Based on what I understand of nano-tech and the human body, I think we're going to see a lot more of this, and this will be the first medical nanotech revolution: Creating drugs that are targetted only at the things they are supposed to affect.
Imagine wrapping, say, kidney drugs in a nanotech container that only opens in the kindeys, and is otherwise harmless. Or imagine an anti-inflammatory that only targets inflamed areas.
This will cut down a lot on undesirable side-effects caused by flooding the entire body with something to affect.1% of it, and also enable us to up the dose as relevant only to the affected parts.
This obviously doesn't apply to everything, but this is the first advance I expect to actually get used. We're a long way from lil' machines that can safely clean out plaque from our arteries (though we recently saw some advances towards doing it unsafely this last week), but this is quite doable, I think.
You're not getting it. You can't open a connection to ssh in Javascript at all. Polling only enters into it if you add stuff to the server, at which point, like I said, anything is possible and it has been for a while.
XMLHttpRequest your SSH server all you want, as often as you want. You're not going to like the results.
Learn what sockets are. Learn (It extends past a single slashdot message.) Learn SSH uses them.
Then compare with the https protocol.
Doesn't matter how clever you get; an https connection isn't an ssh connection; you've already lost before any of your JS program's input has made it onto the wire (encrypted or otherwise).
An absolutely pure, portable, cross-platform Javascript SSH client is currently not possible. Javascript does not have a "socket" primitive. It only has XMLHttpRequest, which can only connect to webservers via HTTP, which is page-based protocol and you can't emulate a socket that way, either.
Of course you can build an SSH-like thing that has a server component, but that's been possible for a while. (It's not easy emulating a term, and it'd be latent as all hell, but that's what you get.)
You can hack and hack and hack, but without server support you just can't get past the fact you don't have a real socket connection in Javascript.
I added all those adjectives at the beginning because if you're willing to write and install a Mozilla XPCOM control or ActiveX or something that exposes a socket you can do it. But that is, presumably, not what you meant since you mentioned not needing to install components.
Despite using Dvorak for all normal typing tasks, I always switch back to QWERTY for Roguelikes, mostly Angband.
The "problem" is that you don't really map keys -> letters -> commands, it's that in short order you're mapping keys -> commands. At that point, all of the advantages of Dvorak, whatever they may be, are out the door anyhow, so why bother? (Especially as I play on a laptop and have to use the Roguelike/vi keys to move.) If you learned the keys with QWERTY, there's no point forcing it.
I wrote a lil' to switch in X, with a notification of what you just switched to, and bound it with my window manager to ALT-F3. Also makes sure my heretic QWERTY wife can use the machine too. (For about a week, after I was comfortable with Dvorak but before I was proficient, whenever discussing QWERTY I would tap ALT-F3 to type "QWERTY". I don't anymore as it's not a gain, but I was amused.)
True... but it would probably trigger an almost instantaneous revolution amoung the people who benefit from US relations, which is a lot of relatively rich people.
Sure, China could "pull the plug"... but guess who gets the worse end of that deal?
Metaphorically, we get hurt. Badly, even. But they die. (Possibly literally for the gov. leaders.)
China may threaten this. They may do little things here and there. But they aren't going to pull the plug enough to do more than minorly inconvenience us. (To a large degree, that works out even less in their favor than a complete plug-pull; the less reliable they are the more people build things elsewhere.)
It's nice to see a bit of progress in the geek community, a little bit of maturity.
When the PS/2 came out, I tried to explain why the hype was incredibly overblown. I got the equivalent of "troll".
If I tried now to explain why the hype for the PS/3 is overblown, now I'd get "Redundant".
Nobody admitted it at the time. (Haven't seen many admit it now, either...) But I think a lot of people basically got burned. (The PS/2 is nice in a lot of ways. It also sucks ass in some completely inexcusable ways. It's the console world's Pentium 4, designed for high numbers at the cost of real performance.) Looks like there's been some hard learning.
Hopefully, this feeds back to the companies in question... many have said it, but I too am sick of seeing pre-rendered scenes that the PS/1 could have pumped out...
Oh, you know: Everything is always the fault of those dastardly people-who-don't-agree-with-me.
You know they're dastardly, because they disagree with me. QED.
Re:Stupidest thing I've read in a while
on
The Phantom...Lives?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How in the world does that even make any sense?
It doesn't on the individual scale, it does on the cultural scale. My skepticism re-inforces yours, re-inforces mine again. This is how "group-think", a very real phenomenon, happens.
By that logic the opposite should also hold true and anyone who believed in the product therefore believed more, and then more still!
It would, if there were critical mass. Remember when the PS/2 was released?
