But what is it about this that is supposed to look like Apple's TiBook? I mean, they both look like laptops. I guess they both have a screen and keyboard in common. And a trackpad in approximately the same spot. They both have metal cases (of different materials). Other than that, they look completely different.
Are you Apple people so desperate that you have to take credit for everything no matter how far the stretch?
And the rollerbladers are evil, not because they are generating waste, but because they're a "distraction". A pedestrian might walk into an open manhole because they were too distracted by the butterfly men.
Sheesh, man, you're really digging deep trying to find something wrong with this. By that logic, you could get sued because you distracted someone by picking your nose.
As far as open manhole covers go, it's the city that would get sued under ANY circumstances. It's not like they normally leave ones lying open without any sort of fencing or another worker directing people around it.
I'd just prefer to wear something that retains some small shred of individuality.
On the other hand, if you have to depend on dress for people to percieve your individuality, there's probably something wrong.
As an aside, I love Ralph Lauren (Polo) clothes. They're incredibly well-made, durable, fit great and look great. Expensive, yes, but this is one of those things you get what you pay for. I'd rather have quality than "individuality".
To be honest with you, other than perhaps understanding the regular expression, what's so difficult about it?
The <%perl> section is perl code. Two variable assignments. @time is an array with the elements of the current time. <% %> encloses an expression, which is inserted into the HTML. % in the first column is Perl code, which compares the third element of the time array (which is the hour) to 12. The 'if' statement encloses two pieces of HTML.
I use Mason and Perl every day, and I'm not sure where the confusion is. Is it just you don't understand Perl, or that you haven't used mixing a programming language with HTML? If the latter, I have to tell you that this is the ONLY way to go when you have complex web pages.
Aside: the regular expression is actually kind of stupid, because you can just do "my @time = localtime" and the third element is the hour.
I am curious to know exactly how you would support these "hundreds of billions" of people, and at what subsistence level?
Come on, is this really so difficult? I'm saying hundreds of billions -- at US economic levels.
Remember that this doesn't happen all at once. It's a gradual progression with problems and solutions happening during the process.
Some of the shit will get turned into fertilizer, but obviously not all of it. But let's remember it's just organic waste. It's not like we can't build giant septic tanks to recycle it into the ground.
where will you get the freshwater to irrigate the crops to feed the people and animals?
The world has plenty of water; some of it is just more expensive to purify than other sources.
Will it be more expensive to maintain 100s of billions than the current population? Undoubtably, but I have yet to hear a problem that wouldn't have a solution.
the frauds of Enron, WorldCom, ArthurAnderson, and the coming bailouts of JP Morgan and Chase, I keep wondering when we'll have some capitalism here in the USA.
You have it exactly backwards. The frauds are evidence of THE SYSTEM WORKING. What it looks like when the system is NOT working is companies committing fraud year after year in partnership with the government, and nothing ever changes until the big collapse (*cough*Japan*cough*).
You can never eliminate fraud from either the private or public sectors. The only question is whether the system is self-correcting, and the US/Capitalism has proven over time that the system corrects itself. Not always as quickly as we would like, and there are certainly examples of corruption that don't seem to ever go away (pork attachments to bills come to mind), but overall the system works a lot better than anything else ever invented.
We aren't supporting the approx. 7 billion we have now. Or maybe you haven't heard of the worlds woes.
The problems of the world are political. The problem is not lack of resources, or even unequal distribution of resources, it's because of unequal distribution of Capitalism.
Hopfully economics will kick in at a sane rate to slow down the population explosion.
Economics is only indirectly responsible. Look at the birth rates in modern societies. It's almost always at or below replacement levels. When a society gets to a certain level of sophistication, the age of having children rises, and the number of children tends to fall. I can't find the study, but I've read a number of them that usually conclude that world population will stabilize somewhere between 2050 and 2100.
Does the fact that I know far, far more about the historical and modern use of the land in Nevada make me a whacko?
