By moving mills away from slicing the arms off children to being run by trained adults interested in mill work, those children got to have this thing called education. Instead of being a burden to others, they became valued members of society, including scientists and engineers.
The left was arguably a major factor in the Enlightenment, without which no science could be done except in secret from the conservatives.
A large proportion of schools and universities in Britain were founded, funded and run by the left. No left, no Faraday, no Rutherford, no Turing, no Crick or Watson - name something you can't live without and I can show those components that would not exist without left-wing establishments, left-wing idealists and left-wing philosophies.
Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?
The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such. (Scientists consider no result a result.)
In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.
Just cut back on projects. Starting with those involving spending money in districts whose politicians work to cripple NASA. Remember, we're coming up to yet another election year and there's no news like bad news to shape the outcomes.
I second that. Some of their guides are ooold, but look rock solid. That isn't too surprising, corporations and politicians never follow guidelines and probably wouldn't understand the NSA's anyway. So the risk of protecting their real opponents is nil. (If they were worried about terrorists, black hats, etc, that would be another matter.)
I used to build myself patchsets roughly equal in size to the kernels themselves. There are a LOT of rare but bbv valuable projects out there.
Steam has opted for well-established APIs, which is reasonable. Not what I would have done, as in a console war, you want to be able to undercut your opponents fatally if need be. However, consoles without games sell about as well as JCB GTs. Probably less. So, from that perspective, Steam (with a few hundred titles) would have wanted to have the games make use of the system. So what they did was correct, given a pre-existing stockpile of software.
On the flip side, those games are merely the now. The games of the future will be written with whatever the best system is in mind. Being that system is a good place to start. As I have said on many a desktop Linux thread, you don't want to be known for being a replacement for the past. The past is gone. You want to define the future. Have the rest of industry catch up to you. You can't win by following the leader.
For a console system, you need sprites, high-speed polygon placement, built-in shaders and deadline-based updates (it has to be damn smooth, if it's going to compete with the alternatives).
What you do not need are windows (beyond picture-in-picture), client-server overheads (consoles aren't likely to be connected to X terminals in a different room, city or country, unless you're using a VERY big monitor), memory overheads from components never used in this context, or support for multiple users with one or more displays each on a single console.
Now, I haven't inspected the code yet, so can't say how far they've gone. Nor do I know if anyone still works on KGI or GGI, although those would be far closer to console requirements than X.
(Hey, I love X, I actually have made a lot of use of redirecting screens several hundred miles for diagnostic purposes, I think there is a lot of life in the system yet, but vanilla X is totally wrong for consoles and even modded X won't give the experience console addicts crave.)
Besides, Valve isn't a desktop flavour. If you want a desktop flavour, one that wows desktop users (just as the desktop market starts dying horribly, it's anguished cry half-drowned in the blood and tabletness flowing forth like a monstrous, misshapen river) then you need to make one.
No, the world doesn't. Consumer OS' need Delay Tolerant Protocol support and Mars One needs to put a giant data server with gigantic solar panels near one of the Martian poles. Anyone with a TV satellite dish and a decent amplifier would be able to put what they wanted there. There's no ISP, no third-party network, no cables that could be cut or tapped, no raidable office, no power switch, no DNS entry to block, no search engine entry to remove.
There is also no way consumers would pay for it. This is one case where you do get what you pay for. Although there are more than enough concerned Internet users to actually put a human-less data centre of useful size on Mars, complete with fault tolerance and hot standby capabilities, so close to absolutely none of you would fork over real money to achieve it that it could never happen.
(How close is close? Fewer than a million is close to zero. Fewer than a hundred million, you could do it if a few were very rich. But since a dead server is equal to no server, anything less than enough to get this working is close to zero.)
Despite everything said in recent months, all the evidence from security experts suggests social engineering is the number one weakness. Network and host security are closing the gap, sure, but unless you plan to go EAL7 - which you can do with a general-purpose OS if you've money to burn - there is nothing that can be trusted.
Nothing? An early backdoor for AT&T Unix was built into the compiler, but it could just as easily have been in any library the compiler used. Auditing the Linux kernel would be bad enough, auditing GCC, glibc and all the maths libraries used by the optimizer? Even with an army of testers and coders, you'd be dead of old age before securing that lot against accidental and deliberate exploits that may arise in code other than that tested.
