No, the original point was whether you can protect yourself by copyrighting (or trademarking, or something) your own data.
"The" company (boy, I wish it was a "the" company...) is also not copyrighting your data. Nobody can. What they can and do do is copyright the collection of data.
For further information, look up "compilation copyright", as this is a somewhat rich topic, and beyond the scope of a Slashdot posting.
You can't copyright facts about yourself, which is what biometrics is based on, and for that matter most of what your privacy-sensitive information is.
You can't copyright the collection, because other people will independently collect it, and they can (and do!) claim their own copyright on the new collection.
Trademarks don't work, because they are mostly concerned with preventing other people from fraudulently passing themselves off as your business concern. Even if you could trademark your fingerprint, which is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't stop people from storing and using it for almost anything they want.
Patents are obviously not a good fit.
Trade secret law is actually the closest IP protection of interest (the forgotten IP protection class here on slashdot), but your privacy-sensitive information suffers from being neither directly related to trade in the sense the name of the law implies (i.e., yes I know your ID at a business is related to trade but that's not what the law means, summaries always drop data), nor is it a secret anymore.
The bad news is, you need new law. The good news is, no aspect of the requisite law is new; you can get there with pieces of the trade secret law, added to copyright, and topped off with some of the protections in trademark. But there is no feasible way to do that under current law, not even with a highly experimental suit.
It's good thinking, though.
(This is a shortened version of the analysis at that first link. If you have some objection, you might want to try that link before replying; it may make your objection go away, it may make it worse, but it's worth checking:-) )
In other words, as a response to external stimuli, they limit themselves. Humans are the only species to come up with reasons not to have kids, even when the environment supports it, they have the money, they could have the time, etc. No animal species fails to have kids when the opportunity arises, except humans.
Not having kids when the opportunity isn't there is not the same thing at all.
once everyone has a decent standard of living we either need to go to space or prepare for another population boom like there is in China / S. America.
Evidence?
This concern is out of date. Rich people have fewer kids; the evidence at this point is effectively incontrovertible, though one can yet debate the reasons.
I'm not ready to panic about underpopulation yet, but if you insist on panicking, that's the way to go at the moment. Malthus was wrong; humans are the only known species to figure out reasons not to have kids.
Generally, I'm pretty anti-Java. I hate working in it myself and I've partially structured my career so as to avoid it.
Why do I hate it? It is a language that builds in bureaucracy, making you say everything three or four times, static this, static that, hard-coded the other, if there's a fun or useful feature it's not there ("generics" are about 5 years too late and from my reading still amazingly weak compared to most other languages, and that's just one of the fun features I have in mind) after programming in a language like Python or Ruby it's like programming with handcuffs and concrete galoshes, complete with the sinking feelings the latter can cause and subsequent project death.
(We didn't used to need IDEs that did half to three-quarters of your typing for you (and I mean keyboard typing), and most languages still manage to live without it. That says something. (I'm also somewhat amazed at the Java community's ability both to have strong namespaces like org.slashdot.something.web, and still name classes with 40 or 50 characters, like WebPageToMirrorDeciderBooleanHelperInterface.))
But there are times that is called for, and NASA development epitomizes that. My personal feeling is that it is called for far, far, far less often than conventional wisdom says it is, but the call is certainly not zero.
All those features I'm bitching about missing above, including but not limited to things like closures, any sort of continuation support, metaclasses, "duck" typing like Python or Ruby, support for "eval"ing strings as if they were source code (which I've used precisely once in the last five years; I'm not saying this is something that should be used a lot), all kinds of things like that, are bad for an state checker, as it really complicates the space and makes it hard to tell what will happen when without actually running the code, which for various reasons is also not a practical solution to state checking.
There may be slightly better languages (ada?), but all in all Java is a good choice for NASA, for the very reasons that I hate it.
Yes, but once that quick hack is deployed, even to beta testers who then build on it (if the testers are large enough), Microsoft supports them in perpetuity.
Example: COM, DCOM, ActiveX, now the various.NET protocols, and remember "COM" covers several iterations itself and has several variants. Windows supports them all.
I am increasingly convinced of two things: One, this is why Windows is so bloated; once a feature gets in, it never gets out. I suspect this is the sole reason; if anything, Microsoft programmers are above average so most other explanations don't fly. Two, this is why open source-style development, realizing you can't have backwards compatibility forever and ever and depending on source code and its recompilation, will eventually win; reverse compatibility becomes too expensive. (This is not to say OSS will win, though OSS gets a big foot in the door when source is distributed, but that the style is inevitable. Shipping binary code to run directly on the processor is just too low-level to be shipping programs around in 2005. The JVM has this right, as do a number of open source projects, shipping the code to a virtual machine around.)
This also explains my assertion that Microsoft programmers are above average with the observed code quality coming out of Redmond; they get increasing amounts of the "above-averaged-ness" frittered away in backwards compatibility support. If Microsoft could truly just start 100% fresh, which they can't (destroy-the-business kind of can't), they'd probably produce a fearsome OS. We'll never know.
