I think it would be wrong to assume that the Sol and Earth arrangement is even the most suitable spot for our kind of life. Maybe, especially if you live in a Mediterranean environment, you think the planet is near perfect, but if you live at higher or lower latitudes or directly on the equator in desert or high humidity rainforest hothouse environments, you'll find extremes and seasonal differences brutal. Think of what an organism in even middle latitudes faces: 100 degree 100% humidity summers with ocassional -20 degree arid dips with bone-chilling wind-chill (although most organisms probably aren't as affected by this as us of the hairless ape variety). All this happening on a yearly basis. This suggests to me that life could readily take purchase on binary or trinary systems with large periodic differences in insolation (solar heating) at least at some latitudes of the planet they are on.
So, the Earth is great, but probably only 5% (totally pulled off the top of my head, if someone wants to do an analysis of temperate high production areas, be my guest) of it or so is 'perfect' for our kind of life. Could the universe do better? Most likely. Also, stars all differ in size and temperature. 1AU might not be the optimal from even our sun (it is clearly not at optimal since its orbit is not perfectly circular and the sun goes through heating and warming cycles that result in measurable differences in energy output received on Earth, suggesting that orbit and distance could be improved for more constant energy transfer) and differences in suns could make planets at many distances quite habitable for our kind of life.
Probably of importance to whether a planet can bear life is the stability of its periodic insolation and tidal changes. Fortunately, solar systems are generally paragons of stability (it's a delicate balance, if they were not, they would quickly come apart) and orbit a shared center in sum as well as engaging in complex checks and balances that lead to synchronization of phenomena (see tidal locking). Therefore, it's quite likely that many planets in the universe have stable periodic fluctuations and if they do, even if those fluctuations are severe, some life will be able to evolve to survive it.
The RIAA is a trade group, not a company, although I have long wondered why they do not run afoul of anti-trust laws since they essentially serve as a vehicle for price fixing, joint litigation, and other forms of collusion between the member companies, which, taken together, represent a de facto monopoly in the music industry.
"old-style Unix development, because of the 'lightweight process model'. It's a unix-ism that's on the way out but until it disappears we will have some things like Ruby that don't 'get it'."
I'm not sure I follow you there. Lightweight process models are perfect for multi-cores. The more the merrier. Given the andundance of high-quality networking and commodity machines, heavyweight programs outside of very niche areas that use internal threads are less suitable for distributed computing than lighteight process models that can call across the network or the OS to other lightweight processes. A heavywight process can only scale to the number of cores avaiable on the machine it is running on, whereas a flock of lightweight processes can scale to the locally available cores and onto to other machines in a distributed fashion without a major bump in the road between local and remote. Any machine that has multi-cores today could easily run, say, one Ruby process per core with negligible overhead.
It's not that much of a tragedy on Mac OS X. Disk Utility, a standard application in/Application/Utlities allows you to create encrypted disk images that operate exactly as described. Perhaps the advantage here is that this is open source?
"That might be the closest thing to go to space one can experience while still staying earthbound. I can imagine standing on the back of the moon watching out would create the same sensation. "
If you meant at the time of the lunar eclipse, sure. But if you meant the other side of the moon from Earth (the so-called "dark side") in general, you would as often as not see the sun because the "dark side" of the moon is actually only completely dark at full moon. At new moon, looking straight out from the back of the moon from Earth would have you looking almost directly into the sun. That we can have solar eclipses where the moon occludes the sun should make this perfectly clear.
(mistakenly attached this to a thread instead of general topic on first post)
I respect Iran's desire to attempt to pursue nuclear weapons to secure their sovereignty and national security from larger powers and increase their power and influence in their region. For the same reasons, I respect other countries' desires to stop them to preserve their own national security and strategic interests in the region. Iran does not have in common with Iraq that the leadership allowed, even if grudgingly, international inspectors and claimed they did not have or intend to have nuclear weapons. Iran does claim that intent. Those countries, principally the U.S., who avow a policy of nuclear non-proliferation must, if they want other countries that would follow the path of Iran to take them seriously, soon crush Iran totally and decisively and install a new caretaker government that disavows all nuclear ambitions.
