The interview above simply debunks the idea that there are currently any clues that an eruption is imminent (although much of it seemed to say "we're not measuring that"). However, there really is a giant magma chamber under Yellowstone, and if it ever breached in the right (or wrong) way, the continental US would be toast, and the rest of the planet would experience a nuclear winter style scenario.
Depending on how you project the historical numbers, we may already be overdue for the next eruption. Then again, the margin for error is measured in millenia, so it's a little like the major asteroid strike scenario: it could happen anytime, but it probably won't.
The interview above simply debunks the idea that there are currently any clues that an eruption is imminent. However, there really is a giant magma chamber under Yellowstone, and if it ever breached in the right (or wrong) way, the continental US would be toast. The next due date for an eruption is, well, any century now...
U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off; Microsoft Masses Troops on Border, Threatens Missile Strikes
Legally speaking, a corporation is a person. And under the U.S. constitution, it has a right to bear arms. Our only hope is that Microsoft lawyers never notice this. Oh jeez, I've said too much^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^NO CARRIER
...who the hell can you pay with the stuff? AFAICT, almost nobody. e-gold is for probably shady transactions between people who know each other, it looks to me (otherwise, why not just do an online transfer between bank accounts?)
Thanks for the info. I realized I didn't completely absorb your earlier post - your DVD includes an English audio track, whereas mine only has Japanese audio, but has an English subtitle track.
I just checked the scene you mentioned (I have Totoro on my hard disk;) There are no subtitles while the water is being shown. The only subtitles correspond to the Japanese audio track:
"Mei, there's a bridge."
(Mei responds on the audio track, but there's no subtitle)
(View of stream with fishes swimming)
(Cut back to sisters)
"Fish."
"See, it flashed again"
On the contrary, for a long time replacing Sourcesafe with CVS was a major way that I managed to sneak Linux into Windows shops (before it became easy to set up CVS servers on Windows). Windows developers who made the switch loved it. Nowadays, they use Linux for all sorts of other reasons, and there's even less reason for them to stick to inferior Microsoft tools.
I agree with you that lip-syncing per se isn't a problem, but I think when people say that, they're often using it to summarize a whole range of things - like the OP said, voices that don't fit the character, for example. Also, translated dialog is often a bit stilted, if it's not done really well, and I find reading such dialog less jarring than hearing a voice saying it.
Could you give an example of the extra dialog? I have a Totoro DVD that's part of a pirated Ghibli Box Set, and I've never noticed any problem with the Totoro subtitles. Maybe I'm just dense. To compare, these DVDs have subtitles in Japanese, Chinese and English.
The box set is great, and I'd recommend it to anyone, except for the fact that the money doesn't go to Ghibli. To assuage my conscience, I've bought the English versions of both Mononoke and Spirited Away, and saw the latter in theaters. I've never even bothered watching the English Mononoke DVD.
OTOH, I think it's dumb that these studios won't just satisfy demand and sell to people who want to buy their products, with or without English dubbing.
...because you don't always say 'february' but 'feb'). Also what happens if language A uses a name for month X that is the same as language B's name for month Y?
Who are you calling a february? That's a mortal insult in my language, you insensitive clod!
I seached monster dot com for lisp and got 12 hits, so clearly there's a use for it.
You carry on searching Monster.com for your coding drone jobs, that just leaves more of those six-figure salary jobs, using advanced programming languages, for those who actually have skills and knowledge.
But when your boss ships your job off to the lowest offshore bidder, you might try picking up a copy of something like PAIP or SICP (google for them), and learn some of the stuff you've missed in your education and/or career so far.
Those that do get hit with the worm are an example of evolution in action. They should have used the OpenBSD "patch". (Hey, Linux is good and all, but I'm not sure I want to trust my brain to anything less than OpenBSD).
This is why this technology worries me - I don't trust myself not to install Debian, for the convenience of being able to do an "apt-get install some-cool-package". Then it's only a matter of time until I install something I shouldn't have - now I need to unmount my brain and fsck it...
The facts presented make it pretty clear that it's not terrorism. What facts do you imagine could make it otherwise?
The point is that the Patriot Act imposes some draconian provisions that allow people's rights to be violated beyond what's usually possible for citizens of the U.S., even egregiously criminal citizens. The justification for these excesses is that the U.S. needs to be able to take unusual measures with terrorists. If the label "terrorist" starts becoming applied to ordinary criminals, it loses its meaning, and the special provisions in law start to look pretty untenable.