This, incidentally, is a sign that they have a major PR disaster on their hands. Nothing can win in the face of this "common knowlegde"; look at what happened to the "Sidetalker". We'd long since made up our collective minds before it came out. To this day, I have no personal, direct experience with the product, though I think I have enough evidence to know we were basically right. (Doesn't always happen, though!)
Have any of you ever done this, and returned with interesting stories to tell?
Nope. Long story short, too much mayhem, not enough adventure.
If you insist on trying this, I suggest avoiding moonshine, cliffs, drunk friends, and a dare. (But I'm sure there are other equally negative combinations.)
This post brought to you by MortISP, the #1 ISP in the Great Beyond.
Well, at the speed of light... yes, things going at the speed of light experience nothing that can be called the progression of time.
But matter can't travel that fast, only things without mass. So, there is the interesting question of what you have that you would call a "bike" or "you".
Physics does not break at the speed of light, but intuitive physics is dead. Relativity is a strain on it at any high speed but just forget lightspeed.
(As I always do when this topic comes up, if you want a crack at understanding this stuff for real, try Reflections on Relativity, free online.)
Re:"blessing" doesn't matter
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Something clearly makes it hard to re-implement Java
I'd like to tender a vote for "It's sheer Brobdingnagian size". Individually, each individual function of an API is something you could probably assign a college student to do, but taken together, to re-implement something like Java (which, like "Perl" or "Python" and unlike old-style "C" or ECMAScript, also implies a fairly sizable standard library) is just damned hard.
And as one lil' open source developer, I can't work up much excitement about re-implementing a language spec. (Full disclosure, I hate Java, but that statement is generally true; I can't think of any language I'd care to donate my time towards re-implementing.) I can't imagine this helps the developer pool. (Obviously this is not true of everyone, if you think I just claimed otherwise please learn to read what people say, not what you think they said. I'm just saying that I doubt this gets many people's blood pumping in a way that Yet Another Web Framework or YA MP3 Player seems to.)
Many many moons ago, I lost my mod privs for modding up the "post of death". I did it because I got a hackerly thrill out of adding my mod points to a post with literally thousands expended on it.
It actually made Slashdot more fun; I am the honorable type and felt compelled to use the mod points responsibly (when not enjoying multi-K pileons), so I browsed at -1, etc. Since "the community" told me to screw off, I'm relieved of that responsibility.
Just chill and enjoy the ride. Barring a major change, Slashdot ought to be superceded or unrecognizable in two years. The owners are making a lot of very classic mistakes, and they refuse to recognize them as such because they result in this slow, long term degradation of respect, not the instantaneous loss of revenue. By the time they understand, it will be too late, Slashdot will already have passed the inflection point. Slashdot may never "die", but I'm sure it will make a hell of a lot less money.
we already have good wireless tech so why would we use horrible wires?
Bandwidth.
Every coaxial cable has huge swathes of bandwidth all to itself in its own little independent world. Fiber has even more, or at least so I assume from how it is used.
The wireless world, no matter how clever you get and no matter what existing uses you shut down, will always have less bandwidth.
Wireless has its uses but for fundamental reasons, barring some really odd and completely unexpected scientific advance, there will alway be wires, or at least fibers, in the world.
Not being a lawyer, what I meant was that you can't just yell "First Amendment!" and expect to be off the hook. OK, every once in a while it can be a part of the defense, but it is never an open invitation to libel wildly.
polemic: 1 a : an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another b : the art or practice of disputation or controversy -- usually used in plural but sing. or plural in constr. 2 : an aggressive controversialist
I've never understood why the US view on higher education is that the moment you get into university, your main goal in life becomes the consumption of fermented vegetables and goldfish.
It isn't. It's just a particularly loud and flamboyant subculture. A lot of people who make movies come from that subculture because you don't need to study hard to make movies. (There are things to learn, yes, but not much compared to engineering.) It also makes for fun movies because the characters tend to be "larger than life".
The other drive is the recent push towards making sure "everybody", for some unsuitably large value of "everybody", goes to college. A lot of people end up there who don't want to be there, and end up trapped by partying. For what it's worth, most of them are flushed out in one year, two at the most, but in the meantime, they are quite loud. You hear about the moron who drinks himself to death, you don't hear about the five thousand other students who were studying at the same time.
When you are criticizing a movie vaguely, you implicitly have an outcome that you would prefer in mind. Specifically, make a better movie. Generally, your specific criticisms point to how you would improve it; if you complain the directing is poor, you have this idea of what better directing would be. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you know you've seen it. Artistic criticism rarely falls under this.
