Right, because you HAVE to buy an iPhone and a toyota or hell a car and a cell phone for that matter. I know successful well to-do people with neither.
Exactly. My personal crystal ball says: eventually windows will be surpassed as on OS by one that does everything out of the box without the user dicking around on the net installing adobe, firefox etc. MS can never do this for fear of anti-trust suits, it's not like they have the functionality sitting around they can push as an update so when it happens they'll be 3 years behind and playing catchup. After that we'll suddenly realize how we screwed them over. I don't have a particular affinity for the company but ya... Also that's to say nothing of whether or not MS would've ever pulled their head out of their ass and made this kinda stuff happen regardless of lawsuits. I mean you have that many resources, income employees etc and you can't just make stuff happen seriously?
I think the question as posed (by the OP not you) is demeaning to both science and religion but hey that's just me. What I mean is this: science is an iterative process whereby we figure out the underlying rules, try to build machinery that takes advantage of that, until the machinery proves that the rules weren't good enough and the process starts over. That's not a bad thing it's just the way it is and given that we're not perfect how it's always gonna be.
I won't go into what religion is or isn't because it's just bound to start a flame war at best, but if one is looking for an entire complete set of philosophy (of science and the world around you) which can be proven a posteriori or by use of logic starting with "I think therefore I am" and so on until one reaches the point whereby he can develop a system of math and science as we currently know them without assuming any axioms or "beliefs" on the basis of "it's just the way it is" then I think you're smoking it. Namely there are philosophical underpinnings to science and math which you essentially can't "prove" on the other hand the two differ quite a bit in practice.
But all this posturing that "science" is better because you can prove it, sounds like elitism to me (and vice versa). Namely there are certain things you can't, and one or the other isn't better, they're just different. Does science give us a good understanding of the value of human life, or what morals to follow or what should legal and not? Not really, and not directly. But how many theological treatises by the Vatican got us to the moon? None. See they're just different things for different problems. Anybody who tries to conflate the two as conflicting or if one is better is bullshitting you.
If they figure out how to build decent usable drones for an exorbitant price (as per SOP) probably not long. That is just a continuation of military philosophy since the people first started using ranged weapons like bows and slingshots in combat. Fight at a distance whenever you can. Of course you can take this too far and try to win a ground war entirely from the air like the US has tried to time and again (and failed for the most part, at least till they pulled their heads out of their *ss) but if you value the lives of your soldiers I see no reason to fight at a greater distance than before. Of course this does raise the philosophical quandry expressed by Lee: "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow fond of it."
I think it was slightly more nuanced than that. Ok it's been a while since my last history class on this (over 5 years) but here it goes: When the Roman Empire split up, two main geographies were created. The West and the East. The dividing line was pretty much were Latin was the primary language, versus were Greek was the primary language. The east remained the official DNA descendant of Rome, since the seat of the empire had been moved there a while ago, as The Eastern Roman Empire, with the capitol as Constantinople (now Istanbul). The West went through a lot of shit, to be frank. But eventually it was for the most part consolidated as The Holy Roman Empire. Originally this was situated in Gaul (France) but eventually the seat moved over to the German/Austrian/Luxembourg area and France split off on her own.
Okay, so then the East (who has had problems with the Persians, now Iran, since before the Empire fell) is facing a huge, no MASSIVE, threat from the Turks. They had just lost ~50,000 heavily armed knights in the field, and along with them their breadbasket and a good recruiting territory. Probably taking about 1/3 to 1/2 their potential recruits. If your the Eastern Roman Emperor, right now, you know you're fucked. So what do you do?
Well the East and the West haven't been the best of buddies since the Empire split (the Schism and all that jazz) but they're on speaking terms and they still view each other as part of the same "society." That's important, they viewed each other much like modern Europe views members of the EU, or the US views NATO members, we get in very hotly worded arguments, but if one of us gets attacked we go help out. So the East asked the West (namely the Vatican) for help. The Vatican responded by appealing to France, England and the HRE. It's important that he went to the HRE because they were seen as the closest DNA link to the ERE seen as they were both descendents of the same empire. And the West responded by sending troops to help defend the East. Supposedly.
