if you get any settlement at all (and what house doesnt settle?), you are going to have horrible cracks throughout.
100% pure concrete definately won't work. It will be interesting to see if any solutions to the concrete problem develop over the next 10 or 20 years. Nanotechnology may be able to offer something.
Truthfully, that's where I see this going. This machine delivers tons of materials (which nanotechnology isn't going to do anytime soon; even a nano-technology-based machine to deliver tons of material is going to be macroscopic if it's going to work in a day or less!), nano-machines come in later to maintain and repair the wall as it cracks.
(Someday, w/ super-hyper-ultra nanotechnology, the entire wall may be made of self-repairing nanomachines, but we may not get that far. The previous paragraph is well within sight, even if it is not currently feasible, without Drexlerian nanotech levels.)
No matter what resolution you rise to, you will always be short of analog.
You seem to be laboring under the misimpression that analog has "infinite" resolution, and/or that it is always better then digital.
That is false. Analog has a resolution, it just tends to be fuzzier, rather then in rigid squares. With the right system we could also display digital signals "fuzzily", nobody cares enough to do it.
DVDs (digital) beat VCRs, hands down, in the resolution department. You may notice the artefacts more, but you'll still be getting much more detail then the VCR gives you, and like I said, if we wanted to fuzz the artefacts out we could.
It is still stupid that marketers use "digital" synonmously with "quality", but the opposite is not true either. "Analog" just has a different characteristic failure mode, one that happens to look better to us, but is still failure.
(Note that if analog did have infinite resolution, then the old joke about using a copying machine to look at a benzene atom by successively enlarging the image wouldn't be a joke.)
This thing isn't going to do in-wall plumbing and electricity either.
Patience. This is an alpha version, if that. Rest assured that version 3.0 will do those things. (Seriously, no sarcasm.)
Given a couple of iterations this could revolutionize home manufacturing. I'd love a highly configurable concrete house, with amenities added in later. One of my least favorite aspects of modern houses is the lack of acoustical isolation between the rooms. Concrete will have its own issues but I suspect they will be solvable long-term.
Given that one is clearly not the same as the other, the real question is, "Why is making money and making an effective OS the same?"
(Answer: They aren't; globally they look similar but they cause much different local decisions. You won't catch Linux being anti-competitive, whereas Microsoft has been proven anti-competitive in court several times. There's one difference for you, and yes, this directly plays out in code quality. If you'd like more details on why this is true, I'd recommend this rather good article on the subject.)
You make a lot of assertions, but you back them up with nothing but your word. I back mine up with actual quotes from actual copyright law, as done in the links, plus discussion based on that law. I'm pretty comfortable basing my understanding on that law, and the various readings of that law. Wacky interpretations made by one person may even be semantically correct in some uselessly abstract sense, but if the entire legal system from top to bottom disagrees with that person, it still does not describe how the system works. And I'm afraid that's where you are.
I leave it for the reader to decide which of us is thus more likely to be right.
"Fair use" is a technical term, and "timeshifting" is not now and never has been "fair use".
The courts did rule in Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984) that use of VCRs is primarily for time-shifting, and that such use does not harm the value of the work to the copyright holder, thus the courts refused to ban VCRs. However, there has never been any ruling, implied or otherwise, that copyright holders are obligated to assist us in our fair use, or prohibited from engaging in other technological measures to prevent us from engaging in activities that might be defended as "fair use".
Slashdot in general has a very, very, very unbelievably wrong idea of what "fair use" is, to the point that it has virtually no connection with what the legal concept actually is. Fair use is a very narrow allowance to use small portions of copyright works subject to severe limitations, no more. There is no such thing as a "fair use" right in law. (Which isn't to say there shouldn't be one; I do in fact argue that something like it should be protected. But that doesn't make it magically appear in the real law we have now.) As a result, the flag can not infringe on our non-existant "fair use right".
The reason why I continue to post this point, despite continued evidence that Slashdot as a whole refuses to understand this, is that the misunderstanding is dangerous. Thinking you are protected legally means you won't do anything to protect a "right" you think is safe. It's not. Fair use doesn't do shit for you unless you fit into the narrow provisions as described in the link above, and Slashdot as a whole needs to stop thinking otherwise or we will continue to have our "fair use rights" "stripped" from us, with no coherent protest.