The topic at hand is one of those rare instances, since the criticism boils down to "CS Lewis shouldn't be true to himself when he writes" (or at least that's what I'm trying to convince you of), and my point is that there is not an acceptable alternative to that. If CS Lewis had tried to write non-Christian books, that contained a worldview he did not share... well, the person I replied to would never have had an opportunity to criticize, because he'd have never heard of CS Lewis.
(Another artistic example I've seen is when people criticize a movie not for being what it is, but for not being what the author thought it should be; my canonical example of that is this review of Monsters, Inc. in Salon, where the author spends most of it bitching that the movie wasn't "darker". He didn't like Monsters, Inc. not because it was poorly directed, or in fact even a poor movie, but because it wasn't some other completely different movie. Uh, excuse me? This is a little less egregiously wrong since it is at least possible to make the change, unlike a single author which can hardly change his worldview to write one book, but still, it's hardly fair to call that a review of Monsters, Inc... it's more a review of this movie that the reviewer has in their head but none of the rest of us have seen. False labelling, at the least.)
This comes up much more in the political arena, where I apply it much more aggressively. When somebody shrieks about some opposition plan, you need to have a better one to get my attention. Simple negativity is pointless. Sometimes that better plan may even be "do nothing, what you believe is a problem isn't", but still, that may be a better plan. (The party itself often has a "better plan", but the individuals and random people on the street are often just pointlessly critical.)
The real thing I'm getting at here isn't the idea that you shouldn't criticize, it's that when you don't even have a feasible alternative, what's the point? You're just being pointlessly negative (except perhaps in certain teaching situations). What's the point of criticizing somebody who already did the least bad thing they could possibly do, if they had no good choices? (Which isn't what I believe the situation is with CS Lewis, but I suspect describes the original poster's point. What's the alternative that works for CS Lewis?)
You need to think more clearly. The "First Amendment" isn't a magic incantation to be waved around willy-nilly. If people are accusing others of libel, and can back it up in court, the First Amendment simply isn't in play, be the libel target government or private. Thus, waving it around in this situation is meaningless. It's not relevant; the First Amendment is never a defense for libel.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see this start to happen.
.1% of it, and also enable us to up the dose as relevant only to the affected parts.
Based on what I understand of nano-tech and the human body, I think we're going to see a lot more of this, and this will be the first medical nanotech revolution: Creating drugs that are targetted only at the things they are supposed to affect.
Imagine wrapping, say, kidney drugs in a nanotech container that only opens in the kindeys, and is otherwise harmless. Or imagine an anti-inflammatory that only targets inflamed areas.
This will cut down a lot on undesirable side-effects caused by flooding the entire body with something to affect
This obviously doesn't apply to everything, but this is the first advance I expect to actually get used. We're a long way from lil' machines that can safely clean out plaque from our arteries (though we recently saw some advances towards doing it unsafely this last week), but this is quite doable, I think.
You're not getting it. You can't open a connection to ssh in Javascript at all. Polling only enters into it if you add stuff to the server, at which point, like I said, anything is possible and it has been for a while.
XMLHttpRequest your SSH server all you want, as often as you want. You're not going to like the results.
Why not use https?
Learn what sockets are. Learn (It extends past a single slashdot message.) Learn SSH uses them.
Then compare with the https protocol.
Doesn't matter how clever you get; an https connection isn't an ssh connection; you've already lost before any of your JS program's input has made it onto the wire (encrypted or otherwise).
An absolutely pure, portable, cross-platform Javascript SSH client is currently not possible. Javascript does not have a "socket" primitive. It only has XMLHttpRequest, which can only connect to webservers via HTTP, which is page-based protocol and you can't emulate a socket that way, either.
Of course you can build an SSH-like thing that has a server component, but that's been possible for a while. (It's not easy emulating a term, and it'd be latent as all hell, but that's what you get.)
You can hack and hack and hack, but without server support you just can't get past the fact you don't have a real socket connection in Javascript.
I added all those adjectives at the beginning because if you're willing to write and install a Mozilla XPCOM control or ActiveX or something that exposes a socket you can do it. But that is, presumably, not what you meant since you mentioned not needing to install components.
As punishment, I have ordered drunken dash a copy.
Wait, why is including reference material a negative? Isn't that an advantage to the user...?
Opportunity cost.
Despite using Dvorak for all normal typing tasks, I always switch back to QWERTY for Roguelikes, mostly Angband.
The "problem" is that you don't really map keys -> letters -> commands, it's that in short order you're mapping keys -> commands. At that point, all of the advantages of Dvorak, whatever they may be, are out the door anyhow, so why bother? (Especially as I play on a laptop and have to use the Roguelike/vi keys to move.) If you learned the keys with QWERTY, there's no point forcing it.
