"Founded by Peter", of course, being a part of the myth they created in the third century, right? Because there isn't the slightest shred of contemporary evidence that Peter had anything to do with founding the Church in Rome in the first century. They just needed an Apostle because all of the competing cities had an Apostle, and Peter got elected.
Iconoclasts too. No respect for authority. Enlightened. Geekish.
Galileo was a hacker. Newton was a hacker. David Hume was a hacker. They just hacked the code of the Universe, the code of epistemology. The church hated that.
Boy, that's just what I want! To work with a bunch of other fat, bald geek males in a room devoted to serious coding! Sort of like "living with goatse" all of the time, tech balls to the wall, so to speak.
Not.
Unless, of course, the just "naturally" attracts all of the young, svelte, female, sexy nude coders. I'm sure there are LOTS of them, all lined up for this job.
To quote an ancient proverb -- "You can often learn to use a GUI in a day, and pay for that knowledge for the rest of your life."
The Unix Way is to be able to chain together large numbers of short, relatively easy to use, powerful commands to create tasks that save days of work in a GUI, if any GUI exists that can facilitate doing them at all. Sure, it takes a while to learn, requires intelligence, is "expert friendly", but in the end you can work friggin' magic. That's why they call the masters of this "gurus" and call the masters of the Windows GUI "MCSEs".
And yeah, even the best of the gurus use the man pages all of the time. Why waste neurons memorizing every single option to ls, or tar, or convert? It is enough to know the command name and that an option exists -- the computer itself is an extension of your brain that remembers every tiny option on request, if you choose to use it that way. And when you can't remember the name of the command, or aren't sure one exists, there is first "apropos", and then things like "yum list \*whatever\*" or google.
GUIs are often stupid, nearly always broken somewhere, only do what the designer thought they should do (which often leaves out any sort of control at all over all sorts of functionality known only to those who understand what lies behind the curtain where the command line provides access), and are slow and inefficient for nearly all tasks except things like "drawing" or otherwise "manipulating graphics" or "playing games", largely because they force you to take your fingers off of the home keys to use them.
my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code
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You don't need to go as far as Google to find a higher degree of efficiency. My personal favorite weather site is the weather underground, wunderground.com (largely because they have superb tropical storm coverage and good weather coverage, and we get serious tropical storms in NC every few years). When I first started to use it (shortly after it was set up as a free service) they realized that they had to fund it somehow and did so by selling advertisements, but they also had users (like me) that hated the embedded advertisements so they allowed users to buy out for a whopping $5 a year. That's right, pay them $5 and you can see and use their site, unlimited usage, on any and all computers you own, no ads. This is important to me because I have as many as a dozen computers and laptops and web-enabled devices at any given time, and can login to all of them (where my login is remembered ad infinitum) and see no ads. No "single machine, single user" license crap, just a practical service, cheap.
I pay them religiously every year, right after my subscription expires (announced by the Return of the Advertisements), which will probably happen in the next month as hurricane season (when I first subscribed) approaches.
I doubt that their "subscription service" -- which works perfectly and sanely -- cost them as much as $1000. I'm guessing that the same people that built the site in the first place took a more or less standard pay-by-credit-card interface, attached a low security db of registered users and profile information, stuck some conditionals into the php or whatever that generates the site's active pages, and voila! No ads if you've paid them and logged in and have a valid cookie.
If the NYT IT and management people weren't acting like complete idiots, they would have simply cloned this for the NYT. I'd pay them $25/year for the same access I have now (unlimited, that is) without advertisements, no crap associated with how many machines or what kinds of machines I use to access it. It's really more of an honor system login, and they make their money per household and in exchange for specific value.
20 million subscribers at $25 each is $500 million dollars. That's a good sized chunk of change given the zero marginal costs for internet distribution of content. Well, not quite zero -- but at most a fraction of a percent of the gross. The other 99+% is there to use to continue to buy all of those fancy reporters and cushy travel arrangments and so on, or to use as profit. And I'd even tolerate a limited number of ads onscreen (much as they have now) and still pay them that much money. What I won't do -- what almost nobody will do, I think they'll discover -- is pay them $300+ a year for access. Are they insane? There will be thunderclaps as they air rushes in to where their internet user base used to be...
If in fact they spent $40 million for this as opposed to $4 thousand or even $40 thousand for what is at most a week's work for any competent web developer, well, that simply demonstrates that they are too stupid to live. Nobody on slashdot will then be terribly surprised if they eventually die. The fact that they are charging paper delivery prices for an internet service only underscores their utter lack of brain. Maybe the slap in the face the market is about to deal them will wake them up. But I doubt it.
rgb
P.S. to Slashdot humans! The Wunderground Way is also a good way for you to fund. Wikipedia humans (if any are reading Slashdot today)! This would also work marvelously well for Wikipedia -- $5/year for unlimited usage ad-free, otherwise sure, sell ad space on the Wikipedia pages. I do my best to give Wikipedia money every year anyway, but "volunteer" contributions are a pain to raise and honestly a pain to (remem
Clearly the best, most thoroughly researched article I've ever read on slashdot. Bombastic micropiranhas! It's been a long time since I picked one of those out from between my teeth. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "bleeding edge technology"...
