Just because I like checking on this, this is what the previous two weeks of apache logs show up: yggdrasil:/var/log/apache# cat a*g a*g*1 | grep IE | wc -l 644 yggdrasil:/var/log/apache# cat a*g a*g*1 | grep [Ff]ire | wc -l 374
Of course this is totally unscientific. Most of the people that come to my simple little webpage, as oppossed to people going to walmart.com or whatever, are a bit geekier than usual. But I think that your third point shouldn't neccesarily be "idiots use computers" as much as "people who don't understand computers use computers". I think there are a lot of people in there 40s who are intelligent professionals, and just can't naturally parse out the difference between "the operating system", "a program used to access (part of) the internet" and "the internet". I think for high school students and college students, it might not be so confusing. I think that this will be the age group in which computing patterns are made.
Im my day, we had ASCII. Well, actually we didn't have ASCII, we just had the codes. Written in binary. And it wasn't even written out, it was just stored on the RAM. We had to detect the status of each bit with a little miniature voltometer. AND WE LIKED IT.
I am thinking of what type of merchandise they would have done for Watchmen...I can't imagine too much in the Watchmen making for the action figure market.
So this is just a specific issue, and no gigantic rebellion against the evilness and vileness of Hollywood? Or do you think Hollywood was pushing him, and this is just the straw that broke the camel's back?
Alan Moore has had at least three movies made from his work recently, and he has seemed relatively okay with having details and stories changed around. I wonder what specifically now has made him change his mind. The main complaint about Hollywood is that they are taking the edginess out of his works and producing "pulp" thrillers. But Alan Moore's own works recently have been less focused on being all edgy and underground and more on being fun...witness the "Tom Strong" series. So is this an issue of commercialization?
In a separate case with the potential for identity theft, a laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of 16,500 current and former MCI Inc. employees was stolen last month from the car of an MCI financial analyst in Colorado, said company spokeswoman Linda Laughlin.
The car was parked in the analyst's home garage and the computer was password-protected, she said. MCI would not comment on whether the data was encrypted.
The Yahoo article mentions this, although the Slashdot article doesn't. I bring this up because this case at least seems like a computer security issue, as oppossed to a human nature issue. If the laptop data wasn't encrypted, all you need to do is mount its harddrive on another computer. That is hardly an arcane or technical procedure, and the article should mention how easy that is. Personally, I think laptops are mostly good for watching funny flash videos with your friends in trendy coffee shops. You should never put important data on a laptop, and then lug it around.
Yes, that does seem difficult...besides of course, we can send the computational results back through the wormhole, and do those 10^34 years in a few seconds.
But seriously...I also didn't quite understand what needs to be measured to keep the wormhole open. Perhaps the amount of "exotic matter" needed to keep the tube open? There may be some feedback mechanism that will make the entire operation less impossible. Although, the whole thing seems to theoretical, that we should perhaps just stop wondering about it.
And, much like the people who have vague reasons for believing that America still leads the world in electronics, my belief that America is still ahead in aircraft comes mostly from having driven by the Boeing factory so many times, and being impressed by it.
Is computational power the only thing missing?
on
Wormholes Unstable (BBC)
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From the article: But building a wormhole with a throat radius big enough to just fit a proton would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 30. A human-sized wormhole would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 60.
"Frankly no engineer is going to be able to do that," said the York researcher.
Well, I don't know if any engineer could do that with pencil and paper, but I am sure a computer could do it. Well, I am not sure a computer could do it, but growths in computational speed and power have certainly surprised us so far...
You should print this out and mail it to yourself certified so you can prove your "I told you so" points.
I don't have quite such a dire view as you do, though. Of course, the thing with economics is when we realize the worst that could happen, we can prevent it from happening. The fact that the government knows that Weimar inflation is possible, makes it improbable.
However, the current government, to say the least, seems to have the habit of ignoring reality. The thing is, the American economy actually can survive quite high trade and budget deficits for a while...but not forever. I believe that if we are lucky, as the American dollar gets weaker, imports will get more expensive and manufactring will be cost-feasible in this country. Thats the good version. The bad version is some type of shock hits the global economy, people panic, people pull money out of the economy, the US can't find a way to fianance its debt...and general badness follows. For my own "I told you so" points, I wrote about this happening in May of 2003: The Two Tiered Economy
I am not the first person to point out here that very few electronics are made in America anymore. But I would like to point out that many people in America don't understand this, and that it is kind of counterintuitive and that various otherwise intelligent people's inability to understand this is causing some bad economic mistakes to be made all along the line. I was born in 1979. I still remember when items like televisions, VCRs, Microwaves and the like were luxury items. For people born earlier, especially in the depression, the idea that goods like these often are literally not worth the space it takes to store them. Many people don't understand that televisions and stereos are mass produced in countries like Taiwan that 20 years ago were third world countries, and that Japan is past us in technology, Taiwan is pulling even, and countries like Malaysia are waiting to catch up. The micro and macro effects of these are causing big ripples in our economy. If the pricing of housing goes up, and the price of consumer goods stays the same, what does that do? If you own an independent electronics retailer, and you sell televisions and stereos at 100 dollars each with a 10 dollar profit, how many do you have to sell to afford a standard 300,000 family home? And, if the US is running a 60 billion dollar a month trade deficit, what is it going to sell to make up for that? Heavy manufactring used to be our bread and butter, but we would have to export (for example), 600 million tons of steel a month to make up that deficit. Pretty much the only thing the US has a clear edge in manufactring these days is commercial aircraft. But the people who are making economic policy don't realize this just because it contradicts their experience when they were growing up. Okay. I have had my say.
