Does this mean that JAVA gets an Extra Long? And maybe a Quadruple? And now UNICODE can expand to 8 bytes per character. Get to include extraterrestial character sets like Klingon and Vulcan.
They rarely achieve the goals they set up an justify their action by. They most often simply trade one set of brutal power brokers for another.
The only "revolution" I have any sympathy for is the so called American Revolution which was 1) really a war of independence rather than a revolution, and 2) more a "revolution" in the philosophies of law, politics, and government having power divided up with check and balances so that dictatorships became unlikely or impossible. So far it has worked. The advent of parlimentary systems in European countries, and many other countries is an extrapolation of that "revolution" of thought rather than an in-the-streets revolution.
When China finally gives into a multi-party state they will be very close to achieving that revolution of thought. How that will occur is still being worked out by the Chinese.
The big problem with Leninist government, such as in China, is that a one party government has no checks on its power and eventually becomes corrupt and self-serving. The other problem is that the people are seldom more than apathetic and even vainly hope to benefit from the corruption. You can expect that corruption will increase, not decrease, in China as the Communist Party there approaches the end of its rope. Unfortunately, as they control the press, you may hear less about it. Cuba is a good example of that process also. Fidel is smoking rope. He is not a "good father" but a brutal dictator. How many Cubans in Cuba have you had a chat with lately on the Internet who expressed other than the party line? When there is no disagreement at all you know that something is very wrong. They can't even tell you the real color now of Fidel's beard!
Last year, when my son graduated from high school, I wanted to take him on a trip around the world to celebrate his achievements. (He also was awarded his Eagle Scout rank. And was a leader of his Sea Scout group.) My plans were to fly to Beijing and take the Trans Mongolian rail to Irkutsk, Russia, and then the Trans Siberian rail to Moscow and points west. But the Yugoslavian war came along and we had to do a tour of Europe instead. It had become too dangerous for Americans to travel in Russia and China may have ignored our visas when we stepped off the plane.
But during the process of getting ready before we had to call that trip off, I got familiar with the Chinese people on the Internet in both Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. I exchanged email with a few people in those cities. One guy in Shanghai was interested in getting a new digital camera and so was I so we compared notes.
One woman I exchanged email with worked in Beijing for the government monitoring the Internet for sites that were "anti-Chinese" (meaning any criticism of the government's policies, whether they were political, sexual, or religious). I didn't want to put her on the spot by raising the moral and ethical issues that her job implied. And she was helpful on getting an inexpensive place to stay.
But I was reminded of similar censoring responsibilities our own civilization assigned to the religious establishments up until the mid-1950s. We mostly think of them as being anti-ponorgaphic but even earlier they and the governments of Europe (the USA wasn't around yet) were quite active in suppressing any anti-government sentiment until it boiled over into revolutions.
Look back on our own history and discover how we moved to a more open society. Basically, the truth is that a centralized government is the most inefficient form of government and slowly falls apart by its own centripital forces. Intelligent people in China will become astute in using that to their advantage. It is a dangerous game but the demon that allowed the cultural revolution to start is dead and slowly being turned into a beneign shadow of his former SOB self.
That is the threat that China is faced with. If it suppresses too much it will eventually face a revolution. If it has too much freedom of expression it will (it believes) disintegrate into anarchy. And its people have the dangerous game of teasing this mad beast into doing what it would not do itself.
China has the following difficult problems to solve: 1) Its population, 2) How to move to a Democracy without falling into revolution or anarchy. Everything else is minor by comparison.
Bypassing the government censors will happen. Our job is to help it happen. You do want Chinese to be able to read Slasdot, don't you?
So China must open up whether it wants to or not a little bit at a time. I have this visual image of a person timidly and slowly getting wet at the edge of an ocean. Yes, it is silly and tragic. But it is their choice (so far). And at least there is email communication, even if it is somewhat limited. And there are Internet cafes in Beijing and other large Cities (almost every city in China is a large city by our standards).
So I challenge you out there to come up with clever ways to help the Chinese citizens to bypass their government censors! It is really not that difficult a problem if you think about it. Have fun.
