I think you're twisting words and their definitions. Let me give you some examples...
If you are someone who is not willing to come dressed clean for your job...
Please don't equate casual with unclean. There's nothing inherently unclean about casual dress, ponytails, sandals, a t-shirt, etc.
Good appearance not only boosts your confidence...
Definitely, but your opinion of "good" may not be mine. I suspect you're trying to equate "good" with "suit", which is manipulative. If you think a "suit" would boost someone's confidence, please say that. On that note, I don't believe that a suit necessarily boosts confidence -- it all depends on what one's job involves (sitting, assembling, reaching, typing), one's body and comfort, the quality of suit one can afford, etc.
Dress like a homeless person and go to the bank, and dress in a suit and go to the bank...
Absolutely. Now roll the clock back 100 years and replace "dress like a homeless person" with "be a female" or "be a non-white person", and you'll see why simply accepting things the way they are, with old and unquestioned values, is commonly neither the right thing to do nor the path to progress.
The article says "Not bad, given that Nintendo DS hardware is in 4 million hands."
Maybe they're talking about just one market (seems unusual though, considering the DS and its games are regionless), but many I've sources claim a DS sales figure of at least 13 million units. Which means it's in around 26 million hands.
It's one thing to be able to see the Tienamin Square results unfiltered by Google, it'd be another thing to be spending a $3M grant on ways to sneak porn (or illegal stuff) past the government proxies.
I don't know that it's "another thing" at all.
There's "free speech", and then there's "conditionally free speech" (which, arguably, China already has). You may be a supporter of the latter concept, just to a different degree than the government in power.
If we analyze the actual content of speech and judge it "worthy" or "legal" then we allow governments and powerful moral majorities to silence anyone that doesn't share their values by simply labelling certain speech illegal or immoral. We're still left living in a system where we have to be scared that what we speak or write or share might offend someone because of prevailing political and moral values, and those values can change overnight and be subject to interpretation to server greater agendas.
Since when do desktop PCs feature throttle capable PCs
Since at least last fall. Motherboard/chipset combos from several manufacturers support CPU clock throttling for Pentium M on the desktop. A couple of examples are DFI's 855GME-MGF and AOpen's i915GMm-HFS. There's another AOpen model (name escapes me) that also supports independent FSB clock throttling.
Sure, let the entrepreneurial students outsource all their projects. The wake-up call will be on them when, during their first real-world interview, I put them in a room, alone, for 20 mins with a whiteboard and ask them to pseudocode an algorithm or data structure.
The students who aren't interested enough in the -science- of a computing project might bet better off majoring in Business Administration and, yes, doing the outsourcing. Leave the architecting, the design, and (maybe) the coding to the real future computer scientists.
I don't think you can conclude much from the McDonalds example.
From the article: Along with the standard Big Macs and fries they also have Teriyaki burgers, fried shrimp burgers, and other things for the Japanese pallet. They didn't force the American tastes on the Japanese and thus, they thrived.
Well I'm happy for McDonalds, but take another example: Starbucks. It does very well in Japan (every location I've seen in Tokyo is equally busy as locations in the U.S. and Canada). And Starbucks did not alter its menu. There are no Japanese beverages, no Japanese dessert squares or mochi balls, no decent quality Japanese loose-leaf teas -- only the same stuff that's served in North America. Everything down to the model of tables, chairs, wall murals, signage, shelving are identical.
So the simpler and more intuitive explanation I offer is that McDonalds didn't change to become any less American or any more Japanese: McDonalds had to change to just suck less in general. (I'm sure their Japanese fare would be well received in North America also.)
Extending this reasoning to Microsoft's experience in Japan is left as an exercise to the reader.
From the article: "The rule of thumb suggested by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital is to hold the volume of a music player no higher than 60 percent of the maximum"
So these "researchers" think that the following aspects of consumer electronics are all standardized or constant enough to stake children's hearing on some magical "60 percent" setting?
* power and efficiency of each device's headphone amplifier
* gain of each model's volume control
* efficiency of each model of headphone/earbud
Spreading advice like that is reckless and potentially false security.
