The local bookstores still has a magazine by die-hard believers called "Infinite Energy".
I don't read it, but it tells what is still going on.
why so many drug movies?
on
Review: Blow
·
· Score: 2
Summer 2000 it was the three RAVE/Ectasy movies (Groove, etc.). Then comes Traffic, Requiem and Blow. Are drugs becoming more significant in
American culture? I don't think so.
I think the new movies are capturing the drug experience better- the joy and the despair.
They are less cops-and robber morality tale and more user experiences.
Neptune was the only planet to be found by
mathematical prediction from anomalies in Jupiter and Saturn orbits. The first six planets were
known from ancient times by eye. Uranus was
accidently discovered with early telescopes.
Mathematicians predicted another planet beyond
Neptune. Pluto was found during a search for
this planet, but it was too small and in the wrong place compared to mathematical predictions.
A few die-hards hold out for another solar planet.
The current technology also is limited to close-in fast moving palnets. You usually have to observe two orbital cycles to verify the result.
So slower orbits, on the order of a year or more haven't really been looked for yet due to the
time and cost involved.
My biggest complaint is that many movies assume
hackers can do *anything*- break into any company's
database in five seconds, stop nuclear missles, etc.
This makes for bad scripts when a hacker basically has no limits.
Awful movies like this include The Net, Enemey of the State, Superman III, to name a few.
I like movies where hacking is clearly limited to reality, and the plot is driven by
character rather than technological onimpotence.
Anti-trust is a resent example of this genre.
InterNet not unique in this regard
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
Most people. probably including myself,
slect other media to reinforce their world-views.
This includes the magazines they read, TV shows they watch, music they listen to, and so on.
I learned everything I know from slashdot!
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
"Linux is the best operating system."
"Hackers are the best people in the world."
"Jon Katz is the smartest journalist & philosopher."
Could slashdot be an example of Internet-blinders too?
It was originally defined as the weight of volume
of water the size of a fractional circumference of the earth
at a particular temperature.
Being difficult to reproduce, this was switched to a
reference physical object of this weight.
The annual standards issue of Physics Today (March 2001, p32) suggest making mass a "derived unit".
These would come from two fundamental equations
of physics- E = mc2 and E = hv giving m = hv'/c2.
C is the speed of light
v' is a vibration rate defined as some highly stable atomic vibration known to 18 decimal places
such as in an atomic clock. The prime refers to a frequency chosen to be exactly a kilogram.
h is Planck's quantum of action, measured independently in other experiments.
These companies are pretty lacadasical about changing
name ownership and IP bindings.
Other organzizations names have been stolen too,
but more as short term hacks.
They should *always* send a change notification &
verification to the original address, much like
banks do.
Except for some fundamental princples,
by the time its gotten to a textbook,
it is not state-of-the art.
Go to the bookstore of a MIT-class university and
you'll find upper-level undergraduate and graduate
book selections rather thin. The reason is because
much of that information has not yet been
distilled into textbooks and the prof, who is
inventing that information, is filtering it for you.
This issue has come up at many universities.
Some faculty have resisted. Concerns include:
Extra cost of polishing materials for wider audience, especially in time. (I cant see how better material would help rather than hinder both paying and non-paying students.)
Conflict with textbook publishing. The popular textbooks, several which are written by MIT profs,
are big money makers for the publishing houses
and the profs themselves. Some pubishing contracts even prohibit open distribution of texts. (Web texts would facilitate more timely upgrades.)
Theft of material. Lazy or less competent teachers
elsewhere could appropriate and call it their own.
(However, the web makes it easy to identify thieves too. Many insitutions would fire blatant
plagairzers.)
Quality control. Would MIT set standards before
allowing material on the open web? Or would each
prof decide standards him/herself?
Its interaction with people that count.
Its pretty much as before when you could go to
the MIT bookstore (Harvard COOP) and buy the
same textbooks as the students. Some people are
able to educate themselves that way. Others
require the prodding of regular lectures,
assignments, and tests.
There's material for several courses.
I'd include the following:
(1) History of the technology- all the way back
to Babbage, picking up after the WWII with the
first programmable mainframes, minis, PCs, PDAs,
and NET.
Then there is the parallel history of software.
Concepts of programming, assembler, compilers,
clients, distributed, databases, games, browsers and so on.
Proprietary until 1970s, then a mass software market and immense wealth afterwards.
(2) Engineer/programmer/hacker culture.
Books by Levy, Cringley, and Katz. "Soul of a machine" by Kidder.
(3) Business cycles- moguls and busts.
Rise, fall, and resurection of IBM. Apple.
MicoSoft. Silly Valley. Rise and fall and rise
and fall of gaming. Famous speculative bubbles
like minicomputers, expert systems, and the InterNet. Books by Stross.
