Despite the harsh tone in your message which leaves one wondering about your personal communication skills, you probably do have more discipline then most BS holders if you truly did go through the Navy (impossible to even begin to guess with an AC). But I'd point out that I never used the word discipline (note correct spelling).
I used the word rigor. As in mathematical rigor. I bothered to reply to such an obvious troll because it's a rather common misconception. You can be as disciplined as you want, but there are certain projects that must be completed using stronger techniques, not just by trying harder. Certainly college grads don't have a lock on either trying harder or knowlege of stronger techniques, but a college grad who used college to their advantage will certainly tend towards a much stronger comprehension and broader knowlege of such techniques. It's a tendency strong enough for Microsoft to use it as a filter criterion with the confidence that they will be cutting far, far more bad prospects then they will be losing good ones.
(Another problem people have is comparing a well-motivated self-taught programmer against a frat-boy who happens to be taking Comp. Sci. as his excuse to qualify to live in the frat house. Comparing well-motivated college grads against well-motivated self-taught programmers will show wide disparities in certain skills that are importent at certain times, especially those that are the reason we call it computer science and not computer programming in college. This is one of them; creating security (as opposed to merely cracking it) is hard; it's possible, but very hard to gain a true appreciation of the truth of that statement without either going through the classes, or replicating the class experience by reading papers in the field, texts on the subject, etc. until you might as well have taken the class. You really can't putter aimlessly around a field as complicated as security and expect to do half as well as people who have made a concentrated effort to learn from decades of experience of the best and brightest... usually in class, at least to start.)
To counter-troll, missing the distinction between rigor and discipline is exactly the sort of rigor I'm talking about. "Self-taught" programmers make exactly those sort of mistakes in truly technical fields all the time, and the shoddy software that results can be downloaded from Sourceforge anytime you like. Some problems are hard; it's really a form of hubris to think that you can do as well (or better(!)) then the entire academic community, which comprises thousands of very smart people working together. The system ain't perfect, but it's hella hard to beat working all by your lonesome.
(Another example of poor thinking is exhibited by all those "self-taught" types who see people like me claim a correlation between skills and schooling, and immediately and highly erroneously translate that to "only school can teach you skills, and it's impossible to self-teach", which is general and regrettably has little to do with whether one is schooled or not. Shades of grey, people, shades of grey.)
To give a serious answer, this sort of job would really benefit from a good grasp of formal methods and provability of correctness, along with a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of security beyond just practical experience cracking it; you can crack things all your life and still be only marginally more competent to create a good system yourself then the next programmer. (Indeed, you may suffer for the exposure to so many bad examples.)
Of course you might learn all of this outside of school... but the same people who sneer at school tend to sneer at this level of understanding and also seem to think that computer science == programming. Requiring a degree is one step towards weeding those folks out. (Remember that weeding a person out is not free from a business perspective, so it literally pays to have such easy criteria to filter on.) It also demonstrates a certain minimal facility with working with this sort of rigor, which is one of the greatest glaring weaknesses in the most self-taught computer scientists^W programmers.
Given the background necessary to really do a good job, I'm kinda surprised they aren't requiring a Masters or PhD in related speciality. Perhaps that would narrow the market too much.
Re:Interesting twisted misconceptions...
on
The Casimir Effect
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· Score: 2
I am far more well versed in the field than you would be had you dedicated your college career to it.
Uh-huh. I'm counting at least 20 points scored on the crackpot index, ten from that sentence alone. Unusually low score, perhaps, but in the absense of substance that's all I've got to go on.
The humourous part is that I'd lay money your theories, assuming you actually HAVE any as opposed to merely disagreeing with thousands of very smart people, have no coherent explanation for the casimir effect or other similar phenomena.
My response to the whole italisized bullshit paragraph is that once again, you make it clear that you do not have much understanding of any physics that I've ever seen, and persist in mixing classical and quantum physics without regards for the very carefully defined boundaries placed on those definitions. Your attacks would have much more substance if you weren't attacking strawman physics. (Basically, nobody claims the classical definition of vacuum is anything but an approximation useful in certain circumstances anymore.)
I won't be replying any further, so please take the crackpot's great joy of having the last word and milk it for all it's worth.
Re:Interesting twisted misconceptions...
on
The Casimir Effect
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I dunno whether it was because the author of the article doesnt understand physics and such, or was talking for the layperson, but a vacuum has no energy, no matter, no vacuum fluctuations, etc.
Your opening sentence is incorrect, and that makes hash of the rest of your post. You seem to be discussing classical vacuum, and in fact seem to be stuck on classical physics in general. For instace, a complete absense of everything would not have a temperature of zero, it would have no temperature.
I'm not a big physicist myself, but you are criticizing things that you don't even have the faintest conception of. Vacuum fluctations result from virtual particles, which is a concept that some view of is necessary to rationalize certain other quantum effects that occur in particle interaction. You need to learn more.