No, but you fall into the same trap of assuming static technology levels.
Where will all the extra water to irrigate those parts of the Mojave desert that aren't currently irrigated come from?
Ever hear of pipes? Build a giant de-sal plant at the ocean and pipe it to Nevada. Or pipe it down from Washington state. If we wanted to turn Nevada into a giant farm, it would be expensive, but doable.
But to state "there are no limits" is to state nonsense.
Sorry, but it's the truth. Every time the gloom and doomers state that the sky is falling, new technology comes along that proves them wrong. And then they say, "well, but what if that solution hadn't come along!!", which of course misses the simple point that necessity breeds invention.
And people wonder why environmentalists come under attack. It's bullshit reports like this that make absolutely no sense and assume a static technology level.
First of all, drive through Nevada some time. Mile after mile of empty space, but according to this report, humans have "appropriated" it. Technically, I'm sure they're right in the sense that someone owns it, but it's not as if the land is being used for anything.
Another thing that's stupid is that they claim that 98% of the land that can grow crops have been farmed. That is just ludicrous, and reminds me of the other wackos that claim that it would take 8 Earths or whatever to support everyone at the level of the US. There are numerous technological solutions to creating more farmland. Sheesh, how about irrigating the desert? How about huge multi-level greenhouses built in the middle of nowhere?
Sure, that would be more expensive than what we're doing now, but so what? The point is that very few resources are actually limited. Technology almost always fills whatever needs arise.
We'll stabilize population way before then, but this planet could support hundreds of billions of people.
Sure, some artists are better than others and still won't receive the credit they deserve because the Internet is so massive that equal opportunity exposure is impossible [...], but that doesn't make what I said previously "idiotic". The record companies' utility has expired, or it is at least winding down.
OK, maybe not idiotic, just wrong.:)
You contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. On the one hand you say that "equal opportunity exposure is impossible". Then you go on to say that a business that help artists achieve exposure are obsolete! That's the primary business of the record companies: promotion and exposure. Sure, manufacturing and distribution is big part, too, but the reason someone signs with a record company is for the promotion.
The Internet helps bypass the record industry with distribution and manufacturing to some extent, but it does very little in promoting.
Record companies were to provide a means for exposure; now that the Internet provides near-universal exposure at comparatively no cost, the record companies' utility has expired.
That's just idiotic. In fact it's the opposite -- because every idiot who owns a guitar can put up a web site, the good bands are drowned by even more noise that we've seen in the past.
I'm sure there are innumerable good bands who put up a web site expecting the flood of CD orders to come charging in -- and then are bitterly disappointed when people don't magically show up.
The fact is, good musicians just aren't that rare. The ones that become extremely popular happen because of combination of luck -- and promotion. The way to get noticed is still to play local clubs hoping that you get good word of mouth. And if that happens, hope that a national promoter (duh) promotes you nationally. Just opening a web site and hoping is not going to cut it.
Or to put it another way, somehow you have to rise above the noise. What makes you unique by just putting up a web site? And even if you did become as popular as a big group, exactly how are you going to produce those million CDs? Can you say "record distributor deal"?
[P.S. This is my 2500th comment on this account. That's not including the 400+ on my old account, though, or miscellaneous A/C posts. And yes, I manage to distribute my wisdom while still having a life! Boy it's great to be me.:)]
No, not in "other" words, but in YOUR words as a devotee of slime.
Yes, in my words -- but also the truth.
Let's review: I post a logical statement stating why Palladium cannot be what the paranoids think it will be. Your response was not to point out any flaws in my logic, but simply to lecture me on their history.
So you tell me how my words don't fit your attitude.
Microsoftheads: explain how you can ignore a decade of news articles, court records, and outrageous lies to such a degree that you are incapable of not feeding from the hand of your enemy?