(The eye candy of Longhorn may take all the processor they've spec'ed out, but, most likely, the reason it needs so much memory is all the garbage hanging around, being backwards compatible. The OSS equivalent of Longhorn eyecandy will fit in much less memory, even if it needs the same or more processor, as a result, and the memory advantage is only going to grow on the OSS side, because by and large, it doesn't implement every half-assed idea from 1988 on in itself. It tries to constrain the half-assed ideas to the last year or so, and goodness knows there are plenty to go around.)
The best metaphor is probably a massive transplant surgery... complete with rejection issues.
(Too many mergers undervalue or simply ignore the difficulties of culture; merging the businesses is something any competent business person could do given a favorable cultural environment, creating said favorable cultural environment seems beyond most mergers.)
This message posted only because I found the thought/metaphor interesting myself, not because it really "ought" to be posted.:-)
Not the theories of Relativity, the Principle. There is a difference. Einstein's theories of Relativity solved an increasingly important conflict between physicists beliefs that the Principle of Relativity was true (an intuitive belief) and their inability to put solid math around the way the Universe works.
The first chapter of this work should help. Basically, the principle of relativity is that physics is the same for all inertial reference frames; Einstien put that together with the fact that light appears to travel the same speed for all observers. Galilean relativity doesn't work with that; it has other contradictions inherent in it (it can't answer the Zeno paradox, again, see the linked work), but it takes longer to notice. There are other relativity theories that haven't panned out, either.
Pardon the pedantry, it's intended to be educational.
Good point. That's actually closer to my real feelings, but I see a lot of people missing two things: "Catch-up" doesn't mean "surpass tommorow", and they are "catching up" to a moving target.
I still see a lot of that old-school communist "style over substance" at work; they moving that into the military domain is quite disturbing... (in an abstract sort of way; they can annoy their neighbors but at the moment they are certainly in no danger of taking over the world or anything.) but now I'm getting pretty OT.
Boy, China is really starting to remind me of the old Soviet Union; a Communist country panicking the free world by looking like it is about to take over a technological lead... but lacking the necessary culture to do that. Substituting for the necessary culture and true innovation and progress, they pour all of their resources into looking like they are progressing, doing well in the Olympics, some token tech program (space-based in the USSR case, possibly China's too), a city or two full of tech and photo ops, and some good people, but no real infrastructure or progress. The USSR did stuff like this too, only they didn't have something as easy to snarf as an open-source software base.
The USSR panicked a lot of people, and I am strongly suspecting China is going to do the same thing over the next couple of decades. Once the USSR fell, though, lo and behold they were borderline a third-world country overall.
If history has taught us anything, it is that only an open culture can truly make radical progress, but any culture can put on a good show to a credulous audience (which China will have in spades, the same audience that really wanted the USSR to win). When China starts truly democratizing and breeding people who are not just free in body, but free in spirit, then I will really start to "worry". (Not really; successful democratic countries don't really worry me.) In the meantime, appearence is easy, substance is hard. Try to avoid the mistake of being taken in by appearence.
(Anyone about to whack the "reply" button to set me straight, I would ask that any arguments you make that China truly is about to become some sort of uber-powerhouse not apply equally to the USSR in 1985, and the US perception of the USSR in 1985. I'm sure there are good reasons on both sides; my point here is not that it is impossible, but that arguments that sound like they are coming straight out of 1985 w.r.t. the USSR aren't going to convince me. We've seen what kind of innovation powerhouse a major Communist country is, and token economic freedoms here or there really don't mean much; the shockwave only occurs when you are really, truly free, like the computer industry of twenty years ago. (On that note, I'd also point out I'm not trying to say everything in the US is hunky-dory, since some weak thinkers always see everything in terms of competition, and that if someone says X is bad, they simply must mean that the thing opposing X is good. I'm only talking about China's putative progress.))
(Even if this isn't from the government of China, I think it still says something about the culture.)
Static discharge is more likely than not the cause of that particular failure.
I can confirm that. I had to give up Palm Pilots because I'd kill them in about eight months with simple static discharges while in my pocket, some of which I could feel. Drilling may have created static; in the right environments (very dry), almost any motion can generate static, even some rather surprising ones.
(It got very dry in the dorms. I'd probably be OK now that I'm out of that environment. On the other hand, even in my subsequent apartments I had to go wireless with my laptop because I kept blasting network hubs with static discharge while hooking them up to my laptop. Fortunately I haven't killed any network equipment since then.)
your remarks on what is "good" for females are condescending at best
You misunderstand completely. His comments were on what is good as a race or culture.
If there is a disconnect between that and the ideals of feminism, than that is a problem worth legitimately thinking about and discussing.
It is not at all proved that just because feminism is the "right thing" at the individual scale that it is the "right thing" at larger scales, and we may have problems if that turns out to be the case, problems which can not be wished away or simply dismissed as heresy. The Universe doesn't give a fuck if you find it offensive, it will simply wipe you out.
While the grandparent to me merely raises interesting ideas meriting further study and I do not consider it by any means proved or unarguable, you need to counter it with better theories and better discussions, not mere accusations of "condescension".