Developmental Computing
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Awari Solved
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· Score: 2
I'm currently taking a grad-level AI course from a major advocate (Dr. J. Weng) of what he calls the Developmental approach. He does not attempt to simulate a human brain, but instead tries to base his programming off of the development process of the human being. For instance, one of his claims is that true intelligence will require a body to interact with the world, as we have one. (This looks like a good introduction to the idea, along with some demos of it in action.)
Interesting stuff. While the jury is still most definately out, he has made some very real progress in some areas many other approaches are finding very difficult. For instance, he has a robot that can navigate the Engineering building with only two or three walkthroughs of the place. Sounds mundane, except that no other technique can come close in such a real-world environment.
I think you'd enjoy reading his stuff. It is being done by a few people; time will tell whether more will pick it up.
Some of us would say that you should choose variable names to mean what they say, so it's reasonably obvious what the type is. Plural in particular is a big help, and hash/list distinctions can often be made obvious. In dynamic languages, this is usually sufficient.
But while I believe in that, what I *really* want to see in perl is the sigil labelling the named object, not the final value of the expression, i.e., %hashvar{THING_IN_HASH} instead of $hashvar{THING_IN_HASH}. Fortunately, Perl 6 is supposed to do it this way.
You actually burned your MP3s back to CD to convert them to OGG?!??!? Convert to wav and then re-encode directly, or find an encoder that can read MP3 directly, like lame!
This works better even if you think you have space issues, because most rippers copy the whole CD to the hard drive to rip (650MB). A quick shell script would allow you to convert MP3->wav->OGG one at a time, requiring only enough extra space to hold your biggest file as MP3, WAV, and OGG all at once.
You know, people have been saying this since at least the Intellivision. Try #1Try #2 (And something for the 2600 is niggling at my brain... there might have been something for that, too.)
After 20+ years of this line... I'll believe it when I see it. Not one second sooner. And with Microsoft fighting this tooth and nail... frankly, the Dreamcast had a much better shot here (what with most or all of them able to run custom CD-ROMs with no modifications to the unit), and it didn't happen either.
Which Mozilla are you using? At this point, except for the obvious Active-X, it's advantage Moz for all of those.
(Watch your definition of "correctly": Too many pages code IE-specific and often incorrect HTML. IE is forgiving, because it has to read the amazingly crappy HTML Office generated for a long time. (In later versions of office, the HTML became cleaner, at the cost of becoming almost entirely illegible.) The correct thing to do on those pages is "something wierd"... IE meets this spec by attempting to read the mind of the designer, especially one steeped in the Microsoft way. Moz doesn't try, it expects the designer to do things correctly. In the long run, the latter works much much better. IE hides bugs, and then pow, you're hit with some small change that suddenly it can't handle... been here, done this, too many times.)
Are there any ActiveX controls you actually need, or are you just covering your bases by allowing ActiveX inside the company?
What do you need that Mozilla doesn't do?
Why not use Netscape 7 for external access, possibly with the pop-up blocking enabled, and IE for internal use only? Given the continuous security problems found in IE anyhow, using IE on the external internet is a liability anyhow.
While I suspect the parent was posted mostly in jest, I think there's actually a lot of truth there.
The 'patterns' in chemistry, more so then in any other intro-level science, are buried three or four layers deep, in ways that no approximation can save. To truly understand chemistry requires immense amounts of quantum mechanics and other physics-layer things. Only once these things are understood deeply can chemistry be "derived".
This is in amazingly stark contrast to Physics, where we can teach people "Newtonian physics" and while it's an approximation, it's a good one for most people. Or math, where we don't all start on elliptic equations.
"Chemistry" is like that; it's like trying to start with elliptic equations, or quantum mechanics, or going straight to the moon instead of building up to it. As a result, it's all memorization, rules of thumb, exceptions to the rules of thumb, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions, and then another large mass of memorization, repeat ad naseum. It's actually to the point where I'm not convinced a whole lot of time should be spent on it in high school or college for non-majors, as unlike physics, very little of chemistry will help you understand the real world, except for the fact that it exists and a few basics. (Unless of course you're going to study it. In which case if you know it's a for-majors-only course, I think it might be possible to organize it much better.)
Very true! I literally meant I was just pointing it out as an exception.
In fact, the most popular question on the tour was, "Can you turn them on for us?" and the answer was basically "Do you want to be blind?" (They had some clever, prepared joke, but I don't recall it well enough.)
Ever seen the inside of a car impact test facility? You've seen this on some commercials, even if you didn't realize what you were looking at. There's a huge bank of lights on during a test. Literally hundreds of lights, each of them on par with the lights used to light stadiums.
They have to be turned on in sequence, because if you tried to turn them all on at once, the current draw would kill the power grid. This despite the extra-hyper-ultra-industrial strength wiring into the grid.
