Should I simply deplore NZ's appalling incompetence over this issue?
Or should I applaud their Kafkaesque debut in the Theatre of the Absurd? (C.f., for instance, "The Trial, which includes a good summary of the novel.") For the interested reader, other potent names in the genre of absurdity include, e.g. Eugene Ionesco and Nobel Laureates Samual Beckett and Harold Pinter. Go look 'em up in the 'pedia if you don't know them.
But if they really want to Kafka-ise NZ society, why bother with the formality of an accusation? Why not - without blocking their Internet access - just define all of their Internet users as implicitly guilty (here, we must remember that Josef K., the main protagonist of "the Trial," was never actually *accused* of anything), so that they can then impose suitably stringent, annually recurring, fines on *all* computer owners/users?
Finally, don't let's be too beastly to the Kiwis, who after all may not really have meant any real harm - perhaps they just wanted a Nobel Prize, too.
[Funny thing is, you start paying for the call as soon as you get the "answering machine" talking to you]
I'm living in Denmark and Lebara, my cell-phone provider, starts charging from the instant I _initiate_ the call, i.e. enter the number and press the "call" key. This means that I still pay the bawsic call charge - even if the number is engaged or unobtainable!
In disagreeing, Nobel laureates Leggett and Ramsay are, of course, completely consistent with the theory, by virtue of being both right and wrong at the same time.
While working on the source code of the new Swedish fighter, the JAS39, about 10 years ago, one of the other two members of our 3-man team (after translating 100's of comments pertaining to the 'laddning' [loading] of software modules) translated the Swedish 'batteriladdning' as 'loading of batteries,' which captivated my imagination, as virtual batteries were a totally new concept for me at the time.
When I pointed it out to him, he simply groaned, saying that he had _obviously_ meant 'charging' (also 'laddning' in Swedish).
At the time, I was on the verge of replacing my old Bondwell (Z80, CP/M - I _still_ have it and yes, I do need to download new batteries) with a new portable. But without the attraction of soft batteries stored on the hard disk, none of the hardware available at the time seemed worthwhile so I never got around to it.
Question: has anybody seen an equation relating amp-hours and GBytes yet?
Sorry to be off-topic - this is a bitch about www.space.com
When I visited their site I got a pop-up advertising "Starry Night." Being a bit gullible, I took a look at the trial download page, completed their User Survey and selected the "Unix/Linux" platform. Having read their privacy statement + terms&conds, I submitted the form and received the next page.
That page told me that there were only WinXX and Mac versions, so I sent email to contact@starrynight.com, asking them to remove all of the info I had given them from their database (yes, I did ask for info on upgrades, etc.).
So imagine my surprise 2 mins later, when I received the following from MAILER-DAEMON@richardson.uni2.net:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 550... User unknown)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to lists.space.com.:
>>> RCPT To:
... User unknown
550 5.1.1... User unknown
What sort of reputation does space.com have? Has anybody else had similar experience?
What's the good of low-price PCs if the Brazilian government's notice and pictures spend half their time transmitting at about 128 Bytes/s and the other half stalled?
140 million Brazilians will need a lot more b/w than they seem to have today.
Or were they just getting Slashdotted when I tried their sites?
Probably a GOOD IDEA, if we're cloning for spare parts & the clones are brainless & the technology is available to everybody & the world can support all of us + all our personal clones. (Does anybody have a reasonable estimate of the resources consumed by a brainless human body over, say, 20 years, including feeding, cleaning, heating/cooling, massage, etc?)
Anyway, cloning for parts is more likely a question of prolonging life by a few years or decades than of gaining eternal life - the brain itself wears out and you're never the same after is a brain transplant. (Nanotech brain & organ repairs would probably pose a more serious threat from the excessive-longevity viewpoint.)
Probably a BAD IDEA if you want a Superbody or Super{spouse,child,soldier,etc.}, though.
The way to go is to create intelligent robots (A.I. is coming Real Soon Now, remember) first, under strict observance of Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics. That would quieten religious and moral objections, at least until the robots start to do the cloning for us. The same 3 laws would also ensure that any sapient clones were paragons of all the virtues and free of all the vices, and that all non-sapient clones were just vegetables.
Finally, cloning could just be a passing fad, soon to be rendered obsolete by nanotech.
