Do this one last.
Pour a gallon of steamy coffee on the appliance while it's operating. If it survives the procedure, give them props in the review. Otherwise, attempt to get technical support for the symptoms. This is not so much to evaluate the potential synergy of electronics and coffe but rather to gauge the support.
Mind you, I don't get to deal with a lot of "big iron" things, but the question of support seems to be a very important as well as a very intangible one. All you can go on is testimonials from the web (which, for all you know, are bogus) and recommendations, really, and some preceived reputation of the vendor, but those really only cover the extremes, because the people on the extreme end of (dis)pleasure are the ones who are the most likely to say something. I'm not aware of any systematic way of trying to rate the average user experience.
Here's a story: one client has Dells and is thrilled with them, and gets good service all the time, no matter what's goingon. Someone else with Dell allegedly had their service contract terminated (they were refunded the money, but still) beacuse the replacement part they needed was more expensive than the support plan. This is just anecdotal evidence - how am I to reconcile things like this into an overall opinion of their service?
Maybe they should also indicate where the support centre is located/outsourced to, so you can be arbitrarily patriotic (or try to impose sanctions) with your purchases.
The energy crisis surrounding oil, aka "peak oil" will affect any nonrenewable resource, which includes uranium. I don't know about any estimates when this might happen - they're not bound to be any more accurate than peak oil estimates, anyway. However, the price of uranium already doubled (or so I heard briefly on the news this morning, but only 'cause Canada, my wee little home, is the second largest "producer" of uranium in the world, after Australia) over the last year, which is a greater increase in price than was seen in oil. Add to that the enormous cost of building and operating nuclear power plants, and this venture seems more like a wasteful attempt at showing off, much like the Yangtze Dam, where it's been suggested that many smaller dams would be equally effective, cheaper to build and less environmentally damaging. I guess it's arguable whether the pollution from nuclear power plants would be more or less harmful than what China currently puts out in coal-burning byproducts.
That's pretty much what's happening, except (for the picky bastards out there):
There really is no such thing as "centrifugal force" - it's the apparent force that acts in the direction opposite of centripetal acceleration; it's a manifestation of Newton's first law of motion, that "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." When you're in a car and turn sharply, the car accelerates towards the inside of the turn (centripetal acceleration on account of the friction between the road and the tires, which "direct" the car) and you feel pushed to the outside of the turn because your body would much rather keep going in a straight line, if it wasn't attached to the car (this is the apparent centrifugal force, and one reason to wear seatbelts). Hence, if it's not a real, "centrifugal force" has nothing to do with anything astronomical or otherwise - it's just an aspect of the way we view the world.
The accretion disk of a black hole (or anything that can have an accretion disk, really, like a protostar, white dwarf or a neutron star) is heated and radiates energy because particles in the disk lose energy as they fall inwards. First, conservation of energy means that, as particles get closer to the black hole, gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. That means that particles closest to the black hole are moving faster than the ones further from it, and they end up losing energy through friction with these slower, outer particles, and this is energy is radiated away. In this manner, matter falling into a black hole radiates away 10-40% of it's mass-energy (the E in E=mc^2) before vanishing from the observable universe beyond the event horizon, compared with 1% of mass-energy being released by fusion, and that's why we get high-energy radiation like x-rays emmited from accretion disks around black holes and neutron stars. That's also the process that (most likely? I don't even know what theories get confirmed or disproved in astronomy these days) generates the incredible energy released by quasars - they're accretion disks around super-massive black holes at the centres of young galaxies (young as in created early in the history of the universe, not as in recently formed).
By spam I take it you mean some of the "comments" posted here (like this one). Well, welcome to Slashdot. As the number of members in a community goes up, so does the number of assclowns in said community (probably not a linear relationship), and said assclowns don't care what they're assclowning, allowing them to overwhelm meaningful content. Being very very big, Slashdot has very very many assclowns. The moderation system is an attempt to address that, but you also get moderators that are assclowns (like me at the moment) so it only helps to some extent. So the moderators also get moderated, and so on and so on. The hope is that some of the assclowns cancel each other out. I'm just hoping that saying "assclown" so many times in a post doesn't completely kill my karma.
Anyway, it's not all bad; even if we can't peacefully/meaningfully discuss the story, and even if some (most?) of those trying to discuss it (like me at the moment) haven't read the linked article(s), a lot of people will still look at what you've done and drool on their keyboards, and that's still something - IMHO capturing the public imagination with space exploration is important, and not only to NASA funding in the short term but probably to humanity as a whole in the long term.
You have a funny idea of just how much money this cost and how much it is worth. The entire mission is under a billion dollars while the entire NASA budget is around $15b and, whether you can appreciate it or not, benefits humanity as a whole, albeit in an intangible way. Compare-and-contrast with other worthy endeavours: US military budget is something around $400b (more with the extra war spending). Wow. Glad we're not wasting too much cash on useless space exploration and instead putting it to work where it's really needed.
There's a real cool "woman vs. funky snake-headed dragon" faceoff.
Ooooh, that's the part where Eowyn takes down a Nazgul. Sweet, I was hoping they'd leave that in.
I was expecting anime fetish porn, actually.