I respect Iran's desire to attempt to pursue nuclear weapons to secure their sovereignty and national security from larger powers and increase their power and influence in their region. For the same reasons, I respect other countries' desires to stop them to preserve their own national security and strategic interests in the region. Iran does not have in common with Iraq that the leadership allowed, even if grudgingly, international inspectors and claimed they did not have or intend to have nuclear weapons. Iran does claim that intent. Those countries, principally the U.S., who avow a policy of nuclear non-proliferation must, if they want other countries that would follow the path of Iran to take them seriously, soon crush Iran totally and decisively and install a new caretaker government that disavows all nuclear ambitions.
Mod parent up. You can beat someone senseless and get a year or less in jail, but send to many requests to a computer and you get two years. It's senseless and probably has roots in the same hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials (something unknown/arcange/magical from the perspective of the law makers).
They'll apparently take anyone as a reseller. I had this same exact problem with another reseller of there's, only they also changed the legal registrant without notifying (though they claimed they did), and the domain was lost.
Will you please stop linking Cringley stories? He's like a rabid dog. It's just one endless speculative fantasy after another and I for one am sick of hearing about the his latest clap trap on Slashdot. Mod me troll if you want, but Cringley making stuff up for attention does not fit into 'stuff that matters'. This guy needs serious mental help, not more attention to his bullshit.
It said right in the Wired "news" article that video was given from a remote site with the lame excuse that it too fragile to move on. Anyone with half a clue knows what that means. Wired should have never reported it as news and Slashdot should never have linked it as an article. It's not news when someone doesn't not present the machine, it's just bullshit. Have some editorial discretion, please.
The gist of this article from what I could stomach seems to be financial analysts whining that some companies are releasing their general purpose software as open source, causing their competitors to drop prices on competing products, lose market share, or have to move onto other products. There may also be a whine in there about vendors not being able to sell their application server for a million dollars and then professional services to actually make it, you know, work because the competition is using open source software and only charging for the professional services.
To that I have to say, tough luck. General purpose software has the same problems as music and movies in that anything that can you can duplicate for essentially zero cost, someone else can, too. Obviously there is upfront R&D cost, but in general that cost is recouped after the first few sales (if an enterprise app) or first few shipments (if a retail app). What this amounts to is financial analysts whining that they cannot find software business models that print money at no additional marginal cost. Well, welcome to reality, where all generalized software is crap, it all has to be customized anyway, and people don't want to pay for generalized crap they can get for free in addition to customization.
There could be a point about possible antitrust violations where a large company makes something free by subsidizing it with retained capital or other products to drive a small software developer out of business (though this usually by classical definition requires that the large company then raise the cost beyond what it would have been once the smaller company is bankrupt), but otherwise, see whining.
"I'm from the Midwest. We're the ones who sent Obama to the senate, remember?"
You didn't send Obama to the Senate. Back to back meltdowns of his opponents did. If you read his history, you will see he was defeated in a House run. Then in the Senate run he was going to lose in the Dem primary, but his opponent had some drama that took him down. Then against the Republican in the general election, his opponent got taken down by filings by his opponent's wife in a court case. Obama is essentially the de facto Senator from Illinois. There was no substantive election.
The key problem with Obama is that his platform, or lack thereof, consists of nebulous hopes wrapped up in positive wordplay. He isn't actually proposing a plan to enhance broadband accessibility or promising to do anything to help it. He's just hoping someone will do it and saying he thinks it would be a good thing if someone does. You can see a dramatic illustration of this in the difficulty the poster in the summary (pretty obviously a shill) is having concretely describing this in a way that would appeal to the Slashdot crowd:
* "Boost broadband? - This is a meaningless statement. How do you "boost broadband?" Did broadband access increase overnight? Did he actually propose a way to increase broadband access? * " Like nearly everything in his speech, this was met with robust applause from the crowd" - Exactly, because they aren't listening to the what he is saying, they are just listening to the words and audience cues built into his speech through pauses and wordplay. I suspect that actual neurological activity in the average crowd member would be around that of watching television - they are just being entertained. Also, the shill is trying to use social proofing to make you think, hey, everyone else was cheering this, I should to. Unfortunately, it invalidates the salience of the boost broadband comment used as the lead to capture the interest of Slashdot readers because, if they were cheering for everything, then their cheering for broadband is meaningless.