I quite agree. However, we must remember that this method can probably only reveal their local (i.e. planet- or planetary-system-wide) communications, but as the idea of detecting other directed intelligence is in itself so fascinating, it could be all we need for a while.
If, however, we want to *communicate* with extraterrestrials or to find an interstellar culture, radio is probably not the medium - and neither are simple pulsed or modulated laser beams - because they're still limited to 3x10^8 m/s and any signals we can receive will therefore only be fossil radio/TV.
But I have a vague memory of an experiment in the late 70s/early 80s, in which a polarising filter was inserted into one half of a split laser beam (A) and used to modify its polarisation. As I remember it, the change in polarisation (or its inverse?) was *instantaneously* reproduced at *all points* along the other half of the beam (B).
Pertinent questions are, what happens to the original beam before the splitter, how is beam B affected if the change in polarisation only affects a small part of the cross-section of beam A, what happens if the beam is not continuous, but pulsed and/or modulated in some way, and what happens in beams 3-n if the parent beam is split into more than 2 parts (by a single multi-way splitter, obviously)?
Imho, this does seem to offer a reasonable shot at interstellar communications. Once we send a mission, let's say to the Sirius system - it's only 8.7 light years away - all we do is set up a permanent laser link to Starbase Sirius, simply start switching the beam polarity and wait 17.4 years for their reply.
If it would work for us, it would work for Them. So, wouldn't it make more sense to look at changes in the polarity of coherent light in space?
"If I have seen less far than others, it is because Hal Abelson was standing on my shoulders."
What about the old UNIX LEARN (1 ??) system? Is/was it proprietary?
Most newbies probably just want to know how to use a shell, grep, find, awk, & friends, and I found learn was fun stuff on my Stride 420 (mid-80s).
Alternatively, why not write some basic Linux tutorials in emacs (natch!) along the lines of the emacs tutorial, which might even give odd newbies an insight into elisp.
"If others have seen further than I it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
Originally inspired by the useful but obvious "Last X" function of the Hewlett-Packard RPN calculators (no prior art here!), the "Next X" function [patent pending] obviates all other "keys" (TM) (including but not restricted to the keys of accordions, computer keyboards, locks, etc.), "buttons" (TM) (including but not restricted to the buttons of mice and other mammals, male and female apparel, etc.) or similar devices [patent pending]. This function (which is accessed via one of the aforementioned keys, buttons or input devices, hard-wired [patent pending] to the user interface) will also utilise "Layer 0 Tunneling" to travel forward in time (thus anticipating the desires of the user), return to the present and enter the data that the aforesaid user would otherwise have been compelled to enter manually. This will have the added benefit of making redundant the use of programming languages (hope I'm not infringing anybody else's patent, etc., here), since computers will henceforth be programmed by the future, itself.
As soon as the tachyon has been modified to transport physical particles [patent pending], this patent will implement the ultimate revolution in on-line shopping, as the computer, or Generic On-line Device (GOD), ever aware of the mind [patent pending] and present and future needs of the user, will then instantly place orders for everything the individual user will ever need during the rest of his or her lifetime, retrieving such articles from the future, where necessary, long before such trivia emerges from the mental morass in which humanity is presently wallowing.
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants (TM) were standing on my shoulders [patent pending]."
[PwrFail] Thank Heavens! At last! An issue as deeply significant as "endianness*" ever was in the late '70s.
*Cf. old 6800/8080 instruction sets and Defoe. [Pay it no heed, lass. 'Tis naught but the random whispering and babbling of the decaying charges on the DRAM gates.]
[PwrFail] Actually, IMHO, I believe his lineage to be Baltic (possibly Latvian) because of his surname, Torvalds (the Swedish and Danish forms of which would be T(h)orvaldsson and T(h)orvaldsen (the "h"'s are optional), respectively). The Swedes and Danes were significant powers in the entire Baltic region in previous centuries and they settled extensively there from the time of the vikings.
All of the Finnish Swedes (i.e., Finland's minority population) I have ever met have retained the original Swedish forms of their names, IOW, with the "sson" suffix, where appropriate.
Many people also fled Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during WWII and sought sanctuary in the Nordic countries due to the incursions of the Nazis and Communists (sadly, many were compulsorily "repatriated" into Russian hands after the war). [Pay it no heed, lad. 'Tis naught but the random gibberings and mumblings of the decaying charges on the DRAM gates.]
Slashdot Mirror
Help! What to do?
Should I simply deplore NZ's appalling incompetence over this issue?
