I can understand when a web site asks very nicely to link to their main page, rather than deep link to a specific thing on their site, but asking and demanding are two different things. Then trying to get the law to say you CAN demand this, and sue people who don't meet your demands - well, that's insanity.
I noticed two things about this:
1) "except in public areas" - basically so our police state can do what we aren't allowed to. Yet Another case of "Do What We Say, Not What We Do!"
2) Do something in violation of the first ammendment and say it's to "Protect the Children"
Next thing you know, they'll be telling me we can't own guns because we have to protect the children. And we can't save a woman who's unborn child will cause her death, because we have to Protect the Children. And, if, while in high school, you play a practical joke on someone by "pants-ing" them (sneaking up behind them and yanking their pants down by the belt-loops) you get labeled a "sex offender" and now - for the rest of your life, you have no right to privacy and must introduce yourself to your neighbors like so: "Hi, my name's joe - and I'm a sex offender. Just had to say that so the Gestapo doesn't come out and shoot me in the face..." -- All to Protect the GODDAMN children!
(Damn - that last link really freakin hurts - I look at the mindless soccer moms I see when I go to a school function with my 11 y/o son, and I wonder - "How good would she be at psychological profiling?" - damn! shivers!)
Maybe there is something we REALLY should protect the children from?.....Uhmmm..... Yeah - probably
Didn't have any problems with my sex life being affected by my programming until, while in college, I learned about recursion. Everything went fine until the bed ran out of stack space and it all fell over. I figured it was a pointer problem, and it took a while to get it all worked out, but now it's kinda fun.
Everything went fine till my junior year and I started in on concurrent processing. Now I can't tell if it's a hardware limitation that's keeping me from performing more than 4 operations simultaneously, or if it's a problem with the OS... Most likely that problem is in my firmware. Probably something is flashing my firmware and causing me to reboot.
Maybe during grad school we'll learn about distributed computing....Then I'll need a bigger bed! But I hear it's hard to keep all the process communication under control, because the ports are so busy....
You know that's what it would be used for! You know it! Own up to it.....
Just what everyone needs - to put a bookmark to The Hun on the crapper's console!
I can imagine my grandpa, sitting on his back porch, eating a salted turnip, with a copy of the bible in his lap when I tell him about this article. He'll say something like:
"Hmmm...sound's like the Mark of the Beast to me."
And then he'll open the bible to revelations and start reading...
Not being quite the religious man my grandfather is, all I have to say about this technology is:
Why do we need this? How will this improve the quality of life for humanity at large?
Well, it ain't. Sorry. I got mine due to a SNAFU with my insurance company. I wanted the LIVE! platinum, but they sent me an audigy. As far as I can tell - no support under linux.
Because I'm forced to dual boot (my wife refuses to learn linux) it's just a minor annoyance that I can't play MP3s most of the time I'm on the computer. And if I really want to, I can boot to windows and do it.
The card is very nice. If you ever wanted to play 46 MP3s all at once, that and an athlon 1.4ghz will let you do it. And mine has a firewire port on it. But the lack of linux support kind of shoots it down for me.
Someone earlier said that for most people, cards above a SB PCI 128 are overkill, and I have to agree.
The short of it: There are two questions I ask when I look for a soundcard.
1) Does it have a non-locking DSP?
2) Does it support 4 channel audio?
SB PCI 128 answers those two questions with a YES, and save you a BUTTLOAD of money.
After that, everything else is just more blinkenlights.
I'll probably never even use the firewire port on the card I have...
As a father and a Tick fan from the VERY beginning (with his one-panel intro in the New England Comics catalog) with a son who loved the cartoon, we sat down and watched the show together. I was a pretty uncomfortable half hour. I wanted to laugh at the bitch line...but I wanted to be a stern, no-nonsense dad that doesn't appreciate that behavior out of an 11 year old. I just hope that Ben can iron out the ticks behavior and make him as stupid, innocent and loveable as the comic/cartoon.
because it's pointless. It's pointless and it's on slashdot's main page. I come here to read decent NEWS...not retarded, pointless crap.....
Oh wait...nevermind.
Suppose it costs $100 in hospital fees to make your baby the regular way. Does that mean that baby is only worth $100?
Sometimes I think I'd trade my son for a puppy. I could get a puppy at the pound for about $60.......But I wouldn't take $60 cash for him. See...my son is a human being, and there's no price on that. But when you can tailor make and mass produce a thing, typically that thing goes down in value because they are easier to make.
Can I buy a baby for $100 by giving it to some poor chumps and telling them to reproduce?
Well - there are some places you could probably do this.
It's mine, right? I bought it. Can I make it work dangerous jobs for me? etc. etc.
No, because there are explicit laws against this.
Oh yeah, can I give that $100 to some black people to reproduce for me? That kid could make cotton etc.
yet again, probably somewhere there's be someone willing...but there are still explicit laws.
