First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion?
Then we have to ask, how long before we reach that many? 100 years? 200 years?
Then we have to ask, what resource is going to run out first? Drinking water? Food? Air?
When we have those answers, we will be able to discuss which is best to spend money and effort on, mining the asteroid field or getting off this damn rock.
I'd say the stuff we can get in the asteroid field will run out long after we've run out of the bare necessities, so we should concentrate on going to a new planet terraforming it.
IF we only have 100--200 years left on this planet, that's "near-term future" enough for me.
Video games are corrupting our youth! Comic books cause delinquency! The internet is limiting our attention span!
Whatever. Save the children: brain-wash them to be "pure and innocent".. or the world will come to an end.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't be where I am today had I not had comic books when I was little, games like the Lucasarts point'n'click adventures when I was a teenager and the internet later on. I literally taught myself to read and write English and French (2nd and 3rd languages) through those things, and was given an incentive and the means to learn about computers and programming, which I happily and successfully make my living off today. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be a completely different person had Dr. Wertham and his minions deprived me of those.
So, I want whiners like that guy to just shut the hell up. I don't want them to censor my comic books, ban my video games or disconnect my internet, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure my kids (if I ever have kids) will have unfettered access to all the stimuli I had when I was young (be those "good" or "bad" in Dr. Wertham's view).
I would go as far as to say, film ratings are stupid. What if a 12-year-old watches a 18+ movies instead of just Disney cartoons with rainbows and flying unicorns?
Good thing Dr. Wertham is already dead, because he would just HATE webcomics (omg, comic books on the internet! It's the work of the devil!)
I'm all for teaching kids programming, and I'd love to see them applying what they learn to solve problems in other courses as well. For instance, it would be great if they were encouraged to use their programming skills to solve maths or physics problems from their other courses. This implies programming is turned into a useful tool rather than some theoretical thing that they forget the day after the exam. Imho, it's better to show them how to solve simple, practical problems than to try to cram in their heads how qsort works, for example.
OpenOffice is nice, however I really recommend you teach them some LaTeX, which is also a very useful tool to know.
Maybe I am, though I don't see how that is relevant here. We're criticising what they DID do with quite a bit of hindsight, so it's historically accurate to say they screwed up big time.
What I want doesn't really matter. The fact is, Java is a very ugly programming language that has been chopped up, extended, distended, designed, redesigned and bloated over the many years it's been around... I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboi, but even C# is a nicer language to use, though tbh not that much nicer.
What we need is a new standard, hopefully one that is really open source and comes with no strings attached.
The similarity of android's dev language with Java is only superficial. It's not really Java by a long way.
Now that Oracle's Java is showing its true colours and proving it's not really open source, I see no reason for Google (or any other company that backs open source) to support it.
This will lead to Java's death, and that's a good thing because it's WAY over-due.
They did way too little, way too late. They had a very powerful brand, but they failed to reinvent themselves in the consumers' eyes because they didn't see digital as a big enough threat to their existing business.
This isn't really news, but it's a great insight on why Kodak became as irrelevant as it is today. They were already inventing a lot of the technology for digital photography as early as the 70s, but they made a terrible business decision not to expand their traditional offerings, thinking film would last forever. They were very wrong, they failed to innovate and adapt fast enough to a changing market and within a couple of decades they were superseded by those who were prepared to embrace the new technology. C'est la vie, I s'pose.
I don't give a toss what your god wants, because if I gave a toss your god would send me straight to hell.
I hope you can see why I find myself at such a terrible impasse.
What's wrong with kids seeing the odd tit on TV? It's just a part of the human body, and let's not forget we all came out of a vagina.
All this bitching probably comes from a bunch of super-religious nuts who are trying to make people feel bad about their bodies, so they can keep telling them god will save them.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 5, Informative
OS/2 wasn't out-competed by other products in the market -- it was tactically murdered by Microsoft to spite IBM (who had hugely invested in it) and put Windows in total control of the market.
So, I wish your buddy could have continued throwing OS/2 in your face, because today we could definitely do with a bit more competition in the OS department.
There's a word for people who apply stereotypes to entire groups of people -- they are called bigots, and I'm afraid that you might be one of them.
I am a full-time Linux user and, just like all other OSS users I know, I have absolutely no qualms about using closed-source software if it gets the job done. To have some idiot comparing me to the religious nutters who objected to Life of Brian just because of what software I use is downright offensive.
Seriously, what were you thinking making a retarded comment like that?
