Highly inappropriate behavior
on
MPAA vs. Television
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
(From my blog)
I question the appropriateness and perhaps even legality (in an abstract theoretical sense) of a member of the legislative branch of the government urging a part of the executive branch to grab power it does not seem to have, because the legislative branch has not granted it. The legislator does not work by fiat, it's his job to legislate. Should he fail in that endeavor, as Hollings has up to this point, he should not go behind the scenes and try to get the executive branch to do his bidding anyhow.
Congress should officially reprimand Hollings for this. (Not that I expect it...)
My experience matches yours, mostly, but a couple of observations:
One: "Inordinate amount of time" is too vague. An 'inordinate' amount of CPU time is more-or-less irrelevant to me. emerge is faster then trying to deal with a src deb.
Two: On that vein, downloading and compiling a source deb was non-trivial when I did it for enlightenment. Fiddly bits here, fiddly bits there, once installed the.deb system didn't seem to know about it (it's good enlightenment was basically a leaf program)... it's not the same.
I have a little underpowered laptop that I have had both Gentoo and Debian on. Great performance gains were obtained in both by compiling enlightenment with a lot of optimizations. The speed's about the same, but guess which was 'fire and forget' and which was 'fiddle with it for a couple of hours'?
I happily trade hours of my CPU time for minutes of my time. I can tell you which is more valuable to me in this era of desktop supercomputers.
Your points are valid, but for many of us, the priorities say Gentoo's a good deal overall. (I've started taking to selectively setting CFLAG and CXXFLAG settings on packages I think will benefit, without getting too anal about it. Non-optimized compiling is often 3-5x faster, even for just -march=i686 -O3 -pipe.) Perhaps not to you... but that's why we have dozens of major distros.
According to my DVD copy of UHF (Wierd Al's movie foray), the (fake) billboard advertisement for "Spatula City" was actually left up for months after filming, directing people to a non-existant shop that nobody in their right mind would care about.
One wonders how many people scratched their heads about that one...
Are you kidding? Are you nuts? You'd never take a quest to destroy the Pepsi-golem! Pepsi would never be associated with golem-like activities! You uneducated beast! Pepsi is associated with puppies, mom, love, apple pie, and most of all, hipness! You'd get past the Golem by giving him an ice-cold Pepsi, and after a single swig, it'd turn into Britney Spears, sing the latest hit, and bounce^H^H^H^H^H^H^H walk away, allowing you to pass.
(Corporate sponsered games would probably be as boring as the corporate sponsered games you can find on your local Happy Meal box. "The latest Disney licensed character's need something to make them happy. Unscramble the letters to find out what they need! : HAPYP MAEL.")
And your problem with your Palm Pilot stems from your reprehensible behavior with regards to the Marlboro Man! You do not ride past the Marlboro Man, you ride up to the Marlboro Man and type: "ASK MARLBORO MAN THE WAY TO FLAVOR COUNTRY". (aside: Apologies if I've forgetten the details of that ad campaign...) He'll give you a cigarette, the you smoke it. Several sexy woman (or men, depending on what gender you claimed to be attracted to on your initial 6-page 'voluntary survey' you were required to fill out to play this fine game) will come out, and one of them will upgrade your "Palm Pilot" to a WinCE machine, which can later be levelled up into a MICROSOFT X-BOX, which will handily defeat the Playstation2, as Sony didn't pony up as much dough as Microsoft.
(Hint: If you type the secret code I WANT TO CARRY BILL'S BABY at the X-BOX level-up screen, you'll be able to watch an animation of Steve Jobs being crushed by the Windows logo! Mega-awesome! It makes me want to buy extra copies of Windows XP2005 just to play it safe!)
Really, these games are pretty cool, if a little easy. One last parting hint: Try typing BARE 'EM, BRITNEY while the Britney-golem is singing, and you'll get a nice surprise from the FBI (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporate America).
That said, wxWindows is nicer to use than MFC, although for a Windows-based chess program, I doubt you'll be able to avoid MFC entirely. MFC just does more than wxWindows.