But we want those provisions, to be able to deal with real terrorists - people who want to destroy buildings and set off bombs and kill thousands of people at a time. So, the best and most responsible course of action is to only treat real terrorists, as terrorists. Both prosecutors & legislators would do well to remember that.
Instead of debating labels, consider how utterly stupid and dangerous this stunt actually was and just how hard this yahoo ought to be slapped.
The question is whether he should be slapped as hard as, say, Saddam Hussein or Jose Padilla - incarcerated without trial, for example? I honestly don't know whether the law allows for this, at this point, since one would have to make a full time career of keeping up with it. But there's more than a semantic issue here if it results in U.S. citizens being treated the same way as real terrorists, regardless of how stupid or misguided they may be.
In addition, legislators and prosecutors often seem not to understand the backlash that this kind of thing can cause. You could end up with a situation where abuses of the Patriot Act against US citizens result in the act being watered down, making it harder for law enforcement and to deal with real terrorists. It's in *everyone's* interests - except the real terrorists - to get this right.
And when I say "stack", I mean exactly that. These were external 28.8k modems that were stacked on top of another. That's the high class way that this ISP ran it's computer room.
Sounds like the owner took the term "TCP/IP stack" a little too literally...
God! Yes! That's it! Why didn't I think of it before? That's what Linux and Linux users need... Another distribution.
Funny as this is, it's on the right track. The system Ian is describing could lead to each user effectively creating their own distribution each time they install Linux. If it's easy enough, what's the downside?
Even when you install Windows, you get the choice (or used to at least) of installing important optional components - like, say, Solitaire.:) But Microsoft can't afford to unbundle and componentize Windows to the extent Linux allows - they're afraid of losing control. Besides, "Microsoft dependency management" is an oxymoron: Microsoft uses unnecessary interdependencies to force users to upgrade. Smart MS admins know this - when you find yourself having to upgrade the browser when installing a new version of Exchange, you tend to clue into the fact that something is fundamentally wrong.
If the customizability of Linux could be delivered to the end user or even "end sysadmin" level - i.e. "professional" sysadmins who aren't Linux geeks - that could be just one more way in which Linux could chip away at Windows' dominance, and it's a way that Microsoft will have a tough time competing with. (First thing they'd have to do is figure out how to unbundle their browser, something they claimed was impossible, in Federal court no less.)
Humans are naturally unnatural. It's what makes us what we are.
Granted. But one question is, will this continue to serve us well in future, or should we recognize that as our technology advances, we may need to become more careful about the kinds of unnatural things we do, and become dependent on? Might we end up self-modifying our species into something weaker, in some crucial respect, than what natural evolution gave us for free?
What the species as a whole does blindly may not be the right choice for an individual. For example, let's say that in Christmas 2012, the hot new gizmo is Microsoft Neural Implant 1.0. Huge numbers of people rush out and get one, and brain surgeons are swamped by the number of requests for implantation (a self-implantation feature is scheduled for version 2.0). Those in a real hurry fly to India and get the implant done cut rate, in Bangalore.
For a while, everything's cool and people walk around sending email and collaborating on projects in their heads. But then the great neural implant worm of 2013 hits, and billions of people are either lobotomized or killed.
At that point, the people who followed the OP's advice, "How about living in a way that our bodies were actually meant to. Exercising, working with our bodies, and communicating in person", are in pretty good shape. Evolutionarily speaking, they took a risk in not going along with what the rest of the species was doing - since they couldn't function effectively in corporations filled with wireheads, and this could have had a negative effect on their survival - but it worked out well for them in the end.
The point is, what's natural could perhaps be defined as whatever works over the long run. Cannibalism, for example, doesn't appear to be natural, since so few societies that try it seem to survive. There are many other "unnatural" behaviors which have similarly died out.
It's true that it's natural for us to try new things, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is good/appropriate/natural, at least until those things have been proven to work to either enhance or at least not impede survival on a species-wide scale, in the long run.
Not quite a 486, but I've been running kernel 2.0.36 on a Pentium 90MHz with 64MB RAM, since 1998. It hosts mail (SMTP+IMAP) for a few small domains, CVS, and a mainly static web server. It also runs the Twiki wiki for a small workgroup. That's Perl-based, and it's the one thing which is a little slow, that we're planning to migrate to a faster box.
I've never tried running a newer kernel on a box that old, though, so I can't say how it would compare. 2.0.36 definitely uses less RAM, though - the various core daemons use anywhere from 10-40% more RAM on a stock 2.4 kernel.
If such a simple thing as an elementary CA can give rise to universal computation, then universal computation and (most importantly) undecidability must be ubiquitous in nature. The world is fundamentally non-integrable and non-predictible.
