Oracle wants a national ID card powered by Oracle. Sun wants a national ID card powered by Java.
...and Bud wants a national ID card powered by beer. So what else is new?
Me, personally? I want a national ID card powered by my smiling face, with a $1 royalty going to me for each card.
I think y'all get the point. At any rate, one can only hope that if Bush ever holds up a card on TV, people will react the same as when Clinton held up a card on TV. Yes... here is how I intend to prevent it:
Dear Mr. Bush,
If you ever hold up a national ID card on TV, I will vote straight Democrat in the next election.
So are "ethnic cleansing" (genocide), "holy war" (religious justification for political opportunism), "free love" (lust run amok) and a host of other euphemisms. I think the PC speech movement, as well as "weasel words" are also not only alive, but prospering quite nicely.
our own Stinger missles are currently considered the biggest threat to the safety of American planes in Afghanastan
I've been thinking about that. It occurs to me that if we are going to give stuff like that to people, it should be designed to fall apart after a few years. Perhaps they could use a special plastic for the chip packages that degraded into conductive goo after a while.
turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear.
Even if they had more bandwidth, it wouldn't help that much. The low bandwidth causes blockiness. The graininess and the poor color comes from the fact that the cameras just don't work well in low light.
Now, a while ago I saw something on the Discovery channel where a guy had a low-light camera that he was using to capture the aurora borealis in real time. They could use something like that.
Of course, I could go on about how there isn't really any need for us to see explosions at night in full technicolor, but that's beside the point.
That reminds me of the one about voice recognition. A sales rep is in the middle of doing a presentation for such a system when somebody in the audience stands up and shouts "FORMAT SEE COLON" and then another guy stands up and yells "YES RETURN".
1.2 kw isn't enough. Right now, I've got a 300W ps running in my box, a monitor, a 60W bulb and a TV (not sure about the TV wattage). Upstairs there is another TV running along with another 60W bulb. If the living room and master bedroom were occupied, and if we were doing laundry and drying clothes right now, I don't think the unit could handle it. I'm not sure exactly what our peak load is. Actually... let me wander over to the breaker box (afk) OK, it says 125 A max, 120-240V. I'm not sure if they mean that we can draw 125 A at 240V. I'm not sure if any of our appliances actually draw 240V.
Anyhow, P=VI so if everything is 120 that's 15kW. IIRC from my power electronic courses the 120 is a RMS (Root Mean Square) voltage so you can use the P=VI equation as if it were DC.
So, for the device to be practical to drive our 2 story house, it needs to output 15kW after being inverted.
The other problem is that H2 is not readily available. Natural gas is piped right into our house, so here is my conclusion:
If they manufacture a unit that can run on natural gas (integrated gas to H2 converter) and output 15kw after inversion they might have a residential market.
At times when electricity from the grid is expensive or unavailable (e.g., California a few months ago) the ability to switch to such an alternative source could be an attractive selling point for a house.
Of course in it's current configuration I'm sure it will find some applications, but if they can't penetrate the residential real estate market they are missing out on a major revenue stream. The several hundred kW unit sounds intriguing for a small town power station.
I wanted to watch just for the reason of being able to go back there, to understand what it was like and what had happened
A few days ago, I walked by a local picture-framing store. They were selling a large framed picture of the skyline with the WTC towers intact and distributing profits to charity. As people walked by many of them, myself included, stood there transfixed by the image. Otherwise busy people stared at it for as long as 5 minutes. It seems like when you look at it, you can almost live in the yesterday for just a few more minutes.
There was an episode where some guy was under a table at a meeting with a laptop, and information was passed through a complex network that included the artist formerly known as Prince. I can't remember too many details of that episode off the top of my head.
I think you're forgetting the really important question, which is: How many potatoes did they have to throw up in the air before they got a shot that looked right?
the browser-applet. as far as I know it did not make it, and I don't see many of them in cyberspace.
followed by...
I wondered why there never was a browser-plugin for languages like Python or Perl.
Well, if applets aren't that useful in Java, it should be obvious that they aren't that useful in Python or Perl either. Try to imagine somebody at some company going to a VC with a business plan of "we're going to do something that will require the user to download a plugin and it will do the same thing Java does."
I would like to hear about reasons why there is no effort to expand the capabilities of websites with language-plugins.
There are now many languages for the JVM. There is a good chance that you can finagle your favorite language onto a JVM somehow. This is more work for the individual programmer, but it requires no effort on the part of users. Remember, when you put something on the web it has to be viewable by most users, otherwise it will just alientate them. When you get one of those boxes that asks you to download something just so you can view a website, how often do you click Yes?