By which standard, you are a racist! Oops! So am I. Wait, wait, I mean you are NOT a racist, NOBODY is a racist, not even people that commit horrific acts that seem to be racist to an unbiased third party observer because if they even so much as thought the word racist, they would thereby magically become racist.
Damn! I didn't mean it! They would not become racist, no matter how often they accused others of racism.
The battle to give humans actual brains? There's an actual battle?
Bear in mind that 1/2 of the world's population has an IQ less than 100. Even allowing for the Flynn effect, what that essentially means is that roughly 2/3 of the world's population isn't going to be able to learn to use complex tools, especially when they have the lazy choice of using simple ones. Either the computer provides the missing intelligence, or the user will have to do without.
In the case of MS's many operating systems post DOS (which required some intelligence to operate) they simply have done without. In the case of Apple's operating systems pre-OSX -- they also did without. Indeed, remember the adage "You can learn to use a Mac in a day, and pay for that knowledge the rest of your life". OSX retained a lot of the brainless simplicity of the GUI, but at least it does have an expert-friendly upwardly mobile path for those whose intelligence is somewhat above the mean.
Either way, one cannot blame users of Microsoft systems for its appalling security. It was insecure by design. I don't know whether or not this still is true -- MS apologists are now asserting that W7 is finally all secure and everything, something that I have little empirical evidence to validate but hey, it COULD be true and if one day I ever try it perhaps I'll find out. You know, when hell freezes over?
...And the problem is that by making the "few bucks" a truly, truly absurd number, the kind of number you have to be batshit crazy to pay them for online access that has more or less zero marginal cost to them to provide, they openly encourage people to work around it while failing to convince people -- like me, for example -- that we should fork over twenty-five cents an article in order to read the 3-4 articles that actually catch our notice in any given day. If they'd charged, say, $25 a year I'd have been all over it -- $2 a month is worth it, and the extra dollar could be a tip. That way, I'd continue to be exposed to their ads and so on, their reader base would remain fat, life would be good.
For a dollar a day, OTOH, well, my igoogle page has three news blocks -- slashdot, cnn, and the nyt. I can really, really, easily replace the nyt (which isn't even as well done as cnn's, which actually updates with new news stories throughout the day where the nyt site sort of pretends that it is an actual "newspaper" that got "put to bed" the night before and doesn't need to report news for another 24 hours).
But we'll see what happens. I predict online readership of the NYT plummets like a rock to zero to the precise extent that they enforce their wall, because most people will recognize that it is stupid to pay a dollar to read the news online every day when the same news can be had for free elsewhere. This will actually make things worse for the NYT, as their revenue from the online ads will diminish without any corresponding increase from the mixed paper/online subscription. They will have visions of their "loyal" customers fleeing to cheaper or free alternatives, they will panic, they will either punt altogether and put it back up free or -- if they don't overreact after firing the boneheads who thought this one up -- they may try again with either a $0.02 pay-per-view online subscription or a $25/year online subscription, either of which I'd probably pay for -- a dime a day max wouldn't break my piggy bank, and I wouldn't be charged for the many days I don't read any of their articles at all.
In the meantime, well, I won't work around their wall because that would be unethical. I'll just ignore the NYT panel for now, and if they don't abandon this soon (because my crystal ball reading could be wrong, after all) then I'll just remove it and replace it with a BBC panel or some other decent news agency. Maybe Al Jazeera -- I wonder if they have an igoogle add on. News is news, and as is the case for books and music and movies, zero marginal cost distribution methods over networks mandate an entire reconstruction of the economics of the industries that provide them, a reconstruction process that is still going on. Nobody is going to pay paper prices for electronic access, because they are smart enough to know that over half the cost of the paper is the real expense of printing it and selling it and delivering it, all replaced by pure major greed profit when delivered at the cost of the sandpaper scrapings of a single penny via an electronic network. Fair profit for collecting the news and writing the articles is all well and good, but with only ten million readers contributing ten dollars a year one can support a staff of seventy reporters, ten IT people, and all the hardware needed to deliver a paper electronically and still make a handsome profit.
Only time will determine whether or not they figure this out before it is too late. In the meantime, this move is as dumb as Sony charging full list price for e-books.
I mean, if two layers of cloth and anywhere from one to three or four inches of wet, salty, conducting flesh allow the unimaginable power output of a tiny consumer electronic device to penetrate all of the way to your bone and magically break down the obviously horrendously weak bonds in the calcium and phosphorus there, you'll need to carry it in a faraday cage to be safe.
Of course, that will make it a bit difficult to actually receive calls...
In addition to inadequate controls galore for confounding causes, this once again fails to take into account two things -- confirmation bias (why would anybody even think of looking for something like this?) and physical mechanism. What part of skin depth and power do people not get? Exposing your skin to direct sunlight is far more dangerous than any cellphone hanging outside of your clothes at your hip.
I agree, actually. Duke has run the gamut of teaching OO languages in their first year classes for decades now, from C++ through java to who knows what now. As a consequence, I end up teaching independent study students who want to actually learn C before they take the required course in operating systems. Most of e.g. C++ relative to C is bloat, in my opinion (although of course, sigh, stating this out loud in Modern Times simply invites the compiler flamewar to begin).