The second sentence is trivially true, but the first is probably false. There are any number of ways to approach the problem, but one first-cut possibility is an 8x8 grid of wxBitmapButtons. You can set all the bitmap states so it doesn't 'look' like a button (raised, etc), and then you need one bitmap per piece per color (plus probably a selection), which isn't that big a deal.
That's probably what I'd personally go with, just because the events are quite natuarally set up, and the bitmap generation isn't that big a deal. You could of course paint directly into the dialog (wxPaintDC), just like you'd end up doing in MFC.
Another interesting thing that you can do with wxWindows that is much harder to do with MFC is the possibility of using the various wrappers around it. wxPython is quite mature, and while I've never used it, I'd bet wxPerl is similarly mature. In this case, C++ probably is your best bet, because chess is one of those things that you need speed, thus you need C(++), and it probably isn't worthwhile to write the GUI in Python or Perl and then shell out to the chess program. But learning wxWindows leaves that as a future possibility.
And believe me, a nice windowing toolkit plus a nice language (Perl or Python depending on temprement... I recommend giving both a good shake before deciding) is a really nice tool to have around. I've knocked together programs in Python/Tk and Python/wxWindows in a couple hours that I'd never even think about doing in MFC/C++ or VB... that goes for (Python/Perl) * (wxWindows/Tk/QT/GTK bindings), not just the combos I've described here.
communism has always tried to achieve its goals through centralized control of all resources.
Tetris is a tolerable metaphor here, though stretched. We can all run a simple game at level 1 for a very, very long time, but one centralized entity can't run the game at level 300 (on the Gameboy ten level scale) for long at all, even if it has the same number of pieces.
Practical communism has always (and will always) fall down on the impossibility of centralized control over everything. (Unless technology in the far future negates that limitation.) Democracy isn't perfect, but any replacement plans at this juncture in history must also include decentralization (i.e., much of the responsibilities the communist governments take upon themselves, we leave to "the invisible hand of the market", which is also not perfect but is doing a lot better then any communist government to date.).
*chuckle* The tech may be maxed out, but there's clearly a lot of bad engineering in the Empire.
Still, it sort of reminds me of the modern state of programming; computer technology is more advanced then a casual survey of your average working-day programmer. Despite having rather astonishing technology at his/her disposal, they program Yet Another Buffer Overflow... and some of these programmers progress embarassingly far! One can easily imagine a mediocre engineer/outstandingly superb bootlicker progressing to Main Deathstar Engineer, since the Empire is human too...;-)
Those sites are fun and the speculation is infectious, isn't it?
Stagnation is one theory in the Star Wars rationalization camp. The other major theory is the idea that they've effectively maxed out their technology. It is established canon that a trip across the galaxy is a matter of hours at most, the energy specs on the weapons are absurdly large, computers have reached human-level intelligence (and we can assume there is no higher intelligence possible for the sake of argument), and the Empire could build most of a "small-moon sized" battlestation in 8 months.
Granted, we believe that more progress could be made in the AI department in the real world, for instance, but for the sake of suspension of disbelief it is plausible to accept that human-level intelligence is the maximum possible, and that the other demonstrated limits are indeed the insuperable maximums of the universe.
(Note I am neither propounding nor defending either theory, just pointing out their existance.)
This site and this site are kick-ass explorations of Star Wars (and the first site does Star Trek in passing) rationalizations. Do not go if you have work to do; if you merely like science or Star Wars, those sites will suck you in for a couple of days.
The optimization may have been it. It's only been running for a bit now, but I haven't been able to crash it and that's been an improvement.
My optimization settings are a relatively conservative "-O2 -mcpu686 -pipe" (still 2.95), and this is the first problem I've had with them on this system. Thanks for the suggestion, as I had plum forgot about that.