I would be interested in what libertarians would say about this. After all, if you own some physical property, it seems that you can do with it as you wish, especially if it is in space, which is not anyone's property.
That may be true, although I think most motherboards designed for a P-II 233 could only address so much memory, which is probably not a gig. In addition, since most motherboards came with at most 3 DIMM slots, and 66 MHz RAM does not commonly come in sizes over 128 Megs.
If you revised that argument up to a Pentium-II 400 MHz, it would probably be true.
Some, but maybe not all or most of that is not really Microsoft's fault. I have a P-II 450 running Debian, and it still takes it close to a minute to bring up OpenOffice.
I think the Hebrews and the Chinese were the people who were the biggest on a Base Ten number system, and who occasionally put the most significance into it. The Babylonians used base-360 a lot, which is where we get our circles from. The Romans didn't really use bases at all.
If you want to look at it another way, Linux has already had a gigantic impact on Windows, because as long ago as 1999, when the first wave of Linux press got started, Microsoft knew they were up to something, and that is probably why you see such an improvement in all of their post-2000 offerings. From what I have heard, Windows XP and the like are fairly reliable, where you can actually run a small server off of them. I think that the success of Firefox will make a similiar difference, with some actual concern for security and stability in their browser.
Slashdot Mirror
yggdrasil:/var/log/apache# cat a*g a*g*1 | grep IE | wc -l
644
yggdrasil:/var/log/apache# cat a*g a*g*1 | grep [Ff]ire | wc -l
374
Of course this is totally unscientific. Most of the people that come to my simple little webpage, as oppossed to people going to walmart.com or whatever, are a bit geekier than usual. But I think that your third point shouldn't neccesarily be "idiots use computers" as much as "people who don't understand computers use computers". I think there are a lot of people in there 40s who are intelligent professionals, and just can't naturally parse out the difference between "the operating system", "a program used to access (part of) the internet" and "the internet". I think for high school students and college students, it might not be so confusing. I think that this will be the age group in which computing patterns are made.
Im my day, we had ASCII. Well, actually we didn't have ASCII, we just had the codes. Written in binary. And it wasn't even written out, it was just stored on the RAM. We had to detect the status of each bit with a little miniature voltometer. AND WE LIKED IT.
I am thinking of what type of merchandise they would have done for Watchmen...I can't imagine too much in the Watchmen making for the action figure market.
"Rorscach...with hot grease splattering action!"
So this is just a specific issue, and no gigantic rebellion against the evilness and vileness of Hollywood? Or do you think Hollywood was pushing him, and this is just the straw that broke the camel's back?
Alan Moore has had at least three movies made from his work recently, and he has seemed relatively okay with having details and stories changed around. I wonder what specifically now has made him change his mind.
The main complaint about Hollywood is that they are taking the edginess out of his works and producing "pulp" thrillers. But Alan Moore's own works recently have been less focused on being all edgy and underground and more on being fun...witness the "Tom Strong" series. So is this an issue of commercialization?
Or was "Hellblazer" just that bad?
I don't know, since there is no way to detect sarcasm without an MRI.
In a separate case with the potential for identity theft, a laptop containing the names and
Social Security numbers of 16,500 current and former MCI Inc. employees was stolen last month from the car of an MCI financial analyst in Colorado, said company spokeswoman Linda Laughlin.
The car was parked in the analyst's home garage and the computer was password-protected, she said. MCI would not comment on whether the data was encrypted.
The Yahoo article mentions this, although the Slashdot article doesn't.
I bring this up because this case at least seems like a computer security issue, as oppossed to a human nature issue.
If the laptop data wasn't encrypted, all you need to do is mount its harddrive on another computer. That is hardly an arcane or technical procedure, and the article should mention how easy that is.
Personally, I think laptops are mostly good for watching funny flash videos with your friends in trendy coffee shops. You should never put important data on a laptop, and then lug it around.
Of course a study with around 25 brain damaged people watching movies is a perfect reason to make phrenological claims.
Yes, that does seem difficult...besides of course, we can send the computational results back through the wormhole, and do those 10^34 years in a few seconds.
