Y'know, keeping the English-speaking tech geeks of the world amused/informed all day long is a big job, and the people making it happen behind the scenes are human. I can imagine the nightshift guy, bleary-eyed, handing off the baton to the early shift guy, bleary-eyed, both in need of more caffeine or sleep. They all work really hard to serve us, most of whom don't pay to read this content.
Once in a while, they slip up. The other 364 days of the year, their work is seamless. So instead of giving them a hard time for the once in a blue moon that they make a mistake or dupe an article, why don't we try, for once, to congratulate them for the excellent work they do, and try to be understanding when the human factor kicks in once in a while.
What if Frodo Baggins, instead of confronting the evil empire in "The Lord of the Rings," just got himself a lawyer and sued?
Hmm, who would have been cast?
Frodo: Joe Pesci Sam: Chris Farley Merry: Adam Sandler Pippin: Ben Stiller Gimli: The Pat character from SNL Legolas: Calista Flockheart (Ally McBeal) Gandalf: Jack Nicholson Aragorn: Antonio Banderas Boromir: Ahnold
Elrond: Christopher Walken Saruman: Crispin Glover Arwyn: never happen, because this was a hokey non-character to begin with...
On the one hand, Newline is MPAA and pulling this kind of stunt is just what you'd expect from them. On the other hand, they did bet the farm on Peter Jackson, and they were the ones who tossed out his original all-in-one movie and said, "let's make a three-parter." I think we all agree that was a blessed moment.
Please don't spread this meme anymore: "I'm powerless so there's no reason to even try." Boy, it's so untrue I can't even begin to tell you.
I started a grassroots political organization last year that has elected officials all over NYC either cheering or running scared; we came to within 18 votes in November of ousting this neo-con state senator in Yonkers/Westchester. A couple weeks ago he was the main obstacle to a bill in Albany that would allow women to buy emergency contraception (day-after pills) over-the-counter in case of rape/incest/etc. It's not a main issue for my organization, but when he heard that we were considering sending volunteers to his district to hand out flyers to his constituents, he not only dropped his opposition but actually sponsored an identical bill that was passed.
And that's just one thing we've managed to do, sometimes with hundreds of volunteers, other times with just a handful of 3 or 4 people, sometimes just one person.
See? I've made a difference, and so can you.
The truth is, most Americans spend an average of 4 hours a day watching TV. You could do a lot to save your country in those 4 hours. And none of the things you could do would take much more thought or energy than reading a book or writing a letter or picking up the phone. Saving democracy is not aerobics.
I think/. should form a PAC, or rather, a non-PAC 527 to put more pressure on Congress on these sorts of issues. EFF is great and all, but that's giving money so they can file lawsuits and write endless emails that go nowhere and do nothing. One person physically showing up at a congressperson's district office or flyering counts for 10,000 emails or letters.
Slashdot could mobilize that kind of pressure, EFF can't.
I agree with this. If you don't have the guts to get out there and canvass for a candidate, stand watch at a poll on election day, or heck, even hand out flyers on a sidewalk, then how on god's green earth do you think you'll have the steel to face down riot police, or worse, troops with fixed bayonets and itchy trigger fingers?
Oh, wait, no I get it: democracy and revolution are for other people to take care of while people who call for this comfortably watch Battlestar Galactica re-runs and wonder why the world is going to hell outside.
I've been thinking about this ever since they did that experiment in Switzerland where they sent one half of a quantumly-entangled pair to the other side of Geneva via fiber optic cable. They pinged one half with lasers, and determined through precise measurement that the information was instantaneous and faster than the speed of light.
At the same time I read about the experiment, apart from dreams of ansibles, I thought, hey, there's no way in hell for any third party to eavesdrop on two quantumly entangled particles.
Also in the news was Napster and Freenet, and I wondered if a person couldn't build an Internet using quantum entangled pairs that is totally immune from government intrusion.
