If I had it to do over again, I'd find an overview of language families, a little history about the evolution of the design philosophies that created them, and so on, would go a long way.
Then take some very useful language and go in depth with it in the next class.
This will be how science finally gets us to 6-asses. I am pre-ordering my 6-assed monkey right now.
But will this really be an improvement? I don't even want to think about how many razor blades will be needed to shave all those asses. They'll probably have to come out with a 12-bladed disposable razor or something...
If these are actually encounters with ghosts of the departed, then it should be possible to prove (in a scientifically non-rigorous way) that the ghost is not a hallucination, provided that the ghost can convey some information to the living that could not be known any other way, but could later be proved.
For example:
While still alive, person writes a secret message and locks it away, to be opened only upon the condition of their demise and revisitation. The message is something that no one else could guess by knowing the person well in real life. An original poem authored by the deceased but never shared with anyone might be a good message.
Person dies.
Person's ghost revisits the living, conveys exactly the contents of the message.
Recipient of the ghost's visit goes to the original message, opens it, and confirms whether it matches what the ghost said.
If they don't match, it was just a hallucination.
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment. But if it happened to you and you knew it wasn't a hoax, it'd be pretty convincing.
> If you ever actually read the OEM licenses for Windows, you'd know that those licenses are bound to the specific hardware that you purchased
And if you had read the applicable laws in your country you would most likely have found out that those license terms are not valid and have no meaning. Due to activation of course you will still have some issues unless you are ready to sue Microsoft...
Please, by all means, somebody sue MS! I'd love to see EULAs declared invalid. Until someone does sue and prevail in court, however, there's a few decades of established business and commerce that have likely gone a long way in the eyes of the courts to legitimize them. I think if a suit would have been brought forward in the early 80's, we might have a much better standing than we do now, some 20-30 years later with these agreements largely unchallenged and accepted by consumers.
I must have half a dozen unused Windows licenses here, because whenever I buy a computer, I get one, no matter whether I then blow the OS away and install Linux.
If you ever actually read the OEM licenses for Windows, you'd know that those licenses are bound to the specific hardware that you purchased, and cannot be transferred to other hardware. So restricted, Microsoft allows the OEM licenses to be deeply discounted.
You might not be using the licenses, but that doesn't mean you've got them stockpiled.
Given that SATA 1 was capable of 1.5 Gbps and SATA 2 is capable of 3.0 Gbps, why the need to go PCIe? This SSD from Micron doesn't even exceed the throughput of the original SATA spec.
How can you include your passwords in your will if you change the password regularly?
It might be better to give the answers to your password recovery questions, since those don't seem to change. Then again, I hate that system, always have and the Palin Yahoo email leak demonstrates why in dramatic fashion.
Really, there should be some kind of power of attorney that web sites should recognize, and grant access to a person's accounts if it can be proven that they have died. Then again, I don't use my real name on many of my user accounts, and don't want them knowing who I am...
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call this patent "How not to make a sandwich"? I sure as hell wouldn't want one of my creations being mistaken for Mickey D's fare.
Then buy one of those automatic card shuffling machines.
Next, photocopy the cliche book and use the shuffling machine to introduce "originality" to your creations.
Seriously, WTF? What writing is there for games that isn't complete (literary, not computer-y) hackery? You're not exactly competing with Dickens. You're not even competing with Dick.
We have a large shield around our planet, which has a special, secret password. No one can ever strip aweay our atmosphere, no matter how much they suck or blow.
"Soul" is not a term that has a meaningful scientific definition. We don't know what it is, and people have wildly differing ideas about it, based on intuition, culture, religion.
You're not going to get meaningful investigation of whether a machine can have a soul unless you first define what you mean by soul. Quite a lot of what religion and culture tells us about souls is not supported by any science to date.
So I suspect the answer is likely "No, but then neither do we." and then with a bit further thought, very likely, "Whatever we can do with our brains, a machine can be built to do the same." And that's quite good enough.
"You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid." Richard Stallman
"Programmers could develop custom software by day, develop general purpose free software for fun. Or pay people for developing free software. Or sell support, or copies of free software." Richard Stallman
It seems RMS fully supports the idea of paid software development. I wonder why so many people think differently - poor reporting, or just personal bias?
Here's the problem:
Let's say that we live in RMS's ideal world, and all software that exists is FOSS.
Say I want some software developed that doesn't exist yet.
I can either:
pay a developer to write it, or
I can sit around and hope that someone else with deeper pockets and a more urgent need will pay a developer to write it, and that it'll be released under a free license, and then I can simply make use of it.
And there you go. Rather than taking initiative and doing something, it becomes advantageous to sit around and wait and hope that someone else will do it for me.