The actual response was drawn out over several hundred years and shouldn't have been. Also the West wound up sacking Constantinople (the city they were supposed to save) and couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag by the time they got to the Holy Land. The Holy Land was also viewed at the time as part of this "society" that they were going to protect, or at the very least strategically vital to doing that. So it wasn't like simply marching to China or something. And when they got there it wasn't a genocide or something, It was a war, and shit happens during wars, but it certainly wasn't anything approaching ethnic or religious cleansing. That's the short and probably butchered version.
New monopolies? I don't know about that. More like new markets. I don't think MS will ever die, but if they ever lose their grip on the desktop market, it won't have anything to do with linux (I'm typing this on FC-12 so I'm not a hater, just a realist). IMO it'll be increasing Apple market share in laptops (mostly young people) and secondly more and more people simply not caring what OS they are running as more stuff is done through the browser.
Meh, we have RHEL5 at my uni in the cs labs and I don't really mind them at all. I mean, all I do in there is write c in emacs and debug it. We even get a web browser, MS Word, Open Office, Matlab and a couple others. What bugs are plaguing you, OTOH what features do you want that you need for lab work are missing?
Disclaimer: I don't do any graphics work, they have some pretty sweet 3D monitors on XP stations in the lab next door for those guys tho.
Ugh, I would hope that you could use more libraries than stdio, I just finished a networking project for school last week. Here is a list of all the libs we needed (for the entire project, not any one source file): errno.h ctype.h limits.h netinet/in.h stdio.h stdlib.h string.h strings.h sys/types.h sys/socket.h arpa/inet.h unistd.h time.h sys/time.h sys/stat.h netdb.h signal.h
I've often heard that for a lot of the cracker folks, cracking is "the game." As in that's why they do it, and as such the harder a game is to crack or the more boastful Company $X is about how robustly secure their system is the more "fun" it will be to crack it. Then again, I don't give a shit, I'm just going to take my money elsewhere seeing as I refuse to pirate games (not just for moral reasons, I also feel that to get some entertainment I shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of friggin hoops) and I refuse to pay for a game that is so obnoxious, for the same reason and because of I bought it it's mine, respect me as a customer and person./rant
This story looks rather odd, at 30 characters a line, that comes out to be ~2.8 GB of code. That's obviously thinking it's C or something similar. If it's assembly, then I can see it being that long. Obviously, yes this is spread across multiple modules, I just wasn't aware a modern car has that much digital storage in it (non-volatile not RAM that is.) Eh, flash has been around a while I guess.
The problem is that we have a Republic. Obama can do what the majority wants and still be defeated in the Senate because a bunch of small states get equal representation. Slate just did an interesting article on filibusters. It turns out that 60% of the time when Democrats have filibustered they've represented the majority of Americans. When Republicans have filibustered they represented the majority only 3% of the time. Repbulicans are better at playing politics because they rarely represent a majority.
Do you really want a straight democracy though? Sure it's a PITA, but I think that's the point. It's supposed to make us think long and hard about something before we pass a national law on the matter and devote $X billion to it. Now, current political machines? Ya, they're messed up and no amount of clever rulemaking on the architects part would fix it now.
I agree that Separation of Church and State is inherently a good thing, however the Constitution specifically only limits Congress from making any laws regarding the regulation, funding etc. of religion. Not the States. For a long time after the revolution many States had an official religion, and that doesn't contradict the Constitution, simply because the Constitution is only restricting Congress in this matter. More generally though, the States should write it into their constitutions too, but that's their business, not the Feds. Also, to make sure we are aware how silly this entire argument is, anything not expressly given to the Federal Govt. was expressly forbidden. Education would be one of those things. In other words it is then the individual states' business how to go about public education (according to the law in theory) not the Feds. You might not agree with this, but then you could get the Constitution amended instead of just papering over it. I don't necessarily agree with any of that, but that is what the law says. Now if you can't be bothered to go about it right for an issue that you want changed, why should somebody else be bothered to do the same when it's an issue you don't want changed? (Patriot Act et. al.)