That said, your last paragraph is entirely off-base as a result of your misunderstanding. On a large scale, which is what he is discussion, one need not enumerate all of the various options; ultimately it just boils down to how many kids and from whom? Details at that level are extraneous.
So, by your standards, if you're not prepared to write a hundred page dissertation on a topic, you should just shut up?
Your standards are impossibly high. How, exactly, is Dvorak supposed to prove to this level that Adobe has a paranoid culture? With another series of assertions that you will label "unjustified", requiring another series of assertions you will label "unjustified", and so on, ad infinitum?
Best of all, if somebody actually wrote something to your standards, you'd bitch about how wordy it is, most likely. (And you'd be right in that case.)
What, did your parents teach you to read with peer-reviewed academic journals, or are you still unsatisfied that the little train did, indeed, make it over the hill, since it was just an unjustified assertion from one source? (By the way, to save you some time, that glib accusation is not justified. I trust the readers of this comment don't need me to continue to spell out what I really mean, you see, and let them judge for themselves whether I might have a point.)
Because I get the idea from your message that you think the article speculates that Microsoft is talking about buying Flash. If so, you rather completely missed the point, in multiple ways, and your accusation of failing to justify non-existant assertions reflects poorly on you, not Dvorak.
Your message is so muddled that I can't make out what is being marked Insightful by the mods (which itself says it probably isn't terribly insightful) seeing as how there's no word about Microsoft planning purchasing Macromedia, unless it is the Slashthink Dvorak bashing getting the mod. In that case, I'd say sure, Dvorak has a crappy track record when it comes to predicting the future, but his explanation of this move makes as much sense as anything else I've seen; I've yet to see a coherent reason for this purchase, and I've seen several intelligent and informed people express confusion.
(Another possibility is that you somehow think that because you think that Microsoft can't possibly be interested in Macromedia, that Adobe can't possibly think that either, and that's not Insightful, that's just plain idiotic. Regardless, I can't find the "Insightful".)
Not quite your scenario, but the likeliest explanation for that document is basically what you outline, and the result is exactly what you anticipated. A lot of people have gotten very excited about it, but the simplest explanation that fits the facts is that somebody just faked the whole thing for kicks.
In the old days they didn't "target the weapons array", they freakin' took care of business.
And the funniest thing to me, these pussies are so Politically Correct that they still give the order to "target the (small) weapons array", when it is demonstrably impossible for them to even hit a ship with more than about half their shots.
They're just lucky everybody else's engineering is as crappy as theirs and if you so much as tap the one and only "weapons array" on the hull, not only will it be out of commision for hours, but it'll probably take out a couple of bridge members with PTTF; might even score the other ship's captain if you're lucky...
cloudmaster's hypothesis is correct; Windows highly aggressively swaps out non-running code, then uses the space for other things that are, in practice, significantly less useful.
In theory, it's a good idea. (Seriously, I recall discussing the topic in OS class and theoretically, it really is a good idea.) In practice, you trade slightly better performance in general for a huge swap-in at exactly one of the times the user is expecting snappy performance, switching apps. Since switching an app to perform a two-second task is hardly uncommon, it can be annoying when the act of switching slows you down by as much as a factor of magnitude.
It's a good server policy; I don't know why Microsoft hasn't switched it for desktop systems yet with a patch or something.
Yes, anat0010, that one document changes everything. One document, written by one guy somewhere, with no sanction and the general historical consensus it wasn't worth keeping, and suddenly we have a better understanding of "the 2nd century views of Christ".
By the way, have you read that Unabomber manifesto? Turns out the average American is anti-technology and bombs people through the mail system, which is apparently the primary use of the mail system in 20th century America. And the recent find of "Dianetics" provides a fascinating view into the religious beliefs of the average American of the 20th century.
No, wait a minute, that's not right.
(One of the persistent fallacies is that the humans of the past are somehow different than today, particularly in their uniformity. They aren't, and the historically-rejected writings of one guy are about as representative as the same happening today, which is to say, not necessarily useless, but you might only learn about the dominant paranoid schizophrenic fantasies of the day (like black helicopters and mind-control beams today), not the common man. You are getting one very small fragment of an image of the time, don't make the mistake of focusing on one small piece and projecting it out on the entire time period. You are the blind man examining the elephant, not a well-informed almost-omniscient observer.)
There is more than enough data to study the 2nd century church, one need not over-intepret one piece of evidence to push an agenda.
the natural light emitted from the interior of the human body isn't what you'd call dazzling
Actually, my point was that as a triggering mechanism, I can imagine building a muscle of some kind that triggers off of light and running it off of some sort of fiber-optic system, although it would need to draw power from another source. Our current, real bodies trigger with electricity, but the actual power comes from chemical energy; the electricity is just a trigger. Light could be a decent trigger (though probably not the best idea, on a battlefield for instance that could be Really Bad (TM), and even in sunlight the light penetrates a ways into you), but heat? How the hell are you going to trigger on heat?
You have barely started the process of beginning
on
Promoting Webcomics?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If I'm reading your site right, you have all of twenty-one comics online.