It's odd because it has a strange history to it in that it was originally a Microsoft game that was later open sourced. Seems to have a pretty dedicated, though small community, still running servers and improving the code base 7 years later. It's claim to fame seems to be an interesting mix of RTS and space combat, with separate interfaces for command and ship piloting. Anyone have any experience with this game?
Software is the future of business. All businesses will become fundamentally software companies. Many are already there. All work will have to be custom, because if you simply buy the same packages as someone else, you have no competitive advantage. It doesn't matter if the industry is farming, manufacturing, or high tech, the ability of your company to compete will depend entirely on your software and the people you employ to make, configure, and maintain that software. Companies that view IT merely as an expenditure will be the road kill of other companies that use custom software to compete in non-traditional ways. It's also a network issue - most companies will want to integrate systems with their partners. If your company doesn't have this ability, and specifically the ability to custom tailor your systems for the integration, then you will be out of the network and, in a few years time, essentially completely out of the economy.
"Accidently fell overboard -- very bad, especially with our cold water here. That's why you don't make ocean passages alone, no matter how experienced you are."
While that is generally true, I would point out that the way watches work, unless you have enough people that you can have two people on watch at all times (takes a lot of people), if you go overboard on your watch alone it's functionally the same as if you were alone. While you are drowning, everyone else onboard is snoring away peacefully. I even heard of a guy who was harnessed to the boat who went over and couldn't get back onboard. His wife found him in the morning drowned and still harnessed. There are transponder systems now to help with that (i.e. sounds an alarm if the transponder of the guy on watch falls overboard), but I'm not sure how many people use them.
If it were not for nuclear weapons, we would probably be on conventional World War IV about now. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is the acquisition of guaranteed sovereignty and the principal of mutually assured deterrence is the only guarantor of peace between large powers. There is no argument that the potential for destruction of nuclear weapons is orders of magnitude more devastating than conventional war, but tens if not hundreds of millions of people would have died in conventional wars in the last six decades without them. Nuclear weapons are why we have cold wars instead of hot ones, or only hot ones between unmatched opponents instead of superpower versus superpower.
I doubt the human body combined with a stationary bicycle is a very efficient processor of biomass into energy. Surely it would be more efficient to take a more direct route? I think this premise comes from the common notion that somehow humans magically create their own energy, rather than simply being replicating biochemical vats for the extraction of energy from food with many adaptations to find said food and perform said replication.
"Google censors results from Americans at the request of the American government. "
None of the articles you link offer any evidence of this being done systematically. Do you have particular search terms or articles talking about specific searches that result in this message that doesn't stem from a temporary injunction or something under appeal?
"The other guy got my account; I got money for the time I put into the character; Blizzard got the money for the game CDs and my monthly subscription; Paypal got their bite out of our transaction; eBay lost money for the bandwidth, site design and hosting."
eBay got money from their fully owned subsidiary, Paypal,
"but the idea that decisions a large company makes are typically based on risk analysis, balancing potential profit and risk, is not exactly something that anyone should view as insightful."
The truly ironic thing here is that you are dismissing the original poster for making a comment that you view as so obvious it shouldn't be marked insightful, yet the original comment isn't even valid. That is how a large company works in the theoretical, academic model. In reality, any sufficiently large corporation is governed by petty egos and politics and therefore any particular decision may or may not make any economic sense. Like police, economics is a corrective force, not a preventative one, once group dynamics are considered.
Once you get beyond syntax you start delving deep into the particular style of a language, which frustrates attempts to compare. A very good 'Rosetta stone' for programming languages already exists:
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't "Liberty City" the name used for New York in Deus Ex?
