On a more serious note, if you want some highly interesting reads on how "schooling interferes with your education," read some stuff by John Taylor Gatto. It's scary 'cos it's true.
At first I thought this nonsense about "inserting flaws" was just the usual Slashdot ridiculosity in story summaries--I figured HP would probably just give some error when trying to print money, or at worst fiddle with the color green (which they do)... but then I saw this:
Two-sided documents - This technique takes advantage of the front-to-back registration accuracy of HP printers by changing the position of objects an infinitesimal amount, too little to be seen by most people, but enough so that a machine can detect it.
So it seems that they are deliberately introducing flaws in their two-sided document printing... do they honestly think, if "one-sided bills and even black and white bills" are passed with little problems, that a change of position "too little to be seen by most people" will do anything but annoy people who are trying to print two-sided documents with exactness?
The point is that Apple is making more money with 1.8% of the "global market share" than they could ever possibly make porting their software over to Windows and increasing their (software, iPod, everything-but-Mac-desktop-hardware) market share.
That's why they'll never port their stuff over. Not because they wouldn't get vastly more market share (they probably would), but because that increased market share in software, iPods, or whatever, would translate into less money, not more.
I think this is a ridiculous sort of question. The same could be said of Americans. "Why don't you help your people to have some food, instead of tinkering with computers?" In any country you pick, you're going to have those who are starving, and those who are affluent.
But if Mahmoud from Iraq is good at "tinkering with computers", chances are he's going to be able to work, and if he's working, then he is, one way or another, "helping his people to have some food". Simple economics.
As somebody else pointed out, software is the only "creation" that can be both copyrighted and patented. Doesn't this seem, well, a bit ridiculous?
If you want to prove to the court that you created prior art, why not just copyright the code? It's a lot cheaper, it shows prior art definitively, and it's not abusing the system by "patenting the obvious".
My "dream" for a unified standard for copy-cut-paste would be this:
Highlighting something copies it into the "primary selection" clipboard-type place.
Middle-clicking the mouse button or shift-insert will paste the "primary selection" text.
Highlighting something and hitting CTRL-C will put it in the "real" clipboard. It will stay there no matter what else you select, until you CTRL-C something else. You paste it with CTRL-V, of course.
Best of both worlds! I hate selecting something with the mouse and trying to paste it elsewhere with shift-insert only to have OpenOffice or whatever stupid program try and paste something from the CTRL-V clipboard instead.
There is absolutely no point in IPv6+NAT. If having your toaster publicly addressable bothers you, stick it behind a firewall and block the ports.
My point is: why bother? Sure, there are plenty of IPv6 addresses to go around, so I can give my toaster an IP address just for the heck of it, and then block access at the firewall... but why? Why not just put it on a local network, inaccessible to "the outside world"? Why does it need a world-accessible IPv6 address if the only machines that will ever access it are on my house's local network?
Dlugar
Why is NAT a "bad thing"?
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I guess I'm not quite sure I "get it", but why is NAT necessarily a "bad thing"? Because it's not "how it's supposed to be"? Because it's klugey?
Bad design? Insecure?
I guess my thinking is, if I've got a house full of electronic devices (let's say a dozen computers, an IP-enabled toaster, fridge, television, etc.) I don't really need or want world-visible IP addresses on all of them. I'd
like them to be just 10.* or whatever IP addresses, and if any communication ever needs to go on between them and the Internet they
should necessarily go through some central house-server/router/firewall. I
should have the option of having, say, three of the computers have world-visible IP addresses, but the rest having local 10.* addresses. But why make my toaster be visible to the Internet when, really, there's no
need for him to be?
Or am I missing something terribly here?
Not to say that IPv6 isn't a good thing... it basically needs to happen sooner or later. But what's wrong with IPv6 plus keeping NAT around? Or is it just the excitement of "We don't have to anymore!"?
It's really simple to grab together pieces from other board games you have lying around the house, sketch out a quick board on some simple paper, and try playing the game with a few friends. I've done this many times, and it helps you see what sort of game-play is fun and interesting, and what's not really, before you go to the trouble of making a more permanent set of cards/plastic pieces/game board. If you really do come up with a winner you think you can sell, I suppose that's the time you can go looking around for companies to manufacture it for you. And I think at that point you'd be better off going to a game company who knows what they're doing, rather than trying to farm out production to various different individual companies to save a buck, and then try to sell the game yourself.
But really: a large piece of paper, a collection of plastic pieces from various board games, some dice, and a few cards can provide for many, many hours of fun and entertainment. You're limited only by your imagination.
Come on, Slashdot... putting SCO on the front page (multiple times sometimes) day after day after day... and you don't call that deliberate Slashdotting^WDDoS?!
I call BS.