I can think of many interesting legal/ethical conundrums regarding the right to kill though:
This type of ethical conundrum is typically a waste of time because no real-world situation can be cleaned up to a one-sentence question, and most of them are so unlikely to happen as to not be worth basing a philosophy on. For instance,
Imagine if there are 100 people about to be killed and the only way to save the other 99 is to shoot one of the 100.
In the entire history of humanity, has there ever been an instance where this actually happened and the choices were that clear cut, shoot or don't shoot? (Even if there have been one or two, that's still nothing.)
In this case, the reason the "answers" are hard is that the questions are unreasonably hard. In real life, the question of defending one's home with lethal force is not an easy one, but it is at least constrained by the realities of the situation. Nobody is going to break into your home and threaten to kill ten strangers unless you allow them to kill your spouse. And even if they did, the odds of them being truthful aren't worth worrying about anyhow.
Oh goodness, no. Not that these were first either, but SULFNBK.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE both predate this comfortably. Both are emails screaming at people to delete certain harmless files from their computer because they are a virus, and will cause loss of functionality if they are actually deleted, albeit a minor loss.
Granted, this is a much bigger loss ("a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing"), but it's the same basic thing.
Point. I failed to specify a point of view, which is the ultimate failing in relativity. My definition of "shrinking horizen" in this case means "the set of things we can perceive is steadily shrinking" (and nothing ever comes back into view), rather then "the amount of space we can see is shrinking". The latter didn't cross my mind because the idea of counting empty space as "seeable" isn't something that leaps to mind.;-)
The fact is, we're seeing 186,000 miles further every second, because light takes time to get places.
Ahhh, if only cosmology were that simple. In fact, due to the way space itself is expanding, and especially in light of the recent discoveries that the expansion continues to accelerate, our horizen is shrinking. Eventually we'll only be able to see our gravitationally bound local group... and if the "big rip" theories hold true (which I am skeptical about on other grounds but we'll see), eventually even those disappear.
You statement is only true in a static universe with a discrete beginning that lept into existence all at once (no 'expansion', just instant matter everywhere that eventually forms into galaxies); three wrong assumptions for the price of one.
Regardless of what a fossil is made of, it must be sturdy to survive millions of years, or the process of being exposed to the surface. Saying "we don't know what a fossil on Mars might be made out of" doesn't mean that it might be made out of Jelly Bellies; I may not be able to speak to the exact composition but there are certain properties that must hold true, or you'd never have seen it in the first place.
I mention this mostly because it's a common fallacy, that some amount of non-knowlege implies total non-knowlege. As soon as you say it, it sounds stupid and is obviously false, but it sneaks up on a lot of people, and is the foundation of entire pervasive modern philosophies. (It is, for instance, an essential philosophical foundation of Strong Post-Modernism.) I do not and can not know everything about the putative fossil on Mars but I can determine some things and make certain observations with great confidence, including observations that lead to the conclusion that it isn't a fossil.;-)
As is usually the case, the media are distorting the contents of the original report. The Informa Media Group's actual prediction is that there will be 30 million PS3s in Europe by 2010, plus or minus 2.3. (No, not "2.3 million", not "2.3 thousand", "2.3".)
Leave it up to the BBC to leave out the italicized phrase in their zeal to "sex up" the story. I'm sure the Informa Media Group is very disappointed. Now people are going to get false impressions about how sure the Informa Media Group is about their predictions.
Oh, you can do better then that. Consider this site. How deep is it? As deep as you want it to be. Useful? Less so.
I remember one that actually did sentence fragments but I can't find it in Google. (Probably because the search terms I'm using are flooded with other relevant hits.)
Fossils are fragile, but they are rocks. You see people being careful with them in movies like Jurassic Park because they are often embedded in other rock, and in your zeal to remove the rock from the rock sometimes it gets hurt.
But no real "fossil" could be obliterated by rolling over in, in Martian gravity no less. The same thing promoting righteous outrage proves that it wasn't a rock in the first place. Even if it "broke up", you'd still see pieces.
Mars isn't the moon, it has an atmosphere; if it broke completely into dust when subjected to such a small force, it would have long since weathered to nothing. A fossil would have to be a rock that has survived millions or billions of years already; rolling over it isn't going to do any more then the wind that would have 'exposed' it, as it would have blown right away with the surrounding dirt.
