why? you probably wouldn't even notice it. have you travelled across the u.s. and seen how empty it is? sure, some parts of the country and the rest of the world are somewhat crowded - but vast areas of land are virtually empty.
Well, I live in the second-least crowded state - Nevada - with two people per square mile - so I think I'm qualified to give some input on this.
In Las Vegas, the population exceeded the capacity of the land to support it long ago - it pipes in a majority of its water from California, at a gigantic cost to everyone.
In Reno, we manage to get by through our sound policies of raping the Truckee River and Lake Tahoe, watering our lawns only 1-2 times a week, and, every ten years, being formally denied showers for a couple weeks. I hear there used to be fish in that river. But, when I was 17, and on the cross-country team, I ran right across it. My socks got wet; my pants did not.
In Fallon, Nevada, there isn't easy access to natural sources of water, so most citizens drill shallow wells to get at the ever-lowering water table. These wells tend to be loaded with concetrations of arsenic as high as 1,000 ppb. The result? One of the largest and most alarming leukemia clusters in the U.S.
Certainly the earth can support a larger population than six billion people if resources were distributed correctly - but don't try telling me that you could alleviate L.A.'s overcrowding problem by 50% by moving half of them to Winnemucca (Recent town billboard: "Winnemucca! Now with paved roads!"). Nevada would be dry in a week - and we'd have to make do with gin.
I believe that a survey of Slashdot reader, if it could possibly be done, would reveal that most *are* in the U.S. Those who are not tend to (often) A) Resent the U.S. for precisely this reason, among others; and B) Act as an extremely vocal minority.
so, because we can "only" stop about 60% (I've heard that a laser based system would be closer to 90%) of the warheads launched at us, we shouldn't bother? If you can only cure 60% of the people infected with HIV, would you not do it because it's only "60% effective?"
You always have to consider cost-benefit analysis. That's exactly what Bush has just done with arsenic. He figures, "If it cost $80 billion to lower the arsenic content to 10 ppb, and saves 50 lives, is it worth it? Is it not possible that 50 extra people would fall below the poverty line and die of exposure if the $80 billion weren't spent otherwise?"
So, consider cost-benefit analysis on the nuclear shield. If we spend $80 billion on a nuclear sheild, and of the 100 nuclear warheads launched at Washington, D.C., we successfully shoot down 90 of them... what have we really gained?
If the pharmaceuticals weren't over-exploiting this system quite so ruthlessly, they would be a good example, as things stand, I'd be on pretty shaky ground defending their recent actions. But if you took away all protection for any of their discoveries, their business model would fold overnight as people (like myself) bailed out of their shares as fast as the markets would allow us.
Bingo. You've hit it exactly.
If IP reigns supreme, companies will ignore what's best for humanity in favor of the bottom line. If freedom of information reigns supreme, companies will simply not develop products.
What I believe the world discovered during the cold war was that neither pure capitalism or pure communism was a viable system. In retrospect, that seems pretty obvious. The only viable system is to take away between 25% and 75% of every person's income and redistribute it. The U.S., right now, is going with a figure of something like 45%, I believe. Yet we still call ourselves "capitalist". Ha.
What the information age will teach us, I believe is that neither IP nor OSS are viable systems, alone. One leads to the stifling of information and technological progess; the other damages incentive and introduces a fair deal of entropy.
If I believed for a minute that Mundy was serious about adopting a "shared source" vision for Microsoft, I would hop out of my chair and cheer. A system where Windows, like Debian, was reviewed and updated constantly, where feedback from the community was instantaneous, and yet where applications tended to be mature, user-friendly, and compatble with each other (as they're developed by a large team of well-compensated designers) sounds almost too good to be true. Eventually, I believe, we will discover the beauty of the "middle ground". It's my prediction that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we will finally start seeing a business model that practices what Mundy preaches: incorporating the benefits of open source (review, speed, innovation) with those of IP (incentive, compatibility, coherence).