Is that the best thing they can find to protest? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! Lemme see, you could, say, talk about the broad and concerted assault on the middle class through Bush's Retirement Roulette scheme, or the nuclear option Congress is practicing on American workers by rewarding outsourcing, or the elimination of personal bankruptcy protections that only hurt anyone not wealthy enough to field a team of lawyers, or the changes to Federal Student Loan guidelines that will double the cost for poorer students' families, or nominating federal judges who equate non-neo-cons with slavers. Heck, you could possibly even talk about a quagmire that never needed to happen, that was sold to the American public on a pack of lies, and that is now grounding down our army, grinding up our treasury, and, incidentally, killing American soldiers and lots and lots of hapless Iraqis.
THIS is what these people choose to spend their time doing?
Starting a grassroots political organization is easy. All you have to do is find a couple of friends/neighbors/colleagues who are as pissed off as you are, get together, and get down to business. Two years ago, reading Slashdot about the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA, about the gov letting MS off the hook, and everything else made my blood boil. And I kept asking, why isn't anyone doing anything about this?
Then, one night at a Slashdot meetup here in NYC, I said to myself, dammit, if nobody else is going to do something about it, then I will. So I put down the PERL books and started blogging and reading what's out there on the net. In no time at all I connected with four other like-minded folks and built an organization from the ground up. We decided to call ourselves New Democratic Majority (www.newdemmajority.org), and tucked into state, congressional and the presidential campaigns. We built a website using drupal (which has outgrown its usefulness and we're working on a redesign now). That plus meetup.com's functionality was all we needed, and away we went.
I'll be honest, this has been by far the most challenging thing I've ever done. I'm an introverted geek by nature, and working with the complexities of the human animal has stretched my brain to the limit. But I'm on the other side of that learning curve now, and being able to help people and create real change has brought me more satisfaction than the first "Hello, World!" program I ever wrote.
But people ask us how to do what we've done all the time, so our media, design, and political team people have put together a New Democratic Majority chapter kit that has sample collateral, logos, Best Practices, and other useful material to help others shorten the learning curve. If you're interested, we can send you one. Just send me a message through my/. ID.
But no matter what you do, do something. You'll be amazed how quickly a smart, motivated individual can begin to change the world. There's not space enough to tell you all the amazing grassroots folks I've met who've single-handedly changed laws, replaced rotten politicians with great candidates, and have transformed the lives of others. And, by the way, all of them did it while holding down day jobs. Good luck, and good hunting!
I didn't want anyone to think I was shilling. But it's New Democratic Majority, www.newdemmajority.org.
If you're in New York, you're welcome to join us this Monday, June 13th at the New Tank on 208 West 37th Street, between 9th and 10th Ave.s in Midtown. We're going to have City Councilwoman Tish James, Rev. Clinton Miller from Brown Baptist Memorial Church, and Chris Owens, candidate for congress there to talk about the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project and smart development. We're also going to talk about what we're doing for city races (mayor's, public advocate, etc.).
Absolutely! The popular wisdom is that you can't do anything about what the government is doing unless you have millions or billions of dollars. That simply isn't true, and I'll tell you why: our elected officials have become such an insular, professional class that average citizens have no idea how to get them to listen. And the electeds like it that way, because it means they don't have to do much work, and everyone just goes along like sheep as long as they mouth certain platitudes like trained seals.
But even just a literal handful of people can rock their world, and compel them to pay attention. Take the example of the five women who were 9/11 widows, who forced the government to undertake a full investigation of what happened. The 9/11 commission was formed as a result. Or take my experience here in New York City. We were pushing our state legislators to change the rules in the Assembly to require lawmakers to be present to cast their vote (used to be that nobody would show up, and their absence would be recorded as a 'yes' vote--talk about a rubber stamp!). An Assemblywoman named Deborah Glick from the East Village refused to back the reforms. Then we turned out 6 people to flyer in her district. Her office got hundreds of angry calls from her constituents, and she was forced to vote for the reforms.
So tell me, you don't know 5 people you could band together with to push for change? In a country where no one gets involved in governance, you the individual can have an incredibly out-sized effect. Get together with 5 of your buddies, call yourself the "Sacramento Citizens' Action Committee" or whatever, march into your congressman's office, and demand answers. If you can get a journalist from the Podunk Times (local papers are always desperate for juicy copy) to go with you, you are virtually guaranteed to get what you want.
