That's basically an iPhone or similar device but with a much more high-quality camera than at present. So basically, the device you're talking about already exists, or will exist as soon as there is sufficient demand.
HIRE A FUCKING LAWYER. Why on earth is it that people keep asking these questions when they know full well that no one here is a lawyer and half the posts are signed with "IANAL"? They have lawyers for a reason, that reason is to give you legal representation in matters involving the interpretation of the LAW. You need a lawyer, not a bunch of people on the interwebs claiming that "they've seen such and such a technique work", "long ago", and "once when my friend got sued by this one guy".
I refuse to accept that the legal system we are all obligated to conform to can only be interpreted by some wizard class. It reminds me of my days in Catholic church -- "Don't read the Bible. You're too stupid to understand it correctly. Instead, you must be told by a properly trained member of the clergy what the Bible does or does not say." That's a load of horse shit.
Once the law becomes so convoluted that only a specialized class of people are able to comprehend it, we are then completely subjugated by the legal system. The power to create law ultimately derives from the people. Therefore, laws should be comprehensible to the people. Otherwise, how are we supposed to know whether the laws are being applied as we intended them?
20% for people over 55 years and 16% for those under 25. Yeap, you read it right, 20% of Twitter users are over 55 years."
Kind of scary, isn't it?
I had to think about this for a second. No, I don't think it's scary. Think about when the Internet first started to hit public consciousness. What, 1994, 1995 or so? Those 55-year-olds were in their early 40's then. Is it so hard to imagine people of that age clicking with the new order right away? We're talking about people the age of your high school teachers. It's hard to remember sometimes, how much time has passed. 55 isn't old anymore, in Internet terms.
The toddler watching TV is a cardinal sin in our house. If I'm watching some program and my son walks into the room I have to turn the TV off. It's sometimes a little annoying but I don't want the kid zoning into a screen.
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Bits of what is the real question?
The question is meaningless, because bits have no unit. They are dimensionless. This is easily seen by looking at Shannon's definition of information entropy. The average entropy in bits of a random source is a weighted sum of logarithms. Logarithms are dimensionless. Therefore, the bit is also dimensionless.
An analogous physical quantity would be angle. Angle has no unit (and the unit is not "angle," there simply isn't one). Note that you can take the sine of an angle. You couldn't do that if angle had a unit associated with it.
Now, there are different scalings possible for quantities of information. Instead of bits (base 2) you could use bans (base 10) or nats (base e). But these are analogous to measuring angles in radians vs. degrees. The underlying quantity is dimensionless no matter how you scale it.
I'm a father of a two year old. I think my brain experienced some kind of segfault when I read this. What is a two (or even three) year old going to say in a text message?
I don't see anything inherently wrong with exposure to technology at a young age. But I think the world (at least among first world countries) is already so saturated with technology that it's hardly necessary to go deliberately pushing it in kid's faces. I'd have to go out of my way to make my son interested in a cell phone. He's far too obsessed with other things, like a stick lying on the ground, or a butterfly flying across his face, or jumping up in down while rotating in a circle until he gets so dizzy he falls over in hysterics.
Compare those experiences with -- what -- sitting in a chair zoning into a tiny little screen? There will be time for that later. Right now, it seems far more important that he learn a few basic facts. Like, I don't know, the basic physical nature of reality. The fundamental rules of social interaction with other children and adults. The way the grass feels on your skin as you roll down a hill.
I don't forbid the child to play with a piece of technology. He just isn't interested in it. Every child is different, but I have to wonder if some parents are deliberately pushing technology on their kids when they'd much rather be doing something else. The world is a big, complex, and rich place. Technology has a way of latching into our minds and compelling us to sit for hours zoning into a screen. I'd rather delay that until later, and does that really make me a bad parent or a Luddite?
One tenet you hear bandied about is "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Given just a little thought it's easy to see that this axiom is untrue. Were it true, any organization (company or OSS leadership) could produce bug-free code by using a huge number of developers. And being able to claim that one's software is 100% bug free is a great marketing cookie, so if it were possible, you would expect many companies to be doing it, and many companies to be claiming 100% correct code. Yet we do not see this in software engineering. There is no perfect code, nobody claims it, and -- we do NOT throw a huge number of developers at a piece of code. The problem is that the communication overhead between developers becomes so large that the task becomes unmanageable. Anybody who doesn't get this needs to read Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month".