None of your argument addresses the ethics of cloning itself. In my experience, the same can be said about the arguments of any other "bioethicist."
How's this: Cloning and genetic engineering opens the doors for reducing humanity to the status of a commodity. When employers and governments can shop for humans like you and I shop for choice cuts of meat, the basis of the american dream is meaningless.
In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson says:
"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator of certain inalienable rights..."
Now - what if all men aren't created equal? What if their creator isn't an invisible Charlton Heston look-alike in white robes (as Jefferson envisioned the creator when he wrote those words, no doubt) but a nerdy guy in a white labcoat? What if this nerdy guy in a white labcoat specifically makes them inequal and without these rights?
Man becomes a commodity. Governments and employers can shop for humans.
The "real ethics of cloning" as you put it is right here: It is dehumanizing. It cheapens all of mankind.
I'm not talking about some spiritual thing. I'm talking about things like civil rights, equal opportunity, and the fact that America was founded on the idea that ANYONE, no matter what their accident of birth gave them, can be great.
Should cloning be stopped? Hell no. The benefits for organ transplant alone say no.
Should it be tightly regulated? Hell YES! the very thought that something like "Brave New World" could happen..ever... DEMANDS that humanity be very careful with these next few steps in biologogical science.
Suppose their research costs were around $10M or so..name the price. It doesn't matter.
Does that mean the cloned person is only worth $10M?
How much am I worth?
How much are you worth?
Can I buy a clone for $10M? If so, what can I do with it? It's mine, right? I bought it. Can I make it work dangerous jobs for me? Like operating a nuclear reactor? I bought it. It's mine. Why pay a human to do that job, when I can buy a clone to do it. Then I don't have to mess with insurance or lawsuits or worker's comp....
Oh yeah - do they come with black skin? I don't currently have a nuclear reactor, but I do have 125 acres of prime kentucky farmland where I could grow some kickass cotton. If they came with black skin they wouldn't sunburn so bad, and I could get more work of out each unit.
"And all this science, I don't understand...
It's just my job, five days a week."
Someone earlier said that we shouldn't poo-poo this guy's dream. More has been done for humanity by the "single genius" (or madman) than has been done by governments. All the important inventions have been done by single people. The horse collar (don't laugh, it made moving things easier). The concept of interchangable parts (sam colt - our society is based on his idea). The assembly line. AC electricity (thank you Tesla!). radio. airplanes. Maybe he'll die...maybe he will. Or maybe he'll succeed. Or maybe he'll die and his death will spark someone else to fix his problems and succeed.
But here's what troubles me:
to achieve orbit requires alot of energy. ALOT. I remember a chinese rocket that went squirrly 2 seconds after ignition, flew 20 miles across the hills and blew up a whole village. I remember several sattelites that were rendered useless because they were hit by a 25,000 KPH !_PAINT_FLECK_! Is this guy putting a rocket into orbit, or is he putting a big piece of flying-death-junk into orbit that future space missions will be endangered by. Sure - ONE piece of flying junk is not so bad. But what if this becomes a big fad...and there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of flying death junk orbiting the earth?
VB is great for one thing I've seen so far:
Any time it would take longer to write the code for the GUI than it would take to write the code for the real guts of the job - us VB.
And no - that doesn't mean "VB is only good for toys" - that's plain wrong. There are plenty of good apps out there that are ENTIRELY a user interface with almost no guts. Or the UI is _SO_ much more important than the "real job" that the real job becomes trivial. FTP clients are a decent example. There's not much to a CLUI FTP client. text parser, tcp/ip connection handler, file handler/error checker - I've done that myself in under two hours. But that becomes a little more complex when you want something a la' "gftp" or "cuteftp" or "wsftp".
That's sort of the point of this whole article. The guts of the FTP client are best written in something like C or C++, and use VB (or the closest likeness thereof on your system. QTdesigner needs help, but it's getting there.)
People keep going on and on about things like "maintainability" and "what if you get hit by a bus" but I keep thinking this: Odds are, this guy's wanting to do exactly my ftp client example. He's got C/C++ in mind for the weightlifting and some other tool like VB or QT designer - or even *GASP* JAVA! in mind for the GUI.
take someone who's only coded in C and Perl, and put them in front of Lisp or Smalltalk
C programmers make a big deal of going out of the way to make their programs completely unreadable. They think it's fun.
Larry Wall is GOOD enough at perl to write some truely beautiful GIBBERISH that actually does something.
with LISP you don't even have to try.
Almost all non-trivial LISP programs are so recursive, even an old, bald, blind LISP master who spends most days contemplating fully-functional AI can't tell you what the code will do at a glance.
it takes some skill to write working, unreadable gibberish in C and PERL, but ALL (almost) LISP programs are unreadable gibberish.