You've barely begun. You've barely begun to refine your style, you've barely begun to find your voice... and you're in direct competition with the comics I just listed, along with a lot of others.
If you're honestly offended that the world isn't beating a path to your door after 21 comics, either get out, or stop caring about your audience numbers, right now. It doesn't work that way. Comics are an opportunity to fame and some modest fortune, but it is hardly a guarantee.
Everybody starts out slow. Frankly and honestly, having seen your site, I'm in no hurry to go back. Your comics aren't that good yet, and your drawing style needs some refinement; right now you're giving me that "ouch, that looks like it hurts" feeling on a lot of your humans as their arms bend in wierd ways and their proportions are off; everything is off model. But... like I said, everybody starts out slow. Sluggy freelance is horribly off-model by the modern standards and the Penny Arcade comic almost seems to be two completely different people than the modern main characters, with only their clothing to indicate continuity. This should be both an encouragement and a challenge.
If the fact that you're going to need to put years into this before seeing any kind of payoff bothers you, you need to quit now and try something else. If this doesn't bother you, ideally because it is something you want to do anyhow, then keep going. If you simply reject this criticism, or it really ruins your day, comic drawing probably isn't for you, either.
One last thing: This needn't be your last comic ever; this can be a "practice" series and nobody need ever know. If you get a better idea, drop this one and start a new one. In particular, I'm not sure you've got the humor chops to pull off single-shot jokes; those are probably the hardest comics to create, and even the masters like Larson did an awful lot of repeating themselves and got in a rut pretty quickly. Consider a more, although perhaps not entirely, character-based comic, with one-shot jokes as you come up with them.
Give yourself 5 years, which seems to be how long it really takes to get going with comics, with continued improvement up to around the 10 year mark where you level off. (This closely parallels the development of any skill; programming works almost identically to this.) Re-assess your progress honestly. I for one would most likely be forced to rationally concede at about year two that I'm not going to make it; only you can decide where you stand.
(Note to people offended about the percieved negativity in this message: Committing to a comic is a serious undertaking... despite what they may have told you in school, which strives to be a Happy Fun Place, not everybody can do everything, and encouraging somebody to do something they shouldn't, which results in a major waste of time (the only non-replenishable resource we have) is evil, not nice. I don't give a flying fuck about "nice", I care about good, and being good here requires some feedback to the poster that isn't all ooshy-gooshy and nice. If he can power through this, then maybe he has what it takes, and he can gain strength from this. If this is enough to de-rail him, that is a strong net good. Don't mindlessly encourage, you think you're being nice but you're really being evil.)
I think you're partially misidentifying the problem, or at least leaving off one gigantic source of confusion. The AMD64 instruction set, from what I've heard, runs about 30% faster than the same code compiled in 32-bit mode, and the latter probably has better optimizations, too. (It takes years for compilers to fully optimize for an architecture; I believe 5 years was an old rule of thumb but I think the lead time has been building since multi-pipelining procs came out.)
But that's not because the processor is 64-bit, it's despite it. The real cause is that the AMD64 has more registers available, so anything not written in assembler directly can benefit, a lot.
I think this leads to a lot of confusion. The fact is, given an operation that fits in X bits, the fastest possible processor for that operation will be one that runs with X bits natively; going higher will incur penalties of size, power, and speed (caused by the greater size and other issues that come up), going lower will incur massive penalties as the operations rapidly become much more complex. (A 64-bit proc can't do anything a 32-bit proc can't in the math department, but it'll run 64-bit math a lot faster; look at the algorithm just to multiply two 64-bin nums on a 32-bit machine.)
The reason it seems otherwise to anybody is that with x86, we've never had "the fastest possible processor". See: Pareto optimality (although that does not draw the larger conclusions that logic directly leads to in a number of fields).
And that's why well-funded public education isn't an add-on; it must be a vitally important part of any country that wishes to call itself a "Land Of Opportunity."
The "real" future of home-schooling is to create a situation where the public school system can no longer ignore them, and becomes absolutely forced to re-think its approach, and adopt functional aspects from the home-schooling techniques. It's going to be a hard transition to treating children as human, instead of robots, but it is inevitable.
(One interesting question is whether the US will lead or follow in this domain, and I consider the answer to this question a large part of whether the US will maintain its dominance over the next 50 years. If some other country beats us to it, especially a big Asian one, we're toast. If we beat them to it, we can pull out of our education slide.)
My estimate on this is ten years, but I tend to overestimate the rationality of the market. But it is virtually inevitable; short of a law banning home schooling which is probably already impossible, I can't see any reason why the trends would reverse, and even if home schooling performance is diluted by general adoption (assuming the current adopters are any kind of elite, which is plausible but still highly questionable), it won't be hard to stay ahead of the public schools.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the original point was whether you can protect yourself by copyrighting (or trademarking, or something) your own data.
"The" company (boy, I wish it was a "the" company...) is also not copyrighting your data. Nobody can. What they can and do do is copyright the collection of data.
For further information, look up "compilation copyright", as this is a somewhat rich topic, and beyond the scope of a Slashdot posting.