Given enough eyeballs, a group of people becomes incapable of making directed progress on an engineering task. That is a far more accurate axiom.
Giving false info to obtain something of value is a crime. PERIOD. Just because everybody on this site commits it doesn't change the fact that its a crime (just like speeding).
Speeding is not a crime. It is a traffic infraction. If speeding was a crime, a speeding ticket would result in a criminal record.
No it doesn't. Unfortunately, as much as I would like to say that there is something to that, karma is total bullshit. I mean, Hitler committed suicide before we could get to him -- how's that for karma?
If you really buy into the karma theory, then you know that the balancing of karma can occur over multiple lifetimes. Just because you die before karma balances doesn't mean there will be no balance. Remember that most religions which have a karma concept also incorporate the reincarnation concept.
Pigs and chickens?? Are you f*cking kidding me?? Does any other engineering profession come up with crap like this? Do civil engineers sit around deciding who the ScrumMaster is going to be when they're gonna build a bridge.
It's facetious. Most people don't use those terms on a daily basis. The distinction between pigs and chickens is basically between who defines the priorities and who executes the workload. Also, chickens can't talk in the daily meetings. What this actually means is that the managers don't get to yell at you during the daily standup. Who the hell would say THAT's a bad thing?
- the bad focus: if you focus on the code quality or on Agile methods, you lose the goal which is to code faster. We have such a focus on code quality that any simple task requires days to code. It's ridiculous.
I suppose it depends on your product, but I've never considered the velocity to be where the value of the method lies. Instead it is the order of magnitude increase in code quality that appeals to me. I've seen the process work miracles in circumstances where there was a tight deadline and a requirement for high quality. But in our case, slipping the deadline is preferable to releasing incompletely tested code.
Your natural velocity (rate of backlog difficulty execution per team member) depends mostly on the team itself, not the little idiosyncracies of your process. If your process is getting in the way it should be changed, but assuming the process is at fault is a lot like assuming you've found a compiler bug -- it could happen, but it's usually something else.
A couple times a month I see some idiot clearly not paying attention on the road and making dangerous decisions. The only clear pattern I've ever observed is that 9 times out of 10 it's someone on a cell-phone.
Ah, but you're confusing cause and effect. Cooper's Laws state that when a dangerous situation begins to form there is a time rate-of-change of the local cellunetic field. This field causes all nearby telecommunications objects to experience a force directly toward the nearest person's cranium (your skull is negatively cellunetically charged and the phone is positively charged). This force causes the cellphone to be pulled toward the cranium. In some instances it can be thrown with enough force to cause actual brain damage.
This is why I always carry a large, negatively cellunetically charged object in my car, like a pit bull (it's well known that pit bulls are dangerous and generate a large cellunetic field). The cell phone will be drawn to the pit bull instead of my skull. If you'd been paying attention in physics instead of texting on your phone you would have learned this.
Wow, your creativity has inspired me. We don't need laws, we can create TECHNICAL solutions. For instance, we don't actually need a law against murder. Instead we can attach a device to each person's brain which will immediately kill them upon sensing murderous thinking. You know, this is really a great idea. Why hold people to a standard of morality and responsibility when we can simply prevent them from doing anything that could possibly harm someone else? It's great -- now we can all go back to behaving like animals and rely on "the system" to keep us safe.
This is exactly why we only have idiots working in government. The smart people understand that a draconian work environment is too psychically punishing to make it worthwhile. Maybe if the "taxpayers" stopped treating government workers like robots and more like human beings we would motivate intelligent and creative people to work in government.
Then you go off and wonder why government employees are all complete dickheads. I think you are getting what you are asking for.
If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.
Are you seriously arguing for net-wide SPI and looking into people's TCP streams? How else do you propose we determine the protocol in use? The port number is just a convention, not a confirmation of what underlying protocol is in use.