After reading your book (actually, my wife read it to me, while I was trying to watch Evil Dead 1&2 and Army of Darkness) I must say - you're a very odd, goofy man.
Seeing all the stunts Sam Raimi "made" you do for those three movies....some of which would make Jacki Chan wince....Was there ever anything Sam asked you to do and you just plain said "NO" (or "HEll NO!" or even "Thank you, no. I'd rather die...") because it was too dangerous/stupid/life threatening/unnatural?
You forget one thing: Some people see linux's rapid development as a BAD THING. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but alot of "pointy haired bosses" seem to think that the constant betterment proces of Linux will CREATE work to be done by their IT staff. In some ways, they are right. If Slashdot posts an article saying "there's a security hole in [bind/sendmail/samba/name-your-service-daemon here]" Now (they think, anyway) there's 8 hours of IT staff time spent updating that service and patching the hole, then dealing with the user issues the patch/downtime will generate.
I've been through this at my job. Tracking usage at a university library:
Me: "Y'know, if we used linux instead of NT, we could track users better, and more easily generate the usage report you want...." {envisioning a simple perl script to scrape the samba logs)
IT manager {read that as "pointy-haired-Boss"}: "I'm not fond of linux. There's so many bug fixes that have to be looked at constantly. It's got poor security"
Me: "NT has even worse security, and there are no fixes released for it..."
IT PHB: "That's not the point... The point is, we won't be wasting all that time installing Linux's patches."
Me: "So you're saying you want to just ignore the problems and stick with windows?"
IT PHB: "Don't you have some work to do over in the business building?"
Later, behind my back, he told his manageroid underlings what I said, and his overall response was: "No-one ever got fired for deploying Microsoft."
Not only does linux need to "get better" and not only does it need to "appel to the suits" but it has to do both with such blinding righteousness that it can't be ignored. In other words it has to be FREE (speech), CHEAP/FREE (beer), and EASY.
On the back of issue #1, there's a full page dedicated to the future bad guys the Tick will fight. Since mine is sealed in acid free mylar, waterproofed and burried in a concrete and steel bunker 47 miles below my house, I'm going off memory here: There's a dolphin in a tank of water, there's a baby in a robotic walker thing, there's a big brown guy with hedgehog quills in a tuxedo, there's a roman centurion with an aquaduct on his head, there's the "armed militant amish commandos", there's a big guy made of black rock, there's a bunch of ninjas (of course)...
so here's the question:
Lots of people have asked about Paul the Samurai and speak and American Maid - but any chance we'll finally see the dolphin character developed, or maybe the Roman god of aquaducts? Or finally learn who this giant porcupine is? I mean, I loved the Red Scare, the Chainsaw Vigilante (my absolute favorite), chairface chippendale, and the Man Eating Cow... But how about moving on and doing some of those villans you showed us oh-so-many years ago with the first issue from NEC?
Okay, I did kind of like Die Fliedermaus in the cartoon, but Batmanuel will be a decent replacement IF:
he drives a mid-seventies El Camino Lowrider with hydraulic lift and a disco-ball instead of a dome light
His sidekick's name is "Rueben"
His secret hideout is in a storm drain under his low-rent apartment, and instead of a butler, he has a "dos equis" drinking uncle Chico that used to be a bullfighter in tijuana
But of course all this comes from Paul Rodruegez's (SP?) stand up sketch about "Vatoman and Rueben" fighting crime in their "chebby lowrider"
HEY! WHERE'S the NINJAS and the big piece of Candy CORN?!? WTF? And why was The Red Scare a real menace instead of a goon hired by "The Running Guy" to beat up the Dewey Decimal Memorial?
Well - it can't be EXACTLY like the comic book, but I damn well hope that they put "The Chainsaw Vigilante" in there...
"Okay Milksnakes! Prepare to hear the voice of reason!"
That's just one of the funniest things I've ever read in my entire life!
My biggest complaint: No face-mask. We shouldn't see the Tick's face! Where's his mask?
Oh wait...it's not really a costume anyway.
And remember: "I...AM...NOT...A....ROACH!!! I'm A TICK!"
"Ticks suck blood. Do you suck blood?"
"I got a straw right here, pal!"
From what I understand, Zelazny died of pancreatic cancer (may be wrong, it's been a while since I read it) and was in none-too-good health when he wrote the last amber book. It showed. It looked very rushed.
I loved the amber books - first "adult" book I ever read without help. I believe I was 8 or so. My sister's boyfriend loaned them to me. He saw me reading "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Twain and handed me a paperback, and said "if you like that, you'll love this." I was hooked from the second sentence of Nine Princes.
Stephen King - like him or not, he's popular. Some of his stuff is REALLY good. He writes about fantastic crap with a decent human perspective. I've actually had college sociology professors reccomend The Stand. That's pretty sound endorsement.