(By an army, I mean 100,000 dedicated, skilled people would be capable of getting a specific Linux kernel watertight after about 1.5 years on the first go. Each iteration would take less, such that the series would be convergent, but you'd always lag by several months. With the compiler and libraries, the interactions are too severe and there's too much code. You could never get it watertight and the series would diverge because complexity would increase exponentially but verification would be linear.)
I would love to see a company on that scale set up for the sole purpose of finding and fixing Linux bugs. I would also love next week's lottery numbers, a girlfriend, a cuddly toy, a chip fabrication plant and something that can make proper tea. (Cue Bruce Forsyth)
Realistically, I have to limit myself to visions of provably secure kernel components, with the rest of the kernel, and the rest of the OS, being either insecure or half-inched from OpenBSD.
Where you put the data doesn't matter. SSL can be regarded as broken and BGP4+ definitely is, meaning you lose everything in transit. Nobody needs to access the data silos.
(I'm not just thinking spy guys - broken is broken, so this includes competitors, patent trolls, lobbyists, home grown terror groups, the PTA, your next door neighbour...)
Nonono. We need a law that allows website owners to fine idiots who PWS (post whilst stupid) or PUIC (post under influence of conspiracies). Slashdot will become immensely rich overnight, will be able to rehire CmdrTaco, and will lose the useless third who we can ship off to another world via the B Ark.
The Swiss could be dwarves, they certainly have Mirrormere (lake Geneva) and the LHC has been accused of being Moria in the past.
We can definitely rule out the Svart Alfar (dark elves in Norse legend) as that part of the world definitely lacks ugly. Dragons, perhaps - the Swiss are a tough vain at times and have been known to hoard. The mountains are suspiciously mountainy. On the other hand, the chocolateers there are amongst the finest in the world. Dragons can't eat chocolates, as they're related to dogs.
Wiz invents. Jobs innovated. When combined, that can be a powerful combination. You will find that the majority of the best work done has come from pairing inventors with innovators, in the arts as well as the sciences. (See John Lennon and Paul McCartney for details.) There have been successful solo acts (the guy who invented the clockwork radio, that Dyson fellow, Brunell, Thomas Telford, etc) but they are rarer and tend to be known for one or two key ideas, with everything else being variants. Successful variants, as a rule, but not genius ones. Just one Great, Original Idea. (The movie A Beautiful Mind broke with John Nash's actual history with that theme, but it is core to the solo creative genius.)
If you want an ideas farm (schedule: unknown, product: unknown), you need two minds, three at most, that can feed off each other constructively. Actually, it tends to be more a tornado than a farm. You do not want a think-tank, just two or three visionaries where the methods are rational and the madness quarternary (complex is old-hat).
Agreed. Most of my thinking has been directed towards different topologies of society. People aren't either creative or not, brilliant artists don't necessarily make brilliant civil engineers (as demonstrated by architects on a regular basis). Brilliant programmers aren't necessarily brilliant writers (as demonstrated by documentation). So the problem becomes one of encouraging creativity where it is real and encouraging standardization where, like Nero with his poetry and music, attempted creativity is the worst of all possible worlds.
Ok, how to deal with the inevitable flaws that creep in? Scientific method. Ideas should be tested, scrutinized, bugfixed, using known methods that work with creative ideas. If the idea survives, it is good. If the idea breaks irreparably, time for a new idea.
Schools? Dealt with that elsewhere. Recap, though: Stream, both above and below average, per subject. If you are not convinced ability in a subject is adequate differentiation, stream in two dimensions, with creativity being the second. Yes, this costs more money. Raid the bloody spy agency's orc division or something. They have far too much money and time on their hands, pump it into schools. All of it, if possible. But even a 9x increase in budget for education will allow enough flexibility to give you 5x the number of truly brilliant people in the workplace, and double the number of creative supergeniuses.
The outer limits of knowledge will always be filled with low-hanging fruit. It is only perceived as difficult because it's at the outer limits. Maybe if they'd called it the Twilight Zone instead it would have helped. The diminishing returns is only true if you scour the same patch of ground time and time again, working towards completeness within some minute specific topic. You will never reach 100% completion and some problems are so specific that they are better solved "just in time" rather than in advance then forgotten.
Don't people need to understand all the details before they can get to the outer edges? No, not really. The number line is a special case of an infinite group, but it can be mastered by any five year old. By age six, in Britain, most kids will have plotted graphs, worked on Venn diagrams and set theory, and learned that you can transform one operation into one or more others (eg: multiply = multiple adds). By seven, they'll probably have done mappings from one group into another.