"Leeching" innovation in this way doesn't advantage the state of the art, but it does advantage leechers who can afford to sit back and wait forever if need be.
If you're a company and your choice is to lead or to leech, the only benefit you gain in leading is that you control the direction of software development, because you're the one funding it.
However, if every one of your competitors can derive just as much benefit from your capital investment simply by sitting around, waiting for you to release a FOSS solution to everyone's problem, then your competitors are going to eat you alive because they don't have to foot the development costs, yet can recoup all of the ROI without having to put up the I.
So, sure, Stallman supports paying people to program. But, so say the objectors, in Stallman's ideal world, no sane company would ever want to pay developers for work that they could get for free by virtue of their competitor doing all the work and releasing it for them.
In reality, I think that the demand for software will force someone to put the money up for its development. Rather than being proprietary products wholly owned and controlled by a corporation like Adobe or Microsoft, we'll see groups and non-profits like Mozilla and Canonical making contributions to open projects, and getting their funding from corporate sponsors that need them.
But there will also be a tremendous amount of software that simply won't get written, because there's no way to turn it into a product and sell it to directly recoup the costs of its development.
The software development ecosystem is probably healthiest when all models are permitted to flourish. FOSS is the best option, if you can get a community to sustain the developers; for small-scale niche projects hobbyist development is OK; but for certain types of software (large-budget games, perhaps?) proprietary just makes the most sense.
This isn't Stallman's pure utopian vision, however, and if a developer can't keep his source closed and sell compiled binaries if that's what he wants to do, then he isn't truly free, even though his software might be.
I wish I had a mod point for you, that's the most blatantly obvious self-evident truth I can think of, yet an entire scientific discipline just ignores the issue and allows it to perpetuate.
Over the years, I've witnessed probably 640 articles on a cure for HIV either having been discovered, or very near.
So before I get all excited and start fucking everything that moves without a condom, is this for real? Or is this another one of those "cures for a small number (eg, 1) of patients, and cannot be turned into a general cure or vaccine for all?
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha, yeah! Unh! Unh!
(with apologies to Will Smith and Lionel Ritchie.)
Because in the Shitty New Economy, people will be blowing all kinds of money on applications for their overpriced smartphones.
If I had it to do over again, I'd find an overview of language families, a little history about the evolution of the design philosophies that created them, and so on, would go a long way.
Then take some very useful language and go in depth with it in the next class.
I told everyone it wouldn't work. But would they laugh at me? No!
If that's the price of freedom, I'm glad to pay it.
This will be how science finally gets us to 6-asses. I am pre-ordering my 6-assed monkey right now.
But will this really be an improvement? I don't even want to think about how many razor blades will be needed to shave all those asses. They'll probably have to come out with a 12-bladed disposable razor or something...
O Hai! I can has life?
If these are actually encounters with ghosts of the departed, then it should be possible to prove (in a scientifically non-rigorous way) that the ghost is not a hallucination, provided that the ghost can convey some information to the living that could not be known any other way, but could later be proved.
For example:
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment. But if it happened to you and you knew it wasn't a hoax, it'd be pretty convincing.
> If you ever actually read the OEM licenses for Windows, you'd know that those licenses are bound to the specific hardware that you purchased
And if you had read the applicable laws in your country you would most likely have found out that those license terms are not valid and have no meaning.
Due to activation of course you will still have some issues unless you are ready to sue Microsoft...
Please, by all means, somebody sue MS! I'd love to see EULAs declared invalid. Until someone does sue and prevail in court, however, there's a few decades of established business and commerce that have likely gone a long way in the eyes of the courts to legitimize them. I think if a suit would have been brought forward in the early 80's, we might have a much better standing than we do now, some 20-30 years later with these agreements largely unchallenged and accepted by consumers.
There is nothing more pleasurable than searching for old books in a second hand book store.
Um, Sex.
I must have half a dozen unused Windows licenses here, because whenever I buy a computer, I get one, no matter whether I then blow the OS away and install Linux.
If you ever actually read the OEM licenses for Windows, you'd know that those licenses are bound to the specific hardware that you purchased, and cannot be transferred to other hardware. So restricted, Microsoft allows the OEM licenses to be deeply discounted.
You might not be using the licenses, but that doesn't mean you've got them stockpiled.
Given that SATA 1 was capable of 1.5 Gbps and SATA 2 is capable of 3.0 Gbps, why the need to go PCIe? This SSD from Micron doesn't even exceed the throughput of the original SATA spec.
How can you include your passwords in your will if you change the password regularly?