I've thought about this; it's a nifty idea but no current protection works.
:-) )
You can't copyright facts about yourself, which is what biometrics is based on, and for that matter most of what your privacy-sensitive information is.
You can't copyright the collection, because other people will independently collect it, and they can (and do!) claim their own copyright on the new collection.
Trademarks don't work, because they are mostly concerned with preventing other people from fraudulently passing themselves off as your business concern. Even if you could trademark your fingerprint, which is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't stop people from storing and using it for almost anything they want.
Patents are obviously not a good fit.
Trade secret law is actually the closest IP protection of interest (the forgotten IP protection class here on slashdot), but your privacy-sensitive information suffers from being neither directly related to trade in the sense the name of the law implies (i.e., yes I know your ID at a business is related to trade but that's not what the law means, summaries always drop data), nor is it a secret anymore.
The bad news is, you need new law. The good news is, no aspect of the requisite law is new; you can get there with pieces of the trade secret law, added to copyright, and topped off with some of the protections in trademark. But there is no feasible way to do that under current law, not even with a highly experimental suit.
It's good thinking, though.
(This is a shortened version of the analysis at that first link. If you have some objection, you might want to try that link before replying; it may make your objection go away, it may make it worse, but it's worth checking
In other words, as a response to external stimuli, they limit themselves. Humans are the only species to come up with reasons not to have kids, even when the environment supports it, they have the money, they could have the time, etc. No animal species fails to have kids when the opportunity arises, except humans.
Not having kids when the opportunity isn't there is not the same thing at all.
once everyone has a decent standard of living we either need to go to space or prepare for another population boom like there is in China / S. America.
Evidence?
This concern is out of date. Rich people have fewer kids; the evidence at this point is effectively incontrovertible, though one can yet debate the reasons.
I'm not ready to panic about underpopulation yet, but if you insist on panicking, that's the way to go at the moment. Malthus was wrong; humans are the only known species to figure out reasons not to have kids.
Generally, I'm pretty anti-Java. I hate working in it myself and I've partially structured my career so as to avoid it.
Why do I hate it? It is a language that builds in bureaucracy, making you say everything three or four times, static this, static that, hard-coded the other, if there's a fun or useful feature it's not there ("generics" are about 5 years too late and from my reading still amazingly weak compared to most other languages, and that's just one of the fun features I have in mind) after programming in a language like Python or Ruby it's like programming with handcuffs and concrete galoshes, complete with the sinking feelings the latter can cause and subsequent project death.
(We didn't used to need IDEs that did half to three-quarters of your typing for you (and I mean keyboard typing), and most languages still manage to live without it. That says something. (I'm also somewhat amazed at the Java community's ability both to have strong namespaces like org.slashdot.something.web, and still name classes with 40 or 50 characters, like WebPageToMirrorDeciderBooleanHelperInterface.))
But there are times that is called for, and NASA development epitomizes that. My personal feeling is that it is called for far, far, far less often than conventional wisdom says it is, but the call is certainly not zero.
All those features I'm bitching about missing above, including but not limited to things like closures, any sort of continuation support, metaclasses, "duck" typing like Python or Ruby, support for "eval"ing strings as if they were source code (which I've used precisely once in the last five years; I'm not saying this is something that should be used a lot), all kinds of things like that, are bad for an state checker, as it really complicates the space and makes it hard to tell what will happen when without actually running the code, which for various reasons is also not a practical solution to state checking.
There may be slightly better languages (ada?), but all in all Java is a good choice for NASA, for the very reasons that I hate it.
Can you reconcile your post with the fact that the license says "requested", not "required"?
Yes, but once that quick hack is deployed, even to beta testers who then build on it (if the testers are large enough), Microsoft supports them in perpetuity.
.NET protocols, and remember "COM" covers several iterations itself and has several variants. Windows supports them all.
Example: COM, DCOM, ActiveX, now the various
I am increasingly convinced of two things: One, this is why Windows is so bloated; once a feature gets in, it never gets out. I suspect this is the sole reason; if anything, Microsoft programmers are above average so most other explanations don't fly. Two, this is why open source-style development, realizing you can't have backwards compatibility forever and ever and depending on source code and its recompilation, will eventually win; reverse compatibility becomes too expensive. (This is not to say OSS will win, though OSS gets a big foot in the door when source is distributed, but that the style is inevitable. Shipping binary code to run directly on the processor is just too low-level to be shipping programs around in 2005. The JVM has this right, as do a number of open source projects, shipping the code to a virtual machine around.)
This also explains my assertion that Microsoft programmers are above average with the observed code quality coming out of Redmond; they get increasing amounts of the "above-averaged-ness" frittered away in backwards compatibility support. If Microsoft could truly just start 100% fresh, which they can't (destroy-the-business kind of can't), they'd probably produce a fearsome OS. We'll never know.
