In the worst case, if one really had to look at the document, just load it onto a laptop, venture out into the world, find some random wireless bandwidth, and read it there. For good measure, buy the wireless card at a flea market and toss it in a dumpster afterward. Just don't drive there in a car that's registered in Texas!
> life is pretty tough and law is pretty unforgiving.
Automobiles traveling at speed are even less forgiving. All these laws and such are there in part to remind of this fact.
> I'm having good times now, but I've had some bad ones where insurance and registration wasn't as important as gasoline and rent.
And what if you had crashed your car into someone else, or their property, without insurance? Who pays for that? As has already been pointed out, driving is a privilege reserved for those who can assume the responsibility. You're willing to take from the system, but you're not willing to give back your fair share. If you have problems with the authorities governing your automobile usage, then don't drive a car!
I have no problem with intrusive surveillance on the highways. What I have a problem with is flawed surveillance that can be hacked. If the cops just sit back and let the computers do their jobs for them, then the hackers will take advantage of the situation. Grandma will get busted for all manner of mayhem while the real crooks with their fake RFID tags are getting away with it.
How is this any different from any other fuel? It's taking carbon from the earth and putting it into the atmosphere, pulling some potential energy out in the process. No different from burning coal, fuel oil, or wood. How is the carbon cycle completed? What gets the carbon back into the ground? All this does is impoverish the soil and add more carbon to the atmosphere. If you start talking about fertilizer, then you've lost your energy savings argument. Someone please tell me how this is any better than burning anything else.
If you're going to burn something to get energy out of it, then burn it REALLY HOT in a VERY LARGE furnace so you can reduce it to CO2 and water, and take advantage of thermodynamics. I'm not advocating big power plants, but they are the best bang for the buck as far as extracting energy from carbon fuel and creating the least amount of pollution from it.
'Who' doesn't matter. It's the code that matters. If it's derived from some non-free source, that can be detected without figuring out who contributed it. The material in question can be removed, and replaced with homegrown code. Figuring out who contributed it really only matters if you want to go after the person for contributing it, which is a secondary concern, having nothing to do with the code. I'll say it again: stop obsessing about what belongs to who, and worry about the quality of the product.
If people like it, they will watch it. If they don't like it, they won't. Is the whole family gonna huddle in front of the computer to watch it? No, they will wait until it's on TV and watch it there. If someone downloads the show and watches it and likes it, they will watch it again when it's on TV. And they might just drag a few more eyeballs to the TV with them. Content producers need to stop obsessing over the control of their content and pay more attention to the quality of the content. Good stuff will be successful, and bad stuff will sink into oblivion. DRM, copy protection, broadcast flags or whatever else that gets in the way, just throws a big wet blanket over the whole process.
"Room temperature" is not constant. Don't worry about introducing randomness into the system, it's already there. There is a lot of hysteresis in the thermostat. The presence of people, sunlight, etc. in the room will have a noticable effect on the temperature. The temperature has a profound effect on the crystal's resonant frequency. And what happens if the computer gets turned off, and then back on again? Uncharacterizable errors will be introduced in the process of transferring the "correct" time back and forth between the battery clock and the system clock. This stuff has to go under the category of "noise" unless it can be characterized. Is this guy going to start analyzing thermostats, furnaces, and sunlight? "Real" frequency generators put the crystal in an oven with lots of thermal inertia and small hysteresis in the thermostat. This analysis ignores all of these effects. The researcher clearly spends too much time in his air-conditioned laboratory.
"Science" is how things work, not how to work things. A "Real" "Computer Science" degree should teach about how computers work: physics, circuit theory, state machines, compilers, applied mathematics, management of complexity, etc. This degree sounds more like "Computer Systems Engineering" to me.
Why is the application environment different from the database environment?
The database is really just persistent program state, right? So why do you have a separate application, etc. for the database?
When you start putting constraints, triggers, etc. on tables, you are already sliding down that slippery slope. Whenever you have a slippery slope, it's a clear sign that a new way of thinking is neeeded.
Why not write the whole application in the database? The stock answer is that the embedded language is not insert adjective here enough to run my application. Why does this have to be the case? Why can't a powerful language have its own database? Why do you have to retrieve variables from the database? Why can't the variables just be in the database in the first place?
Imagine perl tied hashes, but you can also do SQL queries on the same data if you like, no performance penalty. Why not?
If the inventors of motorized vehicles had gotten stuck in this same brain-rut, we would be driving horse-drawn carriages pulled by mechanical horses, instead of automobiles designed from scratch to use engines.
Yesterday we saw that the filesystem is the database. Today we see that the database should be the language. See where this is going? Go read As We May Think again. Prof. Bush is still out in front of us. There's no operating system. There's no file system. There's data, there's the user, and there's the glue (a language) that binds them together. Everything else is just artifacts of the haphazard way we implemented it.