So, if [other language] had trumpted a platform neutral VM first we would probably be asking the same questions about [other language]. Java got there first and has established a huge installed base and name recognition, so until something comes along that just blows it away in terms of capability, programmer-friendliness, or installed base we are stuck with it. So far, MS CLR looks like the only thing that has a chance at doing that, and it is more friendly towards implementing a wide variety of languages than the JVM.
The CLR/C# developers seem to have a thing for functional programming languages, so stuff like OCaml and Haskel (sp.?) could get a shot in the arm from C#.
A lot of what I've heard is along the lines of "you can take the cities, but you'll be forever deviled by hordes coming out of the high valleys".
You also hear a lot of stuff like "there is no beach-head" and "this is a different kind of war".
OK, so the proper response to a different kind of war is a different kind of fight. Instead of taking the cities and then trying to "mop up" the notoriously difficult mountains, why not do it in reverse?
I've been thinking that we should check out these valleys and make sure that a small defensible area is clear. Then, you drop troops and supplies in that area to establish a "valley-head". You do this several places. The choices would be based on how much you can see, and what routes you can see. The mission of these forward bases is to shoot anything that carries a weapon, and to gradually explore and secure the area around the base, eventually establishing checkpoints, or "chokepoints" if you prefer. These guys eventually have to come out of their holes, and we can run surveillance on them day and night.
Once this is accomplished, then, and only then you invade the cities. If they are in the cities it is not so bad because urban fighting is historicly our strength. Once a city is captured, it is secured by house-to-house search for any and all weapons and contraband.
Once the country is controlled, it then becomes a matter of figuring out what government to install and/or how to partition the country. That is a more difficult problem. Expanding the former Soviet republics might not be such a bad idea since there are many ethnic Tadziks, Uzbeks, etc. already there. However, there would probably still have to be some kind of Afghanistan and we may not want to expand Pakistan or Iran.
Imagine a "United States of Islam" or "Islamic Union". That could be much, much worse, especially if it took on the characteristics of a quasi-fascist megapower like China. Then again, it might also be tranquilized by the desire for trade. That is a tough call.
The other worry is that if we stay there too long we could end up building infrastructure that might later be used by China to move troops into the oil fields of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Remember, this is the old "silk road" we are talking about here. As China becomes more and more industrial we have to be wary of what they are going to do when they have the same thirst for oil that we have. So, regardless of what plan we execute we should be careful not to build a modern silk road.
To a great extent this whole mess all started with the US fighting the Soviet Union by proxy. So much for the Cold War being over.
How much longer will it be before there is an "accident" involving biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons?
This is not to say that the statistics you cite aren't important or accurate. The difference is that those problems aren't likely to grow into a threat that could destroy the entire country.
TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
[the remainder of the message is base64 encoded, also please note that some of the characters in the Subject line are unprintable and were replaced with '.' when pasted]
I was alerted to the problem by a dialog box that quickly disappeared, and a lot of extra hard drive activity. I crash-booted my box, and when it came back up there were no extra processes or files, and the registry checked out but that DLL was corrupted.
What If IslamWay.com Really Was A Terrorist Board? Wouldn't it be better to leave it in place and have the CIA monitor it?
In the wake of the attacks, there are just far too many people letting their emotions do the driving.
Take the attacks on Arab-Americans for instance. Not only are these vigilante idiots mistaking Sihks for Moslems, they are totally forgetting what Arab-Americans (even if persecuted) will probably end up doing for us in ways that we can only begin to imagine and may never know about becase many operations will be secret.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Tuskeegee Airmen, The Navajo Code Talkers, and the Japanese "Nisei" who fought in Europe.
If you don't understand the last paragraph, do some reading and get back to me. Then let me know if it still makes sense to vandalize Mosques and shoot people who look like Arabs.
As someone a little bit closer to this issue (check webpage) this is why I think VRML failed.
1. VRML-97 is not a superset of VRML-1. There are features in VRML-1 that don't convert easily to VRML-97 so people who started with VRML-1 had to re-do a lot of stuff by hand. That discouraged a lot of the early movers.
2. The VRML-97 specification specified too many things that didn't need to be specified (like text layout, which looks crappy in VRML anyway) and initially failed to specify some things very well. There was some question about what scripting should be used at first, later Java and ECMAScript worked their way in but that leads me to...
3. It duplicated things that could be done with other things. In particular, you can do a lot of 3d with Java, and if you are going to use Java to script your VRML world anyway you might as well just do everything in Java which leads me to...
4. Crappy installed base. Really weak VRML browser shipped with IE and Netscape died before its decision could have made any impact.