I suppose we should expect a "Mhz war" between the ISPs. You know, lots of false advertising telling people that "more is better, and don't forget to also buy X!" where whoever manages to sell their users the biggest amount of extra crap wins.
Funnily enough, I suspect they'll just take away what we currently have and re-sell it back to us at a higher price.
Ah, cheers. You are right, this is a very different approach than VJ. When I posted that comment I was actually looking at the YouTube video linked in the/. article that is definitely using VJ -- why is there a completely unrelated video linked in the article?!?
Anyway, I remember I did some work with Active Shape Models many many years ago, though we were trying to fit a 3d face model on the image instead of a 2d template -- much harder (and painfully slow with the computers we had in those days).
Can't find any detailed info, but from looking at their demo, I'll guess they are probably using the Viola-Jones method, possibly with a "tree" cascade to detect face angles. The last time I checked, libopencv provided most of the tools to build such as a system, as well as pre-trained detectors for individual face features. Not much invention going on here, but possibly some innovation -- I'd be interested to see more info, if anyone knows where to find it.
That's the whole point -- without net neutrality (in its theoretical, "untainted" form, at least) the ISPs can manually mess with QoS based on how much you are willing to pay. If a bunch of other users are getting the low latency package and you are getting the normal package, then their traffic will always get priority over yours. Put enough of them in the game and your Skype may start stuttering, while they don't even get a reduction in video quality; in other words you get worse service just because you are not paying more than you are now.
Once everyone has bought the low latency package, everyone will get the same QoS as they did before the ISP started prioritising traffic like this, except the ISP is making more money off everyone: win-win for the ISP, lose-lose for the users.
Not sure what your last paragraph is trying to say, but I envision the future will offer a multi-dimensional tiered system, where users will be able to buy "extra" latency and extra speed and extra quota by paying more. It's a pretty shitty future, tbh, because we'll get a bigger gap between "privileged" internet users who pay a fortune every month to get decent service and "bottom feeders" who pay what we pay now and get what's left. I hope I'm wrong and hope to see ISPs invest in better infrastructure, but I'm afraid this whole net neutrality discussion is getting so much attention simply because they don't want to do that.
Paying £3 to get something extra doesn't sound too bad.
What worries me is that ISPs may quietly start crippling their default packages so they can sell "extras". For example, this ISP could artificially raise the latency of normal users' connections, and when anyone complains they might say "it's because we give priority to the more expensive packages -- if you want better latency you must also pay more".
You might say "meh, that'll never happen"... But, this is exactly the sort of thing our ISPs are infamous for doing here in the UK.
At a guess, I'd say the reason employees might take customer data is to maintain relations with their old customers if they go freelance. I doubt most people would take personal customer info to do evil. Sure, there's no doubt some would sell it to spam.com, but I don't think they are the majority.
I'd say the iPad is more "evolutionary" than "revolutionary". The only difference between it and similar devices that predated it is that it's backed by Apple's marketing machine and a truck-load of cash, gold and jewels.
As for the article at hand... a tiny, tiny giant Meh from me -- you can even compare it to the stone tablets of the ancient Greeks, if you are so inclined.
Missing persons haven't spent millions in lobbying, while the copyright industries have.
It's distressing how easy governments are to buy these days, and the US seems to be doing its absolute worst lately -- they are almost dropping all pretence and simply doing what the corporate masters tell them to do.
The Boing Boing "article" you linked to was written by Cory Doctorow himself. There are probably easier ways to contact him than through Boing Boing...
Of course, that wouldn't solve the problem. Perhaps Boing Boing's editor needs a lesson about CC actually being a form of copyright?
But, to be fair, given the content of that article (or rather the lack of it), I doubt they would have paid to have an image there in the first place -- it would have been either no image at all, or a CC image with a less restrictive license.
"A search for Ubuntu on the Dell UK website returns only one laptop"
I'm in the UK. Was looking to buy an ubuntu laptop exactly a year ago, and was looking into Dell. They only had one ubuntu option, even back then. I used their online chat thingy to ask if they had any Linux/bare-bones systems and the answer was "go away". I called them and they said "we don't support ubuntu" and rudely hung up.
So, no. The world's largest computer manufacturer doesn't sell Ubuntu PCs, it doesn't support Ubuntu, it wishes OSS would just POAD.
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First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion?
Then we have to ask, how long before we reach that many? 100 years? 200 years?
Then we have to ask, what resource is going to run out first? Drinking water? Food? Air?
When we have those answers, we will be able to discuss which is best to spend money and effort on, mining the asteroid field or getting off this damn rock.