(4) Literature and movies, including sci-fi.
2001: Space Odyssy, Asimov's computer and robot
stories, Neuromancer, Crytomonium(?). Lots of stuff.
Speculation versus reality.
The current mammalian cloning methodolgy
turns on an alien nucleus in an egg cell
with an electric or chemical shock.
This is literally the Frankenstein technique- lightning.
This shock is the probably cause of damage
and 97-99% failure rate.
I predict methods will improve with time
to at least human IVF yields (25% success).
I'd recommend delaying human procedures until
this success rate is reached.
I work in a vertical software industry,
that is scientific programming for industry
customers. The business grew because many of
customers downsized their in-house developement
during 1990s re-engineering because they lacked
the critical mass for respectable software support.
Our problem is the opposite of yours.
We have many candidates who are graduate students
who know scientific programming,
but never learned the other 90% of the software
business cycle. Our best sucesses are domain
experts who've worked for our customers,
yet maintained a strong ability in computers
and want to move into that side. Recent grad
student business skills are too unpredictable.
Pure comp-sci types job hop a lot (until recently)
and not domain savy.
The drawback to this approach is that you have
to pay computer industry standard salaries and
not academic slavery salaries. The former is
about 50% higher.
I don't think it has been proven that knowing the
genome or pronome "code" allows to to manipulate
life to a serious degree.
Sure there have been results in some genetic
diseases, franken-food, and bio-identity.
But serious bio-hacking may require more than
just information sequences.
Jaron Lanier's recent "Half a manifesto" suggests
that information may not explain everything
and other aspects of reality may be acting there.
John Searle, the Berkeley philosopher has a similar
complaint toeards those who try to digitally emulate the mind.
Thinking that "information manipulation" explains
and controls everything may limit our understanding
of phenomena and ability to control it.
Don't get locked into this box.
The TV series was 50% longer, so it could show
more of desert fremen life. The CGI worms and
thropters were better.
The TV series lacked the stylistic unity of the movie.
The movie clearly delineated the various planets
and cultures, while TV series mushed them together.
The camera work, sound and acting were better in
the movie.
William Hurt was so cardboard, that I fell asleep
during his parts.
There are lots of customer-relation-manager software
that will make a preliminary attempt to sort
mail based on content. Smart companies use this
to pull out the most important problems first.
Do Congressmen use this?
Slashdot Mirror
That applies to 5 years ago or 2000 years ago.
Even paper distintigrates, albeit in centuries.
Only a tiny fraction of stuff is copied now or then.
The local bookstores still has a magazine by die-hard believers called "Infinite Energy".
I don't read it, but it tells what is still going on.
Summer 2000 it was the three RAVE/Ectasy movies (Groove, etc.). Then comes Traffic, Requiem and Blow. Are drugs becoming more significant in American culture? I don't think so.
I think the new movies are capturing the drug experience better- the joy and the despair. They are less cops-and robber morality tale and more user experiences.
Neptune was the only planet to be found by mathematical prediction from anomalies in Jupiter and Saturn orbits. The first six planets were known from ancient times by eye. Uranus was accidently discovered with early telescopes. Mathematicians predicted another planet beyond Neptune. Pluto was found during a search for this planet, but it was too small and in the wrong place compared to mathematical predictions. A few die-hards hold out for another solar planet.
The current technology also is limited to close-in fast moving palnets. You usually have to observe two orbital cycles to verify the result.
So slower orbits, on the order of a year or more haven't really been looked for yet due to the
time and cost involved.
My biggest complaint is that many movies assume hackers can do *anything*- break into any company's database in five seconds, stop nuclear missles, etc. This makes for bad scripts when a hacker basically has no limits. Awful movies like this include The Net, Enemey of the State, Superman III, to name a few.
I like movies where hacking is clearly limited to reality, and the plot is driven by character rather than technological onimpotence. Anti-trust is a resent example of this genre.
Most people. probably including myself,
slect other media to reinforce their world-views.
This includes the magazines they read, TV shows they watch, music they listen to, and so on.
"Linux is the best operating system."
"Hackers are the best people in the world."
"Jon Katz is the smartest journalist & philosopher."
Could slashdot be an example of Internet-blinders too?
The annual standards issue of Physics Today (March 2001, p32) suggest making mass a "derived unit". These would come from two fundamental equations of physics- E = mc2 and E = hv giving m = hv'/c2.
C is the speed of light
v' is a vibration rate defined as some highly stable atomic vibration known to 18 decimal places such as in an atomic clock. The prime refers to a frequency chosen to be exactly a kilogram.
h is Planck's quantum of action, measured independently in other experiments.
These companies are pretty lacadasical about changing
name ownership and IP bindings.
Other organzizations names have been stolen too,
but more as short term hacks.
They should *always* send a change notification &
verification to the original address, much like
banks do.
