And if it is so easy to do then, why didn't the robots just do it when the humans blackened the earth's sky. Seems a lot more efficient than deriving power from human brain activity... pretty much anything has to be more efficient.
" With the number of networks now being NATed and the such, will we ever truly need something like IPv6?"
I would measure the shortage of IPv4 addresses by the number of people using NATs rather than the other way around.
Without a public globally addressable IP adddress, then a computer is not "on" the internet. I would talk about the shortage of IPv4 addresses this way. People have gotten around the shortage of addresses by using NAT... sure some people like their computers behind firewalls, but I woudl argue that the majority of people getting those little NAT boxes at the computer store are interested more in connecting multiple computers to the internet, than any security concerns. The argument that says that there is no shortage of addresses because people can just use NAT is based on the false premise that being behind a firewall is equivalent to being connected to the internet. This is a worldview that says people are happy just reading their web pages, downloading their pron and checking their email. If this were the case then we wouldn't need the internet or computers, the French Minitel system would be all we ever needed.
The Internet is an end-to-end communications platform. An over reliance on NAT will only impede the growth of new Internet services and technologies. There are real limitations to what can be done with computers behind a NAT.
"What RedHat are doing means that anyone can duplicate and sell Fedora CDs and stuff like that, Fedora is becoming more like debian in terms of community involvement -- and this is great!"
Sounds like what Netscape did with mozilla... which ultimately led to a better browser. But in the couple years of meantime, Internet Explorer dominated the desktop and mozilla is hard pressed to regain marketshare. Fedora might be better, but it won't make the world a better place unless it is used by more people.
This could definately be a step back for linux on the desktop, which had finally become a pleasantly useable thing.
"Perhaps in the future we may even see these pledge requests linked within the GUI itself"
Great... just like public radio or television...
'We will bring you to your gui in just a moment, but first... please contribute to our effort... it is you the user that contributes the most to our efforts and if you think that this program is of value to you and you want to see it continuously improved... The next one hundred callers...err emailers will receive a log beach towel with their pledge of one hundred dollars... Okay now we bring you to your user interface.'
"Now then, when the Govt required libraries to block access to porn sites in the interest of "protecting our children" the ACLU steped in and helped fight it. Today libraries must be able to remove those blocks at a moments notice should someone have a desire to view those sites who is not a minor."
Well, the ACLU fought the requirement that libraries use site blocking software for precisely this reason, that some company would be put in charge of deciding what was legitamite speech in a public place. Of course, now that these content filters are blocking overtly unquestionably non-violent political sites, anyone with half a brain should see that this type of software should not be centrally mandated in schools and libraries. Freedom should not be outsourced.
"Truth be told the fact it was redacted in the first place is far more disturbing than the actual content that was removed."
Government representatives are only supposed to keep stuff secret that would give a potential enemy vital information... blacking out anything that doesn't meet this criteria should be a hanging offense. If this report is true, then this is obviously corruption in its most base and basic form.
Next thing you know we will be trillions of dollars in debt spending half our income on taxes with social security about to collapse and being told that everything will be okay. Oh wait a sec...
Despite what many people seem to think, something that kills people very quickly, although terrifying, won't likely become widespread. The worst virus for humanity would be slow working like HIV, but airborn.
Imagine one with no symptoms other than five years after you got it you suffered major organ failure, became airborn easily. That is your doomsday virus. One that kills within days even if it is easily transmitted will likely be contained regionally aka SARS... although I think we should be ready for SARS this winter.
"make sure that they keep their software patches up-to-date"
They are pursuing a subscription based model which the regular release of software patches supports. Now users see regular patches for scary new security holes downloaded on a regular basis... I expect now that most people are getting used to it, that Microsoft will shorten its supported lifecycle for OS releases and require full upgrades... which of course you can get downloaded to your machine directly using a credit card.
Funny how Bill is using the Open Source community to help spread FUD about its own products which will then be used to help force regular costly upgrades on people.
Security concerns might cause some people to start using Linux Desktops, but the majority of people will just buy into a system of regular updates from Microsoft.
This is a no win issue for the Open Source community.
The evil is too strong to resist, the only way to win is to deny it battle.