5. Somewhat different computing paradigm. The VRML file contains "sensors" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. In other words, the data drives the code instead of the code driving the data. Is it a file format? A programming language? What is it? I'll tell you, introducing a different way of computing is fine, but they didn't pitch it that way, which tells me that it was more of an accident. It's always a bad sign when different ways of doing things get introduced by accident.
6. Bloated syntax. I know I'll catch it from some people for this, but I stand by it. Why was the proposal for VRML-97 called VRML-2? I'll tell you: because it has twice as many brackets and braces as VRML-1, and it doesn't really make things any easier to read.
7. Performance, performance, performance. A few months ago someone on comp.lang.vrml posted something that looked like a simple Quake level. It ran at 1 FPS on my box in a tiny little window. The same box runs Quake full screen at least 24 FPS, probably more but I can't tell and I don't care because Quake looks fine. The VRML performance problem is intractable too, because it doesn't have any standard way to do BSP or any of the other tricks that games do.
There are probably other reasons too; that's just the top of my list. Oh well, I had a lot of fun with it in the early days, and I learned a lot coding for it but it is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. I use my VRML program mostly to create animated GIFs and for photo-shop like effects (layering translucent PNGs and taking screen shots is cool) and I keep the web page up because I hate to kill stuff. I harbor no delusions. VRML will never see mass appeal. It seems to have carved out a niche in some government and academic circles, but there is no excitement there, no profit, and not much life.
Slashdot Mirror
Oracle wants a national ID card powered by Oracle. Sun wants a national ID card powered by Java.
...and Bud wants a national ID card powered by beer. So what else is new?
Me, personally? I want a national ID card powered by my smiling face, with a $1 royalty going to me for each card.
I think y'all get the point. At any rate, one can only hope that if Bush ever holds up a card on TV, people will react the same as when Clinton held up a card on TV. Yes... here is how I intend to prevent it:
Dear Mr. Bush,
If you ever hold up a national ID card on TV, I will vote straight Democrat in the next election.
Sincerely,
Steven Marthouse
Ooooh... an ad hominem attack from an AC. I'm so scared.
Sharing is alive and well
So are "ethnic cleansing" (genocide), "holy war" (religious justification for political opportunism), "free love" (lust run amok) and a host of other euphemisms. I think the PC speech movement, as well as "weasel words" are also not only alive, but prospering quite nicely.
our own Stinger missles are currently considered the biggest threat to the safety of American planes in Afghanastan
I've been thinking about that. It occurs to me that if we are going to give stuff like that to people, it should be designed to fall apart after a few years. Perhaps they could use a special plastic for the chip packages that degraded into conductive goo after a while.
Missile XP anybody?
The mouse is a device of the Beatles era
And the steering wheel is a relic of the Jazz age. I don't plan on giving up either of them any time soon.
turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear.
Even if they had more bandwidth, it wouldn't help that much. The low bandwidth causes blockiness. The graininess and the poor color comes from the fact that the cameras just don't work well in low light.
Now, a while ago I saw something on the Discovery channel where a guy had a low-light camera that he was using to capture the aurora borealis in real time. They could use something like that.
Of course, I could go on about how there isn't really any need for us to see explosions at night in full technicolor, but that's beside the point.
...I'll be sure to dial a few extra digits after the number. :)
That reminds me of the one about voice recognition. A sales rep is in the middle of doing a presentation for such a system when somebody in the audience stands up and shouts "FORMAT SEE COLON" and then another guy stands up and yells "YES RETURN".
And yes, the moderators are humor impaired.
So then what we really need are a bunch of non-profit porn dispersal centers.
What do you think the internet is?
1.2 kw isn't enough. Right now, I've got a 300W ps running in my box, a monitor, a 60W bulb and a TV (not sure about the TV wattage). Upstairs there is another TV running along with another 60W bulb. If the living room and master bedroom were occupied, and if we were doing laundry and drying clothes right now, I don't think the unit could handle it. I'm not sure exactly what our peak load is. Actually... let me wander over to the breaker box (afk) OK, it says 125 A max, 120-240V. I'm not sure if they mean that we can draw 125 A at 240V. I'm not sure if any of our appliances actually draw 240V.
Anyhow, P=VI so if everything is 120 that's 15kW. IIRC from my power electronic courses the 120 is a RMS (Root Mean Square) voltage so you can use the P=VI equation as if it were DC.
So, for the device to be practical to drive our 2 story house, it needs to output 15kW after being inverted.
The other problem is that H2 is not readily available. Natural gas is piped right into our house, so here is my conclusion:
If they manufacture a unit that can run on natural gas (integrated gas to H2 converter) and output 15kw after inversion they might have a residential market.