Okay, in all seriousness, in The Two Towers (the movie), Eowyn struck me as such a sighing wench that I was dreading what was going to happen to her later on. My impression from the books was of someone of a much stronger character, so hearing someone say that the fight was cool givems me hope. Still, I'll reserve judgement until I see it myself and, even if it ends up the best scene ever, Jackson is still an assclown in my book for messing with the other characters.
A lot of orations on the subject of eVoting (not Cringely's article specifically, but many others, as well as posts here) seem to take the stand that the technology in question is inherently evil and cannot work for whatever reason. To me that seems to come from the (mis)conception that all things electronic are emphemeral and can be easily manipulated to whatever end. However, large scale electronic system on the accuracy of which ride many lives and billions of dollars (like aircraft navigation, communications networks, financial systems like stock exchanges and banks) exist and function in an acceptable manner, and a reliable voting system should not be any more difficult to make. All that's missing is an honest attempt at doing so, which the current voting machines most certainly are not.
Furthermore, as we've seen with the sketchy fun they had in Florida, where not only was the counting suspect but the voters lists were allegedly manipulated to disenfranchise potential Gore supporters (or so I hear), as well as in this Slashdot story, that where there's a will there's a way. The system failed in the face of wide-scale subversion by the authorities charged with enforcing it and who's to say that any other system (electronic or otherwise) would have fared better. Instead of trying to decide how much or how little technology should be thrown at the issue, maybe people should wake up and smell the gangrene - it is entirely possible that American democracy is faltering in a serious way.
I'm going to swing things back to the Left a little. I agree that the slashdot perspective is skewed, but you seem to be missing something / are out there on the Right when you say stuff like "To management, in times where depression is like a looming sword, cutting costs seems the most obvious solution to survive, unlike some puritans who believe that 'Contributing Back to the US Economy' by hiring US workers is the only way out of this depression."
In recent history, massive layoffs are about as related to the state of the economy as they are to the alignment of the planets. Many companies cut and fire and so on not because they're in trouble but because they realize that while they're making lots of money, they could be making lots of money x3. Car factories move to Mexico, unions are being destroyed, banks close branches and raise service fees and clothing production shifts to cheaper and cheaper sweatshops all while the companies themselves post record earnings. Sure, some companies are in trouble, and the threat of a depression isn't trivial, but on the whole this is the grand myth of capitalism, that a rising tide lifts all boats, shattering.
The truth is that business will try to produce where it's cheapest to produce (say China for unskilled labour, India for skilled) and sell where the standard of living is high and hence prices are the highest (ye ol' North America, for instance). In the long run, all that leaves us are those pesky retail jobs, which don't pay living wages, and will destroy our ability to buy all the purty gadgets that the multinationals expect us to buy from them. And then... we dance! Ehm...
The bleeding socialist in me gets out of control sometimes...
I don't know about the rest of y'all giddy bastards drooling all over these movies, but I'm very disappointed with how the trillogy is turning out thus far. I liked the first movie lots, even though it should have had a few less shots of the scenerey and some more character development, but there was trouble even there. What the trouble was? Arwen/Liv Tyler. I'm as horny as the next guy and can appreciate the reasons for including at least one hottie actress in what was otherwise an all-boys show, but it shouldn't have happened, and it was only the sign of things to come.
Enter the second movie. Not only were there often substantial plot changes, but characters were fundamentally altered, which pissed me off. Faramir turned into a greedy asshole, Eowyn became a sighing wench, the hobbits got preachy and the Ents were cowards. The battle of Helm's Deep was ridiculous, and not just because of the mysterious arrival of the Elves or the fact that Rohan somehow spawned an army on horseback in the throneroom (Microsoft really ought to have patched that exploit) - watch the battle at the end of Army of Darkness and then watch Helm's Deep and you'll get a new appreciation for the silliness. I couldn't stand to watch it the second time around on DVD and I'm not looking forward to the third movie; if the trend continues, it will deviate even further from the books that I love (they are classics for a reason, eh?).
*Insert joke about harnessing the rotational energy of Tolkien's grave.*
The source material was as good as can get and was combined with some very good casting and awesome special effects, but Peter Jackson/Frances Walsh (did the screenplay) couldn't leave it well enough alone, could they? Bastards. If I wasn't so damn lazy or terrified of prison, I'd eat their children.
Sure, IP restrictions are evil and so forth, and there will be many rants here about how terribly the nerds, visionaries and innovators will be oppressed, but that's a whole lot of narrow, selfish thinking by said nerds, visionaries and innovators (there goes my karma). This discussion misses the larger picture and focuses only on what the enlightened, educated, US-based majority of the readers care about and/or can be affected by: bigger, stronger RIAA's and MPAA's, and draconian corporations hoarding more and more knowledge.
What's left out is that the spirit of the whole treaty is basically to make the Central and South American nations subjects to the rule of the US economy and the corporations that feed off it, much like what NAFTA has done to Mexico and Canada. It will create one huge Export Processing Zone all the way from Mexico to the Southern tip of Chile, where such peachy corporations like Nike, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Walmart and so on will practically enslave thousands of displaced farmers while other corporations rape their land for natural resources. It's already happening in countries all over the world, with more localized treaties and deregulations, where the governments don't care, are blinded by the money or have their arms twisted by the might of their patrons. Free Trade in this context is a euphimism for economic conquest by transnational corporations.