I don't believe Mundie/Microsoft made any such direct remarks about Linus...
I don't think it's in the nature of a giant multinational corporation to give raw, emotional statements about a spokesman's personal opinion on a competitor's character.
I think it's a two-sided coin. In an open, free environment, you run the risk of violating logic and reason with ad hominem, emotional statement. In a cloistered, corporate environment, you run the rik of violating logic and reason with sterile corporate drivel written by committee.
My personal political philosophy is "The answer is always somewhere in the middle." Abortion, gun control, welfare, environmentalism, capitalism, you name it - a middle ground always, in my mind, is a saner policy than a "pro" or "anti" stance. Perhaps the very existence of two polar extremes proves this point.
Is there some way to create a workforce that represents a combination of "sterile corporation" and "chaotice open-source"? Is there some way that spokesmen can speak their mind and be honest, while at the same time being vigilant against senseless name-calling and pointless segways? You tell me.
Every time I hear about another "big development in the wireless scene", my first thought is about the bandwidth of the air.
Consider everything that's going through the air even today. First of all, even without human interference, it conducts heat, electricity, and sound. Studies have been done on all three - some very fascinating stuff is surfacing about the effects of noise pollution in big cities on the human physiology. The human contribution to electricity and heat conducton affect the environment in various ways I don't understand.
But then there's the issue of all these high-frequency waves - AM and FM, CB, long-range and short-range wireless networking, television, microwaves.. and their intensity is exploding. I don't have graphs handy on the growth of satellite transmissions or the wireless internet, but I think you can guess that they're following not a linear or even geometrical, but an exponential curve.
Think of an analogy to sonar. If you have one submarine in the ocean, it's going to be able to navigate without any trouble. It simply bounces its signal off of everything. Sure, it might confuse a couple whales and cause them to crash into each other, but it's more or less benign.
But think of an ocean filled with five billion submarines, each one sending out sonic vibrations. Obviously, each one is going to have to send out a vibration that's unique; otherwise, they'll start confusing distances from objects and going completely awry. If a sub sends out, say, a bleep at 440 mHz, and receives one back from a sub 50 yards away, if the signals were fired simultaneously, both subs will think that they're 100 yards apart.
But how many ways can water vibrate? If water's vibrating at two physically sympathetic levels, like the notes "C" and the "G" an octave and a half above, won't it throw off a whole slew of overtones? And can the same cubic inch of water really carry a million transmissions with a million different frequencies and vectors? It boggles the mind.
The point I'm driving at is: What are the possible effects of completely saturating the air with information?
Statistically speaking, people who have a Ph.D. in math certainly make a hell of a lot more than high school dropouts. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but this is the rule.
However, people with a B.A. or B.S. tend to make, on average, about $500 a year more than those who took a year or two of college and then dropped out.
If you're going to, for example, U.C. Berkeley, which costs roughly $20,000 a year, then by dropping out, you've saved $40,000. If you're losing, on average, $500 a year, then it'll be a wash eighty years after you drop out. In other words, you break even if you live to be 102.
Staking all your hopes on Google is short-sighted.
Anyone who's ever run a NOC understands the concept of redundancy. When your proxy server goes down, do you say, "Oh, well, we still have the backup," and throw it in the trash? Most likely, if you're competent, you'll find that redundancy is a condition you want to preserve.
Similarly, if the Chinese invaded and conquered California, would we shrug and say, "Oh well. Doesn't really matter - there's still New York."
It is, in fact, a Good Thing that there is more than one large, easily accessible portal to the internet that doesn't try to constrict the internet to what it wants it to be. And the more of them fall, the more the trend will point to the internet becoming a "walled garden".
Redundancy is a good thing. Redundancy is a good thing.
I'm sure these phones will have some way to monitor your exact position, or relay all your calls to the RIAA, or suck the blood out of your ear and do a DNA test. No new technology is created these days that doesn't violate our privacy in some circumspect way.