Putting aside the arrogance of trying to diagnose me from the other side of your monitor screen...
you are gifted after all)
Actually, I just said I was a nerd. That doesn't really imply gifted.
We all think we are the ugliest kid, we all think everyone hates us.
Well, in my case I'd call it empirically true. The only ugly thing was my teeth, but they were pretty bad. Nearly the only time I ever swung a softball bat, I took my thumbnail off with a hit from the ball. (Literally, though it took about a week. Had to grow a new one. Didn't even know that was possible. Scored a few "gross-out" points for pulling my thumbnail off in the middle of class; no one was more surprised then me.;-) ) I could play T-Ball but only because the ball wasn't moving.
Once I got glasses in high school, it all changed. I could hit baseballs. I could sink baskets. (I consider myself lucky I was close enough to normal vision to develop depth perception at all; some people don't. I must have had normal vision when I was young.) So I can state with confidence the fact that I was unusually bad at sports. (Last one chosen for anything, even basketball, even as the tallest kid in class.)
As for your introversion, I recommend taking the full Myers Briggs to find out your personality type (you may be an extrovert after all).
INT(split)... but what does that prove? (And what would reading like a biography prove? Half of the Meyers Briggs profiles have an element of truth for me... and everyone else.) Myers Briggs can only measure what you are now. It's not even possible to measure what I "could have been" under some other set of circumstances, it doesn't even make sense to talk about it in a psychological sense. Best put the pop-psychology books down, OK?
One of the first things you learn in psychology is never "diagnose" someone at a distance, certainly not from a screenful of text. In this case, you merely insulted and annoyed me, albiet not much. You can do worse. (Check for a reply to the score 5 post on Asberger's.)
Social skills are a two way street. Make sure that the people around him are interacting with him, too.
Today, I am a fairly stereotypical introverted nerd. However, I have heard from my family that I was actually a fairly extroverted kid.... until school. There I committed three sins: I was ugly (a tooth issue not diagnosed correctly until later), uncoordinated and couldn't play sports well (just nearsighted enough to ruin my depth perception, also undiagnosed for many years), and I knew stuff (could already read and do simple arithmetic in kindergarten). Hattrick.
I'm sure I wasn't a social wonder in kindergarten, but who is? My point is, I never had a chance. Now I'm introverted. What choice did I have?
Mind you, I'm happy enough with the outcome; you can't hear my tone so this might sound bitter. It's not; to me this is just how I am, I figured this out years later.
"But what about his hair?" Well, social skills form via feedback, which must be both positive and negative. If a kid is simply ejected from society at a young age, then he's never had an opportunity to learn about hair styling; he literally doesn't know about it. I recall not caring, either. So even to the extent that you may have a kid clueless, it may even be a result, not a cause.
Can society take the whole blame? Beats the tar out of me, but I doubt it. Maybe he's got a light case of Asperger's syndrome... I'm pretty sure I don't, though. But you can't write the effect of his society off, either. I recall trying to reconnect and being firmly ejected over and over.
How does this help? I don't know. Let me know if you find out. Seems people don't get mature enough to allow kids to re-enter society until somewhere around high-school. Getting out of his age group might help.
(Stuff like this makes me strongly sympathetic to the homeschooling system, which often involves significant out-of-age interaction, short-circuiting the need for every kindergarten class to reconstruct society from scratch; is it any surprise they get it so wrong? What do you expect from five-year-olds?)
Some day, some poor anthropologist is going to find this, and write a paper wherein they detail their amazing discovery that Zelda wasn't just a video game, but a true story, and here's the sword to prove it!
Sad part is he/she/it might be believed; more people believe in Atlantis on less evidence...
You want to incur obligation on developers then be prepared to pay us.
You want software for free and you want to incur obligation on the developer, then yes, on behalf of Open Source developers everywhere, you can go fuck yourself.
You can try to turn this around on the developers all you want, but you're just being unbelievably selfish to believe you can obligate us in any way by downloading our free software.
Since you don't seem to be willing to accept the no warantee provisions in Open Source software, in the event you are still using some, please consider yourself in violation of the licenses and stop right away. You can't claim ignorance any more.