Sort of. This is an excellent, clever way to copy the content. However, consider that the copy you have captured may still be watermarked or otherwise uniquely identifiable.
From the perspectives of piracy-detection and legal-prosecution, you may still be on dangerous ground: copies made as you suggest may be tracable and still cause grief for you or anyone posessing them, depending on how the courts interpret "fair-use" that week. I hope using the technique you suggest for personal backup purposes would be legitimate, but you've clearly circumvented a digital rights mechanism (and possibly left evidence in the copy) and I am not a lawyer.
If you behave yourself you are a lot more more likely to choke on your mcdonald's burger and die than ever be arrested or have anything to do with police or the justice system.
This is true. And this will always be true (and sadly misleading) as long as the definition of "behave yourself" (in the government's eyes) is allowed to get more and more and more restrictive.
Those whose lifestyle generally fits within the current definition of "behave yourself" (in the government's eyes) will rally, condescendingly, against everyone who isn't behaving just like they do. "Why can you behave yourself, just like I do?", is the cry. This attitude is not based in freedom -- it's based in intolerance and fear taken too far.
From the Wikipedia entry linked in the original post...
"APL, in which you can write a program to simulate shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them out to several players in four characters, none of which appear on a standard keyboard." - David Given (?)
"APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums." - Edsger Dijkstra, 1968
Naturally, the uneducated fools of the time proclaimed such things to not be "music" - famously, there was that so-called "riot" at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring , which is now considered to be one of the finest pieces of music written in the 20th century.
I agree with your point, but I don't think the Rite of Spring example necessarily supports it.
The premiere of the piece involved very controversial choreography, dance, and acting which included a pagan sacrifice. Such a display in front of a high-society audience, independent of any music, was reason alone for rejection in 1913, I think.
When the music concert of Rite of Spring alone premiered with no dancing (same year or the year following, I think), it was a huge, fairly uncontroversial success. And it still is, as you point out.
Anyways, it's an interesting piece, but I don't think it was strongly questioned as being "music" when its music alone was judged.
That would make for an awful tribute, in my opinion. Moog pioneered and championed analog, imperfect, and continuously variable signals. MIDI is all about crisp, quantized, digital, perfectly sequencable and recordable signals.
A better tribute, in my opinion, would be to play taps on some his own gear (or at least a Theremin or something) run through a class Moog ladder filter.
powered by +/-12V DC, with lots of silver toggle switches, red LEDs, black plastic knobs, and a big patch panel of jacks for audio and Control Voltage in/out.
In their demands, the protesters refer to Bully, a game that's currently under development, and demand Rockstar to:
"Not to release Bully under any circumstances"
The "under any circumstances" part is where they stop being reasonable and rational (and where I stop listening). Essentially, they're saying that they're going to protest any game called "Bully" that Rockstar releases, even if the content was radically edited, sanitized, censored, etc.
This makes it clear that the protesters are not actually interested in improving or sanitizing game content, but that they're simply out for revenge against Rockstar, even if Rockstar was willing to compromise or negotiate.
The first multi-channel sound chip was not that of the NES, it was of the C-64.
The C-64 had (and still has) some really amazing and distinctive sound. But if by multi-channel you mean stereo, then you're wrong. The C-64's SID is not a stereo chip. (You hack 2 into a C-64 and have a crude form of stereo, but that's true of any mono chip.)
And if by multi-channel you mean polyphonic then the C-64 was also not the first -- even the VIC-20 had multi-channel sound before the C-64. The VIC used the MOS Technology "VIC" chip before the C-64 used the MOS Technology 6581 "SID" chip. The VIC had 3 channels of square-wave sound (one oscillator per channel) and one noise channel. No enveolope control or filter, but still very much multi-channel and fun to listen to. (The VIC was also very similar to the POKEY chip from the Ataris and many arcade machines of that era also.)