I've been looking around on mailing lists and such and was just about to mail gentoo or evolution, but I wanted to nail down which was really responsible first. (Neither, as it turns out.) Since I am also evaluating Evolution for use in an office it seemed an opportune forum to ask my question. (This is a metareply to a couple of the other comments in this thread as well.)
Interesting, thanks. AFAIK I had no previous config files but I'll try wiping the dir out. I also found the 'killev' command can be useful. I can't guarentee I tried wiping the evolution dir and killev at the same time...
It's a pity, because I think I'd like to use Evolution as my real mail client...
I'd be interested in hearing other people's stability experiences. I'm running Gentoo and I can't keep Evolution 1.0.7 running more then 30 seconds without a crash. I can sort of use 1.0.5, but it's still fairly fragile.
It's so unstable for me that I figure it's got to be some sort of config problem (gentoo can make things a little TOO up to date sometimes), and I'd like to hear how Evolution does on other, more conservative, distros, especially Red Hat. Can you actually use Evolution, or is it a lot of pretty pictures followed by a segfault?
(Please specify distributions as appropriate; I think it may matter here.)
But continuing on in this blind thought that there's an ample supply of oil
You projected. I said the issue is more complex, I didn't actually say anything about how much oil we have. I don't have the data to make that claim. You don't have the data to make that claim. Quite possibly, nobody does. All I see are various dogmatic claims made on poor models and bad thinking.
The whole 'linear' vs 'non-linear' argument is pretty much mute.
"Moot." (Pet peeve.)
Sure, by using these linear projections they come up with dates that continue to fall by the wayside, but that doesn't mean that the concerns aren't real and pressing.
You do realize that you just said that the truth doesn't matter, don't you?
False projections do result in concerns that are not real. They may get lucky and stumble on the truth, but how can you tell? It is not just possible, but likely that the current understanding is so flawed as to be damaging if acted on.
Poor thinking is poor thinking. Just doing "something" is a fallacy, not a wise course of action, no matter how many people parrot the party line.
You, and several other repliers, projected. I made no 'resource argument'. I made a 'modeling argument'. Better understanding of the issues will lead to better solutions.
Technology requires resources and it gets more expensive with each innovation.
Nope, gets cheaper in every way that matters. How do you think we sustain exponential growth? If it were constantly getting more expensive, growth would be logarithmic.
The answer is to change the way things are done before it is forced by a hard, immovable wall of reality.
Perfect example; by saying this, you demonstrate that you missed my point. There is no 'hard, immovable wall of reality'... it's a 'soft, ever-moving wall of reality'. It exists, yes, but it's not something you can point to, and making plans as if it is will be less successful then plans that take into account the soft nature of it. Panic about the right things.
In the meantime, I make no particular claims about the environment. Everybody jumping to criticize my post on that point merely reinforce my point that people are thinking in very, very inappropriate ways about these issues. (Dogmatic claims are roughtly equivalent to a 'constant' modelling approach, which is even worse then a linear model... and of course there's the issue of reading claims into my post and getting all righteous about correcting these perceived claims, since they don't match dogma.) I have opinions, but surprise surprise! they're too complicated to explain in a simple Slashdot post. They're probably wrong too, but they have the distinction of being adaptable.
This kind of post exemplifies the whole problem with the debate, which is the painful oversimplification of the entire problem, until no opinion is left without overwhelming evidence in its favor.
Some sample problems:
Resources are not constant. Some replenish themselves. The amount of wheat that I consume is a virtually irrelevent point, because that amount of wheat can be grown again. Much the same goes for many other products, such as wood and any chemical that can be produced by a lifeform.
Resources are not a constant. Resources can be recycled, re-used, and re-allocated. We may not be doing the best job of this... or are we doing such a horrid job? The true answer is difficult to ascertain and cannot be done with such a limited analysis.