And again, fuck you. People like you make me wonder why we bother releasing software for free.
Uh, moderators, consider the source, OK? Said site also claims to have photographic proof of a Cardinals baseball cap in NASA Mars pictures, a story about how perfume are secret biological and chemical weapons tests, and a story about the power outage covering a Martian invasion.
I'm 90% sure it's a deliberate humor site; I'd be more certain if they didn't seem to pull so many of their stories straight out of the paranoid schizophrenic playbook.
that while the Atari 2600 joysticks were awful, you also should be able to use the full range of Commodore 64 joysticks were were identical, or Sega Genesis controllers (where you use the "B" button as the single fire key).
(Personally, while I enjoy many 2600 games the joystick is a completely loser for me, especially the ones I've used which tend to be old and only marginally working anyhow. Plug one of those other controllers in and the game immediately becomes more fun. Interestingly, sometimes it immediately becomes easier too, and I'm not a fan of a game being difficult because the controller is fighting you.)
I can't completely guarentee this since I haven't tried it but I see no reason it shouldn't work.
Calling it a "culture" is simply descriptive, not a value claim. There are illegal drug cultures, too. In fact, there are several quite distinct drug cultures; casual weed smokers are different from the hard drugs are different from the ecstasy group. There are quite a few other criminal cultures too.
They meet every criteria for a looser definition of "culture", such as one might describe a hacker "culture" or a sports fan "culture". Of course, they aren't a seperate culture like "US culture" or "French culture", but from context, most people won't mistake the two.
You seem to be seeing an implicit claim that "all cultures are equally valuable", which is a post-modern conception. While there are some academics who would take it down to the finer-grained culture definition (e.g., "hacker" and "ecstasy"), most people apply that only to the coarser-grained one ("French", "Chinese", etc.). Most people would agree that there definately are some cases where one [fine-grained] culture is clearly inferior to another, so by calling the script kiddies a "culture" doesn't logically imply that there is a claim that their actions are OK because all cultures are equal. (There are even some atavists like myself who reject post-modernism entirely; makes it easier to ID implicit post-modernism it when I see it then those who are steeped in it.) Given a choice between a person joining script kiddie culture or joining a sports culture, I know which is more likely to turn out well for both the person and culture at large.
Thus, there are also graffiti cultures. I'm unsure about NAMBLA, I have no idea whether they qualify as a culture, but I doubt it. Similarly for "free speech activists"... other then similar beliefs on free speech issues, that doesn't otherwise imply an outlook, a unique jargon, dress patterns, frequent organized or semi-organized social encounters, etc. that one would normally associate with a "culture". (Script kiddies are odd in that their associations are strictly online, but their demographic similarity, speech patterns, thought patterns, and online meetings are enough, I'd say. Note I'm not trying to carefully define "culture" in this sense since it would be very difficult to match what me mean by the term.)
Re:Use an NP-hard problem
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
a computer which is twice as fast will take half as long to compute the result (more or less).
All else being equal, this is always true, regardless of the problem's type. "Taking half the time to compute a result" kind of is the definition of "twice as fast".;-)
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
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Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
However I'm still a bit worried we will end up with a situation where the problem size must be kept at a moderate size to allow 2-3 years old computers to compute it, and then spamers find some kind of shortcut.
Spammers: If you solve the prime factorization problem, just so you can send spam, you are welcome to send me spam and I might just buy a product or two.
Then we need to create a challenge-response system that somehow critically depends on the Riemann Hypothesis to solve it efficiently.
Then we can move on to the Halting Problem, or perhaps we can settle for an NP-Complete problem.
Harness the power of spammers to solve mathematic's greatest problems!
(ObSerious: Actually, with Bayesian filters we seem to have hit the limits of spammer intelligence. Despite the fact that with a certain amount of mental anguish I once layed out how to destroy Bayesian filtering on a web page in what I thought was plain English, spammers have thus far been unable to even follow the directions to try it, let alone use it. It seems I need have been worried. While the above is kinda humorous and I hope you enjoyed it, spammers seem to have topped out well below the intelligence needed for the above.)
Slashdot Mirror
if you get any settlement at all (and what house doesnt settle?), you are going to have horrible cracks throughout.
