzzword bullshit / marketdroid nonsense vs. real technical innovation--something that's easy to do if you're knowledgable about(and keep up with) the field, but something that you will find challenging (and requires research) for areas of IT you may have previously ignored while working in your specialty. The need to learn and be familiar with new technologies doesn't stop, it accelerates and encompasses more, and becomes arguably more important in doing your job.
There have been 400M downloads of Silverlight so far.
Silverlight is included in many updates to Windows XP. At a company I worked for fairly recently, the windows admin ticked the box to install silverlight on some 100+ PCs. No one at that company ever used it while employed there (the company has since gone bust). With Silverlight being included in basic Windows XP upgrades, I'd say it's very likely the vast majority of the 400M "downloads" you cite has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Silverlight adoption or usage.
"Now instead of studying for my exams and working on my final assignments I must take time to find a place to live before the 29th of May (2009).'""
Wah?
I mean come on, you're paying the price for doing what you knew would get in hot water at school. you DID read the acceptable use policy before you signed it right?
Um... where's the due process. A third party, which has been discredited in another country and fired by the copyright cartels there because their ability to track offenders has been so abysmal and inaccurate, has made an accusation. One that, based on their track record in the United States, should be taken with a mountain of salt.
Based on that accusation, someone has been evicted from their home at a time when they should be studying for exams. As far as I can tell, there's been no disciplinary due process, no hearings, no opportunities for appeal, just a summary eviction with no opportunity for the student to put their case forward. Maybe s/he is guilty. Maybe his/her roommate is a prick and used his equipment to do something stupid so they wouldn't pay the price. Maybe someone else did it entirely, and spoofed his IP address. Or maybe, like in so many cases in the US that the company had to close their doors, no one in the dorm was involved at all, and they're barking up the wrong tree completely.
Doesn't matter. Summary punishment has been meted out, on the barest of accusations. That is a problem, the student's guilt or innocence not withstanding, and if I were considering sending a kid to university, that's one school I would avoid quite possibly wasting my hard earned money on.
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
It isn't. Web 2.0 is shit. Seriously. For every cool app (e.g. Google Streetview) or cool mashup there are tens of thousands of arduous, information obfuscating, time wasting and soul destroying websites that do nothing other than get in the way of what you're trying to do (e.g. book airline tickets) or trying to discover, while spamming you with useless graphics, animations, advertising, and generally teaching your eye to ignore almost everything displayed in your browser...and then hiding the bit of info you're looking for in the area of the screen your eye has trained itself to skip over because of so many ads previously.
Someone needs to develop a browser (or proxy) that downloads a web 2.0 site, disassembles the logic, deconstructs the page, and reconstructs it as a simple HTML page (with forms if necessary) so those of us not interested in spending our hours wading through visual SPAM can get something useful done before the sun expands into a red giant and envelops the Earth.
I quote like Be*There. £22/month is a little pricey, but consistent 21 Gbit download speeds when friends on BT are lucky to get 5 is pretty sweet. Plus they offered to buy a 2nd landline for one year to help beta test their 50 Gbit service (and meet me in a pub in central London to pick up the equipment). I passed, as I didn't want to have to remember to cancel that 2nd landline in a year, but they're a very cool, very laid back, and very competent ISP.
Just when I thought I could relax, and could put the dark years of the Bush interregnum behind me, I read this.
As an American, I feel sick. No love lost for Saddam and he certainly won't be missed, but humiliating him like this during his last days/weeks of life, forcing him to give autographs, watch a humiliating movie, etc. is beyond repugnant. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it violated the Geneva convention in some way, but even if it does not, it certainly violates every code of conduct and ethical norm we (wrongly and naively) expect from our armed forces and our government.
Absolutely right! To the Guardian editors: may I refer you to your local buggy whip manufacturer.
Really, if the Guardian has such an issue with being indexed in a search engine and news aggregator (what morons), then Google should kindly remove them from the same. They can watch their web hits go asymptotically to zero in the hopes that their printed word continues to bring in revenue (good luck...just take a look at fate of the rest of the old media). Or perhaps not so asymptotically... if they're this dumb, their readership could conceivably go to absolute zero, popularist left leanings notwithstanding.
As they say in these here parts (hint: I'm at ground zero for the coming G20 chaos, and the Guardian is a local paper), "good riddance to bad rubbish." After all, there are plenty of left leaning blogs for those of us who lean that way, who do understand the new news paradigm, and don't react to a changing world by trying to legislate an untenable status quo.