If you can comprehend an "add one machine" that takes an input and adds one, then you can comprehend a machine where you pass in the value and a mapping. it's exactly the same, except you don't have to remember what adding is, or even what one is.
So you can jump a decade, by skipping specific transforms and jumping straight to the abstract and a bunch of lookup table.
The field goes on forever. The local bits are well-mapped, sure, but the outer edges are mostly blank spaces. And beyond? Just "Here be dragons" on the charts.
This is true for every discipline, be it science, the humanities or anything else. Schools teach kids to stay in the safe zones, where it is boring. I wouldn't call it safe, mistakes can and do kill people, but it is well-understood danger. There is no incentive amongst the beancounters to remove the dangers (it's costly, and besides, most of those killed are worryingly smart and might find New Stuff to think of) and there is no incentive within schools to push people out into the fringes (textbooks contain errors, especially creationist ones, so it has nothing to do with accurate information).
By the time a child is 16, they aught to have contributed one original idea in something. It is perfectly doable and would take away the fear of New Stuff.
If you looked, they would show that for each indicator, one or two SNPs were involved. These would be identified, along with the standard values and your values.
To determine actual probability, you must multiply (not add) the probability for each indicator, remembering that not all indicators are known.
In the case of Alzheimer's, where external chemicals (aluminium being one) are involved, the indicators mean nothing until you exceed toxic levels of the chemicals. There is nothing to trigger. 100% probability with no neurotoxin is the same as 0% with no neurotoxin. Don't blame me for poor schooling given to people.
23&Me could have done a lot better, I don't consider it faultless, but when PEBKAC, there's nothing they can do.
23&Me are very slow on updating ancestry information and weren't lightning fast on health data. Nonetheless, their data was clearly presented and had clearly stated confidence levels.
Promethease are less well-known to me. I've used their service but I know nothing about the quality of their results, frequency of updates, reaction times when new studies are published, etc. If anyone could fill me in on that, that would be great.
In fact, if 23&Me just moved their health system to an external website with import facility, you'd have the same configuration as with 23&Me + Promethease but with a data set that could evolve through self-reporting. Result - no change from b before, but legal because the DNA company just provides data.
Thank you! There are indeed lots of choices, which makes things interesting. How to balance/optimize the internal and external brain fragments could be an interesting problem and may even be the basis of another generation of culture wars.
Once the consciousness is externalized, then so long as the API and real-time constraints are consistent, you could have multiple physical bodies. You want to go for a drive? Be the person, then become the car. Eliminates any need for mechanical controls (unreliable) and turns the fully networked car into something useful.
It would be interesting to fully explore the impact on the mind. Sorry, Matrix and Neuromancer - excellent fiction though they were - really didn't scratch the surface. However, to say my writing varies is like saying gravity isn't uniform. I can usually manage a decent-sized chapter before fading, but I would need help getting out either a book on the general theory of mind or a story based on such a concept.
P.S. This box contains infinite commas. Be warned, they are freshly baked and may stick to each other. []
Oh no! You know what that means! 100 monkeys is the critical threshold! The brains of all of humanity will now be wiped! I can feel it sta....gurhcfjgjxhhfhcCARRIER LOST
Encourage inventors rather than patent troll them into oblivion.
Just a thought, I know it would destroy much of the current economic model, but maybe - just maybe - those expensive techniques are merely the product of insufficient brains. Does the semiconductor world forget so soon that "cutting edge" in the 1970s was to melt silicon and scrape off the scum on top? Does it eve r occur to anyone that, just as we use reduction techniques to obtain silicon today because older methods were crap, there exists the potential that the expensive, low-quality techniques of today could be the rejects of tomorrow?
There are no inventors any more because silicon is a bloody expensive field to get kicked out of by patent trolls. Mind you, it's also a difficult area to get into, what with TARP being used to fund golden parachutes, bonuses and doubtless a few ladies of the night rather than business loans and venture capital. There's probably a few tens of thousands of mad scientists on Slashdot, and I'm probably one of the maddest. Give each of us 15 million and I guarantee the semiconductor market will never be the same.
(P.S. For the NSA regulars on Slashdot, and if you don't know who you are, you can look it up, feel free to post on your journals or as an article all the nifty chip ideas you've intercepted that have never been used. After all, you're either for us or for the terrorists.)
Slashdot Mirror
By moving mills away from slicing the arms off children to being run by trained adults interested in mill work, those children got to have this thing called education. Instead of being a burden to others, they became valued members of society, including scientists and engineers.