100% pure concrete definately won't work. It will be interesting to see if any solutions to the concrete problem develop over the next 10 or 20 years. Nanotechnology may be able to offer something.
Truthfully, that's where I see this going. This machine delivers tons of materials (which nanotechnology isn't going to do anytime soon; even a nano-technology-based machine to deliver tons of material is going to be macroscopic if it's going to work in a day or less!), nano-machines come in later to maintain and repair the wall as it cracks.
(Someday, w/ super-hyper-ultra nanotechnology, the entire wall may be made of self-repairing nanomachines, but we may not get that far. The previous paragraph is well within sight, even if it is not currently feasible, without Drexlerian nanotech levels.)
No matter what resolution you rise to, you will always be short of analog.
You seem to be laboring under the misimpression that analog has "infinite" resolution, and/or that it is always better then digital.
That is false. Analog has a resolution, it just tends to be fuzzier, rather then in rigid squares. With the right system we could also display digital signals "fuzzily", nobody cares enough to do it.
DVDs (digital) beat VCRs, hands down, in the resolution department. You may notice the artefacts more, but you'll still be getting much more detail then the VCR gives you, and like I said, if we wanted to fuzz the artefacts out we could.
It is still stupid that marketers use "digital" synonmously with "quality", but the opposite is not true either. "Analog" just has a different characteristic failure mode, one that happens to look better to us, but is still failure.
(Note that if analog did have infinite resolution, then the old joke about using a copying machine to look at a benzene atom by successively enlarging the image wouldn't be a joke.)
Reviews?
I'll admit it. I was too skeptical to tape it. But I'm open minded.
This thing isn't going to do in-wall plumbing and electricity either.
Patience. This is an alpha version, if that. Rest assured that version 3.0 will do those things. (Seriously, no sarcasm.)
Given a couple of iterations this could revolutionize home manufacturing. I'd love a highly configurable concrete house, with amenities added in later. One of my least favorite aspects of modern houses is the lack of acoustical isolation between the rooms. Concrete will have its own issues but I suspect they will be solvable long-term.
Given that one is clearly not the same as the other, the real question is, "Why is making money and making an effective OS the same?"
(Answer: They aren't; globally they look similar but they cause much different local decisions. You won't catch Linux being anti-competitive, whereas Microsoft has been proven anti-competitive in court several times. There's one difference for you, and yes, this directly plays out in code quality. If you'd like more details on why this is true, I'd recommend this rather good article on the subject.)
You make a lot of assertions, but you back them up with nothing but your word. I back mine up with actual quotes from actual copyright law, as done in the links, plus discussion based on that law. I'm pretty comfortable basing my understanding on that law, and the various readings of that law. Wacky interpretations made by one person may even be semantically correct in some uselessly abstract sense, but if the entire legal system from top to bottom disagrees with that person, it still does not describe how the system works. And I'm afraid that's where you are.
I leave it for the reader to decide which of us is thus more likely to be right.
"Fair use" is a technical term, and "timeshifting" is not now and never has been "fair use".
The courts did rule in Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984) that use of VCRs is primarily for time-shifting, and that such use does not harm the value of the work to the copyright holder, thus the courts refused to ban VCRs. However, there has never been any ruling, implied or otherwise, that copyright holders are obligated to assist us in our fair use, or prohibited from engaging in other technological measures to prevent us from engaging in activities that might be defended as "fair use".
Slashdot in general has a very, very, very unbelievably wrong idea of what "fair use" is, to the point that it has virtually no connection with what the legal concept actually is. Fair use is a very narrow allowance to use small portions of copyright works subject to severe limitations, no more. There is no such thing as a "fair use" right in law. (Which isn't to say there shouldn't be one; I do in fact argue that something like it should be protected. But that doesn't make it magically appear in the real law we have now.) As a result, the flag can not infringe on our non-existant "fair use right".
The reason why I continue to post this point, despite continued evidence that Slashdot as a whole refuses to understand this, is that the misunderstanding is dangerous. Thinking you are protected legally means you won't do anything to protect a "right" you think is safe. It's not. Fair use doesn't do shit for you unless you fit into the narrow provisions as described in the link above, and Slashdot as a whole needs to stop thinking otherwise or we will continue to have our "fair use rights" "stripped" from us, with no coherent protest.