I used to work in Quality Control for a big grocery wholesaler. One of their biggest problems was inventory control. Not necessarily theft, but human errors such as omissions, extra cases, and mistaken identity (for example, strawberry yogurt instead of strawberry banana yogurt). Sometimes stock was not rotated correctly and it would sit in the warehouse until after its expiration date. We stocked hundreds of grocery stores from each warehouse; I am talking about a LOT of inventory here! They expended a lot of time and energy to track down and minimize these errors. The error rates were watched closely by upper management, because the impact on the bottom line was quite significant. RFID has the potential to detect these sorts of errors ahead of time. The grocery business (in general) is highly competitive and margins are paper-thin, so any technology that helps to cut down on these sorts of problems will show up as lower prices on groceries for you and me. If the RFID tags are associated with cases instead of individual items, consumers will not encounter them, and there is no threat.
The big problem in retail stores is theft, because they let the public roam the aisles. Stuff on the shelves represents tied-up money, so store inventories are kept to a minimum, therefore keeping track of stuff in the stores is not that big a deal. They already use tags to deter theft of big-ticket items such as health and beauty aids. RFID will not help them with this problem any more than the existing tags, so there is not much incentive to use them there. No worries, at least yet.
I've written some very nice 3-D apps using OpenInventor and Motif. OpenInventor is excellent for prototyping 3-D apps. I worked on a simulator project where we used OpenInventor, Motif and Scheme. We had Scheme bindings for everything. Since Scheme is interpreted, we could make changes "on-the-fly" without recompiling or even restarting the program.
Prototyping tools are different from production tools. It's okay (even preferable) to prototype in one environment, and write the deliverable in another. 3-D design is not cut-and dried, so you will spend a lot of time messing with how things look. This is much easier in an interpreted world than in one that requires compiling and linking of big C++ executables every time you decide that the red cube is a little too big.
You are clearly not interested in language design, troll!
Lisp has no syntax at all. It's just groups of symbols. They are arranged in a hierarchy with parentheses. If you think the representation stinks, make your own. That is the bloody point!
The point of Lisp is the abstract data structures and what they do, not the textual representations of them. Get your head out of the sand. You could represent Lisp programs with little nested Pokemon characters if you wanted to, and it's still Lisp.
The AI community went through this stuff in the early 60's and came up with Lisp. These guys will thrash for a while and then they will invent Lisp, too. Maybe they can even patent it!
So how many fans out there are making "illegal" cassette tapes? No one knows. There's no way to find out. So it could be "everyone" and it's just passed off as "fair use". But "We" can tell how many Napster copies are being made and somehow that's worse? I don't understand.
And if these rock&roll people are to be admired as forward-thinking people for their music, maybe they ought to get their heads out of the sand and make an attempt to imagine a future that's significantly different from what we have now. I have ABSOLUTELY NO respect, admiration, etc. for these people because it's clear that they have not invested any quality thinking about their or our future.
Metallica can join Michael Jackson in Neverland for all I care. If I'm going to invest my precious time in listening to music, it's gonna be from people I respect.
So there is this xmlrpc thang that supposedly does everything CORBA does, and much slicker. I've written a CORBA server and client and I can tell you that it isn't fun. I haven't actually worked with xmlrpc, but it looks very nice. I've worked with XML in Java and I like that a lot.
So my question is, are there any ideas/plans/etc for integrating xmlrpc into gnome?
Slashdot Mirror
In the worst case, if one really had to look at the document, just load it onto a laptop, venture out into the world, find some random wireless bandwidth, and read it there. For good measure, buy the wireless card at a flea market and toss it in a dumpster afterward. Just don't drive there in a car that's registered in Texas!
> life is pretty tough and law is pretty unforgiving.
Automobiles traveling at speed are even less forgiving. All these laws and such are there in part to remind of this fact.
> I'm having good times now, but I've had some bad ones where insurance and registration wasn't as important as gasoline and rent.
And what if you had crashed your car into someone else, or their property, without insurance? Who pays for that? As has already been pointed out, driving is a privilege reserved for those who can assume the responsibility. You're willing to take from the system, but you're not willing to give back your fair share. If you have problems with the authorities governing your automobile usage, then don't drive a car!
I have no problem with intrusive surveillance on the highways. What I have a problem with is flawed surveillance that can be hacked. If the cops just sit back and let the computers do their jobs for them, then the hackers will take advantage of the situation. Grandma will get busted for all manner of mayhem while the real crooks with their fake RFID tags are getting away with it.
If you're going to burn something to get energy out of it, then burn it REALLY HOT in a VERY LARGE furnace so you can reduce it to CO2 and water, and take advantage of thermodynamics. I'm not advocating big power plants, but they are the best bang for the buck as far as extracting energy from carbon fuel and creating the least amount of pollution from it.
'Who' doesn't matter. It's the code that matters. If it's derived from some non-free source, that can be detected without figuring out who contributed it. The material in question can be removed, and replaced with homegrown code. Figuring out who contributed it really only matters if you want to go after the person for contributing it, which is a secondary concern, having nothing to do with the code. I'll say it again: stop obsessing about what belongs to who, and worry about the quality of the product.
