The best science fiction movie of all time is a short (half-hour) black/white French film called "La Jetée" [translates as the airport's observation deck]. It is in the format of scanned photos with narration, like Ken Burns' PBS documentaries.
A child sees a man crumble and die while visiting Paris Orly airport's observation deck in 1962. Shortly after there is total nuclear war. Because he is obsessed with this image of a man's death, he is selected to be a guinea pig in an experiment to send him time traveling into the future in order to get an energy source to restart civilization. He succeeds in moving in time, but always ends up in the pre-war era. There, he meets a beautiful woman and falls in love.
It doesn't sound like much, but it is a true masterpiece. MIT even published a coffee-table book detailing every scene.
It is super low-budget. One scene that shows the Arc of Triumph in Paris with a huge chunk blown out of it actually has a pin hole from a thumbtack displayed in it.
David Bowie did a homage to it in video for a song from his Black Tie/White Noise album in the early 1990s.
It is available on DVD from most big-city library systems.
See the comment subject. Lindsay, girl, this is really ill-advised. Not only to you make yourself look like a f*ucking idiot, but you are insulting religion. Which is a dumb thing to do considering how many -millions- of people take this stuff seriously. Like maybe the cop who pulls you over for a busted tail-light and decides to throw in an extra $300 speeding ticket (37 in a 35 zone) just because she goes to Mass every week and doesn't get the joke that you're a Pastafarian.
Plus this driver's license is a legal document. It's not the proper place for this shit.
Grow up, girl, Get a cute boyfriend to hump your brains out on a regular basis and you won't feel the need to go around with a fucking pot on your head.
The endless discussion on the advantages of analog over digital recording always gloss over the fact that a customer has to pay $10-20 for EACH album purchased in the vinyl analog format, while a $10-$20 64Gb SD card stores 1200 albums (@12 songs; @ 5Mb per song in 256BPS MP3 format) for the same price. Plus 1200 albums fills the wall of a house and weighs 100+ kilos, while a 64GB SD card is the size of a thumbnail.
The question of preserving sound quality on different media is like being concerned that a Mozart symphony would disappear if the paper that Mozart himself wrote the symphony on crumbled. Instead we just get a new symphony orchestra to play the same notes that Mozart wrote down with the same instruments. And the symphony sounds the same 250 years later without using any recording technology.
It's the musical experience that is important, not the recording of the musical experience.
Boys have an inherent fascination with the concept of using symbol manipulation to change the functionality of physical machinery. By changing how machines work by typing words and code. Boys are absolutely obsessed with the concept that you can create machines that do what you tell them to do by changing mere symbols (which is what source code is). It is a way of creating life from dead objects by using 'magic' symbols. Religions are based on this. Programming is a type of religion. Boys are very much into this.
Girls, on the other hand, are absolutely fascinated by their ability to create actual living, thinking, unique human beings with their own bodies. They don't need magic symbol manipulation to create artificial life from physical objects. Their bodies create life from their interactions with other life. The lives that girls create can't be controlled like the robots or machinery that boys create, but their human-life creations are infinitely more complicated than what the boys can do.
This is the basic primal fundamental reason why boys are much more attracted to computers and science. Boys spend their lives and careers trying to gain and master the life-creating abilities that girls are endowed with at birth.
Get real, my friend. Stuxnet was designed to prevent psychotic religious fanatics from developing nuclear bombs. There is no real question as to whether the Iranians would use any nuclear bomb under their control to murder 100,000s of Jews in Israel. They have said that they will do it in so many words over and over again in their internal religious sermons. To the foreigners they're a little more diplomatic.
The American-Ashkanzim alliance is the most productive alliance between peoples in all of history. We, as Americans, will never just sit back and watch fascist demented assholes like the Iranian mullahs murder thousands of Jewish people as we did in the early 1940s.
There is no comparison between using hacking to destroy nuclear proliferation and using hacking to suppress an embarrassing Hollywood comedy movie. Anyone who thinks that the two are equal is a fool.
You're a smart person if you're on Slashdot. Don't be a fool.
I'm an old Castro and Che fan from the 1960s. . After having met and talked with many Cuban exiles of my own age who have arrived in my city over the years, I now realize that the entire Cuban revolution was bullshit Things suck there. They are always getting worse. I call bullshit on Cuban government's proposal to 'allow' internet access to its citizens. That country is run by fascist assholes. They will never all access to the internet to ordinary citizens. Only Cuban 'stasi' goon-squad assholes and their trusted weasels will be allowed to view Huff Post or Slashdot.
For a while I've been bugging techies with my conception of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These would be 'ordinary' glasses that would have microphones and nano-technology CPUs inside the frame. The microphones would hear the speech of the person that you are looking at (who is speaking a foreign language), translate that speech into English, and display the text of the translation onto the bottom of the user's frame. Like subtitles in a foreign movie for those of you who have ever seen a subtitled foreign movie. Many Germans haven't. The power to operate these 'subtitle sunglasses' would come from the generators creating electricity from the movement's of the user's head.