I think it would be wrong to assume that the Sol and Earth arrangement is even the most suitable spot for our kind of life. Maybe, especially if you live in a Mediterranean environment, you think the planet is near perfect, but if you live at higher or lower latitudes or directly on the equator in desert or high humidity rainforest hothouse environments, you'll find extremes and seasonal differences brutal. Think of what an organism in even middle latitudes faces: 100 degree 100% humidity summers with ocassional -20 degree arid dips with bone-chilling wind-chill (although most organisms probably aren't as affected by this as us of the hairless ape variety). All this happening on a yearly basis. This suggests to me that life could readily take purchase on binary or trinary systems with large periodic differences in insolation (solar heating) at least at some latitudes of the planet they are on.
So, the Earth is great, but probably only 5% (totally pulled off the top of my head, if someone wants to do an analysis of temperate high production areas, be my guest) of it or so is 'perfect' for our kind of life. Could the universe do better? Most likely. Also, stars all differ in size and temperature. 1AU might not be the optimal from even our sun (it is clearly not at optimal since its orbit is not perfectly circular and the sun goes through heating and warming cycles that result in measurable differences in energy output received on Earth, suggesting that orbit and distance could be improved for more constant energy transfer) and differences in suns could make planets at many distances quite habitable for our kind of life.
Probably of importance to whether a planet can bear life is the stability of its periodic insolation and tidal changes. Fortunately, solar systems are generally paragons of stability (it's a delicate balance, if they were not, they would quickly come apart) and orbit a shared center in sum as well as engaging in complex checks and balances that lead to synchronization of phenomena (see tidal locking). Therefore, it's quite likely that many planets in the universe have stable periodic fluctuations and if they do, even if those fluctuations are severe, some life will be able to evolve to survive it.
The RIAA is a trade group, not a company, although I have long wondered why they do not run afoul of anti-trust laws since they essentially serve as a vehicle for price fixing, joint litigation, and other forms of collusion between the member companies, which, taken together, represent a de facto monopoly in the music industry.
"old-style Unix development, because of the 'lightweight process model'. It's a unix-ism that's on the way out but until it disappears we will have some things like Ruby that don't 'get it'."
I'm not sure I follow you there. Lightweight process models are perfect for multi-cores. The more the merrier. Given the andundance of high-quality networking and commodity machines, heavyweight programs outside of very niche areas that use internal threads are less suitable for distributed computing than lighteight process models that can call across the network or the OS to other lightweight processes. A heavywight process can only scale to the number of cores avaiable on the machine it is running on, whereas a flock of lightweight processes can scale to the locally available cores and onto to other machines in a distributed fashion without a major bump in the road between local and remote. Any machine that has multi-cores today could easily run, say, one Ruby process per core with negligible overhead.
It's not that much of a tragedy on Mac OS X. Disk Utility, a standard application in /Application/Utlities allows you to create encrypted disk images that operate exactly as described. Perhaps the advantage here is that this is open source?
"That might be the closest thing to go to space one can experience while still staying earthbound. I can imagine standing on the back of the moon watching out would create the same sensation. "
If you meant at the time of the lunar eclipse, sure. But if you meant the other side of the moon from Earth (the so-called "dark side") in general, you would as often as not see the sun because the "dark side" of the moon is actually only completely dark at full moon. At new moon, looking straight out from the back of the moon from Earth would have you looking almost directly into the sun. That we can have solar eclipses where the moon occludes the sun should make this perfectly clear.
(mistakenly attached this to a thread instead of general topic on first post)
I respect Iran's desire to attempt to pursue nuclear weapons to secure their sovereignty and national security from larger powers and increase their power and influence in their region. For the same reasons, I respect other countries' desires to stop them to preserve their own national security and strategic interests in the region. Iran does not have in common with Iraq that the leadership allowed, even if grudgingly, international inspectors and claimed they did not have or intend to have nuclear weapons. Iran does claim that intent. Those countries, principally the U.S., who avow a policy of nuclear non-proliferation must, if they want other countries that would follow the path of Iran to take them seriously, soon crush Iran totally and decisively and install a new caretaker government that disavows all nuclear ambitions.