If people like it, they will watch it. If they don't like it, they won't. Is the whole family gonna huddle in front of the computer to watch it? No, they will wait until it's on TV and watch it there. If someone downloads the show and watches it and likes it, they will watch it again when it's on TV. And they might just drag a few more eyeballs to the TV with them. Content producers need to stop obsessing over the control of their content and pay more attention to the quality of the content. Good stuff will be successful, and bad stuff will sink into oblivion. DRM, copy protection, broadcast flags or whatever else that gets in the way, just throws a big wet blanket over the whole process.
"Room temperature" is not constant. Don't worry about introducing randomness into the system, it's already there. There is a lot of hysteresis in the thermostat. The presence of people, sunlight, etc. in the room will have a noticable effect on the temperature. The temperature has a profound effect on the crystal's resonant frequency. And what happens if the computer gets turned off, and then back on again? Uncharacterizable errors will be introduced in the process of transferring the "correct" time back and forth between the battery clock and the system clock. This stuff has to go under the category of "noise" unless it can be characterized. Is this guy going to start analyzing thermostats, furnaces, and sunlight? "Real" frequency generators put the crystal in an oven with lots of thermal inertia and small hysteresis in the thermostat. This analysis ignores all of these effects. The researcher clearly spends too much time in his air-conditioned laboratory.
Sounds like "Engineering" to me.
"Science" is how things work, not how to work things. A "Real" "Computer Science" degree should teach about how computers work: physics, circuit theory, state machines, compilers, applied mathematics, management of complexity, etc. This degree sounds more like "Computer Systems Engineering" to me.
The database is really just persistent program state, right? So why do you have a separate application, etc. for the database?
When you start putting constraints, triggers, etc. on tables, you are already sliding down that slippery slope. Whenever you have a slippery slope, it's a clear sign that a new way of thinking is neeeded.
Why not write the whole application in the database? The stock answer is that the embedded language is not insert adjective here enough to run my application. Why does this have to be the case? Why can't a powerful language have its own database? Why do you have to retrieve variables from the database? Why can't the variables just be in the database in the first place?
Imagine perl tied hashes, but you can also do SQL queries on the same data if you like, no performance penalty. Why not?
If the inventors of motorized vehicles had gotten stuck in this same brain-rut, we would be driving horse-drawn carriages pulled by mechanical horses, instead of automobiles designed from scratch to use engines.
Yesterday we saw that the filesystem is the database. Today we see that the database should be the language. See where this is going? Go read As We May Think again. Prof. Bush is still out in front of us. There's no operating system. There's no file system. There's data, there's the user, and there's the glue (a language) that binds them together. Everything else is just artifacts of the haphazard way we implemented it.
You can make pretend you have a real operating system.
You can even install cdrecord and burn CDs effortlessly.
Works great! No stupid gui to get in your way.
I have to agree with you. "Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters to the Wired Editors".
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065 .htm
This is your worst nightmare come true!
The big problem in retail stores is theft, because they let the public roam the aisles. Stuff on the shelves represents tied-up money, so store inventories are kept to a minimum, therefore keeping track of stuff in the stores is not that big a deal. They already use tags to deter theft of big-ticket items such as health and beauty aids. RFID will not help them with this problem any more than the existing tags, so there is not much incentive to use them there. No worries, at least yet.
Prototyping tools are different from production tools. It's okay (even preferable) to prototype in one environment, and write the deliverable in another. 3-D design is not cut-and dried, so you will spend a lot of time messing with how things look. This is much easier in an interpreted world than in one that requires compiling and linking of big C++ executables every time you decide that the red cube is a little too big.
I have a whole ring full of physical keys. Nobody is out there telling me to replace them all with one. That's not the problem.
Nothing more to be said.
Lisp has no syntax at all. It's just groups of symbols. They are arranged in a hierarchy with parentheses. If you think the representation stinks, make your own. That is the bloody point! The point of Lisp is the abstract data structures and what they do, not the textual representations of them. Get your head out of the sand. You could represent Lisp programs with little nested Pokemon characters if you wanted to, and it's still Lisp.
The AI community went through this stuff in the early 60's and came up with Lisp. These guys will thrash for a while and then they will invent Lisp, too. Maybe they can even patent it!
Bicycles run strictly on human power.
But I suppose eBike sounds sexier than eMoped.
http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/people/kbrussel/Iv y/
With Ivy, you can mess witb OpenInventor interactively, from the scheme prompt. Can't beat it!
And if these rock&roll people are to be admired as forward-thinking people for their music, maybe they ought to get their heads out of the sand and make an attempt to imagine a future that's significantly different from what we have now. I have ABSOLUTELY NO respect, admiration, etc. for these people because it's clear that they have not invested any quality thinking about their or our future.
Metallica can join Michael Jackson in Neverland for all I care. If I'm going to invest my precious time in listening to music, it's gonna be from people I respect.
So my question is, are there any ideas/plans/etc for integrating xmlrpc into gnome?