I can think of many interesting legal/ethical conundrums regarding the right to kill though:
This type of ethical conundrum is typically a waste of time because no real-world situation can be cleaned up to a one-sentence question, and most of them are so unlikely to happen as to not be worth basing a philosophy on. For instance,
Imagine if there are 100 people about to be killed and the only way to save the other 99 is to shoot one of the 100.
In the entire history of humanity, has there ever been an instance where this actually happened and the choices were that clear cut, shoot or don't shoot? (Even if there have been one or two, that's still nothing.)
In this case, the reason the "answers" are hard is that the questions are unreasonably hard. In real life, the question of defending one's home with lethal force is not an easy one, but it is at least constrained by the realities of the situation. Nobody is going to break into your home and threaten to kill ten strangers unless you allow them to kill your spouse. And even if they did, the odds of them being truthful aren't worth worrying about anyhow.
Is this the first tech info virus?
Oh goodness, no. Not that these were first either, but SULFNBK.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE both predate this comfortably. Both are emails screaming at people to delete certain harmless files from their computer because they are a virus, and will cause loss of functionality if they are actually deleted, albeit a minor loss.
Granted, this is a much bigger loss ("a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing"), but it's the same basic thing.
Point. I failed to specify a point of view, which is the ultimate failing in relativity. My definition of "shrinking horizen" in this case means "the set of things we can perceive is steadily shrinking" (and nothing ever comes back into view), rather then "the amount of space we can see is shrinking". The latter didn't cross my mind because the idea of counting empty space as "seeable" isn't something that leaps to mind. ;-)
The fact is, we're seeing 186,000 miles further every second, because light takes time to get places.
Ahhh, if only cosmology were that simple. In fact, due to the way space itself is expanding, and especially in light of the recent discoveries that the expansion continues to accelerate, our horizen is shrinking. Eventually we'll only be able to see our gravitationally bound local group... and if the "big rip" theories hold true (which I am skeptical about on other grounds but we'll see), eventually even those disappear.
You statement is only true in a static universe with a discrete beginning that lept into existence all at once (no 'expansion', just instant matter everywhere that eventually forms into galaxies); three wrong assumptions for the price of one.
Regardless of what a fossil is made of, it must be sturdy to survive millions of years, or the process of being exposed to the surface. Saying "we don't know what a fossil on Mars might be made out of" doesn't mean that it might be made out of Jelly Bellies; I may not be able to speak to the exact composition but there are certain properties that must hold true, or you'd never have seen it in the first place.
;-)
I mention this mostly because it's a common fallacy, that some amount of non-knowlege implies total non-knowlege. As soon as you say it, it sounds stupid and is obviously false, but it sneaks up on a lot of people, and is the foundation of entire pervasive modern philosophies. (It is, for instance, an essential philosophical foundation of Strong Post-Modernism.) I do not and can not know everything about the putative fossil on Mars but I can determine some things and make certain observations with great confidence, including observations that lead to the conclusion that it isn't a fossil.
As is usually the case, the media are distorting the contents of the original report. The Informa Media Group's actual prediction is that there will be 30 million PS3s in Europe by 2010, plus or minus 2.3. (No, not "2.3 million", not "2.3 thousand", "2.3".)
Leave it up to the BBC to leave out the italicized phrase in their zeal to "sex up" the story. I'm sure the Informa Media Group is very disappointed. Now people are going to get false impressions about how sure the Informa Media Group is about their predictions.
Oh, you can do better then that. Consider this site. How deep is it? As deep as you want it to be. Useful? Less so.
I remember one that actually did sentence fragments but I can't find it in Google. (Probably because the search terms I'm using are flooded with other relevant hits.)
You do hear about television losing to reading, just not books.
When Television loses time to the Internet, what do most people do on the Internet? Most people are still reading, and, gasp, perhaps even writing.
Television is losing time to a lot of things, not just video games. This is not a good time to be in the television industry.
Fossils are fragile, but they are rocks. You see people being careful with them in movies like Jurassic Park because they are often embedded in other rock, and in your zeal to remove the rock from the rock sometimes it gets hurt.
But no real "fossil" could be obliterated by rolling over in, in Martian gravity no less. The same thing promoting righteous outrage proves that it wasn't a rock in the first place. Even if it "broke up", you'd still see pieces.
