I'm the first to suggest it, so you all have to obey. Everyone reading this chips in a pound (or dollar, but more than a lira), and you can buy me one of these...
1. Andover Shares. Lots of 'em. 2. Aibo. Actually, two so they can play football. 3. Twiddler 4. World peace 5. A trip to Mars (though I'll settle for Earth orbit) 6. A faster connection to/. It's dog slow today for some reason. 7. A job at nasa. Imagine; there are people out there with the titles of Space Commander and Planetary Protection Officer. I want to be Supreme Commander of the Solar System. 8. There's more, but no-one but my girlfriend will find out what.
One thing that I've noticed is that if an author writes a Star Trek book, they tend to be dismissed by 'real' SF fans unless they've a track record outside that genre. Blish is dismissed because he's best known for his Trek stuff; in fact, AFAIK that's the only stuff that's currently being printed in the UK. Blish is a massively underrated author, and one that the current generation of SF fans needs to read. I can't say for certain that he was an influence on, for example, Vernor Vinge, but there's something distinctly Blishian about A Fire Upon the Deep.
Blish is a great author not just for people who want to understand the history of SF over the past few decades, but for anyone who just plain wants a cool bit of space opera.
Well done to/. for bringing these older authors to the attention of the masses.
Quantum computers are at least a decade away, and by the time they're mass-produced, privacy will be a thing of the past. We're heading that way now, and it's only a matter of years before privacy advocates are viewed in the same way the tin-foil-helmet brigade are viewed today. I'm not just talking about echelon and other such programmes; every aspect of life is coming under supervision as the technology allows it.
People only view privacy as a right because in the past the powers that be (be they PHBs or government spooks) hadn't got the wherewithal to spy on us all.
If you work on a computer, your email can be monitored, as well as your keystrokes and your high scores in tetris. If you walk through any city centre, you're probably on camera for 90% of the time.
Quantum computing will be the final nail in the coffin; encryption will let people hold out for a while, but once your VA Quark comes online, you can bend over and kiss your privacy goodbye.
If he broke into computers, he should be punished. But I'm a bit dubious aobut this 'three years' thing. Computers are no longer a luxury; most people reading this have computers as an integral part of their life. There's also the problem of 'what is a computer'. Can he play pacman in the local retro-arcade? What about a playstation? Can he program his video to record 'buffy' when he's at a parole meeting? Can he take cash from ATMs? I could go on. And given the slightest incentive, I probably will.
I've spent years now looking at this 'internet', and was beginning to despair of anything useful ever appearing. Sure, it's got nudies galore, pictures of planets and even slashdot, but this -- this! is what the internet is all about.
Of course, being the conscientious slashdotter that I am, I bookmarked it, looked long enough to comment on it, and left it for a week so that all the other little dotties can have a look. Next week I can have a game in peace. Do likewise!
Mac graphic artists have been using pens for years with their graphic tablets; I assumed these could be used as mouses as well. If I use anything other than a mouse, it's going to be a Twiddler. Which is cooler than any mere pen, except possibly one that blows up when you click it three times.
do scientists know have firm belief in something that they once doubted? Although scientists were pretty sure about the existence of planets, they weren't positive; as you said, seeing is believing. There were other explanations for the phenomena, but of all the possible answers, a planet was by far the most plausible. You can consider this a confirmation that is nice, but wasn't really necessary for proof. I doubt the same technique would find a moon as well, but you never know.
Woo, oxygen. If I remember my astrobiology correctly, this would be taken as a sign of life if it weren't on a planet four times the mass of jupiter, and with a year of less than four of your Earth days.
Note to everyone who reads science fiction: silicon has a lot of the properties of carbon; this does not mean that silicon-based life (as we sort of know it) is possible. Don't jump to conclusions.
You've got to wonder, though, what the astronomers have discovered when they refuse to talk to the BBC.
It's easy to see how it'd be possible to get away with this, particularly with home users. The SOHO set tend to be less pathological about bleeding edge equipment; they keep their pc until it won't run most of the new games. Upgrading from a P120 to anyPII/III/Whatever gives a demonstrable increase in speed, so the user is less likely to notice if it's a 400 or a 450 or a 500... Of course, it'd take bastardy of a truly prodigious nature to take advantage of this; the third time you try it with a geek your name is probably mud, so you'd have to be very careful about whom you sold the dodgy systems to.