I challenge teckies to approximate how long in the future it will be before this kind of product is available for purchase in the $500 range.
One unusually aspect of Moore's Law is that we can project when a product like this will be actually available. We take the cost of making any science fiction concept using today's technology and use future-value calculations of accounting to project a future price time-frame given that the price of the technology will fall by half every 18 months.
Another trick is to use this example as a crude intelligence IQ test. Claim that the Japanese have actually developed 'subtitle sunglasses' but they only translate English into Japanese. Claim that you have been able to obtain a secret advanced prototype of such glasses. Give an ordinary pair of reading glasses to a person and claim that these are actual real 'subtitle sunglasses' that have tiny speakers that create synthetic spoken sound inside the ears. Invite them to try them on. When they put on the glasses, start speaking in Japanese (learn a few phrases well beforehand). The time that it takes them to realize that you are completely bulllshitting them is an indication of how intelligent they are. Hope that they don't get violent.
I have a 64G SD card that holds 8000 songs that are about 4 minutes each at 250KBPS MP3. This SD card is the size of my toenail. It costs about $15. The same amount of recorded sound on vinyl records would take up about 140 cubic feet of space. Did I forget to mention that I can plug my 8000 song music collection into your computer and a few hours later, my music collection is my any your music collection and it costs you $15, should you decide to store said collection on a medium the size of a toenail. An 800 album vinyl music collection would cost about $12000.
There are idiots out there who would argue that the nearly in-perceivable audio difference between a 250KBPS MP3 music collection and a vinyl collection is worth $12000. They are trustafarians with young perfect ears who don't have to worry about paying rent, food, and childcare on a $40000 salary.
Unless you actually are one of them, you should never take anything that these people say seriously.
I had to pay $60 for an eight mile (12 km) taxi ride from the Portland Oregon airport to downtown because the idiot public transit system there stopped running from the airport at 11:25pm. All the flights from the East coast and Midwest USA leave in the late early evening and arrive between 11:30pm and 1:00am. The local public transport system (TriMet) spends millions of dollars each year telling people how wonderful they are, but they can't even get one single bus an hour on this most important route of the city: the airport to the downtown.
To hell with taxis, and especially to hell with Tri-Met!
Anything that improves the basic transport needs of any 21st-century city is welcome!
I suggest that you use the initials of all the people that you had crushes on when you were in middle school. You won't forget them, and brute-force cracking software is unlikely to detect your password.
For example, if you had crushes on Carly, Janis, Gina, Wanda, Jane, Janet, Joan, Julie, Sally, Cindy, Alice, and Farah, then your general password would be: cjgwjjjjscaf. Which is a wonderful password. [You can't help it: you're a hopeless romantic.]
Unfortunately, nitwit system admins are requiring people use passwords with numbers and "special characters". Which brings us to the number one rule of passwords: Always Let The User Pick Their Own Password! Rule number two: Never force anyone to change their password if they don't want to!
If you are serious about having unbreakable passwords, then forget all this number and special character nonsense and allow backspace to be a character in the password that your user chooses.
One more thing. If you're not guarding hydrogen bombs, then you don't really need hydrogen-bomb-level password security. You don't minimum 10 unique_characters_plus_numbers_and_special_character passwords for your kitten video website.
There is a primal difference between men and women that is applicable to software engineering. Software writing is basically the manipulation of symbols to change the operation of physical machinery. This definition can be extended to mean that software creates functional machinery through the manipulation of symbols (text typed on editors that is compiled into machine-controlling patterns of 1s and 0s).
Men get a primal Promethean thrill and ego boost from creating machines from symbols.
Women get the same thrill and primal sense-of-purpose from creating new living human beings (i.e. babies), instead of machinery.
This, I believe, is the subliminal reason that so few women go into the software development field.
Until such time that the tech community of the world can and will effectively deal with (i.e. either convince to stop misbehaving or just kill 'em) all the brilliant psychopathic programmers in their mist that create malware and viruses that defraud millions of people, then it is plain madness and criminal negligence to encourage people to entrust their data to some unknown and unmonitored external entity such as the 'cloud'.
Until that time, safe and productive cloud computing is just a fantasy. It's a solution in search of problem. Avoid it.
JJ meets his Waterloo when he barges into the electronics lab. Even the black people in the electronics/high tech biz are about as far away from being black as you can be. All fifty of them.
For 400 years, the Afro-american community has been desperately breeding a certain type of individual. A type of person who can survive slave work and still pass their inherent africaness into the next generation. After 20 solid generations, they created the 'African-American'.
The technology industry is almost as old (if you see the industrial revolution and beginning of science as part of the tech industry). It too has created a certain individual type: the nerd.