Personally, I think the best way to teach programming to future computer scientists is indeed to start with a course that mixes a foray (at least) into assembler followed by C. The best description of C that I've heard in numerous discussions on the subject (many of them heated, of course:-) is that C is a thin veneer of upper-level language sensibility on top of naked assembler (sometimes with the assembler literally shining through with inlined code). If your goal is to teach somebody computer science as opposed to train them for a job as a poorly educated web programmer, starting from the ground up in this way teaches them about the processor, memory, registers, basic operations, devices and interfaces, and much more as they learn to program, and in the end will make them far more effective programmers who write far more efficient code. Working without the "safety net" associated with higher level compilers also teaches them (sometimes painfully) to be careful.
Naturally, I expect nothing but flames from those who have focused one OO languages for their professional careers or who have drunk the kool-ade, but I cannot help but finish by posting a link to a bit of humor:
More than a bit of wisdom in this rather biting satire... I truly hope that Duke one day pays heed and returns to teaching its majors solid computer science starting at the very beginning and only later explores OO languages and concepts (and list oriented languages and concepts, and specialty languages and concepts and so on). And it is rather difficult to get more fundamental than C and still be considered a compiler.
Oh, I forgot! For people who live in the really cold and icy world where lakes really, truly freeze solid, if you walk out onto the ice -- if it's a rock on the ice, it's probably a meteorite. Unless you are close to a shore where kids live and throw rocks, but you get the idea. Since rocks generally don't float and aren't horribly mobile on their own, a rock on the ice probably fell from the sky...
Yeah, I was surprised at how many tiny fragments fall. It's enough that one imagines the radius of the earth goes up by maybe some tens of microns per year. That doesn't sound like much, but over a million years, that is tens of meters, and over billions of years that's tens of kilometers. It's interesting to think that a significant fraction of the surface of the Earth is made up of meteorite dust that has been sifting down basically forever.
This is just a Fermi estimate of the effect, and might be off by an order of magnitude, but I'm sure somebody has a better estimate of the total volume of meteorite matter that infalls every year (mostly in small pebble-sized pieces). I think I googled it up once but I don't remember what I learned.
The easiest possible way to collect meteorites is to place a large, flat pan out on your back deck (or a large funnel with a fine screen like those they sell at breweries). Leave it out to collect rainwater. After a few heavy rains, you will notice that there is a small amount of fine grit in the filter or in the bottom of the pan. Carefully drain the water out of it and let it dry the rest of the way. Dump it out on a sheet of white paper, and go over the grit with a powerful magnet (like the ones that come inside old hard disk drives) wrapped in a plastic bag.
Usually about 1/3 to 1/2 of the grit will be attracted to the magnet. It is made up of fragments of small nickel-iron meteorites of the sort that constantly rain in upon the Earth every day and that are one of many things that nucleate rainwater drops. A lot of the remaining grit is probably meteor dust as well, but stony meteor dust, and since some fraction of it is just plain old dust blown up from the ground, it is difficult to differentiate. But chunks of iron falling from the sky are probably meteor material.
This is actually a fairly entertaining thing to do. You can look at the chunks you collect at maybe 10-30 power under a microscope, and see that they often do look melted and fused like their larger cousins. If you run a trap for a while and pull out the ferrous micrometeorites regularly, you can actually build up a small vial full of the stuff. My kids each did this as elementary science fair projects when they reached the right age, and it was always one of the most popular of displays.
Finding larger meteorites isn't terribly difficult either as they constantly fall as well, but identifying them is more difficult. A rock, after all, looks a lot like a rock. Stony meteorites may not look like the right kind of rock for some location, but a non-expert isn't going to see the difference easily. Iron meteorites again are the easiest ones to identify if not find -- unless you live near an iron mine, an isolated chunk of iron-rich rock has a decent chance of being a meteorite. For these, good metal detectors can help.
Some places make it easier to find meteorites than others. If you wander around in the middle of a big, arid, flat, desert, meteor craters sometimes stand out, unweathered, or stray rocks out on the surface turn out to be meteorites. Plowed fields and so on again let you look over a large surface area in a relatively short time, but even so it is a crap shoot. The only decent sized meteorite I've found I found without a metal detector -- it was a heavy, iron-rich rock out of place in the middle of a field. But anybody can find the micro-kind, right in their own back yard!
As for equipment -- the same hard-disk drive magnet that you use to pull out the micrometeorites, securely attached to the end of your walking stick, is a great way to find them. If you're walking through a field (again in some part of the country not known for having native iron deposits) and your walking stick happens to pick up a chunk of possibly fused-looking rock, well, there you are!
There is actually a very simple argument from thermodynamics and/or statistical mechanics that this will not happen. No matter what you think that we might do -- drill down to the Earth's mantle, for example, or build a super-accelerator capable of extremely energetic collisions -- Nature does it first, and does it all of the time. For example, asteroids have drilled down to the Earth's mantle in the past, and volcanoes do it in the present. Galactic Cosmic Rays with energies greater than anything we can imagine creating in an accelerator happen all of the time -- the most powerful one observed so far is (IIRC) a proton with roughly the same kinetic energy as a baseball travelling at 90 mph. People worried that the first nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere and turn the world into a short-lived sun, ignoring the fact that temperatures and pressures well in excess of nuclear bomb temperatures occur in both the GCR events and in asteroid impacts -- if such a thing were possible, it would have already happened long ago.