I don't find myself wishing machines had souls. Now, a sense of humor, that would be something worth wishing for, so would a conscience, but not a soul.
Be careful what you wish for.
Every time your windows pc crashes, or your car refuses to start (or breaks down), every time the ATM refuses to give you cash, or the printer jams... you are witnessing a machine's sense of humour. The problem is, you are the butt of the joke.
All hail, and long live, our electromechanical overlords.
"It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying grey goo in nanotechnology. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder--or even impossible--to control. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge."
This sort of hysterical Ludditism is all too alive and well, and Bill Joy is (or has been) a Luddite of the first order with regards to genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
Unless he has seriously revised his stance, if Bill Joy becomes Obama's "Technology Czar" (what a stupid title "czar" is) we can look forward to a world where the most promising technologies are banned or severely curtailed in the US, with a high probability that international treaties will be pushed down the worlds throat to make the ban universal. At best, such technologies will be developed in China, India, and elsewhere (and at least some people will reap the benefits). This is IMHO, not the kind of person we need setting US political policies as regards technology.
I don't believe I've ever dreamt in black and white, so I cannot comment from personal experience. However, I think we all would be surprised at how much of our visual input, in particular that which stimulates the imagination, comes from movies and television. It's not inconceivable that a generation or two, brought up on black and white movies and television, might find years of that sensory input have had a significant influence on their dreaming patterns.
We have these problems now precisely because Bush stole the election of 2000, and quite possibly stole the 2004 election in Ohio and Flordia (see http://blackboxvoting.org/). There is a very real possibility we NEVER elected these neocons to power, and the mess we see, and the failed leadership we suffer under, was no more democratically elected than the recently deposed president of Pakistan.
This isn't about specific software, hardware or other standards per se.
This is about a corrupt process, which this debacle happened to reveal. The organisation is fundamentally corrupt, the procedures are fundamentally corruptible, and the appeals process has proven that there is no effective corrective mechanism for dealing with corruption.
This makes every standard they stamp, be it the crappy and unimplementable software standard that proved their level of corruption and incapacity for correcting it, or another standard that may be legitimate, or the result of equally corrupt processes to which we are not privy, equally suspect. We cannot know which standards are good, and which are the result of industrial corruption, so all are relatively worthless.
Well, it's not authoritative (I'm at work and don't have time to dig up primary sources), but here's an overview of what happened:
Studios flee to Hollywood[1]
In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often sued by Edison to stop their productions.
To escape his control, and because of the ideal weather conditions and varied terrain, moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles to make their films. If agents from Edison's company came out west to find and stop these filmmakers, adequate notice allowed for a quick escape to Mexico.
Working without disturbance from Edison, the Biograph Company moved west with actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others, to make their films. After beginning filming in Los Angeles, the company decided to explore the neighboring area and stumbled across Hollywood.
Biograph made the first film in Hollywood, entitled In Old California. After hearing of Biograph's praise of the area, other filmmakers headed west to set up shop.
The first motion picture studio was built in 1919, in nearby Edendale, just east of Hollywood, by Selig Polyscope Company, and the first one built in Hollywood was founded by filmmaker David Horsley's general manager Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Movie studios began to crop up all over Hollywood after Christie's appearance, including ones for Cecil B. DeMille in 1913, the Charlie Chaplin Studio in 1917, and many others.
...is simple. There seem to be a plethora of users there who relish intellectual masturbation. I bet a lot of these folks would give God a "B" for creating the universe.
Increasing entropy in a game "you can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave"? Mass suffering of billions, random rules of right and wrong, hundreds of religions where you have to pick "the right one" or go directly to Hell without passing go, without collecting 200 talents?
If there were a god (obviously, there isn't), I think a grade of B would be woefully over-generous. D- at best, more likely F, with a requirement to do the work over (and stop playing Doctor with Satan), on pain of getting a 0 for the entire course. I can think of half a dozen better designs, non involving the eternal circling of the entropy drain, and that's just on one lunch break.
I've benchmarked Windows and Linux under various hypervisors, and that is simply untrue.
Linux under Xen 3.3.0 gets 98% and better bare metal performance (both 32 and 64 bit paravirtualized). VMWare won't paravirtualize 64-bit (though they allude that someday they might), arguing it isn't necessary, BUT 64-bit Linux under VMWare gets nowhere near 98% bare metal performance.
Likewise, Windows (XP, 2003, 2008) under Windows Server 2008 with HyperV performs better than under VMWare ESX, and I say that as one who doesn't care for Microsoft products at all.