Canada has a unique position in all this, because unlike the other (soon to be) subjugated countries, we have a high standard of living and an educated, skilled workforce. Hence, we don't have sweatshops - instead, our manufacturing left for the sweatshop factories of Mexico and the Export Processing Zones in the Phillipines and China along with that of the United States. Still, we're very much slaves of our big brother, constantly battered over fishing, softwood lumber, grain and so on. No political action that contravenes the US ideology goes without the consideration of what it will do to our economy. Legalize weed? Sure, sounds good, but can't you see Dubya over there shaking his head? Don't want to go to war with Iraq? Just you wait 'til the next time we set lumber tariffs.
First, I don't think this article is irrelevant, unlike a lot of the people that posted replies so far (uh, what's this... I'm a (-1, troll) already? dammit...). Some guy's musings about his lack of a job are probably not front-page material, and posting it to Slashdot seems like shameless self-promotion, but the sad truth is that there are more and more people out there who are either unemployed or, almost if not equally as bad, underemployed (McJob, anyone?). People who went to school at the height of the late-90s high-tech boom (like me) are entering the workforce to find it flooded by people who worked through that boom, are more experienced, at least equally skilled, and are also looking for jobs. Even seemingly trivial jobs have substantial requirements of experience and obscure skills because employers know they can easily get overqualified people. At the same time, older people find themselves being edged out by the young'uns, who are willing to work longer and compromise more for less money.
This leads to depression, sarcasm and cynicism, all of which seem come across in that writeup; most of the things he lists there are not really benefits of being unemployed but benefits of having lots of free time, which is a byproduct of unemployment but not the only way to get it. Philosophical insights and beard growth aside, you can get this stuff and still work. The trick is to have a good job, and by that I mean one that affords you lost of free time and enough money to get by. Working for the gov't is good, at least in Canada - pay's ok, hours are fixed, and the boss isn't particuarly evil. Getting into a union, though those are increasingly rare, is even better. My father always complains how lazy those union guys are - I envy their laziness, and weep every time unions lose out to big corporations.
Personally, I've been without a job since April and haven't had much success finding for one. All I'm really going on right now is sarcasm and cynicism - the money's all gone (I guess, then, I'm also going on the good nature of my parents). I'm even starting to become cynical about my own cynicism. I go nutty periodically and produce "great" works of prose (beware of popups, and I promise that my resume is nowhere to be found), but how long can I go on? The end is not in sight...
What kind of a world do you live in? Do you run to the police station after speeding on the highway or doing a rolling stop at a stop-sign? The fact is people casually break the law all the time, and even when the authorities witness it they often don't react (again, the car example; people generally don't get speeding tickets for going 110km/h on a 100km/h highway). Even when you get stopped, it doesn't mean you'll get a ticket - it's a judgement call by the officer. The idea is that the system is fuzzy, with some give here or there, which makes the world livable. Even so, there are plenty of abuses by the authorities.
Now we have RIAA flexing its hugely wealthy legal muscle, forcing ISPs to cough up their customers information, suing people a gazillion dollars per IP-infringing song and trampling fair-use in the process, and you're suggesting that an organization like the EFF, generally concerned with watching out for the little guy, tell people to hand themselves over? Would you go running to them?
Hmpf, you're either extremely right-wing or, well, I don't want to get modded into obscurity for being needlessly rude.
And now that I've previewed my glorious write-up, I noticed that you've been moderated into obscurity yourself. Good for you. I didn't want to waste my last point as a moderator on this, and it felt good to rant.
SPEWS is dead, and it's not a bad thing. They were arbitrary and indiscriminate in blacklisting huge chunks of the internet, and one was more likely to get ravaged by a pair of nymphos in a dark alley than get taken off their list. Amongst their more notable achievements, I hear they had the entire country of Brazil blacklisted. They also blacklisted somethingawful.com at some point in time, and comedy ensued. Now quick, while they're down, drive a stake through the heart, chop of the head, and don't forget the words; "Klatu Verata Nrmnphnfhr..."
? billion years ahead
All the stars have long burned out and the cosmos is a cold and dark place. Dead stars and black holes are all that remain.
Not that it's a grave omission or something but I'm low on karma and desperate to feed slashdot'ers some (mis)information, so I will point out that, over a sufficiently long period of time, black holes will also disappear.
See, quantum theories predict (and some effects of this have been observed, I think) that particles are randomply popping into the universe all the time and everywhere. They appear in matter-antimatter pairs (so an electron and positron will appear together), are called vitual particles and, before anyone even knows they were there, they annihilate each other. The net effect is zero and mass-energy of the universe is preserved.
However, when this happens near the event horizon of a black hole, one of the particles could cross the event horizon and fall into the black hole, thus preventing the pair of virtual particles from annihilating each other. In this manner, real matter and anti-matter is created out of the potential gravitational energy of the black hole. When these real particles meet and annihilate each other, they create real photons that escape out into space and the black hole is seen to be radiating. Theory says that this would cause the black hole to lose mass (shrink), and the phenomenon is called Hawking radioation, after Stephen Hawking who predicted it.
