Unfortunatly, history proves the intelligence threshhold for procreation is fairly low for humans, since we stopped shoving the dumb ones off cliffs. We are currently selecting for low IQ by shooting the smart ones. Then again, there were a few smart ones who got away...
Talk about not having something better to do. These guys would be beter off if I told them how it ends...
Skywalker dies...
At the hands of his son...
In another movie.
Sounds like just another touchy-feely idea from the left. Take criminal and give them skills to migrate to a different sort of crime.
Put them into the military instead. This way they learn discipline, get some training, and are seperated from the creeps who got them into crime in the first place. It's amazing how basic training can reorient an immature punk with a chip on his shoulder.
Either way they improve their act or get fragged on the first live-fire mission, and if they return to the 'hood, they do so with a stronger self-image than any amount of positech training will ever give them.
You know how the pusher gives you free sample of a controlled substance? You get addicted and the next thing the prices get real high, since you FEEL you can't do without.
There isn't a single technology in MS which isn't available elsewhere. The fools who geared their entire IT departments to rely on MS for development have only themselves to blame, since they took the free sample, and since their jobs now depend upon getting the stuff, MS will be happy to provide it at higher and higher const. Since the stuff is by all accounts "controlled", the developer is stuck in the nasty situation by a culture willing to settle for MS mediocrity.
Oh, well...
If you want the fancy IDE and the semi-useful library of interfaces to the OS, you can do one of two things; you can continue to pay an escalating rate or you can brew you own.
Warning: Just like the established pushers are the ones who call the authorities in when they get small time competition, you can count on MS to call in the authorities (via lawsuits, guerrila licensing, namebrand misdirection) anytime somebody tries to produce an OS and development system to compete with theirs. Think BeOS among others. Remember IBM produced a stable, resilient OS with all of the features of Windows 95 but made the mistake of licensing the technology to MS; Can you say OS2 Warp?
If you search the relevant documentation, studio betamax VCRs had an input shuttle feature which could do just that. VHS and betmax duked it out and the consumer was left with an inferior product.
Why not just have a machine with Windows on it to run the Windows stuff and a linux box to run the rest? Microsoft will just change the API the minute these folks get a foothold. Besides, WINE hasn't exactly been the fastest thing in the world either. I'm no supporter of Microsoft, but at the same time if you think a game running on MS's platform is worthwhile then just hold your nose and use it.
Machines are cheap, and the only thing I use my Windows machine for these days IS games. If I have to do anything real and important I just use my beowolf cluster of forty machines. You can't get a VCS compile of 2 million gates on a silly MS driven machine anyways, but you sure can play Diablo II (if you don't mind the crashes!).
When I was in Switzerland in 1980 a VCR from Japan could pause live tv just fine. I know because my land lady had one and would pause the commercials. Video editors at studios can pause live input from various sources too, without nuch difficulty.
Actually, in California you can be. There you can be sued for just about anything. All it takes is a lawyer who is willing to take the case and a target with deep pockets. I've been sued a few times; every suit was deemed frivilous, but the judge let it go to trial anyways. If you get a jury who sympathises with the plaintif, (usually due to class envy tactics), then you can count on shelling out, though if you have lots of money do not under any circumstances let the judge decide (he's a lawyer too, and looks out after his brothers) Luckily I was able to defend myself since none of the cases were factually based (though that is no longer a criterion anymore either). Remember, the lawyer you retain probably golfs with the lawyer who is suing you, and they likely connived to drum up the mutual business anyways. One lawyer in town is hungry. Two in town are open for business.
I hope TiVo manages to defend itself, since VCR's have been able do the same function for years (though at a slower speed)
>> Most software is so bad, in fact, that if it were a bridge, no one in his or her right mind would walk across it.
>> If it were a house, we would be afraid to enter.
These lines have been so overused they are beginning to sound a tad trite. The fact remains, if the principles of engineering as applied to software, without the inadequacies of the development systems we get saddled with, software would be as robust as the bridge or the house.
It is poor management, insufficient development time, impatient customers, and crappy infrastructure which are to blame for a large number of the wrecks out there. I have met and worked with many talented engineers who are given the same sort of commands Scotty got on the Enterprise; "Make it happen yesterday!" is the motto of our time, instead of make it happen right.
Try just figuring out the exceptions to logic in the latest version of MSVC. Ad hoc operating systems aside, engineering anything usefull with the tools at hand can be quite an arduous and unnescessary adventure.