(Why was this in science and not politics?)
I respect Iran's desire to attempt to pursue nuclear weapons to secure their sovereignty and national security from larger powers and increase their power and influence in their region. For the same reasons, I respect other countries' desires to stop them to preserve their own national security and strategic interests in the region. Iran does not have in common with Iraq that the leadership allowed, even if grudgingly, international inspectors and claimed they did not have or intend to have nuclear weapons. Iran does claim that intent. Those countries, principally the U.S., who avow a policy of nuclear non-proliferation must, if they want other countries that would follow the path of Iran to take them seriously, soon crush Iran totally and decisively and install a new caretaker government that disavows all nuclear ambitions.
(Why was this in science and not politics?)
Mod parent up. You can beat someone senseless and get a year or less in jail, but send to many requests to a computer and you get two years. It's senseless and probably has roots in the same hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials (something unknown/arcange/magical from the perspective of the law makers).
They'll apparently take anyone as a reseller. I had this same exact problem with another reseller of there's, only they also changed the legal registrant without notifying (though they claimed they did), and the domain was lost.
Will you please stop linking Cringley stories? He's like a rabid dog. It's just one endless speculative fantasy after another and I for one am sick of hearing about the his latest clap trap on Slashdot. Mod me troll if you want, but Cringley making stuff up for attention does not fit into 'stuff that matters'. This guy needs serious mental help, not more attention to his bullshit.
It said right in the Wired "news" article that video was given from a remote site with the lame excuse that it too fragile to move on. Anyone with half a clue knows what that means. Wired should have never reported it as news and Slashdot should never have linked it as an article. It's not news when someone doesn't not present the machine, it's just bullshit. Have some editorial discretion, please.
The gist of this article from what I could stomach seems to be financial analysts whining that some companies are releasing their general purpose software as open source, causing their competitors to drop prices on competing products, lose market share, or have to move onto other products. There may also be a whine in there about vendors not being able to sell their application server for a million dollars and then professional services to actually make it, you know, work because the competition is using open source software and only charging for the professional services.
To that I have to say, tough luck. General purpose software has the same problems as music and movies in that anything that can you can duplicate for essentially zero cost, someone else can, too. Obviously there is upfront R&D cost, but in general that cost is recouped after the first few sales (if an enterprise app) or first few shipments (if a retail app). What this amounts to is financial analysts whining that they cannot find software business models that print money at no additional marginal cost. Well, welcome to reality, where all generalized software is crap, it all has to be customized anyway, and people don't want to pay for generalized crap they can get for free in addition to customization.
There could be a point about possible antitrust violations where a large company makes something free by subsidizing it with retained capital or other products to drive a small software developer out of business (though this usually by classical definition requires that the large company then raise the cost beyond what it would have been once the smaller company is bankrupt), but otherwise, see whining.
"I'm from the Midwest. We're the ones who sent Obama to the senate, remember?"
You didn't send Obama to the Senate. Back to back meltdowns of his opponents did. If you read his history, you will see he was defeated in a House run. Then in the Senate run he was going to lose in the Dem primary, but his opponent had some drama that took him down. Then against the Republican in the general election, his opponent got taken down by filings by his opponent's wife in a court case. Obama is essentially the de facto Senator from Illinois. There was no substantive election.
The key problem with Obama is that his platform, or lack thereof, consists of nebulous hopes wrapped up in positive wordplay. He isn't actually proposing a plan to enhance broadband accessibility or promising to do anything to help it. He's just hoping someone will do it and saying he thinks it would be a good thing if someone does. You can see a dramatic illustration of this in the difficulty the poster in the summary (pretty obviously a shill) is having concretely describing this in a way that would appeal to the Slashdot crowd:
* "Boost broadband? - This is a meaningless statement. How do you "boost broadband?" Did broadband access increase overnight? Did he actually propose a way to increase broadband access?