Mars isn't the moon, it has an atmosphere; if it broke completely into dust when subjected to such a small force, it would have long since weathered to nothing. A fossil would have to be a rock that has survived millions or billions of years already; rolling over it isn't going to do any more then the wind that would have 'exposed' it, as it would have blown right away with the surrounding dirt.
Putting aside the arrogance of trying to diagnose me from the other side of your monitor screen...
;-) ) I could play T-Ball but only because the ball wasn't moving.
you are gifted after all)
Actually, I just said I was a nerd. That doesn't really imply gifted.
We all think we are the ugliest kid, we all think everyone hates us.
Well, in my case I'd call it empirically true. The only ugly thing was my teeth, but they were pretty bad. Nearly the only time I ever swung a softball bat, I took my thumbnail off with a hit from the ball. (Literally, though it took about a week. Had to grow a new one. Didn't even know that was possible. Scored a few "gross-out" points for pulling my thumbnail off in the middle of class; no one was more surprised then me.
Once I got glasses in high school, it all changed. I could hit baseballs. I could sink baskets. (I consider myself lucky I was close enough to normal vision to develop depth perception at all; some people don't. I must have had normal vision when I was young.) So I can state with confidence the fact that I was unusually bad at sports. (Last one chosen for anything, even basketball, even as the tallest kid in class.)
As for your introversion, I recommend taking the full Myers Briggs to find out your personality type (you may be an extrovert after all).
INT(split)... but what does that prove? (And what would reading like a biography prove? Half of the Meyers Briggs profiles have an element of truth for me... and everyone else.) Myers Briggs can only measure what you are now. It's not even possible to measure what I "could have been" under some other set of circumstances, it doesn't even make sense to talk about it in a psychological sense. Best put the pop-psychology books down, OK?
One of the first things you learn in psychology is never "diagnose" someone at a distance, certainly not from a screenful of text. In this case, you merely insulted and annoyed me, albiet not much. You can do worse. (Check for a reply to the score 5 post on Asberger's.)
Social skills are a two way street. Make sure that the people around him are interacting with him, too.
Today, I am a fairly stereotypical introverted nerd. However, I have heard from my family that I was actually a fairly extroverted kid.... until school. There I committed three sins: I was ugly (a tooth issue not diagnosed correctly until later), uncoordinated and couldn't play sports well (just nearsighted enough to ruin my depth perception, also undiagnosed for many years), and I knew stuff (could already read and do simple arithmetic in kindergarten). Hattrick.
I'm sure I wasn't a social wonder in kindergarten, but who is? My point is, I never had a chance. Now I'm introverted. What choice did I have?
Mind you, I'm happy enough with the outcome; you can't hear my tone so this might sound bitter. It's not; to me this is just how I am, I figured this out years later.
"But what about his hair?" Well, social skills form via feedback, which must be both positive and negative. If a kid is simply ejected from society at a young age, then he's never had an opportunity to learn about hair styling; he literally doesn't know about it. I recall not caring, either. So even to the extent that you may have a kid clueless, it may even be a result, not a cause.
Can society take the whole blame? Beats the tar out of me, but I doubt it. Maybe he's got a light case of Asperger's syndrome... I'm pretty sure I don't, though. But you can't write the effect of his society off, either. I recall trying to reconnect and being firmly ejected over and over.
How does this help? I don't know. Let me know if you find out. Seems people don't get mature enough to allow kids to re-enter society until somewhere around high-school. Getting out of his age group might help.
(Stuff like this makes me strongly sympathetic to the homeschooling system, which often involves significant out-of-age interaction, short-circuiting the need for every kindergarten class to reconstruct society from scratch; is it any surprise they get it so wrong? What do you expect from five-year-olds?)
Some day, some poor anthropologist is going to find this, and write a paper wherein they detail their amazing discovery that Zelda wasn't just a video game, but a true story, and here's the sword to prove it!
Sad part is he/she/it might be believed; more people believe in Atlantis on less evidence...
You missed the point.
You want to incur obligation on developers then be prepared to pay us.
You want software for free and you want to incur obligation on the developer, then yes, on behalf of Open Source developers everywhere, you can go fuck yourself.
You can try to turn this around on the developers all you want, but you're just being unbelievably selfish to believe you can obligate us in any way by downloading our free software.