Resources are not constant. Improved extraction and refining techniques effectively increase the amount of any given resource that can be extracted from the Earth. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this. Remember how we were supposed to run out of oil by 19x0? Well, we did, we just found more. It may not be reasonable to suppose an infinite supply exists, but again, it's not reasonable to project linearly, either. There may be enough to last us two hundred years, assuming the population growth is slowing as it seems to be in some ways. Or there may not be enough, in which case the economy will throw significant non-linearities into the equation as it raises the price of oil. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
Resources are not constant. Any space activity in the next few decades completely throws everything off. More realistically, any new refining technique increases resources, any new genetic engineering technique increases resources, any new drilling technique or location technique or recycling technique increases resources. As technology improves, so does efficiency, the moreso if anybody cared. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
As a consequence of much of the above, resources are created, not found. Oil no longer wells up out of the ground, and all the easy resources are long gone. The US may use a 'disproportionate' share, but by being the technology leader, it also produces a vastly disproportionate share of the world's resources, both directly and indirectly. Better oil-finding technique benefit many people, not just the US, and the agricultural research done in the US benefits Third World countries astoundingly. Arithmetic analysis does not lead to understanding this issue. Linear analysis can not correctly predict the effects of this.
It's going to take some catastrophic change that impacts the U.S. directly to get us to wake up.
We have woken up. Personally, I worry more about everybody's use of linear or God help us all, constant projection techniques in understanding these phenomena. We'll stupid ourselves into the cosmic grave yet...
Take it one step at a time. You don't have to jump from 'noatun's current state straight to perfection; just improve it some, submit the improvements, and repeat to taste. You can learn as you go along. Interface in particular should be improvable without going too deeply into the KDE arch... (if that's not the case, then there may be a problem with the KDE arch...)
Reminds me of an obscure and strange sci-fi-ish novella Where were you last Pluterday?, based (sort of) on the idea that the rich and powerful can buy their way into an eight day of the week, which only they experience... wierd book, and that's not the only reason... worth picking up on the chance in heck you find a copy.
Cryptography actually is very easy when you remove the requirement of being able to decrypt the ciphertext.
Hey, thanks, I think I just figured out what my Master's thesis will be...;-) "On Cryptographically Secure Write-Once, Read-Never Memory And Its Application To Buzzword-Compliant Technologies."
(disclaimer: I am not specifically a cryptographic researcher as that statement may imply. Just a regular ole' comp. sci. master's student who understand math well enough to trust the crypto researchers over a poorly-prepared teenager any day, no matter how romatic it might be to think that the teen has actually come up with something valuable...)
Assuming this abstract is complete and correct, then it provides us enough information to know that his encryption technique is more snake oil.
Specifically, we have the unbreakable claim warning sign, and even more specifically, this is almost certainly one of the one -time pad errors:
The bits in the pad cannot be generated by an algorithm or cipher. They must be truly random, using a real random source such as specialized hardware, radioactive decay timings, etc. Some snake oil vendors will try to dance around this issue, and talk about functions they perform on the bit stream, things they do with the bit stream vs. the plaintext, or something similar. But this still doesn't change the fact that anything that doesn't use
real random bits is not an OTP. The important part of an OTP is the source of the bits, not what one does with them.
Much as I love Gentoo, this criticism is a bit unfounded. I never know with the next "emerge rsync" whether I'll get an obscure couple of new revisions to obscure packages I never use, or a sudden change to a new compiler version that will recompile everything I have just to update my window manager. Installing a RedHat distro is far, far more stable.
This is why I go Gentoo; I'm willing to risk the instability to get the latest features, and for the most part, it pays off. I'd hesistate before putting it on a server, though, and when I finally decided to go for it (the performance boost is quite tasty), I'd be very careful about actually updating it.
Debian's a good example, with 'stable', 'unstable', and 'testing', a.k.a. 'probably actually unstable'. (Unstable is usually an OK choice for most uses.) You can't have it all.
Just remember that the key to a certification is to mindlessly parrot what the certifying body is saying on the test, NOT saying what you know is true.
Getting a certification in a field you know something about can be extra challenging, as there's no law saying the certifiers have to be particularly competent in the field they are 'certifying'; I'd be particularly nervous about a 'project management' certification, as experience could be really detrimental to getting certified...