Except for some fundamental princples,
by the time its gotten to a textbook,
it is not state-of-the art.
Go to the bookstore of a MIT-class university and
you'll find upper-level undergraduate and graduate
book selections rather thin. The reason is because
much of that information has not yet been
distilled into textbooks and the prof, who is
inventing that information, is filtering it for you.
Extra cost of polishing materials for wider audience, especially in time. (I cant see how better material would help rather than hinder both paying and non-paying students.)
Conflict with textbook publishing. The popular textbooks, several which are written by MIT profs, are big money makers for the publishing houses and the profs themselves. Some pubishing contracts even prohibit open distribution of texts. (Web texts would facilitate more timely upgrades.)
Theft of material. Lazy or less competent teachers elsewhere could appropriate and call it their own. (However, the web makes it easy to identify thieves too. Many insitutions would fire blatant plagairzers.)
Quality control. Would MIT set standards before allowing material on the open web? Or would each prof decide standards him/herself?
It is who and how they are used that matters.
One can find many examples on both sides of
immense benefits and greed and evil.
If you polk around you can find some MIT courses
with syllabi, homework, and even text.
Some of the departemental seminars are in
streaming video.
Its interaction with people that count.
Its pretty much as before when you could go to
the MIT bookstore (Harvard COOP) and buy the
same textbooks as the students. Some people are
able to educate themselves that way. Others
require the prodding of regular lectures,
assignments, and tests.
I see the comment sender defaults to
formatting after lokking at the HMTL source.
I'll try to avoid this in the future.
There's material for several courses.
I'd include the following:
(1) History of the technology- all the way back
to Babbage, picking up after the WWII with the
first programmable mainframes, minis, PCs, PDAs,
and NET.
Then there is the parallel history of software.
Concepts of programming, assembler, compilers,
clients, distributed, databases, games, browsers and so on.
Proprietary until 1970s, then a mass software market and immense wealth afterwards.
(2) Engineer/programmer/hacker culture.
Books by Levy, Cringley, and Katz. "Soul of a machine" by Kidder.
(3) Business cycles- moguls and busts.
Rise, fall, and resurection of IBM. Apple.
MicoSoft. Silly Valley. Rise and fall and rise
and fall of gaming. Famous speculative bubbles
like minicomputers, expert systems, and the InterNet. Books by Stross.
(4) Literature and movies, including sci-fi.
2001: Space Odyssy, Asimov's computer and robot
stories, Neuromancer, Crytomonium(?). Lots of stuff.
Speculation versus reality.
The current mammalian cloning methodolgy
turns on an alien nucleus in an egg cell
with an electric or chemical shock.
This is literally the Frankenstein technique- lightning.
This shock is the probably cause of damage
and 97-99% failure rate.
I predict methods will improve with time
to at least human IVF yields (25% success).
I'd recommend delaying human procedures until
this success rate is reached.
I work in a vertical software industry,
that is scientific programming for industry
customers. The business grew because many of
customers downsized their in-house developement
during 1990s re-engineering because they lacked
the critical mass for respectable software support.
Our problem is the opposite of yours.
We have many candidates who are graduate students
who know scientific programming,
but never learned the other 90% of the software
business cycle. Our best sucesses are domain
experts who've worked for our customers,
yet maintained a strong ability in computers
and want to move into that side. Recent grad
student business skills are too unpredictable.
Pure comp-sci types job hop a lot (until recently)
and not domain savy.
The drawback to this approach is that you have
to pay computer industry standard salaries and
not academic slavery salaries. The former is
about 50% higher.
Thats how you get strange numbers.
I don't think it has been proven that knowing the
genome or pronome "code" allows to to manipulate
life to a serious degree.
Sure there have been results in some genetic
diseases, franken-food, and bio-identity.
But serious bio-hacking may require more than
just information sequences.
Jaron Lanier's recent "Half a manifesto" suggests
that information may not explain everything
and other aspects of reality may be acting there.
John Searle, the Berkeley philosopher has a similar
complaint toeards those who try to digitally emulate the mind.
Thinking that "information manipulation" explains
and controls everything may limit our understanding
of phenomena and ability to control it.
Don't get locked into this box.
Slashdot makes big use of Salon links,
as the subsequent article shows.
'nuf said.
The TV series was 50% longer, so it could show
more of desert fremen life. The CGI worms and
thropters were better.
The TV series lacked the stylistic unity of the movie.
The movie clearly delineated the various planets
and cultures, while TV series mushed them together.
The camera work, sound and acting were better in
the movie.
William Hurt was so cardboard, that I fell asleep
during his parts.
There are lots of customer-relation-manager software
that will make a preliminary attempt to sort
mail based on content. Smart companies use this
to pull out the most important problems first.
Do Congressmen use this?