You also can't leave them on for more then a few seconds because the heat generated burns them out. (It is actually a challenge to balance these two conflicting priorities, to turn them on quickly, yet slowly.)
The power draw for a single test is enough that they actively try to minimize the amount of time these lights are on. This despite the fact that electicity is normally so cheap we really don't think about it much. (Think in business terms; this means it's worth someone who is being paid $50+/hour to actively spend time worrying about how to minimize the time these lights are drawing current.)
All of this for the ultra-high-speed photography that takes place. I don't recall exactly how bright they said it was in the facility I was in, but I think it blows sunlight away by several times.
I mention this as an example application where "bright flashes of light" (emphasis mine) aren't practical, so they have to go whole hog. Kinda cool.
That's a great example of how movies can contaminate one's mind and screw up perceptions of whats possible and impossible.
Assuming the way most people do that in movies, it's basically not possible. Take a stop-motion picture of the process, and you'll find the majority of each page is not even visible, ever. You can't read through paper without a damaging amount of light.
Now, you might be able to page the book quickly, in a minute or two, because then each page is visible. Lots of processing power and probably some novel techniques would be necessary, but at least the data is present, so it's theoretically possible.
Courts are already still a little leary about the EULA you agree to by opening the package containing the EULA; I don't think that one has ever even gone to court, and the enforcability of EULAs remains a big legal unknown. One purpose of the still-abortive UCITA is to nail this point down (with a "yes", of course).
But even in my most paranoid fantasies, I can't imagine a thing that you can't even see, ever, that you somehow "automatically" agree to, ever being binding. The EULA is not negated, in this case, it simply never existed.
One: An enzyme is not a living thing. Thus, it is also not a "foreign" living thing. A "foreign" thing it may be, but this is hardly unusual; your body manages to survive well despite the amazing array of foreign things it comes into contact with.
Two: Your body is not an ecosystem. While some aspects may be modelled that way, it can not be completely reduced to an "ecosystem". You have conciousness and a will to live, and you can die, a binary "dead/alive" process that ecosystems can not be said to experience. (While we talk of killing ecosystems, ecosystems always change. The only truly dead ecosystem is the one that contains no life. The state of the ecosystem naturally changes over time; it may change to the point that we say its no longer the same ecosystem, but there's really no natural reason to say such things.)
Thus, even accepting the fallacious point that this treatment consists of an induced viral infection, because we face the possibility of true death, it may make perfect sense to choose not-certain-(and-quite-unlikely-)death (this treatment) over certain death (anthrax), a choice embedded in an ethical system that has no real analogue in your ecosystem reduction. Thus the reduction is of no value.
(On a final note, "Bad things happen when..." is an amazing, horrific oversimplification on just about every level. For instance, try a clear definition of "foreign". It's a hell of a lot harder then you may think. Just as a sampler, would it be "foriegn" to re-introduce the mammoth now into the Great Plains, even though it's now extinct? What about ten years after the extinction? That's just a sampler of the sampler, too; "bad things" do not always happen; more often, the 'foreign' transplantee just dies. Major havoc is the exception, rather then the rule. Proof of that on the body level is your continued existance despite exposure to all kinds of foreign life forms, some of which even get so far as causing you to get a "cold", a significant infection, yet not managing to kill you.)
"Fair Use" is a specific legal concept that we're probably hurting ourselves by misusing all the time like this. It is unlikely that skipping commercials is "Fair Use". Wrong problem, wrong concept, wrong argument.
The real question is, since when are we obligated? I'll leave the sentence fragment like that, because it makes more sense then specifying the obligations. Exactly at which point did we become obligated to watch commercials? Where are these obligations stated? How did we agree to these obligations? Who the hell seriously believes in these obligations? What legal basis do these obligations have?
Are we equally obligated to watch every single commercial that comes into our home? Are we obligated to watch the same damn Burger King commercial all 4000 times it is on a day? (One could interpret it that way.) What if we only watch part of a show? What if we only watch two minutes of the show, then leave? Are we obligated to watch some commercials later?
Are we all going to be in deep legal poo-poo for retroactive penalties for not watching commercials? Can the judge rule in favor of the obligation theory when he or she has almost certainly not behaved that way themselves? Do the executives making these insane claims themselves watch commercials?... or TV at all? (Are they specially immune because they are executives?) As a democratic republic, can we seriously believe this argument has the slighest basis in law when every television watcher and voter does not agree with it? Isn't that where the law ultimately derives from, not the means-are-ends fantasy-land interpretations of the law promulgated by Big Copyright?
Fair use is a phrase best left unused by Slashdotters, as most of them get it wrong. The real questions in this case are trivialized by using the fair use concept. (Look it up.)
And once we're all used to getting EEG'ed, we'll all sit by and watch as they slowly get more powerful and more accurate over the next 30 years until they basically ARE reading your thoughts with some high degree of effectiveness. (And of course they will demand to stick a cap on your head as soon as they find out it won't work without it.)