In other words, your logic is "I hate Microsoft so much that I'll believe ANY conspiracy theory no matter how outlandish and illogical, without applying any thought or reasoning."
How is Microsoft supposed to roll this out? How EXACTLY are they supposed to take over the world such that ONLY signed code can run, and maintain backward compatibility?
No backward compatibility, no sales.
Once again it has to be pointed out: Microsoft is in business to sell operating systems and software, not to take over the world.
Palladium will ALWAYS be able to run unsigned code. There's no other way it can happen.
"Soon"? Considering that they haven't even finished deciding the features and changes of Perl 6, I think it's safe to say that a release version is at least a few years off, with 50% adoption being another three years plus after that.
Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI.
I don't necessarily mean to knock the resarch itself, it's really the name that is WAY overreaching at this point. If you're going to research artificial intelligence, then dammit, I want Artificial HUMAN intelligence.
Now, to be fair, that was the original goal, and still is to *some* extent, but the vast majority of it has no bearing on understanding human intelligence and self-awareness.
Take chess -- everyone acknowledges that chess playing computers do NOT do it the same way that humans do it. It's just a bigger version of a tic-tac-toe program. Just because you have a bigger computer doesn't mean you have a smarter computer.
which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.
Which I approve of. I think we really need to confine AI research to actual intelligence and self-awareness research.
And I suppose you have some alternative theory that explains it as well?
I don't have to have an alternative theory to know that everything we call "AI" are just fancy algorithms and have no relation to human intelligence and self-awareness (whatever the latter means).
As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.
On the contrary, at least for me: I've never thought any of this was AI. As far as I'm concerned, there is no "science" of AI at this point. We're at the equivalent level of the greeks thinking physics consisted of the four elements of fire, water, earth and sky.
Maybe you should learn some economics before spouting off. Prices don't go down because a company wants to do you a favor, prices go down in response to competition. Less manufacturing cost == more room to reduce prices to undercut the competition.
If you haven't noticed, there has been a price war for several years. Or haven't you noticed that a 100 gig drive for $200 is insanely cheap?
I don't know what you are paying in electricity there in CA,
I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, but my last month's bill was $422 for 1,967 kWh. That should go way down now that it's cooling off, but I'm sure that no more than $100 is A/C. I *really* should care more about getting it down, but I bought the house about 1.5 years ago as a fixer upper, and there have been much larger fish to fry every weekend.:)
in fact, what might be easiest (but make sure you have surge protectors for computers and electronics) is to simply turn off the breakers.
I've done some of this, but to be honest I can't really say that I've gone to that much trouble at this point. Also, my breaker box is completely insane with circuits going all over the house. Too many past "homeowner jobs".
If you turn it off, the house heats up (or cools down in winter), and it takes that much more energy to bring the air, and EVERYTHING ELSE in the house, including the walls, back down to the proper temperature.
This is interesting... you think it takes less overall energy to maintain the temperature through an entire day, rather than turn it completely off during the day and then bring it down in the evening? I would have thought the opposite. Obviously, at some point it must make sense to turn it off (keeping it off for a month, for example).
Anyway, the A/C obviously sucks power like it's going out of style, but even when I don't run the A/C the power level just seems way too high. I have my suspicians that it might be my pool's pump motor.
But overall, you're right. You can tell a lot through the use of the circuit breakers and some investigative work, but I've been too busy/lazy/childrened to track it down.:)
I should also mention that I live in California where power rates are beyond out of control.
Slashdot Mirror
I was ridiculing the argument that the butterfly men were Evil, simply because they posed a distraction.
Sorry, I think I misread your post. It's a little ambiguous there in the middle. :)
But what is it about this that is supposed to look like Apple's TiBook? I mean, they both look like laptops. I guess they both have a screen and keyboard in common. And a trackpad in approximately the same spot. They both have metal cases (of different materials). Other than that, they look completely different.
Are you Apple people so desperate that you have to take credit for everything no matter how far the stretch?
