This message is posted from the future, using microwaves and faster than light travel. BTW, we figured out why a microwave burst crosses a cesium filled cavity to emerge fully formed slightly earlier in time: to get to the other side! Anyway, here is what http://implants.stanford.edu/ says 50 years from now in my inertial frame. If your browser does not support inertial frames, try this page:
Fifty years ago, a computer with less computational power than a modern spamfilter implant
filled a whole matchbox -- no, it's true, it's hard to imagine: people used to "wear" computers in their clothing back when they wore clothing -- and ran programs consisting of something less than a few hundred million instructions.
In the intervening decades, computer hardware has continued to shrink, though physicists assure us that we will soon reach the limits of silicon chip physics and will need start using "quantum computers" and "optical computers". And, software functionality has continued to grow, or at least, code size has, so that today we can fit the whole <drool>Beowulf cluster</drool> used to drive this simple webpage into a World Wide Web server farm the size of one grit. Still no room for Propaganda, though.
the other guy was right, I was complaining about your use of irony. Irony is not any incongruity between expectations and occurences, it is in particular inconguity which is more akin to "opposite", and it generally concerns "intentions" or "opinions" so that someone or thing seems disappointed or hypocritcal. Expanding on the example you came up with from the dictionary (and not trying to start a war):
"Ireland hates England, but ends up copying England" is incongruous and ironic.
"Ireland hates England, and tries to do everything the opposite, and winds up exactly copying France" is also incongruous, but it is not ironic.
the tone I used before was a bit too harsh (sorry!), but I'm just bitter because I'm particularly annoyed at political uses of irony. Consider: "it is ironic that people who are anti-abortion call themselves pro-life, and yet they favor the death penalty." That's not really irony, it is more akin to hypocrisy. Except, it's not hypocrisy, either. Because, consider "it is ironic that those who object to capital punishment for murderers, have no objection to killing fetuses" or "those who are in favor of legal abortion call themselves pro-choice, yet they tend not wish abortion law to be left to the choice of the voters, nor do they demand that the FDA give women control of their own bodies when it comes to breast implants." And those who demand "reproductive freedom" don't seem to come out in favor of human cloning themselves.
So, I'm not trying to start an argument on those issues either, but if you did want to start, start by saying what you believe and why I should believe it, and avoid pointing out how true believers can't see the other side.
Oh, this is going to be good, it'll be better than Netpliance! Tear the cover off this sucker, load your favorite OS, and press go! Doesn't matter what it is, anything will run!
How? The Transmeta uses code-morphing! It analyzes the code at runtime and figures out what it needs to do, then does it!
Hooray for code-morphing! Any waste of a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from tragic!
you are so biased against speech censorware that you are thinking in a fog: "censorware censors self" would be ironic. "censorware contains security hole like a zillion other pieces of software" has no irony; it is simply a troll for people who share your [yawn] POV
I concur with everything said by the repliers on "my side" here, and would just add one more point. it is a little geeky (and economically unsophisticated) to think that monopoly == literally "1". ask any economist, 80% market share controlled by a collusive group is more than enough to support a monopoly pricing scheme, cf. OPEC. Even 50% can be plenty in the right sort of market. If you (or your group) are the largest, you can compete everywhere. And, anywhere you face a frament of competition you can lower prices or offer other inducements, just enough to bleed the smaller competitor of the resources that they would need to grow large enough to be a real threat. It's the way that the major airlines bleed little upstarts, and... oh, here's a good example: why do all movies cost the same amount in every theater, or every video store, with out regard to cost, supply, or demand... how come? because the prices are being illegally fixed, that's why. The "oscars" should be a sentencing hearing, not an awards ceremony.
The record industry has recently by fingered by the Feds for colluding to set artificially high prices for CDs. It is a feature of monopoly pricing that it decreases sales volumes but increases overall profit. We can see the increased profits in the financial results the companies report.