I don't even mind the different layouts so much as opposed to one another. I just find it really annoying to have to relearn how to use a freaking website every three months when I've been on it for a couple years. Also, if slashdot nerds get annoyed with relearning the UI, how do you think Jane Smith feels? Extremely confused, especially given that they've been changing their privacy settings around too. Some people might just give up. I don't know.
I think it's pretty sad that Constellation is being canceled but from the sounds of it, it was very broken. And at this point, yes it stinks we poured over $9 billion into it, but it's a sunk cost. I just hope that this new direction is good for NASA and the US as a whole. What's even worse is that this'll probably get blasted into orbit by Congress whether or not it's a good direction.
I think it's more true on slashdot and the internet in general. People either are intentionally being trolls, or they let their words get away from them in an online forum without a second thought because it's not like they are at a work party and are going to get looked at weird. Full Disclosure: I am an American, I know people that voted for Bush/Mcain and Al Gore/Kerry/Obama and none of them are ever this polarised.
I worked for a software contractor in college. Real young, small company, contracted for a large corp. We had bi-weekly phone conference meetings every Tuesday/Thursday mornings for 15 min a piece. These were only for QA and development groups (kept small) and meant as free for all events were everybody could voice their issues etc. Of course there were the "project wide meetings" which were more or less a dialogue between the various managers which were obviously useful for them (and nobody else) but didn't really build any spirit. To somebody working on the bottom of the food chain, the 15 minute stand up say your thing meetings did foster that sort of thing. Caveat: these probably require halfway reasonable and smart folks.
You don't think you're overreacting in the slightest? Oh wait, forget it, America bashing gets you mod points on slashdot, carry on. I say this as an exploration loving tax-paying attemtping to be reasonable American (even though I might not do a great job all the time).
I would say little/big endianness, (I know then it should be 2350 vs 5023 but the public won't catch that) just as an excuse to start that holy war all over again.
I couldn't be arsed to read the other comments to see if anyone already addressed (harr harr) this, but did that other judge seriously compare a cellphone to an address book? I have a couple problems with this.
An address book can contain: a list of people you know, their contact information, their place of residence, a schedule or planner, some offhand notes and a couple local maps. Most address books of friends and family I have ever seen are never this complete or detailed. Typically, all the people he or she knows are not in there, what people are in their perhaps only an address is given or only a phone number and so forth. Also I have never seen nor been aware of an address book sold commercially to the consumer market that was lockable by the user with a unique passcode, nor an address book that could participate in a communications network.
A cellphone, and I'm going to go with the highest common denominator here* (i.e. a very well powered and feature packed device such as an iPhone or Blackberry) can contain a list of people you know, both on the phone hardware and through network services, their contact information, place of residence, other extensive information about them, a record of your communications with them, via phone, text, email, chat and other various services, a record of where you've been, a record of what you have searched for on the 'net, and various images and videos which may be user-created. A very good deal of contact with said people and the various networks takes place through this device, and a lot of contact that doesn't is still viewable and searchable through it. Some consumer devices, and various services on it separately, are lockable with a unique password (i.e. this isn't software only available to the CIA director, it is cheaply and widely available), are much more fragile than a dead paper book, and could and can be much more central to the operation of a family or business than an address book ever was, and overall can currently contain up to 32GB of data compared to the paltry amount that could be reasonably contained by an address book. Also, data on the various people known by the owner tends to be more extensive (e.g. through Facebook, instead of individual entry on each phone) and more people tend to be included in the lists of "known contacts." So how the hell are they comparable?
*I'm going with the "highest common denominator" because if you're going to set a precedent, it would probably be wise to set one that is relatively future-proof, and doesn't assume anything about the limitations of the device that would be unreasonable. In other words, it's somewhat unreasonable to assume that a phone wouldn't be able to use a IM service just because there are good deal of phones that can't, phones which are probably going to become more rare (at least in terms of functionality) and some can, so the issue should be addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because you HAVE to buy an iPhone and a toyota or hell a car and a cell phone for that matter. I know successful well to-do people with neither.