" what about the guy (or gal) who invented FIRE!!! That accomplishment is no less than frigging Einstein!! Also, I sure would like to invent the dude who learnt to count with his fingers, that's pretty smart too."
Dude, that was such an obvious "invention" I can't believe he would even submit a patent application. What is wrong with the patent office these days!!
The whole point of a resume is to highlight a persons accomplishments and experiece that might have prepared you for some new position. Therefore most recent experience and accomplishment is most relevant. But an intelectual exercise to come up with a resume for humanity is pointless unless you determine who your reader would be... It might be a good exercise if one were to think of an alien race looking at a resume or God, but isn't a list of individuals pointless and even a list of ideas and discoveries might be included in some sort of list of skills. But the meat of the resume, the experience section would be filled with accomplishments, if alien civilizations where our readers then experience and accomplishments such as; harnessing energy to set up a vaste electrical grid, setting up a communication network around the Earth, distributing water, the Suez and Panama canals, exploring our Solar system with probes, basically anything big that humanity has done to interact with and change our environment. Otherwise, much like the "defeated Hitler" argument, many of humanities endeavors are purely to perpetuate our species, akin to putting "I lost 10 pounds" on your resume. Even some of those things that I wrote might be considered in this category of basic self help... ie discovered drug A that allowed us to live longer would not be important, rather only what was done with that extra time would be important. But the increase in population might go on the resume as an indication of success, as well as, the fact that humans can be found all over the earth as well as in orbit. But these would be the lines of a resume of humanity, not that some individual discovered gravity.
As for the usual education section, it seems that we would want to give an indication here that we have a sizeable recorded history stretching back a few thousand years, so as to indicate that perhaps we have learned something during that time that might be useful.
Extremely insightful pointing out that communism has never been tried before (at least not on a scale large enough for anyone to notice).
Sure it has been tried, on the only scale it could possibly work. Small scale. As you say, it seems very unlikely that Communism is a tenable long or even medium term social arrangement. This seems especially true for large societies, when there is no way of non violently coercing productivity out of individuals. But in smaller societies, say a few hundred individuals. It seems like it would be possible to sustain a communist society where productivity was based on common understanding and interest, where those values could be shared merely by the peer pressure of being part of the community. But once you reach a size whereas you don't know everyone, then you run into problems. Also, communism implies that there is "enough" of material things like food, water, clothing, etc being produced to go around. In a resource poor place, communism would quickly have problems because of competition for those resources.
Most people reading this probably know a bit about the give and take of software development or at least understand the complex uncertainties of any new creative process. Timelines and estimates are rarely more than half good when trying to do a new complicated software project like this.
This is a really flimsy excuse for a delay like this. And the timing is strange since they just started putting out rumors about a possible delay in the weeks before this "leak" happened. I wonder what the delay would have been without this code "leak", my guess would be that it realistically adds at most a couple weeks to the schedule.
This makes me wonder if the stated reasons behind this delay are a symptom of an internal breakdown in communication which has resulted in a convenient lie being told to take advantage of an excuse that people might believe, other than the truth that development is just very time consuming and took them longer than they thought. Or maybe this is just external marketing bunk. Either way it is simply not believable that this code leak all of a sudden caused this entire delay. They should have been substantially done by now to meet their original deadline.
of course, I am not an investor, so I don't give a rat's ass about the internal politics and marketing. Just hope the game is good and that it comes out sometime soon.
"(assuming that having the phrase met exactly means the result is more accurate)"
If you want accuracy, then use quotes, which will match the phrase exactly. But with google most times I find that I want relevancy. Which means that I want to include results that might not have worded the subject the way I do.
My original suggestion was wrong I think, it doesn't substancially differ from doing an exact match search, therefore would be unhelpful.
Google has got it about as good as it can be. It would be nice to see stronger competition in search algorithms, without all the bogus result buying that the other search engines got into.
"School to Avoid??? I would have avoided it when 90% of the bandwith was being sucked up by people sharing MP3s and porn, now maybe the bandwith is reliable and useful for stuff other than loading Google"
Don't you start with Google... Google is what we are and what we want.