Piers Anthony - Like him or not - he's written more books than anyone I can think of. Volume alone has to count for something.
Michael Crichton - The idea behind Jurassic Park has been tattooed on our society. I'm waiting for some freak geneticist to try something similar, but maybe with a carolina parakeet first.
VC Andrews - even though she's dead, she'll still be publishing new books in 2051, and someone will be reading them
L. Ron Hubbard - same as VC Andrews, only I'd better shut up or John Travolta will hunt me down and kick my non-scientologist ass.
Kurt Vonnegut - is he still alive? Last time I checked he was... Anyway, he's destined to be a "cult classic" forever. He'll have a niche similar to what Poe occupies today
Anne Rice - as long as being a teenager means sexual confusion and angst and lost of identity, they'll read Anne Rice. It would be nice to stop it, but....
If you include other written media then I'd say Stan Lee, John Ostrander and a whole other crew of excellent comic book writers. Not only because their work is great, but because Amazing Fantasy #15 is worth SHITLOADS of money, and people will still be trading that comic book in 2051, if there are any surviving copies.
Stop thinking of nanotechnological (whadda word!) devices as tiny little robots with a claw hand and tank treads - that's Star Trek crap!
Nanotech robots will have more in common with bacteria, or maybe viruses than they do with the welding robots on the Ford assembly line.
Power, you ask? Ever hear of glucose, fructose and a bunch of other sugars. It's what most ever living thing uses for feul. Makes good feul too. chemically reacts but not in a destructive way.
Self-assembly? Why not trick something else into assembling replacements for you? modify the DNA of an animal T-cell, and it'll start producing whatever you want (granted this is some pretty "star trek crap" too, but it's looking more and more feasible as geneticists learn more about DNA/RNA).
control? sensors? data storage? DNA does that. DNA does that better than all the electronic data storage we have now. May not be super fast, but it's more reliable than a hard drive. DNA is a better chemical sensor than we could ever design on purpose. Control? DNA is both storage and a processor...
second problem: how small do you think "nanotech" is? virus sized? white bloodcell sized? even if the little critters were the size of a grain of sand - say the size of a flea - they could still cause horrendous damage to an animal.
Algae != "green goo" you say... Why go so far as the "green goo" version of armageddon? think more like "Red Tide" - y'know, algae turn the water red, kills tons of fish and stuff...
No - nanotech that you should be worried about is not the little robots on tractor treads that Wesley Crusher (sorry wil, if you're reading this... Not your fault, bad writing.) unleashed on the Enterprise. Nanotech will have more in common with a programmable, targetable disease. Imaging that nasty "flesh eating" bacteria, but one that you can turn on and off. Let it spread a month while acting benign, then send out second nanite to turn on the first, and the target population turns to goop in minutes.
Assuming I'm an average internet user (which I'm not) I'd like to know what benefits I can get from using cryptography for my private email/internet communications.
It's been said "I don't do anything illegal, why do I need it?" and it's also been said "I don't kill people, why do I need a gun?" (valid answer to both is "just because")
I guess the main question in this post is this:
For John Q. Public, what benefit will "impossible/darn-near-impossible to crack" encryption give? In other words: Who are we encrypting against? Who - in your opinion is reading my email and why?
Cut the framerate: If it's just for security purposes, you can safely cut the framerate to (less than)10 FPS and be fine. Remember, US cartoon animation runs at 24fps and average anime runs at 12-15fps. As long as someone can't get in and back out of the camera range between the frames, it's doing it's job. Some security cameras run at 2-3fps and make a "Slide Show", and it works pretty well.
motion sensors: only turn the cameras on when you have to.
DVT: digital video tape. I dunno if this is still around, but back when DAT was attempting to make a go of it, some high-end users (like TV studios) used a version of DAT for video. It was a three-inch-wide tape that looked like a CD (all silver/rainbow hues) and had >4X the storage per inch of VHS. Like I said - dunno if these things are still around, or how much they'll chew on your wallet.
Human review: Actually LOOK at the data before it's archived, and see if you have to archive it. (depends on the application) If you're only archiving "incidents" and not required to archive the "lack of incidents" then this works WONDERS on storage needs.
Most of the other stuff I can think of entail some pretty heavy software design..
such as:
Variable compression: compress alot when nothing's happening - a little when there's action.
Variable Framerate: same thing, just with the framerate. (just in case the motion sensors miss a ninja inching his way REAAAAL slow across the floor or something)
We've ALL (yes you have, c'mon, admit it) been to those pr0n sites that open more browser windows than you can handle, and ever time you close one, it opens three more.
Back when I only had 64MB ram, win98SE would choke and die at about 35 windows of netscape...
Now with 512MB it can handle about 60 or so...Can't really count then because as someone said before, each task in the task bar is only about a pixel wide.