(The eye candy of Longhorn may take all the processor they've spec'ed out, but, most likely, the reason it needs so much memory is all the garbage hanging around, being backwards compatible. The OSS equivalent of Longhorn eyecandy will fit in much less memory, even if it needs the same or more processor, as a result, and the memory advantage is only going to grow on the OSS side, because by and large, it doesn't implement every half-assed idea from 1988 on in itself. It tries to constrain the half-assed ideas to the last year or so, and goodness knows there are plenty to go around.)
The best metaphor is probably a massive transplant surgery... complete with rejection issues.
:-)
(Too many mergers undervalue or simply ignore the difficulties of culture; merging the businesses is something any competent business person could do given a favorable cultural environment, creating said favorable cultural environment seems beyond most mergers.)
This message posted only because I found the thought/metaphor interesting myself, not because it really "ought" to be posted.
Not the theories of Relativity, the Principle. There is a difference. Einstein's theories of Relativity solved an increasingly important conflict between physicists beliefs that the Principle of Relativity was true (an intuitive belief) and their inability to put solid math around the way the Universe works.
The first chapter of this work should help. Basically, the principle of relativity is that physics is the same for all inertial reference frames; Einstien put that together with the fact that light appears to travel the same speed for all observers. Galilean relativity doesn't work with that; it has other contradictions inherent in it (it can't answer the Zeno paradox, again, see the linked work), but it takes longer to notice. There are other relativity theories that haven't panned out, either.
Pardon the pedantry, it's intended to be educational.
Good point. That's actually closer to my real feelings, but I see a lot of people missing two things: "Catch-up" doesn't mean "surpass tommorow", and they are "catching up" to a moving target.
I still see a lot of that old-school communist "style over substance" at work; they moving that into the military domain is quite disturbing... (in an abstract sort of way; they can annoy their neighbors but at the moment they are certainly in no danger of taking over the world or anything.) but now I'm getting pretty OT.
Boy, China is really starting to remind me of the old Soviet Union; a Communist country panicking the free world by looking like it is about to take over a technological lead... but lacking the necessary culture to do that. Substituting for the necessary culture and true innovation and progress, they pour all of their resources into looking like they are progressing, doing well in the Olympics, some token tech program (space-based in the USSR case, possibly China's too), a city or two full of tech and photo ops, and some good people, but no real infrastructure or progress. The USSR did stuff like this too, only they didn't have something as easy to snarf as an open-source software base.
The USSR panicked a lot of people, and I am strongly suspecting China is going to do the same thing over the next couple of decades. Once the USSR fell, though, lo and behold they were borderline a third-world country overall.
If history has taught us anything, it is that only an open culture can truly make radical progress, but any culture can put on a good show to a credulous audience (which China will have in spades, the same audience that really wanted the USSR to win). When China starts truly democratizing and breeding people who are not just free in body, but free in spirit, then I will really start to "worry". (Not really; successful democratic countries don't really worry me.) In the meantime, appearence is easy, substance is hard. Try to avoid the mistake of being taken in by appearence.
(Anyone about to whack the "reply" button to set me straight, I would ask that any arguments you make that China truly is about to become some sort of uber-powerhouse not apply equally to the USSR in 1985, and the US perception of the USSR in 1985. I'm sure there are good reasons on both sides; my point here is not that it is impossible, but that arguments that sound like they are coming straight out of 1985 w.r.t. the USSR aren't going to convince me. We've seen what kind of innovation powerhouse a major Communist country is, and token economic freedoms here or there really don't mean much; the shockwave only occurs when you are really, truly free, like the computer industry of twenty years ago. (On that note, I'd also point out I'm not trying to say everything in the US is hunky-dory, since some weak thinkers always see everything in terms of competition, and that if someone says X is bad, they simply must mean that the thing opposing X is good. I'm only talking about China's putative progress.))
(Even if this isn't from the government of China, I think it still says something about the culture.)
Static discharge is more likely than not the cause of that particular failure.
I can confirm that. I had to give up Palm Pilots because I'd kill them in about eight months with simple static discharges while in my pocket, some of which I could feel. Drilling may have created static; in the right environments (very dry), almost any motion can generate static, even some rather surprising ones.
(It got very dry in the dorms. I'd probably be OK now that I'm out of that environment. On the other hand, even in my subsequent apartments I had to go wireless with my laptop because I kept blasting network hubs with static discharge while hooking them up to my laptop. Fortunately I haven't killed any network equipment since then.)
your remarks on what is "good" for females are condescending at best
You misunderstand completely. His comments were on what is good as a race or culture.
If there is a disconnect between that and the ideals of feminism, than that is a problem worth legitimately thinking about and discussing.
It is not at all proved that just because feminism is the "right thing" at the individual scale that it is the "right thing" at larger scales, and we may have problems if that turns out to be the case, problems which can not be wished away or simply dismissed as heresy. The Universe doesn't give a fuck if you find it offensive, it will simply wipe you out.
While the grandparent to me merely raises interesting ideas meriting further study and I do not consider it by any means proved or unarguable, you need to counter it with better theories and better discussions, not mere accusations of "condescension".
That said, your last paragraph is entirely off-base as a result of your misunderstanding. On a large scale, which is what he is discussion, one need not enumerate all of the various options; ultimately it just boils down to how many kids and from whom? Details at that level are extraneous.