It might be better to give the answers to your password recovery questions, since those don't seem to change. Then again, I hate that system, always have and the Palin Yahoo email leak demonstrates why in dramatic fashion.
Really, there should be some kind of power of attorney that web sites should recognize, and grant access to a person's accounts if it can be proven that they have died. Then again, I don't use my real name on many of my user accounts, and don't want them knowing who I am...
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call this patent "How not to make a sandwich"? I sure as hell wouldn't want one of my creations being mistaken for Mickey D's fare.
Then buy a photocopier.
Then buy one of those automatic card shuffling machines.
Next, photocopy the cliche book and use the shuffling machine to introduce "originality" to your creations.
Seriously, WTF? What writing is there for games that isn't complete (literary, not computer-y) hackery? You're not exactly competing with Dickens. You're not even competing with Dick.
No, in the future it'll come back as an alien intelligence named T'lbg.
We have a large shield around our planet, which has a special, secret password. No one can ever strip aweay our atmosphere, no matter how much they suck or blow.
Can't wait to hear the last SCO story. Barring appeals, I really hope this is it.
...an alien probe named S'pdr will encounter the USS Enterprise.
"Soul" is not a term that has a meaningful scientific definition. We don't know what it is, and people have wildly differing ideas about it, based on intuition, culture, religion.
You're not going to get meaningful investigation of whether a machine can have a soul unless you first define what you mean by soul. Quite a lot of what religion and culture tells us about souls is not supported by any science to date.
So I suspect the answer is likely "No, but then neither do we." and then with a bit further thought, very likely, "Whatever we can do with our brains, a machine can be built to do the same." And that's quite good enough.
Also, he's 84. "Rest of his life" isn't going to be all that long in any case.
"You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid." Richard Stallman
"Programmers could develop custom software by day, develop general purpose free software for fun. Or pay people for developing free software. Or sell support, or copies of free software." Richard Stallman
It seems RMS fully supports the idea of paid software development. I wonder why so many people think differently - poor reporting, or just personal bias?
Here's the problem:
Let's say that we live in RMS's ideal world, and all software that exists is FOSS.
Say I want some software developed that doesn't exist yet.
I can either:
And there you go. Rather than taking initiative and doing something, it becomes advantageous to sit around and wait and hope that someone else will do it for me.
"Leeching" innovation in this way doesn't advantage the state of the art, but it does advantage leechers who can afford to sit back and wait forever if need be.
If you're a company and your choice is to lead or to leech, the only benefit you gain in leading is that you control the direction of software development, because you're the one funding it.
However, if every one of your competitors can derive just as much benefit from your capital investment simply by sitting around, waiting for you to release a FOSS solution to everyone's problem, then your competitors are going to eat you alive because they don't have to foot the development costs, yet can recoup all of the ROI without having to put up the I.
So, sure, Stallman supports paying people to program. But, so say the objectors, in Stallman's ideal world, no sane company would ever want to pay developers for work that they could get for free by virtue of their competitor doing all the work and releasing it for them.
In reality, I think that the demand for software will force someone to put the money up for its development. Rather than being proprietary products wholly owned and controlled by a corporation like Adobe or Microsoft, we'll see groups and non-profits like Mozilla and Canonical making contributions to open projects, and getting their funding from corporate sponsors that need them.
But there will also be a tremendous amount of software that simply won't get written, because there's no way to turn it into a product and sell it to directly recoup the costs of its development.
The software development ecosystem is probably healthiest when all models are permitted to flourish. FOSS is the best option, if you can get a community to sustain the developers; for small-scale niche projects hobbyist development is OK; but for certain types of software (large-budget games, perhaps?) proprietary just makes the most sense.
This isn't Stallman's pure utopian vision, however, and if a developer can't keep his source closed and sell compiled binaries if that's what he wants to do, then he isn't truly free, even though his software might be.
I wish I had a mod point for you, that's the most blatantly obvious self-evident truth I can think of, yet an entire scientific discipline just ignores the issue and allows it to perpetuate.
Seriously, this is just preaching to the choir at this stage. Although it'd be nice if this picked up some mainstream coverage.
People always talk about preaching to the choir like it's a waste of time. I woke up one day and realized it's actually the best use of time.
Why?
The choir's actually listening. And when they sing, a lot more people can hear their collective voices. That's how you get the word out.
Don't discount the value of communicating ideas to people who are receptive to them. It works remarkably well.
Over the years, I've witnessed probably 640 articles on a cure for HIV either having been discovered, or very near.
So before I get all excited and start fucking everything that moves without a condom, is this for real? Or is this another one of those "cures for a small number (eg, 1) of patients, and cannot be turned into a general cure or vaccine for all?