Guys, it's so, so easy to get results in this country. It's literally a phone call or office visit away. Stop telling yourselves you're powerless, and get out there! The country literally won't survive if you don't.
There are a great many who do care, and we have been fighting for quite some time now. I used to read stuff like this on Slashdot, get all worked up, post, then do nothing and wonder why I felt so dissatisfied. Then I realized that no one else was doing anything about it, dammit, so I had to. I started a grassroots political organization here in New York that has swelled to 15,000 people.
Last election cycle we took back three state senate seats from the neo-cons, and fought really hard on two others, getting the one to within 8% of victory and the other to within a mere 18 votes! That puts us 4 seats out from regaining a majority in state senate, and in turning back the neo-con tide here in New York. We also fought really hard to remove a Bush rubber stamp Congressman called Vito Fossella from the district in Staten Island. Got our guy to within 8% again, but because of our efforts the party is now going to focus money and support on that race in 2006.
Right now we're working on NYC races for mayor, etc., but really planning for the mid-term elections in 2006. We're 15 seats out from recapturing the House of Representatives, people. What does that mean? The ability to launch congressional investigations into Cheney's deals with Big Oil, who leaked Valery Plame's name to the press, the Downing Street memo that confirmed that Bush lied to the American public to get them to invade Iraq, etc., etc. It means we can impeach, imprison (at Guantanamo!), and expunge this blight from our country and world.
So get out there and help! The neo-cons are petrified of the idea that Americans will wake up and start fighting back. It doesn't matter where you are in the country, fight back. We vastly outnumber them.
Of course there's manipulation going on all the time. For example, here in New York the subways suddenly started having all kinds of structural problems, delays, fires in electrical conduits, etc. The service has gone down dramatically. Then lo and behold the MTA announces that either the state OK's another rate hike in two years or they simply won't be able to maintain the integrity of the system. And now people are nodding their heads, gee they must be right. Hmm, methinks I smell a rat.
And yes, companies do hire PR firms to tell the sheeple what to think and do. And it works. But on the other hand, without PR small startups and organizations and movements couldn't get started--it's simply way, way too expensive to access the communication channels the way the Fortune 500 do.
My friends, those who hope for purity in information as passive consumers are living in a fool's paradise. Information and discourse are fought over as fiercely as anything in this world. If you're not prepared to fight to be heard, then my advice is go be a hermit in Kamchatka.
Here in New York, driving an obnoxiously loud Harley down the street is risking your life, because pedestrians, residents, and everyone else can barely restrain themselves from hauling you off the bike and bludgeoning you to death with your own mufflers. Imagine that instead of a Harley, you had a loud turboprop coming and going morning and night. Then imagine thousands of them coming and going all the time. Only the deaf would survive.
I have always wanted to be able to blind security cameras somehow. Would pointing a laser at them do anything like burn out the receptors, or at least dazzle them for a time? Anyone know?
Else, we'll have to wait until they invent inviso-cloaks.
As a layman here, wouldn't quantum computers completely trump any optical computer? Why not pile on with efforts on quantum computing if it's the ultimate solution?
Yes, but all the things you list as benefits (excluding gun ownership), New York already has and better. You can get a meal/cultural experience/sporting event/what-have-you at your average venue in NYC that you could only, maybe, get at the finest and most expensive establishment in your entire state.
True, you can get a bigger house, but to do what, sit around and watch TV? Or maybe it's to store the mass quantities of consumer goods that you acquire from high-end places like Walmart? New York apartments might be a touch on the small side, but on the other hand I'm a 30-second walk away from the corner grocery store, and a 15-minute bus/subway ride away from cultural institutions (considered 3rd-string in NYC) that would still blow the Texas philharmonic (if there even is such a thing) out of the water. In short, anything you could possibly want, anytime of the day you might be awake, in whatever crazy combination you want, you can get in NYC and it will still be the finest in the world. Bah! You can keep your large open spaces--they're empty and boring.