Xen and HyperV may have their issues (HyperV in particular doesn't support live migration, and won't until 2010), but performance isn't one of them. For someone wanting to Virtualize on the cheap, and maximize performance, Linux under Xen and Windows under HyperV appears to be the way to go...with Windows on VMWare if you need live migration today. Others may disagree or have other opinions based on their needs, but to religiously proclaim VMWare as the only solution and all other virtualization technologies inferior is, well, partisan, dogmatic, and contrary to the real-world experience and benchmarking of many of us.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.
Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.
As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.
What about User's with black avatar's? How about User's with a female avatar? Were they more likely to give compliance, or less? Were the researcher's Avatars always male, or did they use equal white/black/male/female?
More interesting still, what are the genders/races of the real human beings using the Avatars? An ugly, seldom mentioned aspect of ethnicisms of all kinds is that, quite often, members of the "targeted" ethnic group are themselves be incredibly *ist against their own group. Examples include some of the Jewish collaborators during WW II, black-on-black bigotry (often a taboo subject), and women coming out far more aggressively against suffragettes and feminists than even the most misogynistic men.
If we knew this, we might be able to factor out "tribalism" and establish (or refute) cultural biases that everyone (including the bias-targeted population within the culture) may have absorbed.
[Best Republican Redneck Drawl] Man's gettin' what he deserves! He should thank his lucky UFOs he's going to Federal Pound-me-in-the-ass Prison for 70 years, and not gitmo for life. [end Best Republican Redneck Drawl]
Seriously, if there was ever a time to question the lack of proportionality in our post-9/11 Bushite anti-terror legislation, this is it. Unfortunately, the fact that the man in not from the US, and doesn't have a very powerful lobbying base in the US, probably means this particular injustice will have to run its course, along with many others, before anyone in America wakes up, smells the coffee, and starts to reclaim the country.
Helped many of my stocks. Pity I can't spend the money until I'm 60, by which time those dollars ought to be worth about... oh, maybe $0.0000001 thanks to the inflation current monetary policies are likely to incur. Oh well, it's fun to watch the big numbers anyway, even if they do end up being like the Zimbabwean dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one would find it very useful, for embedding things like sexagesimal numerals, e.g http://autonomyseries.com/autonomy-canon/community-standard-sexagesimal/ right now uses an aging wordpress plugin to display sexagesimal.ttf glyphs. Being able to embed "@font=sexagesimal.ttf" (or whatever the syntax is) would be very handy, but not if we're forced to convert our ttfs to Microsoft's worthless alternative format.
As for Microsoft's pathetic excuse that someone, somewhere might violate a copyright at some point in time my response is: so what? Just because someone, somewhere might violate someone's asinine copyright on a particular implementation of the alphabet's 26 letters, doesn't mean monopolists like Microsoft have any business throwing roadblocks in the way of the rest of us, who design our own fonts and want to be able to display and distribute them simply, seamlessly, and painlessly in standard, open formats. This isn't about protecting copyrights on fonts, its about Microsoft making sure IE isn't quite compatible with every other browser, and making sure we have to use their tools if we want anything to work on their dominant platform (and, if history is anything to judge by, eventually buy a license to do so). It's about muscling in on web standards to the detriment of everyone else, and I for one am fed up with it. I'm delighted Firefox, Opera, and Apple are embracing this. Hopefully they'll do the same with ogg-vorbis and other open standards, so we can have a complete web stack (including fonts and multimedia) that is unencumbered by American software patents, Microsoft (or anyone else's) proprietaryisms, sometimes-expensive licensing of third party products, and proprietary formats that only run on one or two widespread platforms.
This device wouldn't have been fit for purpose:
quoting the first and second link you provided:
(emphesis mine)
Since he wanted to track goods shipping from Chicago to California (i.e. in America), this device wouldn't have worked for him at all. US GSM carriers use different frequencies than Europe (which is why those of us using cell phones in both places need Quad-band phones). Now there may well be a North American variant of this device that would work (I don't have time to dig it up if it exists), but the links as shown do not provide a viable alternative for task.
Answering my own question:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/teenage-media-habits-morgan-stanley
It actually is an interesting read, if anectdotal.