Or should I applaud their Kafkaesque debut in the Theatre of the Absurd? (C.f., for instance, "The Trial, which includes a good summary of the novel.") For the interested reader, other potent names in the genre of absurdity include, e.g. Eugene Ionesco and Nobel Laureates Samual Beckett and Harold Pinter. Go look 'em up in the 'pedia if you don't know them.
But if they really want to Kafka-ise NZ society, why bother with the formality of an accusation? Why not - without blocking their Internet access - just define all of their Internet users as implicitly guilty (here, we must remember that Josef K., the main protagonist of "the Trial," was never actually *accused* of anything), so that they can then impose suitably stringent, annually recurring, fines on *all* computer owners/users?
Finally, don't let's be too beastly to the Kiwis, who after all may not really have meant any real harm - perhaps they just wanted a Nobel Prize, too.
[Funny thing is, you start paying for the call as soon as you get the "answering machine" talking to you]
I'm living in Denmark and Lebara, my cell-phone provider, starts charging from the instant I _initiate_ the call, i.e. enter the number and press the "call" key. This means that I still pay the bawsic call charge - even if the number is engaged or unobtainable!
Lebara sucks!
In disagreeing, Nobel laureates Leggett and Ramsay are, of course, completely consistent with the theory, by virtue of being both right and wrong at the same time.
If there's any money in it, I claim prior art.
While working on the source code of the new Swedish fighter, the JAS39, about 10 years ago, one of the other two members of our 3-man team (after translating 100's of comments pertaining to the 'laddning' [loading] of software modules) translated the Swedish 'batteriladdning' as 'loading of batteries,' which captivated my imagination, as virtual batteries were a totally new concept for me at the time.
When I pointed it out to him, he simply groaned, saying that he had _obviously_ meant 'charging' (also 'laddning' in Swedish).
At the time, I was on the verge of replacing my old Bondwell (Z80, CP/M - I _still_ have it and yes, I do need to download new batteries) with a new portable. But without the attraction of soft batteries stored on the hard disk, none of the hardware available at the time seemed worthwhile so I never got around to it.
Question: has anybody seen an equation relating amp-hours and GBytes yet?
Sorry to be off-topic - this is a bitch about www.space.com
... User unknown)
... User unknown
When I visited their site I got a pop-up advertising "Starry Night." Being a bit gullible, I took a look at the trial download page, completed their User Survey and selected the "Unix/Linux" platform. Having read their privacy statement + terms&conds, I submitted the form and received the next page.
That page told me that there were only WinXX and Mac versions, so I sent email to contact@starrynight.com, asking them to remove all of the info I had given them from their database (yes, I did ask for info on upgrades, etc.).
So imagine my surprise 2 mins later, when I received the following from MAILER-DAEMON@richardson.uni2.net:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 550
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to lists.space.com.:
>>> RCPT To:
... User unknown
550 5.1.1
What sort of reputation does space.com have? Has anybody else had similar experience?
What's the good of low-price PCs if the Brazilian government's notice and pictures spend half their time transmitting at about 128 Bytes/s and the other half stalled?
140 million Brazilians will need a lot more b/w than they seem to have today.
Or were they just getting Slashdotted when I tried their sites?
Probably a GOOD IDEA, if we're cloning for spare parts & the clones are brainless & the technology is available to everybody & the world can support all of us + all our personal clones. (Does anybody have a reasonable estimate of the resources consumed by a brainless human body over, say, 20 years, including feeding, cleaning, heating/cooling, massage, etc?)
Anyway, cloning for parts is more likely a question of prolonging life by a few years or decades than of gaining eternal life - the brain itself wears out and you're never the same after is a brain transplant. (Nanotech brain & organ repairs would probably pose a more serious threat from the excessive-longevity viewpoint.)
Probably a BAD IDEA if you want a Superbody or Super{spouse,child,soldier,etc.}, though.
The way to go is to create intelligent robots (A.I. is coming Real Soon Now, remember) first, under strict observance of Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics. That would quieten religious and moral objections, at least until the robots start to do the cloning for us. The same 3 laws would also ensure that any sapient clones were paragons of all the virtues and free of all the vices, and that all non-sapient clones were just vegetables.
Finally, cloning could just be a passing fad, soon to be rendered obsolete by nanotech.