H.C. is among those mistaken Democrats who think that "triangulation" is a viable strategy for anyone but Bill Clinton in the two presidential elections he won. The DNC has run that same strategy three times in a row now and lost every time. I say let her do that--she's not fooling anyone. No Republican will ever, ever, ever vote for her and Democrats are mighty sick of the same losing message being recycled over and over.
At the same time, if the electorate is really so darn morally conservative nowadays, then why the heck is GTA SA selling so well? Maybe it's because it's one of the best video games ever made and people understand that the violence, etc., is NOT REAL and not any more reflective of what they actually think, feel, and do in the real world than going to see Alien vs Predator is.
Forgive my ignorance here, but I thought I remembered reading a few years' back that everyone was looking forward to Voyager getting way out beyond the solar system because we might learn something more about the Oort cloud, source of all those nifty global killer meteors people got so worked up about after "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact."
Or is the instrumentation on Voyager just inadequate for finding that little matter in that much volume?
but I think it's pretty cool that Kenyan schoolchildren are getting devices for school that American and European kids don't have yet. There are bright minds everywhere, and if you water them they will blossom. And education is the best way possible for folks in developing countries to better their situation.
I've always wondered if somewhere in Africa is the schoolkid who will someday cure cancer, if only he/she can get an opportunity from programs like these. After all, just by sheer numbers alone there should be several dozen Einsteins in the developing world, just waiting to be discovered. If the human mind is the greatest of all national resources, then the developing world is vastly wealthier than all the developed nations put together.
I read about setting up a cluster about six months' back, and they said that you can only really run programs that are specifically designed to run on a beowulf cluster. It seems like if you could set up a cluster and be able to run any old app on it without special coding, then you'd have your massive adoption of linux. Plug-n-play supercomputer, using the crappy old boxes gathering dust under the cubicles.
Is there any plans to take beowulf in this direction? Is it already possible, but I was just reading the wrong FAQ?
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, keeping the English-speaking tech geeks of the world amused/informed all day long is a big job, and the people making it happen behind the scenes are human. I can imagine the nightshift guy, bleary-eyed, handing off the baton to the early shift guy, bleary-eyed, both in need of more caffeine or sleep. They all work really hard to serve us, most of whom don't pay to read this content.
Once in a while, they slip up. The other 364 days of the year, their work is seamless. So instead of giving them a hard time for the once in a blue moon that they make a mistake or dupe an article, why don't we try, for once, to congratulate them for the excellent work they do, and try to be understanding when the human factor kicks in once in a while.
Sorry, my fact-checking department is in the Hamptons :-)
What if Frodo Baggins, instead of confronting the evil empire in "The Lord of the Rings," just got himself a lawyer and sued?
Hmm, who would have been cast?
Frodo: Joe Pesci
Sam: Chris Farley
Merry: Adam Sandler
Pippin: Ben Stiller
Gimli: The Pat character from SNL
Legolas: Calista Flockheart (Ally McBeal)
Gandalf: Jack Nicholson
Aragorn: Antonio Banderas
Boromir: Ahnold
Elrond: Christopher Walken
Saruman: Crispin Glover
Arwyn: never happen, because this was a hokey non-character to begin with...
On the one hand, Newline is MPAA and pulling this kind of stunt is just what you'd expect from them. On the other hand, they did bet the farm on Peter Jackson, and they were the ones who tossed out his original all-in-one movie and said, "let's make a three-parter." I think we all agree that was a blessed moment.
So kinda don't know how to come down on this one.
Please don't spread this meme anymore: "I'm powerless so there's no reason to even try." Boy, it's so untrue I can't even begin to tell you.
I started a grassroots political organization last year that has elected officials all over NYC either cheering or running scared; we came to within 18 votes in November of ousting this neo-con state senator in Yonkers/Westchester. A couple weeks ago he was the main obstacle to a bill in Albany that would allow women to buy emergency contraception (day-after pills) over-the-counter in case of rape/incest/etc. It's not a main issue for my organization, but when he heard that we were considering sending volunteers to his district to hand out flyers to his constituents, he not only dropped his opposition but actually sponsored an identical bill that was passed.