Slashdot Mirror
(From my blog)
I question the appropriateness and perhaps even legality (in an abstract theoretical sense) of a member of the legislative branch of the government urging a part of the executive branch to grab power it does not seem to have, because the legislative branch has not granted it. The legislator does not work by fiat, it's his job to legislate. Should he fail in that endeavor, as Hollings has up to this point, he should not go behind the scenes and try to get the executive branch to do his bidding anyhow.
Congress should officially reprimand Hollings for this. (Not that I expect it...)
My experience matches yours, mostly, but a couple of observations:
.deb system didn't seem to know about it (it's good enlightenment was basically a leaf program)... it's not the same.
One: "Inordinate amount of time" is too vague. An 'inordinate' amount of CPU time is more-or-less irrelevant to me. emerge is faster then trying to deal with a src deb.
Two: On that vein, downloading and compiling a source deb was non-trivial when I did it for enlightenment. Fiddly bits here, fiddly bits there, once installed the
I have a little underpowered laptop that I have had both Gentoo and Debian on. Great performance gains were obtained in both by compiling enlightenment with a lot of optimizations. The speed's about the same, but guess which was 'fire and forget' and which was 'fiddle with it for a couple of hours'?
I happily trade hours of my CPU time for minutes of my time. I can tell you which is more valuable to me in this era of desktop supercomputers.
Your points are valid, but for many of us, the priorities say Gentoo's a good deal overall. (I've started taking to selectively setting CFLAG and CXXFLAG settings on packages I think will benefit, without getting too anal about it. Non-optimized compiling is often 3-5x faster, even for just -march=i686 -O3 -pipe.) Perhaps not to you... but that's why we have dozens of major distros.
According to my DVD copy of UHF (Wierd Al's movie foray), the (fake) billboard advertisement for "Spatula City" was actually left up for months after filming, directing people to a non-existant shop that nobody in their right mind would care about.
One wonders how many people scratched their heads about that one...
Are you kidding? Are you nuts? You'd never take a quest to destroy the Pepsi-golem! Pepsi would never be associated with golem-like activities! You uneducated beast! Pepsi is associated with puppies, mom, love, apple pie, and most of all, hipness! You'd get past the Golem by giving him an ice-cold Pepsi, and after a single swig, it'd turn into Britney Spears, sing the latest hit, and bounce^H^H^H^H^H^H^H walk away, allowing you to pass.
(Corporate sponsered games would probably be as boring as the corporate sponsered games you can find on your local Happy Meal box. "The latest Disney licensed character's need something to make them happy. Unscramble the letters to find out what they need! : HAPYP MAEL.")
And your problem with your Palm Pilot stems from your reprehensible behavior with regards to the Marlboro Man! You do not ride past the Marlboro Man, you ride up to the Marlboro Man and type: " ASK MARLBORO MAN THE WAY TO FLAVOR COUNTRY ". (aside: Apologies if I've forgetten the details of that ad campaign...) He'll give you a cigarette, the you smoke it. Several sexy woman (or men, depending on what gender you claimed to be attracted to on your initial 6-page 'voluntary survey' you were required to fill out to play this fine game) will come out, and one of them will upgrade your "Palm Pilot" to a WinCE machine, which can later be levelled up into a MICROSOFT X-BOX, which will handily defeat the Playstation2, as Sony didn't pony up as much dough as Microsoft.
(Hint: If you type the secret code I WANT TO CARRY BILL'S BABY at the X-BOX level-up screen, you'll be able to watch an animation of Steve Jobs being crushed by the Windows logo! Mega-awesome! It makes me want to buy extra copies of Windows XP2005 just to play it safe!)
Really, these games are pretty cool, if a little easy. One last parting hint: Try typing BARE 'EM, BRITNEY while the Britney-golem is singing, and you'll get a nice surprise from the FBI (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corporate America).