We need to stop this, preferably sooner rather then later. The brain must be held as sacrosanct, or we'll really going to regret letting this go.
Another trading freedom for illusory security story again.
What, you don't want your mind read? You must be a terrorist. Your citizenship is revoked. HAND.
Of course, there are some flip sides to the issue.
One, of all the views that someone would deem dumb... which is most of them... some of them are right.
Another is the issue of the fringe. Yes, we may all agree that someone who believes in (some fringe belief) is basically a nut. But there are plenty of issues where we either can't or don't know the answer, and many of these issues are very, very, very importent! Is there purpose to life? Why am I here? Am I special? What is moral? (Is there a "moral"?)
In the end, you're just a human being. Are you really so sure you're right? Why?
Hey, maybe you are right. If you're interpreting this message as a defense of believing in (some kooky thing), you've missed the point. The point is that it's really damned easy to overestimate the strength of your position, and that applies every bit as much to the skeptics as anyone else, as is evidenced by the long list of things that have been skeptically dismissed, then found likely to be true. In general I'd describe myself as a skeptic, but I'm also a Christian. The odds that you hold some belief that somebody else would call kooky (and to add a bit of fairness, a person that you would not consider kooky, to avoid the obvious mutual-kooky-opinion scenario that really doesn't count for much here) are quite high. (That ought to be rewritten, but hey, this is Slashdot, and who cares, I'm about to be flamed for claiming both "skeptic" and "Christian", so why try too hard?)
Thus, while the article may be true in general, and probably is true in general, it is incorrect (in the mathematical sense of the term) to try to apply this observation directly to the world in any but a statistical manner.
Well in some cases, if you would just provide the source in the patent, then people could just copy+paste it and they wouldn't have to buy your product.
True.
Every example like this of why Patent law doesn't quite work for software is another example of why software should be covered by copyright, and copyright only. Copyright works. Patents don't. I can list a lot more reasons like this but it's not germane; plus I'm still writing the essay;-)
"Slashdot", inasmuch as it can be said to have an opinion, is hostile to software patents.
In fact, many of us against software patents are just fine with mechanical patents, which is after all where patents came from. However, your own message provides an excellent argument about why software should not be patented. When software is patented, it does not provide enough information to allow one skilled in the arts to reproduce the invention, it only sorta/kinda describes it. It does not provide all the details on how the software works. Read, for instance, the Amazon one-click patent, and then try to implement it. You will find that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of unresolved issues in how exactly the system should work and persist data.
In fact, patents should really only cover source code. Source code would meet your criteria for the goodness of patents. Source code is already protected under both copyright law (no matter what), and trade secret law (if the company so desires). Why should software be patented, if none of the legitimate advantages of a patent derive from that act, since those advantages and more are covered by the copyright system, yet we get all of the disadvantages that we have seen in software patents (ambiguity, unfair patent grants, patent land grabs)?
If you can answer that question with some degree of usefulness (i.e., applicability in the real world, rather then vague sweeping claims of potentially hypothetical advantages based on pre-conceived notions, which is all I've ever seen in software patent's defense), then maybe you can ask incredulously why Slashdot is so against patents. Personally, after several years pondering the issue, I don't believe there is an answer, which is why I don't think software should be patentable.
For all the reasons you mentioned, and a few others (such as the fact the patent is of limited duration), I think that patenting the keyboard in question is totally legitimate. All the posters claiming "this has all been done" to the contrary, there are some legitimately clever and new ideas in this design that deserve protection before one of the established companies steal them from him. Maybe the ideas are dumb and won't work, but he deserves the shot in a fair market to find out whether this product can sell.
(For those who claim this issue has been done, find me a product with all the characteristics the guy enumerates on his site, and maybe I'll listen then. In particular a chord keyboard with the fingers in neutral like that, that is an excellent idea that apparently isn't obvious, seeing as how no commercial product has done it yet.)
However, we HAVE bounced signals off of other heavenly bodies, as well. Radar maps were made of Venus from the Earth... very poor resolution, of course.
Yes, if you have a very short message, this can be practical.
Bandwidth considerations come into play. The bandwidth of bouncing off Venus will not be good, which is another way of stating the reasons behind the lack of resolution of the maps. If you've got a few gigabytes to move, this could take a very, very long time to send the message. I don't care to even BOTE this;-) And Venus is probably the only other option that makes sense for even short messages. Mars is smaller and much further away. Mercury is smaller yet and a bit closer. The gas giants are awfully noisy in those bands, so I seriously doubt you could power a signal strong enough to bounce detectably off of them.
I assume without any reason whatsoever that an Earth-shattering discovery will take some largish number of bits to communicate;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the harsh tone in your message which leaves one wondering about your personal communication skills, you probably do have more discipline then most BS holders if you truly did go through the Navy (impossible to even begin to guess with an AC). But I'd point out that I never used the word discipline (note correct spelling).