Of course, there's always the Apple manoeuvre; drop the speed by 50,000,000 Hz across the board.
A trawl through the archives on the Irish Linux Users' Group's page reveals... As you may/may not know already Trinity Netsoc have invited open-source guru, Eric S. Raymond to deliver a talk entitled 'Freedom, Power and Software' and to sign copies of his new book 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar'. The talk will be happening on the 25th November in the Walton Theater (Arts Bulding) at 19:00. Entry is 1 quid for non-member/students and 3 quid for non-member/corporates. A drinks reception will follow in Doyles pub.
Despite having floppy copies of most of the stuff in here, I'll be getting it anyway. For several reasons. 1. ESR will be in Dublin on Thursday, and I don't feel like having him sign my Palm III. 2. I don't want to use my palm in the bath (so to speak). 3. It looks cool on the bookshelf.
I don't want to start that whole 'books vs virtuality' again, just thought I should mention that I enjoy both.
If you were to count the number of bacteria inside you that were helping keep you alive at the moment, you'd be there for a while. No man is an island; we all rely to huge extents on other organisms; they just happen to have evolved over billennia instead of being made in a lab. If your objection is to the amount of man-made foreign matter in the body, then however many nanoprobes you have inside you they probably won't have the combined mass of a pacemaker. I can't state for certain they'll never be affected by a virus, but these probes will be built up atom by atom. Everyone knows this, but few appreciate exactly what that means. They won't have a power failure unless they're stuck in a vacuum. The won't break down, because they'll be build using chemical bonds that are vewy, vewy stable and as unbreakable as they can be. they'll also be highly resistant to bonding with foreign molecules.
At the current rate even nanotech will run out of options. If this new transistor can be scaled (and the chip boys 'n' girls have about ten years before it's vital), then it should push Moore's law's validity into the 2020s or 2030s. By then there's bound to be some manner of nanotech that'll improve matters; that or optical computing, or quantum computing, or...
If we truly do achieve a nano solution, then no-one'll really care about Moore's law. If you can use assemblers to build the chips, a much greater precision at existing scales will be achievable, so it'll be less vital to get smaller and fuzzier. Of course, once true nanotech is online, we'll be all less worried about the speed of quake XI and more about adjusting to living for a couple of thousand years. I hope.
Just when you think Moore's Law is about to reach the wall, something happens. You'd think that by now we'd know better. This is also a rather cool discovery. It's overcome the problem with light etching and electron leaking in one go; that's impressive.
The problem with a treadmill is that it's only good for moving forward in back; for full movement in 2d you'd need either a sophisticated treadmill that could move along two axes or a separate control that rotates the environment around the user, so that the can continuously face one direction. The problem with the former is that I can't envision how it'd work (others may be more perspicacious), and the latter takes away from total immersion. 3d movement, once 2d is taken care of, is simple as long as no-one wants to climb a virtual Everest.
I saw the twenty-seven hour version that was only released in Burkino Faso. It was good, but there were a few things I didn't remember from the book, like the dwarf^H^H^H^H^H short person telling Stilgar in a dream that Paul was the One.
I wouldn't mind seeing the miniseries; the first book was incredibly awesome, two could have been better and longer, and the rest... well, I didn't rush out to buy the latest sequel. It looks like Herbert Jr. is going to do a Christopher Tolkien; I look forward over the next decade to reading the secret writing of the Bene Gesserit Volume 8 : The origin of the Kwisatz Haderach myths.
He got to spend fifteen years playing on a rapid-decelerator smashing into a wall, and those Salon people make it sound like a bad thing. I'd pay money.
In reality the entire scientific community is bunch of argumentative ego-maniacs And slashdot is a bunch of anonymous cowards.
You're falling victim to the same problem as the reporters you cited; you've heard about a couple of egomaniacal scientists, and you assume that 'science teaches that they're all ego driven'.
If a bunch of moronic reporters or lazy scriptwriters invoke a theory that's outdated (or just plain wrong), don't blame the scientists. Which scientist do you blame when even Lisa Simpson thinks that the coriolis effect works on toilets?
There could be thousands of cases thrown out of court in the past, and that wouldn't stop the scientologists. They're greedy, amoral people whose only hope for maintaining their hold on their victims is through lawsuits; they's sue anyone, anywhere, anyhow. If they lose, they take it to a higher court. I realise that in America this is nothing unusual, but the scientologists have it down to a fine art.