As far as I know, this effect (shrinking of black holes) is yet to be experimentally or observationally confirmed, but it's still pretty neat.
I've seen a few poorly moderated posts recommending Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy." I'm not sure why it's not worthy of a few points of praise - it's a truly awesome trilogy in five parts, but perhaps it's so well known that recommending it is moot. Not that most of the other, well rated recommendations aren't well known classics either, but to each his own.
Anyway, if you've already read and/or are tired of hearing about the "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy," I highly recommend Mr. Adams' unrelated yet equally (actually more so, IMHO) amusing "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul." The only problem with these books is that they're so damn short you can finish one off in a day or two if you put your mind to it.
Some other books sitting on my shelf that I enjoyed reading:
- "Nemesis" by Isaac Asimov
- "If Chins Could Kill" by the great Bruce Campbell
- Anything by Charles Dickens is good, though "A Tale Of Two Cities" is my personal favourite - this man is a master of l33t verbiage, and as a bonus his books cost next to nothing because no one has collected any royalties on them in centuries.
- "The Iliad" by Homer, one of Humanity's earliest great classics, was surprisingly good. The other well known ancient epic, Virgil's "Aeneid," turned out to be so much Daikatana; +700 years after Homer, Virgil took what Homer had done, added some of his good ideas and tired to do better, but in fact did worse (IMHO).
- Calculus 3rd Edition... err, wait...
"I hope that RedHat successfully forces both Gnome and KDE to become compatible with one another which would result in the creation of a single desktop. This would be the greatest gift to the Linux world."
Yeah, sure. We hate M$ for being too controling and inhibiting choice with their single dominant product, but a single unified Linux product would be a good thing. Some people apparently fail to realize that the incompatibilities that many rant about and that Red Hat would try to smooth out are a direct consequence of variety. Sure, standards are nice, but nobody pays these people to do any of this, or be compatible with any other product - they do what they like, and if you don't like it then you go to a different bunch of people. It's called choice.
The same thing applies to Red Hat themselves. If you don't like the fact that they're limiting variety of desktop environments then you go with a different distro, or set up your own desktop environment, or do whatever the hell you want to. There are lots of choices, after all, which makes this whole thing moot.
This amazing resiliance demonstrated by electronics (not just this but also Mir and Poineer 10, and there are probably others), combined with the fact that electronics are starting to get smart and escape (as reported on Slashdot, but I can't find the story now), is rather alarming. Sure, right now it's durable space probes and escaping benign experimental robots, but what will happen in the near future? You'll throw out your toaster and the thing will come back ten years later seeking revenge. Combine this with the work on modular robots and you won't only have a pissed toaster out for vengeance, but it'll be riding on that lawn mower you tossed earlier, firing AOL CDs and spraying used motor oil. *shudder*
They give us an editor that can set up wonderful, wonderful things, but that won't let you experience any of them. This means that by the time NWN goes to replication, there's going to be 3x more content online than on the CDs and legions of mod-makers will stalk the malls, camping out in front of software stores, hoping against hope that their creations don't cause any spectacular windows errors when loaded up with the real thing. I'd be seething with anger if I wasn't bouncing off the walls waiting for the thing to finally download. Damnit, 40k/s is not fast enough!
( I know, I'll get moderated into obscurity when someone catches that one tomorrow, when they can't even connect to a server, let alone download.:p )
As far as I know, my university (Uinversity of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, eh?) does no such thing. Faculties maintain their own banks of papers, projects and programs, and compare the students' submissions when they are handed in. They're suprisingly good at catching students (and the students are suprisingly stupid - I heard that once half a class handed in the same assignment), and I've heard no mention of subscribing to any knid of centralized system where other universities' projects are also considered.
This makes me wonder as to how big a problem this is. Are a lot of universities doing this? Are they small ones or big ones? Do schools like MIT do it? It seems to me that this is some sort of an attempt at a cost-effective, effortless solution that smaller schools would go for, and would factor into the quality of education they provide. As long as big schools do their own thing, the glorious, presigious ideal will remain to stay away from such crap and students will know what they're getting into when they end up at Smith & Sons U.
I love corelational studies. They follow the principle that, if you stare at a set of numbers long enough, your brain's propensity for arbitrarily ordering things that have no real order will allow you to produce any answer you are looking for and more. You end up with results like these, answers to questions nobody asked.
The number of participants, 1.1M, is also very scientific, indicating that whomever did the study has no idea what the hell they're doing. See, statisticians would have us believe that you need about a thousand subjects to get a result roughly within 3% of the truth, as long as those one thousand subjects are representative of the entire population. Somehow I don't think that is the case here.
Why? Because their opposition has more money, and you can't fight money in this money-driven society of ours.