Actually even fingerprints can be forged. There are an awfull lot of issues here that need to be raised. What if some company starts using your electronic signature for purposes other than what you originally sent it in for? What protections exist? What recouse for fraud? Will this lead to a Federal Department of Signatures? Is this a federal or a state issue? Gee, we have enough issues to keep us busy for the next 50 years. Just because France and Italy have legalized it doesn't mean that the USA should jump off that cliff.
My guess is that we will see a lot more of this until two things happen: 1) The Internet is reduced to utter chaos. There are just not enough FBI agents to plug all the holes. 2) In reaction to the chaos, limits are placed on the actions of users and devices. This may lead to a leap-frog process. However, the consequence of that "security" may itself be another problem. A way to reduce the risk for this is to not take "revenge" against assumed foes. And work through the system. Yes, you should work with the FBI. Unfortunately, we have a generation reaching for power that doesn't always understand the consequence of their actions. And, remember, that at least 3% of any population are sociopaths. Enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts.
This is really silly. Why bring your children up in a Santa Claus level of religion? A much better answer to your daughter is that you don't know. Really a hard thing for a lot of people to do.
Good going. Challenge the Masters. Tweek the formulas. I look forward to the results of this debate. As for the fundamentalist comments...they don't have the minds to comprehend anything but simple concepts and Santa Claus versions of God. Ignore them (except when they try to ban the science of evolution from schools, or ban books). They don't worship God anyway but some wierd Demon of Ignorance.
Bill Gates reminds me of the Farmer who said he wasn't greedy; he just wanted all the land that bordered his farm. The serious problem with Microsoft and Mr. Gates is that he has his fingers in everything. If he is not stopped soon he will be the first dictator of the world.
I've been in the computer field for 35 years and I have never heard the term "hacker" used in a complimentrary way. Same for "cracker", unless you are from Florida or Georgia. We also call them "bit-flippers". People that like to tweek and not document their work. Hackers better come up with another word. They lost the battle a long time ago and are not socially aware to realize it.
I gave both of my kids a 26 language Lingo Translator for Christmas two years ago. Only $99. http://www.4biz.com/lingo/products/index.html It is handy when you are travelling in Europe, Asia, or South America. I had planned on taking my son on a trip around the world as his graduation present by flying to Beijing and taking the Trans-Mongolian Train to Irkutsk, Russia, and then from there on the Trans-Siberian Train to Moscow and on into Berlin and Paris. There is a tour company in HongKong that handles all the red tape and getting the tickets. But the Yugoslavian War came along and suddenly it was not a good idea to go to China or Russia. We did a tour in most of Europe instead. The funny thing is that everywhere we went in Europe, most everyone knew English. Even in Paris. And the French are NOT rude. Really great people. Only a few times in Germany did I need to use my college Deutsch. And even there they spoke English in all the Internet Cafes. By the way, Internet Cafes are also great places to download your digital camera's pictures onto a Zip Drive disk or onto a R/W CD. Then your memory cards can be cleared and used again. There are also several web sites that will translate text for you by cut and paste.
Newton was heavily into alchemy
on
NASA Snake-Bots
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· Score: 1
Actually Newton was heavily into alchemy. And I doubt if anybody laughted at him then.
I'm a little puzzled here. Why is you program downloading child porn 5% of the time? Especially if the person didn't request it. This is a pretty high number. One out of every 20 downloads. Are you designing your program to search for "random porn" or are you saying that one out of every 20 persons is asking for child porn, or that one out of every 20 web files to download is child porn? Sounds like your program has a "perversion" and should be removed.
We need more sites like this to make it dangerous for perverts to use the Net. I'm tired of a permissive society that thinks it is all right as long as they don't know about it. The Master at Saybrook College, Yale University, was dismissed, tried and convicted of downloading child porn last year. He's files were discovered by accident when he used his computer at in his office to down load the stuff. They are going through reversal of tenure proceedings right now to eliminate his last claim to Yale University. He will never teach in a university again. And good for Yale to be vigilant in eliminating this trash. The senior vice president of the largest Teachers Union in California was also convicted of child porn charges. In other words, it is clear that pedofiles gravitate to educational institutions and there must be extra caution in examining the backgrounds of all people in the educational business for such tendencies. The guy that traced the IPs back to edus ought to notify the educational sites that they have people there accessing child porn!