At times when electricity from the grid is expensive or unavailable (e.g., California a few months ago) the ability to switch to such an alternative source could be an attractive selling point for a house.
Of course in it's current configuration I'm sure it will find some applications, but if they can't penetrate the residential real estate market they are missing out on a major revenue stream. The several hundred kW unit sounds intriguing for a small town power station.
I wanted to watch just for the reason of being able to go back there, to understand what it was like and what had happened
A few days ago, I walked by a local picture-framing store. They were selling a large framed picture of the skyline with the WTC towers intact and distributing profits to charity. As people walked by many of them, myself included, stood there transfixed by the image. Otherwise busy people stared at it for as long as 5 minutes. It seems like when you look at it, you can almost live in the yesterday for just a few more minutes.
There was an episode where some guy was under a table at a meeting with a laptop, and information was passed through a complex network that included the artist formerly known as Prince. I can't remember too many details of that episode off the top of my head.
I think you're forgetting the really important question, which is: How many potatoes did they have to throw up in the air before they got a shot that looked right?
OK... let's carry this out to the logical end. What if everybody had The Bomb?
I mean, right now "only government and large industry" can build the The Bomb. Wouldn't life be better if everybody had it?
Oh wait... somebody just went postal in the next county over. The news is telling me I have 2 minutes before the fallout hits.
the browser-applet. as far as I know it did not make it, and I don't see many of them in cyberspace.
followed by...
I wondered why there never was a browser-plugin for languages like Python or Perl.
Well, if applets aren't that useful in Java, it should be obvious that they aren't that useful in Python or Perl either. Try to imagine somebody at some company going to a VC with a business plan of "we're going to do something that will require the user to download a plugin and it will do the same thing Java does."
I would like to hear about reasons why there is no effort to expand the capabilities of websites with language-plugins.
There are now many languages for the JVM. There is a good chance that you can finagle your favorite language onto a JVM somehow. This is more work for the individual programmer, but it requires no effort on the part of users. Remember, when you put something on the web it has to be viewable by most users, otherwise it will just alientate them. When you get one of those boxes that asks you to download something just so you can view a website, how often do you click Yes?
So, if [other language] had trumpted a platform neutral VM first we would probably be asking the same questions about [other language]. Java got there first and has established a huge installed base and name recognition, so until something comes along that just blows it away in terms of capability, programmer-friendliness, or installed base we are stuck with it. So far, MS CLR looks like the only thing that has a chance at doing that, and it is more friendly towards implementing a wide variety of languages than the JVM.
The CLR/C# developers seem to have a thing for functional programming languages, so stuff like OCaml and Haskel (sp.?) could get a shot in the arm from C#.
A lot of what I've heard is along the lines of "you can take the cities, but you'll be forever deviled by hordes coming out of the high valleys".
You also hear a lot of stuff like "there is no beach-head" and "this is a different kind of war".
OK, so the proper response to a different kind of war is a different kind of fight. Instead of taking the cities and then trying to "mop up" the notoriously difficult mountains, why not do it in reverse?
I've been thinking that we should check out these valleys and make sure that a small defensible area is clear. Then, you drop troops and supplies in that area to establish a "valley-head". You do this several places. The choices would be based on how much you can see, and what routes you can see. The mission of these forward bases is to shoot anything that carries a weapon, and to gradually explore and secure the area around the base, eventually establishing checkpoints, or "chokepoints" if you prefer. These guys eventually have to come out of their holes, and we can run surveillance on them day and night.
Once this is accomplished, then, and only then you invade the cities. If they are in the cities it is not so bad because urban fighting is historicly our strength. Once a city is captured, it is secured by house-to-house search for any and all weapons and contraband.
Once the country is controlled, it then becomes a matter of figuring out what government to install and/or how to partition the country. That is a more difficult problem. Expanding the former Soviet republics might not be such a bad idea since there are many ethnic Tadziks, Uzbeks, etc. already there. However, there would probably still have to be some kind of Afghanistan and we may not want to expand Pakistan or Iran.
Imagine a "United States of Islam" or "Islamic Union". That could be much, much worse, especially if it took on the characteristics of a quasi-fascist megapower like China. Then again, it might also be tranquilized by the desire for trade. That is a tough call.
The other worry is that if we stay there too long we could end up building infrastructure that might later be used by China to move troops into the oil fields of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Remember, this is the old "silk road" we are talking about here. As China becomes more and more industrial we have to be wary of what they are going to do when they have the same thirst for oil that we have. So, regardless of what plan we execute we should be careful not to build a modern silk road.
To a great extent this whole mess all started with the US fighting the Soviet Union by proxy. So much for the Cold War being over.