I used the word rigor. As in mathematical rigor. I bothered to reply to such an obvious troll because it's a rather common misconception. You can be as disciplined as you want, but there are certain projects that must be completed using stronger techniques, not just by trying harder. Certainly college grads don't have a lock on either trying harder or knowlege of stronger techniques, but a college grad who used college to their advantage will certainly tend towards a much stronger comprehension and broader knowlege of such techniques. It's a tendency strong enough for Microsoft to use it as a filter criterion with the confidence that they will be cutting far, far more bad prospects then they will be losing good ones.
(Another problem people have is comparing a well-motivated self-taught programmer against a frat-boy who happens to be taking Comp. Sci. as his excuse to qualify to live in the frat house. Comparing well-motivated college grads against well-motivated self-taught programmers will show wide disparities in certain skills that are importent at certain times, especially those that are the reason we call it computer science and not computer programming in college. This is one of them; creating security (as opposed to merely cracking it) is hard ; it's possible, but very hard to gain a true appreciation of the truth of that statement without either going through the classes, or replicating the class experience by reading papers in the field, texts on the subject, etc. until you might as well have taken the class. You really can't putter aimlessly around a field as complicated as security and expect to do half as well as people who have made a concentrated effort to learn from decades of experience of the best and brightest... usually in class, at least to start.)
To counter-troll, missing the distinction between rigor and discipline is exactly the sort of rigor I'm talking about. "Self-taught" programmers make exactly those sort of mistakes in truly technical fields all the time, and the shoddy software that results can be downloaded from Sourceforge anytime you like. Some problems are hard; it's really a form of hubris to think that you can do as well (or better(!)) then the entire academic community, which comprises thousands of very smart people working together. The system ain't perfect, but it's hella hard to beat working all by your lonesome.
(Another example of poor thinking is exhibited by all those "self-taught" types who see people like me claim a correlation between skills and schooling, and immediately and highly erroneously translate that to "only school can teach you skills, and it's impossible to self-teach", which is general and regrettably has little to do with whether one is schooled or not. Shades of grey, people, shades of grey.)
To give a serious answer, this sort of job would really benefit from a good grasp of formal methods and provability of correctness, along with a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of security beyond just practical experience cracking it; you can crack things all your life and still be only marginally more competent to create a good system yourself then the next programmer. (Indeed, you may suffer for the exposure to so many bad examples.)
Of course you might learn all of this outside of school... but the same people who sneer at school tend to sneer at this level of understanding and also seem to think that computer science == programming. Requiring a degree is one step towards weeding those folks out. (Remember that weeding a person out is not free from a business perspective, so it literally pays to have such easy criteria to filter on.) It also demonstrates a certain minimal facility with working with this sort of rigor, which is one of the greatest glaring weaknesses in the most self-taught computer scientists^W programmers.
Given the background necessary to really do a good job, I'm kinda surprised they aren't requiring a Masters or PhD in related speciality. Perhaps that would narrow the market too much.
I am far more well versed in the field than you would be had you dedicated your college career to it.
Uh-huh. I'm counting at least 20 points scored on the crackpot index, ten from that sentence alone. Unusually low score, perhaps, but in the absense of substance that's all I've got to go on.
The humourous part is that I'd lay money your theories, assuming you actually HAVE any as opposed to merely disagreeing with thousands of very smart people, have no coherent explanation for the casimir effect or other similar phenomena.
My response to the whole italisized bullshit paragraph is that once again, you make it clear that you do not have much understanding of any physics that I've ever seen, and persist in mixing classical and quantum physics without regards for the very carefully defined boundaries placed on those definitions. Your attacks would have much more substance if you weren't attacking strawman physics. (Basically, nobody claims the classical definition of vacuum is anything but an approximation useful in certain circumstances anymore.)
I won't be replying any further, so please take the crackpot's great joy of having the last word and milk it for all it's worth.
I dunno whether it was because the author of the article doesnt understand physics and such, or was talking for the layperson, but a vacuum has no energy, no matter, no vacuum fluctuations, etc.
Your opening sentence is incorrect, and that makes hash of the rest of your post. You seem to be discussing classical vacuum, and in fact seem to be stuck on classical physics in general. For instace, a complete absense of everything would not have a temperature of zero, it would have no temperature.
I'm not a big physicist myself, but you are criticizing things that you don't even have the faintest conception of. Vacuum fluctations result from virtual particles, which is a concept that some view of is necessary to rationalize certain other quantum effects that occur in particle interaction. You need to learn more.
I'm currently taking a grad-level AI course from a major advocate (Dr. J. Weng) of what he calls the Developmental approach. He does not attempt to simulate a human brain, but instead tries to base his programming off of the development process of the human being. For instance, one of his claims is that true intelligence will require a body to interact with the world, as we have one. (This looks like a good introduction to the idea, along with some demos of it in action.)