You know, I'll grant the point of the political scaremongers who insist that American education is not all that it could be. Nonetheless, I think most of us are educated enough to know the difference between a pluralized word and one which is not.
For example, if I said, "Go to my website and buy bananas! It's at http://www.bananas.com!", do you think it is more likely that you would A) Visit www.bananas.com; or B) Screw up, visit www.banana.com, follow some links, end up at a completely unrelated personal homepage for a 14 year old Malaysian girl, get discouraged, and refuse to do business with me, ever again?
If the answer is B), then, for the first time in his life, George W. Bush may be right: we really do need some education reform.
My best guess is that video games do not significantly improve most college students' grades. Let's take a sample question from a hypothetical test:
(20 points) Cite evidence that ancient Egyptian society was composed of Africans rather than Caucasians, and explain the impact of this anthropological theory.
Now, let's do a sample experiment. Play Starcraft for three hours. Then, write an essay on the aforementioned question. See how you do.
Perhaps, though, you want to know whether studying for school improves one's ability to play video games.
Let's do another sample experiment. Play ten games of Pac Man. Then, spend three hours studying ancient Egyptian culture. When you're finished, play another game of Pac Man and see if your score is any higher.
I haven't done these experiments, but my hypothesis is that the two are probably so closely linked that every second you spend thinking about whether the Sphinx is a black man will raise your score at least 20,000 points.
No, no, have them play Starcraft. Have them play it every day for two straight days, with only a four-hour break for sleep. Then, on the day of their final, have them play Starcraft instead of showing up.
That's what I did, and it had a *very* definite corellative effect on my grades.
And if you don't know anything about security, you'll become a prime target for skript-kiddies who want to use your box to send mail bombs to other skript-kiddies!!
You spent four hours setting up mutt with nothing to show for it. I'll admit that something here does indeed suck, but I think it's pretty obvious its _not_ X:)
I'm guessing that your mail server is probably a Linux box, that your primary email address is subscribed to the mailing lists and not some weird alias, and that your username matches your primary email address.
I'm also guessing that your default settings for vi actually work and that you hadn't installed mutt previously and then partially deleted it, leaving some of the conffiles intact.
Finally, I'm guessing that you're only fetching email from one server, and if you're using multiple addresses on multiple servers, you're handling them roughly the same way.
Still, when all was said and done, mutt's sure a million times better than that fucking Pronto piece of shit.
Well, the way I see it, computers are supposed to save us time, right? So if a government employee can already open your tax form, write down your social security number, and then open your social security file and type that number in, why is it any worse just to tie the databases?
We've been saying all along that linking itself isn't criminal. Taking the position that the government should have to access each piece of information manually and inefficiently is technophobic and, well, MPAA.
Aren't your IRS and Social Security files cross-corellated already?? I mean, they're both owned by the Federal Government, and you do put your social security number on your tax forms...
Oh, come on. I think this is valid and thought-out well enough that it doesn't deserve "Flamebait". The flamebait tag moderates a message down because it assumes something has no function other than to get people to respond with flames. I'm pretty sure this doesn't fall into that category.
I think that's just the problem with the spherical model. It would be easy to render terrain - but rendering an actual object, like a brick being thrown at your head, or a glass of beer, or a naked woman, would be considerably more difficult.
As for actually having sex with the naked woman... well, this isn't the device for that. I think you're going to have to wait for the nanorobots that interface directly with your brain.
Slashdot Mirror
why? you probably wouldn't even notice it. have you travelled across the u.s. and seen how empty it is? sure, some parts of the country and the rest of the world are somewhat crowded - but vast areas of land are virtually empty.
Well, I live in the second-least crowded state - Nevada - with two people per square mile - so I think I'm qualified to give some input on this.
In Las Vegas, the population exceeded the capacity of the land to support it long ago - it pipes in a majority of its water from California, at a gigantic cost to everyone.
