For those who aren't sure, "the width of a human hair" is based on the average width of a clump of random hairs kept under a glass Bell jar at constant tempterature and humidity in Paris, France. I've never seen it, but allegedly the clump is about the size of a hailstone.
Parts of Alexandria, VA and the Georgetown section of Washington DC have cobblestones. Yeah, it's difficult to go much more than 5 MPH without rattling your teeth. What's real fun is that parts of G-town also have streetcar tracks that were never removed (the last streetcar ran in the early 60s, I think). If your wheelbase is right, you can line up with the tracks and drive much faster than if you were on the stones. It was just right with a small Toyota. If you don't have the right wheelbase, you run the risk of cutting your tires on the tracks.
If I needed an international keyboard, I'd just swap out the caps for the keys. I know I've seen this done some place. Maybe these guys will find a niche market at the UN and other places where many different nationalities frequently sit down at the same keys and don't want to bring their own keyboard. I hope they have planned to recoup their development costs within a small number of units sold.
Since many of the aforementioned features are blocked by DRM, they had to implement DRM. If that isn't spending time to break a feature, I don't know what is. Also, I would think that if MS just took the software they had lying around, and ported to the player, it would act as a hard drive by default. No, they probably had to spend some effort to make a hard drive, which accepts all files by default, only accept files under certain conditions. Get it?
I wouldn't go that far. It seems like a BS is the new highs chool diploma. It's not impossible to get a job without one, but I think you're hobbling yourself without it. Of course there are exceptions--Bill Gates never bothered to finish his degree. You might have the same level of skill, but you probably don't have the same luck.
I'm not in the game industry, but if a resume ever came across my desk with a "game degree" on it, I'd almost reflexively trash it. True or not, the impression is that such "degrees" are offered by profit-motivated, crank 'em out, trade school companies. If I were in the game industry, the profile I'd be looking for is somebody with a CS degree (not necessarily a master's) who has the additional background is applicable to games. (vector algebra? assembly optimization? I don't know--you'll have to do some research to find out what skills are really required for game development, and then select coursework in your MSCS that will prepare you for it). If the candidate didn't have game development experience, I'd be looking for a freeware or OSS game that he'd written. It wouldn't have to be popular, it would just have to demonstrate skill. IMHO, when looking for people to do any type of programming, there is no better indicator of future success than the fact that they are already practicing the art. That seems rather obvious, and yet so many people don't even consider it. They just look at your degree; so get a MSCS. Don't even think about a game degree. Run really fast in the other direction. Did I mention not to get a game degree? OK, good.
Conversely, if it takes a gambling issue to end "Free Trade", so be it. Any real economist will tell you TANSTAAFL. If people would quit worshiping at the altar of Free Trade, we might actually collect sufficient fees at ports of entry to inspect more than 2 percent of all the cargo that comes in to this country. And no, I'm not talking about terrorists either. Anybody ever add up the economic impact of Chestnut blight, fruit flies, zebra mussels and all the other trade-borne pests? These things never appear on the balance sheet of any Free Trade advocate. We can ammortize that cost slowly, with just enough tarrif to fund a worthwhile inspection and regulation of import/export, or we can shift that cost away from the import/export companies towards the general population, and pay the unpredictable costs of ecological disasters. I prefer the former, but nobody cares, and nobody will listen.
How much was Slashdot paid to post this? Nothing? You got ripped off. More seriously, if I was running a news site, I might be inclined not to run any stories that were specificly related to the novelty of an ad campaign. I mean, I wouldn't shoot myself in the foot. For example, if the Chinese send somebody to the moon and the rocket just happens to have McWonton's logo on the side, I wouldn't refuse to run the story just for that. If, on the other hand, the payload includes a giant mylar LMart sign, why run a story on that without pay? I'd just say "in addition to exploring the moon, the rocket will also carry advertising".
If that become the journalistic standard, either news outlets will get paid to report this crap (probably unethical) or we can look forward to less obtrusive ads. I know. I'm a dreamer. See you at Jack Kent Cook Memorial Stadium... or Candlestick Park.
This is just like concert tickets. Bands won't charge the market price for a ticket. If they did, many hard core fans couldn't afford the tickets. The problem? While some fans will stand in line "for the passion", the difference between the sale price and the marke price creates an opportunity for profiteers.
The Band promoters, like Sony, are actually trying to do a GOOD THING by pricing their tickets below what they know the market will bear.