I wish my wife would get up the gumption to learn X/KDE so I can clean this virus off my computer and stop dual booting....
You're right.
it was in a computer lab. Half the machines were 200 P-pros, the other half were 233 MMX... I had to go open the case on that one to see what it's CPU was;)
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand when a web site asks very nicely to link to their main page, rather than deep link to a specific thing on their site, but asking and demanding are two different things. Then trying to get the law to say you CAN demand this, and sue people who don't meet your demands - well, that's insanity.
I noticed two things about this:
1) "except in public areas" - basically so our police state can do what we aren't allowed to. Yet Another case of "Do What We Say, Not What We Do!"
2) Do something in violation of the first ammendment and say it's to "Protect the Children"
Next thing you know, they'll be telling me we can't own guns because we have to protect the children. And we can't save a woman who's unborn child will cause her death, because we have to Protect the Children. And, if, while in high school, you play a practical joke on someone by "pants-ing" them (sneaking up behind them and yanking their pants down by the belt-loops) you get labeled a "sex offender" and now - for the rest of your life, you have no right to privacy and must introduce yourself to your neighbors like so: "Hi, my name's joe - and I'm a sex offender. Just had to say that so the Gestapo doesn't come out and shoot me in the face..." -- All to Protect the GODDAMN children!
(Damn - that last link really freakin hurts - I look at the mindless soccer moms I see when I go to a school function with my 11 y/o son, and I wonder - "How good would she be at psychological profiling?" - damn! shivers!)
Maybe there is something we REALLY should protect the children from?.....Uhmmm..... Yeah - probably
Didn't have any problems with my sex life being affected by my programming until, while in college, I learned about recursion. Everything went fine until the bed ran out of stack space and it all fell over.
I figured it was a pointer problem, and it took a while to get it all worked out, but now it's kinda fun.
Everything went fine till my junior year and I started in on concurrent processing. Now I can't tell if it's a hardware limitation that's keeping me from performing more than 4 operations simultaneously, or if it's a problem with the OS...
Most likely that problem is in my firmware. Probably something is flashing my firmware and causing me to reboot.
Maybe during grad school we'll learn about distributed computing....Then I'll need a bigger bed! But I hear it's hard to keep all the process communication under control, because the ports are so busy....
You know that's what it would be used for! You know it! Own up to it..... Just what everyone needs - to put a bookmark to The Hun on the crapper's console!
I can imagine my grandpa, sitting on his back porch, eating a salted turnip, with a copy of the bible in his lap when I tell him about this article. He'll say something like:
"Hmmm...sound's like the Mark of the Beast to me."
And then he'll open the bible to revelations and start reading...
Not being quite the religious man my grandfather is, all I have to say about this technology is:
Why do we need this? How will this improve the quality of life for humanity at large?
Well, it ain't. Sorry. I got mine due to a SNAFU with my insurance company. I wanted the LIVE! platinum, but they sent me an audigy. As far as I can tell - no support under linux.
Because I'm forced to dual boot (my wife refuses to learn linux) it's just a minor annoyance that I can't play MP3s most of the time I'm on the computer. And if I really want to, I can boot to windows and do it.
The card is very nice. If you ever wanted to play 46 MP3s all at once, that and an athlon 1.4ghz will let you do it. And mine has a firewire port on it. But the lack of linux support kind of shoots it down for me.
Someone earlier said that for most people, cards above a SB PCI 128 are overkill, and I have to agree.
The short of it: There are two questions I ask when I look for a soundcard.
1) Does it have a non-locking DSP?
2) Does it support 4 channel audio?
SB PCI 128 answers those two questions with a YES, and save you a BUTTLOAD of money.
After that, everything else is just more blinkenlights.
I'll probably never even use the firewire port on the card I have...
As a father and a Tick fan from the VERY beginning (with his one-panel intro in the New England Comics catalog) with a son who loved the cartoon, we sat down and watched the show together. I was a pretty uncomfortable half hour. I wanted to laugh at the bitch line...but I wanted to be a stern, no-nonsense dad that doesn't appreciate that behavior out of an 11 year old. I just hope that Ben can iron out the ticks behavior and make him as stupid, innocent and loveable as the comic/cartoon.
p.s. - I miss the mask.
because it's pointless. It's pointless and it's on slashdot's main page. I come here to read decent NEWS...not retarded, pointless crap.....
Oh wait...nevermind.
Sometimes I think I'd trade my son for a puppy. I could get a puppy at the pound for about $60.......But I wouldn't take $60 cash for him. See...my son is a human being, and there's no price on that. But when you can tailor make and mass produce a thing, typically that thing goes down in value because they are easier to make.
Well - there are some places you could probably do this.
No, because there are explicit laws against this.
yet again, probably somewhere there's be someone willing...but there are still explicit laws.