So why do sales decline most next to universities? Because sales to buyers with the highest price elasticity of demand will suffer the most, and with fixed budgets, college students certainly are among the most elastic consumers.
The story could easily have been titled ("spun") as: study indicates cartel pricing behavior by record industry.
this could turn into a quibblefest if we aren't careful about our language. I said the world's a better place, and you translated that into human happiness and contentment. I'm not trying say one measure is better than the other, or that i was being totally clear, just that we need to be careful that we are are talking about the same things.
My measures would be more abundant food, more people living with shelter, heat, A/C, pollution on the wane, many more people living in democratic free markets, and fewer threats to democracy and free markets. Measurably more knowledge and technology that will lead to more good stuff in the future, genetic reengineering, etc. These sorts of things I'm mentioning are what most people strive for and I'm measuring that people are getting what they want, not getting philosophical about whether or what they should want.
I don't think contentment or happiness have necessarily gone up. My personal sense is that those things are actually variable/relative as a survival instinct, so that individuals don't slack off. In any case, there was a study published in the last few years that seemed to indicate the ongoing sense of happiness is genetically predetermined (people injured permanently in accidents, for example, feel unhappy at first, but return to their pre-accident level of happiness later).
We won't ever see the lower prices in the form of cheaper fast food
fast food is incredibly cheap as it is already, it will definitely get cheaper in the future. The price of a Big Mac as a percentage of a customer's daily wage? it's a tiny fraction.
If somebody could make food cheaper than McDonald's already does, they would because it would be a fantastically lucrative way to take over a huge industry. Of course, this magic only works so long as there is competition. McDonald's probably has been allowed to get too large as their negotiating position in the potato and beef markets is probably too strong.
your questions can be summed up as "since this oversimplification doesn't work, can someone suggest another oversimplification that I can prove won't work?" yawn.
the answer is, given our goals and the situation in China (culture, history), what should our policy toward China be? What message would a change in policy send, and would it harm our interests anywhere in the future?
Now, answer the same questions for Cuba. And for the UK, for that matter. That's all. It's really not difficult terrain for adults to negotiate: yes, there're no perfect answers, we won't necessarily recognize the optimal ones, we can't predict the future, and there's feedback in the system that makes it even more intractable...
But our history is pretty good. Despite all the Chicken Littles running around Slashdot, the world's a better place than it was 25 years ago, and 50 years ago, and 100 years ago, and... you get the picture. And the world will be a better place 50 years from now too, because most of the Chicken Littles will have grown up and they'll realize that Farenheit 451 is a nice morality tale to give to kidz, but is not particularly a reflection of the longterm trend in Western democracy.
Well...there goes another staple of high school summer employment opportunities
yep, like milking cows and churning butter... i.e., automation and productivity improvements are always a good thing for the economy and the people in the economy. Because of previous inventions like automated butter churners and cow milkers, high school kids in industrial countries lead easier lives today than they ever have in the past, and this will further that trend by leading to lower prices and more available labor to do other things that are being left undone today.
the alternative approach can be seen in third world countries where child labor is routinely employed to make bricks, carpets, etc.
you are undoubtedly more familiar with the state-of-the-art today, but there will come a day (if not today) when it will be cheaper to use mass-produced general purpose articulated arms than to custom build different machines for hamburgers, frankfurters, apple pies, etc.
then, what to do with all the spare capacity of the highly capable arm? give it a calculator and it can participate in SETI@home:) or play that mumblety-peg game that the cyborg in Alien plays, with the knife and the splayed fingers:)
You don't need tubes on the moon: it's a vacuum! Kinda cool, actually. Without all that glass, we could achieve high density packaging... integrated circuits, really. Moore's law is saved! if when silicon runs out of oomph, we can just turn the surface of the moon into...
thanks. don't ask me how I missed that originally... crack smoke?:)
You of course realize your anachronism...
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
This is the exact thing Bradbury was talking about:) He noticed that PC stuff... was causing a massive wave of fear even then.