In Reno, we manage to get by through our sound policies of raping the Truckee River and Lake Tahoe, watering our lawns only 1-2 times a week, and, every ten years, being formally denied showers for a couple weeks. I hear there used to be fish in that river. But, when I was 17, and on the cross-country team, I ran right across it. My socks got wet; my pants did not.
In Fallon, Nevada, there isn't easy access to natural sources of water, so most citizens drill shallow wells to get at the ever-lowering water table. These wells tend to be loaded with concetrations of arsenic as high as 1,000 ppb. The result? One of the largest and most alarming leukemia clusters in the U.S.
Certainly the earth can support a larger population than six billion people if resources were distributed correctly - but don't try telling me that you could alleviate L.A.'s overcrowding problem by 50% by moving half of them to Winnemucca (Recent town billboard: "Winnemucca! Now with paved roads!"). Nevada would be dry in a week - and we'd have to make do with gin.
I believe that a survey of Slashdot reader, if it could possibly be done, would reveal that most *are* in the U.S. Those who are not tend to (often) A) Resent the U.S. for precisely this reason, among others; and B) Act as an extremely vocal minority.
Exactly the same thing? How can you say that?? Audio CD-Rs come with their own jewel cases, and have pretty little fabricated graphs on the packaging!
Sheesh..
so, because we can "only" stop about 60% (I've heard that a laser based system would be closer to 90%) of the warheads launched at us, we shouldn't bother? If you can only cure 60% of the people infected with HIV, would you not do it because it's only "60% effective?"
You always have to consider cost-benefit analysis. That's exactly what Bush has just done with arsenic. He figures, "If it cost $80 billion to lower the arsenic content to 10 ppb, and saves 50 lives, is it worth it? Is it not possible that 50 extra people would fall below the poverty line and die of exposure if the $80 billion weren't spent otherwise?"
So, consider cost-benefit analysis on the nuclear shield. If we spend $80 billion on a nuclear sheild, and of the 100 nuclear warheads launched at Washington, D.C., we successfully shoot down 90 of them... what have we really gained?
If the pharmaceuticals weren't over-exploiting this system quite so ruthlessly, they would be a good example, as things stand, I'd be on pretty shaky ground defending their recent actions. But if you took away all protection for any of their discoveries, their business model would fold overnight as people (like myself) bailed out of their shares as fast as the markets would allow us.
Bingo. You've hit it exactly.
If IP reigns supreme, companies will ignore what's best for humanity in favor of the bottom line. If freedom of information reigns supreme, companies will simply not develop products.
What I believe the world discovered during the cold war was that neither pure capitalism or pure communism was a viable system. In retrospect, that seems pretty obvious. The only viable system is to take away between 25% and 75% of every person's income and redistribute it. The U.S., right now, is going with a figure of something like 45%, I believe. Yet we still call ourselves "capitalist". Ha.
What the information age will teach us, I believe is that neither IP nor OSS are viable systems, alone. One leads to the stifling of information and technological progess; the other damages incentive and introduces a fair deal of entropy.
If I believed for a minute that Mundy was serious about adopting a "shared source" vision for Microsoft, I would hop out of my chair and cheer. A system where Windows, like Debian, was reviewed and updated constantly, where feedback from the community was instantaneous, and yet where applications tended to be mature, user-friendly, and compatble with each other (as they're developed by a large team of well-compensated designers) sounds almost too good to be true. Eventually, I believe, we will discover the beauty of the "middle ground". It's my prediction that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we will finally start seeing a business model that practices what Mundy preaches: incorporating the benefits of open source (review, speed, innovation) with those of IP (incentive, compatibility, coherence).
Okay, for fetched.. better example: Someone in an oil company stumbles over the design for an engine that will run on water.. what does he do?
Patent water, of course.
is that more or less of a personal attack then mundie bashing free software
Well, let me think about that. Mundie is a person, and free software is not. So the answer is therefore... more of a personal attack.
I don't believe Mundie/Microsoft made any such direct remarks about Linus...