Hourly would work out in your favor, but is harder for them to predict... say you want to work on it for 80 hours one week? Are they goign to cap your hours and want time sheets and such? Charging a monthly fee, might give you more flexibility and give them a set cost... as if they had hired you... but without the benefits.
Also, depends how big the company is, larger corporations will want to fit you into one of their accounting/hr categories, but a smaller company won't care if you fit into a certain model.
You can easily search for any exact phrase just by putting double quotes around the phrase. So in this case "replacing a washer in a leaky faucet" yields this result. Which was exactly 0. So if you leave out the quotes google helps you.
I have found just a few situations that require using the double quotes to get more relevant results, but those are rare.
As a suggestion to Google, it might be useful to keep the "common" words as part of the search only to move those records within the returned set that match the phrase exactly higher up in the search. But that could reduce speed of the search, which is of much greater importance to me.
"It's not a misconception. It's a first year law school concept - there is a distinction, based on several centuries of legislation and jurisprudence, and going back to English Common Law, between political speech, commercial speech, speech that consitutes "action" (yelling fire in a crowded theater), and other forms of speech."
While I'll agree that different forms of speech can be categorized and have been legally, but they all still fall under the first amendment right regardless of content. That so called Commercial speech is still speech with the same fundamental protection as other forms of speech. Commercial speech isn't subject to more "checks and balances" because it is in a certain category of speech, but rather because of its content. "Restrictions" upon truthfullness are based upon contract law not speech rights and do not constitute prior restraint. You can lie all you want without effect, but if you promise somebody something in return for something else, then you owe that person something. That is an after the fact effect of the contents of your speech rather than a restriction. Yup, no yelling fire, that's great until there is one... Also, if you tell a hit man to kill your husband this is against the law as well, but those are life and death examples and it is usually the case in the courts that life comes before liberty in the legal pecking order.
But the question of life doesn't reasonably come up when talking about these phone calls. And this regulation does not cover fraud, but rather someone calling to ask you to give them money. This seems more akin to an anti pan-handling law or an anti door-to-door salesperson law, but those are largely overturned in the courts when challenged. Yes, I think we can all agree that it is annoying to be bothered at home, get junk mail, or spam email but overly broad bans like this are very rarely reasonable.
"but I fail to see how this is a restraint on Free Speech, since (a) the speech we are talking about here falls into the "commercial" category (b) it is "speech" directed into people's private homes without their authorization, permission or any expectation that they want to be bothered with it."
This is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in America, when people say that free speech doens't apply to commercial speech. Free Speech rights do not apply to corporations, since they are artificial entitities and not individuals. But a corporation or group has no voice, so the point is irrelevant. It is the individuals that make up a corporation that have the right to speak and express themselves to their own purpose. I have a right to walk down the street and ask people for money whether it is for me or for someone else, just as I have a right to carry a sign saying that blacks should have equal rights or hand out flyers that tell people that Jesus Saves.
Yes there seem to be more people like you these days that say that speech made for profit should not be free, but you are very very wrong. What difference should the speakers motive make and how does anyone propose to tell the difference? Is not speech of a politcal nature, which is commonly recocgnized as central to freedom and the common good, usually just a guy trying to get a job so he can make a living?
I think most concerns could be addressed by introducing a write only medium much like pen and paper is. Seems prone to fraud to only have the rewriteable medium of a hard drive to record votes. We need something that can after the fact be verified to have been tampered with, akin to eraser marks on a ballot. Otherwise, it is just far too easy and tempting to rewrite the votes. Especially for close elections.
Perhaps, something akin to Burning a CD as each vote is cast? Something like that. But Whatever medium is chosen it should be cheap. And the mechanism reliable. And it should be verified by the voter after each vote cast that the vote was recorded properly on that medium.
For many people, who gets elected is a matter of life and death, this isn't just another software application.
Slashdot Mirror
And if it is so easy to do then, why didn't the robots just do it when the humans blackened the earth's sky. Seems a lot more efficient than deriving power from human brain activity... pretty much anything has to be more efficient.
" With the number of networks now being NATed and the such, will we ever truly need something like IPv6?"
I would measure the shortage of IPv4 addresses by the number of people using NATs rather than the other way around.