The A-As and the nerds are about as far apart as people can be. All the characteristics bred into one group were bred out of the other group. They can barely talk to each other, even when they speak the same language.
The tech industry hires two types of people: nerds and people who support the needs of nerds. And since the tech industry is one of the most important industries in the world today, (along with food production and high finance) , they get to choose who they will pay to work for them.
The only reason the nerds will hire black people is as office pets. And then only the ones who know the difference between flux and a capacitor. And the ones "just know" without being specifically taught that you can type "ST7735R" into Google when you want to get the 250 page manual of a thin-flat-transistor screen. And who would never bring up the subject of "mah dih'que" in the workplace. Not too many people like this around, and the ones that are, are already working in the high tech biz.
So let's just redirect our conversation to the vast legacy of great JJ jokes that have written over the past half century. Old standards like:
JJ visited the Middle East and met with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. After the meeting, JJ was overheard saying to himself: "...been a long time since I said 'Yah, sir' to anyone".
A 700 frame per second camera really isn't needed by very many people. It doesn't matter if a new design reduces its price by an order of magnitude.
What we need is the opposite: a very cheap camera with very high resolution and a very low price. Then we can put them on light poles and get good high-resolution courts-evidence-quality images of the people who are running out of nowhere to attack you, beat you senseless, and stealing your $500 bicycle when neighborhood is quite 100% gentrified yet.
At the present we have low-res video of "people" doing this, but they are rarely have enough resolution to positively identify the attackers.
Same with 'Flash mobs' that come into a store in groups of dozens, grab handfuls of stuff off the shelves, and just walk out in a large group.
The chances of advanced technological lifeforms developing is nearly infinitely small, and the distances between the ones that actually do develop are so great, that they never contact or even become aware of each other. Life forms on earth that are far in advance of humans are based on intelligence that evolved into post-biological form before one of the 100 million year cycles that periodically destroys all life on earth.
" His GDC talk focused on 'misogyny, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia and other types of social injustice.' "
Boy, this one is a challenge. Wish I had Will Shortz here to help. But I'll do the best I can: Capital Crime: Example in a game comment: misogyny You dumb fuck, you fight like a girl sexism You dumb chick, you don't fight worth a fuck racism You fight like a white boy. ethnocentrism You fight like a French white boy.
nationalism You fight like a French white boy. USA, fuckin' A!
ageism You fight like an old French white boy. USA, fuckin' A! ableism You fight like an old French white boy in a wheelchair. USA, fuckin' A! , homophobia, You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair. USA, fuckin' A! ,
transphobia You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair who dropped her dick on the floor. USA, fuckin' A!
queerphobia You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair who dropped her dick in his boyfriend's asshole. USA, fuckin' A!
I was going to write exactly the same thing as the comment above.
A bunch of pissants in a country like India that think that they can shake down Google for f-ing $5 BILLION dollars are living in the the 20th century when power was defined by being a country with a flag, a UN seat, an airline, and a president-for-life.
Things are different now.
Especially for a country like India, which is run by corrupt IIT graduates who live on delusions of being a super-power with a moon base and don't have a clue about how to deal with having 500 million people living in abject poverty around them.
With all respect...
All the comments that you'll be getting from Slashdot readers will be worthless to the point of your question. As you may have noticed by now, every responder assumes that you want to learn to how to do what they consider a dream job in CS to be. And they give replies like 'read Knuth' or 'do MIT on-line courses'.
Since you already have an excellent job with a good future, and you have already studied elementary program texts in CS languages like Java, allow me to suggest that you ask the middle school students in your programming club what they would consider to be cool and useful programs to have. After you get through the fantasy aps like ' a really cool game that the player doesn't end up always losing' and ' a smokin' 3-D interactive girlfriend' or ' a bio-implant that will allow me to get perfect SAT scores without studying', then you might get some interesting suggestions.
Personally I suggest that you and your programming students develop Arduino and Raspberry Pi applications. The elementary 'blinking LED' stuff, simple robotics applications, and digital television art projects made from inexpensive TFT displays will be fascinating to middle school and high school students. (hopefully).
And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about the president....
No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.
Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.
A billion dollars tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry. More chickensh*t public posturing from a man who has spent most of his adult life publicly posturing about chickenshit.
National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. They missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.
Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.
No comment necessary. Stupid is what stupid does. This is South Carolina. North Carolina is just the same, all you do is just change the name. In fact the whole South is like this. And not to put too fine a point on it, every point on earth south of the Mason Dixon latitude line is like this. (except Australia and New Zealand).
Don't move there. Don't take a job there. Unless you have the money to deal with stupid sh*t like this. But you'll need a lot of money. Because there are a lot of just plain stupid people in the South.
And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about Mr. Kerry....
No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.
Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.
A billion dollars here and there tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry.