I'm amused by the comments about Dr. Brown's Loglan, (now: Lojban). I knew Dr. Brown when I was with the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, where Loglan was developed. Used to go out to his place on a lake east of the town. He was a very entertaining person. I realized that it was a futile effort then (back in the late 1960s) as one of the most important functions of any language was to allow ambiguity, obfuscation, and other acts that we don't often think of as verbal things. Usually we think they are some limitation or defect of a language instead of a necessary part of the language. A language that attempts to eliminate that is not a language that people will use. That is the fundemental flaw of Loglan/Lojban. I think the Lojban name was created as Dr. Brown had a copyright on the Loglan language and a splinter group wanted to control the development of the language.
Unlike most languages, English has grown by absorbing new words from other languages. Sort of like the BORG of languages. Unfortunately, the results of this is that it changes so that it is very difficult to read material that is more than 400 years old. When I learned Mandarin Chinese I was able to translate the poetry of Du Fu and Li Bai who wrote in the Tang dynasty about 1,000 years ago as Chinese had changed that little. Only a few characters were not in my dictionary. The internet should speed up the changes in English so that in 100 years they very well might not be able to read this message. Whether English remains the dominate language is something we cannot answer now. Yet there is no other language with the vocabulary and flexibility that English has, which is necessary to handle the complexity of our modern world.
This would certainly explain all the stale bread in Italy. Italy, a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water would "focus" the neutralinos (how did they discover they are male?) and cause the bread to age faster than in France, where stale bread is used to feed the pigeons. Please note that in Venice even the pigeons will NOT eat bread; they prefer a diet of corn and sunflower seeds.
It is not clear if the people in Italy would age faster also. But there, especially in Rome, more people wear black, perhaps to protect themselves instinctively from the WIMP swarms. Obviously more research is needed now the meutralino break-through has been made.
Would Vitamin E be effective against the focused neutralinos? If only Linus Pauling were still alive to conduct this research...
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that JAVA gets an Extra Long? And maybe a Quadruple? And now UNICODE can expand to 8 bytes per character. Get to include extraterrestial character sets like Klingon and Vulcan.
Hey! You forgot the REXX purist!
I've never met a revolution that I didn't like.
They rarely achieve the goals they set up an justify their action by. They most often simply trade one set of brutal power brokers for another.
The only "revolution" I have any sympathy for is the so called American Revolution which was 1) really a war of independence rather than a revolution, and 2) more a "revolution" in the philosophies of law, politics, and government having power divided up with check and balances so that dictatorships became unlikely or impossible. So far it has worked. The advent of parlimentary systems in European countries, and many other countries is an extrapolation of that "revolution" of thought rather than an in-the-streets revolution.
When China finally gives into a multi-party state they will be very close to achieving that revolution of thought. How that will occur is still being worked out by the Chinese.
The big problem with Leninist government, such as in China, is that a one party government has no checks on its power and eventually becomes corrupt and self-serving. The other problem is that the people are seldom more than apathetic and even vainly hope to benefit from the corruption. You can expect that corruption will increase, not decrease, in China as the Communist Party there approaches the end of its rope. Unfortunately, as they control the press, you may hear less about it. Cuba is a good example of that process also. Fidel is smoking rope. He is not a "good father" but a brutal dictator. How many Cubans in Cuba have you had a chat with lately on the Internet who expressed other than the party line? When there is no disagreement at all you know that something is very wrong. They can't even tell you the real color now of Fidel's beard!
Well, yeah. I think you got it right about Al Gore. But you really need to rent a few foreign films.
And I'm surprised you haven't brought up the famous Uummm UUHmmm incident of the Cave Revolt in 16,035 B.C.
Did you forget your happy pills this morning?
How many people have you chatted with from China?
Last year, when my son graduated from high school, I wanted to take him on a trip around the world to celebrate his achievements. (He also was awarded his Eagle Scout rank. And was a leader of his Sea Scout group.) My plans were to fly to Beijing and take the Trans Mongolian rail to Irkutsk, Russia, and then the Trans Siberian rail to Moscow and points west. But the Yugoslavian war came along and we had to do a tour of Europe instead. It had become too dangerous for Americans to travel in Russia and China may have ignored our visas when we stepped off the plane.
But during the process of getting ready before we had to call that trip off, I got familiar with the Chinese people on the Internet in both Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. I exchanged email with a few people in those cities. One guy in Shanghai was interested in getting a new digital camera and so was I so we compared notes.