As soon as you tell me that port X gets faster rates than some other port, I will adjust my services to use port X in order to get enhanced throughput, and you're nuts if you think people are not going to do that. So you end up completely failing to achieve your goal while breaking the usability of the network by incentivizing people to use port numbers that don't correspond to the traditional service residing at that port.
The alternative is actual inspection of packet contents. No thanks, dude.
Having (unfortunately) been involved in a defamation case myself, I think it would have been an awfully interesting trial. In order to be defamation, a statement must 1) be untrue and 2) cause damage to somebody's reputation.
So what we're talking about here are the words "skank," "ho," and "psychotic." Is calling somebody a skank a statement of fact? We would need a legal definition of what a "skank" is. I figure it would take several days of legal argument just to hash out that part of it. Then, having established the legal definition of a "skank," Ms. Cohen would have to provide at least some evidence that she is not, in fact, a skank (unlike a criminal trial, civil suits are based on a preponderance of the evidence -- if Cohen does not actively defend herself, she loses). So her private sexual life will now become a matter of public record.
How about "psychotic?" Well, that's certainly something we can prove in court. We'll subject Ms. Cohen to a battery of psychological tests to determine her state of mind. That should certainly be pleasant for her.
Now, "ho" is a bit more complicated. Does it literally mean "whore," a.k.a. prostitute? We'll need to legally define this as well.
I think what happened here is that some lawyer with a brain finally clued her in about what exactly would happen in court if she pushed this through. You don't get to just stand there and say "It's not true, poo on you."
Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant.
Why do I give a shit if the man profits from it? Good for him. You sound like one of those guys on the freeway who lets nobody merge just because you don't want anybody to get ahead of you. I was not aware that it was a race or competition.
sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system)
How is this tying up the court system? I suppose you'd prefer if everybody sued individually, multiplying the case load by thousands of times? I really am not following this logic.
That's the rooting reflex, and it's instinctual. What is not instinctual is the actual connection of the mouth onto the nipple (known as "latch"). The baby does not understand how to properly do this any more than the woman does -- if the behavior was instinctive, you would expect the woman to also intuitively know what to do. However, many woman/baby pairs have great difficulty making it work, with results like nipple soreness, clogged milk ducts and the resulting infections, etc. This is the basis of the lactation consultation industry. No, breastfeeding is a learned activity with some instincts which help it work better.
Or you could just shut the whole thing off. From my understanding, the only useful reason to have a BitTorrent client running is to either download or upload data. Without the main PC running, how will you access main storage in order to save and retrieve this information? Unless the network stick has several GB of persistent storage on it (which is possible, of course) I can't see how that would be useful.
But if we're just looking to save power and torrent shit at the same time, why not use a small, low-power device, such as a multifunction mobile, and port a BT client to it?
I fail to see the purpose of this hack, cool as it is. Basically it's a tiny, low-power computer which connects to your PC. Why not just do that over a USB link and gain the advantage of a portable network device you can take anywhere?
Pretty much what I was thinking. I don't think it detracts from the "cool" factor, though. Life on earth, in general, is pretty cool. Evolution really seems to entail two things. One, those patterns which are most effective at continuing to persist, continue to persist. That's really a tautology when you think about it, and not very interesting. What IS interesting is how the self-sustaining patterns of the universe seem to become more complex. I can't think of any simple reason why this complexity arises, but it does seem to arise.
I'm reminded of a drive I took on a country road in the autumn. I noticed that all the leaves were neatly pushed to the sides of the roadway, and there were no leaves on the road itself. It looks like it is by design, that some intelligent force decided to arrange the leaves this way. But the simple truth is, the leaves which are on the road are moved by the wind of passing cars. They continue to be moved until they come to rest on the side of the road, at which point the wind no longer affects them. So the neat arrangement of leaves is nothing but the inevitable outcome of a fact which is hardly worth mentioning. And yet we have this complexity.
I'm not surprised by these robots, but it's still awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought we already discounted hydroelectric as being "bad for the fishies." So I think your water-lifting idea is out.
If I take a hard drive from one machine to a different machine how is that not the same as moving the bits?