I recently undertook a project to move the office (12 employees) to VoIP. We chose a firm that specializes in hosted (and in-house) Asterisk-based solutions. To avoid the install, config, tuning, tweaking learning curve of Asterisk, we chose them to host the server at a datacenter (to which we connected via 3.5 Mbps DSL). Those folks customize and maintain the dial plan (extensions, forwarding rules, ring groups, etc.) and lease us the desktop handsets. (We also had access to the Asterisk scripts ourselves when small changes were necessary.) The handsets were mostly Sayson -- very nice feature set and with high-quality build and feeling. We kept the phones on a separate LAN with QoS features enabled on the firewall/router before heading out onto the network. We also tried a configuration with a local Asterisk server running in firmware at the office so the hop over DSL and the internet to the hosting company was Asterisk-to-Asterisk and (I'm told) more resistant to 'jitter' (i.e. inconsistent latency between handset and server)
In the end, we dumped the VoIP solution, despite excellent customer service and many many hours of tuning, tweaking, and debugging by the hosting company. Even with just one or two simultaneous calls (i.e. not maxing bandwidth), we had terrible call quality. Echoes. Dropouts. Metallic sounds. Yes, every codec and compression level was tried, every trick they knew of (and that had apparently cured our symptoms in others) was employed. Ultimately this was blamed on the variable latency or 'jitter'. The hosting company concluded something in the nature of our DSL connection was causing inconsistent latency between our office and the rest of the net and that we were the minority case that would not get good results from VoIP (today -- things will likely improve over time). I'm told even moderately high latency is better than inconsistent latency from a quality-destroying perspective
As for uptime, our connection was probably up 100% of the time, but the recommended and seemingly good quality VoIP handsets (approx CAN$350 to buy, but we leased) would crash and hang frequently. Despite firmware upgrades and custom keep-alive scripts on the server, it was a morning ritual to walk in have to reboot your phone (and/or to do it mid-day when you noticed it was hung only because it had not been ringing as frequently as it used to).
It sounds like we're likely the exception, but this was a very bad VoIP experience. We're back to using an in-house multi-line analog setup that can use old-fashioned single or multiline phones and we have excellent voice quality on calls anywhere in the world. This was very important to us. Our LD rates over analog are very competitive because we make a lot of LD calls, so the VoIP cost savings aren't terribly missed. Some of the promises of arbitrarily scriptable extensions, time-of-day features, call seeking/forwarding, dynamic menus, etc. that Asterisk promised will be missed though. Better luck for us next year, maybe...
Why isn't this a viable model for control of the LaGrange points? Seems like there is a lot less resources to exploit in the LaGrange points than in the antarctic... hell, there aren't even any penguins living in the LaGrange points!
Ask yourself if you'd rather own a claim to part of Antarctica or to a LaGrange Point. Which is or will be more valuable? I'll take a LaGrange Point, thank you very much. That's why nations are willing to fight over it. They are (or will be) very valuable pieces of real estate. And they're not making them anymore!
A couple of days ago I undertook a project to get a Palm Tungsten T running with my Linux (Gentoo) IBM Thinkpad T42. Overall, I'm fairly impressed. I started with Bluetooth syncing and that worked quite well, but I've decided to stick with USB syncing since the Palm charges in the cradle so it needs to be there for a while every day anyways. I still use Bluetooth for occasional application installs and file transfers though.
KOrganizer is a nice calendar & to-do list app. (And it brings my MS Exchange schedule down without glitches, so far.) Kontact manages, well contacts. And KPilot syncs everything.
My only warning is that this all took -much- longer to get working than a functionally similar (or superior) setup in Windows. Be prepared to tweak things for a few days until it works like it should.
My fianceé would like to study computer science at home, with a view to becoming a software engineer. She is disabled, so it is hard for her to attend a course at an actual college or university. She completed high school, getting good qualifications in maths
Sounds easy enough. Get her to start applying to universities for Distance/Open/Tele/Remote degree programs.
Admission: * her good grades will help * being disabled sure won't hurt her any, and might even help if quota systems are in place
Financially: * her disability gives her more opportunities to apply for scholarships and bursaries * ditto for being female and studying Computer Science (many private bursaries have been created to encourage females in this area) * when she gains entrance, there will likely be someone at the institution she can talk to about applying for private or government financial grants
The Indonesian information minister's statement is ridiculous: "They can't force developing countries like us to solely use legal software since we can't afford it." WTF? Why not? If you can afford Windows, give it a shot. If you can't, try OSS. It'll work. Maybe better, maybe worse. But you sure as hell can be forced to do things legally.