One woman I exchanged email with worked in Beijing for the government monitoring the Internet for sites that were "anti-Chinese" (meaning any criticism of the government's policies, whether they were political, sexual, or religious). I didn't want to put her on the spot by raising the moral and ethical issues that her job implied. And she was helpful on getting an inexpensive place to stay.
But I was reminded of similar censoring responsibilities our own civilization assigned to the religious establishments up until the mid-1950s. We mostly think of them as being anti-ponorgaphic but even earlier they and the governments of Europe (the USA wasn't around yet) were quite active in suppressing any anti-government sentiment until it boiled over into revolutions.
Look back on our own history and discover how we moved to a more open society. Basically, the truth is that a centralized government is the most inefficient form of government and slowly falls apart by its own centripital forces. Intelligent people in China will become astute in using that to their advantage. It is a dangerous game but the demon that allowed the cultural revolution to start is dead and slowly being turned into a beneign shadow of his former SOB self.
That is the threat that China is faced with. If it suppresses too much it will eventually face a revolution. If it has too much freedom of expression it will (it believes) disintegrate into anarchy. And its people have the dangerous game of teasing this mad beast into doing what it would not do itself.
China has the following difficult problems to solve: 1) Its population, 2) How to move to a Democracy without falling into revolution or anarchy. Everything else is minor by comparison.
Bypassing the government censors will happen. Our job is to help it happen. You do want Chinese to be able to read Slasdot, don't you?
So China must open up whether it wants to or not a little bit at a time. I have this visual image of a person timidly and slowly getting wet at the edge of an ocean. Yes, it is silly and tragic. But it is their choice (so far). And at least there is email communication, even if it is somewhat limited. And there are Internet cafes in Beijing and other large Cities (almost every city in China is a large city by our standards).
So I challenge you out there to come up with clever ways to help the Chinese citizens to bypass their government censors! It is really not that difficult a problem if you think about it. Have fun.
Actually even fingerprints can be forged. There are an awfull lot of issues here that need to be raised. What if some company starts using your electronic signature for purposes other than what you originally sent it in for? What protections exist? What recouse for fraud? Will this lead to a Federal Department of Signatures? Is this a federal or a state issue? Gee, we have enough issues to keep us busy for the next 50 years. Just because France and Italy have legalized it doesn't mean that the USA should jump off that cliff.
My guess is that we will see a lot more of this until two things happen: 1) The Internet is reduced to utter chaos. There are just not enough FBI agents to plug all the holes. 2) In reaction to the chaos, limits are placed on the actions of users and devices. This may lead to a leap-frog process. However, the consequence of that "security" may itself be another problem. A way to reduce the risk for this is to not take "revenge" against assumed foes. And work through the system. Yes, you should work with the FBI. Unfortunately, we have a generation reaching for power that doesn't always understand the consequence of their actions. And, remember, that at least 3% of any population are sociopaths. Enjoy your "freedom" while it lasts.
This is really silly. Why bring your children up in a Santa Claus level of religion? A much better answer to your daughter is that you don't know. Really a hard thing for a lot of people to do.
Good going. Challenge the Masters. Tweek the formulas. I look forward to the results of this debate. As for the fundamentalist comments...they don't have the minds to comprehend anything but simple concepts and Santa Claus versions of God. Ignore them (except when they try to ban the science of evolution from schools, or ban books). They don't worship God anyway but some wierd Demon of Ignorance.
Bill Gates reminds me of the Farmer who said he wasn't greedy; he just wanted all the land that bordered his farm. The serious problem with Microsoft and Mr. Gates is that he has his fingers in everything. If he is not stopped soon he will be the first dictator of the world.
I've been in the computer field for 35 years and I have never heard the term "hacker" used in a complimentrary way. Same for "cracker", unless you are from Florida or Georgia. We also call them "bit-flippers". People that like to tweek and not document their work. Hackers better come up with another word. They lost the battle a long time ago and are not socially aware to realize it.