That's basically an iPhone or similar device but with a much more high-quality camera than at present. So basically, the device you're talking about already exists, or will exist as soon as there is sufficient demand.
HIRE A FUCKING LAWYER. Why on earth is it that people keep asking these questions when they know full well that no one here is a lawyer and half the posts are signed with "IANAL"? They have lawyers for a reason, that reason is to give you legal representation in matters involving the interpretation of the LAW. You need a lawyer, not a bunch of people on the interwebs claiming that "they've seen such and such a technique work", "long ago", and "once when my friend got sued by this one guy".
I refuse to accept that the legal system we are all obligated to conform to can only be interpreted by some wizard class. It reminds me of my days in Catholic church -- "Don't read the Bible. You're too stupid to understand it correctly. Instead, you must be told by a properly trained member of the clergy what the Bible does or does not say." That's a load of horse shit.
Once the law becomes so convoluted that only a specialized class of people are able to comprehend it, we are then completely subjugated by the legal system. The power to create law ultimately derives from the people. Therefore, laws should be comprehensible to the people. Otherwise, how are we supposed to know whether the laws are being applied as we intended them?
20% for people over 55 years and 16% for those under 25. Yeap, you read it right, 20% of Twitter users are over 55 years."
Kind of scary, isn't it?
I had to think about this for a second. No, I don't think it's scary. Think about when the Internet first started to hit public consciousness. What, 1994, 1995 or so? Those 55-year-olds were in their early 40's then. Is it so hard to imagine people of that age clicking with the new order right away? We're talking about people the age of your high school teachers. It's hard to remember sometimes, how much time has passed. 55 isn't old anymore, in Internet terms.
The toddler watching TV is a cardinal sin in our house. If I'm watching some program and my son walks into the room I have to turn the TV off. It's sometimes a little annoying but I don't want the kid zoning into a screen.
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Bits of what is the real question?
The question is meaningless, because bits have no unit. They are dimensionless. This is easily seen by looking at Shannon's definition of information entropy. The average entropy in bits of a random source is a weighted sum of logarithms. Logarithms are dimensionless. Therefore, the bit is also dimensionless.
An analogous physical quantity would be angle. Angle has no unit (and the unit is not "angle," there simply isn't one). Note that you can take the sine of an angle. You couldn't do that if angle had a unit associated with it.
Now, there are different scalings possible for quantities of information. Instead of bits (base 2) you could use bans (base 10) or nats (base e). But these are analogous to measuring angles in radians vs. degrees. The underlying quantity is dimensionless no matter how you scale it.
I'm a father of a two year old. I think my brain experienced some kind of segfault when I read this. What is a two (or even three) year old going to say in a text message?
I don't see anything inherently wrong with exposure to technology at a young age. But I think the world (at least among first world countries) is already so saturated with technology that it's hardly necessary to go deliberately pushing it in kid's faces. I'd have to go out of my way to make my son interested in a cell phone. He's far too obsessed with other things, like a stick lying on the ground, or a butterfly flying across his face, or jumping up in down while rotating in a circle until he gets so dizzy he falls over in hysterics.
Compare those experiences with -- what -- sitting in a chair zoning into a tiny little screen? There will be time for that later. Right now, it seems far more important that he learn a few basic facts. Like, I don't know, the basic physical nature of reality. The fundamental rules of social interaction with other children and adults. The way the grass feels on your skin as you roll down a hill.
I don't forbid the child to play with a piece of technology. He just isn't interested in it. Every child is different, but I have to wonder if some parents are deliberately pushing technology on their kids when they'd much rather be doing something else. The world is a big, complex, and rich place. Technology has a way of latching into our minds and compelling us to sit for hours zoning into a screen. I'd rather delay that until later, and does that really make me a bad parent or a Luddite?
One tenet you hear bandied about is "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Given just a little thought it's easy to see that this axiom is untrue. Were it true, any organization (company or OSS leadership) could produce bug-free code by using a huge number of developers. And being able to claim that one's software is 100% bug free is a great marketing cookie, so if it were possible, you would expect many companies to be doing it, and many companies to be claiming 100% correct code. Yet we do not see this in software engineering. There is no perfect code, nobody claims it, and -- we do NOT throw a huge number of developers at a piece of code. The problem is that the communication overhead between developers becomes so large that the task becomes unmanageable. Anybody who doesn't get this needs to read Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month".