Exactly. My personal crystal ball says: eventually windows will be surpassed as on OS by one that does everything out of the box without the user dicking around on the net installing adobe, firefox etc. MS can never do this for fear of anti-trust suits, it's not like they have the functionality sitting around they can push as an update so when it happens they'll be 3 years behind and playing catchup. After that we'll suddenly realize how we screwed them over. I don't have a particular affinity for the company but ya... Also that's to say nothing of whether or not MS would've ever pulled their head out of their ass and made this kinda stuff happen regardless of lawsuits. I mean you have that many resources, income employees etc and you can't just make stuff happen seriously?
I think the question as posed (by the OP not you) is demeaning to both science and religion but hey that's just me. What I mean is this: science is an iterative process whereby we figure out the underlying rules, try to build machinery that takes advantage of that, until the machinery proves that the rules weren't good enough and the process starts over. That's not a bad thing it's just the way it is and given that we're not perfect how it's always gonna be.
I won't go into what religion is or isn't because it's just bound to start a flame war at best, but if one is looking for an entire complete set of philosophy (of science and the world around you) which can be proven a posteriori or by use of logic starting with "I think therefore I am" and so on until one reaches the point whereby he can develop a system of math and science as we currently know them without assuming any axioms or "beliefs" on the basis of "it's just the way it is" then I think you're smoking it. Namely there are philosophical underpinnings to science and math which you essentially can't "prove" on the other hand the two differ quite a bit in practice.
But all this posturing that "science" is better because you can prove it, sounds like elitism to me (and vice versa). Namely there are certain things you can't, and one or the other isn't better, they're just different. Does science give us a good understanding of the value of human life, or what morals to follow or what should legal and not? Not really, and not directly. But how many theological treatises by the Vatican got us to the moon? None. See they're just different things for different problems. Anybody who tries to conflate the two as conflicting or if one is better is bullshitting you.
If they figure out how to build decent usable drones for an exorbitant price (as per SOP) probably not long. That is just a continuation of military philosophy since the people first started using ranged weapons like bows and slingshots in combat. Fight at a distance whenever you can. Of course you can take this too far and try to win a ground war entirely from the air like the US has tried to time and again (and failed for the most part, at least till they pulled their heads out of their *ss) but if you value the lives of your soldiers I see no reason to fight at a greater distance than before. Of course this does raise the philosophical quandry expressed by Lee: "It is good that war is so terrible, lest we grow fond of it."
Aug 26 is my birthday... seriously, i did not know that little tidbit. I think you just made my day. (Posting from windows.... oops.)
I think it was slightly more nuanced than that. Ok it's been a while since my last history class on this (over 5 years) but here it goes: When the Roman Empire split up, two main geographies were created. The West and the East. The dividing line was pretty much were Latin was the primary language, versus were Greek was the primary language. The east remained the official DNA descendant of Rome, since the seat of the empire had been moved there a while ago, as The Eastern Roman Empire, with the capitol as Constantinople (now Istanbul). The West went through a lot of shit, to be frank. But eventually it was for the most part consolidated as The Holy Roman Empire. Originally this was situated in Gaul (France) but eventually the seat moved over to the German/Austrian/Luxembourg area and France split off on her own.
Okay, so then the East (who has had problems with the Persians, now Iran, since before the Empire fell) is facing a huge, no MASSIVE, threat from the Turks. They had just lost ~50,000 heavily armed knights in the field, and along with them their breadbasket and a good recruiting territory. Probably taking about 1/3 to 1/2 their potential recruits. If your the Eastern Roman Emperor, right now, you know you're fucked. So what do you do?
Well the East and the West haven't been the best of buddies since the Empire split (the Schism and all that jazz) but they're on speaking terms and they still view each other as part of the same "society." That's important, they viewed each other much like modern Europe views members of the EU, or the US views NATO members, we get in very hotly worded arguments, but if one of us gets attacked we go help out. So the East asked the West (namely the Vatican) for help. The Vatican responded by appealing to France, England and the HRE. It's important that he went to the HRE because they were seen as the closest DNA link to the ERE seen as they were both descendents of the same empire. And the West responded by sending troops to help defend the East. Supposedly.