National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. Indonesia was gone. John Kerry is just giving them a 'head's up" warning.
NG also missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.
Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.
Get used professional MIDI tone modules on eBay for your musical instruments. The 10-20 year-old stuff is rapidly increasing in resale value so you can always resell any piece of equipment on eBay for what you paid for it.Get a Yamaha MOTIF, Korg Kronos, Roland Fantom G, or something in this class. The interfaces are awkward with lots of rack-mount front panel button pressing, but the sounds are good enough. You can build interactive MIDI controllers with Arduinos to overcome the inherent user-interface difficulties of these MIDI modules.
Try all the cheap and free software before buying anything. Anything that you buy that costs more than a few hundred dollars is going to make you sound like everyone else who bought the same program.
If you live in Norway, stick with proven technology. Like gasoline engines. Let's face it. Norway is often very cold in the winter. Cold enough that people die from cold unless they have machines to keep them warm. When you live in places that have extreme weather, you HAVE to accept that proven working technology like gasoline-engines-for -transportation overrides any emotional feelings of needing to serve as a test site for so-called green technology. In California it doesn't matter. But Norway's not California. If you fuck up and buy a 'green' car that won't start in the cold, then you die in the cold. Act accordingly. Nobody in California gives a shit whether or not you freeze to death because their technology failed.
This very expensive automobile has demonstratively failed to meet the needs of people who live north of the 55th meridian. Norwegians should not buy it. Buy a Volvo: Swedes understand cold and their cars can be coaxed to start in extremely cold weather.
And there is this briefly mentioned problem of the fucking Norwegian electrical connectors not mating with standard electric car connectors... You'all need to find the guy responsible for this, strip him to underwear, and dump out into the snow. Be sure to leave him with an electric heater that has a plug that just quite doesn't fit into the socket needed to stay alive. If he lives, then he won't be doing stupid shit like this any more. If he dies, well, just one more soul sacrifice to the Viking gods.
You never learned of subjunctive, conditional, imperative, indicative? All native english speakers I talk to said they did.
-- They learned a few of those terms when studying french. There's only one unusual use of pure subjunctive mode in English that I know of: the grammatically correct use of "if I were..." instead of the common form "if I was..."
French needs all of its tenses because it has such a high percentage of vowel-based phonemic constructions and the tenses (with all their slightly different endings) are needed to tell them apart.
French is now, always has been, and will continue to be the language of diplomacy. When you are in the presence of your enemies and they refuse to debase themselves by speaking your language and you would rather die than actually hear the sound of their language come out of your mouth, then you both speak French to each other. It's pretentious and stupid, but it works.
I learned a little French in secondary school. But no one (except for the Europeans) learns enough of a language in secondary school to actually speak or use the language. I am relearning French by using Hollywood movie DVDs. In North America all the DVDS of Hollywood movies have French language subtitles and audio dialog tracks. I watch the movie first in English to know what's going on. Then I set both the subtitles and audio track to French and re-watch it. They NEVER match because the subtitles are done in France and the audio dubbing is done in Quebec. It just means that we have to develop our ears to hear when the words spoken mean more-or-less what the subtitles are showing. As far as I can tell, this is the only realistic way to learn conversational French in the modern world (outside of actually being in Quebec or France). Since secondary school, I've been in francophonic countries two or three times and could never understand anything that was said to me. Now after about a year of DVD movie training, I understand about 30% of spoken dialog in French audio tracks of Hollywood films.
French films are worthless for this training as they almost never have subtitles in french (for deaf people, etc...). Only two DVDs I've found had french audio that exactly matched the french subtitles: Luc Besson's 'La femme Nikita' (1992 with Tcherky Karlo and Jean Reno) and Truffaut's 'La Nuit Americain' (1974 with gorgeous Jackie Bissett)
Europe is nothing more than a bunch of weird small countries. Always has been, always will be.
Lighten up on the Americans. Their famed lack of precision knowledge in any individual field is basically inconsequential now that there are Google computers that can instantly deliver the general facts that we laugh at them for not knowing.
Here's your best friend's conversation:
(American receptionist) Hello, (your best friend) Allo Bonjour Est-ce que vous parlez francais? Je voudrais que mon order soit avait envoyer a Europe? Combien ca coutera? (Amer) Sorry, I don't speak spanish. (your best friend) I want to have my order sent to Europe. (Amer gal) What part of the USA is Europe? (your best friend) No Europe, Europe.. Specifically to the Netherlands. You know Holland? with dikes, tulips, windmills, Heiniken beer. -- superior European snicker and contemptuous laughter -- (Amer gal) Oh, that Europe! Wij zullen het uit aan u vanavond verschepen. Dank u voor het roepen!
Slashdot Mirror
The best science fiction movie of all time is a short (half-hour) black/white French film called "La Jetée" [translates as the airport's observation deck]. It is in the format of scanned photos with narration, like Ken Burns' PBS documentaries.