Given enough eyeballs, a group of people becomes incapable of making directed progress on an engineering task. That is a far more accurate axiom.
Giving false info to obtain something of value is a crime. PERIOD. Just because everybody on this site commits it doesn't change the fact that its a crime (just like speeding).
Speeding is not a crime. It is a traffic infraction. If speeding was a crime, a speeding ticket would result in a criminal record.
No it doesn't. Unfortunately, as much as I would like to say that there is something to that, karma is total bullshit. I mean, Hitler committed suicide before we could get to him -- how's that for karma?
If you really buy into the karma theory, then you know that the balancing of karma can occur over multiple lifetimes. Just because you die before karma balances doesn't mean there will be no balance. Remember that most religions which have a karma concept also incorporate the reincarnation concept.
Pigs and chickens?? Are you f*cking kidding me?? Does any other engineering profession come up with crap like this? Do civil engineers sit around deciding who the ScrumMaster is going to be when they're gonna build a bridge.
It's facetious. Most people don't use those terms on a daily basis. The distinction between pigs and chickens is basically between who defines the priorities and who executes the workload. Also, chickens can't talk in the daily meetings. What this actually means is that the managers don't get to yell at you during the daily standup. Who the hell would say THAT's a bad thing?
- the bad focus: if you focus on the code quality or on Agile methods, you lose the goal which is to code faster. We have such a focus on code quality that any simple task requires days to code. It's ridiculous.
I suppose it depends on your product, but I've never considered the velocity to be where the value of the method lies. Instead it is the order of magnitude increase in code quality that appeals to me. I've seen the process work miracles in circumstances where there was a tight deadline and a requirement for high quality. But in our case, slipping the deadline is preferable to releasing incompletely tested code.
Your natural velocity (rate of backlog difficulty execution per team member) depends mostly on the team itself, not the little idiosyncracies of your process. If your process is getting in the way it should be changed, but assuming the process is at fault is a lot like assuming you've found a compiler bug -- it could happen, but it's usually something else.
A couple times a month I see some idiot clearly not paying attention on the road and making dangerous decisions. The only clear pattern I've ever observed is that 9 times out of 10 it's someone on a cell-phone.
Ah, but you're confusing cause and effect. Cooper's Laws state that when a dangerous situation begins to form there is a time rate-of-change of the local cellunetic field. This field causes all nearby telecommunications objects to experience a force directly toward the nearest person's cranium (your skull is negatively cellunetically charged and the phone is positively charged). This force causes the cellphone to be pulled toward the cranium. In some instances it can be thrown with enough force to cause actual brain damage.
This is why I always carry a large, negatively cellunetically charged object in my car, like a pit bull (it's well known that pit bulls are dangerous and generate a large cellunetic field). The cell phone will be drawn to the pit bull instead of my skull. If you'd been paying attention in physics instead of texting on your phone you would have learned this.
Wow, your creativity has inspired me. We don't need laws, we can create TECHNICAL solutions. For instance, we don't actually need a law against murder. Instead we can attach a device to each person's brain which will immediately kill them upon sensing murderous thinking. You know, this is really a great idea. Why hold people to a standard of morality and responsibility when we can simply prevent them from doing anything that could possibly harm someone else? It's great -- now we can all go back to behaving like animals and rely on "the system" to keep us safe.
Oh yeah sure, but YOU, you were attending a defensive driving course for other reasons and are, of course, no danger to anyone on the road.
This is exactly why we only have idiots working in government. The smart people understand that a draconian work environment is too psychically punishing to make it worthwhile. Maybe if the "taxpayers" stopped treating government workers like robots and more like human beings we would motivate intelligent and creative people to work in government.
Then you go off and wonder why government employees are all complete dickheads. I think you are getting what you are asking for.
Is your app from 1995 supported on Windows 7? I'm impressed.
If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.