Expect letters from Boies and company any time now. "SCO Sues Media Giant Slashdot" the next headline?
I was under the impression that's about how most HTML email clients work?
They may be able to display email that way, but they certainly don't send it in that manner. It's normally sent as an attached HTML file with huge amounts of garbage in it.
Not to mention that most email clients won't allow you to set up which HTML tags you allow/parse.
You make some good points, but I don't think it should require an entire HTML page (and all the related bloat and overhead) to make some text bold. Most email clients already turn valid URLs into a clickable HTML link, without any a href necessary. Email clients should also take <b> </b> tags and turn them into bold text (a la AIM/Gaim).
In other words, simply include the HTML tags in your email, along with some header informing the email client of your HTML-ish intentions, and the client can do the rest. The client can even have fully configurable "tags allowed" options (yes to local images, no to remote images, tables are okay, but the blink tag definitely not, etc).
This removes the biggest problems: bloat, and lack of ability to fail gracefully. Those of us still using pine won't have any problem reading Little Timmy's <font color="neon green">colorful</font> emails--we're used to tuning out HTML tags anyway.
If it's possible for you to download the semester's worth of PowerPoint presentations, spend a week going through the material and trying it out on your own, and you learn just as much as the old-fashioned taking-notes-with-pencil-and-paper method, then why should you go to class?!
School isn't supposed to just be a difficult obstacle course you have to maneuver through. You're supposed to be learning things. What you should be complaining about is that, now that the time-consuming black-board scribbling has been done away with, your professors should be spending this extra time teaching you more... not that they should go back to teaching you less because of artificial anti-technology constraints.
Universiteit Gent has some pictures of reversible logic gates, including a four-bit adder composed out of Feynman's "NOT, the CONTROLLED NOT, and the CONTROLLED CONTROLLED NOT" reversible logic gates, and some other circuits they've built.
Also note the bottom of the page: there's a vacancy in the research group, for all those just aching for a chance to work on reversible computing! (Looks like you'll have to speak Dutch, though.);-)
The article mentions itself that this idea "date[s] back to the early 1960s"... Feynman gave a lecture at some conference in Japan, I believe, in which he gave detailed explanations of his ideas for reversible logic gates, and the theoretical uses and limits for such machines. You can find it in the book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which I have, or apparently also in Feynman Lectures on Computation, which I don't have. I don't have either book on-hand to check out the exact date, but it was quite a while ago.
However, while it may not be particularly new or radical, it is quite interesting.
I think this is a "good thing"[tm] for at least one reason: people are going to start saying, "Hey, even Hollywood uses Linux? This must be something pretty cool. Let's take a look at it."
Slashdot Mirror
On a more serious note, if you want some highly interesting reads on how "schooling interferes with your education," read some stuff by John Taylor Gatto. It's scary 'cos it's true.
Dlugar
Absolutely ridiculous.
Dlugar
The point is that Apple is making more money with 1.8% of the "global market share" than they could ever possibly make porting their software over to Windows and increasing their (software, iPod, everything-but-Mac-desktop-hardware) market share.
That's why they'll never port their stuff over. Not because they wouldn't get vastly more market share (they probably would), but because that increased market share in software, iPods, or whatever, would translate into less money, not more.
Dlugar
I think this is a ridiculous sort of question. The same could be said of Americans. "Why don't you help your people to have some food, instead of tinkering with computers?" In any country you pick, you're going to have those who are starving, and those who are affluent.
But if Mahmoud from Iraq is good at "tinkering with computers", chances are he's going to be able to work, and if he's working, then he is, one way or another, "helping his people to have some food". Simple economics.
Dlugar
So then they post a silly comment to the story and get their mod points back! Proble solved :-)
Dlugar
As somebody else pointed out, software is the only "creation" that can be both copyrighted and patented. Doesn't this seem, well, a bit ridiculous?
If you want to prove to the court that you created prior art, why not just copyright the code? It's a lot cheaper, it shows prior art definitively, and it's not abusing the system by "patenting the obvious".
Dlugar
- Highlighting something copies it into the "primary selection" clipboard-type place.
- Highlighting something and hitting CTRL-C will put it in the "real" clipboard. It will stay there no matter what else you select, until you CTRL-C something else. You paste it with CTRL-V, of course.
Best of both worlds! I hate selecting something with the mouse and trying to paste it elsewhere with shift-insert only to have OpenOffice or whatever stupid program try and paste something from the CTRL-V clipboard instead.Middle-clicking the mouse button or shift-insert will paste the "primary selection" text.
Dlugar
Dlugar
Dlugar
I guess I'm not quite sure I "get it", but why is NAT necessarily a "bad thing"? Because it's not "how it's supposed to be"? Because it's klugey? Bad design? Insecure?