So you are actually probably pretty safe from most things like this that we might do. Even a global thermonuclear war (which is no longer terribly likely, at least at this time, politically) is very unlikely to kill off all of humanity. Nature, however, could easily produce a pandemic killer bug without our help. Or a nearby sun (including our own) could almost casually snuff out the human race in a matter of minutes. Or a really big rock could fall and manage it. There are a few "plausible" extinction/doomsday scenarios, if by plausible you mean things that could cause it are known to happen somewhere in the Universe and could do the job, but none of them are terribly likely on a timescale of a few million years at this point in the natural evolution of our solar system and our biosphere. They are, if anything, less likely as time goes by -- a pandemic that might have been (nearly) universally fatal three hundred years ago would probably not be today, between our knowledge of the causes of disease and our ability to produce remedies and or quarantines that would very likely contain it.
In a nutshell, we probably won't "destroy ourselves", but if we really want the human species to survive in the long run, we do need to move off of planet Earth and out into the Universe at large -- events likely to wipe out all life on Earth are rather likely to be confined to Earth or local Galactic environments until we hit deadlines like the Big Crunch or the Big Freeze. By which time, singularity or not, we'll both likely be dead...
Yeah, and many of us users (myself for instance) are just waiting for it to pop into e.g. Fedora or Debian at which point it will be "downloaded" infinity times automagically in the overnight yum or aptget update. Not that I'm lazy, but honestly a browser is a browser and it's not like FF 3.6whatever doesn't work or something.
It took IE until what, two years ago to get TABS. Microsoft still doesn't seem to fully grasp the concept of multiple desktops or open standards. All of this is clear evidence that Microsoft Will Die because its development cycle is a decade or so behind and complacently reactive, not proactive.
Alas, that relies on one more teensy condition. Intelligent humans making rational choices.
Damn. Microsoft will be around forever, and Firefox probably will indeed die. Why did we have to bring human intelligence into this?
Not at all, and I certainly agree. Although I imagine that turbulence and so on are pretty important as they pass the speed of sound, if nowhere else. Enough early jets came apart right about there before they figured that one out. And "deep space" is certainly a harsh environment, too, just not in the way(s) that they suggest. But it is so boring to just point all of that out and wonder if they are doing tests of solar-flare (radiation/EMP) resistance, space-junk-moving-at-10 km/sec-resistance, damn-blew-up-our-engine-resistance, and so on...;-)
Hell, I'm not even serious about BTC. I think a bunch of people above have already remarked on what money really is. Money isn't gold, it isn't paper, it isn't an exchange medium. Money is a promise, a fantasy, a collective collaborative agreement. It is as imaginary as "human rights" and "satan".
The only thing that makes money money is having a powerful and persistent institution that can be trusted underwrite, guarantee, secure it. Otherwise anybody can take paper and draw a picture on it and say "this is money" and try to get you to accept it in exchange for things of actual value. In some cases -- such as WoW GP or Magic cards or Pokeman cards -- they succeed, and a new "currency" is introduced, at least until the underwriting institution fails or individuals lose confidence in it. The latter will usually happen rather quickly if anyone defaults on the value issue and the underwriter has no means of enforcement. I can tell Harris Teeter that I bought 1000 GP for $50 real dollars and try to use them to pay for food, but they'll laugh at me, and neither I nor Blizzard can compel them to accept them. In fact, I can't even be certain that BLIZZARD will accept them outside of game context, and at any time they can more or less confiscate them in game context.
Part of my confidence in real money is the fact that it isn't terribly easy to forge, there are heavy penalties for forgery, there are armed men who actively pursue forgers, and it says right on the notes that you have to take them if I try to by food with them (or armed men will come and punish you). Even with this not particularly veiled threat of naked violence, forgery is common, fraud even more common, and there are hundreds of ways one can lose one's money without recourse. If bitcoins are ever accepted as currency and then defrauded, who will enforce their value? What recourse will you have? Pretty much only the recourse a powerful, permanent institution like the U.S. Government chooses to give you, unless there are open-source strong men who will come to your house and beat you up or jail you for forging them or defrauding people in to thinking that you are transferring them.
Yeah, if anybody figures out a good answer to this, let me know. My 15 year old is trying to figure out how to put a mass into orbit for a high school science project. Since I happen to be a physicist, he keeps bugging me to help him. I try to explain the little problem of paying for energy on a budget of a couple of hundred dollars absolute max, to no avail...;-)
We can probably afford to do one of the mylar balloons that can lift a moderate payload to near space on that (like the ones used to take nifty pictures by various private citizens). Instead of a camera, we can probably carry some other payload of a few kilograms, such as "a rocket". However, getting even a payload of grams to six or seven km/sec out of kilograms of fuel seems difficult, assuming we could put together e.g. a solid fuel rocket without the department of homeland security showing up at our door (and where I am not a chemist, let alone and explosives expert).
I am not optimistic about taking our microwave oven and converting it into an ion drive (his latest idea). Anybody have a good idea for how to get anything into orbit on a budget of $200? Or heck, even $300, why not splurge?
Slashdot Mirror
"Founded by Peter", of course, being a part of the myth they created in the third century, right? Because there isn't the slightest shred of contemporary evidence that Peter had anything to do with founding the Church in Rome in the first century. They just needed an Apostle because all of the competing cities had an Apostle, and Peter got elected.
rgb
Mod up 1. Damn skippy.
Iconoclasts too. No respect for authority. Enlightened. Geekish.