And the rollerbladers are evil, not because they are generating waste, but because they're a "distraction". A pedestrian might walk into an open manhole because they were too distracted by the butterfly men.
Sheesh, man, you're really digging deep trying to find something wrong with this. By that logic, you could get sued because you distracted someone by picking your nose.
As far as open manhole covers go, it's the city that would get sued under ANY circumstances. It's not like they normally leave ones lying open without any sort of fencing or another worker directing people around it.
I'd just prefer to wear something that retains some small shred of individuality.
On the other hand, if you have to depend on dress for people to percieve your individuality, there's probably something wrong.
As an aside, I love Ralph Lauren (Polo) clothes. They're incredibly well-made, durable, fit great and look great. Expensive, yes, but this is one of those things you get what you pay for. I'd rather have quality than "individuality".
To be honest with you, other than perhaps understanding the regular expression, what's so difficult about it?
The <%perl> section is perl code. Two variable assignments. @time is an array with the elements of the current time. <% %> encloses an expression, which is inserted into the HTML. % in the first column is Perl code, which compares the third element of the time array (which is the hour) to 12. The 'if' statement encloses two pieces of HTML.
I use Mason and Perl every day, and I'm not sure where the confusion is. Is it just you don't understand Perl, or that you haven't used mixing a programming language with HTML? If the latter, I have to tell you that this is the ONLY way to go when you have complex web pages.
Aside: the regular expression is actually kind of stupid, because you can just do "my @time = localtime" and the third element is the hour.
I am curious to know exactly how you would support these "hundreds of billions" of people, and at what subsistence level?
Come on, is this really so difficult? I'm saying hundreds of billions -- at US economic levels.
Remember that this doesn't happen all at once. It's a gradual progression with problems and solutions happening during the process.
Some of the shit will get turned into fertilizer, but obviously not all of it. But let's remember it's just organic waste. It's not like we can't build giant septic tanks to recycle it into the ground.
where will you get the freshwater to irrigate the crops to feed the people and animals?
The world has plenty of water; some of it is just more expensive to purify than other sources.
Will it be more expensive to maintain 100s of billions than the current population? Undoubtably, but I have yet to hear a problem that wouldn't have a solution.
the frauds of Enron, WorldCom, ArthurAnderson, and the coming bailouts of JP Morgan and Chase, I keep wondering when we'll have some capitalism here in the USA.
You have it exactly backwards. The frauds are evidence of THE SYSTEM WORKING. What it looks like when the system is NOT working is companies committing fraud year after year in partnership with the government, and nothing ever changes until the big collapse (*cough*Japan*cough*).
You can never eliminate fraud from either the private or public sectors. The only question is whether the system is self-correcting, and the US/Capitalism has proven over time that the system corrects itself. Not always as quickly as we would like, and there are certainly examples of corruption that don't seem to ever go away (pork attachments to bills come to mind), but overall the system works a lot better than anything else ever invented.
We aren't supporting the approx. 7 billion we have now. Or maybe you haven't heard of the worlds woes.
The problems of the world are political. The problem is not lack of resources, or even unequal distribution of resources, it's because of unequal distribution of Capitalism.
Hopfully economics will kick in at a sane rate to slow down the population explosion.
Economics is only indirectly responsible. Look at the birth rates in modern societies. It's almost always at or below replacement levels. When a society gets to a certain level of sophistication, the age of having children rises, and the number of children tends to fall. I can't find the study, but I've read a number of them that usually conclude that world population will stabilize somewhere between 2050 and 2100.
Does the fact that I know far, far more about the historical and modern use of the land in Nevada make me a whacko?
No, but you fall into the same trap of assuming static technology levels.
Where will all the extra water to irrigate those parts of the Mojave desert that aren't currently irrigated come from?
Ever hear of pipes? Build a giant de-sal plant at the ocean and pipe it to Nevada. Or pipe it down from Washington state. If we wanted to turn Nevada into a giant farm, it would be expensive, but doable.