And that's just one thing we've managed to do, sometimes with hundreds of volunteers, other times with just a handful of 3 or 4 people, sometimes just one person.
See? I've made a difference, and so can you.
The truth is, most Americans spend an average of 4 hours a day watching TV. You could do a lot to save your country in those 4 hours. And none of the things you could do would take much more thought or energy than reading a book or writing a letter or picking up the phone. Saving democracy is not aerobics.
I think /. should form a PAC, or rather, a non-PAC 527 to put more pressure on Congress on these sorts of issues. EFF is great and all, but that's giving money so they can file lawsuits and write endless emails that go nowhere and do nothing. One person physically showing up at a congressperson's district office or flyering counts for 10,000 emails or letters.
Slashdot could mobilize that kind of pressure, EFF can't.
I agree with this. If you don't have the guts to get out there and canvass for a candidate, stand watch at a poll on election day, or heck, even hand out flyers on a sidewalk, then how on god's green earth do you think you'll have the steel to face down riot police, or worse, troops with fixed bayonets and itchy trigger fingers?
Oh, wait, no I get it: democracy and revolution are for other people to take care of while people who call for this comfortably watch Battlestar Galactica re-runs and wonder why the world is going to hell outside.
I've been thinking about this ever since they did that experiment in Switzerland where they sent one half of a quantumly-entangled pair to the other side of Geneva via fiber optic cable. They pinged one half with lasers, and determined through precise measurement that the information was instantaneous and faster than the speed of light.
At the same time I read about the experiment, apart from dreams of ansibles, I thought, hey, there's no way in hell for any third party to eavesdrop on two quantumly entangled particles.
Also in the news was Napster and Freenet, and I wondered if a person couldn't build an Internet using quantum entangled pairs that is totally immune from government intrusion.
Try to read our logs then, mofos!
Is that the best thing they can find to protest? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! Lemme see, you could, say, talk about the broad and concerted assault on the middle class through Bush's Retirement Roulette scheme, or the nuclear option Congress is practicing on American workers by rewarding outsourcing, or the elimination of personal bankruptcy protections that only hurt anyone not wealthy enough to field a team of lawyers, or the changes to Federal Student Loan guidelines that will double the cost for poorer students' families, or nominating federal judges who equate non-neo-cons with slavers. Heck, you could possibly even talk about a quagmire that never needed to happen, that was sold to the American public on a pack of lies, and that is now grounding down our army, grinding up our treasury, and, incidentally, killing American soldiers and lots and lots of hapless Iraqis.
THIS is what these people choose to spend their time doing?
Starting a grassroots political organization is easy. All you have to do is find a couple of friends/neighbors/colleagues who are as pissed off as you are, get together, and get down to business. Two years ago, reading Slashdot about the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA, about the gov letting MS off the hook, and everything else made my blood boil. And I kept asking, why isn't anyone doing anything about this?
/. ID.
Then, one night at a Slashdot meetup here in NYC, I said to myself, dammit, if nobody else is going to do something about it, then I will. So I put down the PERL books and started blogging and reading what's out there on the net. In no time at all I connected with four other like-minded folks and built an organization from the ground up. We decided to call ourselves New Democratic Majority (www.newdemmajority.org), and tucked into state, congressional and the presidential campaigns. We built a website using drupal (which has outgrown its usefulness and we're working on a redesign now). That plus meetup.com's functionality was all we needed, and away we went.
I'll be honest, this has been by far the most challenging thing I've ever done. I'm an introverted geek by nature, and working with the complexities of the human animal has stretched my brain to the limit. But I'm on the other side of that learning curve now, and being able to help people and create real change has brought me more satisfaction than the first "Hello, World!" program I ever wrote.