A child sees a man crumble and die while visiting Paris Orly airport's observation deck in 1962. Shortly after there is total nuclear war. Because he is obsessed with this image of a man's death, he is selected to be a guinea pig in an experiment to send him time traveling into the future in order to get an energy source to restart civilization. He succeeds in moving in time, but always ends up in the pre-war era. There, he meets a beautiful woman and falls in love.
It doesn't sound like much, but it is a true masterpiece. MIT even published a coffee-table book detailing every scene.
It is super low-budget. One scene that shows the Arc of Triumph in Paris with a huge chunk blown out of it actually has a pin hole from a thumbtack displayed in it.
David Bowie did a homage to it in video for a song from his Black Tie/White Noise album in the early 1990s.
It is available on DVD from most big-city library systems.
See the comment subject. Lindsay, girl, this is really ill-advised. Not only to you make yourself look like a f*ucking idiot, but you are insulting religion. Which is a dumb thing to do considering how many -millions- of people take this stuff seriously. Like maybe the cop who pulls you over for a busted tail-light and decides to throw in an extra $300 speeding ticket (37 in a 35 zone) just because she goes to Mass every week and doesn't get the joke that you're a Pastafarian.
Plus this driver's license is a legal document. It's not the proper place for this shit.
Grow up, girl, Get a cute boyfriend to hump your brains out on a regular basis and you won't feel the need to go around with a fucking pot on your head.
The endless discussion on the advantages of analog over digital recording always gloss over the fact that a customer has to pay $10-20 for EACH album purchased in the vinyl analog format, while a $10-$20 64Gb SD card stores 1200 albums (@12 songs; @ 5Mb per song in 256BPS MP3 format) for the same price. Plus 1200 albums fills the wall of a house and weighs 100+ kilos, while a 64GB SD card is the size of a thumbnail.
The question of preserving sound quality on different media is like being concerned that a Mozart symphony would disappear if the paper that Mozart himself wrote the symphony on crumbled. Instead we just get a new symphony orchestra to play the same notes that Mozart wrote down with the same instruments. And the symphony sounds the same 250 years later without using any recording technology.
It's the musical experience that is important, not the recording of the musical experience.
Boys have an inherent fascination with the concept of using symbol manipulation to change the functionality of physical machinery. By changing how machines work by typing words and code. Boys are absolutely obsessed with the concept that you can create machines that do what you tell them to do by changing mere symbols (which is what source code is). It is a way of creating life from dead objects by using 'magic' symbols. Religions are based on this. Programming is a type of religion. Boys are very much into this.
Girls, on the other hand, are absolutely fascinated by their ability to create actual living, thinking, unique human beings with their own bodies. They don't need magic symbol manipulation to create artificial life from physical objects. Their bodies create life from their interactions with other life. The lives that girls create can't be controlled like the robots or machinery that boys create, but their human-life creations are infinitely more complicated than what the boys can do.
This is the basic primal fundamental reason why boys are much more attracted to computers and science. Boys spend their lives and careers trying to gain and master the life-creating abilities that girls are endowed with at birth.
Get real, my friend. Stuxnet was designed to prevent psychotic religious fanatics from developing nuclear bombs. There is no real question as to whether the Iranians would use any nuclear bomb under their control to murder 100,000s of Jews in Israel. They have said that they will do it in so many words over and over again in their internal religious sermons. To the foreigners they're a little more diplomatic.
The American-Ashkanzim alliance is the most productive alliance between peoples in all of history. We, as Americans, will never just sit back and watch fascist demented assholes like the Iranian mullahs murder thousands of Jewish people as we did in the early 1940s.
There is no comparison between using hacking to destroy nuclear proliferation and using hacking to suppress an embarrassing Hollywood comedy movie. Anyone who thinks that the two are equal is a fool.
You're a smart person if you're on Slashdot. Don't be a fool.
I'm an old Castro and Che fan from the 1960s. . After having met and talked with many Cuban exiles of my own age who have arrived in my city over the years, I now realize that the entire Cuban revolution was bullshit Things suck there. They are always getting worse. I call bullshit on Cuban government's proposal to 'allow' internet access to its citizens. That country is run by fascist assholes. They will never all access to the internet to ordinary citizens. Only Cuban 'stasi' goon-squad assholes and their trusted weasels will be allowed to view Huff Post or Slashdot.
This speech translator is trés cool.
For a while I've been bugging techies with my conception of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These would be 'ordinary' glasses that would have microphones and nano-technology CPUs inside the frame. The microphones would hear the speech of the person that you are looking at (who is speaking a foreign language), translate that speech into English, and display the text of the translation onto the bottom of the user's frame. Like subtitles in a foreign movie for those of you who have ever seen a subtitled foreign movie. Many Germans haven't. The power to operate these 'subtitle sunglasses' would come from the generators creating electricity from the movement's of the user's head.