It's not like they're being forced to pay outrageous prices for their sole source of food or something. They have a choice of software, and they choose an expensive, proprietary, non-free one. The shiny, fancy one. Guess what? It costs money.
Beware the Butterfly Effect in the copies...
on
Download Your Brain
·
· Score: 1
I hope the visionary research continues, but I'll be skeptical until some visible progress in this field can be shown. Some proof that this can work in practice on some simpler life forms would be a better start than predictions by a futurist.
I think I understand people's desires to either "live on" or perhaps for their passed loved ones to "live on". But I hope we don't let the emotional desperation for immortality hide the possibility that what this tech promises could be entirely off its target.
We'd all agree that even generations into this technology, there will be flaws and limitations. A few errors isn't a big deal for some systems. But in a chaotic, highly-interconnected, complexly fedback system like the brain, it could be a big problem -- we know that a small change in the input, or system state at input, will commonly result in massive changes in output -- the output will be unpredictable and very likely not what the orignal system would have output.
For example, even if tiny little (seemly acceptable) errors result in differences as subtle as being in an altered chemical state or forgetful or extremely agitated, this could be effectively useless.
"Close" may not cut it for this to be really useful or really satisfying.
I thought I was filling out the cover pages on my TPS Reports properly, but I don't know what a "C-Level Executive" is. Do I have to meet with the Bobs to find out?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty funny, blunt interview. A few snippets, for those too lazy to RTF...
GS: How come we've never heard of you until right now?
KS: Well we're based in Kyoto, right? So we're ninja. You can't find us!
KS: Our policy is not to have a vision.
KS: We just beg them.
GS: Seems like when you've made 1,100 games you shouldn't have to beg.
GS: What's your stock value?
SC: It's about 16 dollars now. We've had better days.
I think you're twisting words and their definitions. Let me give you some examples...
If you are someone who is not willing to come dressed clean for your job...
Please don't equate casual with unclean. There's nothing inherently unclean about casual dress, ponytails, sandals, a t-shirt, etc.
Good appearance not only boosts your confidence...
Definitely, but your opinion of "good" may not be mine. I suspect you're trying to equate "good" with "suit", which is manipulative. If you think a "suit" would boost someone's confidence, please say that. On that note, I don't believe that a suit necessarily boosts confidence -- it all depends on what one's job involves (sitting, assembling, reaching, typing), one's body and comfort, the quality of suit one can afford, etc.
Dress like a homeless person and go to the bank, and dress in a suit and go to the bank...
Absolutely. Now roll the clock back 100 years and replace "dress like a homeless person" with "be a female" or "be a non-white person", and you'll see why simply accepting things the way they are, with old and unquestioned values, is commonly neither the right thing to do nor the path to progress.
The article says "Not bad, given that Nintendo DS hardware is in 4 million hands."
Maybe they're talking about just one market (seems unusual though, considering the DS and its games are regionless), but many I've sources claim a DS sales figure of at least 13 million units. Which means it's in around 26 million hands.
It's one thing to be able to see the Tienamin Square results unfiltered by Google, it'd be another thing to be spending a $3M grant on ways to sneak porn (or illegal stuff) past the government proxies.
I don't know that it's "another thing" at all.
There's "free speech", and then there's "conditionally free speech" (which, arguably, China already has). You may be a supporter of the latter concept, just to a different degree than the government in power.
If we analyze the actual content of speech and judge it "worthy" or "legal" then we allow governments and powerful moral majorities to silence anyone that doesn't share their values by simply labelling certain speech illegal or immoral. We're still left living in a system where we have to be scared that what we speak or write or share might offend someone because of prevailing political and moral values, and those values can change overnight and be subject to interpretation to server greater agendas.
Since when do desktop PCs feature throttle capable PCs
Since at least last fall. Motherboard/chipset combos from several manufacturers support CPU clock throttling for Pentium M on the desktop. A couple of examples are DFI's 855GME-MGF and AOpen's i915GMm-HFS. There's another AOpen model (name escapes me) that also supports independent FSB clock throttling.