The left was arguably a major factor in the Enlightenment, without which no science could be done except in secret from the conservatives.
A large proportion of schools and universities in Britain were founded, funded and run by the left. No left, no Faraday, no Rutherford, no Turing, no Crick or Watson - name something you can't live without and I can show those components that would not exist without left-wing establishments, left-wing idealists and left-wing philosophies.
Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?
The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such. (Scientists consider no result a result.)
In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.
Just cut back on projects. Starting with those involving spending money in districts whose politicians work to cripple NASA. Remember, we're coming up to yet another election year and there's no news like bad news to shape the outcomes.
I second that. Some of their guides are ooold, but look rock solid. That isn't too surprising, corporations and politicians never follow guidelines and probably wouldn't understand the NSA's anyway. So the risk of protecting their real opponents is nil. (If they were worried about terrorists, black hats, etc, that would be another matter.)
I used to build myself patchsets roughly equal in size to the kernels themselves. There are a LOT of rare but bbv valuable projects out there.
Steam has opted for well-established APIs, which is reasonable. Not what I would have done, as in a console war, you want to be able to undercut your opponents fatally if need be. However, consoles without games sell about as well as JCB GTs. Probably less. So, from that perspective, Steam (with a few hundred titles) would have wanted to have the games make use of the system. So what they did was correct, given a pre-existing stockpile of software.
On the flip side, those games are merely the now. The games of the future will be written with whatever the best system is in mind. Being that system is a good place to start. As I have said on many a desktop Linux thread, you don't want to be known for being a replacement for the past. The past is gone. You want to define the future. Have the rest of industry catch up to you. You can't win by following the leader.
For a console system, you need sprites, high-speed polygon placement, built-in shaders and deadline-based updates (it has to be damn smooth, if it's going to compete with the alternatives).
What you do not need are windows (beyond picture-in-picture), client-server overheads (consoles aren't likely to be connected to X terminals in a different room, city or country, unless you're using a VERY big monitor), memory overheads from components never used in this context, or support for multiple users with one or more displays each on a single console.
Now, I haven't inspected the code yet, so can't say how far they've gone. Nor do I know if anyone still works on KGI or GGI, although those would be far closer to console requirements than X.
(Hey, I love X, I actually have made a lot of use of redirecting screens several hundred miles for diagnostic purposes, I think there is a lot of life in the system yet, but vanilla X is totally wrong for consoles and even modded X won't give the experience console addicts crave.)
Besides, Valve isn't a desktop flavour. If you want a desktop flavour, one that wows desktop users (just as the desktop market starts dying horribly, it's anguished cry half-drowned in the blood and tabletness flowing forth like a monstrous, misshapen river) then you need to make one.
No, the world doesn't. Consumer OS' need Delay Tolerant Protocol support and Mars One needs to put a giant data server with gigantic solar panels near one of the Martian poles. Anyone with a TV satellite dish and a decent amplifier would be able to put what they wanted there. There's no ISP, no third-party network, no cables that could be cut or tapped, no raidable office, no power switch, no DNS entry to block, no search engine entry to remove.
There is also no way consumers would pay for it. This is one case where you do get what you pay for. Although there are more than enough concerned Internet users to actually put a human-less data centre of useful size on Mars, complete with fault tolerance and hot standby capabilities, so close to absolutely none of you would fork over real money to achieve it that it could never happen.
(How close is close? Fewer than a million is close to zero. Fewer than a hundred million, you could do it if a few were very rich. But since a dead server is equal to no server, anything less than enough to get this working is close to zero.)
Despite everything said in recent months, all the evidence from security experts suggests social engineering is the number one weakness. Network and host security are closing the gap, sure, but unless you plan to go EAL7 - which you can do with a general-purpose OS if you've money to burn - there is nothing that can be trusted.
Nothing? An early backdoor for AT&T Unix was built into the compiler, but it could just as easily have been in any library the compiler used. Auditing the Linux kernel would be bad enough, auditing GCC, glibc and all the maths libraries used by the optimizer? Even with an army of testers and coders, you'd be dead of old age before securing that lot against accidental and deliberate exploits that may arise in code other than that tested.
(By an army, I mean 100,000 dedicated, skilled people would be capable of getting a specific Linux kernel watertight after about 1.5 years on the first go. Each iteration would take less, such that the series would be convergent, but you'd always lag by several months. With the compiler and libraries, the interactions are too severe and there's too much code. You could never get it watertight and the series would diverge because complexity would increase exponentially but verification would be linear.)