The actual response was drawn out over several hundred years and shouldn't have been. Also the West wound up sacking Constantinople (the city they were supposed to save) and couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag by the time they got to the Holy Land. The Holy Land was also viewed at the time as part of this "society" that they were going to protect, or at the very least strategically vital to doing that. So it wasn't like simply marching to China or something. And when they got there it wasn't a genocide or something, It was a war, and shit happens during wars, but it certainly wasn't anything approaching ethnic or religious cleansing. That's the short and probably butchered version.
I hate to be an ass, but then maybe they shouldn't have tickled the big bad mean bear...
New monopolies? I don't know about that. More like new markets. I don't think MS will ever die, but if they ever lose their grip on the desktop market, it won't have anything to do with linux (I'm typing this on FC-12 so I'm not a hater, just a realist). IMO it'll be increasing Apple market share in laptops (mostly young people) and secondly more and more people simply not caring what OS they are running as more stuff is done through the browser.
Meh, we have RHEL5 at my uni in the cs labs and I don't really mind them at all. I mean, all I do in there is write c in emacs and debug it. We even get a web browser, MS Word, Open Office, Matlab and a couple others. What bugs are plaguing you, OTOH what features do you want that you need for lab work are missing?
Disclaimer: I don't do any graphics work, they have some pretty sweet 3D monitors on XP stations in the lab next door for those guys tho.
Ugh, I would hope that you could use more libraries than stdio, I just finished a networking project for school last week. Here is a list of all the libs we needed (for the entire project, not any one source file):
errno.h
ctype.h
limits.h
netinet/in.h
stdio.h
stdlib.h
string.h
strings.h
sys/types.h
sys/socket.h
arpa/inet.h
unistd.h
time.h
sys/time.h
sys/stat.h
netdb.h
signal.h
You don't need to read the cellular phone protocol specs to make a call.
So there was a conspiracy to trick me into an EE degree. Ha, I knew it, and yes I'm bitter.
I've often heard that for a lot of the cracker folks, cracking is "the game." As in that's why they do it, and as such the harder a game is to crack or the more boastful Company $X is about how robustly secure their system is the more "fun" it will be to crack it. Then again, I don't give a shit, I'm just going to take my money elsewhere seeing as I refuse to pirate games (not just for moral reasons, I also feel that to get some entertainment I shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of friggin hoops) and I refuse to pay for a game that is so obnoxious, for the same reason and because of I bought it it's mine, respect me as a customer and person. /rant
I heartily agree, it's the only way out of this http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/otherwise infinite loop. And it's not like somebody else is going to sit there and say, "No I don't want your money."
This story looks rather odd, at 30 characters a line, that comes out to be ~2.8 GB of code. That's obviously thinking it's C or something similar. If it's assembly, then I can see it being that long. Obviously, yes this is spread across multiple modules, I just wasn't aware a modern car has that much digital storage in it (non-volatile not RAM that is.) Eh, flash has been around a while I guess.
It's really that bad out there? Jeebus, I better stock up on bibles and ammo.
The problem is that we have a Republic. Obama can do what the majority wants and still be defeated in the Senate because a bunch of small states get equal representation. Slate just did an interesting article on filibusters. It turns out that 60% of the time when Democrats have filibustered they've represented the majority of Americans. When Republicans have filibustered they represented the majority only 3% of the time. Repbulicans are better at playing politics because they rarely represent a majority.
Do you really want a straight democracy though? Sure it's a PITA, but I think that's the point. It's supposed to make us think long and hard about something before we pass a national law on the matter and devote $X billion to it. Now, current political machines? Ya, they're messed up and no amount of clever rulemaking on the architects part would fix it now.
I agree that Separation of Church and State is inherently a good thing, however the Constitution specifically only limits Congress from making any laws regarding the regulation, funding etc. of religion. Not the States. For a long time after the revolution many States had an official religion, and that doesn't contradict the Constitution, simply because the Constitution is only restricting Congress in this matter. More generally though, the States should write it into their constitutions too, but that's their business, not the Feds.
Also, to make sure we are aware how silly this entire argument is, anything not expressly given to the Federal Govt. was expressly forbidden. Education would be one of those things. In other words it is then the individual states' business how to go about public education (according to the law in theory) not the Feds. You might not agree with this, but then you could get the Constitution amended instead of just papering over it. I don't necessarily agree with any of that, but that is what the law says. Now if you can't be bothered to go about it right for an issue that you want changed, why should somebody else be bothered to do the same when it's an issue you don't want changed? (Patriot Act et. al.)