What's going on is nothing new, and it is a well known and (mostly) accepted fact that it's all about wealth (money). Some people resist this notion, but they usually end up not having the money to prove their point, or to even survive for that matter. Wealth is what makes you smarter, stronger, and generally better. If you own more stuff than the next guy, you're better than the next guy. It's even better if you own the next guy. It's been going on since the guy with a club met the guy with a rock and they founded a town between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Since then, it's been slavery, empires, slavery, more empires, some more slavery, feudalism, slavery, colonization, good amounts of slavery, empires, slavery, industrial revolution, glorious amounts of slavery, and now, in the 21st century, we are in the age of law, and if you follow the pattern, what's bound to follow is slavery. I don't know about you, but I can't wait.
I say this man goes to too much trouble to infiltrate these offices. At my former office, a bum walked in off the street, went straight through reception and out the back door with a $3000 laptop full of somewhat confidential information. Just some smelly guy in a dirty trenchcoat. I wonder what the receptionist thought when he passed by; that he was a programmer?
Slashdot Mirror
Do this one last. Pour a gallon of steamy coffee on the appliance while it's operating. If it survives the procedure, give them props in the review. Otherwise, attempt to get technical support for the symptoms. This is not so much to evaluate the potential synergy of electronics and coffe but rather to gauge the support. Mind you, I don't get to deal with a lot of "big iron" things, but the question of support seems to be a very important as well as a very intangible one. All you can go on is testimonials from the web (which, for all you know, are bogus) and recommendations, really, and some preceived reputation of the vendor, but those really only cover the extremes, because the people on the extreme end of (dis)pleasure are the ones who are the most likely to say something. I'm not aware of any systematic way of trying to rate the average user experience. Here's a story: one client has Dells and is thrilled with them, and gets good service all the time, no matter what's goingon. Someone else with Dell allegedly had their service contract terminated (they were refunded the money, but still) beacuse the replacement part they needed was more expensive than the support plan. This is just anecdotal evidence - how am I to reconcile things like this into an overall opinion of their service? Maybe they should also indicate where the support centre is located/outsourced to, so you can be arbitrarily patriotic (or try to impose sanctions) with your purchases.
The energy crisis surrounding oil, aka "peak oil" will affect any nonrenewable resource, which includes uranium. I don't know about any estimates when this might happen - they're not bound to be any more accurate than peak oil estimates, anyway. However, the price of uranium already doubled (or so I heard briefly on the news this morning, but only 'cause Canada, my wee little home, is the second largest "producer" of uranium in the world, after Australia) over the last year, which is a greater increase in price than was seen in oil. Add to that the enormous cost of building and operating nuclear power plants, and this venture seems more like a wasteful attempt at showing off, much like the Yangtze Dam, where it's been suggested that many smaller dams would be equally effective, cheaper to build and less environmentally damaging. I guess it's arguable whether the pollution from nuclear power plants would be more or less harmful than what China currently puts out in coal-burning byproducts.
That's pretty much what's happening, except (for the picky bastards out there):
By spam I take it you mean some of the "comments" posted here (like this one). Well, welcome to Slashdot. As the number of members in a community goes up, so does the number of assclowns in said community (probably not a linear relationship), and said assclowns don't care what they're assclowning, allowing them to overwhelm meaningful content. Being very very big, Slashdot has very very many assclowns. The moderation system is an attempt to address that, but you also get moderators that are assclowns (like me at the moment) so it only helps to some extent. So the moderators also get moderated, and so on and so on. The hope is that some of the assclowns cancel each other out. I'm just hoping that saying "assclown" so many times in a post doesn't completely kill my karma.
Anyway, it's not all bad; even if we can't peacefully/meaningfully discuss the story, and even if some (most?) of those trying to discuss it (like me at the moment) haven't read the linked article(s), a lot of people will still look at what you've done and drool on their keyboards, and that's still something - IMHO capturing the public imagination with space exploration is important, and not only to NASA funding in the short term but probably to humanity as a whole in the long term.
You have a funny idea of just how much money this cost and how much it is worth. The entire mission is under a billion dollars while the entire NASA budget is around $15b and, whether you can appreciate it or not, benefits humanity as a whole, albeit in an intangible way. Compare-and-contrast with other worthy endeavours: US military budget is something around $400b (more with the extra war spending). Wow. Glad we're not wasting too much cash on useless space exploration and instead putting it to work where it's really needed.
There's a real cool "woman vs. funky snake-headed dragon" faceoff.
Ooooh, that's the part where Eowyn takes down a Nazgul. Sweet, I was hoping they'd leave that in.
I was expecting anime fetish porn, actually.
Okay, in all seriousness, in The Two Towers (the movie), Eowyn struck me as such a sighing wench that I was dreading what was going to happen to her later on. My impression from the books was of someone of a much stronger character, so hearing someone say that the fight was cool givems me hope. Still, I'll reserve judgement until I see it myself and, even if it ends up the best scene ever, Jackson is still an assclown in my book for messing with the other characters.
A lot of orations on the subject of eVoting (not Cringely's article specifically, but many others, as well as posts here) seem to take the stand that the technology in question is inherently evil and cannot work for whatever reason. To me that seems to come from the (mis)conception that all things electronic are emphemeral and can be easily manipulated to whatever end. However, large scale electronic system on the accuracy of which ride many lives and billions of dollars (like aircraft navigation, communications networks, financial systems like stock exchanges and banks) exist and function in an acceptable manner, and a reliable voting system should not be any more difficult to make. All that's missing is an honest attempt at doing so, which the current voting machines most certainly are not.