Galileo was a hacker. Newton was a hacker. David Hume was a hacker. They just hacked the code of the Universe, the code of epistemology. The church hated that.
rgb
Boy, that's just what I want! To work with a bunch of other fat, bald geek males in a room devoted to serious coding! Sort of like "living with goatse" all of the time, tech balls to the wall, so to speak.
Not.
Unless, of course, the just "naturally" attracts all of the young, svelte, female, sexy nude coders. I'm sure there are LOTS of them, all lined up for this job.
rgb
A nice example of the bash-fu mentioned earlier.
To quote an ancient proverb -- "You can often learn to use a GUI in a day, and pay for that knowledge for the rest of your life."
The Unix Way is to be able to chain together large numbers of short, relatively easy to use, powerful commands to create tasks that save days of work in a GUI, if any GUI exists that can facilitate doing them at all. Sure, it takes a while to learn, requires intelligence, is "expert friendly", but in the end you can work friggin' magic. That's why they call the masters of this "gurus" and call the masters of the Windows GUI "MCSEs".
And yeah, even the best of the gurus use the man pages all of the time. Why waste neurons memorizing every single option to ls, or tar, or convert? It is enough to know the command name and that an option exists -- the computer itself is an extension of your brain that remembers every tiny option on request, if you choose to use it that way. And when you can't remember the name of the command, or aren't sure one exists, there is first "apropos", and then things like "yum list \*whatever\*" or google.
GUIs are often stupid, nearly always broken somewhere, only do what the designer thought they should do (which often leaves out any sort of control at all over all sorts of functionality known only to those who understand what lies behind the curtain where the command line provides access), and are slow and inefficient for nearly all tasks except things like "drawing" or otherwise "manipulating graphics" or "playing games", largely because they force you to take your fingers off of the home keys to use them.
rgb
my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code
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You don't need to go as far as Google to find a higher degree of efficiency. My personal favorite weather site is the weather underground, wunderground.com (largely because they have superb tropical storm coverage and good weather coverage, and we get serious tropical storms in NC every few years). When I first started to use it (shortly after it was set up as a free service) they realized that they had to fund it somehow and did so by selling advertisements, but they also had users (like me) that hated the embedded advertisements so they allowed users to buy out for a whopping $5 a year. That's right, pay them $5 and you can see and use their site, unlimited usage, on any and all computers you own, no ads. This is important to me because I have as many as a dozen computers and laptops and web-enabled devices at any given time, and can login to all of them (where my login is remembered ad infinitum) and see no ads. No "single machine, single user" license crap, just a practical service, cheap.
I pay them religiously every year, right after my subscription expires (announced by the Return of the Advertisements), which will probably happen in the next month as hurricane season (when I first subscribed) approaches.
I doubt that their "subscription service" -- which works perfectly and sanely -- cost them as much as $1000. I'm guessing that the same people that built the site in the first place took a more or less standard pay-by-credit-card interface, attached a low security db of registered users and profile information, stuck some conditionals into the php or whatever that generates the site's active pages, and voila! No ads if you've paid them and logged in and have a valid cookie.
If the NYT IT and management people weren't acting like complete idiots, they would have simply cloned this for the NYT. I'd pay them $25/year for the same access I have now (unlimited, that is) without advertisements, no crap associated with how many machines or what kinds of machines I use to access it. It's really more of an honor system login, and they make their money per household and in exchange for specific value.
20 million subscribers at $25 each is $500 million dollars. That's a good sized chunk of change given the zero marginal costs for internet distribution of content. Well, not quite zero -- but at most a fraction of a percent of the gross. The other 99+% is there to use to continue to buy all of those fancy reporters and cushy travel arrangments and so on, or to use as profit. And I'd even tolerate a limited number of ads onscreen (much as they have now) and still pay them that much money. What I won't do -- what almost nobody will do, I think they'll discover -- is pay them $300+ a year for access. Are they insane? There will be thunderclaps as they air rushes in to where their internet user base used to be...
If in fact they spent $40 million for this as opposed to $4 thousand or even $40 thousand for what is at most a week's work for any competent web developer, well, that simply demonstrates that they are too stupid to live. Nobody on slashdot will then be terribly surprised if they eventually die. The fact that they are charging paper delivery prices for an internet service only underscores their utter lack of brain. Maybe the slap in the face the market is about to deal them will wake them up. But I doubt it.
rgb
P.S. to Slashdot humans! The Wunderground Way is also a good way for you to fund. Wikipedia humans (if any are reading Slashdot today)! This would also work marvelously well for Wikipedia -- $5/year for unlimited usage ad-free, otherwise sure, sell ad space on the Wikipedia pages. I do my best to give Wikipedia money every year anyway, but "volunteer" contributions are a pain to raise and honestly a pain to (remem
Clearly the best, most thoroughly researched article I've ever read on slashdot. Bombastic micropiranhas! It's been a long time since I picked one of those out from between my teeth. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "bleeding edge technology"...
rgb
By which standard, you are a racist! Oops! So am I. Wait, wait, I mean you are NOT a racist, NOBODY is a racist, not even people that commit horrific acts that seem to be racist to an unbiased third party observer because if they even so much as thought the word racist, they would thereby magically become racist.
Damn! I didn't mean it! They would not become racist, no matter how often they accused others of racism.