I challenge teckies to approximate how long in the future it will be before this kind of product is available for purchase in the $500 range.
One unusually aspect of Moore's Law is that we can project when a product like this will be actually available. We take the cost of making any science fiction concept using today's technology and use future-value calculations of accounting to project a future price time-frame given that the price of the technology will fall by half every 18 months.
Another trick is to use this example as a crude intelligence IQ test. Claim that the Japanese have actually developed 'subtitle sunglasses' but they only translate English into Japanese. Claim that you have been able to obtain a secret advanced prototype of such glasses. Give an ordinary pair of reading glasses to a person and claim that these are actual real 'subtitle sunglasses' that have tiny speakers that create synthetic spoken sound inside the ears. Invite them to try them on. When they put on the glasses, start speaking in Japanese (learn a few phrases well beforehand). The time that it takes them to realize that you are completely bulllshitting them is an indication of how intelligent they are. Hope that they don't get violent.
I have a 64G SD card that holds 8000 songs that are about 4 minutes each at 250KBPS MP3. This SD card is the size of my toenail. It costs about $15. The same amount of recorded sound on vinyl records would take up about 140 cubic feet of space.
Did I forget to mention that I can plug my 8000 song music collection into your computer and a few hours later, my music collection is my any your music collection and it costs you $15, should you decide to store said collection on a medium the size of a toenail. An 800 album vinyl music collection would cost about $12000.
There are idiots out there who would argue that the nearly in-perceivable audio difference between a 250KBPS MP3 music collection and a vinyl collection is worth $12000. They are trustafarians with young perfect ears who don't have to worry about paying rent, food, and childcare on a $40000 salary.
Unless you actually are one of them, you should never take anything that these people say seriously.
I had to pay $60 for an eight mile (12 km) taxi ride from the Portland Oregon airport to downtown because the idiot public transit system there stopped running from the airport at 11:25pm. All the flights from the East coast and Midwest USA leave in the late early evening and arrive between 11:30pm and 1:00am. The local public transport system (TriMet) spends millions of dollars each year telling people how wonderful they are, but they can't even get one single bus an hour on this most important route of the city: the airport to the downtown.
To hell with taxis, and especially to hell with Tri-Met!
Anything that improves the basic transport needs of any 21st-century city is welcome!
I suggest that you use the initials of all the people that you had crushes on when you were in middle school. You won't forget them, and brute-force cracking software is unlikely to detect your password.
For example, if you had crushes on Carly, Janis, Gina, Wanda, Jane, Janet, Joan, Julie, Sally, Cindy, Alice, and Farah, then your general password would be: cjgwjjjjscaf. Which is a wonderful password. [You can't help it: you're a hopeless romantic.]
Unfortunately, nitwit system admins are requiring people use passwords with numbers and "special characters".
Which brings us to the number one rule of passwords: Always Let The User Pick Their Own Password!
Rule number two: Never force anyone to change their password if they don't want to!
If you are serious about having unbreakable passwords, then forget all this number and special character nonsense and allow backspace to be a character in the password that your user chooses.
One more thing. If you're not guarding hydrogen bombs, then you don't really need hydrogen-bomb-level password security. You don't minimum 10 unique_characters_plus_numbers_and_special_character passwords for your kitten video website.
There is a primal difference between men and women that is applicable to software engineering.
Software writing is basically the manipulation of symbols to change the operation of physical machinery. This definition can be extended to mean that software creates functional machinery through the manipulation of symbols (text typed on editors that is compiled into machine-controlling patterns of 1s and 0s).
Men get a primal Promethean thrill and ego boost from creating machines from symbols.
Women get the same thrill and primal sense-of-purpose from creating new living human beings (i.e. babies), instead of machinery.
This, I believe, is the subliminal reason that so few women go into the software development field.
Until such time that the tech community of the world can and will effectively deal with (i.e. either convince to stop misbehaving or just kill 'em) all the brilliant psychopathic programmers in their mist that create malware and viruses that defraud millions of people, then it is plain madness and criminal negligence to encourage people to entrust their data to some unknown and unmonitored external entity such as the 'cloud'.
Until that time, safe and productive cloud computing is just a fantasy. It's a solution in search of problem. Avoid it.
JJ meets his Waterloo when he barges into the electronics lab. Even the black people in the electronics/high tech biz are about as far away from being black as you can be. All fifty of them.
For 400 years, the Afro-american community has been desperately breeding a certain type of individual. A type of person who can survive slave work and still pass their inherent africaness into the next generation. After 20 solid generations, they created the 'African-American'.
The technology industry is almost as old (if you see the industrial revolution and beginning of science as part of the tech industry). It too has created a certain individual type: the nerd.
The A-As and the nerds are about as far apart as people can be. All the characteristics bred into one group were bred out of the other group. They can barely talk to each other, even when they speak the same language.