Alternatives? Sony prices the boxes at twice the fair price for the first two weeks of the release. Then how would you feel? Or, how about a special program for people with more money to pay a higher price and get their units earlier? That would smack of elitism too, wouldn't it?
The current situation really seems to be the best we can do so far. Were there homeless guys in the lines, sure. Are there ticket scalpers buying up tickets? Sure. I've also seen die-hard fans play "get the first click in" on Ticket Master, get their ticket, and GO TO THE SHOW at a fair price. No doubt, there will be some kids playing hookie for those PS-3s and getting them at a fair price too. Or... maybe they'll re-sell it and wait a month to get one at a fair price plus some games from their profit. After all, unlike concert tix, the supply of PS-3 is comparatively unlimited over a long enough run.
According to my quick googling, Libras tend to avoid conflict. This speaks well for your idea in terms of avoiding foreign conflicts, but I have to wonder why someone who avoids conflict would need a gun. I had no idea there were Zodiac based political parties. Do tell more.
And yes, I know it's a troll and I know he meant Libertarian, but I think this is fun. I could care less about the mods. -1 is more fun sometimes.
I've had two infections on my Windows over the years--Nimda and a video codec trojan. I'm not counting the second boxes that I used to use for experiments--I never put anything important on them, so I tended to just not care, and blow away Windows when they got nasty--that was back in the bad old dialup days when potential damage to others was minimal, and Windows was a lot less secure. I don't know if AV would have stopped Nimda, because I didn't use AV back then. AV didn't stop the trojan. I used to disable AV routinely because it *is* a virus. It used to slow boxes down way too much, and cause all kinds of problems with installers. I always un-do the stupid defaults in Windows and IE, and I try not to be too careless. Nimda is really the only one I can blame on MS, and it was patched ages ago. I would probably disable AV on my current box, but they seem to have gotten better about not hogging resources and/or crashing the box so I just leave it alone.
I wonder if Vista is finally going to display extensions by default. That was always irritating. It would be *nice* if you had to enable active content on a per-site basis by default. It would be better if they just didn't have so much active content out there. Would I "just trust" a Vista box? No way. But would I run it without AV if there was none pre-installed? Yes, in a heartbeat--but I would still be very careful about how I conducted myself on the web, and I would still want to go through all the settings to make sure there was nothing stupid in there. And I would *still* be checking up on processes and registry keys from time-to-time.
But anyway, XP without AV is not a big deal--if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, that's a big if. Nevermind 7 year olds. It's the 57 year olds that you have to worry about.
This won't be embedded in a lot of things because of that. It seems like LGPL makes more sense for this, since Java is often embedded in other apps. Firefox isn't GPL. Can they mix and match without changing the license? Maybe, maybe not; LGPL would have made the question unambiguous.
Voting for local officials and nothing more. Why? Because I live in DC, the nation's capital, which has NO REPRESENTATION in Congress! We have a "shadow" representative only.
Control of information by a totalitarian regime has NOTHING to do with lack of information due to destruction of the network infrastructure.
If I were wrong, I would (and have many times in the past) stand corrected; but I'm right this time. You aren't making the proper inference. There is no ammendment I can make to my original statement to prevent you from making an improper inference. If I were to carefully phrase all my postings so as to cover all improper inferences that might be made, it would probably take me 10 paragraphs just to make sure I had the proper meaning of "is". End rant.
Huh? I didn't say anything about controlling knowledge at all. It never ceases to amaze me what people will infer from a Slashdot posting. You can't really do that anyway; at least not for very long. Somebody always squeals eventually. Pretty much anybody who wants to know how to build a nuke can find out. It's accumulating fissile material that's the hard and expensive part. If the cost of accumulating fissile material comes down, or if a cheap method of accumulating deuterium and fusing it without a fission trigger is found, the cat's out of the bag. Who knows, maybe such a method is already languishing as a closely-guarded secret in some government research lab, and we've had leaks in the past. I wouldn't say that keeping information like that secret requires a totalitarian regime. Shit, if the US knows how to make fusion bombs for $500/megaton, keeping that information locked up as long as possible is decidedly *liberating*, not oppressive.
As technology improves and new discoveries are made, it seems inevitable that high energy technology will be available to small powers. I'm not nearly as concerned about a country having nukes as I am about irresponsable companies having them, or insane neighbors using some sort of device that, say... accumulates easily fusile material in a small package, and cheaply. No, such technology doesn't exist now; but it seems inevitable that the cost of nuclear tech will go down.