I don't think it's in the nature of a giant multinational corporation to give raw, emotional statements about a spokesman's personal opinion on a competitor's character.
I think it's a two-sided coin. In an open, free environment, you run the risk of violating logic and reason with ad hominem, emotional statement. In a cloistered, corporate environment, you run the rik of violating logic and reason with sterile corporate drivel written by committee.
My personal political philosophy is "The answer is always somewhere in the middle." Abortion, gun control, welfare, environmentalism, capitalism, you name it - a middle ground always, in my mind, is a saner policy than a "pro" or "anti" stance. Perhaps the very existence of two polar extremes proves this point.
Is there some way to create a workforce that represents a combination of "sterile corporation" and "chaotice open-source"? Is there some way that spokesmen can speak their mind and be honest, while at the same time being vigilant against senseless name-calling and pointless segways? You tell me.
Every time I hear about another "big development in the wireless scene", my first thought is about the bandwidth of the air.
Consider everything that's going through the air even today. First of all, even without human interference, it conducts heat, electricity, and sound. Studies have been done on all three - some very fascinating stuff is surfacing about the effects of noise pollution in big cities on the human physiology. The human contribution to electricity and heat conducton affect the environment in various ways I don't understand.
But then there's the issue of all these high-frequency waves - AM and FM, CB, long-range and short-range wireless networking, television, microwaves.. and their intensity is exploding. I don't have graphs handy on the growth of satellite transmissions or the wireless internet, but I think you can guess that they're following not a linear or even geometrical, but an exponential curve.
Think of an analogy to sonar. If you have one submarine in the ocean, it's going to be able to navigate without any trouble. It simply bounces its signal off of everything. Sure, it might confuse a couple whales and cause them to crash into each other, but it's more or less benign.
But think of an ocean filled with five billion submarines, each one sending out sonic vibrations. Obviously, each one is going to have to send out a vibration that's unique; otherwise, they'll start confusing distances from objects and going completely awry. If a sub sends out, say, a bleep at 440 mHz, and receives one back from a sub 50 yards away, if the signals were fired simultaneously, both subs will think that they're 100 yards apart.
But how many ways can water vibrate? If water's vibrating at two physically sympathetic levels, like the notes "C" and the "G" an octave and a half above, won't it throw off a whole slew of overtones? And can the same cubic inch of water really carry a million transmissions with a million different frequencies and vectors? It boggles the mind.
The point I'm driving at is: What are the possible effects of completely saturating the air with information?
Statistically speaking, people who have a Ph.D. in math certainly make a hell of a lot more than high school dropouts. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but this is the rule.
However, people with a B.A. or B.S. tend to make, on average, about $500 a year more than those who took a year or two of college and then dropped out.
If you're going to, for example, U.C. Berkeley, which costs roughly $20,000 a year, then by dropping out, you've saved $40,000. If you're losing, on average, $500 a year, then it'll be a wash eighty years after you drop out. In other words, you break even if you live to be 102.
Staking all your hopes on Google is short-sighted.
Anyone who's ever run a NOC understands the concept of redundancy. When your proxy server goes down, do you say, "Oh, well, we still have the backup," and throw it in the trash? Most likely, if you're competent, you'll find that redundancy is a condition you want to preserve.
Similarly, if the Chinese invaded and conquered California, would we shrug and say, "Oh well. Doesn't really matter - there's still New York."
It is, in fact, a Good Thing that there is more than one large, easily accessible portal to the internet that doesn't try to constrict the internet to what it wants it to be. And the more of them fall, the more the trend will point to the internet becoming a "walled garden".
Redundancy is a good thing. Redundancy is a good thing.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You are the fifth person to point out that some astroids have moons.
Perhaps you should now proceed to point out that Charon and Pluto orbit around a gravitational center which is nowhere near the center of Pluto.
That way, I can ensure that all the slashbots are in perfect sync.