I would love to see a company on that scale set up for the sole purpose of finding and fixing Linux bugs. I would also love next week's lottery numbers, a girlfriend, a cuddly toy, a chip fabrication plant and something that can make proper tea. (Cue Bruce Forsyth)
Realistically, I have to limit myself to visions of provably secure kernel components, with the rest of the kernel, and the rest of the OS, being either insecure or half-inched from OpenBSD.
I dunno, Mars is looking very nice about now.
Where you put the data doesn't matter. SSL can be regarded as broken and BGP4+ definitely is, meaning you lose everything in transit. Nobody needs to access the data silos.
(I'm not just thinking spy guys - broken is broken, so this includes competitors, patent trolls, lobbyists, home grown terror groups, the PTA, your next door neighbour...)
Nonono. We need a law that allows website owners to fine idiots who PWS (post whilst stupid) or PUIC (post under influence of conspiracies). Slashdot will become immensely rich overnight, will be able to rehire CmdrTaco, and will lose the useless third who we can ship off to another world via the B Ark.
The Swiss could be dwarves, they certainly have Mirrormere (lake Geneva) and the LHC has been accused of being Moria in the past.
We can definitely rule out the Svart Alfar (dark elves in Norse legend) as that part of the world definitely lacks ugly. Dragons, perhaps - the Swiss are a tough vain at times and have been known to hoard. The mountains are suspiciously mountainy. On the other hand, the chocolateers there are amongst the finest in the world. Dragons can't eat chocolates, as they're related to dogs.
Ok, Dwarves it is.
Tunnels and Trolls is an RPG, not a Slashdot posting policy. Go back to bestgore, where you belong.
Innovation != Invention.
Wiz invents. Jobs innovated. When combined, that can be a powerful combination. You will find that the majority of the best work done has come from pairing inventors with innovators, in the arts as well as the sciences. (See John Lennon and Paul McCartney for details.) There have been successful solo acts (the guy who invented the clockwork radio, that Dyson fellow, Brunell, Thomas Telford, etc) but they are rarer and tend to be known for one or two key ideas, with everything else being variants. Successful variants, as a rule, but not genius ones. Just one Great, Original Idea. (The movie A Beautiful Mind broke with John Nash's actual history with that theme, but it is core to the solo creative genius.)
If you want an ideas farm (schedule: unknown, product: unknown), you need two minds, three at most, that can feed off each other constructively. Actually, it tends to be more a tornado than a farm. You do not want a think-tank, just two or three visionaries where the methods are rational and the madness quarternary (complex is old-hat).
Agreed. Most of my thinking has been directed towards different topologies of society. People aren't either creative or not, brilliant artists don't necessarily make brilliant civil engineers (as demonstrated by architects on a regular basis). Brilliant programmers aren't necessarily brilliant writers (as demonstrated by documentation). So the problem becomes one of encouraging creativity where it is real and encouraging standardization where, like Nero with his poetry and music, attempted creativity is the worst of all possible worlds.
Ok, how to deal with the inevitable flaws that creep in? Scientific method. Ideas should be tested, scrutinized, bugfixed, using known methods that work with creative ideas. If the idea survives, it is good. If the idea breaks irreparably, time for a new idea.
Schools? Dealt with that elsewhere. Recap, though: Stream, both above and below average, per subject. If you are not convinced ability in a subject is adequate differentiation, stream in two dimensions, with creativity being the second. Yes, this costs more money. Raid the bloody spy agency's orc division or something. They have far too much money and time on their hands, pump it into schools. All of it, if possible. But even a 9x increase in budget for education will allow enough flexibility to give you 5x the number of truly brilliant people in the workplace, and double the number of creative supergeniuses.
The outer limits of knowledge will always be filled with low-hanging fruit. It is only perceived as difficult because it's at the outer limits. Maybe if they'd called it the Twilight Zone instead it would have helped. The diminishing returns is only true if you scour the same patch of ground time and time again, working towards completeness within some minute specific topic. You will never reach 100% completion and some problems are so specific that they are better solved "just in time" rather than in advance then forgotten.
Don't people need to understand all the details before they can get to the outer edges? No, not really. The number line is a special case of an infinite group, but it can be mastered by any five year old. By age six, in Britain, most kids will have plotted graphs, worked on Venn diagrams and set theory, and learned that you can transform one operation into one or more others (eg: multiply = multiple adds). By seven, they'll probably have done mappings from one group into another.