Right now, it's pretty cheap for my neighbor to make a fertilizer bomb and take out my entire block. This is pretty much the practical limit of Insane Nutjob Technology (INT). INT is already advanced to a stage that, if you went back to the middle ages, would make a small army jealous.
When INT advances to the point where it can take out an entire city, that's a serious problem. When terrorist armed with INT can scale up enough to destroy the planet, it could end civilization.
This was one of the interesting things about Star Trek that made it less than utopian--INT had progressed to the point where INs could take out entire planets. Fortunately, there was at least one new planet every week.
We may not have that luxury. When INT can take out a significant portion of the planet, that is indeed what might happen, until INT destroys enough of civilization to reduce the power of INT to manageable levels again (no internet, no bomb-making manuals, INT is decremented), or until humanity is destroyed.
You're more likely to be killed by a car accident than terrorism. You can take steps to reduce the odds, but they will always be there. With few exceptions though, the other drivers are not trying to kill you. Your car, the weather, or whatever it is causes the accident is not an intelligent being that "has it in for you".
So. Are people irrational or not? Maybe not. Terrorists, if successful, can destabilize the whole society. It hasn't happened yet, but in theory, left unchecked, it could. OTOH, lightning strike incidence can be looked up in an actuarial table, and is not likely to increase very much.
While I often agree with Schneir on a lot of things, I disagree that the actions of intelligent beings (the terrorists) can be fairly compared to the random acts of nature. Human beings are probably "programmed" to respond differently to intelligent threats. That sounds like a successful survival strategy to me.
What if Bill Gates went to each member of the ruling politburo or whatever they call it, and offered each one a large sum of money. Condition? Strict piracy laws and adoption and enforcement of the same Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. Half now. Half on successful compliance within one year. He's the only man in the world who might be able to pull this off. I mean, it wasn't unheard of for African slaves in the pre-Civil War US to have their freedom bought by wealthy northern Abolitionists. Why not buy freedom for a whole country? In the end, don't most despots just want palaces and hundreds of shoes for their wives anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
For those who aren't sure, "the width of a human hair" is based on the average width of a clump of random hairs kept under a glass Bell jar at constant tempterature and humidity in Paris, France. I've never seen it, but allegedly the clump is about the size of a hailstone.
Parts of Alexandria, VA and the Georgetown section of Washington DC have cobblestones. Yeah, it's difficult to go much more than 5 MPH without rattling your teeth. What's real fun is that parts of G-town also have streetcar tracks that were never removed (the last streetcar ran in the early 60s, I think). If your wheelbase is right, you can line up with the tracks and drive much faster than if you were on the stones. It was just right with a small Toyota. If you don't have the right wheelbase, you run the risk of cutting your tires on the tracks.
If I needed an international keyboard, I'd just swap out the caps for the keys. I know I've seen this done some place. Maybe these guys will find a niche market at the UN and other places where many different nationalities frequently sit down at the same keys and don't want to bring their own keyboard. I hope they have planned to recoup their development costs within a small number of units sold.
Since many of the aforementioned features are blocked by DRM, they had to implement DRM. If that isn't spending time to break a feature, I don't know what is. Also, I would think that if MS just took the software they had lying around, and ported to the player, it would act as a hard drive by default. No, they probably had to spend some effort to make a hard drive, which accepts all files by default, only accept files under certain conditions. Get it?
I doubt it. In fact, they probably spent a lot of time preventing those features from working.
It's brown and it comes from Microsoft. Do I really need to say anything else?
I wouldn't go that far. It seems like a BS is the new highs chool diploma. It's not impossible to get a job without one, but I think you're hobbling yourself without it. Of course there are exceptions--Bill Gates never bothered to finish his degree. You might have the same level of skill, but you probably don't have the same luck.
I'm not in the game industry, but if a resume ever came across my desk with a "game degree" on it, I'd almost reflexively trash it. True or not, the impression is that such "degrees" are offered by profit-motivated, crank 'em out, trade school companies. If I were in the game industry, the profile I'd be looking for is somebody with a CS degree (not necessarily a master's) who has the additional background is applicable to games. (vector algebra? assembly optimization? I don't know--you'll have to do some research to find out what skills are really required for game development, and then select coursework in your MSCS that will prepare you for it). If the candidate didn't have game development experience, I'd be looking for a freeware or OSS game that he'd written. It wouldn't have to be popular, it would just have to demonstrate skill. IMHO, when looking for people to do any type of programming, there is no better indicator of future success than the fact that they are already practicing the art. That seems rather obvious, and yet so many people don't even consider it. They just look at your degree; so get a MSCS. Don't even think about a game degree. Run really fast in the other direction. Did I mention not to get a game degree? OK, good.