Actually, "PC stuff" is exactly the wave of fear what Sen. Joe McCarthy was exploiting--you have your definition of "PC" backwards.
The present day label "politically correct" hearkens back to the actual use of that phrase by communists in the time of Joe McCarthy. At that time the American Communist Party was highly conformist with the Stalinist party in control of the Soviet Union. Under Stalinism, and later Maoism, uttering any statement that hinted at disagreement with "the party line" was forbidden, and being labelled "politically incorrect" would get you excommunicated or sent at to a "reeducation" camp, if not to your death. The phrase achieved currency more recently in describing the brittleness of some well-intentioned left-wing ideas as expressed in overreaching rules and regulations on college campuses where, for example, saying "girl" instead of "woman" for an 18y.o. female could get you in hot water without regard to your supposed freedom of speech or thought.
It is just not accurate to use "political correctness" to refer to right-wing zealotry, both because of its historical inaccuracy, but also because the term lacks irony in that usage.
What's the syllabus for the course? What services and daemons do they cover, and what tools for each are they recommending? This information wants to be free but I couldn't find it in ten minutes on their site. Hard to know whether we need the course if we don't know what they cover.
Unfortunately, none of those question have anything to do with the matter at hand
Those questions have all sorts of things to do with the matter at hand. Slashdot has every right to question, through their attorneys, the premises of Microsoft's request. It's a little concept called "due process". Not even Microsoft's attorneys would raise their eyebrows at this response. The lawyers are doing what lawyers do.
You also are doing what so many others do: shooting your mouth off about things you are unqualified to speak about. It's OK, it's your right and it's the process, but it doesn't change the underlying process: Slashdot is doing what Slashdot should do, and has every right to do: testing the grounds before deciding to seek their day in court, so they can look out for your and my rights to participate in a discussion without fear of censorship.
Do you think that Microsoft has been damaged by this release of their <dripping with sarcsasm>big secret>?
Re:No, it's something else
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 4
It is not as depressing as all that for Europe... or, at least, it's not more depressing than it was. It's not the US that is dominating the internet, or new technology. Freedom dominates the internet and freedom will keep dominating new technologies.
The US offers the most freedom to its people -- yes, including the freedom to go broke and lay off and fire people, who then have the freedom to have no healthcare and not enough food. But with those social ills... ah, but not: with only the risk of those social ills comes the power of flexibility. It means that a free economy can quickly throw out the old and adopt the new.
In the 80's, everybody talked about Japan and European unification. Now, everybody talks about China. Why did J and E "fail" to overthrow US economic dominance, and why will C? Because they still don't get it: economic freedom allows individuals to generate more technology and more wealth.
But, there's nothing uniquely "US" about freedom -- other than historically, it's where we've seen the most experimentation with freedom. Look at the open and free software movement: lot's of non US participation, maybe even dominance. Why? Because it's an area that offers freedom without regard to where you come from.
I already pay to colo an i386 box on which I run linux, and I host a few dozen domains for friends and charitable organizations. I'd much rather do it as a VM on a mainframe with somebody else worrying about keeping it running and backed up, but with me having total sysadmin control.
My total traffic and other activity is low, but wouldn't it be nice to have some big horsepower and a big fat pipe whenever I need it?
I use RedHat right now, but I'd switch in a heartbeat. I've tested Mandrake and SuSE, and the switch from RedHat was painless. I've also played around with the other free unixalikes and they're all easy enough to change to that the distro is not overwhelmingly important.
Please, somebody, start offering virtual machine linux et al hosting: even if you inevitably decide to charge just a little too much for it, the new option will drive down the price that other ISPs will need to charge:)
I thought Andover was hosting the site: I clicked "geek" and... wait a minute... are you telling me people really talk like this?:)
ok, more seriously and correct me if I'm wrong, but if this thing were open-sourced there'd be mirrors and variations everywhere already. With many eyes, all dialects are shallow:) As it is, it looks like might die along with the rest of the closed world
um... you're both wrong? security absolutism drives me nuts.