And here I thought you had meant running s/.*//g as a deliberate commentary on the average value of email going to or from Yahoo!....
That said, wxWindows is nicer to use than MFC, although for a Windows-based chess program, I doubt you'll be able to avoid MFC entirely. MFC just does more than wxWindows.
The second sentence is trivially true, but the first is probably false. There are any number of ways to approach the problem, but one first-cut possibility is an 8x8 grid of wxBitmapButtons. You can set all the bitmap states so it doesn't 'look' like a button (raised, etc), and then you need one bitmap per piece per color (plus probably a selection), which isn't that big a deal.
That's probably what I'd personally go with, just because the events are quite natuarally set up, and the bitmap generation isn't that big a deal. You could of course paint directly into the dialog (wxPaintDC), just like you'd end up doing in MFC.
Another interesting thing that you can do with wxWindows that is much harder to do with MFC is the possibility of using the various wrappers around it. wxPython is quite mature, and while I've never used it, I'd bet wxPerl is similarly mature. In this case, C++ probably is your best bet, because chess is one of those things that you need speed, thus you need C(++), and it probably isn't worthwhile to write the GUI in Python or Perl and then shell out to the chess program. But learning wxWindows leaves that as a future possibility.
And believe me, a nice windowing toolkit plus a nice language (Perl or Python depending on temprement... I recommend giving both a good shake before deciding) is a really nice tool to have around. I've knocked together programs in Python/Tk and Python/wxWindows in a couple hours that I'd never even think about doing in MFC/C++ or VB... that goes for (Python/Perl) * (wxWindows/Tk/QT/GTK bindings), not just the combos I've described here.
communism has always tried to achieve its goals through centralized control of all resources.
Tetris is a tolerable metaphor here, though stretched. We can all run a simple game at level 1 for a very, very long time, but one centralized entity can't run the game at level 300 (on the Gameboy ten level scale) for long at all, even if it has the same number of pieces.
Practical communism has always (and will always) fall down on the impossibility of centralized control over everything. (Unless technology in the far future negates that limitation.) Democracy isn't perfect, but any replacement plans at this juncture in history must also include decentralization (i.e., much of the responsibilities the communist governments take upon themselves, we leave to "the invisible hand of the market", which is also not perfect but is doing a lot better then any communist government to date.).
Hey, he said should, not would!
*chuckle* The tech may be maxed out, but there's clearly a lot of bad engineering in the Empire.
;-)
Still, it sort of reminds me of the modern state of programming; computer technology is more advanced then a casual survey of your average working-day programmer. Despite having rather astonishing technology at his/her disposal, they program Yet Another Buffer Overflow... and some of these programmers progress embarassingly far! One can easily imagine a mediocre engineer/outstandingly superb bootlicker progressing to Main Deathstar Engineer, since the Empire is human too...
Those sites are fun and the speculation is infectious, isn't it?
Stagnation is one theory in the Star Wars rationalization camp. The other major theory is the idea that they've effectively maxed out their technology. It is established canon that a trip across the galaxy is a matter of hours at most, the energy specs on the weapons are absurdly large, computers have reached human-level intelligence (and we can assume there is no higher intelligence possible for the sake of argument), and the Empire could build most of a "small-moon sized" battlestation in 8 months.
Granted, we believe that more progress could be made in the AI department in the real world, for instance, but for the sake of suspension of disbelief it is plausible to accept that human-level intelligence is the maximum possible, and that the other demonstrated limits are indeed the insuperable maximums of the universe.
(Note I am neither propounding nor defending either theory, just pointing out their existance.)
This site and this site are kick-ass explorations of Star Wars (and the first site does Star Trek in passing) rationalizations. Do not go if you have work to do; if you merely like science or Star Wars, those sites will suck you in for a couple of days.
The optimization may have been it. It's only been running for a bit now, but I haven't been able to crash it and that's been an improvement.
My optimization settings are a relatively conservative "-O2 -mcpu686 -pipe" (still 2.95), and this is the first problem I've had with them on this system. Thanks for the suggestion, as I had plum forgot about that.