Software engineers make an easy target, since what they must product takes more time then all other segments of a project. But you have to ask youself: Why does it take so long?
The answer: When hardware engineers design a chip, whenever the come to a flaw in their design, instead of forcing a reexamination of the specification, they call it a feature and so the Software people have to work around that pothole. In addition, marketting wants a little more bang for the buck, so they want the software crew to slam in a new feature better done in hardware, but "oh, it can't wait for the next spin" Charlie wants it done in software now!
Needless to say, poor communication in the analysis phase, poor modelling in the design phase and poor execution in the coding phase (read: programming is designing while coding, instead of designing before coding), result in a Frankenstein monster with more features than a Japanese microwave and twice as many bugs.
If the managers could get off their cans an ensure these phases are followed AND supported, then the product would come out of the house rubust, usefull, and on-time (by realistic human standards).
NOTE: There are 1278 bridges in California alone, which have failed federal safety guidelines and are in need of urgent repair. Have you seen the way they have been building houses lately?
Grumble, grumble, grumble...
...now where is that coffee machine again?...
What about non-sagging breasts? Inter-cellular nanites which monitor and adjust the callogen content of breast tissue could be a rather interresting mod. The first sales guy who opens the door on that one will have foot prints all over him women firght over the product. Or am I wrong?
In response to a bunch of socialist crap
Give me a break! You socialists had your chance and you screwed it up, so quit whining. All we need is more bomb throwing fanatics on the street.
You name me one person who actually likes to sit in front of a sewing machine all day for 12 hours a day sewing blouses for some fashion designer in New York city along with the two thousand other slaves, and I buy your argument.
You sewage souled socialists killed more people in the last century than all of the crusades, holy wars, and barbarian raids combined.
Trotsky was a murderer, as were his followers!
What's this about making a virtue of slave labor by calling it honest labor? What in the world happend to the work ethic in socialist countries then? There aint none!
Give me a time and effort saving device that replaces the ratty slave labor sewn garments I buy at the chain stores any day of the week.
You want revolt: I find your opinion of technology revolting.
Why in the world didn't the guy rig up a camera so we could watch the poor sod in action as he tried to make off with his gravitationaly biased booty? I bet it would have been on the telly as one of those bloopers or the like.
Speaking of cruel tricks to play on burglers:
You know how alot of burglers go through the icebox looking for yummies before they scoot with the goods? Get a popular brand of ice cream, vanilla is best, and mix it with a handfull of urea crystals. Leave it in the icebox if you suspect a burgler or a nosy housemate. Make sure you get the whole thing on video.
Methinks Google needs to work on the ole translator. My LISP freng does a better job. Reading that bogon was like drinking silly putty through a straw.
Detention and arrest: same thing really. May have a different legal definition, but since lawyers aren't sentiant we can ignore the distinction.
If a police officer stops you and takes you into any form of custody; you are arrested whether it is declared or not (read the definition of false arrest) In order to arrest you he must of course detain you, for to arrest you without detaining you is sort of silly.
EVERYBODY start a napster service. They can't arrest everybody can they...
Oops. Maybe they can... After all they have before. Russia, China, Cambodia, Iraq,...
Rats! I thought I was onto something.
See guys, this is what happens when you fork over hard cash to support a government. Eventually they buy big guns and take away your tunes, not to mention everything else you hold dear.
Remember, the bully you hid from in elementary school, the one you got pounded on by in high school, went through the police acadamy and is standing outside your door, waiting to exercise his constitutional right to abridge your freedom.
A colony on the moon is less expensive than you think. You don't have to ship eveything to the moon (concrete, steel, Oxygen, etc). Comets and other phenomna have been smacking the moon nearly as long as they have been hitting the Earth. I am fairly certain, if you dug below the thermally dynamic surface layers, you would find material very similar to Earth rock. Embedded in that rock you would find silica and metals for structures, and CHON for life suport.
Sending automated factories to mine and fabricate materials on the moon would be the safest, and in the long run cheapest way to proceed. Unfortunately, autonomy is the problem; the machine would have to perform it's task under autonomous or teleoperated conditions for a long time, other machines would repair and maintain the equipment. As long as the devices weren't built with planned obsolescence designed in, you could have a fairly sizable base ob operations once the right minerals are located and exploited.