If you're placing a firewall in front of hosts that aren't secure, you're just kidding yourself.
No, you are placing insecure machines behind what you hope is a secure firewall. You are as vulnerable as the firewall is. Yes, you could be more secure, but you are not kidding yourself, you just need to be aware that you have a single layer of security which may turn out to have holes, and you are also more vulnerable to having overlooked something.
Unix in front of Unix
Yep, heterogeneous is more likely to be better, but firewall in front is good, secure is good, and they are additive. There's other good stuff too. It also is additive.
Paranoia is good, but don't confuse it with being bitchy which does not help no matter how much it suffuses the sysadmin and security worlds.
Although it's not a good idea to advertise their security infrastructure layout to the world.
IYHO, would it be a good idea to advertise a false security infrastructure layout?:)
Or better yet, while you're at it, short a few thousand shares of Cisco and Arrowpoint, then Slashdot'em! (it's a joke I'm kidding, 'K? no need to deny, etc.)
So in times of a disaster like this, more information on the whereabouts of people wouldn't be so bad.
Because... why? so the newspapers can accurately print how many? so they can light the right number of candles at some cheesey public grieving ceremoney? so they can use public funds to fly in the right-sized team of professional grief counselors?
Oh wait, I know: so the right number of freaks can race to the accident scene to pose as priests!
Slashdot Mirror
I hereby announce my intention to patent "one stroke" fulfillment of needs... oh, damn you wankers and your prior art!
Anyway, here is what http://implants.stanford.edu/ says 50 years from now in my inertial frame. If your browser does not support inertial frames, try this page:
"Ireland hates England, but ends up copying England" is incongruous and ironic.
"Ireland hates England, and tries to do everything the opposite, and winds up exactly copying France" is also incongruous, but it is not ironic.
the tone I used before was a bit too harsh (sorry!), but I'm just bitter because I'm particularly annoyed at political uses of irony. Consider: "it is ironic that people who are anti-abortion call themselves pro-life, and yet they favor the death penalty." That's not really irony, it is more akin to hypocrisy. Except, it's not hypocrisy, either. Because, consider "it is ironic that those who object to capital punishment for murderers, have no objection to killing fetuses" or "those who are in favor of legal abortion call themselves pro-choice, yet they tend not wish abortion law to be left to the choice of the voters, nor do they demand that the FDA give women control of their own bodies when it comes to breast implants." And those who demand "reproductive freedom" don't seem to come out in favor of human cloning themselves.
So, I'm not trying to start an argument on those issues either, but if you did want to start, start by saying what you believe and why I should believe it, and avoid pointing out how true believers can't see the other side.
How? The Transmeta uses code-morphing! It analyzes the code at runtime and figures out what it needs to do, then does it!
Hooray for code-morphing! Any waste of a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from tragic!
you are so biased against speech censorware that you are thinking in a fog: "censorware censors self" would be ironic. "censorware contains security hole like a zillion other pieces of software" has no irony; it is simply a troll for people who share your [yawn] POV
I concur with everything said by the repliers on "my side" here, and would just add one more point. it is a little geeky (and economically unsophisticated) to think that monopoly == literally "1". ask any economist, 80% market share controlled by a collusive group is more than enough to support a monopoly pricing scheme, cf. OPEC. Even 50% can be plenty in the right sort of market. If you (or your group) are the largest, you can compete everywhere. And, anywhere you face a frament of competition you can lower prices or offer other inducements, just enough to bleed the smaller competitor of the resources that they would need to grow large enough to be a real threat. It's the way that the major airlines bleed little upstarts, and ... oh, here's a good example: why do all movies cost the same amount in every theater, or every video store, with out regard to cost, supply, or demand... how come? because the prices are being illegally fixed, that's why. The "oscars" should be a sentencing hearing, not an awards ceremony.