Furthermore, as we've seen with the sketchy fun they had in Florida, where not only was the counting suspect but the voters lists were allegedly manipulated to disenfranchise potential Gore supporters (or so I hear), as well as in this Slashdot story, that where there's a will there's a way. The system failed in the face of wide-scale subversion by the authorities charged with enforcing it and who's to say that any other system (electronic or otherwise) would have fared better. Instead of trying to decide how much or how little technology should be thrown at the issue, maybe people should wake up and smell the gangrene - it is entirely possible that American democracy is faltering in a serious way.
I'm going to swing things back to the Left a little. I agree that the slashdot perspective is skewed, but you seem to be missing something / are out there on the Right when you say stuff like "To management, in times where depression is like a looming sword, cutting costs seems the most obvious solution to survive, unlike some puritans who believe that 'Contributing Back to the US Economy' by hiring US workers is the only way out of this depression."
In recent history, massive layoffs are about as related to the state of the economy as they are to the alignment of the planets. Many companies cut and fire and so on not because they're in trouble but because they realize that while they're making lots of money, they could be making lots of money x3. Car factories move to Mexico, unions are being destroyed, banks close branches and raise service fees and clothing production shifts to cheaper and cheaper sweatshops all while the companies themselves post record earnings. Sure, some companies are in trouble, and the threat of a depression isn't trivial, but on the whole this is the grand myth of capitalism, that a rising tide lifts all boats, shattering.
The truth is that business will try to produce where it's cheapest to produce (say China for unskilled labour, India for skilled) and sell where the standard of living is high and hence prices are the highest (ye ol' North America, for instance). In the long run, all that leaves us are those pesky retail jobs, which don't pay living wages, and will destroy our ability to buy all the purty gadgets that the multinationals expect us to buy from them. And then... we dance! Ehm...
The bleeding socialist in me gets out of control sometimes...
*begin rant*
I don't know about the rest of y'all giddy bastards drooling all over these movies, but I'm very disappointed with how the trillogy is turning out thus far. I liked the first movie lots, even though it should have had a few less shots of the scenerey and some more character development, but there was trouble even there. What the trouble was? Arwen/Liv Tyler. I'm as horny as the next guy and can appreciate the reasons for including at least one hottie actress in what was otherwise an all-boys show, but it shouldn't have happened, and it was only the sign of things to come.
Enter the second movie. Not only were there often substantial plot changes, but characters were fundamentally altered, which pissed me off. Faramir turned into a greedy asshole, Eowyn became a sighing wench, the hobbits got preachy and the Ents were cowards. The battle of Helm's Deep was ridiculous, and not just because of the mysterious arrival of the Elves or the fact that Rohan somehow spawned an army on horseback in the throneroom (Microsoft really ought to have patched that exploit) - watch the battle at the end of Army of Darkness and then watch Helm's Deep and you'll get a new appreciation for the silliness. I couldn't stand to watch it the second time around on DVD and I'm not looking forward to the third movie; if the trend continues, it will deviate even further from the books that I love (they are classics for a reason, eh?).
*Insert joke about harnessing the rotational energy of Tolkien's grave.*
The source material was as good as can get and was combined with some very good casting and awesome special effects, but Peter Jackson/Frances Walsh (did the screenplay) couldn't leave it well enough alone, could they? Bastards. If I wasn't so damn lazy or terrified of prison, I'd eat their children.
*end rant*
Sure, IP restrictions are evil and so forth, and there will be many rants here about how terribly the nerds, visionaries and innovators will be oppressed, but that's a whole lot of narrow, selfish thinking by said nerds, visionaries and innovators (there goes my karma). This discussion misses the larger picture and focuses only on what the enlightened, educated, US-based majority of the readers care about and/or can be affected by: bigger, stronger RIAA's and MPAA's, and draconian corporations hoarding more and more knowledge.
What's left out is that the spirit of the whole treaty is basically to make the Central and South American nations subjects to the rule of the US economy and the corporations that feed off it, much like what NAFTA has done to Mexico and Canada. It will create one huge Export Processing Zone all the way from Mexico to the Southern tip of Chile, where such peachy corporations like Nike, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Walmart and so on will practically enslave thousands of displaced farmers while other corporations rape their land for natural resources. It's already happening in countries all over the world, with more localized treaties and deregulations, where the governments don't care, are blinded by the money or have their arms twisted by the might of their patrons. Free Trade in this context is a euphimism for economic conquest by transnational corporations.
Canada has a unique position in all this, because unlike the other (soon to be) subjugated countries, we have a high standard of living and an educated, skilled workforce. Hence, we don't have sweatshops - instead, our manufacturing left for the sweatshop factories of Mexico and the Export Processing Zones in the Phillipines and China along with that of the United States. Still, we're very much slaves of our big brother, constantly battered over fishing, softwood lumber, grain and so on. No political action that contravenes the US ideology goes without the consideration of what it will do to our economy. Legalize weed? Sure, sounds good, but can't you see Dubya over there shaking his head? Don't want to go to war with Iraq? Just you wait 'til the next time we set lumber tariffs.