I've been looking around on mailing lists and such and was just about to mail gentoo or evolution, but I wanted to nail down which was really responsible first. (Neither, as it turns out.) Since I am also evaluating Evolution for use in an office it seemed an opportune forum to ask my question. (This is a metareply to a couple of the other comments in this thread as well.)
Interesting, thanks. AFAIK I had no previous config files but I'll try wiping the dir out. I also found the 'killev' command can be useful. I can't guarentee I tried wiping the evolution dir and killev at the same time...
It's a pity, because I think I'd like to use Evolution as my real mail client...
I'd be interested in hearing other people's stability experiences. I'm running Gentoo and I can't keep Evolution 1.0.7 running more then 30 seconds without a crash. I can sort of use 1.0.5, but it's still fairly fragile.
It's so unstable for me that I figure it's got to be some sort of config problem (gentoo can make things a little TOO up to date sometimes), and I'd like to hear how Evolution does on other, more conservative, distros, especially Red Hat. Can you actually use Evolution, or is it a lot of pretty pictures followed by a segfault?
(Please specify distributions as appropriate; I think it may matter here.)
OpenGL will die on Windows at the same time as John Carmack dies.
I now regret killing him so many times in Doom II. I guess I've done my part to support the monopoly...
But continuing on in this blind thought that there's an ample supply of oil
You projected. I said the issue is more complex, I didn't actually say anything about how much oil we have. I don't have the data to make that claim. You don't have the data to make that claim. Quite possibly, nobody does. All I see are various dogmatic claims made on poor models and bad thinking.
The whole 'linear' vs 'non-linear' argument is pretty much mute.
"Moot." (Pet peeve.)
Sure, by using these linear projections they come up with dates that continue to fall by the wayside, but that doesn't mean that the concerns aren't real and pressing.
You do realize that you just said that the truth doesn't matter, don't you?
False projections do result in concerns that are not real. They may get lucky and stumble on the truth, but how can you tell? It is not just possible, but likely that the current understanding is so flawed as to be damaging if acted on.
Poor thinking is poor thinking. Just doing "something" is a fallacy, not a wise course of action, no matter how many people parrot the party line.
Your resource argument is rather bland and ugly.
You, and several other repliers, projected. I made no 'resource argument'. I made a 'modeling argument'. Better understanding of the issues will lead to better solutions.
Technology requires resources and it gets more expensive with each innovation.
Nope, gets cheaper in every way that matters. How do you think we sustain exponential growth? If it were constantly getting more expensive, growth would be logarithmic.
The answer is to change the way things are done before it is forced by a hard, immovable wall of reality.
Perfect example; by saying this, you demonstrate that you missed my point. There is no 'hard, immovable wall of reality'... it's a 'soft, ever-moving wall of reality'. It exists, yes, but it's not something you can point to, and making plans as if it is will be less successful then plans that take into account the soft nature of it. Panic about the right things.
In the meantime, I make no particular claims about the environment. Everybody jumping to criticize my post on that point merely reinforce my point that people are thinking in very, very inappropriate ways about these issues. (Dogmatic claims are roughtly equivalent to a 'constant' modelling approach, which is even worse then a linear model... and of course there's the issue of reading claims into my post and getting all righteous about correcting these perceived claims, since they don't match dogma.) I have opinions, but surprise surprise! they're too complicated to explain in a simple Slashdot post. They're probably wrong too, but they have the distinction of being adaptable.
Some sample problems:
- Resources are not constant. Some replenish themselves. The amount of wheat that I consume is a virtually irrelevent point, because that amount of wheat can be grown again. Much the same goes for many other products, such as wood and any chemical that can be produced by a lifeform.
- Resources are not a constant. Resources can be recycled, re-used, and re-allocated. We may not be doing the best job of this... or are we doing such a horrid job? The true answer is difficult to ascertain and cannot be done with such a limited analysis.