I'm sure these phones will have some way to monitor your exact position, or relay all your calls to the RIAA, or suck the blood out of your ear and do a DNA test. No new technology is created these days that doesn't violate our privacy in some circumspect way.
You know, I'll grant the point of the political scaremongers who insist that American education is not all that it could be. Nonetheless, I think most of us are educated enough to know the difference between a pluralized word and one which is not.
For example, if I said, "Go to my website and buy bananas! It's at http://www.bananas.com!", do you think it is more likely that you would A) Visit www.bananas.com; or B) Screw up, visit www.banana.com, follow some links, end up at a completely unrelated personal homepage for a 14 year old Malaysian girl, get discouraged, and refuse to do business with me, ever again?
If the answer is B), then, for the first time in his life, George W. Bush may be right: we really do need some education reform.
I play Tribes all day
But my grades are good because
Of amphetamines.
My best guess is that video games do not significantly improve most college students' grades. Let's take a sample question from a hypothetical test:
(20 points) Cite evidence that ancient Egyptian society was composed of Africans rather than Caucasians, and explain the impact of this anthropological theory.
Now, let's do a sample experiment. Play Starcraft for three hours. Then, write an essay on the aforementioned question. See how you do.
Perhaps, though, you want to know whether studying for school improves one's ability to play video games.
Let's do another sample experiment. Play ten games of Pac Man. Then, spend three hours studying ancient Egyptian culture. When you're finished, play another game of Pac Man and see if your score is any higher.
I haven't done these experiments, but my hypothesis is that the two are probably so closely linked that every second you spend thinking about whether the Sphinx is a black man will raise your score at least 20,000 points.
No, no, have them play Starcraft. Have them play it every day for two straight days, with only a four-hour break for sleep. Then, on the day of their final, have them play Starcraft instead of showing up.
That's what I did, and it had a *very* definite corellative effect on my grades.
You can't get girls with vi.
Let me repeat that. I don't want to let this guy give any of you the wrong impression.
You can't get girls with vi.
No - he honestly expects that a team of civil engineers will come to his house and dynamite a canal through his kitchen.
Then evil crackers can enter and access his hardware directly through the hole in the wall.
And if you don't know anything about security, you'll become a prime target for skript-kiddies who want to use your box to send mail bombs to other skript-kiddies!!
You spent four hours setting up mutt with nothing to show for it. I'll admit that something here does indeed suck, but I think it's pretty obvious its _not_ X :)
I'm guessing that your mail server is probably a Linux box, that your primary email address is subscribed to the mailing lists and not some weird alias, and that your username matches your primary email address.
I'm also guessing that your default settings for vi actually work and that you hadn't installed mutt previously and then partially deleted it, leaving some of the conffiles intact.
Finally, I'm guessing that you're only fetching email from one server, and if you're using multiple addresses on multiple servers, you're handling them roughly the same way.
Still, when all was said and done, mutt's sure a million times better than that fucking Pronto piece of shit.
Well, the way I see it, computers are supposed to save us time, right? So if a government employee can already open your tax form, write down your social security number, and then open your social security file and type that number in, why is it any worse just to tie the databases?
We've been saying all along that linking itself isn't criminal. Taking the position that the government should have to access each piece of information manually and inefficiently is technophobic and, well, MPAA.
Aren't your IRS and Social Security files cross-corellated already?? I mean, they're both owned by the Federal Government, and you do put your social security number on your tax forms...
Oh, come on. I think this is valid and thought-out well enough that it doesn't deserve "Flamebait". The flamebait tag moderates a message down because it assumes something has no function other than to get people to respond with flames. I'm pretty sure this doesn't fall into that category.
I think that's just the problem with the spherical model. It would be easy to render terrain - but rendering an actual object, like a brick being thrown at your head, or a glass of beer, or a naked woman, would be considerably more difficult.
As for actually having sex with the naked woman... well, this isn't the device for that. I think you're going to have to wait for the nanorobots that interface directly with your brain.