But people ask us how to do what we've done all the time, so our media, design, and political team people have put together a New Democratic Majority chapter kit that has sample collateral, logos, Best Practices, and other useful material to help others shorten the learning curve. If you're interested, we can send you one. Just send me a message through my
But no matter what you do, do something. You'll be amazed how quickly a smart, motivated individual can begin to change the world. There's not space enough to tell you all the amazing grassroots folks I've met who've single-handedly changed laws, replaced rotten politicians with great candidates, and have transformed the lives of others. And, by the way, all of them did it while holding down day jobs. Good luck, and good hunting!
I didn't want anyone to think I was shilling. But it's New Democratic Majority, www.newdemmajority.org.
If you're in New York, you're welcome to join us this Monday, June 13th at the New Tank on 208 West 37th Street, between 9th and 10th Ave.s in Midtown. We're going to have City Councilwoman Tish James, Rev. Clinton Miller from Brown Baptist Memorial Church, and Chris Owens, candidate for congress there to talk about the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project and smart development. We're also going to talk about what we're doing for city races (mayor's, public advocate, etc.).
Absolutely! The popular wisdom is that you can't do anything about what the government is doing unless you have millions or billions of dollars. That simply isn't true, and I'll tell you why: our elected officials have become such an insular, professional class that average citizens have no idea how to get them to listen. And the electeds like it that way, because it means they don't have to do much work, and everyone just goes along like sheep as long as they mouth certain platitudes like trained seals.
But even just a literal handful of people can rock their world, and compel them to pay attention. Take the example of the five women who were 9/11 widows, who forced the government to undertake a full investigation of what happened. The 9/11 commission was formed as a result. Or take my experience here in New York City. We were pushing our state legislators to change the rules in the Assembly to require lawmakers to be present to cast their vote (used to be that nobody would show up, and their absence would be recorded as a 'yes' vote--talk about a rubber stamp!). An Assemblywoman named Deborah Glick from the East Village refused to back the reforms. Then we turned out 6 people to flyer in her district. Her office got hundreds of angry calls from her constituents, and she was forced to vote for the reforms.
So tell me, you don't know 5 people you could band together with to push for change? In a country where no one gets involved in governance, you the individual can have an incredibly out-sized effect. Get together with 5 of your buddies, call yourself the "Sacramento Citizens' Action Committee" or whatever, march into your congressman's office, and demand answers. If you can get a journalist from the Podunk Times (local papers are always desperate for juicy copy) to go with you, you are virtually guaranteed to get what you want.
Guys, it's so, so easy to get results in this country. It's literally a phone call or office visit away. Stop telling yourselves you're powerless, and get out there! The country literally won't survive if you don't.
There are a great many who do care, and we have been fighting for quite some time now. I used to read stuff like this on Slashdot, get all worked up, post, then do nothing and wonder why I felt so dissatisfied. Then I realized that no one else was doing anything about it, dammit, so I had to. I started a grassroots political organization here in New York that has swelled to 15,000 people.
Last election cycle we took back three state senate seats from the neo-cons, and fought really hard on two others, getting the one to within 8% of victory and the other to within a mere 18 votes! That puts us 4 seats out from regaining a majority in state senate, and in turning back the neo-con tide here in New York. We also fought really hard to remove a Bush rubber stamp Congressman called Vito Fossella from the district in Staten Island. Got our guy to within 8% again, but because of our efforts the party is now going to focus money and support on that race in 2006.
Right now we're working on NYC races for mayor, etc., but really planning for the mid-term elections in 2006. We're 15 seats out from recapturing the House of Representatives, people. What does that mean? The ability to launch congressional investigations into Cheney's deals with Big Oil, who leaked Valery Plame's name to the press, the Downing Street memo that confirmed that Bush lied to the American public to get them to invade Iraq, etc., etc. It means we can impeach, imprison (at Guantanamo!), and expunge this blight from our country and world.
So get out there and help! The neo-cons are petrified of the idea that Americans will wake up and start fighting back. It doesn't matter where you are in the country, fight back. We vastly outnumber them.
I use to highlight the virtues of Linux.
Of course there's manipulation going on all the time. For example, here in New York the subways suddenly started having all kinds of structural problems, delays, fires in electrical conduits, etc. The service has gone down dramatically. Then lo and behold the MTA announces that either the state OK's another rate hike in two years or they simply won't be able to maintain the integrity of the system. And now people are nodding their heads, gee they must be right. Hmm, methinks I smell a rat.