... it basically needs to happen sooner or later. But what's wrong with IPv6 plus keeping NAT around? Or is it just the excitement of "We don't have to anymore!"?
I guess my thinking is, if I've got a house full of electronic devices (let's say a dozen computers, an IP-enabled toaster, fridge, television, etc.) I don't really need or want world-visible IP addresses on all of them. I'd like them to be just 10.* or whatever IP addresses, and if any communication ever needs to go on between them and the Internet they should necessarily go through some central house-server/router/firewall. I should have the option of having, say, three of the computers have world-visible IP addresses, but the rest having local 10.* addresses. But why make my toaster be visible to the Internet when, really, there's no need for him to be?
Or am I missing something terribly here?
Not to say that IPv6 isn't a good thing
Dlugar
I don't even want to speculate.
Dlugar
It's really simple to grab together pieces from other board games you have lying around the house, sketch out a quick board on some simple paper, and try playing the game with a few friends. I've done this many times, and it helps you see what sort of game-play is fun and interesting, and what's not really, before you go to the trouble of making a more permanent set of cards/plastic pieces/game board. If you really do come up with a winner you think you can sell, I suppose that's the time you can go looking around for companies to manufacture it for you. And I think at that point you'd be better off going to a game company who knows what they're doing, rather than trying to farm out production to various different individual companies to save a buck, and then try to sell the game yourself.
But really: a large piece of paper, a collection of plastic pieces from various board games, some dice, and a few cards can provide for many, many hours of fun and entertainment. You're limited only by your imagination.
Dlugar
Come on, Slashdot ... putting SCO on the front page (multiple times sometimes) day after day after day ... and you don't call that deliberate Slashdotting^WDDoS?!
I call BS.
Expect letters from Boies and company any time now. "SCO Sues Media Giant Slashdot" the next headline?
Dlugar
Not to mention that most email clients won't allow you to set up which HTML tags you allow/parse.
Dlugar
You make some good points, but I don't think it should require an entire HTML page (and all the related bloat and overhead) to make some text bold. Most email clients already turn valid URLs into a clickable HTML link, without any a href necessary. Email clients should also take <b> </b> tags and turn them into bold text (a la AIM/Gaim).
In other words, simply include the HTML tags in your email, along with some header informing the email client of your HTML-ish intentions, and the client can do the rest. The client can even have fully configurable "tags allowed" options (yes to local images, no to remote images, tables are okay, but the blink tag definitely not, etc).
This removes the biggest problems: bloat, and lack of ability to fail gracefully. Those of us still using pine won't have any problem reading Little Timmy's <font color="neon green">colorful</font> emails--we're used to tuning out HTML tags anyway.
Dlugar
Check out the first screenshot on this page:
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/sources.html
Dlugar
Obligatory Simpsons Reference
Dlugar
If it's possible for you to download the semester's worth of PowerPoint presentations, spend a week going through the material and trying it out on your own, and you learn just as much as the old-fashioned taking-notes-with-pencil-and-paper method, then why should you go to class?!
... not that they should go back to teaching you less because of artificial anti-technology constraints.
School isn't supposed to just be a difficult obstacle course you have to maneuver through. You're supposed to be learning things. What you should be complaining about is that, now that the time-consuming black-board scribbling has been done away with, your professors should be spending this extra time teaching you more
Dlugar
I wonder how many people read the article only because of this post here.
I know I did.
Doesn't "ana moya" mean "I am water"? "Moyati" would mean "my water". Just curious.
Dlugar
Universiteit Gent has some pictures of reversible logic gates, including a four-bit adder composed out of Feynman's "NOT, the CONTROLLED NOT, and the CONTROLLED CONTROLLED NOT" reversible logic gates, and some other circuits they've built.
They also have links to other sites about reversible logic and reversible computing, such as Ralph Merkle's Reversible Computing page (from Xerox).
Also note the bottom of the page: there's a vacancy in the research group, for all those just aching for a chance to work on reversible computing! (Looks like you'll have to speak Dutch, though.) ;-)
Dlugar
The article mentions itself that this idea "date[s] back to the early 1960s" ... Feynman gave a lecture at some conference in Japan, I believe, in which he gave detailed explanations of his ideas for reversible logic gates, and the theoretical uses and limits for such machines. You can find it in the book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which I have, or apparently also in Feynman Lectures on Computation, which I don't have. I don't have either book on-hand to check out the exact date, but it was quite a while ago.
However, while it may not be particularly new or radical, it is quite interesting.
Dlugar
I think this is a "good thing"[tm] for at least one reason: people are going to start saying, "Hey, even Hollywood uses Linux? This must be something pretty cool. Let's take a look at it."
Dlugar
I've always preferred
OO
OO
O
Dlugar
Then write one yourself, private!!