Conversely, if it takes a gambling issue to end "Free Trade", so be it. Any real economist will tell you TANSTAAFL. If people would quit worshiping at the altar of Free Trade, we might actually collect sufficient fees at ports of entry to inspect more than 2 percent of all the cargo that comes in to this country. And no, I'm not talking about terrorists either. Anybody ever add up the economic impact of Chestnut blight, fruit flies, zebra mussels and all the other trade-borne pests? These things never appear on the balance sheet of any Free Trade advocate. We can ammortize that cost slowly, with just enough tarrif to fund a worthwhile inspection and regulation of import/export, or we can shift that cost away from the import/export companies towards the general population, and pay the unpredictable costs of ecological disasters. I prefer the former, but nobody cares, and nobody will listen.
I'm quite happy I grew up with IV-VI.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that. Just that. And nothing more.
How much was Slashdot paid to post this? Nothing? You got ripped off. More seriously, if I was running a news site, I might be inclined not to run any stories that were specificly related to the novelty of an ad campaign. I mean, I wouldn't shoot myself in the foot. For example, if the Chinese send somebody to the moon and the rocket just happens to have McWonton's logo on the side, I wouldn't refuse to run the story just for that. If, on the other hand, the payload includes a giant mylar LMart sign, why run a story on that without pay? I'd just say "in addition to exploring the moon, the rocket will also carry advertising".
If that become the journalistic standard, either news outlets will get paid to report this crap (probably unethical) or we can look forward to less obtrusive ads. I know. I'm a dreamer. See you at Jack Kent Cook Memorial Stadium... or Candlestick Park.
This is just like concert tickets. Bands won't charge the market price for a ticket. If they did, many hard core fans couldn't afford the tickets. The problem? While some fans will stand in line "for the passion", the difference between the sale price and the marke price creates an opportunity for profiteers.
The Band promoters, like Sony, are actually trying to do a GOOD THING by pricing their tickets below what they know the market will bear.
Alternatives? Sony prices the boxes at twice the fair price for the first two weeks of the release. Then how would you feel? Or, how about a special program for people with more money to pay a higher price and get their units earlier? That would smack of elitism too, wouldn't it?
The current situation really seems to be the best we can do so far. Were there homeless guys in the lines, sure. Are there ticket scalpers buying up tickets? Sure. I've also seen die-hard fans play "get the first click in" on Ticket Master, get their ticket, and GO TO THE SHOW at a fair price. No doubt, there will be some kids playing hookie for those PS-3s and getting them at a fair price too. Or... maybe they'll re-sell it and wait a month to get one at a fair price plus some games from their profit. After all, unlike concert tix, the supply of PS-3 is comparatively unlimited over a long enough run.
Vote Libratarian
According to my quick googling, Libras tend to avoid conflict. This speaks well for your idea in terms of avoiding foreign conflicts, but I have to wonder why someone who avoids conflict would need a gun. I had no idea there were Zodiac based political parties. Do tell more.
And yes, I know it's a troll and I know he meant Libertarian, but I think this is fun. I could care less about the mods. -1 is more fun sometimes.
I've had two infections on my Windows over the years--Nimda and a video codec trojan. I'm not counting the second boxes that I used to use for experiments--I never put anything important on them, so I tended to just not care, and blow away Windows when they got nasty--that was back in the bad old dialup days when potential damage to others was minimal, and Windows was a lot less secure. I don't know if AV would have stopped Nimda, because I didn't use AV back then. AV didn't stop the trojan. I used to disable AV routinely because it *is* a virus. It used to slow boxes down way too much, and cause all kinds of problems with installers. I always un-do the stupid defaults in Windows and IE, and I try not to be too careless. Nimda is really the only one I can blame on MS, and it was patched ages ago. I would probably disable AV on my current box, but they seem to have gotten better about not hogging resources and/or crashing the box so I just leave it alone.
I wonder if Vista is finally going to display extensions by default. That was always irritating. It would be *nice* if you had to enable active content on a per-site basis by default. It would be better if they just didn't have so much active content out there. Would I "just trust" a Vista box? No way. But would I run it without AV if there was none pre-installed? Yes, in a heartbeat--but I would still be very careful about how I conducted myself on the web, and I would still want to go through all the settings to make sure there was nothing stupid in there. And I would *still* be checking up on processes and registry keys from time-to-time.