I gave both of my kids a 26 language Lingo Translator for Christmas two years ago. Only $99. http://www.4biz.com/lingo/products/index.html It is handy when you are travelling in Europe, Asia, or South America. I had planned on taking my son on a trip around the world as his graduation present by flying to Beijing and taking the Trans-Mongolian Train to Irkutsk, Russia, and then from there on the Trans-Siberian Train to Moscow and on into Berlin and Paris. There is a tour company in HongKong that handles all the red tape and getting the tickets. But the Yugoslavian War came along and suddenly it was not a good idea to go to China or Russia. We did a tour in most of Europe instead. The funny thing is that everywhere we went in Europe, most everyone knew English. Even in Paris. And the French are NOT rude. Really great people. Only a few times in Germany did I need to use my college Deutsch. And even there they spoke English in all the Internet Cafes. By the way, Internet Cafes are also great places to download your digital camera's pictures onto a Zip Drive disk or onto a R/W CD. Then your memory cards can be cleared and used again. There are also several web sites that will translate text for you by cut and paste.
Actually Newton was heavily into alchemy. And I doubt if anybody laughted at him then.
Is JavaScript not being used? Or is it not considered a CGI scripting language? Would be interested in any answers to those questions. Thanks.
Hey, I can be crude too. You make me sick Nicolas. PosterBoy, I support your position. I have no tolerance for perversion. None.
I'm a little puzzled here. Why is you program downloading child porn 5% of the time? Especially if the person didn't request it. This is a pretty high number. One out of every 20 downloads. Are you designing your program to search for "random porn" or are you saying that one out of every 20 persons is asking for child porn, or that one out of every 20 web files to download is child porn? Sounds like your program has a "perversion" and should be removed.
We need more sites like this to make it dangerous for perverts to use the Net. I'm tired of a permissive society that thinks it is all right as long as they don't know about it. The Master at Saybrook College, Yale University, was dismissed, tried and convicted of downloading child porn last year. He's files were discovered by accident when he used his computer at in his office to down load the stuff. They are going through reversal of tenure proceedings right now to eliminate his last claim to Yale University. He will never teach in a university again. And good for Yale to be vigilant in eliminating this trash. The senior vice president of the largest Teachers Union in California was also convicted of child porn charges. In other words, it is clear that pedofiles gravitate to educational institutions and there must be extra caution in examining the backgrounds of all people in the educational business for such tendencies. The guy that traced the IPs back to edus ought to notify the educational sites that they have people there accessing child porn!
I'm amused by the comments about Dr. Brown's Loglan, (now: Lojban). I knew Dr. Brown when I was with the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, where Loglan was developed. Used to go out to his place on a lake east of the town. He was a very entertaining person. I realized that it was a futile effort then (back in the late 1960s) as one of the most important functions of any language was to allow ambiguity, obfuscation, and other acts that we don't often think of as verbal things. Usually we think they are some limitation or defect of a language instead of a necessary part of the language. A language that attempts to eliminate that is not a language that people will use. That is the fundemental flaw of Loglan/Lojban. I think the Lojban name was created as Dr. Brown had a copyright on the Loglan language and a splinter group wanted to control the development of the language.
Unlike most languages, English has grown by absorbing new words from other languages. Sort of like the BORG of languages. Unfortunately, the results of this is that it changes so that it is very difficult to read material that is more than 400 years old. When I learned Mandarin Chinese I was able to translate the poetry of Du Fu and Li Bai who wrote in the Tang dynasty about 1,000 years ago as Chinese had changed that little. Only a few characters were not in my dictionary. The internet should speed up the changes in English so that in 100 years they very well might not be able to read this message. Whether English remains the dominate language is something we cannot answer now. Yet there is no other language with the vocabulary and flexibility that English has, which is necessary to handle the complexity of our modern world.
Poor little thing....sorry I stepped on your mind.
This would certainly explain all the stale bread in Italy. Italy, a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water would "focus" the neutralinos (how did they discover they are male?) and cause the bread to age faster than in France, where stale bread is used to feed the pigeons. Please note that in Venice even the pigeons will NOT eat bread; they prefer a diet of corn and sunflower seeds.
It is not clear if the people in Italy would age faster also. But there, especially in Rome, more people wear black, perhaps to protect themselves instinctively from the WIMP swarms. Obviously more research is needed now the meutralino break-through has been made.
Would Vitamin E be effective against the focused neutralinos? If only Linus Pauling were still alive to conduct this research...