I wrote a lil' to switch in X, with a notification of what you just switched to, and bound it with my window manager to ALT-F3. Also makes sure my heretic QWERTY wife can use the machine too. (For about a week, after I was comfortable with Dvorak but before I was proficient, whenever discussing QWERTY I would tap ALT-F3 to type "QWERTY". I don't anymore as it's not a gain, but I was amused.)
True... but it would probably trigger an almost instantaneous revolution amoung the people who benefit from US relations, which is a lot of relatively rich people.
Sure, China could "pull the plug"... but guess who gets the worse end of that deal?
Metaphorically, we get hurt. Badly, even. But they die. (Possibly literally for the gov. leaders.)
China may threaten this. They may do little things here and there. But they aren't going to pull the plug enough to do more than minorly inconvenience us. (To a large degree, that works out even less in their favor than a complete plug-pull; the less reliable they are the more people build things elsewhere.)
It's nice to see a bit of progress in the geek community, a little bit of maturity.
When the PS/2 came out, I tried to explain why the hype was incredibly overblown. I got the equivalent of "troll".
If I tried now to explain why the hype for the PS/3 is overblown, now I'd get "Redundant".
Nobody admitted it at the time. (Haven't seen many admit it now, either...) But I think a lot of people basically got burned. (The PS/2 is nice in a lot of ways. It also sucks ass in some completely inexcusable ways. It's the console world's Pentium 4, designed for high numbers at the cost of real performance.) Looks like there's been some hard learning.
Hopefully, this feeds back to the companies in question... many have said it, but I too am sick of seeing pre-rendered scenes that the PS/1 could have pumped out...
Oh, you know: Everything is always the fault of those dastardly people-who-don't-agree-with-me.
You know they're dastardly, because they disagree with me. QED.
How in the world does that even make any sense?
It doesn't on the individual scale, it does on the cultural scale. My skepticism re-inforces yours, re-inforces mine again. This is how "group-think", a very real phenomenon, happens.
By that logic the opposite should also hold true and anyone who believed in the product therefore believed more, and then more still!
It would, if there were critical mass. Remember when the PS/2 was released?
This, incidentally, is a sign that they have a major PR disaster on their hands. Nothing can win in the face of this "common knowlegde"; look at what happened to the "Sidetalker". We'd long since made up our collective minds before it came out. To this day, I have no personal, direct experience with the product, though I think I have enough evidence to know we were basically right. (Doesn't always happen, though!)
"Flamebait", huh?
If the truth hurts, whose fault is that?
[Linux kernel], GCC, glibc, X11, Gnome and KDE
You think those are the packages bringing us down?
You left off a couple of words...
when did we ever hear on Slashdot of Stallman being pleased.
In this case, do shoot the messenger.
Have any of you ever done this, and returned with interesting stories to tell?
Nope. Long story short, too much mayhem, not enough adventure.
If you insist on trying this, I suggest avoiding moonshine, cliffs, drunk friends, and a dare. (But I'm sure there are other equally negative combinations.)
This post brought to you by MortISP, the #1 ISP in the Great Beyond.
Well, at the speed of light... yes, things going at the speed of light experience nothing that can be called the progression of time.
But matter can't travel that fast, only things without mass. So, there is the interesting question of what you have that you would call a "bike" or "you".
Physics does not break at the speed of light, but intuitive physics is dead. Relativity is a strain on it at any high speed but just forget lightspeed.
(As I always do when this topic comes up, if you want a crack at understanding this stuff for real, try Reflections on Relativity, free online.)
Something clearly makes it hard to re-implement Java
I'd like to tender a vote for "It's sheer Brobdingnagian size". Individually, each individual function of an API is something you could probably assign a college student to do, but taken together, to re-implement something like Java (which, like "Perl" or "Python" and unlike old-style "C" or ECMAScript, also implies a fairly sizable standard library) is just damned hard.
And as one lil' open source developer, I can't work up much excitement about re-implementing a language spec. (Full disclosure, I hate Java, but that statement is generally true; I can't think of any language I'd care to donate my time towards re-implementing.) I can't imagine this helps the developer pool. (Obviously this is not true of everyone, if you think I just claimed otherwise please learn to read what people say, not what you think they said. I'm just saying that I doubt this gets many people's blood pumping in a way that Yet Another Web Framework or YA MP3 Player seems to.)
Many many moons ago, I lost my mod privs for modding up the "post of death". I did it because I got a hackerly thrill out of adding my mod points to a post with literally thousands expended on it.