First, I don't think this article is irrelevant, unlike a lot of the people that posted replies so far (uh, what's this... I'm a (-1, troll) already? dammit...). Some guy's musings about his lack of a job are probably not front-page material, and posting it to Slashdot seems like shameless self-promotion, but the sad truth is that there are more and more people out there who are either unemployed or, almost if not equally as bad, underemployed (McJob, anyone?). People who went to school at the height of the late-90s high-tech boom (like me) are entering the workforce to find it flooded by people who worked through that boom, are more experienced, at least equally skilled, and are also looking for jobs. Even seemingly trivial jobs have substantial requirements of experience and obscure skills because employers know they can easily get overqualified people. At the same time, older people find themselves being edged out by the young'uns, who are willing to work longer and compromise more for less money.
This leads to depression, sarcasm and cynicism, all of which seem come across in that writeup; most of the things he lists there are not really benefits of being unemployed but benefits of having lots of free time, which is a byproduct of unemployment but not the only way to get it. Philosophical insights and beard growth aside, you can get this stuff and still work. The trick is to have a good job, and by that I mean one that affords you lost of free time and enough money to get by. Working for the gov't is good, at least in Canada - pay's ok, hours are fixed, and the boss isn't particuarly evil. Getting into a union, though those are increasingly rare, is even better. My father always complains how lazy those union guys are - I envy their laziness, and weep every time unions lose out to big corporations.
Personally, I've been without a job since April and haven't had much success finding for one. All I'm really going on right now is sarcasm and cynicism - the money's all gone (I guess, then, I'm also going on the good nature of my parents). I'm even starting to become cynical about my own cynicism. I go nutty periodically and produce "great" works of prose (beware of popups, and I promise that my resume is nowhere to be found), but how long can I go on? The end is not in sight...
What kind of a world do you live in? Do you run to the police station after speeding on the highway or doing a rolling stop at a stop-sign? The fact is people casually break the law all the time, and even when the authorities witness it they often don't react (again, the car example; people generally don't get speeding tickets for going 110km/h on a 100km/h highway). Even when you get stopped, it doesn't mean you'll get a ticket - it's a judgement call by the officer. The idea is that the system is fuzzy, with some give here or there, which makes the world livable. Even so, there are plenty of abuses by the authorities.
Now we have RIAA flexing its hugely wealthy legal muscle, forcing ISPs to cough up their customers information, suing people a gazillion dollars per IP-infringing song and trampling fair-use in the process, and you're suggesting that an organization like the EFF, generally concerned with watching out for the little guy, tell people to hand themselves over? Would you go running to them?
Hmpf, you're either extremely right-wing or, well, I don't want to get modded into obscurity for being needlessly rude.
And now that I've previewed my glorious write-up, I noticed that you've been moderated into obscurity yourself. Good for you. I didn't want to waste my last point as a moderator on this, and it felt good to rant.
When I saw the title, I thought CowboyNeal quit Slashdot and got a real job.
SPEWS is dead, and it's not a bad thing. They were arbitrary and indiscriminate in blacklisting huge chunks of the internet, and one was more likely to get ravaged by a pair of nymphos in a dark alley than get taken off their list. Amongst their more notable achievements, I hear they had the entire country of Brazil blacklisted. They also blacklisted somethingawful.com at some point in time, and comedy ensued. Now quick, while they're down, drive a stake through the heart, chop of the head, and don't forget the words; "Klatu Verata Nrmnphnfhr..."
Not that it's a grave omission or something but I'm low on karma and desperate to feed slashdot'ers some (mis)information, so I will point out that, over a sufficiently long period of time, black holes will also disappear.
See, quantum theories predict (and some effects of this have been observed, I think) that particles are randomply popping into the universe all the time and everywhere. They appear in matter-antimatter pairs (so an electron and positron will appear together), are called vitual particles and, before anyone even knows they were there, they annihilate each other. The net effect is zero and mass-energy of the universe is preserved.
However, when this happens near the event horizon of a black hole, one of the particles could cross the event horizon and fall into the black hole, thus preventing the pair of virtual particles from annihilating each other. In this manner, real matter and anti-matter is created out of the potential gravitational energy of the black hole. When these real particles meet and annihilate each other, they create real photons that escape out into space and the black hole is seen to be radiating. Theory says that this would cause the black hole to lose mass (shrink), and the phenomenon is called Hawking radioation, after Stephen Hawking who predicted it.
As far as I know, this effect (shrinking of black holes) is yet to be experimentally or observationally confirmed, but it's still pretty neat.
I've seen a few poorly moderated posts recommending Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy." I'm not sure why it's not worthy of a few points of praise - it's a truly awesome trilogy in five parts, but perhaps it's so well known that recommending it is moot. Not that most of the other, well rated recommendations aren't well known classics either, but to each his own.
Anyway, if you've already read and/or are tired of hearing about the "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy," I highly recommend Mr. Adams' unrelated yet equally (actually more so, IMHO) amusing "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul." The only problem with these books is that they're so damn short you can finish one off in a day or two if you put your mind to it.