Has anyone actually found the damn report? As another pointed out, google search is so polluted with 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that googling the report is singulary unrevealing (or perhaps more accurately: multiplicatively unrevealing). Unlike other snarky comments here, I wouldn't be surprised if this kid's observations weren't dead on. I'm unsurprised twitter is considered passe, I'm unsurprised that teenagers are finding better ways to chat than SMS messages pecked out on a cell phone number pad, and I'm unsurprised that teenagers are abandoning television and print media as primary information sources, given how often those expensive and slow media forms have been shown to be inaccurate, overtly deceptive, and (worst of all for a young person) utterly out of touch with the zeitgeist of the moment.
About the only surprise in the captions is that young people are using gaming consoles more than other media for chatting, but that may be down to me not being a gamer. In any event, I'd like to read the report before passing judgement, and particularly befor joining the jaded, knee-jerk reaction of "the kid's clueless, we shouldn't listen" mantra that seems to have become so common on slashdot (and makes us all sound like cranky old men, even more out of touch with the world's current trends than the Old Media).
Very well said. As others have said, if I had mod points today I'd have used one of them here.
I had similiar misconceptions about management (and about big companies vs. small companies, etc.). Now I find myself in management, managing teams and projects that span the globe from Tokyo to London to New York and various and sundry places in between, and I discover that a) not only do I like it, but b) I'm surprisingly good at it and c) your tech skills don't atrophy, they grow. Even if you're not hacking shell scripts, java code, or kernel compiles in detail, you're managing people who are, evaluating competing technical solutions to meet business needs, estimating deadlines, composing proposals, developing, managing, and adhering to budgets, researching new technical solutions and staying abreast of the field in a much wider context.
Less specialization, but by no means less technical application or knowledge. If anything, as a manager, you need to stay even more abreast of new developments, and certainly a wider range of technologies, than when you're a specialized techie, whether its a developer, sysadmin, or architect ...and you'll need your technical knowledge to differentiate between buzzword bullshit / marketdroid nonsense vs. real technical innovation--something that's easy to do if you're knowledgable about(and keep up with) the field, but something that you will find challenging (and requires research) for areas of IT you may have previously ignored while working in your specialty. The need to learn and be familiar with new technologies doesn't stop, it accelerates and encompasses more, and becomes arguably more important in doing your job.
There have been 400M downloads of Silverlight so far.
Silverlight is included in many updates to Windows XP. At a company I worked for fairly recently, the windows admin ticked the box to install silverlight on some 100+ PCs. No one at that company ever used it while employed there (the company has since gone bust). With Silverlight being included in basic Windows XP upgrades, I'd say it's very likely the vast majority of the 400M "downloads" you cite has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Silverlight adoption or usage.
"Now instead of studying for my exams and working on my final assignments I must take time to find a place to live before the 29th of May (2009).'""
Wah?
I mean come on, you're paying the price for doing what you knew would get in hot water at school. you DID read the acceptable use policy before you signed it right?
Um ... where's the due process. A third party, which has been discredited in another country and fired by the copyright cartels there because their ability to track offenders has been so abysmal and inaccurate, has made an accusation. One that, based on their track record in the United States, should be taken with a mountain of salt.
Based on that accusation, someone has been evicted from their home at a time when they should be studying for exams. As far as I can tell, there's been no disciplinary due process, no hearings, no opportunities for appeal, just a summary eviction with no opportunity for the student to put their case forward. Maybe s/he is guilty. Maybe his/her roommate is a prick and used his equipment to do something stupid so they wouldn't pay the price. Maybe someone else did it entirely, and spoofed his IP address. Or maybe, like in so many cases in the US that the company had to close their doors, no one in the dorm was involved at all, and they're barking up the wrong tree completely.
Doesn't matter. Summary punishment has been meted out, on the barest of accusations. That is a problem, the student's guilt or innocence not withstanding, and if I were considering sending a kid to university, that's one school I would avoid quite possibly wasting my hard earned money on.
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
It isn't. Web 2.0 is shit. Seriously. For every cool app (e.g. Google Streetview) or cool mashup there are tens of thousands of arduous, information obfuscating, time wasting and soul destroying websites that do nothing other than get in the way of what you're trying to do (e.g. book airline tickets) or trying to discover, while spamming you with useless graphics, animations, advertising, and generally teaching your eye to ignore almost everything displayed in your browser...and then hiding the bit of info you're looking for in the area of the screen your eye has trained itself to skip over because of so many ads previously.
Someone needs to develop a browser (or proxy) that downloads a web 2.0 site, disassembles the logic, deconstructs the page, and reconstructs it as a simple HTML page (with forms if necessary) so those of us not interested in spending our hours wading through visual SPAM can get something useful done before the sun expands into a red giant and envelops the Earth.