As a matter of interest: if I have a page on nursery rhymes and I have the word 'Hubbard' in my metatags (as well as 'Humpty' and 'Nantucket'), will I be sued?
Prevailing theories state that it's possible in very rare cases for anti-matter to spontaneously turn into matter. Therefore 99.lotsof9s % of the universe annihilated, and what we see is a teeny fraction of what the universe started with. Of course, it's only a theory, so who knows?
The preprints database is a joy to behold; it regularly contains off-the-wall theories that may or may not be worth considering. As for the manyfold theory: this (to my untrained and feeble mind) sounds a lot like M-theory, which is string theory with an extra dimension.
It presents us with a new dark matter particle and a new framework for the evolution of structure in our universe. Cool. Predictions always make a theory more worthy of consideration. I also learnt the word 'phenomenology' which I'll have to use somehow today. Damn!
If the code does fork, do they still call it Linux, or is that just going to create confusion? Yes, it's still called linux, and maybe it'll cause confusion. Doesn't matter. Redhat is different from Debian is different from Suse; they're all fundamentally the same but they do have their differences. A 'true' fork is the same thing but on a larger scale. If everyone likes corel's new install, we'll see it appearing elsewhere. If they don't, we won't. If this clustering software from Turbolinux is that shit hot, it'll be assimilated. If something is cool but not Free, it may enjoy usage but it won't become part of Linux.
That's a bit of a ramble, so I'll sum up by agreeing with what others have said, forks don't matter.
It's not an academic definition, but I've always based limericks on five lines of anapests (unstressessed, unstressed, stressed); three, three, two, two, three. The first foot can be iambic without causing offense (as in the now-legendary man from nantucket, who also has an unstressed syllable appended). So your limerick (in morse) goes dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah
That's something I'd never have typed in using Windows; the old highlight/middle click makes things a lot easier. Of course, this is a rigid definition, unstressed syllables can be added or removed more or less at will an still maintain an aesthetic aspect. IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the first to suggest it, so you all have to obey. Everyone reading this chips in a pound (or dollar, but more than a lira), and you can buy me one of these...
/. It's dog slow today for some reason.
1. Andover Shares. Lots of 'em.
2. Aibo. Actually, two so they can play football.
3. Twiddler
4. World peace
5. A trip to Mars (though I'll settle for Earth orbit)
6. A faster connection to
7. A job at nasa. Imagine; there are people out there with the titles of Space Commander and Planetary Protection Officer. I want to be Supreme Commander of the Solar System.
8. There's more, but no-one but my girlfriend will find out what.
One thing that I've noticed is that if an author writes a Star Trek book, they tend to be dismissed by 'real' SF fans unless they've a track record outside that genre. Blish is dismissed because he's best known for his Trek stuff; in fact, AFAIK that's the only stuff that's currently being printed in the UK.
/. for bringing these older authors to the attention of the masses.
Blish is a massively underrated author, and one that the current generation of SF fans needs to read. I can't say for certain that he was an influence on, for example, Vernor Vinge, but there's something distinctly Blishian about A Fire Upon the Deep.
Blish is a great author not just for people who want to understand the history of SF over the past few decades, but for anyone who just plain wants a cool bit of space opera.
Well done to
Quantum computers are at least a decade away, and by the time they're mass-produced, privacy will be a thing of the past. We're heading that way now, and it's only a matter of years before privacy advocates are viewed in the same way the tin-foil-helmet brigade are viewed today. I'm not just talking about echelon and other such programmes; every aspect of life is coming under supervision as the technology allows it.
People only view privacy as a right because in the past the powers that be (be they PHBs or government spooks) hadn't got the wherewithal to spy on us all.
If you work on a computer, your email can be monitored, as well as your keystrokes and your high scores in tetris. If you walk through any city centre, you're probably on camera for 90% of the time.
Quantum computing will be the final nail in the coffin; encryption will let people hold out for a while, but once your VA Quark comes online, you can bend over and kiss your privacy goodbye.
If he broke into computers, he should be punished. But I'm a bit dubious aobut this 'three years' thing. Computers are no longer a luxury; most people reading this have computers as an integral part of their life. There's also the problem of 'what is a computer'. Can he play pacman in the local retro-arcade? What about a playstation? Can he program his video to record 'buffy' when he's at a parole meeting? Can he take cash from ATMs?
I could go on. And given the slightest incentive, I probably will.