So why do sales decline most next to universities? Because sales to buyers with the highest price elasticity of demand will suffer the most, and with fixed budgets, college students certainly are among the most elastic consumers.
The story could easily have been titled ("spun") as: study indicates cartel pricing behavior by record industry.
My measures would be more abundant food, more people living with shelter, heat, A/C, pollution on the wane, many more people living in democratic free markets, and fewer threats to democracy and free markets. Measurably more knowledge and technology that will lead to more good stuff in the future, genetic reengineering, etc. These sorts of things I'm mentioning are what most people strive for and I'm measuring that people are getting what they want, not getting philosophical about whether or what they should want.
I don't think contentment or happiness have necessarily gone up. My personal sense is that those things are actually variable/relative as a survival instinct, so that individuals don't slack off. In any case, there was a study published in the last few years that seemed to indicate the ongoing sense of happiness is genetically predetermined (people injured permanently in accidents, for example, feel unhappy at first, but return to their pre-accident level of happiness later).
fast food is incredibly cheap as it is already, it will definitely get cheaper in the future. The price of a Big Mac as a percentage of a customer's daily wage? it's a tiny fraction.
If somebody could make food cheaper than McDonald's already does, they would because it would be a fantastically lucrative way to take over a huge industry. Of course, this magic only works so long as there is competition. McDonald's probably has been allowed to get too large as their negotiating position in the potato and beef markets is probably too strong.
the answer is, given our goals and the situation in China (culture, history), what should our policy toward China be? What message would a change in policy send, and would it harm our interests anywhere in the future?
Now, answer the same questions for Cuba. And for the UK, for that matter. That's all. It's really not difficult terrain for adults to negotiate: yes, there're no perfect answers, we won't necessarily recognize the optimal ones, we can't predict the future, and there's feedback in the system that makes it even more intractable...
But our history is pretty good. Despite all the Chicken Littles running around Slashdot, the world's a better place than it was 25 years ago, and 50 years ago, and 100 years ago, and... you get the picture. And the world will be a better place 50 years from now too, because most of the Chicken Littles will have grown up and they'll realize that Farenheit 451 is a nice morality tale to give to kidz, but is not particularly a reflection of the longterm trend in Western democracy.
yep, like milking cows and churning butter... i.e., automation and productivity improvements are always a good thing for the economy and the people in the economy. Because of previous inventions like automated butter churners and cow milkers, high school kids in industrial countries lead easier lives today than they ever have in the past, and this will further that trend by leading to lower prices and more available labor to do other things that are being left undone today.
the alternative approach can be seen in third world countries where child labor is routinely employed to make bricks, carpets, etc.
then, what to do with all the spare capacity of the highly capable arm? give it a calculator and it can participate in SETI@home :) or play that mumblety-peg game that the cyborg in Alien plays, with the knife and the splayed fingers :)
You don't need tubes on the moon: it's a vacuum! Kinda cool, actually. Without all that glass, we could achieve high density packaging... integrated circuits, really. Moore's law is saved! if when silicon runs out of oomph, we can just turn the surface of the moon into...
thanks. don't ask me how I missed that originally... crack smoke? :)
Actually, "PC stuff" is exactly the wave of fear what Sen. Joe McCarthy was exploiting--you have your definition of "PC" backwards.
The present day label "politically correct" hearkens back to the actual use of that phrase by communists in the time of Joe McCarthy. At that time the American Communist Party was highly conformist with the Stalinist party in control of the Soviet Union. Under Stalinism, and later Maoism, uttering any statement that hinted at disagreement with "the party line" was forbidden, and being labelled "politically incorrect" would get you excommunicated or sent at to a "reeducation" camp, if not to your death. The phrase achieved currency more recently in describing the brittleness of some well-intentioned left-wing ideas as expressed in overreaching rules and regulations on college campuses where, for example, saying "girl" instead of "woman" for an 18y.o. female could get you in hot water without regard to your supposed freedom of speech or thought.