Are you seriously arguing for net-wide SPI and looking into people's TCP streams? How else do you propose we determine the protocol in use? The port number is just a convention, not a confirmation of what underlying protocol is in use.
As soon as you tell me that port X gets faster rates than some other port, I will adjust my services to use port X in order to get enhanced throughput, and you're nuts if you think people are not going to do that. So you end up completely failing to achieve your goal while breaking the usability of the network by incentivizing people to use port numbers that don't correspond to the traditional service residing at that port.
The alternative is actual inspection of packet contents. No thanks, dude.
Having (unfortunately) been involved in a defamation case myself, I think it would have been an awfully interesting trial. In order to be defamation, a statement must 1) be untrue and 2) cause damage to somebody's reputation.
So what we're talking about here are the words "skank," "ho," and "psychotic." Is calling somebody a skank a statement of fact? We would need a legal definition of what a "skank" is. I figure it would take several days of legal argument just to hash out that part of it. Then, having established the legal definition of a "skank," Ms. Cohen would have to provide at least some evidence that she is not, in fact, a skank (unlike a criminal trial, civil suits are based on a preponderance of the evidence -- if Cohen does not actively defend herself, she loses). So her private sexual life will now become a matter of public record.
How about "psychotic?" Well, that's certainly something we can prove in court. We'll subject Ms. Cohen to a battery of psychological tests to determine her state of mind. That should certainly be pleasant for her.
Now, "ho" is a bit more complicated. Does it literally mean "whore," a.k.a. prostitute? We'll need to legally define this as well.
I think what happened here is that some lawyer with a brain finally clued her in about what exactly would happen in court if she pushed this through. You don't get to just stand there and say "It's not true, poo on you."
Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant.
Why do I give a shit if the man profits from it? Good for him. You sound like one of those guys on the freeway who lets nobody merge just because you don't want anybody to get ahead of you. I was not aware that it was a race or competition.
sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system)
How is this tying up the court system? I suppose you'd prefer if everybody sued individually, multiplying the case load by thousands of times? I really am not following this logic.
That's the rooting reflex, and it's instinctual. What is not instinctual is the actual connection of the mouth onto the nipple (known as "latch"). The baby does not understand how to properly do this any more than the woman does -- if the behavior was instinctive, you would expect the woman to also intuitively know what to do. However, many woman/baby pairs have great difficulty making it work, with results like nipple soreness, clogged milk ducts and the resulting infections, etc. This is the basis of the lactation consultation industry. No, breastfeeding is a learned activity with some instincts which help it work better.
This much discussion and not a single link to the IDE Killer (scroll about halfway down)?
Or you could just shut the whole thing off. From my understanding, the only useful reason to have a BitTorrent client running is to either download or upload data. Without the main PC running, how will you access main storage in order to save and retrieve this information? Unless the network stick has several GB of persistent storage on it (which is possible, of course) I can't see how that would be useful.
But if we're just looking to save power and torrent shit at the same time, why not use a small, low-power device, such as a multifunction mobile, and port a BT client to it?
I fail to see the purpose of this hack, cool as it is. Basically it's a tiny, low-power computer which connects to your PC. Why not just do that over a USB link and gain the advantage of a portable network device you can take anywhere?
Pretty much what I was thinking. I don't think it detracts from the "cool" factor, though. Life on earth, in general, is pretty cool. Evolution really seems to entail two things. One, those patterns which are most effective at continuing to persist, continue to persist. That's really a tautology when you think about it, and not very interesting. What IS interesting is how the self-sustaining patterns of the universe seem to become more complex. I can't think of any simple reason why this complexity arises, but it does seem to arise.
I'm reminded of a drive I took on a country road in the autumn. I noticed that all the leaves were neatly pushed to the sides of the roadway, and there were no leaves on the road itself. It looks like it is by design, that some intelligent force decided to arrange the leaves this way. But the simple truth is, the leaves which are on the road are moved by the wind of passing cars. They continue to be moved until they come to rest on the side of the road, at which point the wind no longer affects them. So the neat arrangement of leaves is nothing but the inevitable outcome of a fact which is hardly worth mentioning. And yet we have this complexity.
I'm not surprised by these robots, but it's still awesome.