I think the cheap little web cams have some interesting possibilities
It's innocuous little sentences like that that result in major paradigm shifts a couple of years down the line. This could be interesting.
1. Sorry for saying 'paradigm shift'
2. Am I the only one that had to change the character set so I could read this page?
I've spent years now looking at this 'internet', and was beginning to despair of anything useful ever appearing.
Sure, it's got nudies galore, pictures of planets and even slashdot, but this -- this! is what the internet is all about.
Of course, being the conscientious slashdotter that I am, I bookmarked it, looked long enough to comment on it, and left it for a week so that all the other little dotties can have a look. Next week I can have a game in peace.
Do likewise!
Mac graphic artists have been using pens for years with their graphic tablets; I assumed these could be used as mouses as well.
If I use anything other than a mouse, it's going to be a Twiddler. Which is cooler than any mere pen, except possibly one that blows up when you click it three times.
do scientists know have firm belief in something that they once doubted?
Although scientists were pretty sure about the existence of planets, they weren't positive; as you said, seeing is believing. There were other explanations for the phenomena, but of all the possible answers, a planet was by far the most plausible. You can consider this a confirmation that is nice, but wasn't really necessary for proof.
I doubt the same technique would find a moon as well, but you never know.
Woo, oxygen. If I remember my astrobiology correctly, this would be taken as a sign of life if it weren't on a planet four times the mass of jupiter, and with a year of less than four of your Earth days.
Note to everyone who reads science fiction: silicon has a lot of the properties of carbon; this does not mean that silicon-based life (as we sort of know it) is possible. Don't jump to conclusions.
You've got to wonder, though, what the astronomers have discovered when they refuse to talk to the BBC.
I read this a couple of days ago, and understood several of the words involved. Further reading, with decent enough explanations, can be found here.
It's easy to see how it'd be possible to get away with this, particularly with home users. The SOHO set tend to be less pathological about bleeding edge equipment; they keep their pc until it won't run most of the new games. Upgrading from a P120 to anyPII/III/Whatever gives a demonstrable increase in speed, so the user is less likely to notice if it's a 400 or a 450 or a 500...
Of course, it'd take bastardy of a truly prodigious nature to take advantage of this; the third time you try it with a geek your name is probably mud, so you'd have to be very careful about whom you sold the dodgy systems to.
Of course, there's always the Apple manoeuvre; drop the speed by 50,000,000 Hz across the board.
A trawl through the archives on the Irish Linux Users' Group's page reveals...
As you may/may not know already Trinity Netsoc have invited open-source
guru, Eric S. Raymond to deliver a talk entitled 'Freedom, Power and
Software' and to sign copies of his new book 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar'.
The talk will be happening on the 25th November in the Walton Theater
(Arts Bulding) at 19:00. Entry is 1 quid for non-member/students and 3
quid for non-member/corporates. A drinks reception will follow in Doyles
pub.
Despite having floppy copies of most of the stuff in here, I'll be getting it anyway. For several reasons.
1. ESR will be in Dublin on Thursday, and I don't feel like having him sign my Palm III.
2. I don't want to use my palm in the bath (so to speak).
3. It looks cool on the bookshelf.
I don't want to start that whole 'books vs virtuality' again, just thought I should mention that I enjoy both.
If you were to count the number of bacteria inside you that were helping keep you alive at the moment, you'd be there for a while. No man is an island; we all rely to huge extents on other organisms; they just happen to have evolved over billennia instead of being made in a lab.
If your objection is to the amount of man-made foreign matter in the body, then however many nanoprobes you have inside you they probably won't have the combined mass of a pacemaker.
I can't state for certain they'll never be affected by a virus, but these probes will be built up atom by atom. Everyone knows this, but few appreciate exactly what that means. They won't have a power failure unless they're stuck in a vacuum. The won't break down, because they'll be build using chemical bonds that are vewy, vewy stable and as unbreakable as they can be. they'll also be highly resistant to bonding with foreign molecules.
At the current rate even nanotech will run out of options.
If this new transistor can be scaled (and the chip boys 'n' girls have about ten years before it's vital), then it should push Moore's law's validity into the 2020s or 2030s. By then there's bound to be some manner of nanotech that'll improve matters; that or optical computing, or quantum computing, or...
If we truly do achieve a nano solution, then no-one'll really care about Moore's law. If you can use assemblers to build the chips, a much greater precision at existing scales will be achievable, so it'll be less vital to get smaller and fuzzier.