I quote like Be*There. £22/month is a little pricey, but consistent 21 Gbit download speeds when friends on BT are lucky to get 5 is pretty sweet. Plus they offered to buy a 2nd landline for one year to help beta test their 50 Gbit service (and meet me in a pub in central London to pick up the equipment). I passed, as I didn't want to have to remember to cancel that 2nd landline in a year, but they're a very cool, very laid back, and very competent ISP.
Just when I thought I could relax, and could put the dark years of the Bush interregnum behind me, I read this.
As an American, I feel sick. No love lost for Saddam and he certainly won't be missed, but humiliating him like this during his last days/weeks of life, forcing him to give autographs, watch a humiliating movie, etc. is beyond repugnant. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it violated the Geneva convention in some way, but even if it does not, it certainly violates every code of conduct and ethical norm we (wrongly and naively) expect from our armed forces and our government.
Absolutely sickening.
Absolutely right! To the Guardian editors: may I refer you to your local buggy whip manufacturer.
Really, if the Guardian has such an issue with being indexed in a search engine and news aggregator (what morons), then Google should kindly remove them from the same. They can watch their web hits go asymptotically to zero in the hopes that their printed word continues to bring in revenue (good luck...just take a look at fate of the rest of the old media). Or perhaps not so asymptotically ... if they're this dumb, their readership could conceivably go to absolute zero, popularist left leanings notwithstanding.
As they say in these here parts (hint: I'm at ground zero for the coming G20 chaos, and the Guardian is a local paper), "good riddance to bad rubbish." After all, there are plenty of left leaning blogs for those of us who lean that way, who do understand the new news paradigm, and don't react to a changing world by trying to legislate an untenable status quo.
I don't find myself wishing machines had souls. Now, a sense of humor, that would be something worth wishing for, so would a conscience, but not a soul.
Be careful what you wish for.
Every time your windows pc crashes, or your car refuses to start (or breaks down), every time the ATM refuses to give you cash, or the printer jams ... you are witnessing a machine's sense of humour. The problem is, you are the butt of the joke.
All hail, and long live, our electromechanical overlords.
In Wired, Issue 8.04, April 2000, Bill Joy wrote:
"It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying grey goo in nanotechnology. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder--or even impossible--to control. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge."
This sort of hysterical Ludditism is all too alive and well, and Bill Joy is (or has been) a Luddite of the first order with regards to genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
Unless he has seriously revised his stance, if Bill Joy becomes Obama's "Technology Czar" (what a stupid title "czar" is) we can look forward to a world where the most promising technologies are banned or severely curtailed in the US, with a high probability that international treaties will be pushed down the worlds throat to make the ban universal. At best, such technologies will be developed in China, India, and elsewhere (and at least some people will reap the benefits). This is IMHO, not the kind of person we need setting US political policies as regards technology.
That's a very interesting way to dream. Did your girlfriend watch lots of cartoons as a child, or read a lot of comic books?
I don't believe I've ever dreamt in black and white, so I cannot comment from personal experience. However, I think we all would be surprised at how much of our visual input, in particular that which stimulates the imagination, comes from movies and television. It's not inconceivable that a generation or two, brought up on black and white movies and television, might find years of that sensory input have had a significant influence on their dreaming patterns.
We have these problems now precisely because Bush stole the election of 2000, and quite possibly stole the 2004 election in Ohio and Flordia (see http://blackboxvoting.org/). There is a very real possibility we NEVER elected these neocons to power, and the mess we see, and the failed leadership we suffer under, was no more democratically elected than the recently deposed president of Pakistan.
This isn't about specific software, hardware or other standards per se.
This is about a corrupt process, which this debacle happened to reveal. The organisation is fundamentally corrupt, the procedures are fundamentally corruptible, and the appeals process has proven that there is no effective corrective mechanism for dealing with corruption.
This makes every standard they stamp, be it the crappy and unimplementable software standard that proved their level of corruption and incapacity for correcting it, or another standard that may be legitimate, or the result of equally corrupt processes to which we are not privy, equally suspect. We cannot know which standards are good, and which are the result of industrial corruption, so all are relatively worthless.
Well, it's not authoritative (I'm at work and don't have time to dig up primary sources), but here's an overview of what happened:
Studios flee to Hollywood[1]
In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often sued by Edison to stop their productions.
To escape his control, and because of the ideal weather conditions and varied terrain, moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles to make their films. If agents from Edison's company came out west to find and stop these filmmakers, adequate notice allowed for a quick escape to Mexico.
