According to my lookup chart.... crossing number pad story with italicized very results in a minimum chance of 7.25%. So you're right, but he's not that far off.
It's old now, and I found the author to be a bit of a know-it-all, but the book itself was great. No code, no requirements, just ideas on making a website useful.
Even IF global warming were happening WHICH it isn't, business would build special suits, vehicles and housing and create new materials to live on a hotter planet.
I know you're merely joking, but I always get a kick when I hear that stopping global warming would cost gazillions of dollars and destroy the US economy. As if the economy can easily adapt to any conceivable situation EXCEPT one that we know is coming and have decades to prepare for. Sure, maybe we'd stop building SUVs, but wouldn't we just start making more energy efficient houses and such?
Interestingly, you didn't provide such an approach. But I think you're right: overpopulation is a significant problem. Does increasing the food supply decrease overpopulation? At best, it decreases the number of people without enough food. What about water? What about shelter or land? What is the carrying capacity of earth, really? I'm reminded of the Thoreau quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
And if their unique genetics manages to survive and thrive in the "wild", is that not a simple example of natural selection and an indication of their hardiness?
I think the part you're missing is that certain plants thrive in certain conditions to the detriment of other vitally important plants. Take kudzu in the southeast USA. It's not necessarily hardier than an oak tree, but it doesn't have any naturally-occuring limiting factor, so it grows rampant. It kills other trees and shrubs. All of a sudden, there isn't enough food to support wildlife in the area. Animals that relied on those trees and shrubs have to move elsewhere to live.
It's called an invasive species. In their natural environment, there's nothing wrong with them, but move them elsewhere and you have all sorts of trouble. So what's the natural environment for patently-unnatural plants?
I'm not sure I'm being misanthropic here, but I always wonder just what is the point of making ever-increasing amounts of food. I seem to remember from my high school biology class that any group of organisms will invariably grow until it outstrips its food supply. From that standpoint, increasing the food supply does NOT decrease the number of people that will go hungry. If the ratio of hungry to not-hungry populations stays constant, you're increasing the number of hungry people, aren't you? Whenever a topic like this comes up, I just can't help but feel like we're trying to help, but we're making things worse.
...it is damn near impossible to corrupt if db design is correct...
Seriously, not corrupting data is the first task of a database. Having a correct design is not a requirement. No matter how bad my design is, the database should never corrupt itself. If it does, it's a bug. End of story.
If you have to set up a secured computer and your Facility Security Officer can't direct you how (roughly), then there's no way you'll get classified information on the system. It's not like you can set up a computer and all of a sudden the government will trust you to put secure information on it. You need to have a written, approved procedure for doing so. Your DIS rep has to authorize you to put stuff on the system.
At I place I used to work, we just bought Dells. (Heck, I think we even leased them!) When they were delivered, we'd put a standard image on them that did things like warn the users before they logged on, and turned on auditing on certain directories.
Isn't this basically what everyone has been saying for the past ten years or so? Sure, OOo opens lots and lots of Words docs, and Excel docs, and plenty of other stuff, but not everything. Face it: until anyone can plop any word doc into OOo, it's not "there" yet. I expect they'll have all the kinks worked out in time to make OOo a nifty easter egg in Duke Nuken Forever.
Man, you said it. Have you ever looked at the stuff Edmumd Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mt Everest with? It was like a windbreaker and some fluffy slippers. Ridiculous! The first astronauts may as well have been shot into space with a cannon (and pretty much were) for all the technology they had. People have never, at any point been prepared for what they were doing.
I always feel a bit misanthropic when I hear this argument...exactly why is it that Man must survive an extinction level event? I'm sure we'd all like to believe that we're too important to lose, but are we really?
What is it that Man has done that is truly universal? It seems like we've done plenty of stuff that is universal to Man, but to all living things everywhere in the universe? That sounds staggeringly arrogant to me. How do we even know what qualities make something universal in this sense?
Hello, I know it is possible to circumvent the Chinese Firewall and such, but exactly how do you do it? Who is your contact in the Network Administration Administration? Do you discuss these issues with other people inside the firewall? What are their names and do you know where they live? No, I am just curious. I do not work for the glorious and envied government of PRC.
I'm glad to know that when you're settled in to play a networked game of UT, you're as quiet as a mouse in a field. When I do it, I know I tend to yell at the guy next to me, and him at me.
Your other point is smack-on, though. I imagine a group of people camping and the wives wanting to go on a nature walk while all the guys are huddled around the laptop, checking their fantasy football scores.
And we can always rely on complete strangers to be polite and discreet, can't we? I mean, it's not like you ever go to the zoo and see people trying to throw hot dogs to the bears, right? I've even seen people trying to throw a hot dog over the sign saying "please do not feed the animals."
Is it really so hard to understand? I bet the last thing we "get away from it all" types want at a peaceful and quite possibly sensitive area is a more amusement-park style atmosphere. Believe me, I would love to see more people to enjoying the outdoors and all its attendant beauty, but it's something you kind of have to take on its terms, not yours.