And yes, companies do hire PR firms to tell the sheeple what to think and do. And it works. But on the other hand, without PR small startups and organizations and movements couldn't get started--it's simply way, way too expensive to access the communication channels the way the Fortune 500 do.
My friends, those who hope for purity in information as passive consumers are living in a fool's paradise. Information and discourse are fought over as fiercely as anything in this world. If you're not prepared to fight to be heard, then my advice is go be a hermit in Kamchatka.
You've obviously never seen a Brooklyn dock worker. Contrary to popular perception, New Yorkers are in the main, large, strong, and tough.
Here in New York, driving an obnoxiously loud Harley down the street is risking your life, because pedestrians, residents, and everyone else can barely restrain themselves from hauling you off the bike and bludgeoning you to death with your own mufflers. Imagine that instead of a Harley, you had a loud turboprop coming and going morning and night. Then imagine thousands of them coming and going all the time. Only the deaf would survive.
I have always wanted to be able to blind security cameras somehow. Would pointing a laser at them do anything like burn out the receptors, or at least dazzle them for a time? Anyone know?
Else, we'll have to wait until they invent inviso-cloaks.
As a layman here, wouldn't quantum computers completely trump any optical computer? Why not pile on with efforts on quantum computing if it's the ultimate solution?
True, you can get a bigger house, but to do what, sit around and watch TV? Or maybe it's to store the mass quantities of consumer goods that you acquire from high-end places like Walmart? New York apartments might be a touch on the small side, but on the other hand I'm a 30-second walk away from the corner grocery store, and a 15-minute bus/subway ride away from cultural institutions (considered 3rd-string in NYC) that would still blow the Texas philharmonic (if there even is such a thing) out of the water. In short, anything you could possibly want, anytime of the day you might be awake, in whatever crazy combination you want, you can get in NYC and it will still be the finest in the world. Bah! You can keep your large open spaces--they're empty and boring.
H.C. is among those mistaken Democrats who think that "triangulation" is a viable strategy for anyone but Bill Clinton in the two presidential elections he won. The DNC has run that same strategy three times in a row now and lost every time. I say let her do that--she's not fooling anyone. No Republican will ever, ever, ever vote for her and Democrats are mighty sick of the same losing message being recycled over and over.
At the same time, if the electorate is really so darn morally conservative nowadays, then why the heck is GTA SA selling so well? Maybe it's because it's one of the best video games ever made and people understand that the violence, etc., is NOT REAL and not any more reflective of what they actually think, feel, and do in the real world than going to see Alien vs Predator is.
Forgive my ignorance here, but I thought I remembered reading a few years' back that everyone was looking forward to Voyager getting way out beyond the solar system because we might learn something more about the Oort cloud, source of all those nifty global killer meteors people got so worked up about after "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact."
Or is the instrumentation on Voyager just inadequate for finding that little matter in that much volume?
I'd last 20 seconds longer than the last time I arm-wrestled a girl...
but I think it's pretty cool that Kenyan schoolchildren are getting devices for school that American and European kids don't have yet. There are bright minds everywhere, and if you water them they will blossom. And education is the best way possible for folks in developing countries to better their situation.
I've always wondered if somewhere in Africa is the schoolkid who will someday cure cancer, if only he/she can get an opportunity from programs like these. After all, just by sheer numbers alone there should be several dozen Einsteins in the developing world, just waiting to be discovered. If the human mind is the greatest of all national resources, then the developing world is vastly wealthier than all the developed nations put together.
I read about setting up a cluster about six months' back, and they said that you can only really run programs that are specifically designed to run on a beowulf cluster. It seems like if you could set up a cluster and be able to run any old app on it without special coding, then you'd have your massive adoption of linux. Plug-n-play supercomputer, using the crappy old boxes gathering dust under the cubicles.
Is there any plans to take beowulf in this direction? Is it already possible, but I was just reading the wrong FAQ?