It actually made Slashdot more fun; I am the honorable type and felt compelled to use the mod points responsibly (when not enjoying multi-K pileons), so I browsed at -1, etc. Since "the community" told me to screw off, I'm relieved of that responsibility.
Just chill and enjoy the ride. Barring a major change, Slashdot ought to be superceded or unrecognizable in two years. The owners are making a lot of very classic mistakes, and they refuse to recognize them as such because they result in this slow, long term degradation of respect, not the instantaneous loss of revenue. By the time they understand, it will be too late, Slashdot will already have passed the inflection point. Slashdot may never "die", but I'm sure it will make a hell of a lot less money.
we already have good wireless tech so why would we use horrible wires?
Bandwidth.
Every coaxial cable has huge swathes of bandwidth all to itself in its own little independent world. Fiber has even more, or at least so I assume from how it is used.
The wireless world, no matter how clever you get and no matter what existing uses you shut down, will always have less bandwidth.
Wireless has its uses but for fundamental reasons, barring some really odd and completely unexpected scientific advance, there will alway be wires, or at least fibers, in the world.
Touche.
Not being a lawyer, what I meant was that you can't just yell "First Amendment!" and expect to be off the hook. OK, every once in a while it can be a part of the defense, but it is never an open invitation to libel wildly.
I'm honestly curious, what did you mean to say?
"Dear Paul Graham:
In the future, could you ask permission from me to write your articles before you post them?
Sincerely, jay-be-em."
It's exactly what you're asking, only without the smokescreen of condescension.
Screw people like you.
I've never understood why the US view on higher education is that the moment you get into university, your main goal in life becomes the consumption of fermented vegetables and goldfish.
It isn't. It's just a particularly loud and flamboyant subculture. A lot of people who make movies come from that subculture because you don't need to study hard to make movies. (There are things to learn, yes, but not much compared to engineering.) It also makes for fun movies because the characters tend to be "larger than life".
The other drive is the recent push towards making sure "everybody", for some unsuitably large value of "everybody", goes to college. A lot of people end up there who don't want to be there, and end up trapped by partying. For what it's worth, most of them are flushed out in one year, two at the most, but in the meantime, they are quite loud. You hear about the moron who drinks himself to death, you don't hear about the five thousand other students who were studying at the same time.
You misunderstand.
When you are criticizing a movie vaguely, you implicitly have an outcome that you would prefer in mind. Specifically, make a better movie. Generally, your specific criticisms point to how you would improve it; if you complain the directing is poor, you have this idea of what better directing would be. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you know you've seen it. Artistic criticism rarely falls under this.
The topic at hand is one of those rare instances, since the criticism boils down to "CS Lewis shouldn't be true to himself when he writes" (or at least that's what I'm trying to convince you of), and my point is that there is not an acceptable alternative to that. If CS Lewis had tried to write non-Christian books, that contained a worldview he did not share... well, the person I replied to would never have had an opportunity to criticize, because he'd have never heard of CS Lewis.
(Another artistic example I've seen is when people criticize a movie not for being what it is, but for not being what the author thought it should be; my canonical example of that is this review of Monsters, Inc. in Salon, where the author spends most of it bitching that the movie wasn't "darker". He didn't like Monsters, Inc. not because it was poorly directed, or in fact even a poor movie, but because it wasn't some other completely different movie. Uh, excuse me? This is a little less egregiously wrong since it is at least possible to make the change, unlike a single author which can hardly change his worldview to write one book, but still, it's hardly fair to call that a review of Monsters, Inc... it's more a review of this movie that the reviewer has in their head but none of the rest of us have seen. False labelling, at the least.)
This comes up much more in the political arena, where I apply it much more aggressively. When somebody shrieks about some opposition plan, you need to have a better one to get my attention. Simple negativity is pointless. Sometimes that better plan may even be "do nothing, what you believe is a problem isn't", but still, that may be a better plan. (The party itself often has a "better plan", but the individuals and random people on the street are often just pointlessly critical.)
The real thing I'm getting at here isn't the idea that you shouldn't criticize, it's that when you don't even have a feasible alternative, what's the point? You're just being pointlessly negative (except perhaps in certain teaching situations). What's the point of criticizing somebody who already did the least bad thing they could possibly do, if they had no good choices? (Which isn't what I believe the situation is with CS Lewis, but I suspect describes the original poster's point. What's the alternative that works for CS Lewis?)
This defends against libel how, exactly?
You need to think more clearly. The "First Amendment" isn't a magic incantation to be waved around willy-nilly. If people are accusing others of libel, and can back it up in court, the First Amendment simply isn't in play, be the libel target government or private. Thus, waving it around in this situation is meaningless. It's not relevant; the First Amendment is never a defense for libel.