Without a public globally addressable IP adddress, then a computer is not "on" the internet. I would talk about the shortage of IPv4 addresses this way. People have gotten around the shortage of addresses by using NAT... sure some people like their computers behind firewalls, but I woudl argue that the majority of people getting those little NAT boxes at the computer store are interested more in connecting multiple computers to the internet, than any security concerns. The argument that says that there is no shortage of addresses because people can just use NAT is based on the false premise that being behind a firewall is equivalent to being connected to the internet. This is a worldview that says people are happy just reading their web pages, downloading their pron and checking their email. If this were the case then we wouldn't need the internet or computers, the French Minitel system would be all we ever needed.
The Internet is an end-to-end communications platform. An over reliance on NAT will only impede the growth of new Internet services and technologies. There are real limitations to what can be done with computers behind a NAT.
"What RedHat are doing means that anyone can duplicate and sell Fedora CDs and stuff like that, Fedora is becoming more like debian in terms of community involvement -- and this is great!"
Sounds like what Netscape did with mozilla... which ultimately led to a better browser. But in the couple years of meantime, Internet Explorer dominated the desktop and mozilla is hard pressed to regain marketshare. Fedora might be better, but it won't make the world a better place unless it is used by more people.
This could definately be a step back for linux on the desktop, which had finally become a pleasantly useable thing.
"Perhaps in the future we may even see these pledge requests linked within the GUI itself"
...err emailers will receive a log beach towel with their pledge of one hundred dollars... Okay now we bring you to your user interface.'
Great... just like public radio or television...
'We will bring you to your gui in just a moment, but first... please contribute to our effort... it is you the user that contributes the most to our efforts and if you think that this program is of value to you and you want to see it continuously improved... The next one hundred callers
repeat every 3 months.
"Now then, when the Govt required libraries to block access to porn sites in the interest of "protecting our children" the ACLU steped in and helped fight it. Today libraries must be able to remove those blocks at a moments notice should someone have a desire to view those sites who is not a minor."
Well, the ACLU fought the requirement that libraries use site blocking software for precisely this reason, that some company would be put in charge of deciding what was legitamite speech in a public place. Of course, now that these content filters are blocking overtly unquestionably non-violent political sites, anyone with half a brain should see that this type of software should not be centrally mandated in schools and libraries. Freedom should not be outsourced.
Fuck em.
"Truth be told the fact it was redacted in the first place is far more disturbing than the actual content that was removed."
Government representatives are only supposed to keep stuff secret that would give a potential enemy vital information... blacking out anything that doesn't meet this criteria should be a hanging offense. If this report is true, then this is obviously corruption in its most base and basic form.
Next thing you know we will be trillions of dollars in debt spending half our income on taxes with social security about to collapse and being told that everything will be okay. Oh wait a sec...
Despite what many people seem to think, something that kills people very quickly, although terrifying, won't likely become widespread. The worst virus for humanity would be slow working like HIV, but airborn.
Imagine one with no symptoms other than five years after you got it you suffered major organ failure, became airborn easily. That is your doomsday virus. One that kills within days even if it is easily transmitted will likely be contained regionally aka SARS... although I think we should be ready for SARS this winter.
"make sure that they keep their software patches up-to-date"
They are pursuing a subscription based model which the regular release of software patches supports. Now users see regular patches for scary new security holes downloaded on a regular basis... I expect now that most people are getting used to it, that Microsoft will shorten its supported lifecycle for OS releases and require full upgrades... which of course you can get downloaded to your machine directly using a credit card.
Funny how Bill is using the Open Source community to help spread FUD about its own products which will then be used to help force regular costly upgrades on people.
Security concerns might cause some people to start using Linux Desktops, but the majority of people will just buy into a system of regular updates from Microsoft.
This is a no win issue for the Open Source community.
The evil is too strong to resist, the only way to win is to deny it battle.
" what about the guy (or gal) who invented FIRE!!! That accomplishment is no less than frigging Einstein!! Also, I sure would like to invent the dude who learnt to count with his fingers, that's pretty smart too."
Dude, that was such an obvious "invention" I can't believe he would even submit a patent application. What is wrong with the patent office these days!!