The tech industry hires two types of people: nerds and people who support the needs of nerds. And since the tech industry is one of the most important industries in the world today, (along with food production and high finance) , they get to choose who they will pay to work for them.
The only reason the nerds will hire black people is as office pets. And then only the ones who know the difference between flux and a capacitor. And the ones "just know" without being specifically taught that you can type "ST7735R" into Google when you want to get the 250 page manual of a thin-flat-transistor screen. And who would never bring up the subject of "mah dih'que" in the workplace. Not too many people like this around, and the ones that are, are already working in the high tech biz.
So let's just redirect our conversation to the vast legacy of great JJ jokes that have written over the past half century. Old standards like:
Q: What's this? fee foh fii - fii fee foh foh A: JJ's telephone number (from 1977)
-or, the more esoteric,
JJ visited the Middle East and met with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. After the meeting, JJ was overheard saying to himself: "...been a long time since I said 'Yah, sir' to anyone".
A 700 frame per second camera really isn't needed by very many people. It doesn't matter if a new design reduces its price by an order of magnitude.
What we need is the opposite: a very cheap camera with very high resolution and a very low price. Then we can put them on light poles and get good high-resolution courts-evidence-quality images of the people who are running out of nowhere to attack you, beat you senseless, and stealing your $500 bicycle when neighborhood is quite 100% gentrified yet.
At the present we have low-res video of "people" doing this, but they are rarely have enough resolution to positively identify the attackers.
Same with 'Flash mobs' that come into a store in groups of dozens, grab handfuls of stuff off the shelves, and just walk out in a large group.
The chances of advanced technological lifeforms developing is nearly infinitely small, and the distances between the ones that actually do develop are so great, that they never contact or even become aware of each other. Life forms on earth that are far in advance of humans are based on intelligence that evolved into post-biological form before one of the 100 million year cycles that periodically destroys all life on earth.
" His GDC talk focused on 'misogyny, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia and other types of social injustice.' "
Boy, this one is a challenge. Wish I had Will Shortz here to help. But I'll do the best I can:
Capital Crime: Example in a game comment:
misogyny You dumb fuck, you fight like a girl
sexism You dumb chick, you don't fight worth a fuck
racism You fight like a white boy.
ethnocentrism You fight like a French white boy.
nationalism You fight like a French white boy. USA, fuckin' A!
ageism You fight like an old French white boy. USA, fuckin' A!
ableism You fight like an old French white boy in a wheelchair. USA, fuckin' A! ,
homophobia, You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair. USA, fuckin' A! ,
transphobia You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair who dropped her dick on the floor. USA, fuckin' A!
queerphobia You fight like an old French faggot white boy in a wheelchair who dropped her dick in his boyfriend's asshole. USA, fuckin' A!
Did I miss anything?
I was going to write exactly the same thing as the comment above.
A bunch of pissants in a country like India that think that they can shake down Google for f-ing $5 BILLION dollars are living in the the 20th century when power was defined by being a country with a flag, a UN seat, an airline, and a president-for-life.
Things are different now.
Especially for a country like India, which is run by corrupt IIT graduates who live on delusions of being a super-power with a moon base and don't have a clue about how to deal with having 500 million people living in abject poverty around them.
With all respect...
All the comments that you'll be getting from Slashdot readers will be worthless to the point of your question. As you may have noticed by now, every responder assumes that you want to learn to how to do what they consider a dream job in CS to be. And they give replies like 'read Knuth' or 'do MIT on-line courses'.
Since you already have an excellent job with a good future, and you have already studied elementary program texts in CS languages like Java, allow me to suggest that you ask the middle school students in your programming club what they would consider to be cool and useful programs to have. After you get through the fantasy aps like ' a really cool game that the player doesn't end up always losing' and ' a smokin' 3-D interactive girlfriend' or ' a bio-implant that will allow me to get perfect SAT scores without studying', then you might get some interesting suggestions.
Personally I suggest that you and your programming students develop Arduino and Raspberry Pi applications. The elementary 'blinking LED' stuff, simple robotics applications, and digital television art projects made from inexpensive TFT displays will be fascinating to middle school and high school students. (hopefully).
And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about the president....
No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.
Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.
A billion dollars tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry. More chickensh*t public posturing from a man who has spent most of his adult life publicly posturing about chickenshit.
National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. They missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.
Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.
Gnome Sane?
No comment necessary. Stupid is what stupid does. This is South Carolina. North Carolina is just the same, all you do is just change the name. In fact the whole South is like this. And not to put too fine a point on it, every point on earth south of the Mason Dixon latitude line is like this. (except Australia and New Zealand).
Don't move there. Don't take a job there. Unless you have the money to deal with stupid sh*t like this.
But you'll need a lot of money. Because there are a lot of just plain stupid people in the South.