But to state "there are no limits" is to state nonsense.
Sorry, but it's the truth. Every time the gloom and doomers state that the sky is falling, new technology comes along that proves them wrong. And then they say, "well, but what if that solution hadn't come along!!", which of course misses the simple point that necessity breeds invention.
And people wonder why environmentalists come under attack. It's bullshit reports like this that make absolutely no sense and assume a static technology level.
First of all, drive through Nevada some time. Mile after mile of empty space, but according to this report, humans have "appropriated" it. Technically, I'm sure they're right in the sense that someone owns it, but it's not as if the land is being used for anything.
Another thing that's stupid is that they claim that 98% of the land that can grow crops have been farmed. That is just ludicrous, and reminds me of the other wackos that claim that it would take 8 Earths or whatever to support everyone at the level of the US. There are numerous technological solutions to creating more farmland. Sheesh, how about irrigating the desert? How about huge multi-level greenhouses built in the middle of nowhere?
Sure, that would be more expensive than what we're doing now, but so what? The point is that very few resources are actually limited. Technology almost always fills whatever needs arise.
We'll stabilize population way before then, but this planet could support hundreds of billions of people.
The first true breakthrough in pen technology in 200 years
Er, the ball-point pen invented in 1938 wasn't a "true" breakthrough?
Yeah, I've always thought that ball-point pens were overrated. Fountain pens forever, baby!
Archimedes invented the screw pump while taking a bath
Actually, it's a bit more logical than that. He discovered the principal of displacement while taking a bath.
I'm not exactly sure how one would think of "screw pumps" while in the bath. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
Sure, some artists are better than others and still won't receive the credit they deserve because the Internet is so massive that equal opportunity exposure is impossible [...], but that doesn't make what I said previously "idiotic". The record companies' utility has expired, or it is at least winding down.
OK, maybe not idiotic, just wrong. :)
You contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. On the one hand you say that "equal opportunity exposure is impossible". Then you go on to say that a business that help artists achieve exposure are obsolete! That's the primary business of the record companies: promotion and exposure. Sure, manufacturing and distribution is big part, too, but the reason someone signs with a record company is for the promotion.
The Internet helps bypass the record industry with distribution and manufacturing to some extent, but it does very little in promoting.
Record companies were to provide a means for exposure; now that the Internet provides near-universal exposure at comparatively no cost, the record companies' utility has expired.
That's just idiotic. In fact it's the opposite -- because every idiot who owns a guitar can put up a web site, the good bands are drowned by even more noise that we've seen in the past.
I'm sure there are innumerable good bands who put up a web site expecting the flood of CD orders to come charging in -- and then are bitterly disappointed when people don't magically show up.
The fact is, good musicians just aren't that rare. The ones that become extremely popular happen because of combination of luck -- and promotion. The way to get noticed is still to play local clubs hoping that you get good word of mouth. And if that happens, hope that a national promoter (duh) promotes you nationally. Just opening a web site and hoping is not going to cut it.
Or to put it another way, somehow you have to rise above the noise. What makes you unique by just putting up a web site? And even if you did become as popular as a big group, exactly how are you going to produce those million CDs? Can you say "record distributor deal"?
[P.S. This is my 2500th comment on this account. That's not including the 400+ on my old account, though, or miscellaneous A/C posts. And yes, I manage to distribute my wisdom while still having a life! Boy it's great to be me. :)]
No, not in "other" words, but in YOUR words as a devotee of slime.
Yes, in my words -- but also the truth.
Let's review: I post a logical statement stating why Palladium cannot be what the paranoids think it will be. Your response was not to point out any flaws in my logic, but simply to lecture me on their history.
So you tell me how my words don't fit your attitude.
Microsoftheads: explain how you can ignore a decade of news articles, court records, and outrageous lies to such a degree that you are incapable of not feeding from the hand of your enemy?