So, by your standards, if you're not prepared to write a hundred page dissertation on a topic, you should just shut up?
Your standards are impossibly high. How, exactly, is Dvorak supposed to prove to this level that Adobe has a paranoid culture? With another series of assertions that you will label "unjustified", requiring another series of assertions you will label "unjustified", and so on, ad infinitum?
Best of all, if somebody actually wrote something to your standards, you'd bitch about how wordy it is, most likely. (And you'd be right in that case.)
What, did your parents teach you to read with peer-reviewed academic journals, or are you still unsatisfied that the little train did, indeed, make it over the hill, since it was just an unjustified assertion from one source? (By the way, to save you some time, that glib accusation is not justified. I trust the readers of this comment don't need me to continue to spell out what I really mean, you see, and let them judge for themselves whether I might have a point.)
What speculation exactly are you referring to?
Because I get the idea from your message that you think the article speculates that Microsoft is talking about buying Flash. If so, you rather completely missed the point, in multiple ways, and your accusation of failing to justify non-existant assertions reflects poorly on you, not Dvorak.
Your message is so muddled that I can't make out what is being marked Insightful by the mods (which itself says it probably isn't terribly insightful) seeing as how there's no word about Microsoft planning purchasing Macromedia, unless it is the Slashthink Dvorak bashing getting the mod. In that case, I'd say sure, Dvorak has a crappy track record when it comes to predicting the future, but his explanation of this move makes as much sense as anything else I've seen; I've yet to see a coherent reason for this purchase, and I've seen several intelligent and informed people express confusion.
(Another possibility is that you somehow think that because you think that Microsoft can't possibly be interested in Macromedia, that Adobe can't possibly think that either, and that's not Insightful, that's just plain idiotic. Regardless, I can't find the "Insightful".)
Like this?
Not quite your scenario, but the likeliest explanation for that document is basically what you outline, and the result is exactly what you anticipated. A lot of people have gotten very excited about it, but the simplest explanation that fits the facts is that somebody just faked the whole thing for kicks.
In the old days they didn't "target the weapons array", they freakin' took care of business.
And the funniest thing to me, these pussies are so Politically Correct that they still give the order to "target the (small) weapons array", when it is demonstrably impossible for them to even hit a ship with more than about half their shots.
They're just lucky everybody else's engineering is as crappy as theirs and if you so much as tap the one and only "weapons array" on the hull, not only will it be out of commision for hours, but it'll probably take out a couple of bridge members with PTTF; might even score the other ship's captain if you're lucky...
cloudmaster's hypothesis is correct; Windows highly aggressively swaps out non-running code, then uses the space for other things that are, in practice, significantly less useful.
In theory, it's a good idea. (Seriously, I recall discussing the topic in OS class and theoretically, it really is a good idea.) In practice, you trade slightly better performance in general for a huge swap-in at exactly one of the times the user is expecting snappy performance, switching apps. Since switching an app to perform a two-second task is hardly uncommon, it can be annoying when the act of switching slows you down by as much as a factor of magnitude.
It's a good server policy; I don't know why Microsoft hasn't switched it for desktop systems yet with a patch or something.
Yes, anat0010, that one document changes everything. One document, written by one guy somewhere, with no sanction and the general historical consensus it wasn't worth keeping, and suddenly we have a better understanding of "the 2nd century views of Christ".
By the way, have you read that Unabomber manifesto? Turns out the average American is anti-technology and bombs people through the mail system, which is apparently the primary use of the mail system in 20th century America. And the recent find of "Dianetics" provides a fascinating view into the religious beliefs of the average American of the 20th century.
No, wait a minute, that's not right.
(One of the persistent fallacies is that the humans of the past are somehow different than today, particularly in their uniformity. They aren't, and the historically-rejected writings of one guy are about as representative as the same happening today, which is to say, not necessarily useless, but you might only learn about the dominant paranoid schizophrenic fantasies of the day (like black helicopters and mind-control beams today), not the common man. You are getting one very small fragment of an image of the time, don't make the mistake of focusing on one small piece and projecting it out on the entire time period. You are the blind man examining the elephant, not a well-informed almost-omniscient observer.)
There is more than enough data to study the 2nd century church, one need not over-intepret one piece of evidence to push an agenda.
You might be able to split the difference by using Jython.
Not personally convinced that Java is where it's at where UI research is concerned, but I'll confess freely to not having RTFA.
the natural light emitted from the interior of the human body isn't what you'd call dazzling
Actually, my point was that as a triggering mechanism, I can imagine building a muscle of some kind that triggers off of light and running it off of some sort of fiber-optic system, although it would need to draw power from another source. Our current, real bodies trigger with electricity, but the actual power comes from chemical energy; the electricity is just a trigger. Light could be a decent trigger (though probably not the best idea, on a battlefield for instance that could be Really Bad (TM), and even in sunlight the light penetrates a ways into you), but heat? How the hell are you going to trigger on heat?
If I'm reading your site right, you have all of twenty-one comics online.