Stand beside her, and... nah. Let's just all move to Europe.
(in case you can't tell, that was SARCASM)
Five thousand dead in a single accident is
Accident!?
How much longer will it be before there is an "accident" involving biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons?
This is not to say that the statistics you cite aren't important or accurate. The difference is that those problems aren't likely to grow into a threat that could destroy the entire country.
Why not just put it in the public domain
Self defense. Placing something in the public domain doesn't give you any disclaimer of liability.
Run system file checker after you get this. Riched20.dll may be corrupted. My headers looked like this:
d esktopdesktopsamplemakefiledesktopjeditcvsmakefile jeditcvsmakefiledesktopdesktopjeditcvsmakefilesamp lejeditcvsmakefilemakefiledesktopjeditcvssamplemak efilesamplesamplejeditcvsdesktmail-incoming2.ahnet .net.jeditcvs
A AA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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boundary="====_ABC0987654321DEF_===="
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charset="iso-8859-1"
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<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
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</iframe></BODY></HTML>
--====_ABC0987654321DEF_====--
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Content-Type: audio/x-wav;
name="readme.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-ID: <EA4DMGBP9p>
TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
[the remainder of the message is base64 encoded, also please note that some of the characters in the Subject line are unprintable and were replaced with '.' when pasted]
I was alerted to the problem by a dialog box that quickly disappeared, and a lot of extra hard drive activity. I crash-booted my box, and when it came back up there were no extra processes or files, and the registry checked out but that DLL was corrupted.
What If IslamWay.com Really Was A Terrorist Board? Wouldn't it be better to leave it in place and have the CIA monitor it?
In the wake of the attacks, there are just far too many people letting their emotions do the driving.
Take the attacks on Arab-Americans for instance. Not only are these vigilante idiots mistaking Sihks for Moslems, they are totally forgetting what Arab-Americans (even if persecuted) will probably end up doing for us in ways that we can only begin to imagine and may never know about becase many operations will be secret.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Tuskeegee Airmen, The Navajo Code Talkers, and the Japanese "Nisei" who fought in Europe.
If you don't understand the last paragraph, do some reading and get back to me. Then let me know if it still makes sense to vandalize Mosques and shoot people who look like Arabs.
But... I told you so. (this additional fluff added to dodge the postercomment compression filter).
As someone a little bit closer to this issue (check webpage) this is why I think VRML failed.
1. VRML-97 is not a superset of VRML-1. There are features in VRML-1 that don't convert easily to VRML-97 so people who started with VRML-1 had to re-do a lot of stuff by hand. That discouraged a lot of the early movers.
2. The VRML-97 specification specified too many things that didn't need to be specified (like text layout, which looks crappy in VRML anyway) and initially failed to specify some things very well. There was some question about what scripting should be used at first, later Java and ECMAScript worked their way in but that leads me to...
3. It duplicated things that could be done with other things. In particular, you can do a lot of 3d with Java, and if you are going to use Java to script your VRML world anyway you might as well just do everything in Java which leads me to...
4. Crappy installed base. Really weak VRML browser shipped with IE and Netscape died before its decision could have made any impact.
5. Somewhat different computing paradigm. The VRML file contains "sensors" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. In other words, the data drives the code instead of the code driving the data. Is it a file format? A programming language? What is it? I'll tell you, introducing a different way of computing is fine, but they didn't pitch it that way, which tells me that it was more of an accident. It's always a bad sign when different ways of doing things get introduced by accident.
6. Bloated syntax. I know I'll catch it from some people for this, but I stand by it. Why was the proposal for VRML-97 called VRML-2? I'll tell you: because it has twice as many brackets and braces as VRML-1, and it doesn't really make things any easier to read.
7. Performance, performance, performance. A few months ago someone on comp.lang.vrml posted something that looked like a simple Quake level. It ran at 1 FPS on my box in a tiny little window. The same box runs Quake full screen at least 24 FPS, probably more but I can't tell and I don't care because Quake looks fine. The VRML performance problem is intractable too, because it doesn't have any standard way to do BSP or any of the other tricks that games do.
There are probably other reasons too; that's just the top of my list. Oh well, I had a lot of fun with it in the early days, and I learned a lot coding for it but it is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. I use my VRML program mostly to create animated GIFs and for photo-shop like effects (layering translucent PNGs and taking screen shots is cool) and I keep the web page up because I hate to kill stuff. I harbor no delusions. VRML will never see mass appeal. It seems to have carved out a niche in some government and academic circles, but there is no excitement there, no profit, and not much life.
Sell Slashdot to NYT online. That would solve all the login problems too.
If anybody found it offensive I offer my deepest, sincerest apologies.