In other words, your logic is "I hate Microsoft so much that I'll believe ANY conspiracy theory no matter how outlandish and illogical, without applying any thought or reasoning."
The same question that I have in my sig:
How is Microsoft supposed to roll this out? How EXACTLY are they supposed to take over the world such that ONLY signed code can run, and maintain backward compatibility?
No backward compatibility, no sales.
Once again it has to be pointed out: Microsoft is in business to sell operating systems and software, not to take over the world.
Palladium will ALWAYS be able to run unsigned code. There's no other way it can happen.
Isn't Perl 6 coming out soon?
"Soon"? Considering that they haven't even finished deciding the features and changes of Perl 6, I think it's safe to say that a release version is at least a few years off, with 50% adoption being another three years plus after that.
Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI.
I don't necessarily mean to knock the resarch itself, it's really the name that is WAY overreaching at this point. If you're going to research artificial intelligence, then dammit, I want Artificial HUMAN intelligence.
Now, to be fair, that was the original goal, and still is to *some* extent, but the vast majority of it has no bearing on understanding human intelligence and self-awareness.
Take chess -- everyone acknowledges that chess playing computers do NOT do it the same way that humans do it. It's just a bigger version of a tic-tac-toe program. Just because you have a bigger computer doesn't mean you have a smarter computer.
which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.
Which I approve of. I think we really need to confine AI research to actual intelligence and self-awareness research.
And I suppose you have some alternative theory that explains it as well?
I don't have to have an alternative theory to know that everything we call "AI" are just fancy algorithms and have no relation to human intelligence and self-awareness (whatever the latter means).
As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.
On the contrary, at least for me: I've never thought any of this was AI. As far as I'm concerned, there is no "science" of AI at this point. We're at the equivalent level of the greeks thinking physics consisted of the four elements of fire, water, earth and sky.
Sheesh, good riddance. Bad moderators are annoying, but whiners are far worse.
I twenty-second the motion: get a life.
Here's a free clue: IT'S NOT THAT IMPORTANT THAT PEOPLE READ WHAT YOU WRITE. Get over yourself.
Maybe you should learn some economics before spouting off. Prices don't go down because a company wants to do you a favor, prices go down in response to competition. Less manufacturing cost == more room to reduce prices to undercut the competition.
If you haven't noticed, there has been a price war for several years. Or haven't you noticed that a 100 gig drive for $200 is insanely cheap?
I don't know what you are paying in electricity there in CA,
I'm almost embarrassed to tell you, but my last month's bill was $422 for 1,967 kWh. That should go way down now that it's cooling off, but I'm sure that no more than $100 is A/C. I *really* should care more about getting it down, but I bought the house about 1.5 years ago as a fixer upper, and there have been much larger fish to fry every weekend. :)
in fact, what might be easiest (but make sure you have surge protectors for computers and electronics) is to simply turn off the breakers.
I've done some of this, but to be honest I can't really say that I've gone to that much trouble at this point. Also, my breaker box is completely insane with circuits going all over the house. Too many past "homeowner jobs".
If you turn it off, the house heats up (or cools down in winter), and it takes that much more energy to bring the air, and EVERYTHING ELSE in the house, including the walls, back down to the proper temperature.
This is interesting... you think it takes less overall energy to maintain the temperature through an entire day, rather than turn it completely off during the day and then bring it down in the evening? I would have thought the opposite. Obviously, at some point it must make sense to turn it off (keeping it off for a month, for example).
Anyway, the A/C obviously sucks power like it's going out of style, but even when I don't run the A/C the power level just seems way too high. I have my suspicians that it might be my pool's pump motor.
But overall, you're right. You can tell a lot through the use of the circuit breakers and some investigative work, but I've been too busy/lazy/childrened to track it down. :)
I should also mention that I live in California where power rates are beyond out of control.