Interesting stuff. While the jury is still most definately out, he has made some very real progress in some areas many other approaches are finding very difficult. For instance, he has a robot that can navigate the Engineering building with only two or three walkthroughs of the place. Sounds mundane, except that no other technique can come close in such a real-world environment.
I think you'd enjoy reading his stuff. It is being done by a few people; time will tell whether more will pick it up.
import subgenious
bob = subgenious.Subgenious()
bob.aquireSlack() # loops forever...
Some of us would say that you should choose variable names to mean what they say, so it's reasonably obvious what the type is. Plural in particular is a big help, and hash/list distinctions can often be made obvious. In dynamic languages, this is usually sufficient.
But while I believe in that, what I *really* want to see in perl is the sigil labelling the named object, not the final value of the expression, i.e., %hashvar{THING_IN_HASH} instead of $hashvar{THING_IN_HASH}. Fortunately, Perl 6 is supposed to do it this way.
You actually burned your MP3s back to CD to convert them to OGG?!??!? Convert to wav and then re-encode directly, or find an encoder that can read MP3 directly, like lame!
This works better even if you think you have space issues, because most rippers copy the whole CD to the hard drive to rip (650MB). A quick shell script would allow you to convert MP3->wav->OGG one at a time, requiring only enough extra space to hold your biggest file as MP3, WAV, and OGG all at once.
You know, people have been saying this since at least the Intellivision. Try #1 Try #2 (And something for the 2600 is niggling at my brain... there might have been something for that, too.)
After 20+ years of this line... I'll believe it when I see it. Not one second sooner. And with Microsoft fighting this tooth and nail... frankly, the Dreamcast had a much better shot here (what with most or all of them able to run custom CD-ROMs with no modifications to the unit), and it didn't happen either.
Which Mozilla are you using? At this point, except for the obvious Active-X, it's advantage Moz for all of those.
(Watch your definition of "correctly": Too many pages code IE-specific and often incorrect HTML. IE is forgiving, because it has to read the amazingly crappy HTML Office generated for a long time. (In later versions of office, the HTML became cleaner, at the cost of becoming almost entirely illegible.) The correct thing to do on those pages is "something wierd"... IE meets this spec by attempting to read the mind of the designer, especially one steeped in the Microsoft way. Moz doesn't try, it expects the designer to do things correctly. In the long run, the latter works much much better. IE hides bugs, and then pow, you're hit with some small change that suddenly it can't handle... been here, done this, too many times.)
We'd really need more info to answer this.
Are there any ActiveX controls you actually need, or are you just covering your bases by allowing ActiveX inside the company?
What do you need that Mozilla doesn't do?
Why not use Netscape 7 for external access, possibly with the pop-up blocking enabled, and IE for internal use only? Given the continuous security problems found in IE anyhow, using IE on the external internet is a liability anyhow.
As opposed to the problem of going blind because you happened to be looking in the direction of the bomb when it went off?
While I suspect the parent was posted mostly in jest, I think there's actually a lot of truth there.
The 'patterns' in chemistry, more so then in any other intro-level science, are buried three or four layers deep, in ways that no approximation can save. To truly understand chemistry requires immense amounts of quantum mechanics and other physics-layer things. Only once these things are understood deeply can chemistry be "derived".
This is in amazingly stark contrast to Physics, where we can teach people "Newtonian physics" and while it's an approximation, it's a good one for most people. Or math, where we don't all start on elliptic equations.
"Chemistry" is like that; it's like trying to start with elliptic equations, or quantum mechanics, or going straight to the moon instead of building up to it. As a result, it's all memorization, rules of thumb, exceptions to the rules of thumb, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions, and then another large mass of memorization, repeat ad naseum. It's actually to the point where I'm not convinced a whole lot of time should be spent on it in high school or college for non-majors, as unlike physics, very little of chemistry will help you understand the real world, except for the fact that it exists and a few basics. (Unless of course you're going to study it. In which case if you know it's a for-majors-only course, I think it might be possible to organize it much better.)
Very true! I literally meant I was just pointing it out as an exception.
In fact, the most popular question on the tour was, "Can you turn them on for us?" and the answer was basically "Do you want to be blind?" (They had some clever, prepared joke, but I don't recall it well enough.)
Ever seen the inside of a car impact test facility? You've seen this on some commercials, even if you didn't realize what you were looking at. There's a huge bank of lights on during a test. Literally hundreds of lights, each of them on par with the lights used to light stadiums.
They have to be turned on in sequence, because if you tried to turn them all on at once, the current draw would kill the power grid. This despite the extra-hyper-ultra-industrial strength wiring into the grid.