How's this: Cloning and genetic engineering opens the doors for reducing humanity to the status of a commodity. When employers and governments can shop for humans like you and I shop for choice cuts of meat, the basis of the american dream is meaningless.
In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson says:
"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator of certain inalienable rights..."
Now - what if all men aren't created equal? What if their creator isn't an invisible Charlton Heston look-alike in white robes (as Jefferson envisioned the creator when he wrote those words, no doubt) but a nerdy guy in a white labcoat? What if this nerdy guy in a white labcoat specifically makes them inequal and without these rights?
Man becomes a commodity. Governments and employers can shop for humans.
The "real ethics of cloning" as you put it is right here: It is dehumanizing. It cheapens all of mankind.
I'm not talking about some spiritual thing. I'm talking about things like civil rights, equal opportunity, and the fact that America was founded on the idea that ANYONE, no matter what their accident of birth gave them, can be great.
Should cloning be stopped? Hell no. The benefits for organ transplant alone say no.
Should it be tightly regulated? Hell YES! the very thought that something like "Brave New World" could happen
Suppose their research costs were around $10M or so..name the price. It doesn't matter.
Does that mean the cloned person is only worth $10M?
How much am I worth?
How much are you worth?
Can I buy a clone for $10M? If so, what can I do with it? It's mine, right? I bought it. Can I make it work dangerous jobs for me? Like operating a nuclear reactor? I bought it. It's mine. Why pay a human to do that job, when I can buy a clone to do it. Then I don't have to mess with insurance or lawsuits or worker's comp....
Oh yeah - do they come with black skin? I don't currently have a nuclear reactor, but I do have 125 acres of prime kentucky farmland where I could grow some kickass cotton. If they came with black skin they wouldn't sunburn so bad, and I could get more work of out each unit.
"And all this science, I don't understand...
It's just my job, five days a week."
Someone earlier said that we shouldn't poo-poo this guy's dream. More has been done for humanity by the "single genius" (or madman) than has been done by governments. All the important inventions have been done by single people. The horse collar (don't laugh, it made moving things easier). The concept of interchangable parts (sam colt - our society is based on his idea). The assembly line. AC electricity (thank you Tesla!). radio. airplanes. Maybe he'll die...maybe he will. Or maybe he'll succeed. Or maybe he'll die and his death will spark someone else to fix his problems and succeed.
But here's what troubles me:
to achieve orbit requires alot of energy. ALOT. I remember a chinese rocket that went squirrly 2 seconds after ignition, flew 20 miles across the hills and blew up a whole village. I remember several sattelites that were rendered useless because they were hit by a 25,000 KPH !_PAINT_FLECK_! Is this guy putting a rocket into orbit, or is he putting a big piece of flying-death-junk into orbit that future space missions will be endangered by. Sure - ONE piece of flying junk is not so bad. But what if this becomes a big fad...and there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of flying death junk orbiting the earth?
VB is great for one thing I've seen so far:
Any time it would take longer to write the code for the GUI than it would take to write the code for the real guts of the job - us VB.
And no - that doesn't mean "VB is only good for toys" - that's plain wrong. There are plenty of good apps out there that are ENTIRELY a user interface with almost no guts. Or the UI is _SO_ much more important than the "real job" that the real job becomes trivial. FTP clients are a decent example. There's not much to a CLUI FTP client. text parser, tcp/ip connection handler, file handler/error checker - I've done that myself in under two hours. But that becomes a little more complex when you want something a la' "gftp" or "cuteftp" or "wsftp".
That's sort of the point of this whole article. The guts of the FTP client are best written in something like C or C++, and use VB (or the closest likeness thereof on your system. QTdesigner needs help, but it's getting there.)
People keep going on and on about things like "maintainability" and "what if you get hit by a bus" but I keep thinking this: Odds are, this guy's wanting to do exactly my ftp client example. He's got C/C++ in mind for the weightlifting and some other tool like VB or QT designer - or even *GASP* JAVA! in mind for the GUI.
take someone who's only coded in C and Perl, and put them in front of Lisp or Smalltalk
C programmers make a big deal of going out of the way to make their programs completely unreadable. They think it's fun.
Larry Wall is GOOD enough at perl to write some truely beautiful GIBBERISH that actually does something.
with LISP you don't even have to try.
Almost all non-trivial LISP programs are so recursive, even an old, bald, blind LISP master who spends most days contemplating fully-functional AI can't tell you what the code will do at a glance.
it takes some skill to write working, unreadable gibberish in C and PERL, but ALL (almost) LISP programs are unreadable gibberish.
After reading your book (actually, my wife read it to me, while I was trying to watch Evil Dead 1&2 and Army of Darkness) I must say - you're a very odd, goofy man.