I don't understand how it's proved "ubiquitous in nature." What's to keep it from being "ubiquitous in base-10"? How do we know this isn't a construct imposed by our rational thinking and arbritrary number systems, rather than a fundamental element of nature itself?
For a start, these models have nothing to do with base 10. There's plenty of mathematical theory to back up the equivalence between computability in any system you can come up with, for example Turing Machines (computing on an infinite tape with a read/write head) can compute the same things as the lambda calculus (formulae which are reduced according to simple algebraic substitution rules), which in turn can compute the same sort of thing as certain cellular automata. The equivalence of these systems in terms of their ability to compute has been proved (by people like Church and Turing), and they are subject to the same constraints such as the halting problem, which implies undecideability.
The point is that a very small and simple set of rules (lambda calculus has three reduction rules and three or four grammar rules, for example, and cellular automata are at least as simple) can produce a system capable of universal computation, i.e. being able to compute anything any other computing system can compute.
We know this has nothing to do with arbitrary number systems, at least. As proof of this, lambda calculus supports multiple number systems, such as Church numerals in which the number N is represented by N applications of a function to another function.
Whether this is "a construct imposed by our rational thinking... rather than a fundamental element of nature itself" is kind of irrelevant. You can say it's a fundamental element of nature, or of reality, but so what? The various systems I touched on above are all ways to model some subset of that reality, to express it in different forms. That all of these models can be proved equivalent demonstrates that we have found something very basic and fundamental. If our ability to comprehend this is limited by our perception in some way, there's nothing we can do about that - but we've come as close as we are capable of, to something that appears to be universal, based on every test and proof mechanism we can throw at it.
Extremist positions on both sides are silly. But here's the simple difference in this particular case: a particular service was wanted, and was essentially put out to tender, with requirements, etc. Only problem is, the pay was zero, and even the attempt at payment in terms of peer acknowledgment was flubbed badly. So there's no incentive to do it.
The case with artists, whether they produce music, paintings, or code, is different. I doubt anyone is suggesting that Superbowl commercials be produced free of charge by volunteers. That's business, and it's paid for. But that's not the motivation for producing art. Those motivations are different, and they don't really have anything to do with money - someone producing art or code for money is not an artist or a hacker, they're a commercial resource, an economic agent.
The organizers of this project didn't understand open source or free software at all - or at least, the person who named it (sardonically) perhaps understood it, but those who pushed it to fruition did not.
This is not a question of the shoe being on the other foot, it's a case of people not knowing that they're trying to force the foot into entirely the wrong kind of shoe.
Change the law and allow people to go into a famer's field and pick the crops without paying and see how quick people give up on farming. Sorry there's no difference.
See, you're doing it again. No-one grows hundreds of hectares of corn for the fun or love of it - they do it for commercial reasons. A closer analogy would be someone who grows corn for their family and friends. But the difference is that they have physical and economic limits on how much of the corn they can produce. No such limits exist for software, so someone doing it for reasons other than primarily commercial can distribute an unlimited amount of the stuff.
All this doesn't even touch on the fact that a lot of open source isn't done for fun or love but from quite pragmatic reasons - it just makes sense to make some kinds of code public, and benefit from others' contributions, where each person contributes for their own reasons, which can't really be forced in one direction or another.
The problem here is just that people stuck in the if-it's-free-there-must-be-something-wrong mindset have failed to recognize the huge range of things that motivate humans, other than money. Their attempts to fit these behaviors into naive but familiar little boxes, like the laughable point system that the Sardonix project came up with, are doomed to failure until they really understand what they're dealing with.
OK, now someone mod me up. I want my karma points, dammit!;)
Slashdot Mirror
The interview above simply debunks the idea that there are currently any clues that an eruption is imminent (although much of it seemed to say "we're not measuring that"). However, there really is a giant magma chamber under Yellowstone, and if it ever breached in the right (or wrong) way, the continental US would be toast, and the rest of the planet would experience a nuclear winter style scenario.
Depending on how you project the historical numbers, we may already be overdue for the next eruption. Then again, the margin for error is measured in millenia, so it's a little like the major asteroid strike scenario: it could happen anytime, but it probably won't.
The interview above simply debunks the idea that there are currently any clues that an eruption is imminent. However, there really is a giant magma chamber under Yellowstone, and if it ever breached in the right (or wrong) way, the continental US would be toast. The next due date for an eruption is, well, any century now...