I'd say the stuff we can get in the asteroid field will run out long after we've run out of the bare necessities, so we should concentrate on going to a new planet terraforming it.
IF we only have 100--200 years left on this planet, that's "near-term future" enough for me.
Video games are corrupting our youth! Comic books cause delinquency! The internet is limiting our attention span!
Whatever. Save the children: brain-wash them to be "pure and innocent".. or the world will come to an end.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't be where I am today had I not had comic books when I was little, games like the Lucasarts point'n'click adventures when I was a teenager and the internet later on. I literally taught myself to read and write English and French (2nd and 3rd languages) through those things, and was given an incentive and the means to learn about computers and programming, which I happily and successfully make my living off today. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be a completely different person had Dr. Wertham and his minions deprived me of those.
So, I want whiners like that guy to just shut the hell up. I don't want them to censor my comic books, ban my video games or disconnect my internet, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure my kids (if I ever have kids) will have unfettered access to all the stimuli I had when I was young (be those "good" or "bad" in Dr. Wertham's view).
I would go as far as to say, film ratings are stupid. What if a 12-year-old watches a 18+ movies instead of just Disney cartoons with rainbows and flying unicorns?
Good thing Dr. Wertham is already dead, because he would just HATE webcomics (omg, comic books on the internet! It's the work of the devil!)
I'm all for teaching kids programming, and I'd love to see them applying what they learn to solve problems in other courses as well. For instance, it would be great if they were encouraged to use their programming skills to solve maths or physics problems from their other courses. This implies programming is turned into a useful tool rather than some theoretical thing that they forget the day after the exam. Imho, it's better to show them how to solve simple, practical problems than to try to cram in their heads how qsort works, for example.
OpenOffice is nice, however I really recommend you teach them some LaTeX, which is also a very useful tool to know.
Don't get me started on the platform.
Maybe I am, though I don't see how that is relevant here. We're criticising what they DID do with quite a bit of hindsight, so it's historically accurate to say they screwed up big time.
What I want doesn't really matter. The fact is, Java is a very ugly programming language that has been chopped up, extended, distended, designed, redesigned and bloated over the many years it's been around... I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboi, but even C# is a nicer language to use, though tbh not that much nicer. What we need is a new standard, hopefully one that is really open source and comes with no strings attached.
The similarity of android's dev language with Java is only superficial. It's not really Java by a long way.
Now that Oracle's Java is showing its true colours and proving it's not really open source, I see no reason for Google (or any other company that backs open source) to support it.
This will lead to Java's death, and that's a good thing because it's WAY over-due.
TechDirt's Mike Masnick did a wonderful job explaining why you are wrong: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100808/00561810539.shtml
They did way too little, way too late. They had a very powerful brand, but they failed to reinvent themselves in the consumers' eyes because they didn't see digital as a big enough threat to their existing business.
This isn't really news, but it's a great insight on why Kodak became as irrelevant as it is today. They were already inventing a lot of the technology for digital photography as early as the 70s, but they made a terrible business decision not to expand their traditional offerings, thinking film would last forever. They were very wrong, they failed to innovate and adapt fast enough to a changing market and within a couple of decades they were superseded by those who were prepared to embrace the new technology. C'est la vie, I s'pose.
I don't give a toss what your god wants, because if I gave a toss your god would send me straight to hell. I hope you can see why I find myself at such a terrible impasse.
What's wrong with kids seeing the odd tit on TV? It's just a part of the human body, and let's not forget we all came out of a vagina. All this bitching probably comes from a bunch of super-religious nuts who are trying to make people feel bad about their bodies, so they can keep telling them god will save them.
OS/2 wasn't out-competed by other products in the market -- it was tactically murdered by Microsoft to spite IBM (who had hugely invested in it) and put Windows in total control of the market.
I kid you not. This played a huge part in the anti-trust lawsuit, and it's well-documented historical fact. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/368660.stm
So, I wish your buddy could have continued throwing OS/2 in your face, because today we could definitely do with a bit more competition in the OS department.
There's a word for people who apply stereotypes to entire groups of people -- they are called bigots, and I'm afraid that you might be one of them.
I am a full-time Linux user and, just like all other OSS users I know, I have absolutely no qualms about using closed-source software if it gets the job done. To have some idiot comparing me to the religious nutters who objected to Life of Brian just because of what software I use is downright offensive.
Seriously, what were you thinking making a retarded comment like that?