You know, things like shortcutting switchbacks or picking flowers, or trying to feed chipmunks are bad things, and if you're just running over the park like some sort of scavenger hunt, are you going to worry about that stuff?
Bottem line is that technology is good and that this is going to make our lives and everyone else who uses the park but is not crazy, lives easier.
Technology is not good. Technology is also not bad. Technology is, and that's probably the most you can say about it.
I think the part people are very nervous about (myself included) is that while they are out trying to enjoy the seclusion and serenity of the outdoors, someone else will be enjoying it while loudly playing Doom with the accompanying noise and such. I admit I'm a lot more negative on the possibility of cell towers than I am wifi, but it's basically the same thing.
What I can't understand is why would someone go so far away from their homes just to reproduce their home environment? Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I was in Utah a few months ago in an area positively reknown for its night-time views, and it upset me that the first thing some people would do when it got dark was turn on a 1M candle-power unhooded flood light at their campsite.
Believe it or not, many people actually dislike the confinements of their city lives and are weary of making their escape location just another tourist spot. I know I am.
My hypothesis is that the computers account for the similarities in any carol by eliminating common chords. The remainder must be the stuff that differentiates a good song from a bad one. I believe this is a bad way to go about deciding what good music is, exactly because we want to hear those chords that are similar, but we also want to hear movement in music, which requires dissonance.
Think of a search engine: if you're indexing 1000 pages that all have the word "purple" in them, then your engine is probably going to ignore "purple" when deciding what is important about each document.
Okay, I admit that I haven't heard any of the music and don't know a darn thing about Eigenradio or the author's past works, but I will say something about the music...
If it is all dissonant, could it be because dissonance is the thing that makes music interesting? If you heard a piece of music that was all major chords (or heck, all minor chords), you would get bored almost immediately. Western ears seem to like major and minor chords the most, but you just can't listen to nothing but. Good music needs a little conflict for it to be worthwhile.
Hypothesizing a little bit, if the the music computers had some algorithm for deciding which pieces of the sample music differentiated one from another, it certainly wouldn't be the recognizable chords, since every song would contain essentially the same ones. Therefore, the only pieces that the computers might see as making a song good or bad would be the dissonant chords.
It's one explanation, at least, and no stupider than button fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Russians have bear hands? I hope if we ever go to war, it's not hand-to-hand combat!
> Plus what's up with Planet G? Planet M would have been better ;)
G stands for Gorilla.
According to my lookup chart.... crossing number pad story with italicized very results in a minimum chance of 7.25%. So you're right, but he's not that far off.
Your experience was very different from mine.
I found an obvious solution and wrote it down in the margin of a book. I even discovered a proof of this, but the margin was too narrow to contain it.
It's old now, and I found the author to be a bit of a know-it-all, but the book itself was great. No code, no requirements, just ideas on making a website useful.
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
In practice, very few people get executed for treason in the USA. It's mostly a lifetime in prison offense...unless we're at war. Hey wait a minute!
Wait a minute...Google watches you pee, too? Man, someone's got to get a hold of this monster.
Yes, it's much better to have three well-aimed bullets, and then a hail of 20 totally un-aimed ones.
Even IF global warming were happening WHICH it isn't, business would build special suits, vehicles and housing and create new materials to live on a hotter planet.
I know you're merely joking, but I always get a kick when I hear that stopping global warming would cost gazillions of dollars and destroy the US economy. As if the economy can easily adapt to any conceivable situation EXCEPT one that we know is coming and have decades to prepare for. Sure, maybe we'd stop building SUVs, but wouldn't we just start making more energy efficient houses and such?
Interestingly, you didn't provide such an approach. But I think you're right: overpopulation is a significant problem. Does increasing the food supply decrease overpopulation? At best, it decreases the number of people without enough food. What about water? What about shelter or land? What is the carrying capacity of earth, really? I'm reminded of the Thoreau quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
And if their unique genetics manages to survive and thrive in the "wild", is that not a simple example of natural selection and an indication of their hardiness?
I think the part you're missing is that certain plants thrive in certain conditions to the detriment of other vitally important plants. Take kudzu in the southeast USA. It's not necessarily hardier than an oak tree, but it doesn't have any naturally-occuring limiting factor, so it grows rampant. It kills other trees and shrubs. All of a sudden, there isn't enough food to support wildlife in the area. Animals that relied on those trees and shrubs have to move elsewhere to live.
It's called an invasive species. In their natural environment, there's nothing wrong with them, but move them elsewhere and you have all sorts of trouble. So what's the natural environment for patently-unnatural plants?
I'm not sure I'm being misanthropic here, but I always wonder just what is the point of making ever-increasing amounts of food. I seem to remember from my high school biology class that any group of organisms will invariably grow until it outstrips its food supply. From that standpoint, increasing the food supply does NOT decrease the number of people that will go hungry. If the ratio of hungry to not-hungry populations stays constant, you're increasing the number of hungry people, aren't you? Whenever a topic like this comes up, I just can't help but feel like we're trying to help, but we're making things worse.