#!@% Godellian knots...
rgb
The battle to give humans actual brains? There's an actual battle?
Bear in mind that 1/2 of the world's population has an IQ less than 100. Even allowing for the Flynn effect, what that essentially means is that roughly 2/3 of the world's population isn't going to be able to learn to use complex tools, especially when they have the lazy choice of using simple ones. Either the computer provides the missing intelligence, or the user will have to do without.
In the case of MS's many operating systems post DOS (which required some intelligence to operate) they simply have done without. In the case of Apple's operating systems pre-OSX -- they also did without. Indeed, remember the adage "You can learn to use a Mac in a day, and pay for that knowledge the rest of your life". OSX retained a lot of the brainless simplicity of the GUI, but at least it does have an expert-friendly upwardly mobile path for those whose intelligence is somewhat above the mean.
Either way, one cannot blame users of Microsoft systems for its appalling security. It was insecure by design. I don't know whether or not this still is true -- MS apologists are now asserting that W7 is finally all secure and everything, something that I have little empirical evidence to validate but hey, it COULD be true and if one day I ever try it perhaps I'll find out. You know, when hell freezes over?
rgb
...And the problem is that by making the "few bucks" a truly, truly absurd number, the kind of number you have to be batshit crazy to pay them for online access that has more or less zero marginal cost to them to provide, they openly encourage people to work around it while failing to convince people -- like me, for example -- that we should fork over twenty-five cents an article in order to read the 3-4 articles that actually catch our notice in any given day. If they'd charged, say, $25 a year I'd have been all over it -- $2 a month is worth it, and the extra dollar could be a tip. That way, I'd continue to be exposed to their ads and so on, their reader base would remain fat, life would be good.
For a dollar a day, OTOH, well, my igoogle page has three news blocks -- slashdot, cnn, and the nyt. I can really, really, easily replace the nyt (which isn't even as well done as cnn's, which actually updates with new news stories throughout the day where the nyt site sort of pretends that it is an actual "newspaper" that got "put to bed" the night before and doesn't need to report news for another 24 hours).
But we'll see what happens. I predict online readership of the NYT plummets like a rock to zero to the precise extent that they enforce their wall, because most people will recognize that it is stupid to pay a dollar to read the news online every day when the same news can be had for free elsewhere. This will actually make things worse for the NYT, as their revenue from the online ads will diminish without any corresponding increase from the mixed paper/online subscription. They will have visions of their "loyal" customers fleeing to cheaper or free alternatives, they will panic, they will either punt altogether and put it back up free or -- if they don't overreact after firing the boneheads who thought this one up -- they may try again with either a $0.02 pay-per-view online subscription or a $25/year online subscription, either of which I'd probably pay for -- a dime a day max wouldn't break my piggy bank, and I wouldn't be charged for the many days I don't read any of their articles at all.
In the meantime, well, I won't work around their wall because that would be unethical. I'll just ignore the NYT panel for now, and if they don't abandon this soon (because my crystal ball reading could be wrong, after all) then I'll just remove it and replace it with a BBC panel or some other decent news agency. Maybe Al Jazeera -- I wonder if they have an igoogle add on. News is news, and as is the case for books and music and movies, zero marginal cost distribution methods over networks mandate an entire reconstruction of the economics of the industries that provide them, a reconstruction process that is still going on. Nobody is going to pay paper prices for electronic access, because they are smart enough to know that over half the cost of the paper is the real expense of printing it and selling it and delivering it, all replaced by pure major greed profit when delivered at the cost of the sandpaper scrapings of a single penny via an electronic network. Fair profit for collecting the news and writing the articles is all well and good, but with only ten million readers contributing ten dollars a year one can support a staff of seventy reporters, ten IT people, and all the hardware needed to deliver a paper electronically and still make a handsome profit.
Only time will determine whether or not they figure this out before it is too late. In the meantime, this move is as dumb as Sony charging full list price for e-books.
rgb
Lead-lined murses, at that.
I mean, if two layers of cloth and anywhere from one to three or four inches of wet, salty, conducting flesh allow the unimaginable power output of a tiny consumer electronic device to penetrate all of the way to your bone and magically break down the obviously horrendously weak bonds in the calcium and phosphorus there, you'll need to carry it in a faraday cage to be safe.
Of course, that will make it a bit difficult to actually receive calls...
rgb
In addition to inadequate controls galore for confounding causes, this once again fails to take into account two things -- confirmation bias (why would anybody even think of looking for something like this?) and physical mechanism. What part of skin depth and power do people not get? Exposing your skin to direct sunlight is far more dangerous than any cellphone hanging outside of your clothes at your hip.
rgb
I agree, actually. Duke has run the gamut of teaching OO languages in their first year classes for decades now, from C++ through java to who knows what now. As a consequence, I end up teaching independent study students who want to actually learn C before they take the required course in operating systems. Most of e.g. C++ relative to C is bloat, in my opinion (although of course, sigh, stating this out loud in Modern Times simply invites the compiler flamewar to begin).
Personally, I think the best way to teach programming to future computer scientists is indeed to start with a course that mixes a foray (at least) into assembler followed by C. The best description of C that I've heard in numerous discussions on the subject (many of them heated, of course:-) is that C is a thin veneer of upper-level language sensibility on top of naked assembler (sometimes with the assembler literally shining through with inlined code). If your goal is to teach somebody computer science as opposed to train them for a job as a poorly educated web programmer, starting from the ground up in this way teaches them about the processor, memory, registers, basic operations, devices and interfaces, and much more as they learn to program, and in the end will make them far more effective programmers who write far more efficient code. Working without the "safety net" associated with higher level compilers also teaches them (sometimes painfully) to be careful.