You also can't leave them on for more then a few seconds because the heat generated burns them out. (It is actually a challenge to balance these two conflicting priorities, to turn them on quickly, yet slowly.)
The power draw for a single test is enough that they actively try to minimize the amount of time these lights are on. This despite the fact that electicity is normally so cheap we really don't think about it much. (Think in business terms; this means it's worth someone who is being paid $50+/hour to actively spend time worrying about how to minimize the time these lights are drawing current.)
All of this for the ultra-high-speed photography that takes place. I don't recall exactly how bright they said it was in the facility I was in, but I think it blows sunlight away by several times.
I mention this as an example application where "bright flashes of light" (emphasis mine) aren't practical, so they have to go whole hog. Kinda cool.
That's a great example of how movies can contaminate one's mind and screw up perceptions of whats possible and impossible.
Assuming the way most people do that in movies, it's basically not possible. Take a stop-motion picture of the process, and you'll find the majority of each page is not even visible, ever. You can't read through paper without a damaging amount of light.
Now, you might be able to page the book quickly, in a minute or two, because then each page is visible. Lots of processing power and probably some novel techniques would be necessary, but at least the data is present, so it's theoretically possible.
Courts are already still a little leary about the EULA you agree to by opening the package containing the EULA; I don't think that one has ever even gone to court, and the enforcability of EULAs remains a big legal unknown. One purpose of the still-abortive UCITA is to nail this point down (with a "yes", of course).
But even in my most paranoid fantasies, I can't imagine a thing that you can't even see, ever, that you somehow "automatically" agree to, ever being binding. The EULA is not negated, in this case, it simply never existed.
One: An enzyme is not a living thing. Thus, it is also not a "foreign" living thing. A "foreign" thing it may be, but this is hardly unusual; your body manages to survive well despite the amazing array of foreign things it comes into contact with.
Two: Your body is not an ecosystem. While some aspects may be modelled that way, it can not be completely reduced to an "ecosystem". You have conciousness and a will to live, and you can die, a binary "dead/alive" process that ecosystems can not be said to experience. (While we talk of killing ecosystems, ecosystems always change. The only truly dead ecosystem is the one that contains no life. The state of the ecosystem naturally changes over time; it may change to the point that we say its no longer the same ecosystem, but there's really no natural reason to say such things.)
Thus, even accepting the fallacious point that this treatment consists of an induced viral infection, because we face the possibility of true death, it may make perfect sense to choose not-certain-(and-quite-unlikely-)death (this treatment) over certain death (anthrax), a choice embedded in an ethical system that has no real analogue in your ecosystem reduction. Thus the reduction is of no value.
(On a final note, "Bad things happen when..." is an amazing, horrific oversimplification on just about every level. For instance, try a clear definition of "foreign". It's a hell of a lot harder then you may think. Just as a sampler, would it be "foriegn" to re-introduce the mammoth now into the Great Plains, even though it's now extinct? What about ten years after the extinction? That's just a sampler of the sampler, too; "bad things" do not always happen; more often, the 'foreign' transplantee just dies. Major havoc is the exception, rather then the rule. Proof of that on the body level is your continued existance despite exposure to all kinds of foreign life forms, some of which even get so far as causing you to get a "cold", a significant infection, yet not managing to kill you.)
In this situation, since you don't work and live in the same state, you pay no taxes at all on your income.
Or do you trust Random Slashdot Yahoo #17166?
"Fair Use" is a specific legal concept that we're probably hurting ourselves by misusing all the time like this. It is unlikely that skipping commercials is "Fair Use". Wrong problem, wrong concept, wrong argument.
... or TV at all? (Are they specially immune because they are executives?) As a democratic republic, can we seriously believe this argument has the slighest basis in law when every television watcher and voter does not agree with it? Isn't that where the law ultimately derives from, not the means-are-ends fantasy-land interpretations of the law promulgated by Big Copyright?
The real question is, since when are we obligated? I'll leave the sentence fragment like that, because it makes more sense then specifying the obligations. Exactly at which point did we become obligated to watch commercials? Where are these obligations stated? How did we agree to these obligations? Who the hell seriously believes in these obligations? What legal basis do these obligations have?
Are we equally obligated to watch every single commercial that comes into our home? Are we obligated to watch the same damn Burger King commercial all 4000 times it is on a day? (One could interpret it that way.) What if we only watch part of a show? What if we only watch two minutes of the show, then leave? Are we obligated to watch some commercials later?
Are we all going to be in deep legal poo-poo for retroactive penalties for not watching commercials? Can the judge rule in favor of the obligation theory when he or she has almost certainly not behaved that way themselves? Do the executives making these insane claims themselves watch commercials?
Fair use is a phrase best left unused by Slashdotters, as most of them get it wrong. The real questions in this case are trivialized by using the fair use concept. (Look it up.)