On the issue of gravity: If you fell off of the top floor of that hotel onto the crater floor, you would still make a respectable "SPLAT!". For one thing gravity may be one sixth, but without air to halt acceleration at terminal velocity, you would continue to accelerate and be going at quite a clip when you became one with the moon. Nobody really knows what gravitational acceleration is needed to maintain healthy bones and organs, if you are talking about spinning something on the surface, you might as well do it in orbit. It's pretty easy to get into orbit from the surface of the moon, since you don't have to push through miles of atmosphere.
Go to Las Vegas and ask for a tour of one of the huge hotels: They have to import everything to make one of those buildings run. It's like a small city.
Power generation could be from orbit. Since there is no atmosphere (actually there is some ionized sodium gas near the surface during the two week day) you could use a high power laser in orbit to pump one on the ground and use that laser in conjunction with thermocouples to generate power. Just don't fly throught the beam (bzzzzzt...)
Considering the huge amount of money we throw away everyday on trivialities, whats a few billion here or there to design and deploy the machines needed to start the job. Then you could retrain all those telemarketers to become teleoperators and solve two problems at once.
It doesn't look like it would fare to well against falling rocks. Imagine if you will: You sitting in the jacuzzi in the playboy suite, when you hear; crack, psssssssss.....
Safer to use cameras and fake the windows then use the real thing when you haven't any atmosphere to slow down suborbital debree.
This way you can build an enourmous hotel in a lava tube and give everyone the same incredible view. Or heck, you could reserve the better views for the highest paying customers.
Send back a brick. It weighs about the same. They probably don't even open the boxes. They probably just count 'em and crush 'em. The hardware MIGHT end up at a surplus place like HSC, but chances are, they are reclaiming them to account for depreciation, to satisfy auditors or other bean counters. Since they are most likely claimed by the company as capital equipment, such a deduction is some sort of possesion during the fiscal year. If they are resold, then the deduction is recaptured (bad move since the IRS will take ALL of the proceeds up to the amount depreciated), hence they are likely destroyed, which depreciates them 100%.
Realise though; the company doing the crushing is not going to like the brick much, since it isn't metal, and cannot be recycled!
Worse case, you will have to pay for the gateway AND the cost of shipping that brick! But, if you are actually using the gateway, you are probably getting some value out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunatly, history proves the intelligence threshhold for procreation is fairly low for humans, since we stopped shoving the dumb ones off cliffs. We are currently selecting for low IQ by shooting the smart ones. Then again, there were a few smart ones who got away...
Talk about not having something better to do. These guys would be beter off if I told them how it ends...
Skywalker dies...
At the hands of his son...
In another movie.
Now you can go home and take a bath.
It's just a dumb idea.
Sounds like just another touchy-feely idea from the left. Take criminal and give them skills to migrate to a different sort of crime.
Put them into the military instead. This way they learn discipline, get some training, and are seperated from the creeps who got them into crime in the first place. It's amazing how basic training can reorient an immature punk with a chip on his shoulder.
Either way they improve their act or get fragged on the first live-fire mission, and if they return to the 'hood, they do so with a stronger self-image than any amount of positech training will ever give them.
You know how the pusher gives you free sample of a controlled substance? You get addicted and the next thing the prices get real high, since you FEEL you can't do without.
There isn't a single technology in MS which isn't available elsewhere. The fools who geared their entire IT departments to rely on MS for development have only themselves to blame, since they took the free sample, and since their jobs now depend upon getting the stuff, MS will be happy to provide it at higher and higher const. Since the stuff is by all accounts "controlled", the developer is stuck in the nasty situation by a culture willing to settle for MS mediocrity.
Oh, well...
If you want the fancy IDE and the semi-useful library of interfaces to the OS, you can do one of two things; you can continue to pay an escalating rate or you can brew you own.
Warning: Just like the established pushers are the ones who call the authorities in when they get small time competition, you can count on MS to call in the authorities (via lawsuits, guerrila licensing, namebrand misdirection) anytime somebody tries to produce an OS and development system to compete with theirs. Think BeOS among others. Remember IBM produced a stable, resilient OS with all of the features of Windows 95 but made the mistake of licensing the technology to MS; Can you say OS2 Warp?
If you search the relevant documentation, studio betamax VCRs had an input shuttle feature which could do just that. VHS and betmax duked it out and the consumer was left with an inferior product.
Why not just have a machine with Windows on it to run the Windows stuff and a linux box to run the rest? Microsoft will just change the API the minute these folks get a foothold. Besides, WINE hasn't exactly been the fastest thing in the world either. I'm no supporter of Microsoft, but at the same time if you think a game running on MS's platform is worthwhile then just hold your nose and use it.