I quite agree. However, we must remember that this method can probably only reveal their local (i.e. planet- or planetary-system-wide) communications, but as the idea of detecting other directed intelligence is in itself so fascinating, it could be all we need for a while.
If, however, we want to *communicate* with extraterrestrials or to find an interstellar culture, radio is probably not the medium - and neither are simple pulsed or modulated laser beams - because they're still limited to 3x10^8 m/s and any signals we can receive will therefore only be fossil radio/TV.
But I have a vague memory of an experiment in the late 70s/early 80s, in which a polarising filter was inserted into one half of a split laser beam (A) and used to modify its polarisation. As I remember it, the change in polarisation (or its inverse?) was *instantaneously* reproduced at *all points* along the other half of the beam (B).
Pertinent questions are, what happens to the original beam before the splitter, how is beam B affected if the change in polarisation only affects a small part of the cross-section of beam A, what happens if the beam is not continuous, but pulsed and/or modulated in some way, and what happens in beams 3-n if the parent beam is split into more than 2 parts (by a single multi-way splitter, obviously)?
Imho, this does seem to offer a reasonable shot at interstellar communications. Once we send a mission, let's say to the Sirius system - it's only 8.7 light years away - all we do is set up a permanent laser link to Starbase Sirius, simply start switching the beam polarity and wait 17.4 years for their reply.
If it would work for us, it would work for Them. So, wouldn't it make more sense to look at changes in the polarity of coherent light in space?
"If I have seen less far than others, it is because Hal Abelson was standing on my shoulders."
What about the old UNIX LEARN (1 ??) system? Is/was it proprietary?
Most newbies probably just want to know how to use a shell, grep, find, awk, & friends, and I found learn was fun stuff on my Stride 420 (mid-80s).
Alternatively, why not write some basic Linux tutorials in emacs (natch!) along the lines of the emacs tutorial, which might even give odd newbies an insight into elisp.
"If others have seen further than I it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
The one-button keyboard [patent pending].
Originally inspired by the useful but obvious "Last X" function of the Hewlett-Packard RPN calculators (no prior art here!), the "Next X" function [patent pending] obviates all other "keys" (TM) (including but not restricted to the keys of accordions, computer keyboards, locks, etc.), "buttons" (TM) (including but not restricted to the buttons of mice and other mammals, male and female apparel, etc.) or similar devices [patent pending]. This function (which is accessed via one of the aforementioned keys, buttons or input devices, hard-wired [patent pending] to the user interface) will also utilise "Layer 0 Tunneling" to travel forward in time (thus anticipating the desires of the user), return to the present and enter the data that the aforesaid user would otherwise have been compelled to enter manually. This will have the added benefit of making redundant the use of programming languages (hope I'm not infringing anybody else's patent, etc., here), since computers will henceforth be programmed by the future, itself.
As soon as the tachyon has been modified to transport physical particles [patent pending], this patent will implement the ultimate revolution in on-line shopping, as the computer, or Generic On-line Device (GOD), ever aware of the mind [patent pending] and present and future needs of the user, will then instantly place orders for everything the individual user will ever need during the rest of his or her lifetime, retrieving such articles from the future, where necessary, long before such trivia emerges from the mental morass in which humanity is presently wallowing.
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants (TM) were standing on my shoulders [patent pending]."
[PwrFail]
Thank Heavens! At last! An issue as deeply significant as "endianness*" ever was in the late '70s.
*Cf. old 6800/8080 instruction sets and Defoe.
[Pay it no heed, lass. 'Tis naught but the random whispering and babbling of the decaying charges on the DRAM gates.]
[PwrFail]
Actually, IMHO, I believe his lineage to be Baltic (possibly Latvian) because of his surname, Torvalds (the Swedish and Danish forms of which would be T(h)orvaldsson and T(h)orvaldsen (the "h"'s are optional), respectively). The Swedes and Danes were significant powers in the entire Baltic region in previous centuries and they settled extensively there from the time of the vikings.
All of the Finnish Swedes (i.e., Finland's minority population) I have ever met have retained the original Swedish forms of their names, IOW, with the "sson" suffix, where appropriate.
Many people also fled Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during WWII and sought sanctuary in the Nordic countries due to the incursions of the Nazis and Communists (sadly, many were compulsorily "repatriated" into Russian hands after the war).
[Pay it no heed, lad. 'Tis naught but the random gibberings and mumblings of the decaying charges on the DRAM gates.]