Seeing all the stunts Sam Raimi "made" you do for those three movies....some of which would make Jacki Chan wince....Was there ever anything Sam asked you to do and you just plain said "NO" (or "HEll NO!" or even "Thank you, no. I'd rather die...") because it was too dangerous/stupid/life threatening/unnatural?
You forget one thing: Some people see linux's rapid development as a BAD THING. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but alot of "pointy haired bosses" seem to think that the constant betterment proces of Linux will CREATE work to be done by their IT staff. In some ways, they are right. If Slashdot posts an article saying "there's a security hole in [bind/sendmail/samba/name-your-service-daemon here]" Now (they think, anyway) there's 8 hours of IT staff time spent updating that service and patching the hole, then dealing with the user issues the patch/downtime will generate.
I've been through this at my job. Tracking usage at a university library:
Me: "Y'know, if we used linux instead of NT, we could track users better, and more easily generate the usage report you want...." {envisioning a simple perl script to scrape the samba logs)
IT manager {read that as "pointy-haired-Boss"}: "I'm not fond of linux. There's so many bug fixes that have to be looked at constantly. It's got poor security"
Me: "NT has even worse security, and there are no fixes released for it..."
IT PHB: "That's not the point... The point is, we won't be wasting all that time installing Linux's patches."
Me: "So you're saying you want to just ignore the problems and stick with windows?"
IT PHB: "Don't you have some work to do over in the business building?"
Later, behind my back, he told his manageroid underlings what I said, and his overall response was: "No-one ever got fired for deploying Microsoft."
Not only does linux need to "get better" and not only does it need to "appel to the suits" but it has to do both with such blinding righteousness that it can't be ignored. In other words it has to be FREE (speech), CHEAP/FREE (beer), and EASY.
On the back of issue #1, there's a full page dedicated to the future bad guys the Tick will fight. Since mine is sealed in acid free mylar, waterproofed and burried in a concrete and steel bunker 47 miles below my house, I'm going off memory here: There's a dolphin in a tank of water, there's a baby in a robotic walker thing, there's a big brown guy with hedgehog quills in a tuxedo, there's a roman centurion with an aquaduct on his head, there's the "armed militant amish commandos", there's a big guy made of black rock, there's a bunch of ninjas (of course)...
so here's the question:
Lots of people have asked about Paul the Samurai and speak and American Maid - but any chance we'll finally see the dolphin character developed, or maybe the Roman god of aquaducts? Or finally learn who this giant porcupine is? I mean, I loved the Red Scare, the Chainsaw Vigilante (my absolute favorite), chairface chippendale, and the Man Eating Cow... But how about moving on and doing some of those villans you showed us oh-so-many years ago with the first issue from NEC?
Okay, I did kind of like Die Fliedermaus in the cartoon, but Batmanuel will be a decent replacement IF:
he drives a mid-seventies El Camino Lowrider with hydraulic lift and a disco-ball instead of a dome light
His sidekick's name is "Rueben"
His secret hideout is in a storm drain under his low-rent apartment, and instead of a butler, he has a "dos equis" drinking uncle Chico that used to be a bullfighter in tijuana
But of course all this comes from Paul Rodruegez's (SP?) stand up sketch about "Vatoman and Rueben" fighting crime in their "chebby lowrider"
HEY! WHERE'S the NINJAS and the big piece of Candy CORN?!? WTF? And why was The Red Scare a real menace instead of a goon hired by "The Running Guy" to beat up the Dewey Decimal Memorial?
Well - it can't be EXACTLY like the comic book, but I damn well hope that they put "The Chainsaw Vigilante" in there...
"Okay Milksnakes! Prepare to hear the voice of reason!"
That's just one of the funniest things I've ever read in my entire life!
My biggest complaint: No face-mask. We shouldn't see the Tick's face! Where's his mask?
Oh wait...it's not really a costume anyway.
And remember: "I...AM...NOT...A....ROACH!!! I'm A TICK!"
"Ticks suck blood. Do you suck blood?"
"I got a straw right here, pal!"
From what I understand, Zelazny died of pancreatic cancer (may be wrong, it's been a while since I read it) and was in none-too-good health when he wrote the last amber book. It showed. It looked very rushed.
I loved the amber books - first "adult" book I ever read without help. I believe I was 8 or so. My sister's boyfriend loaned them to me. He saw me reading "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Twain and handed me a paperback, and said "if you like that, you'll love this." I was hooked from the second sentence of Nine Princes.
Stephen King - like him or not, he's popular. Some of his stuff is REALLY good. He writes about fantastic crap with a decent human perspective. I've actually had college sociology professors reccomend The Stand. That's pretty sound endorsement.
Piers Anthony - Like him or not - he's written more books than anyone I can think of. Volume alone has to count for something.
Michael Crichton - The idea behind Jurassic Park has been tattooed on our society. I'm waiting for some freak geneticist to try something similar, but maybe with a carolina parakeet first.