Naturally, I expect nothing but flames from those who have focused one OO languages for their professional careers or who have drunk the kool-ade, but I cannot help but finish by posting a link to a bit of humor:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/c++_interview.php
More than a bit of wisdom in this rather biting satire... I truly hope that Duke one day pays heed and returns to teaching its majors solid computer science starting at the very beginning and only later explores OO languages and concepts (and list oriented languages and concepts, and specialty languages and concepts and so on). And it is rather difficult to get more fundamental than C and still be considered a compiler.
rgb
Oh, I forgot! For people who live in the really cold and icy world where lakes really, truly freeze solid, if you walk out onto the ice -- if it's a rock on the ice, it's probably a meteorite. Unless you are close to a shore where kids live and throw rocks, but you get the idea. Since rocks generally don't float and aren't horribly mobile on their own, a rock on the ice probably fell from the sky...
rgb
Yeah, I was surprised at how many tiny fragments fall. It's enough that one imagines the radius of the earth goes up by maybe some tens of microns per year. That doesn't sound like much, but over a million years, that is tens of meters, and over billions of years that's tens of kilometers. It's interesting to think that a significant fraction of the surface of the Earth is made up of meteorite dust that has been sifting down basically forever.
This is just a Fermi estimate of the effect, and might be off by an order of magnitude, but I'm sure somebody has a better estimate of the total volume of meteorite matter that infalls every year (mostly in small pebble-sized pieces). I think I googled it up once but I don't remember what I learned.
rgb
The easiest possible way to collect meteorites is to place a large, flat pan out on your back deck (or a large funnel with a fine screen like those they sell at breweries). Leave it out to collect rainwater. After a few heavy rains, you will notice that there is a small amount of fine grit in the filter or in the bottom of the pan. Carefully drain the water out of it and let it dry the rest of the way. Dump it out on a sheet of white paper, and go over the grit with a powerful magnet (like the ones that come inside old hard disk drives) wrapped in a plastic bag.
Usually about 1/3 to 1/2 of the grit will be attracted to the magnet. It is made up of fragments of small nickel-iron meteorites of the sort that constantly rain in upon the Earth every day and that are one of many things that nucleate rainwater drops. A lot of the remaining grit is probably meteor dust as well, but stony meteor dust, and since some fraction of it is just plain old dust blown up from the ground, it is difficult to differentiate. But chunks of iron falling from the sky are probably meteor material.
This is actually a fairly entertaining thing to do. You can look at the chunks you collect at maybe 10-30 power under a microscope, and see that they often do look melted and fused like their larger cousins. If you run a trap for a while and pull out the ferrous micrometeorites regularly, you can actually build up a small vial full of the stuff. My kids each did this as elementary science fair projects when they reached the right age, and it was always one of the most popular of displays.
Finding larger meteorites isn't terribly difficult either as they constantly fall as well, but identifying them is more difficult. A rock, after all, looks a lot like a rock. Stony meteorites may not look like the right kind of rock for some location, but a non-expert isn't going to see the difference easily. Iron meteorites again are the easiest ones to identify if not find -- unless you live near an iron mine, an isolated chunk of iron-rich rock has a decent chance of being a meteorite. For these, good metal detectors can help.
Some places make it easier to find meteorites than others. If you wander around in the middle of a big, arid, flat, desert, meteor craters sometimes stand out, unweathered, or stray rocks out on the surface turn out to be meteorites. Plowed fields and so on again let you look over a large surface area in a relatively short time, but even so it is a crap shoot. The only decent sized meteorite I've found I found without a metal detector -- it was a heavy, iron-rich rock out of place in the middle of a field. But anybody can find the micro-kind, right in their own back yard!
As for equipment -- the same hard-disk drive magnet that you use to pull out the micrometeorites, securely attached to the end of your walking stick, is a great way to find them. If you're walking through a field (again in some part of the country not known for having native iron deposits) and your walking stick happens to pick up a chunk of possibly fused-looking rock, well, there you are!
rgb
There is actually a very simple argument from thermodynamics and/or statistical mechanics that this will not happen. No matter what you think that we might do -- drill down to the Earth's mantle, for example, or build a super-accelerator capable of extremely energetic collisions -- Nature does it first, and does it all of the time. For example, asteroids have drilled down to the Earth's mantle in the past, and volcanoes do it in the present. Galactic Cosmic Rays with energies greater than anything we can imagine creating in an accelerator happen all of the time -- the most powerful one observed so far is (IIRC) a proton with roughly the same kinetic energy as a baseball travelling at 90 mph. People worried that the first nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere and turn the world into a short-lived sun, ignoring the fact that temperatures and pressures well in excess of nuclear bomb temperatures occur in both the GCR events and in asteroid impacts -- if such a thing were possible, it would have already happened long ago.