I suppose we should expect a "Mhz war" between the ISPs. You know, lots of false advertising telling people that "more is better, and don't forget to also buy X!" where whoever manages to sell their users the biggest amount of extra crap wins.
Funnily enough, I suspect they'll just take away what we currently have and re-sell it back to us at a higher price.
Ah, cheers. You are right, this is a very different approach than VJ. When I posted that comment I was actually looking at the YouTube video linked in the /. article that is definitely using VJ -- why is there a completely unrelated video linked in the article?!?
Anyway, I remember I did some work with Active Shape Models many many years ago, though we were trying to fit a 3d face model on the image instead of a 2d template -- much harder (and painfully slow with the computers we had in those days).
Can't find any detailed info, but from looking at their demo, I'll guess they are probably using the Viola-Jones method, possibly with a "tree" cascade to detect face angles. The last time I checked, libopencv provided most of the tools to build such as a system, as well as pre-trained detectors for individual face features. Not much invention going on here, but possibly some innovation -- I'd be interested to see more info, if anyone knows where to find it.
That's the whole point -- without net neutrality (in its theoretical, "untainted" form, at least) the ISPs can manually mess with QoS based on how much you are willing to pay. If a bunch of other users are getting the low latency package and you are getting the normal package, then their traffic will always get priority over yours. Put enough of them in the game and your Skype may start stuttering, while they don't even get a reduction in video quality; in other words you get worse service just because you are not paying more than you are now.
Once everyone has bought the low latency package, everyone will get the same QoS as they did before the ISP started prioritising traffic like this, except the ISP is making more money off everyone: win-win for the ISP, lose-lose for the users.
Not sure what your last paragraph is trying to say, but I envision the future will offer a multi-dimensional tiered system, where users will be able to buy "extra" latency and extra speed and extra quota by paying more. It's a pretty shitty future, tbh, because we'll get a bigger gap between "privileged" internet users who pay a fortune every month to get decent service and "bottom feeders" who pay what we pay now and get what's left. I hope I'm wrong and hope to see ISPs invest in better infrastructure, but I'm afraid this whole net neutrality discussion is getting so much attention simply because they don't want to do that.
Paying £3 to get something extra doesn't sound too bad. What worries me is that ISPs may quietly start crippling their default packages so they can sell "extras". For example, this ISP could artificially raise the latency of normal users' connections, and when anyone complains they might say "it's because we give priority to the more expensive packages -- if you want better latency you must also pay more". You might say "meh, that'll never happen"... But, this is exactly the sort of thing our ISPs are infamous for doing here in the UK.
The lobbyists have made it pretty clear before that they are very much willing to exploit child porn to push through their own crap. Here's Christian Engstrom's (Pirate Party MEP) blog entry: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/
At a guess, I'd say the reason employees might take customer data is to maintain relations with their old customers if they go freelance. I doubt most people would take personal customer info to do evil. Sure, there's no doubt some would sell it to spam.com, but I don't think they are the majority.
I'd say the iPad is more "evolutionary" than "revolutionary". The only difference between it and similar devices that predated it is that it's backed by Apple's marketing machine and a truck-load of cash, gold and jewels.
As for the article at hand... a tiny, tiny giant Meh from me -- you can even compare it to the stone tablets of the ancient Greeks, if you are so inclined.
Missing persons haven't spent millions in lobbying, while the copyright industries have. It's distressing how easy governments are to buy these days, and the US seems to be doing its absolute worst lately -- they are almost dropping all pretence and simply doing what the corporate masters tell them to do.
I'm sure all terrorists use Blackberries. After all, it's a high-income job, right?
The Boing Boing "article" you linked to was written by Cory Doctorow himself. There are probably easier ways to contact him than through Boing Boing... Of course, that wouldn't solve the problem. Perhaps Boing Boing's editor needs a lesson about CC actually being a form of copyright? But, to be fair, given the content of that article (or rather the lack of it), I doubt they would have paid to have an image there in the first place -- it would have been either no image at all, or a CC image with a less restrictive license.
"A search for Ubuntu on the Dell UK website returns only one laptop"
I'm in the UK. Was looking to buy an ubuntu laptop exactly a year ago, and was looking into Dell. They only had one ubuntu option, even back then. I used their online chat thingy to ask if they had any Linux/bare-bones systems and the answer was "go away". I called them and they said "we don't support ubuntu" and rudely hung up.
So, no. The world's largest computer manufacturer doesn't sell Ubuntu PCs, it doesn't support Ubuntu, it wishes OSS would just POAD.