- Resources are not constant. Improved extraction and refining techniques effectively increase the amount of any given resource that can be extracted from the Earth. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this. Remember how we were supposed to run out of oil by 19x0? Well, we did, we just found more. It may not be reasonable to suppose an infinite supply exists, but again, it's not reasonable to project linearly, either. There may be enough to last us two hundred years, assuming the population growth is slowing as it seems to be in some ways. Or there may not be enough, in which case the economy will throw significant non-linearities into the equation as it raises the price of oil. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
- Resources are not constant. Any space activity in the next few decades completely throws everything off. More realistically, any new refining technique increases resources, any new genetic engineering technique increases resources, any new drilling technique or location technique or recycling technique increases resources. As technology improves, so does efficiency, the moreso if anybody cared. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
- As a consequence of much of the above, resources are created, not found. Oil no longer wells up out of the ground, and all the easy resources are long gone. The US may use a 'disproportionate' share, but by being the technology leader, it also produces a vastly disproportionate share of the world's resources, both directly and indirectly. Better oil-finding technique benefit many people, not just the US, and the agricultural research done in the US benefits Third World countries astoundingly. Arithmetic analysis does not lead to understanding this issue. Linear analysis can not correctly predict the effects of this.
It's going to take some catastrophic change that impacts the U.S. directly to get us to wake up.We have woken up. Personally, I worry more about everybody's use of linear or God help us all, constant projection techniques in understanding these phenomena. We'll stupid ourselves into the cosmic grave yet...
Take it one step at a time. You don't have to jump from 'noatun's current state straight to perfection; just improve it some, submit the improvements, and repeat to taste. You can learn as you go along. Interface in particular should be improvable without going too deeply into the KDE arch... (if that's not the case, then there may be a problem with the KDE arch...)
Reminds me of an obscure and strange sci-fi-ish novella Where were you last Pluterday?, based (sort of) on the idea that the rich and powerful can buy their way into an eight day of the week, which only they experience... wierd book, and that's not the only reason... worth picking up on the chance in heck you find a copy.
Cryptography actually is very easy when you remove the requirement of being able to decrypt the ciphertext.
;-) "On Cryptographically Secure Write-Once, Read-Never Memory And Its Application To Buzzword-Compliant Technologies."
Hey, thanks, I think I just figured out what my Master's thesis will be...
(disclaimer: I am not specifically a cryptographic researcher as that statement may imply. Just a regular ole' comp. sci. master's student who understand math well enough to trust the crypto researchers over a poorly-prepared teenager any day, no matter how romatic it might be to think that the teen has actually come up with something valuable...)
Specifically, we have the unbreakable claim warning sign, and even more specifically, this is almost certainly one of the one -time pad errors: There's also the technobabble, secret algorithms, and revolutionary breakthrough warning signs.
I hope they enjoy the $20,000 patent, 'cause it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
"It seems to me"
Famous last words in the field of cryptography.
Much as I love Gentoo, this criticism is a bit unfounded. I never know with the next "emerge rsync" whether I'll get an obscure couple of new revisions to obscure packages I never use, or a sudden change to a new compiler version that will recompile everything I have just to update my window manager. Installing a RedHat distro is far, far more stable.
This is why I go Gentoo; I'm willing to risk the instability to get the latest features, and for the most part, it pays off. I'd hesistate before putting it on a server, though, and when I finally decided to go for it (the performance boost is quite tasty), I'd be very careful about actually updating it.
Debian's a good example, with 'stable', 'unstable', and 'testing', a.k.a. 'probably actually unstable'. (Unstable is usually an OK choice for most uses.) You can't have it all.
Just remember that the key to a certification is to mindlessly parrot what the certifying body is saying on the test, NOT saying what you know is true.
Getting a certification in a field you know something about can be extra challenging, as there's no law saying the certifiers have to be particularly competent in the field they are 'certifying'; I'd be particularly nervous about a 'project management' certification, as experience could be really detrimental to getting certified...