Sure, let the entrepreneurial students outsource all their projects. The wake-up call will be on them when, during their first real-world interview, I put them in a room, alone, for 20 mins with a whiteboard and ask them to pseudocode an algorithm or data structure.
The students who aren't interested enough in the -science- of a computing project might bet better off majoring in Business Administration and, yes, doing the outsourcing. Leave the architecting, the design, and (maybe) the coding to the real future computer scientists.
I don't think you can conclude much from the McDonalds example.
From the article: Along with the standard Big Macs and fries they also have Teriyaki burgers, fried shrimp burgers, and other things for the Japanese pallet. They didn't force the American tastes on the Japanese and thus, they thrived.
Well I'm happy for McDonalds, but take another example: Starbucks. It does very well in Japan (every location I've seen in Tokyo is equally busy as locations in the U.S. and Canada). And Starbucks did not alter its menu. There are no Japanese beverages, no Japanese dessert squares or mochi balls, no decent quality Japanese loose-leaf teas -- only the same stuff that's served in North America. Everything down to the model of tables, chairs, wall murals, signage, shelving are identical.
So the simpler and more intuitive explanation I offer is that McDonalds didn't change to become any less American or any more Japanese: McDonalds had to change to just suck less in general. (I'm sure their Japanese fare would be well received in North America also.)
Extending this reasoning to Microsoft's experience in Japan is left as an exercise to the reader.
my custom built Pocket PC based remote ... controls every aspect of my HTPC ... with just one button: the touchscreen :)
Sure, and if Microsoft had its way, it would turn each of the 76,800 pixels on your 320x240 touchscreen into a button.
Think of all the wonderful functionality this could open up! And the marketing opportunities! Oh, joy!
From the article: "The rule of thumb suggested by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital is to hold the volume of a music player no higher than 60 percent of the maximum"
So these "researchers" think that the following aspects of consumer electronics are all standardized or constant enough to stake children's hearing on some magical "60 percent" setting?
* power and efficiency of each device's headphone amplifier
* gain of each model's volume control
* efficiency of each model of headphone/earbud
Spreading advice like that is reckless and potentially false security.
the content is now unprotected for all time
Sort of. This is an excellent, clever way to copy the content. However, consider that the copy you have captured may still be watermarked or otherwise uniquely identifiable.
From the perspectives of piracy-detection and legal-prosecution, you may still be on dangerous ground: copies made as you suggest may be tracable and still cause grief for you or anyone posessing them, depending on how the courts interpret "fair-use" that week. I hope using the technique you suggest for personal backup purposes would be legitimate, but you've clearly circumvented a digital rights mechanism (and possibly left evidence in the copy) and I am not a lawyer.
So so many people have bought game consoles only because they wanted to play GTA.
I bought a game console because "PRESS PLAY ON TAPE" was getting old.
If you behave yourself you are a lot more more likely to choke on your mcdonald's burger and die than ever be arrested or have anything to do with police or the justice system.
This is true. And this will always be true (and sadly misleading) as long as the definition of "behave yourself" (in the government's eyes) is allowed to get more and more and more restrictive.
Those whose lifestyle generally fits within the current definition of "behave yourself" (in the government's eyes) will rally, condescendingly, against everyone who isn't behaving just like they do. "Why can you behave yourself, just like I do?", is the cry. This attitude is not based in freedom -- it's based in intolerance and fear taken too far.
From the Wikipedia entry linked in the original post...
"APL, in which you can write a program to simulate shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them out to several players in four characters, none of which appear on a standard keyboard." - David Given (?)
"APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums." - Edsger Dijkstra, 1968
Naturally, the uneducated fools of the time proclaimed such things to not be "music" - famously, there was that so-called "riot" at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring , which is now considered to be one of the finest pieces of music written in the 20th century.
I agree with your point, but I don't think the Rite of Spring example necessarily supports it.
The premiere of the piece involved very controversial choreography, dance, and acting which included a pagan sacrifice. Such a display in front of a high-society audience, independent of any music, was reason alone for rejection in 1913, I think.