Seriously, not corrupting data is the first task of a database. Having a correct design is not a requirement. No matter how bad my design is, the database should never corrupt itself. If it does, it's a bug. End of story.
If you have to set up a secured computer and your Facility Security Officer can't direct you how (roughly), then there's no way you'll get classified information on the system. It's not like you can set up a computer and all of a sudden the government will trust you to put secure information on it. You need to have a written, approved procedure for doing so. Your DIS rep has to authorize you to put stuff on the system.
At I place I used to work, we just bought Dells. (Heck, I think we even leased them!) When they were delivered, we'd put a standard image on them that did things like warn the users before they logged on, and turned on auditing on certain directories.
Isn't this basically what everyone has been saying for the past ten years or so? Sure, OOo opens lots and lots of Words docs, and Excel docs, and plenty of other stuff, but not everything. Face it: until anyone can plop any word doc into OOo, it's not "there" yet. I expect they'll have all the kinks worked out in time to make OOo a nifty easter egg in Duke Nuken Forever.
ry
Man, you said it. Have you ever looked at the stuff Edmumd Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mt Everest with? It was like a windbreaker and some fluffy slippers. Ridiculous! The first astronauts may as well have been shot into space with a cannon (and pretty much were) for all the technology they had. People have never, at any point been prepared for what they were doing.
I always feel a bit misanthropic when I hear this argument...exactly why is it that Man must survive an extinction level event? I'm sure we'd all like to believe that we're too important to lose, but are we really?
What is it that Man has done that is truly universal? It seems like we've done plenty of stuff that is universal to Man, but to all living things everywhere in the universe? That sounds staggeringly arrogant to me. How do we even know what qualities make something universal in this sense?
Hello, I know it is possible to circumvent the Chinese Firewall and such, but exactly how do you do it? Who is your contact in the Network Administration Administration? Do you discuss these issues with other people inside the firewall? What are their names and do you know where they live? No, I am just curious. I do not work for the glorious and envied government of PRC.
I don't know much about the state parks, but I know they had to close down the zoo when their monkey went to Washington.
Thanks folks, I'm here all week.
I'm glad to know that when you're settled in to play a networked game of UT, you're as quiet as a mouse in a field. When I do it, I know I tend to yell at the guy next to me, and him at me.
Your other point is smack-on, though. I imagine a group of people camping and the wives wanting to go on a nature walk while all the guys are huddled around the laptop, checking their fantasy football scores.
And we can always rely on complete strangers to be polite and discreet, can't we? I mean, it's not like you ever go to the zoo and see people trying to throw hot dogs to the bears, right? I've even seen people trying to throw a hot dog over the sign saying "please do not feed the animals."
Is it really so hard to understand? I bet the last thing we "get away from it all" types want at a peaceful and quite possibly sensitive area is a more amusement-park style atmosphere. Believe me, I would love to see more people to enjoying the outdoors and all its attendant beauty, but it's something you kind of have to take on its terms, not yours.
You know, things like shortcutting switchbacks or picking flowers, or trying to feed chipmunks are bad things, and if you're just running over the park like some sort of scavenger hunt, are you going to worry about that stuff?
Technology is not good. Technology is also not bad. Technology is, and that's probably the most you can say about it.
I think the part people are very nervous about (myself included) is that while they are out trying to enjoy the seclusion and serenity of the outdoors, someone else will be enjoying it while loudly playing Doom with the accompanying noise and such. I admit I'm a lot more negative on the possibility of cell towers than I am wifi, but it's basically the same thing.
What I can't understand is why would someone go so far away from their homes just to reproduce their home environment? Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I was in Utah a few months ago in an area positively reknown for its night-time views, and it upset me that the first thing some people would do when it got dark was turn on a 1M candle-power unhooded flood light at their campsite.
Believe it or not, many people actually dislike the confinements of their city lives and are weary of making their escape location just another tourist spot. I know I am.
My hypothesis is that the computers account for the similarities in any carol by eliminating common chords. The remainder must be the stuff that differentiates a good song from a bad one. I believe this is a bad way to go about deciding what good music is, exactly because we want to hear those chords that are similar, but we also want to hear movement in music, which requires dissonance.
Think of a search engine: if you're indexing 1000 pages that all have the word "purple" in them, then your engine is probably going to ignore "purple" when deciding what is important about each document.
If it is all dissonant, could it be because dissonance is the thing that makes music interesting? If you heard a piece of music that was all major chords (or heck, all minor chords), you would get bored almost immediately. Western ears seem to like major and minor chords the most, but you just can't listen to nothing but. Good music needs a little conflict for it to be worthwhile.
Hypothesizing a little bit, if the the music computers had some algorithm for deciding which pieces of the sample music differentiated one from another, it certainly wouldn't be the recognizable chords, since every song would contain essentially the same ones. Therefore, the only pieces that the computers might see as making a song good or bad would be the dissonant chords.
It's one explanation, at least, and no stupider than button fly.