I don't even mind the different layouts so much as opposed to one another. I just find it really annoying to have to relearn how to use a freaking website every three months when I've been on it for a couple years. Also, if slashdot nerds get annoyed with relearning the UI, how do you think Jane Smith feels? Extremely confused, especially given that they've been changing their privacy settings around too. Some people might just give up. I don't know.
I think it's pretty sad that Constellation is being canceled but from the sounds of it, it was very broken. And at this point, yes it stinks we poured over $9 billion into it, but it's a sunk cost. I just hope that this new direction is good for NASA and the US as a whole. What's even worse is that this'll probably get blasted into orbit by Congress whether or not it's a good direction.
I think it's more true on slashdot and the internet in general. People either are intentionally being trolls, or they let their words get away from them in an online forum without a second thought because it's not like they are at a work party and are going to get looked at weird. Full Disclosure: I am an American, I know people that voted for Bush/Mcain and Al Gore/Kerry/Obama and none of them are ever this polarised.
I worked for a software contractor in college. Real young, small company, contracted for a large corp. We had bi-weekly phone conference meetings every Tuesday/Thursday mornings for 15 min a piece. These were only for QA and development groups (kept small) and meant as free for all events were everybody could voice their issues etc. Of course there were the "project wide meetings" which were more or less a dialogue between the various managers which were obviously useful for them (and nobody else) but didn't really build any spirit. To somebody working on the bottom of the food chain, the 15 minute stand up say your thing meetings did foster that sort of thing. Caveat: these probably require halfway reasonable and smart folks.
You don't think you're overreacting in the slightest? Oh wait, forget it, America bashing gets you mod points on slashdot, carry on. I say this as an exploration loving tax-paying attemtping to be reasonable American (even though I might not do a great job all the time).
I would say little/big endianness, (I know then it should be 2350 vs 5023 but the public won't catch that) just as an excuse to start that holy war all over again.
Okay, I should have said spanning set or some such since highest common denominator doesn't really make sense, but you get the point.
I couldn't be arsed to read the other comments to see if anyone already addressed (harr harr) this, but did that other judge seriously compare a cellphone to an address book? I have a couple problems with this.
An address book can contain: a list of people you know, their contact information, their place of residence, a schedule or planner, some offhand notes and a couple local maps. Most address books of friends and family I have ever seen are never this complete or detailed. Typically, all the people he or she knows are not in there, what people are in their perhaps only an address is given or only a phone number and so forth. Also I have never seen nor been aware of an address book sold commercially to the consumer market that was lockable by the user with a unique passcode, nor an address book that could participate in a communications network.
A cellphone, and I'm going to go with the highest common denominator here* (i.e. a very well powered and feature packed device such as an iPhone or Blackberry) can contain a list of people you know, both on the phone hardware and through network services, their contact information, place of residence, other extensive information about them, a record of your communications with them, via phone, text, email, chat and other various services, a record of where you've been, a record of what you have searched for on the 'net, and various images and videos which may be user-created. A very good deal of contact with said people and the various networks takes place through this device, and a lot of contact that doesn't is still viewable and searchable through it. Some consumer devices, and various services on it separately, are lockable with a unique password (i.e. this isn't software only available to the CIA director, it is cheaply and widely available), are much more fragile than a dead paper book, and could and can be much more central to the operation of a family or business than an address book ever was, and overall can currently contain up to 32GB of data compared to the paltry amount that could be reasonably contained by an address book. Also, data on the various people known by the owner tends to be more extensive (e.g. through Facebook, instead of individual entry on each phone) and more people tend to be included in the lists of "known contacts." So how the hell are they comparable?
*I'm going with the "highest common denominator" because if you're going to set a precedent, it would probably be wise to set one that is relatively future-proof, and doesn't assume anything about the limitations of the device that would be unreasonable. In other words, it's somewhat unreasonable to assume that a phone wouldn't be able to use a IM service just because there are good deal of phones that can't, phones which are probably going to become more rare (at least in terms of functionality) and some can, so the issue should be addressed.