And once we're all used to getting EEG'ed, we'll all sit by and watch as they slowly get more powerful and more accurate over the next 30 years until they basically ARE reading your thoughts with some high degree of effectiveness. (And of course they will demand to stick a cap on your head as soon as they find out it won't work without it.)
We need to stop this, preferably sooner rather then later. The brain must be held as sacrosanct, or we'll really going to regret letting this go.
Another trading freedom for illusory security story again.
What, you don't want your mind read? You must be a terrorist. Your citizenship is revoked. HAND.
Of course, there are some flip sides to the issue.
One, of all the views that someone would deem dumb... which is most of them... some of them are right.
Another is the issue of the fringe. Yes, we may all agree that someone who believes in (some fringe belief) is basically a nut. But there are plenty of issues where we either can't or don't know the answer, and many of these issues are very, very, very importent! Is there purpose to life? Why am I here? Am I special? What is moral? (Is there a "moral"?)
In the end, you're just a human being. Are you really so sure you're right? Why?
Hey, maybe you are right. If you're interpreting this message as a defense of believing in (some kooky thing), you've missed the point. The point is that it's really damned easy to overestimate the strength of your position, and that applies every bit as much to the skeptics as anyone else, as is evidenced by the long list of things that have been skeptically dismissed, then found likely to be true. In general I'd describe myself as a skeptic, but I'm also a Christian. The odds that you hold some belief that somebody else would call kooky (and to add a bit of fairness, a person that you would not consider kooky, to avoid the obvious mutual-kooky-opinion scenario that really doesn't count for much here) are quite high. (That ought to be rewritten, but hey, this is Slashdot, and who cares, I'm about to be flamed for claiming both "skeptic" and "Christian", so why try too hard?)
Thus, while the article may be true in general, and probably is true in general, it is incorrect (in the mathematical sense of the term) to try to apply this observation directly to the world in any but a statistical manner.
Well in some cases, if you would just provide the source in the patent, then people could just copy+paste it and they wouldn't have to buy your product.
;-)
True.
Every example like this of why Patent law doesn't quite work for software is another example of why software should be covered by copyright, and copyright only. Copyright works. Patents don't. I can list a lot more reasons like this but it's not germane; plus I'm still writing the essay
"Slashdot", inasmuch as it can be said to have an opinion, is hostile to software patents.
In fact, many of us against software patents are just fine with mechanical patents, which is after all where patents came from. However, your own message provides an excellent argument about why software should not be patented. When software is patented, it does not provide enough information to allow one skilled in the arts to reproduce the invention, it only sorta/kinda describes it. It does not provide all the details on how the software works. Read, for instance, the Amazon one-click patent, and then try to implement it. You will find that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of unresolved issues in how exactly the system should work and persist data.
In fact, patents should really only cover source code. Source code would meet your criteria for the goodness of patents. Source code is already protected under both copyright law (no matter what), and trade secret law (if the company so desires). Why should software be patented, if none of the legitimate advantages of a patent derive from that act, since those advantages and more are covered by the copyright system, yet we get all of the disadvantages that we have seen in software patents (ambiguity, unfair patent grants, patent land grabs)?
If you can answer that question with some degree of usefulness (i.e., applicability in the real world, rather then vague sweeping claims of potentially hypothetical advantages based on pre-conceived notions, which is all I've ever seen in software patent's defense), then maybe you can ask incredulously why Slashdot is so against patents. Personally, after several years pondering the issue, I don't believe there is an answer, which is why I don't think software should be patentable.
For all the reasons you mentioned, and a few others (such as the fact the patent is of limited duration), I think that patenting the keyboard in question is totally legitimate. All the posters claiming "this has all been done" to the contrary, there are some legitimately clever and new ideas in this design that deserve protection before one of the established companies steal them from him. Maybe the ideas are dumb and won't work, but he deserves the shot in a fair market to find out whether this product can sell.
(For those who claim this issue has been done, find me a product with all the characteristics the guy enumerates on his site, and maybe I'll listen then. In particular a chord keyboard with the fingers in neutral like that, that is an excellent idea that apparently isn't obvious, seeing as how no commercial product has done it yet.)
However, we HAVE bounced signals off of other heavenly bodies, as well. Radar maps were made of Venus from the Earth... very poor resolution, of course.
;-) And Venus is probably the only other option that makes sense for even short messages. Mars is smaller and much further away. Mercury is smaller yet and a bit closer. The gas giants are awfully noisy in those bands, so I seriously doubt you could power a signal strong enough to bounce detectably off of them.
;-)
Yes, if you have a very short message, this can be practical.
Bandwidth considerations come into play. The bandwidth of bouncing off Venus will not be good, which is another way of stating the reasons behind the lack of resolution of the maps. If you've got a few gigabytes to move, this could take a very, very long time to send the message. I don't care to even BOTE this
I assume without any reason whatsoever that an Earth-shattering discovery will take some largish number of bits to communicate