* " Like nearly everything in his speech, this was met with robust applause from the crowd" - Exactly, because they aren't listening to the what he is saying, they are just listening to the words and audience cues built into his speech through pauses and wordplay. I suspect that actual neurological activity in the average crowd member would be around that of watching television - they are just being entertained. Also, the shill is trying to use social proofing to make you think, hey, everyone else was cheering this, I should to. Unfortunately, it invalidates the salience of the boost broadband comment used as the lead to capture the interest of Slashdot readers because, if they were cheering for everything, then their cheering for broadband is meaningless.
I recently came across a rather odd game called (Free) Allegiance:
http://www.freeallegiance.org/
It's odd because it has a strange history to it in that it was originally a Microsoft game that was later open sourced. Seems to have a pretty dedicated, though small community, still running servers and improving the code base 7 years later. It's claim to fame seems to be an interesting mix of RTS and space combat, with separate interfaces for command and ship piloting. Anyone have any experience with this game?
Software is the future of business. All businesses will become fundamentally software companies. Many are already there. All work will have to be custom, because if you simply buy the same packages as someone else, you have no competitive advantage. It doesn't matter if the industry is farming, manufacturing, or high tech, the ability of your company to compete will depend entirely on your software and the people you employ to make, configure, and maintain that software. Companies that view IT merely as an expenditure will be the road kill of other companies that use custom software to compete in non-traditional ways. It's also a network issue - most companies will want to integrate systems with their partners. If your company doesn't have this ability, and specifically the ability to custom tailor your systems for the integration, then you will be out of the network and, in a few years time, essentially completely out of the economy.
"Accidently fell overboard -- very bad, especially with our cold water here. That's why you don't make ocean passages alone, no matter how experienced you are."
While that is generally true, I would point out that the way watches work, unless you have enough people that you can have two people on watch at all times (takes a lot of people), if you go overboard on your watch alone it's functionally the same as if you were alone. While you are drowning, everyone else onboard is snoring away peacefully. I even heard of a guy who was harnessed to the boat who went over and couldn't get back onboard. His wife found him in the morning drowned and still harnessed. There are transponder systems now to help with that (i.e. sounds an alarm if the transponder of the guy on watch falls overboard), but I'm not sure how many people use them.
If it were not for nuclear weapons, we would probably be on conventional World War IV about now. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is the acquisition of guaranteed sovereignty and the principal of mutually assured deterrence is the only guarantor of peace between large powers. There is no argument that the potential for destruction of nuclear weapons is orders of magnitude more devastating than conventional war, but tens if not hundreds of millions of people would have died in conventional wars in the last six decades without them. Nuclear weapons are why we have cold wars instead of hot ones, or only hot ones between unmatched opponents instead of superpower versus superpower.
I doubt the human body combined with a stationary bicycle is a very efficient processor of biomass into energy. Surely it would be more efficient to take a more direct route? I think this premise comes from the common notion that somehow humans magically create their own energy, rather than simply being replicating biochemical vats for the extraction of energy from food with many adaptations to find said food and perform said replication.
"Google censors results from Americans at the request of the American government. "
None of the articles you link offer any evidence of this being done systematically. Do you have particular search terms or articles talking about specific searches that result in this message that doesn't stem from a temporary injunction or something under appeal?
"The other guy got my account;
I got money for the time I put into the character;
Blizzard got the money for the game CDs and my monthly subscription;
Paypal got their bite out of our transaction;
eBay lost money for the bandwidth, site design and hosting."
eBay got money from their fully owned subsidiary, Paypal,
"but the idea that decisions a large company makes are typically based on risk analysis, balancing potential profit and risk, is not exactly something that anyone should view as insightful."
The truly ironic thing here is that you are dismissing the original poster for making a comment that you view as so obvious it shouldn't be marked insightful, yet the original comment isn't even valid. That is how a large company works in the theoretical, academic model. In reality, any sufficiently large corporation is governed by petty egos and politics and therefore any particular decision may or may not make any economic sense. Like police, economics is a corrective force, not a preventative one, once group dynamics are considered.
You mean ANTI-federalism.
Once you get beyond syntax you start delving deep into the particular style of a language, which frustrates attempts to compare. A very good 'Rosetta stone' for programming languages already exists:
s yntax-across-languages/
http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/