But seriously...I also didn't quite understand what needs to be measured to keep the wormhole open. Perhaps the amount of "exotic matter" needed to keep the tube open? There may be some feedback mechanism that will make the entire operation less impossible. Although, the whole thing seems to theoretical, that we should perhaps just stop wondering about it.
I seem to stand corrected.
And, much like the people who have vague reasons for believing that America still leads the world in electronics, my belief that America is still ahead in aircraft comes mostly from having driven by the Boeing factory so many times, and being impressed by it.
From the article:
But building a wormhole with a throat radius big enough to just fit a proton would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 30. A human-sized wormhole would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 60.
"Frankly no engineer is going to be able to do that," said the York researcher.
Well, I don't know if any engineer could do that with pencil and paper, but I am sure a computer could do it. Well, I am not sure a computer could do it, but growths in computational speed and power have certainly surprised us so far...
You should print this out and mail it to yourself certified so you can prove your "I told you so" points.
I don't have quite such a dire view as you do, though. Of course, the thing with economics is when we realize the worst that could happen, we can prevent it from happening. The fact that the government knows that Weimar inflation is possible, makes it improbable.
However, the current government, to say the least,
seems to have the habit of ignoring reality. The thing is, the American economy actually can survive quite high trade and budget deficits for a while...but not forever. I believe that if we are lucky, as the American dollar gets weaker, imports will get more expensive and manufactring will be cost-feasible in this country. Thats the good version. The bad version is some type of shock hits the global economy, people panic, people pull money out of the economy, the US can't find a way to fianance its debt...and general badness follows.
For my own "I told you so" points, I wrote about this happening in May of 2003:
The Two Tiered Economy
Besides around January-May, when most of the apples come from New Zealand!
I am not the first person to point out here that very few electronics are made in America anymore. But I would like to point out that many people in America don't understand this, and that it is kind of counterintuitive and that various otherwise intelligent people's inability to understand this is causing some bad economic mistakes to be made all along the line.
I was born in 1979. I still remember when items like televisions, VCRs, Microwaves and the like were luxury items. For people born earlier, especially in the depression, the idea that goods like these often are literally not worth the space it takes to store them. Many people don't understand that televisions and stereos are mass produced in countries like Taiwan that 20 years ago were third world countries, and that Japan is past us in technology, Taiwan is pulling even, and countries like Malaysia are waiting to catch up.
The micro and macro effects of these are causing big ripples in our economy. If the pricing of housing goes up, and the price of consumer goods stays the same, what does that do? If you own an independent electronics retailer, and you sell televisions and stereos at 100 dollars each with a 10 dollar profit, how many do you have to sell to afford a standard 300,000 family home?
And, if the US is running a 60 billion dollar a month trade deficit, what is it going to sell to make up for that? Heavy manufactring used to be our bread and butter, but we would have to export (for example), 600 million tons of steel a month to make up that deficit. Pretty much the only thing the US has a clear edge in manufactring these days is commercial aircraft. But the people who are making economic policy don't realize this just because it contradicts their experience when they were growing up.
Okay. I have had my say.
I would be interested in what libertarians would say about this.
After all, if you own some physical property, it seems that you can do with it as you wish, especially if it is in space, which is not anyone's property.
He will only be a hamburger after you run around, causing the different layers of him to all drop to the bottom.
That may be true, although I think most motherboards designed for a P-II 233 could only address so much memory, which is probably not a gig. In addition, since most motherboards came with at most 3 DIMM slots, and 66 MHz RAM does not commonly come in sizes over 128 Megs.
If you revised that argument up to a Pentium-II 400 MHz, it would probably be true.
Some, but maybe not all or most of that is not really Microsoft's fault. I have a P-II 450 running Debian, and it still takes it close to a minute to bring up OpenOffice.
Maybe you would die due to attracting lots of wasps and other insects.
I stand corrected.
Although the way the numbers are written, you could say they also included a base V, a base L, a base C, a base D, and a base M.
No one ever got fired for imitating IBM.
I think the Hebrews and the Chinese were the people who were the biggest on a Base Ten number system, and who occasionally put the most significance into it.
The Babylonians used base-360 a lot, which is where we get our circles from.
The Romans didn't really use bases at all.
If you want to look at it another way, Linux has already had a gigantic impact on Windows, because as long ago as 1999, when the first wave of Linux press got started, Microsoft knew they were up to something, and that is probably why you see such an improvement in all of their post-2000 offerings.
From what I have heard, Windows XP and the like are fairly reliable, where you can actually run a small server off of them.
I think that the success of Firefox will make a similiar difference, with some actual concern for security and stability in their browser.
This entire post would make more sense if someone would explain what a "blog" was.
First, I should have used the characters, but Slashdot doesn't accept them.
Second, Cantonese is gutter speech.