Of course, once true nanotech is online, we'll be all less worried about the speed of quake XI and more about adjusting to living for a couple of thousand years. I hope.
Just when you think Moore's Law is about to reach the wall, something happens. You'd think that by now we'd know better.
This is also a rather cool discovery. It's overcome the problem with light etching and electron leaking in one go; that's impressive.
The problem with a treadmill is that it's only good for moving forward in back; for full movement in 2d you'd need either a sophisticated treadmill that could move along two axes or a separate control that rotates the environment around the user, so that the can continuously face one direction.
The problem with the former is that I can't envision how it'd work (others may be more perspicacious), and the latter takes away from total immersion.
3d movement, once 2d is taken care of, is simple as long as no-one wants to climb a virtual Everest.
I saw the twenty-seven hour version that was only released in Burkino Faso. It was good, but there were a few things I didn't remember from the book, like the dwarf^H^H^H^H^H short person telling Stilgar in a dream that Paul was the One.
I wouldn't mind seeing the miniseries; the first book was incredibly awesome, two could have been better and longer, and the rest... well, I didn't rush out to buy the latest sequel.
It looks like Herbert Jr. is going to do a Christopher Tolkien; I look forward over the next decade to reading the secret writing of the Bene Gesserit Volume 8 : The origin of the Kwisatz Haderach myths.
He got to spend fifteen years playing on a rapid-decelerator smashing into a wall, and those Salon people make it sound like a bad thing.
I'd pay money.
In reality the entire scientific community is bunch of argumentative ego-maniacs
And slashdot is a bunch of anonymous cowards.
You're falling victim to the same problem as the reporters you cited; you've heard about a couple of egomaniacal scientists, and you assume that 'science teaches that they're all ego driven'.
If a bunch of moronic reporters or lazy scriptwriters invoke a theory that's outdated (or just plain wrong), don't blame the scientists. Which scientist do you blame when even Lisa Simpson thinks that the coriolis effect works on toilets?
There could be thousands of cases thrown out of court in the past, and that wouldn't stop the scientologists. They're greedy, amoral people whose only hope for maintaining their hold on their victims is through lawsuits; they's sue anyone, anywhere, anyhow. If they lose, they take it to a higher court.
I realise that in America this is nothing unusual, but the scientologists have it down to a fine art.
As a matter of interest: if I have a page on nursery rhymes and I have the word 'Hubbard' in my metatags (as well as 'Humpty' and 'Nantucket'), will I be sued?
Prevailing theories state that it's possible in very rare cases for anti-matter to spontaneously turn into matter. Therefore 99.lotsof9s % of the universe annihilated, and what we see is a teeny fraction of what the universe started with.
Of course, it's only a theory, so who knows?
The preprints database is a joy to behold; it regularly contains off-the-wall theories that may or may not be worth considering.
As for the manyfold theory: this (to my untrained and feeble mind) sounds a lot like M-theory, which is string theory with an extra dimension.
It presents us with a new dark matter particle and a new framework for the evolution of structure in our universe.
Cool. Predictions always make a theory more worthy of consideration.
I also learnt the word 'phenomenology' which I'll have to use somehow today. Damn!
If the code does fork, do they still call it Linux, or is that just going to create confusion?
Yes, it's still called linux, and maybe it'll cause confusion. Doesn't matter.
Redhat is different from Debian is different from Suse; they're all fundamentally the same but they do have their differences. A 'true' fork is the same thing but on a larger scale.
If everyone likes corel's new install, we'll see it appearing elsewhere. If they don't, we won't. If this clustering software from Turbolinux is that shit hot, it'll be assimilated. If something is cool but not Free, it may enjoy usage but it won't become part of Linux.
That's a bit of a ramble, so I'll sum up by agreeing with what others have said, forks don't matter.
It's not an academic definition, but I've always based limericks on five lines of anapests (unstressessed, unstressed, stressed); three, three, two, two, three. The first foot can be iambic without causing offense (as in the now-legendary man from nantucket, who also has an unstressed syllable appended).
So your limerick (in morse) goes
dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah
dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah
dit dit dah dit dit dah
dit dit dah dit dit dah
dit dit dah dit dit dah dit dit dah
That's something I'd never have typed in using Windows; the old highlight/middle click makes things a lot easier.
Of course, this is a rigid definition, unstressed syllables can be added or removed more or less at will an still maintain an aesthetic aspect. IMHO.