And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about Mr. Kerry....
No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.
Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.
A billion dollars here and there tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry.
National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. Indonesia was gone. John Kerry is just giving them a 'head's up" warning.
NG also missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.
Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.
Gnome Sane?
Get used professional MIDI tone modules on eBay for your musical instruments. The 10-20 year-old stuff is rapidly increasing in resale value so you can always resell any piece of equipment on eBay for what you paid for it.Get a Yamaha MOTIF, Korg Kronos, Roland Fantom G, or something in this class. The interfaces are awkward with lots of rack-mount front panel button pressing, but the sounds are good enough. You can build interactive MIDI controllers with Arduinos to overcome the inherent user-interface difficulties of these MIDI modules.
Try all the cheap and free software before buying anything. Anything that you buy that costs more than a few hundred dollars is going to make you sound like everyone else who bought the same program.
If you live in Norway, stick with proven technology. Like gasoline engines. Let's face it. Norway is often very cold in the winter. Cold enough that people die from cold unless they have machines to keep them warm. When you live in places that have extreme weather, you HAVE to accept that proven working technology like gasoline-engines-for -transportation overrides any emotional feelings of needing to serve as a test site for so-called green technology. In California it doesn't matter. But Norway's not California. If you fuck up and buy a 'green' car that won't start in the cold, then you die in the cold. Act accordingly. Nobody in California gives a shit whether or not you freeze to death because their technology failed.
This very expensive automobile has demonstratively failed to meet the needs of people who live north of the 55th meridian. Norwegians should not buy it. Buy a Volvo: Swedes understand cold and their cars can be coaxed to start in extremely cold weather.
And there is this briefly mentioned problem of the fucking Norwegian electrical connectors not mating with standard electric car connectors... You'all need to find the guy responsible for this, strip him to underwear, and dump out into the snow. Be sure to leave him with an electric heater that has a plug that just quite doesn't fit into the socket needed to stay alive. If he lives, then he won't be doing stupid shit like this any more. If he dies, well, just one more soul sacrifice to the Viking gods.
You never learned of subjunctive, conditional, imperative, indicative? All native english speakers I talk to said they did.
-- They learned a few of those terms when studying french. There's only one unusual use of pure subjunctive mode in English that I know of: the grammatically correct use of "if I were..." instead of the common form "if I was..."
French needs all of its tenses because it has such a high percentage of vowel-based phonemic constructions and the tenses (with all their slightly different endings) are needed to tell them apart.
French is now, always has been, and will continue to be the language of diplomacy. When you are in the presence of your enemies and they refuse to debase themselves by speaking your language and you would rather die than actually hear the sound of their language come out of your mouth, then you both speak French to each other. It's pretentious and stupid, but it works.
I learned a little French in secondary school. But no one (except for the Europeans) learns enough of a language in secondary school to actually speak or use the language. I am relearning French by using Hollywood movie DVDs. In North America all the DVDS of Hollywood movies have French language subtitles and audio dialog tracks. I watch the movie first in English to know what's going on. Then I set both the subtitles and audio track to French and re-watch it. They NEVER match because the subtitles are done in France and the audio dubbing is done in Quebec. It just means that we have to develop our ears to hear when the words spoken mean more-or-less what the subtitles are showing. As far as I can tell, this is the only realistic way to learn conversational French in the modern world (outside of actually being in Quebec or France). Since secondary school, I've been in francophonic countries two or three times and could never understand anything that was said to me. Now after about a year of DVD movie training, I understand about 30% of spoken dialog in French audio tracks of Hollywood films.
French films are worthless for this training as they almost never have subtitles in french (for deaf people, etc...). Only two DVDs I've found had french audio that exactly matched the french subtitles: Luc Besson's 'La femme Nikita' (1992 with Tcherky Karlo and Jean Reno) and Truffaut's 'La Nuit Americain' (1974 with gorgeous Jackie Bissett)
Europe is nothing more than a bunch of weird small countries. Always has been, always will be.
Lighten up on the Americans. Their famed lack of precision knowledge in any individual field is basically inconsequential now that there are Google computers that can instantly deliver the general facts that we laugh at them for not knowing.
Here's your best friend's conversation:
(American receptionist) Hello,
(your best friend) Allo Bonjour Est-ce que vous parlez francais? Je voudrais que mon order soit avait envoyer a Europe? Combien ca coutera?
(Amer) Sorry, I don't speak spanish.
(your best friend) I want to have my order sent to Europe.
(Amer gal) What part of the USA is Europe?
(your best friend) No Europe, Europe.. Specifically to the Netherlands. You know Holland? with dikes, tulips, windmills, Heiniken beer.
-- superior European snicker and contemptuous laughter --
(Amer gal) Oh, that Europe! Wij zullen het uit aan u vanavond verschepen. Dank u voor het roepen!