When the music concert of Rite of Spring alone premiered with no dancing (same year or the year following, I think), it was a huge, fairly uncontroversial success. And it still is, as you point out.
Anyways, it's an interesting piece, but I don't think it was strongly questioned as being "music" when its music alone was judged.
Someone should posted a MIDI version of Taps.
That would make for an awful tribute, in my opinion. Moog pioneered and championed analog, imperfect, and continuously variable signals. MIDI is all about crisp, quantized, digital, perfectly sequencable and recordable signals.
A better tribute, in my opinion, would be to play taps on some his own gear (or at least a Theremin or something) run through a class Moog ladder filter.
That would get him self-oscillating, I'm sure.
powered by +/-12V DC, with lots of silver toggle switches, red LEDs, black plastic knobs, and a big patch panel of jacks for audio and Control Voltage in/out.
Oscillate wildly, Robert Moog.
See also: Robert Moog Wikipedia page.
In their demands, the protesters refer to Bully, a game that's currently under development, and demand Rockstar to:
"Not to release Bully under any circumstances "
The "under any circumstances" part is where they stop being reasonable and rational (and where I stop listening). Essentially, they're saying that they're going to protest any game called "Bully" that Rockstar releases, even if the content was radically edited, sanitized, censored, etc.
This makes it clear that the protesters are not actually interested in improving or sanitizing game content, but that they're simply out for revenge against Rockstar, even if Rockstar was willing to compromise or negotiate.
The first multi-channel sound chip was not that of the NES, it was of the C-64.
The C-64 had (and still has) some really amazing and distinctive sound. But if by multi-channel you mean stereo, then you're wrong. The C-64's SID is not a stereo chip. (You hack 2 into a C-64 and have a crude form of stereo, but that's true of any mono chip.)
And if by multi-channel you mean polyphonic then the C-64 was also not the first -- even the VIC-20 had multi-channel sound before the C-64. The VIC used the MOS Technology "VIC" chip before the C-64 used the MOS Technology 6581 "SID" chip. The VIC had 3 channels of square-wave sound (one oscillator per channel) and one noise channel. No enveolope control or filter, but still very much multi-channel and fun to listen to. (The VIC was also very similar to the POKEY chip from the Ataris and many arcade machines of that era also.)
More on the SID here
More on sound chips here
I recently undertook a project to move the office (12 employees) to VoIP. We chose a firm that specializes in hosted (and in-house) Asterisk-based solutions. To avoid the install, config, tuning, tweaking learning curve of Asterisk, we chose them to host the server at a datacenter (to which we connected via 3.5 Mbps DSL). Those folks customize and maintain the dial plan (extensions, forwarding rules, ring groups, etc.) and lease us the desktop handsets. (We also had access to the Asterisk scripts ourselves when small changes were necessary.) The handsets were mostly Sayson -- very nice feature set and with high-quality build and feeling. We kept the phones on a separate LAN with QoS features enabled on the firewall/router before heading out onto the network. We also tried a configuration with a local Asterisk server running in firmware at the office so the hop over DSL and the internet to the hosting company was Asterisk-to-Asterisk and (I'm told) more resistant to 'jitter' (i.e. inconsistent latency between handset and server)
In the end, we dumped the VoIP solution, despite excellent customer service and many many hours of tuning, tweaking, and debugging by the hosting company. Even with just one or two simultaneous calls (i.e. not maxing bandwidth), we had terrible call quality. Echoes. Dropouts. Metallic sounds. Yes, every codec and compression level was tried, every trick they knew of (and that had apparently cured our symptoms in others) was employed. Ultimately this was blamed on the variable latency or 'jitter'. The hosting company concluded something in the nature of our DSL connection was causing inconsistent latency between our office and the rest of the net and that we were the minority case that would not get good results from VoIP (today -- things will likely improve over time). I'm told even moderately high latency is better than inconsistent latency from a quality-destroying perspective
As for uptime, our connection was probably up 100% of the time, but the recommended and seemingly good quality VoIP handsets (approx CAN$350 to buy, but we leased) would crash and hang frequently. Despite firmware upgrades and custom keep-alive scripts on the server, it was a morning ritual to walk in have to reboot your phone (and/or to do it mid-day when you noticed it was hung only because it had not been ringing as frequently as it used to).