Working without disturbance from Edison, the Biograph Company moved west with actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others, to make their films. After beginning filming in Los Angeles, the company decided to explore the neighboring area and stumbled across Hollywood.
Biograph made the first film in Hollywood, entitled In Old California. After hearing of Biograph's praise of the area, other filmmakers headed west to set up shop.
The first motion picture studio was built in 1919, in nearby Edendale, just east of Hollywood, by Selig Polyscope Company, and the first one built in Hollywood was founded by filmmaker David Horsley's general manager Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Movie studios began to crop up all over Hollywood after Christie's appearance, including ones for Cecil B. DeMille in 1913, the Charlie Chaplin Studio in 1917, and many others.
[1]: http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3871.html
[2]: http://webpages.dcu.ie/~flynnr/hollywood_history_1891_-_1917.htm (interesting timeline)
[3]: http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/edison_trust.htm (details on Edison's monopoly, which Hollywood broke)
Primary sources would take longer than I have to dig up, but you get the idea.
or 32 microts
...is simple. There seem to be a plethora of users there who relish intellectual masturbation. I bet a lot of these folks would give God a "B" for creating the universe.
Increasing entropy in a game "you can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave"? Mass suffering of billions, random rules of right and wrong, hundreds of religions where you have to pick "the right one" or go directly to Hell without passing go, without collecting 200 talents?
If there were a god (obviously, there isn't), I think a grade of B would be woefully over-generous. D- at best, more likely F, with a requirement to do the work over (and stop playing Doctor with Satan), on pain of getting a 0 for the entire course. I can think of half a dozen better designs, non involving the eternal circling of the entropy drain, and that's just on one lunch break.
Hell,
I've benchmarked Windows and Linux under various hypervisors, and that is simply untrue.
Linux under Xen 3.3.0 gets 98% and better bare metal performance (both 32 and 64 bit paravirtualized). VMWare won't paravirtualize 64-bit (though they allude that someday they might), arguing it isn't necessary, BUT 64-bit Linux under VMWare gets nowhere near 98% bare metal performance.
Likewise, Windows (XP, 2003, 2008) under Windows Server 2008 with HyperV performs better than under VMWare ESX, and I say that as one who doesn't care for Microsoft products at all.
Xen and HyperV may have their issues (HyperV in particular doesn't support live migration, and won't until 2010), but performance isn't one of them. For someone wanting to Virtualize on the cheap, and maximize performance, Linux under Xen and Windows under HyperV appears to be the way to go...with Windows on VMWare if you need live migration today. Others may disagree or have other opinions based on their needs, but to religiously proclaim VMWare as the only solution and all other virtualization technologies inferior is, well, partisan, dogmatic, and contrary to the real-world experience and benchmarking of many of us.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.
Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.
As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.
What about User's with black avatar's? How about User's with a female avatar? Were they more likely to give compliance, or less? Were the researcher's Avatars always male, or did they use equal white/black/male/female?
More interesting still, what are the genders/races of the real human beings using the Avatars? An ugly, seldom mentioned aspect of ethnicisms of all kinds is that, quite often, members of the "targeted" ethnic group are themselves be incredibly *ist against their own group. Examples include some of the Jewish collaborators during WW II, black-on-black bigotry (often a taboo subject), and women coming out far more aggressively against suffragettes and feminists than even the most misogynistic men.
If we knew this, we might be able to factor out "tribalism" and establish (or refute) cultural biases that everyone (including the bias-targeted population within the culture) may have absorbed.
He's a terrorist.
[Best Republican Redneck Drawl]
Man's gettin' what he deserves! He should thank his lucky UFOs he's going to Federal Pound-me-in-the-ass Prison for 70 years, and not gitmo for life.
[end Best Republican Redneck Drawl]
Seriously, if there was ever a time to question the lack of proportionality in our post-9/11 Bushite anti-terror legislation, this is it. Unfortunately, the fact that the man in not from the US, and doesn't have a very powerful lobbying base in the US, probably means this particular injustice will have to run its course, along with many others, before anyone in America wakes up, smells the coffee, and starts to reclaim the country.
If it isn't already too late.
Helped many of my stocks. Pity I can't spend the money until I'm 60, by which time those dollars ought to be worth about ... oh, maybe $0.0000001 thanks to the inflation current monetary policies are likely to incur. Oh well, it's fun to watch the big numbers anyway, even if they do end up being like the Zimbabwean dollar.