Legally speaking, a corporation is a person. And under the U.S. constitution, it has a right to bear arms. Our only hope is that Microsoft lawyers never notice this. Oh jeez, I've said too much^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^NO CARRIER
Where's the -1, Seriously Disturbing Imagery mod option when you need it??
(define set-him-straight
(lambda ()
(display "Learn a language that's capable of abstraction without boilerplate, dammit!")))
(set-him-straight)
...who the hell can you pay with the stuff? AFAICT, almost nobody. e-gold is for probably shady transactions between people who know each other, it looks to me (otherwise, why not just do an online transfer between bank accounts?)
You say that like it's a bad thing!
Of course, a dedicated fan might do a Cat Bus conversion on his car!
I just checked the scene you mentioned (I have Totoro on my hard disk ;) There are no subtitles while the water is being shown. The only subtitles correspond to the Japanese audio track:
> So please!!! Re-release the Totoro DVD :-)
Sure - there can never be too much Totoro! ;)
On the contrary, for a long time replacing Sourcesafe with CVS was a major way that I managed to sneak Linux into Windows shops (before it became easy to set up CVS servers on Windows). Windows developers who made the switch loved it. Nowadays, they use Linux for all sorts of other reasons, and there's even less reason for them to stick to inferior Microsoft tools.
I agree with you that lip-syncing per se isn't a problem, but I think when people say that, they're often using it to summarize a whole range of things - like the OP said, voices that don't fit the character, for example. Also, translated dialog is often a bit stilted, if it's not done really well, and I find reading such dialog less jarring than hearing a voice saying it.
The box set is great, and I'd recommend it to anyone, except for the fact that the money doesn't go to Ghibli. To assuage my conscience, I've bought the English versions of both Mononoke and Spirited Away, and saw the latter in theaters. I've never even bothered watching the English Mononoke DVD.
OTOH, I think it's dumb that these studios won't just satisfy demand and sell to people who want to buy their products, with or without English dubbing.
- Phlogiston T. Muzzlethwick III, Esq.
You carry on searching Monster.com for your coding drone jobs, that just leaves more of those six-figure salary jobs, using advanced programming languages, for those who actually have skills and knowledge.
But when your boss ships your job off to the lowest offshore bidder, you might try picking up a copy of something like PAIP or SICP (google for them), and learn some of the stuff you've missed in your education and/or career so far.
This is why this technology worries me - I don't trust myself not to install Debian, for the convenience of being able to do an "apt-get install some-cool-package". Then it's only a matter of time until I install something I shouldn't have - now I need to unmount my brain and fsck it...
The point is that the Patriot Act imposes some draconian provisions that allow people's rights to be violated beyond what's usually possible for citizens of the U.S., even egregiously criminal citizens. The justification for these excesses is that the U.S. needs to be able to take unusual measures with terrorists. If the label "terrorist" starts becoming applied to ordinary criminals, it loses its meaning, and the special provisions in law start to look pretty untenable.
But we want those provisions, to be able to deal with real terrorists - people who want to destroy buildings and set off bombs and kill thousands of people at a time. So, the best and most responsible course of action is to only treat real terrorists, as terrorists. Both prosecutors & legislators would do well to remember that.
The question is whether he should be slapped as hard as, say, Saddam Hussein or Jose Padilla - incarcerated without trial, for example? I honestly don't know whether the law allows for this, at this point, since one would have to make a full time career of keeping up with it. But there's more than a semantic issue here if it results in U.S. citizens being treated the same way as real terrorists, regardless of how stupid or misguided they may be.
In addition, legislators and prosecutors often seem not to understand the backlash that this kind of thing can cause. You could end up with a situation where abuses of the Patriot Act against US citizens result in the act being watered down, making it harder for law enforcement and to deal with real terrorists. It's in *everyone's* interests - except the real terrorists - to get this right.
Sounds like the owner took the term "TCP/IP stack" a little too literally...
Funny as this is, it's on the right track. The system Ian is describing could lead to each user effectively creating their own distribution each time they install Linux. If it's easy enough, what's the downside?
Even when you install Windows, you get the choice (or used to at least) of installing important optional components - like, say, Solitaire. :) But Microsoft can't afford to unbundle and componentize Windows to the extent Linux allows - they're afraid of losing control. Besides, "Microsoft dependency management" is an oxymoron: Microsoft uses unnecessary interdependencies to force users to upgrade. Smart MS admins know this - when you find yourself having to upgrade the browser when installing a new version of Exchange, you tend to clue into the fact that something is fundamentally wrong.