Compare the twenty-first Sluggy Freelance with the most recent one (note the current Saturday is another artist), or the the twenty-first Penny Arcade with the latest one.
You've barely begun. You've barely begun to refine your style, you've barely begun to find your voice... and you're in direct competition with the comics I just listed, along with a lot of others.
If you're honestly offended that the world isn't beating a path to your door after 21 comics, either get out, or stop caring about your audience numbers, right now. It doesn't work that way. Comics are an opportunity to fame and some modest fortune, but it is hardly a guarantee.
Everybody starts out slow. Frankly and honestly, having seen your site, I'm in no hurry to go back. Your comics aren't that good yet, and your drawing style needs some refinement; right now you're giving me that "ouch, that looks like it hurts" feeling on a lot of your humans as their arms bend in wierd ways and their proportions are off; everything is off model. But... like I said, everybody starts out slow. Sluggy freelance is horribly off-model by the modern standards and the Penny Arcade comic almost seems to be two completely different people than the modern main characters, with only their clothing to indicate continuity. This should be both an encouragement and a challenge.
If the fact that you're going to need to put years into this before seeing any kind of payoff bothers you, you need to quit now and try something else. If this doesn't bother you, ideally because it is something you want to do anyhow, then keep going. If you simply reject this criticism, or it really ruins your day, comic drawing probably isn't for you, either.
One last thing: This needn't be your last comic ever; this can be a "practice" series and nobody need ever know. If you get a better idea, drop this one and start a new one. In particular, I'm not sure you've got the humor chops to pull off single-shot jokes; those are probably the hardest comics to create, and even the masters like Larson did an awful lot of repeating themselves and got in a rut pretty quickly. Consider a more, although perhaps not entirely, character-based comic, with one-shot jokes as you come up with them.
Give yourself 5 years, which seems to be how long it really takes to get going with comics, with continued improvement up to around the 10 year mark where you level off. (This closely parallels the development of any skill; programming works almost identically to this.) Re-assess your progress honestly. I for one would most likely be forced to rationally concede at about year two that I'm not going to make it; only you can decide where you stand.
(Note to people offended about the percieved negativity in this message: Committing to a comic is a serious undertaking... despite what they may have told you in school, which strives to be a Happy Fun Place, not everybody can do everything, and encouraging somebody to do something they shouldn't, which results in a major waste of time (the only non-replenishable resource we have) is evil, not nice. I don't give a flying fuck about "nice", I care about good, and being good here requires some feedback to the poster that isn't all ooshy-gooshy and nice. If he can power through this, then maybe he has what it takes, and he can gain strength from this. If this is enough to de-rail him, that is a strong net good. Don't mindlessly encourage, you think you're being nice but you're really being evil.)
You want to use heat energy to trigger shape changes for a muscle?
:-)
Not chemical?
Not electrical?
Not light?
Not mechanical?
Did you go looking for the worst possible trigger?
I think you're partially misidentifying the problem, or at least leaving off one gigantic source of confusion. The AMD64 instruction set, from what I've heard, runs about 30% faster than the same code compiled in 32-bit mode, and the latter probably has better optimizations, too. (It takes years for compilers to fully optimize for an architecture; I believe 5 years was an old rule of thumb but I think the lead time has been building since multi-pipelining procs came out.)
But that's not because the processor is 64-bit, it's despite it. The real cause is that the AMD64 has more registers available, so anything not written in assembler directly can benefit, a lot.
I think this leads to a lot of confusion. The fact is, given an operation that fits in X bits, the fastest possible processor for that operation will be one that runs with X bits natively; going higher will incur penalties of size, power, and speed (caused by the greater size and other issues that come up), going lower will incur massive penalties as the operations rapidly become much more complex. (A 64-bit proc can't do anything a 32-bit proc can't in the math department, but it'll run 64-bit math a lot faster; look at the algorithm just to multiply two 64-bin nums on a 32-bit machine.)
The reason it seems otherwise to anybody is that with x86, we've never had "the fastest possible processor". See: Pareto optimality (although that does not draw the larger conclusions that logic directly leads to in a number of fields).
And that's why well-funded public education isn't an add-on; it must be a vitally important part of any country that wishes to call itself a "Land Of Opportunity."
The "real" future of home-schooling is to create a situation where the public school system can no longer ignore them, and becomes absolutely forced to re-think its approach, and adopt functional aspects from the home-schooling techniques. It's going to be a hard transition to treating children as human, instead of robots, but it is inevitable.
(One interesting question is whether the US will lead or follow in this domain, and I consider the answer to this question a large part of whether the US will maintain its dominance over the next 50 years. If some other country beats us to it, especially a big Asian one, we're toast. If we beat them to it, we can pull out of our education slide.)
My estimate on this is ten years, but I tend to overestimate the rationality of the market. But it is virtually inevitable; short of a law banning home schooling which is probably already impossible, I can't see any reason why the trends would reverse, and even if home schooling performance is diluted by general adoption (assuming the current adopters are any kind of elite, which is plausible but still highly questionable), it won't be hard to stay ahead of the public schools.