The whole point of a resume is to highlight a persons accomplishments and experiece that might have prepared you for some new position. Therefore most recent experience and accomplishment is most relevant. But an intelectual exercise to come up with a resume for humanity is pointless unless you determine who your reader would be... It might be a good exercise if one were to think of an alien race looking at a resume or God, but isn't a list of individuals pointless and even a list of ideas and discoveries might be included in some sort of list of skills. But the meat of the resume, the experience section would be filled with accomplishments, if alien civilizations where our readers then experience and accomplishments such as; harnessing energy to set up a vaste electrical grid, setting up a communication network around the Earth, distributing water, the Suez and Panama canals, exploring our Solar system with probes, basically anything big that humanity has done to interact with and change our environment. Otherwise, much like the "defeated Hitler" argument, many of humanities endeavors are purely to perpetuate our species, akin to putting "I lost 10 pounds" on your resume. Even some of those things that I wrote might be considered in this category of basic self help... ie discovered drug A that allowed us to live longer would not be important, rather only what was done with that extra time would be important. But the increase in population might go on the resume as an indication of success, as well as, the fact that humans can be found all over the earth as well as in orbit. But these would be the lines of a resume of humanity, not that some individual discovered gravity.
As for the usual education section, it seems that we would want to give an indication here that we have a sizeable recorded history stretching back a few thousand years, so as to indicate that perhaps we have learned something during that time that might be useful.
Hmm... References Available Upon Request.
"Forcing the American idea of freedom"
Seems that many Americans have forgotten what freedom is.
"saftey should be paramount, and if that isn't the case I would urge congress to put a stop all manned flights until that is the case."
saftey should be paramount, and if that isn't the case I would urge congress to put a stop all manned automobile travel until that is the case.
Extremely insightful pointing out that communism has never been tried before (at least not on a scale large enough for anyone to notice).
Sure it has been tried, on the only scale it could possibly work. Small scale. As you say, it seems very unlikely that Communism is a tenable long or even medium term social arrangement. This seems especially true for large societies, when there is no way of non violently coercing productivity out of individuals. But in smaller societies, say a few hundred individuals. It seems like it would be possible to sustain a communist society where productivity was based on common understanding and interest, where those values could be shared merely by the peer pressure of being part of the community. But once you reach a size whereas you don't know everyone, then you run into problems. Also, communism implies that there is "enough" of material things like food, water, clothing, etc being produced to go around. In a resource poor place, communism would quickly have problems because of competition for those resources.
yes, yes, yes, very good. :)
Most people reading this probably know a bit about the give and take of software development or at least understand the complex uncertainties of any new creative process. Timelines and estimates are rarely more than half good when trying to do a new complicated software project like this.
This is a really flimsy excuse for a delay like this. And the timing is strange since they just started putting out rumors about a possible delay in the weeks before this "leak" happened. I wonder what the delay would have been without this code "leak", my guess would be that it realistically adds at most a couple weeks to the schedule.
This makes me wonder if the stated reasons behind this delay are a symptom of an internal breakdown in communication which has resulted in a convenient lie being told to take advantage of an excuse that people might believe, other than the truth that development is just very time consuming and took them longer than they thought. Or maybe this is just external marketing bunk. Either way it is simply not believable that this code leak all of a sudden caused this entire delay. They should have been substantially done by now to meet their original deadline.
of course, I am not an investor, so I don't give a rat's ass about the internal politics and marketing. Just hope the game is good and that it comes out sometime soon.
"(assuming that having the phrase met exactly means the result is more accurate)"
If you want accuracy, then use quotes, which will match the phrase exactly. But with google most times I find that I want relevancy. Which means that I want to include results that might not have worded the subject the way I do.
My original suggestion was wrong I think, it doesn't substancially differ from doing an exact match search, therefore would be unhelpful.
Google has got it about as good as it can be. It would be nice to see stronger competition in search algorithms, without all the bogus result buying that the other search engines got into.
"School to Avoid??? I would have avoided it when 90% of the bandwith was being sucked up by people sharing MP3s and porn, now maybe the bandwith is reliable and useful for stuff other than loading Google"
Don't you start with Google... Google is what we are and what we want.
Depends how they want to pay.
Hourly would work out in your favor, but is harder for them to predict... say you want to work on it for 80 hours one week? Are they goign to cap your hours and want time sheets and such? Charging a monthly fee, might give you more flexibility and give them a set cost... as if they had hired you... but without the benefits.