Since you don't seem to be willing to accept the no warantee provisions in Open Source software, in the event you are still using some, please consider yourself in violation of the licenses and stop right away. You can't claim ignorance any more.
And again, fuck you. People like you make me wonder why we bother releasing software for free.
Uh, moderators, consider the source, OK? Said site also claims to have photographic proof of a Cardinals baseball cap in NASA Mars pictures, a story about how perfume are secret biological and chemical weapons tests, and a story about the power outage covering a Martian invasion.
I'm 90% sure it's a deliberate humor site; I'd be more certain if they didn't seem to pull so many of their stories straight out of the paranoid schizophrenic playbook.
that while the Atari 2600 joysticks were awful, you also should be able to use the full range of Commodore 64 joysticks were were identical, or Sega Genesis controllers (where you use the "B" button as the single fire key).
(Personally, while I enjoy many 2600 games the joystick is a completely loser for me, especially the ones I've used which tend to be old and only marginally working anyhow. Plug one of those other controllers in and the game immediately becomes more fun. Interestingly, sometimes it immediately becomes easier too, and I'm not a fan of a game being difficult because the controller is fighting you.)
I can't completely guarentee this since I haven't tried it but I see no reason it shouldn't work.
Calling it a "culture" is simply descriptive, not a value claim. There are illegal drug cultures, too. In fact, there are several quite distinct drug cultures; casual weed smokers are different from the hard drugs are different from the ecstasy group. There are quite a few other criminal cultures too.
They meet every criteria for a looser definition of "culture", such as one might describe a hacker "culture" or a sports fan "culture". Of course, they aren't a seperate culture like "US culture" or "French culture", but from context, most people won't mistake the two.
You seem to be seeing an implicit claim that "all cultures are equally valuable", which is a post-modern conception. While there are some academics who would take it down to the finer-grained culture definition (e.g., "hacker" and "ecstasy"), most people apply that only to the coarser-grained one ("French", "Chinese", etc.). Most people would agree that there definately are some cases where one [fine-grained] culture is clearly inferior to another, so by calling the script kiddies a "culture" doesn't logically imply that there is a claim that their actions are OK because all cultures are equal. (There are even some atavists like myself who reject post-modernism entirely; makes it easier to ID implicit post-modernism it when I see it then those who are steeped in it.) Given a choice between a person joining script kiddie culture or joining a sports culture, I know which is more likely to turn out well for both the person and culture at large.
Thus, there are also graffiti cultures. I'm unsure about NAMBLA, I have no idea whether they qualify as a culture, but I doubt it. Similarly for "free speech activists"... other then similar beliefs on free speech issues, that doesn't otherwise imply an outlook, a unique jargon, dress patterns, frequent organized or semi-organized social encounters, etc. that one would normally associate with a "culture". (Script kiddies are odd in that their associations are strictly online, but their demographic similarity, speech patterns, thought patterns, and online meetings are enough, I'd say. Note I'm not trying to carefully define "culture" in this sense since it would be very difficult to match what me mean by the term.)
a computer which is twice as fast will take half as long to compute the result (more or less).
;-)
All else being equal, this is always true, regardless of the problem's type. "Taking half the time to compute a result" kind of is the definition of "twice as fast".
However I'm still a bit worried we will end up with a situation where the problem size must be kept at a moderate size to allow 2-3 years old computers to compute it, and then spamers find some kind of shortcut.
Spammers: If you solve the prime factorization problem, just so you can send spam, you are welcome to send me spam and I might just buy a product or two.
Then we need to create a challenge-response system that somehow critically depends on the Riemann Hypothesis to solve it efficiently.
Then we can move on to the Halting Problem, or perhaps we can settle for an NP-Complete problem.
Harness the power of spammers to solve mathematic's greatest problems!
(ObSerious: Actually, with Bayesian filters we seem to have hit the limits of spammer intelligence. Despite the fact that with a certain amount of mental anguish I once layed out how to destroy Bayesian filtering on a web page in what I thought was plain English, spammers have thus far been unable to even follow the directions to try it, let alone use it. It seems I need have been worried. While the above is kinda humorous and I hope you enjoyed it, spammers seem to have topped out well below the intelligence needed for the above.)