It sounds like we're likely the exception, but this was a very bad VoIP experience. We're back to using an in-house multi-line analog setup that can use old-fashioned single or multiline phones and we have excellent voice quality on calls anywhere in the world. This was very important to us. Our LD rates over analog are very competitive because we make a lot of LD calls, so the VoIP cost savings aren't terribly missed. Some of the promises of arbitrarily scriptable extensions, time-of-day features, call seeking/forwarding, dynamic menus, etc. that Asterisk promised will be missed though. Better luck for us next year, maybe...
Why isn't this a viable model for control of the LaGrange points? Seems like there is a lot less resources to exploit in the LaGrange points than in the antarctic... hell, there aren't even any penguins living in the LaGrange points!
Ask yourself if you'd rather own a claim to part of Antarctica or to a LaGrange Point. Which is or will be more valuable? I'll take a LaGrange Point, thank you very much. That's why nations are willing to fight over it. They are (or will be) very valuable pieces of real estate. And they're not making them anymore!
A couple of days ago I undertook a project to get a Palm Tungsten T running with my Linux (Gentoo) IBM Thinkpad T42. Overall, I'm fairly impressed. I started with Bluetooth syncing and that worked quite well, but I've decided to stick with USB syncing since the Palm charges in the cradle so it needs to be there for a while every day anyways. I still use Bluetooth for occasional application installs and file transfers though.
KOrganizer is a nice calendar & to-do list app. (And it brings my MS Exchange schedule down without glitches, so far.) Kontact manages, well contacts. And KPilot syncs everything.
My only warning is that this all took -much- longer to get working than a functionally similar (or superior) setup in Windows. Be prepared to tweak things for a few days until it works like it should.
My fianceé would like to study computer science at home, with a view to becoming a software engineer. She is disabled, so it is hard for her to attend a course at an actual college or university. She completed high school, getting good qualifications in maths
Sounds easy enough. Get her to start applying to universities for Distance/Open/Tele/Remote degree programs.
Admission:
* her good grades will help
* being disabled sure won't hurt her any, and might even help if quota systems are in place
Financially:
* her disability gives her more opportunities to apply for scholarships and bursaries
* ditto for being female and studying Computer Science (many private bursaries have been created to encourage females in this area)
* when she gains entrance, there will likely be someone at the institution she can talk to about applying for private or government financial grants
The Indonesian information minister's statement is ridiculous: "They can't force developing countries like us to solely use legal software since we can't afford it." WTF? Why not? If you can afford Windows, give it a shot. If you can't, try OSS. It'll work. Maybe better, maybe worse. But you sure as hell can be forced to do things legally.
It's not like they're being forced to pay outrageous prices for their sole source of food or something. They have a choice of software, and they choose an expensive, proprietary, non-free one. The shiny, fancy one. Guess what? It costs money.
I hope the visionary research continues, but I'll be skeptical until some visible progress in this field can be shown. Some proof that this can work in practice on some simpler life forms would be a better start than predictions by a futurist.
I think I understand people's desires to either "live on" or perhaps for their passed loved ones to "live on". But I hope we don't let the emotional desperation for immortality hide the possibility that what this tech promises could be entirely off its target.
We'd all agree that even generations into this technology, there will be flaws and limitations. A few errors isn't a big deal for some systems. But in a chaotic, highly-interconnected, complexly fedback system like the brain, it could be a big problem -- we know that a small change in the input, or system state at input, will commonly result in massive changes in output -- the output will be unpredictable and very likely not what the orignal system would have output.
For example, even if tiny little (seemly acceptable) errors result in differences as subtle as being in an altered chemical state or forgetful or extremely agitated, this could be effectively useless.
"Close" may not cut it for this to be really useful or really satisfying.
I thought I was filling out the cover pages on my TPS Reports properly, but I don't know what a "C-Level Executive" is. Do I have to meet with the Bobs to find out?