Also, depends how big the company is, larger corporations will want to fit you into one of their accounting/hr categories, but a smaller company won't care if you fit into a certain model.
I'll bite too, just to be "Informative"
You can easily search for any exact phrase just by putting double quotes around the phrase. So in this case "replacing a washer in a leaky faucet" yields this result. Which was exactly 0. So if you leave out the quotes google helps you.
I have found just a few situations that require using the double quotes to get more relevant results, but those are rare.
As a suggestion to Google, it might be useful to keep the "common" words as part of the search only to move those records within the returned set that match the phrase exactly higher up in the search. But that could reduce speed of the search, which is of much greater importance to me.
If you want an exact match use "the quotes"
"although the fact that "modernized" society keeps increasing its power consumption, there may soon come a day when 100m2 isn't enough..."
Yes, once I plaster my walls with Plasma displays at 500 Watts each, then I'll need a bigger roof.
Percentages are somewhat stupid to look at here except as a marketing lie. Percentages changes are always exagerated with lower numbers.
"Voice will be just another form of data."
Voice is already just another form of data.
"It's not a misconception. It's a first year law school concept - there is a distinction, based on several centuries of legislation and jurisprudence, and going back to English Common Law, between political speech, commercial speech, speech that consitutes "action" (yelling fire in a crowded theater), and other forms of speech."
While I'll agree that different forms of speech can be categorized and have been legally, but they all still fall under the first amendment right regardless of content. That so called Commercial speech is still speech with the same fundamental protection as other forms of speech. Commercial speech isn't subject to more "checks and balances" because it is in a certain category of speech, but rather because of its content. "Restrictions" upon truthfullness are based upon contract law not speech rights and do not constitute prior restraint. You can lie all you want without effect, but if you promise somebody something in return for something else, then you owe that person something. That is an after the fact effect of the contents of your speech rather than a restriction. Yup, no yelling fire, that's great until there is one... Also, if you tell a hit man to kill your husband this is against the law as well, but those are life and death examples and it is usually the case in the courts that life comes before liberty in the legal pecking order.
But the question of life doesn't reasonably come up when talking about these phone calls. And this regulation does not cover fraud, but rather someone calling to ask you to give them money. This seems more akin to an anti pan-handling law or an anti door-to-door salesperson law, but those are largely overturned in the courts when challenged. Yes, I think we can all agree that it is annoying to be bothered at home, get junk mail, or spam email but overly broad bans like this are very rarely reasonable.
Yes, of course I signed up my number.
"but I fail to see how this is a restraint on Free Speech, since (a) the speech we are talking about here falls into the "commercial" category (b) it is "speech" directed into people's private homes without their authorization, permission or any expectation that they want to be bothered with it."
This is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in America, when people say that free speech doens't apply to commercial speech. Free Speech rights do not apply to corporations, since they are artificial entitities and not individuals. But a corporation or group has no voice, so the point is irrelevant. It is the individuals that make up a corporation that have the right to speak and express themselves to their own purpose. I have a right to walk down the street and ask people for money whether it is for me or for someone else, just as I have a right to carry a sign saying that blacks should have equal rights or hand out flyers that tell people that Jesus Saves.
Yes there seem to be more people like you these days that say that speech made for profit should not be free, but you are very very wrong. What difference should the speakers motive make and how does anyone propose to tell the difference? Is not speech of a politcal nature, which is commonly recocgnized as central to freedom and the common good, usually just a guy trying to get a job so he can make a living?
I think most concerns could be addressed by introducing a write only medium much like pen and paper is. Seems prone to fraud to only have the rewriteable medium of a hard drive to record votes. We need something that can after the fact be verified to have been tampered with, akin to eraser marks on a ballot. Otherwise, it is just far too easy and tempting to rewrite the votes. Especially for close elections.
Perhaps, something akin to Burning a CD as each vote is cast? Something like that. But Whatever medium is chosen it should be cheap. And the mechanism reliable. And it should be verified by the voter after each vote cast that the vote was recorded properly on that medium.
For many people, who gets elected is a matter of life and death, this isn't just another software application.