So you are actually probably pretty safe from most things like this that we might do. Even a global thermonuclear war (which is no longer terribly likely, at least at this time, politically) is very unlikely to kill off all of humanity. Nature, however, could easily produce a pandemic killer bug without our help. Or a nearby sun (including our own) could almost casually snuff out the human race in a matter of minutes. Or a really big rock could fall and manage it. There are a few "plausible" extinction/doomsday scenarios, if by plausible you mean things that could cause it are known to happen somewhere in the Universe and could do the job, but none of them are terribly likely on a timescale of a few million years at this point in the natural evolution of our solar system and our biosphere. They are, if anything, less likely as time goes by -- a pandemic that might have been (nearly) universally fatal three hundred years ago would probably not be today, between our knowledge of the causes of disease and our ability to produce remedies and or quarantines that would very likely contain it.
In a nutshell, we probably won't "destroy ourselves", but if we really want the human species to survive in the long run, we do need to move off of planet Earth and out into the Universe at large -- events likely to wipe out all life on Earth are rather likely to be confined to Earth or local Galactic environments until we hit deadlines like the Big Crunch or the Big Freeze. By which time, singularity or not, we'll both likely be dead...
rgb
Yeah, and many of us users (myself for instance) are just waiting for it to pop into e.g. Fedora or Debian at which point it will be "downloaded" infinity times automagically in the overnight yum or aptget update. Not that I'm lazy, but honestly a browser is a browser and it's not like FF 3.6whatever doesn't work or something.
It took IE until what, two years ago to get TABS. Microsoft still doesn't seem to fully grasp the concept of multiple desktops or open standards. All of this is clear evidence that Microsoft Will Die because its development cycle is a decade or so behind and complacently reactive, not proactive.
Alas, that relies on one more teensy condition. Intelligent humans making rational choices.
Damn. Microsoft will be around forever, and Firefox probably will indeed die. Why did we have to bring human intelligence into this?
rgb
Not at all, and I certainly agree. Although I imagine that turbulence and so on are pretty important as they pass the speed of sound, if nowhere else. Enough early jets came apart right about there before they figured that one out. And "deep space" is certainly a harsh environment, too, just not in the way(s) that they suggest. But it is so boring to just point all of that out and wonder if they are doing tests of solar-flare (radiation/EMP) resistance, space-junk-moving-at-10 km/sec-resistance, damn-blew-up-our-engine-resistance, and so on...;-)
rgb
Oh, wait, you thought I was serious, didn't you?
Hell, I'm not even serious about BTC. I think a bunch of people above have already remarked on what money really is. Money isn't gold, it isn't paper, it isn't an exchange medium. Money is a promise, a fantasy, a collective collaborative agreement. It is as imaginary as "human rights" and "satan".
The only thing that makes money money is having a powerful and persistent institution that can be trusted underwrite, guarantee, secure it. Otherwise anybody can take paper and draw a picture on it and say "this is money" and try to get you to accept it in exchange for things of actual value. In some cases -- such as WoW GP or Magic cards or Pokeman cards -- they succeed, and a new "currency" is introduced, at least until the underwriting institution fails or individuals lose confidence in it. The latter will usually happen rather quickly if anyone defaults on the value issue and the underwriter has no means of enforcement. I can tell Harris Teeter that I bought 1000 GP for $50 real dollars and try to use them to pay for food, but they'll laugh at me, and neither I nor Blizzard can compel them to accept them. In fact, I can't even be certain that BLIZZARD will accept them outside of game context, and at any time they can more or less confiscate them in game context.
Part of my confidence in real money is the fact that it isn't terribly easy to forge, there are heavy penalties for forgery, there are armed men who actively pursue forgers, and it says right on the notes that you have to take them if I try to by food with them (or armed men will come and punish you). Even with this not particularly veiled threat of naked violence, forgery is common, fraud even more common, and there are hundreds of ways one can lose one's money without recourse. If bitcoins are ever accepted as currency and then defrauded, who will enforce their value? What recourse will you have? Pretty much only the recourse a powerful, permanent institution like the U.S. Government chooses to give you, unless there are open-source strong men who will come to your house and beat you up or jail you for forging them or defrauding people in to thinking that you are transferring them.
rgb
Now if we can only get Azeroth vendors to accept BTC directly... rgb
...between bitcoins and WoW gp?
Why bother creating a new electronic currency when there is a perfectly viable one already in existence...
rgb
Do you mean a talking moose?
rgb
No, the real question is -- will anybody still be able to run Windows!
Yeah, if anybody figures out a good answer to this, let me know. My 15 year old is trying to figure out how to put a mass into orbit for a high school science project. Since I happen to be a physicist, he keeps bugging me to help him. I try to explain the little problem of paying for energy on a budget of a couple of hundred dollars absolute max, to no avail...;-)
We can probably afford to do one of the mylar balloons that can lift a moderate payload to near space on that (like the ones used to take nifty pictures by various private citizens). Instead of a camera, we can probably carry some other payload of a few kilograms, such as "a rocket". However, getting even a payload of grams to six or seven km/sec out of kilograms of fuel seems difficult, assuming we could put together e.g. a solid fuel rocket without the department of homeland security showing up at our door (and where I am not a chemist, let alone and explosives expert).
I am not optimistic about taking our microwave oven and converting it into an ion drive (his latest idea). Anybody have a good idea for how to get anything into orbit on a budget of $200? Or heck, even $300, why not splurge?
rgb
Wow. Mod troll, evil A.C.. Alas, my points expired yesterday.