Machines are cheap, and the only thing I use my Windows machine for these days IS games. If I have to do anything real and important I just use my beowolf cluster of forty machines. You can't get a VCS compile of 2 million gates on a silly MS driven machine anyways, but you sure can play Diablo II (if you don't mind the crashes!).
GPS Drawing has to be the silliest thing going! Let's hope none of this stuff ends up in a gallery somewhere, it might actually become mainstream...
[looking for my GPS and interface cable. just in case.]
When I was in Switzerland in 1980 a VCR from Japan could pause live tv just fine. I know because my land lady had one and would pause the commercials. Video editors at studios can pause live input from various sources too, without nuch difficulty.
Actually, in California you can be. There you can be sued for just about anything. All it takes is a lawyer who is willing to take the case and a target with deep pockets. I've been sued a few times; every suit was deemed frivilous, but the judge let it go to trial anyways. If you get a jury who sympathises with the plaintif, (usually due to class envy tactics), then you can count on shelling out, though if you have lots of money do not under any circumstances let the judge decide (he's a lawyer too, and looks out after his brothers) Luckily I was able to defend myself since none of the cases were factually based (though that is no longer a criterion anymore either). Remember, the lawyer you retain probably golfs with the lawyer who is suing you, and they likely connived to drum up the mutual business anyways. One lawyer in town is hungry. Two in town are open for business.
I hope TiVo manages to defend itself, since VCR's have been able do the same function for years (though at a slower speed)
Sounds like prior art to me.
>> Most software is so bad, in fact, that if it were a bridge, no one in his or her right mind would walk across it.
>> If it were a house, we would be afraid to enter.
These lines have been so overused they are beginning to sound a tad trite. The fact remains, if the principles of engineering as applied to software, without the inadequacies of the development systems we get saddled with, software would be as robust as the bridge or the house.
It is poor management, insufficient development time, impatient customers, and crappy infrastructure which are to blame for a large number of the wrecks out there. I have met and worked with many talented engineers who are given the same sort of commands Scotty got on the Enterprise; "Make it happen yesterday!" is the motto of our time, instead of make it happen right.
Try just figuring out the exceptions to logic in the latest version of MSVC. Ad hoc operating systems aside, engineering anything usefull with the tools at hand can be quite an arduous and unnescessary adventure.
Software engineers make an easy target, since what they must product takes more time then all other segments of a project. But you have to ask youself: Why does it take so long?
The answer: When hardware engineers design a chip, whenever the come to a flaw in their design, instead of forcing a reexamination of the specification, they call it a feature and so the Software people have to work around that pothole. In addition, marketting wants a little more bang for the buck, so they want the software crew to slam in a new feature better done in hardware, but "oh, it can't wait for the next spin" Charlie wants it done in software now!
Needless to say, poor communication in the analysis phase, poor modelling in the design phase and poor execution in the coding phase (read: programming is designing while coding, instead of designing before coding), result in a Frankenstein monster with more features than a Japanese microwave and twice as many bugs.
If the managers could get off their cans an ensure these phases are followed AND supported, then the product would come out of the house rubust, usefull, and on-time (by realistic human standards).
NOTE: There are 1278 bridges in California alone, which have failed federal safety guidelines and are in need of urgent repair. Have you seen the way they have been building houses lately?
Grumble, grumble, grumble...
...now where is that coffee machine again?...
What about non-sagging breasts? Inter-cellular nanites which monitor and adjust the callogen content of breast tissue could be a rather interresting mod. The first sales guy who opens the door on that one will have foot prints all over him women firght over the product. Or am I wrong?
In response to a bunch of socialist crap Give me a break! You socialists had your chance and you screwed it up, so quit whining. All we need is more bomb throwing fanatics on the street.
You name me one person who actually likes to sit in front of a sewing machine all day for 12 hours a day sewing blouses for some fashion designer in New York city along with the two thousand other slaves, and I buy your argument.
You sewage souled socialists killed more people in the last century than all of the crusades, holy wars, and barbarian raids combined.
Trotsky was a murderer, as were his followers!
What's this about making a virtue of slave labor by calling it honest labor? What in the world happend to the work ethic in socialist countries then? There aint none!
Give me a time and effort saving device that replaces the ratty slave labor sewn garments I buy at the chain stores any day of the week.