Some other books sitting on my shelf that I enjoyed reading:
- "Nemesis" by Isaac Asimov
- "If Chins Could Kill" by the great Bruce Campbell
- Anything by Charles Dickens is good, though "A Tale Of Two Cities" is my personal favourite - this man is a master of l33t verbiage, and as a bonus his books cost next to nothing because no one has collected any royalties on them in centuries.
- "The Iliad" by Homer, one of Humanity's earliest great classics, was surprisingly good. The other well known ancient epic, Virgil's "Aeneid," turned out to be so much Daikatana; +700 years after Homer, Virgil took what Homer had done, added some of his good ideas and tired to do better, but in fact did worse (IMHO).
- Calculus 3rd Edition... err, wait...
"I hope that RedHat successfully forces both Gnome and KDE to become compatible with one another which would result in the creation of a single desktop. This would be the greatest gift to the Linux world."
Yeah, sure. We hate M$ for being too controling and inhibiting choice with their single dominant product, but a single unified Linux product would be a good thing. Some people apparently fail to realize that the incompatibilities that many rant about and that Red Hat would try to smooth out are a direct consequence of variety. Sure, standards are nice, but nobody pays these people to do any of this, or be compatible with any other product - they do what they like, and if you don't like it then you go to a different bunch of people. It's called choice.
The same thing applies to Red Hat themselves. If you don't like the fact that they're limiting variety of desktop environments then you go with a different distro, or set up your own desktop environment, or do whatever the hell you want to. There are lots of choices, after all, which makes this whole thing moot.
This amazing resiliance demonstrated by electronics (not just this but also Mir and Poineer 10, and there are probably others), combined with the fact that electronics are starting to get smart and escape (as reported on Slashdot, but I can't find the story now), is rather alarming. Sure, right now it's durable space probes and escaping benign experimental robots, but what will happen in the near future? You'll throw out your toaster and the thing will come back ten years later seeking revenge. Combine this with the work on modular robots and you won't only have a pissed toaster out for vengeance, but it'll be riding on that lawn mower you tossed earlier, firing AOL CDs and spraying used motor oil. *shudder*
They give us an editor that can set up wonderful, wonderful things, but that won't let you experience any of them. This means that by the time NWN goes to replication, there's going to be 3x more content online than on the CDs and legions of mod-makers will stalk the malls, camping out in front of software stores, hoping against hope that their creations don't cause any spectacular windows errors when loaded up with the real thing. I'd be seething with anger if I wasn't bouncing off the walls waiting for the thing to finally download. Damnit, 40k/s is not fast enough!
:p )
( I know, I'll get moderated into obscurity when someone catches that one tomorrow, when they can't even connect to a server, let alone download.
As far as I know, my university (Uinversity of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, eh?) does no such thing. Faculties maintain their own banks of papers, projects and programs, and compare the students' submissions when they are handed in. They're suprisingly good at catching students (and the students are suprisingly stupid - I heard that once half a class handed in the same assignment), and I've heard no mention of subscribing to any knid of centralized system where other universities' projects are also considered.
This makes me wonder as to how big a problem this is. Are a lot of universities doing this? Are they small ones or big ones? Do schools like MIT do it? It seems to me that this is some sort of an attempt at a cost-effective, effortless solution that smaller schools would go for, and would factor into the quality of education they provide. As long as big schools do their own thing, the glorious, presigious ideal will remain to stay away from such crap and students will know what they're getting into when they end up at Smith & Sons U.
I love corelational studies. They follow the principle that, if you stare at a set of numbers long enough, your brain's propensity for arbitrarily ordering things that have no real order will allow you to produce any answer you are looking for and more. You end up with results like these, answers to questions nobody asked.
The number of participants, 1.1M, is also very scientific, indicating that whomever did the study has no idea what the hell they're doing. See, statisticians would have us believe that you need about a thousand subjects to get a result roughly within 3% of the truth, as long as those one thousand subjects are representative of the entire population. Somehow I don't think that is the case here.
Slashdoting is no longer a side-effect of limited bandwidth - it's a distributed computing project ran for the good of humanity.
Why? Because their opposition has more money, and you can't fight money in this money-driven society of ours.
What's going on is nothing new, and it is a well known and (mostly) accepted fact that it's all about wealth (money). Some people resist this notion, but they usually end up not having the money to prove their point, or to even survive for that matter. Wealth is what makes you smarter, stronger, and generally better. If you own more stuff than the next guy, you're better than the next guy. It's even better if you own the next guy. It's been going on since the guy with a club met the guy with a rock and they founded a town between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Since then, it's been slavery, empires, slavery, more empires, some more slavery, feudalism, slavery, colonization, good amounts of slavery, empires, slavery, industrial revolution, glorious amounts of slavery, and now, in the 21st century, we are in the age of law, and if you follow the pattern, what's bound to follow is slavery. I don't know about you, but I can't wait.
I say this man goes to too much trouble to infiltrate these offices. At my former office, a bum walked in off the street, went straight through reception and out the back door with a $3000 laptop full of somewhat confidential information. Just some smelly guy in a dirty trenchcoat. I wonder what the receptionist thought when he passed by; that he was a programmer?
Lol, TF2 died the moment Counter-Strike was born. The guys at Valve saw it and said "Shit." They've been trying to outdo it ever since.