It is just not accurate to use "political correctness" to refer to right-wing zealotry, both because of its historical inaccuracy, but also because the term lacks irony in that usage.
What's the syllabus for the course? What services and daemons do they cover, and what tools for each are they recommending? This information wants to be free but I couldn't find it in ten minutes on their site. Hard to know whether we need the course if we don't know what they cover.
put a
in front of your sig, and maybe <i> around it and it'll look more "significant"
Those questions have all sorts of things to do with the matter at hand. Slashdot has every right to question, through their attorneys, the premises of Microsoft's request. It's a little concept called "due process". Not even Microsoft's attorneys would raise their eyebrows at this response. The lawyers are doing what lawyers do.
You also are doing what so many others do: shooting your mouth off about things you are unqualified to speak about. It's OK, it's your right and it's the process, but it doesn't change the underlying process: Slashdot is doing what Slashdot should do, and has every right to do: testing the grounds before deciding to seek their day in court, so they can look out for your and my rights to participate in a discussion without fear of censorship.
Do you think that Microsoft has been damaged by this release of their <dripping with sarcsasm>big secret>?
The US offers the most freedom to its people -- yes, including the freedom to go broke and lay off and fire people, who then have the freedom to have no healthcare and not enough food. But with those social ills... ah, but not: with only the risk of those social ills comes the power of flexibility. It means that a free economy can quickly throw out the old and adopt the new.
In the 80's, everybody talked about Japan and European unification. Now, everybody talks about China. Why did J and E "fail" to overthrow US economic dominance, and why will C? Because they still don't get it: economic freedom allows individuals to generate more technology and more wealth.
But, there's nothing uniquely "US" about freedom -- other than historically, it's where we've seen the most experimentation with freedom. Look at the open and free software movement: lot's of non US participation, maybe even dominance. Why? Because it's an area that offers freedom without regard to where you come from.
My total traffic and other activity is low, but wouldn't it be nice to have some big horsepower and a big fat pipe whenever I need it?
I use RedHat right now, but I'd switch in a heartbeat. I've tested Mandrake and SuSE, and the switch from RedHat was painless. I've also played around with the other free unixalikes and they're all easy enough to change to that the distro is not overwhelmingly important.
Please, somebody, start offering virtual machine linux et al hosting: even if you inevitably decide to charge just a little too much for it, the new option will drive down the price that other ISPs will need to charge :)
I thought Andover was hosting the site: I clicked "geek" and... wait a minute... are you telling me people really talk like this? :)
ok, more seriously and correct me if I'm wrong, but if this thing were open-sourced there'd be mirrors and variations everywhere already. With many eyes, all dialects are shallow :) As it is, it looks like might die along with the rest of the closed world
If you're placing a firewall in front of hosts that aren't secure, you're just kidding yourself.
No, you are placing insecure machines behind what you hope is a secure firewall. You are as vulnerable as the firewall is. Yes, you could be more secure, but you are not kidding yourself, you just need to be aware that you have a single layer of security which may turn out to have holes, and you are also more vulnerable to having overlooked something.
Unix in front of Unix
Yep, heterogeneous is more likely to be better, but firewall in front is good, secure is good, and they are additive. There's other good stuff too. It also is additive.
Paranoia is good, but don't confuse it with being bitchy which does not help no matter how much it suffuses the sysadmin and security worlds.
IYHO, would it be a good idea to advertise a false security infrastructure layout? :)
Or better yet, while you're at it, short a few thousand shares of Cisco and Arrowpoint, then Slashdot'em! (it's a joke I'm kidding, 'K? no need to deny, etc.)
not everyone is as familiar with Canada as you are, monsieur. He means:
Because... why? so the newspapers can accurately print how many? so they can light the right number of candles at some cheesey public grieving ceremoney? so they can use public funds to fly in the right-sized team of professional grief counselors?
Oh wait, I know: so the right number of freaks can race to the accident scene to pose as priests!