You want revolt: I find your opinion of technology revolting.
err... I hope I didn't come on too strong
I think the word is "Sarcasm"
Why in the world didn't the guy rig up a camera so we could watch the poor sod in action as he tried to make off with his gravitationaly biased booty? I bet it would have been on the telly as one of those bloopers or the like. Speaking of cruel tricks to play on burglers: You know how alot of burglers go through the icebox looking for yummies before they scoot with the goods? Get a popular brand of ice cream, vanilla is best, and mix it with a handfull of urea crystals. Leave it in the icebox if you suspect a burgler or a nosy housemate. Make sure you get the whole thing on video.
Methinks Google needs to work on the ole translator. My LISP freng does a better job. Reading that bogon was like drinking silly putty through a straw.
Boat sorta looked like a windjammer on stilts.
Detention and arrest: same thing really. May have a different legal definition, but since lawyers aren't sentiant we can ignore the distinction.
If a police officer stops you and takes you into any form of custody; you are arrested whether it is declared or not (read the definition of false arrest) In order to arrest you he must of course detain you, for to arrest you without detaining you is sort of silly.
EVERYBODY start a napster service. They can't arrest everybody can they...
...
Oops. Maybe they can... After all they have before. Russia, China, Cambodia, Iraq,
Rats! I thought I was onto something.
See guys, this is what happens when you fork over hard cash to support a government. Eventually they buy big guns and take away your tunes, not to mention everything else you hold dear.
Remember, the bully you hid from in elementary school, the one you got pounded on by in high school, went through the police acadamy and is standing outside your door, waiting to exercise his constitutional right to abridge your freedom.
A colony on the moon is less expensive than you think. You don't have to ship eveything to the moon (concrete, steel, Oxygen, etc). Comets and other phenomna have been smacking the moon nearly as long as they have been hitting the Earth. I am fairly certain, if you dug below the thermally dynamic surface layers, you would find material very similar to Earth rock. Embedded in that rock you would find silica and metals for structures, and CHON for life suport.
Sending automated factories to mine and fabricate materials on the moon would be the safest, and in the long run cheapest way to proceed. Unfortunately, autonomy is the problem; the machine would have to perform it's task under autonomous or teleoperated conditions for a long time, other machines would repair and maintain the equipment. As long as the devices weren't built with planned obsolescence designed in, you could have a fairly sizable base ob operations once the right minerals are located and exploited.
On the issue of gravity: If you fell off of the top floor of that hotel onto the crater floor, you would still make a respectable "SPLAT!". For one thing gravity may be one sixth, but without air to halt acceleration at terminal velocity, you would continue to accelerate and be going at quite a clip when you became one with the moon. Nobody really knows what gravitational acceleration is needed to maintain healthy bones and organs, if you are talking about spinning something on the surface, you might as well do it in orbit. It's pretty easy to get into orbit from the surface of the moon, since you don't have to push through miles of atmosphere.
Go to Las Vegas and ask for a tour of one of the huge hotels: They have to import everything to make one of those buildings run. It's like a small city.
Power generation could be from orbit. Since there is no atmosphere (actually there is some ionized sodium gas near the surface during the two week day) you could use a high power laser in orbit to pump one on the ground and use that laser in conjunction with thermocouples to generate power. Just don't fly throught the beam (bzzzzzt...)
Considering the huge amount of money we throw away everyday on trivialities, whats a few billion here or there to design and deploy the machines needed to start the job. Then you could retrain all those telemarketers to become teleoperators and solve two problems at once.
It doesn't look like it would fare to well against falling rocks. Imagine if you will: You sitting in the jacuzzi in the playboy suite, when you hear; crack, psssssssss.....
Safer to use cameras and fake the windows then use the real thing when you haven't any atmosphere to slow down suborbital debree.
This way you can build an enourmous hotel in a lava tube and give everyone the same incredible view. Or heck, you could reserve the better views for the highest paying customers.
Send back a brick. It weighs about the same. They probably don't even open the boxes. They probably just count 'em and crush 'em. The hardware MIGHT end up at a surplus place like HSC, but chances are, they are reclaiming them to account for depreciation, to satisfy auditors or other bean counters. Since they are most likely claimed by the company as capital equipment, such a deduction is some sort of possesion during the fiscal year. If they are resold, then the deduction is recaptured (bad move since the IRS will take ALL of the proceeds up to the amount depreciated), hence they are likely destroyed, which depreciates them 100%. Realise though; the company doing the crushing is not going to like the brick much, since it isn't metal, and cannot be recycled! Worse case, you will have to pay for the gateway AND the cost of shipping that brick! But, if you are actually using the gateway, you are probably getting some value out of it.