But anyway, XP without AV is not a big deal--if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, that's a big if. Nevermind 7 year olds. It's the 57 year olds that you have to worry about.
Although battling them will always be dangerous, take care to avoid engagements during breakfast hours.
I agree. Having the tools GPL'd is no problem, since the output of a tool is not license constrained; it's the runtime that needs LGPL or similar
This won't be embedded in a lot of things because of that. It seems like LGPL makes more sense for this, since Java is often embedded in other apps. Firefox isn't GPL. Can they mix and match without changing the license? Maybe, maybe not; LGPL would have made the question unambiguous.
Hacker votes for %df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%56%76Richard M. Stallman.
Stallman wins the Whitehouse.
That would get their attention.
Voting for local officials and nothing more. Why? Because I live in DC, the nation's capital, which has NO REPRESENTATION in Congress! We have a "shadow" representative only.
Control of information by a totalitarian regime has NOTHING to do with lack of information due to destruction of the network infrastructure.
If I were wrong, I would (and have many times in the past) stand corrected; but I'm right this time. You aren't making the proper inference. There is no ammendment I can make to my original statement to prevent you from making an improper inference. If I were to carefully phrase all my postings so as to cover all improper inferences that might be made, it would probably take me 10 paragraphs just to make sure I had the proper meaning of "is". End rant.
Huh? I didn't say anything about controlling knowledge at all. It never ceases to amaze me what people will infer from a Slashdot posting. You can't really do that anyway; at least not for very long. Somebody always squeals eventually. Pretty much anybody who wants to know how to build a nuke can find out. It's accumulating fissile material that's the hard and expensive part. If the cost of accumulating fissile material comes down, or if a cheap method of accumulating deuterium and fusing it without a fission trigger is found, the cat's out of the bag. Who knows, maybe such a method is already languishing as a closely-guarded secret in some government research lab, and we've had leaks in the past. I wouldn't say that keeping information like that secret requires a totalitarian regime. Shit, if the US knows how to make fusion bombs for $500/megaton, keeping that information locked up as long as possible is decidedly *liberating*, not oppressive.
As technology improves and new discoveries are made, it seems inevitable that high energy technology will be available to small powers. I'm not nearly as concerned about a country having nukes as I am about irresponsable companies having them, or insane neighbors using some sort of device that, say... accumulates easily fusile material in a small package, and cheaply. No, such technology doesn't exist now; but it seems inevitable that the cost of nuclear tech will go down.
Right now, it's pretty cheap for my neighbor to make a fertilizer bomb and take out my entire block. This is pretty much the practical limit of Insane Nutjob Technology (INT). INT is already advanced to a stage that, if you went back to the middle ages, would make a small army jealous.
When INT advances to the point where it can take out an entire city, that's a serious problem. When terrorist armed with INT can scale up enough to destroy the planet, it could end civilization.
This was one of the interesting things about Star Trek that made it less than utopian--INT had progressed to the point where INs could take out entire planets. Fortunately, there was at least one new planet every week.
We may not have that luxury. When INT can take out a significant portion of the planet, that is indeed what might happen, until INT destroys enough of civilization to reduce the power of INT to manageable levels again (no internet, no bomb-making manuals, INT is decremented), or until humanity is destroyed.
You're more likely to be killed by a car accident than terrorism. You can take steps to reduce the odds, but they will always be there. With few exceptions though, the other drivers are not trying to kill you. Your car, the weather, or whatever it is causes the accident is not an intelligent being that "has it in for you".
So. Are people irrational or not? Maybe not. Terrorists, if successful, can destabilize the whole society. It hasn't happened yet, but in theory, left unchecked, it could. OTOH, lightning strike incidence can be looked up in an actuarial table, and is not likely to increase very much.
While I often agree with Schneir on a lot of things, I disagree that the actions of intelligent beings (the terrorists) can be fairly compared to the random acts of nature. Human beings are probably "programmed" to respond differently to intelligent threats. That sounds like a successful survival strategy to me.
What if Bill Gates went to each member of the ruling politburo or whatever they call it, and offered each one a large sum of money. Condition? Strict piracy laws and adoption and enforcement of the same Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. Half now. Half on successful compliance within one year. He's the only man in the world who might be able to pull this off. I mean, it wasn't unheard of for African slaves in the pre-Civil War US to have their freedom bought by wealthy northern Abolitionists. Why not buy freedom for a whole country? In the end, don't most despots just want palaces and hundreds of shoes for their wives anyway?
Since when?