If you can comprehend an "add one machine" that takes an input and adds one, then you can comprehend a machine where you pass in the value and a mapping. it's exactly the same, except you don't have to remember what adding is, or even what one is.
So you can jump a decade, by skipping specific transforms and jumping straight to the abstract and a bunch of lookup table.
The field goes on forever. The local bits are well-mapped, sure, but the outer edges are mostly blank spaces. And beyond? Just "Here be dragons" on the charts.
This is true for every discipline, be it science, the humanities or anything else. Schools teach kids to stay in the safe zones, where it is boring. I wouldn't call it safe, mistakes can and do kill people, but it is well-understood danger. There is no incentive amongst the beancounters to remove the dangers (it's costly, and besides, most of those killed are worryingly smart and might find New Stuff to think of) and there is no incentive within schools to push people out into the fringes (textbooks contain errors, especially creationist ones, so it has nothing to do with accurate information).
By the time a child is 16, they aught to have contributed one original idea in something. It is perfectly doable and would take away the fear of New Stuff.
If you looked, they would show that for each indicator, one or two SNPs were involved. These would be identified, along with the standard values and your values.
To determine actual probability, you must multiply (not add) the probability for each indicator, remembering that not all indicators are known.
In the case of Alzheimer's, where external chemicals (aluminium being one) are involved, the indicators mean nothing until you exceed toxic levels of the chemicals. There is nothing to trigger. 100% probability with no neurotoxin is the same as 0% with no neurotoxin. Don't blame me for poor schooling given to people.
23&Me could have done a lot better, I don't consider it faultless, but when PEBKAC, there's nothing they can do.
23&Me are very slow on updating ancestry information and weren't lightning fast on health data. Nonetheless, their data was clearly presented and had clearly stated confidence levels.
Promethease are less well-known to me. I've used their service but I know nothing about the quality of their results, frequency of updates, reaction times when new studies are published, etc. If anyone could fill me in on that, that would be great.
In fact, if 23&Me just moved their health system to an external website with import facility, you'd have the same configuration as with 23&Me + Promethease but with a data set that could evolve through self-reporting. Result - no change from b before, but legal because the DNA company just provides data.
Thank you! There are indeed lots of choices, which makes things interesting. How to balance/optimize the internal and external brain fragments could be an interesting problem and may even be the basis of another generation of culture wars.
Once the consciousness is externalized, then so long as the API and real-time constraints are consistent, you could have multiple physical bodies. You want to go for a drive? Be the person, then become the car. Eliminates any need for mechanical controls (unreliable) and turns the fully networked car into something useful.
It would be interesting to fully explore the impact on the mind. Sorry, Matrix and Neuromancer - excellent fiction though they were - really didn't scratch the surface. However, to say my writing varies is like saying gravity isn't uniform. I can usually manage a decent-sized chapter before fading, but I would need help getting out either a book on the general theory of mind or a story based on such a concept.
P.S. This box contains infinite commas. Be warned, they are freshly baked and may stick to each other. []
Oh no! You know what that means! 100 monkeys is the critical threshold! The brains of all of humanity will now be wiped! I can feel it sta....gurhcfjgjxhhfhcCARRIER LOST
Encourage inventors rather than patent troll them into oblivion.
Just a thought, I know it would destroy much of the current economic model, but maybe - just maybe - those expensive techniques are merely the product of insufficient brains. Does the semiconductor world forget so soon that "cutting edge" in the 1970s was to melt silicon and scrape off the scum on top? Does it eve r occur to anyone that, just as we use reduction techniques to obtain silicon today because older methods were crap, there exists the potential that the expensive, low-quality techniques of today could be the rejects of tomorrow?
There are no inventors any more because silicon is a bloody expensive field to get kicked out of by patent trolls. Mind you, it's also a difficult area to get into, what with TARP being used to fund golden parachutes, bonuses and doubtless a few ladies of the night rather than business loans and venture capital. There's probably a few tens of thousands of mad scientists on Slashdot, and I'm probably one of the maddest. Give each of us 15 million and I guarantee the semiconductor market will never be the same.
(P.S. For the NSA regulars on Slashdot, and if you don't know who you are, you can look it up, feel free to post on your journals or as an article all the nifty chip ideas you've intercepted that have never been used. After all, you're either for us or for the terrorists.)
It was an incompatible finger protocol. You have to upgrade your hand and try again.
Been there, done that. Beanies are completely ineffective at helping concentration. Yours or anyone else's.
Microsoft don't write any SCADA control applications, do they?