VC Andrews - even though she's dead, she'll still be publishing new books in 2051, and someone will be reading them
L. Ron Hubbard - same as VC Andrews, only I'd better shut up or John Travolta will hunt me down and kick my non-scientologist ass.
Kurt Vonnegut - is he still alive? Last time I checked he was... Anyway, he's destined to be a "cult classic" forever. He'll have a niche similar to what Poe occupies today
Anne Rice - as long as being a teenager means sexual confusion and angst and lost of identity, they'll read Anne Rice. It would be nice to stop it, but....
If you include other written media then I'd say Stan Lee, John Ostrander and a whole other crew of excellent comic book writers. Not only because their work is great, but because Amazing Fantasy #15 is worth SHITLOADS of money, and people will still be trading that comic book in 2051, if there are any surviving copies.
Stop thinking of nanotechnological (whadda word!) devices as tiny little robots with a claw hand and tank treads - that's Star Trek crap!
Nanotech robots will have more in common with bacteria, or maybe viruses than they do with the welding robots on the Ford assembly line.
Power, you ask? Ever hear of glucose, fructose and a bunch of other sugars. It's what most ever living thing uses for feul. Makes good feul too. chemically reacts but not in a destructive way.
Self-assembly? Why not trick something else into assembling replacements for you? modify the DNA of an animal T-cell, and it'll start producing whatever you want (granted this is some pretty "star trek crap" too, but it's looking more and more feasible as geneticists learn more about DNA/RNA).
control? sensors? data storage? DNA does that. DNA does that better than all the electronic data storage we have now. May not be super fast, but it's more reliable than a hard drive. DNA is a better chemical sensor than we could ever design on purpose. Control? DNA is both storage and a processor...
second problem: how small do you think "nanotech" is? virus sized? white bloodcell sized? even if the little critters were the size of a grain of sand - say the size of a flea - they could still cause horrendous damage to an animal.
Algae != "green goo" you say... Why go so far as the "green goo" version of armageddon? think more like "Red Tide" - y'know, algae turn the water red, kills tons of fish and stuff...
No - nanotech that you should be worried about is not the little robots on tractor treads that Wesley Crusher (sorry wil, if you're reading this... Not your fault, bad writing.) unleashed on the Enterprise. Nanotech will have more in common with a programmable, targetable disease. Imaging that nasty "flesh eating" bacteria, but one that you can turn on and off. Let it spread a month while acting benign, then send out second nanite to turn on the first, and the target population turns to goop in minutes.
Assuming I'm an average internet user (which I'm not) I'd like to know what benefits I can get from using cryptography for my private email/internet communications.
It's been said "I don't do anything illegal, why do I need it?" and it's also been said "I don't kill people, why do I need a gun?" (valid answer to both is "just because")
I guess the main question in this post is this:
For John Q. Public, what benefit will "impossible/darn-near-impossible to crack" encryption give? In other words: Who are we encrypting against? Who - in your opinion is reading my email and why?
Cut the framerate: If it's just for security purposes, you can safely cut the framerate to (less than)10 FPS and be fine. Remember, US cartoon animation runs at 24fps and average anime runs at 12-15fps. As long as someone can't get in and back out of the camera range between the frames, it's doing it's job. Some security cameras run at 2-3fps and make a "Slide Show", and it works pretty well.
motion sensors: only turn the cameras on when you have to.
DVT: digital video tape. I dunno if this is still around, but back when DAT was attempting to make a go of it, some high-end users (like TV studios) used a version of DAT for video. It was a three-inch-wide tape that looked like a CD (all silver/rainbow hues) and had >4X the storage per inch of VHS. Like I said - dunno if these things are still around, or how much they'll chew on your wallet.
Human review: Actually LOOK at the data before it's archived, and see if you have to archive it. (depends on the application) If you're only archiving "incidents" and not required to archive the "lack of incidents" then this works WONDERS on storage needs.
Most of the other stuff I can think of entail some pretty heavy software design..
such as:
Variable compression: compress alot when nothing's happening - a little when there's action.
Variable Framerate: same thing, just with the framerate. (just in case the motion sensors miss a ninja inching his way REAAAAL slow across the floor or something)
We've ALL (yes you have, c'mon, admit it) been to those pr0n sites that open more browser windows than you can handle, and ever time you close one, it opens three more.
Back when I only had 64MB ram, win98SE would choke and die at about 35 windows of netscape...
Now with 512MB it can handle about 60 or so...Can't really count then because as someone said before, each task in the task bar is only about a pixel wide.
I wish my wife would get up the gumption to learn X/KDE so I can clean this virus off my computer and stop dual booting....
You're right. ;)
it was in a computer lab. Half the machines were 200 P-pros, the other half were 233 MMX... I had to go open the case on that one to see what it's CPU was