If the customizability of Linux could be delivered to the end user or even "end sysadmin" level - i.e. "professional" sysadmins who aren't Linux geeks - that could be just one more way in which Linux could chip away at Windows' dominance, and it's a way that Microsoft will have a tough time competing with. (First thing they'd have to do is figure out how to unbundle their browser, something they claimed was impossible, in Federal court no less.)
What the species as a whole does blindly may not be the right choice for an individual. For example, let's say that in Christmas 2012, the hot new gizmo is Microsoft Neural Implant 1.0. Huge numbers of people rush out and get one, and brain surgeons are swamped by the number of requests for implantation (a self-implantation feature is scheduled for version 2.0). Those in a real hurry fly to India and get the implant done cut rate, in Bangalore.
For a while, everything's cool and people walk around sending email and collaborating on projects in their heads. But then the great neural implant worm of 2013 hits, and billions of people are either lobotomized or killed.
At that point, the people who followed the OP's advice, "How about living in a way that our bodies were actually meant to. Exercising, working with our bodies, and communicating in person", are in pretty good shape. Evolutionarily speaking, they took a risk in not going along with what the rest of the species was doing - since they couldn't function effectively in corporations filled with wireheads, and this could have had a negative effect on their survival - but it worked out well for them in the end.
The point is, what's natural could perhaps be defined as whatever works over the long run. Cannibalism, for example, doesn't appear to be natural, since so few societies that try it seem to survive. There are many other "unnatural" behaviors which have similarly died out.
It's true that it's natural for us to try new things, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is good/appropriate/natural, at least until those things have been proven to work to either enhance or at least not impede survival on a species-wide scale, in the long run.
I've never tried running a newer kernel on a box that old, though, so I can't say how it would compare. 2.0.36 definitely uses less RAM, though - the various core daemons use anywhere from 10-40% more RAM on a stock 2.4 kernel.
If I were you I'd be more upset that BladeMelbourne didn't get your hint about the three-way, and start looking for someone a bit more open-minded...
The point is that a very small and simple set of rules (lambda calculus has three reduction rules and three or four grammar rules, for example, and cellular automata are at least as simple) can produce a system capable of universal computation, i.e. being able to compute anything any other computing system can compute.
We know this has nothing to do with arbitrary number systems, at least. As proof of this, lambda calculus supports multiple number systems, such as Church numerals in which the number N is represented by N applications of a function to another function.
Whether this is "a construct imposed by our rational thinking ... rather than a fundamental element of nature itself" is kind of irrelevant. You can say it's a fundamental element of nature, or of reality, but so what? The various systems I touched on above are all ways to model some subset of that reality, to express it in different forms. That all of these models can be proved equivalent demonstrates that we have found something very basic and fundamental. If our ability to comprehend this is limited by our perception in some way, there's nothing we can do about that - but we've come as close as we are capable of, to something that appears to be universal, based on every test and proof mechanism we can throw at it.
The case with artists, whether they produce music, paintings, or code, is different. I doubt anyone is suggesting that Superbowl commercials be produced free of charge by volunteers. That's business, and it's paid for. But that's not the motivation for producing art. Those motivations are different, and they don't really have anything to do with money - someone producing art or code for money is not an artist or a hacker, they're a commercial resource, an economic agent.
The organizers of this project didn't understand open source or free software at all - or at least, the person who named it (sardonically) perhaps understood it, but those who pushed it to fruition did not.
This is not a question of the shoe being on the other foot, it's a case of people not knowing that they're trying to force the foot into entirely the wrong kind of shoe.
Change the law and allow people to go into a famer's field and pick the crops without paying and see how quick people give up on farming. Sorry there's no difference.
See, you're doing it again. No-one grows hundreds of hectares of corn for the fun or love of it - they do it for commercial reasons. A closer analogy would be someone who grows corn for their family and friends. But the difference is that they have physical and economic limits on how much of the corn they can produce. No such limits exist for software, so someone doing it for reasons other than primarily commercial can distribute an unlimited amount of the stuff.
All this doesn't even touch on the fact that a lot of open source isn't done for fun or love but from quite pragmatic reasons - it just makes sense to make some kinds of code public, and benefit from others' contributions, where each person contributes for their own reasons, which can't really be forced in one direction or another.
The problem here is just that people stuck in the if-it's-free-there-must-be-something-wrong mindset have failed to recognize the huge range of things that motivate humans, other than money. Their attempts to fit these behaviors into naive but familiar little boxes, like the laughable point system that the Sardonix project came up with, are doomed to failure until they really understand what they're dealing with.
OK, now someone mod me up. I want my karma points, dammit! ;)