...You can walk over to the adult section and pick up some books there, too. Seriously: Ender's Game might be a fun escapist read for kids, but it's not even good as far as science fiction is concerned. And personally, I'd instead encourage kids to read Mein Kampf.
Jack, you dumbass: user-made content = open source
Just because you aren't smart enough to figure out how to get value out of your users' labour doesn't mean it's not worth anything! I'd expect better from a company with a service-based business model...
Are you sure they don't recognise they're sinking and this is the best response they can come up with? After all, it's pretty obvious: they're a hardware-OS company whose two key product lines (SPARC and Solaris) cannot compete with the free/commodity competition. What else are they supposed to do but flail around looking for a market?
At the very least, announcing something to do with IBM will keep their stock afloat since the average stockholders probably knows even less about Solaris' market position than the average/.er.
Why do you think the Canadian government is so against the weaponisation of space? So when the space-mechs are launched, there will be nothing that can stop them. And what do you think we've been doing with all that money we're not putting into conventional military equipment?
Similarly, the X-Prize is just a front for the daVinci Project, the real purpose is so we can continue to launch space-mechs when all the rest of the worlds' launch pads are smoking holes.
It's not like anything is forcing him to be wealthy and powerful: if he gave all his money away, no one would bother kidnapping him.
It's like music and movie celebrities who complain about paparazzi: their salary is based on their worship by the masses, but they expect the masses to worship them without idols?
Ah interesting, I would certainly concede that Calgary has the best potential for IT grow in Canada. So why doesn't it have more of the other IT things, like software companies? Is it possible that its because Calgary is lacking in the Creative Class? (Whether it's true or not, even urban Alberta has a serious redneck image; could this be keeping IT talent away?)
I'm sorry, but what are the top three IT hubs and how are you measuring them?
My understanding is that what little IT there is in Alberta is almost entirely internal stuff for company HQs in Calgary (ie: no software companies). And I could find any number of measures that consistently put Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa above anywhere in Alberta.
Actually in the 2001 census, 17% of the population listed their ethnic origin as being partially Canadian and 23% entirely Canadian. "North American Indian" was a separate category.
I'm not sure that ethnic origin and "race" should be considered synonymous, but I think this is enough evidence to demonstrate your ignorance.
Simple solution: setup a firewall to block outgoing connections from the free accounts. The person using it to develop doesn't need any outside access at all, for email you open just that port. Think like chroot: protect your box from the users on it just as well as from the users off.
Are we supposed to follow through with your OS = GMO analogy to conclude that operating systems should be banned?! I wouldn't complain if Monsanto's corporate charter were struck down, but I think that banning their class of product is not the right way to curtail their behaviour.
You're right, however, that we are more likely to know the pesticides used on GMOs because they are designed with companion chemicals. This is at least partially beneficial because then there's only one pesticide I need to worry about. Also, this suggests that mandatory chemical labelling would be a superset of GMO labelling, which would be significantly more beneficial to consumers.
Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.
I agree that GMO developers are gearing up to be just as damaging to society as pharmaceutical developers are now; so maybe we need open source GMOs developed by nationalised R&D labs, but we don't need to ban GMOs.
Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.
I realise there is enough food now, but many anti-GMO advocates claim there would still be enough food if we stopped using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. I've never heard these claims backed up, though...
Genetic patents, agro marketing, and everything Monsanto does is bad, but it's irrational to deduce from those issues that GMOs are the problem. Much agriculture today is overly reliant on heavily marketed and patented chemicals, but I don't see anyone complaining about that. Maybe agro R&D should be open source, maybe countries should offer tax incentives against monoculture, regardless, we are asking the wrong question if banning GMOs is the answer.
Believe it or not, I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while. Right now I'm painfully crawling through my Master's thesis, but when (or if?) I finish, I'll definitely give a project like this some serious consideration. Of course, even a mediocre book like GEB takes more effort than I may be able to muster, so don't get your hopes up too high.:)
If anybody is interested in discussing this a few months from now, please post a comment in my journal.
Escher and Bach are only given lip-service in order to make the book seem more balanced. You cannot learn about music or visual art by just reading text! Sure Hoftstader seems to know some stuff about Bach, but unless you augment the book with some serious listening and/or music reading he might as well just be making it all up. And Escher's art, as you can conclude from how well it sells, is more pop than profound: sure he had an amazing intuition for the Golden Ratio and similar mathematical series, but the recursion is all pretty basic. (If you want to learn about advanced tesselation, you're better off reading The Emperor's New Mind.)
Forget biological WMDs, we have been under attack by chemical WMDs for decades. GMO food is the only reasonable* way to reduce pesticide use, which is actually causing health problems right now, as opposed to the vague danger of GMOs. Ingestion of weird DNA does nothing but entertain your stomach acids, so the only potential health threat is that GMOs may produce weird chemicals -- but surely they won't be as bad as the franken-pollutents in our environment right now!
* I'd like to believe the claims that organic food can feed the world, but it's an extraordinary claim and I have yet to see even weak evidence.
A good Computer Science program will cover everything in GEB with more depth and without all the stupid-writing-tricks and dumbing down that Hofstadter employs. As someone who forced myself through GEB (to see what all the fuss was about) after graduating from a good CS program, I would describe it as a must-read book only for highschool-educated Perl hackers without any exposure to theoretical computing.
So maybe the problem is the US system, hmm? Isn't it a double-standard to blacklist these banana republics because their law enforcement isn't cracking down on fraud or whatever but let Americans companies do whatever they want because "that's just how capitalism is". If your country's part of the Internet has rampant problems, maybe you should consider nationalising it?
I do get really tired of people from other countries blaming any view or action taken by a US citizen on the United States as a whole.
Does the buck stop anywhere in your country? Nearly 50% of you voted for the current executive -- probably more than that for the legislative -- and the rest of you haven't done all that much to fight it, so if your country is democratic, as Americans seem to claim, then all American citizens are responsible for their government's actions.
Sorry, but I doubt our new Chinese masters (who I welcome, BTW), will be willing to allow Engrish to continue to be the lingua franca of the Net. If they're generous enough to continue to use our crude alphabet, I expect the TLDs will be.yueliang,.diqiou,.huoxing But it's more likely we'll just end up using Unicode.
Like say a language where you declare what functions do rather than specify how they do them? In a very precise and well-defined language? Believe it or not, such languages already exist! In academia we call them "functional programming languages". These exotic beasts significantly reduce the programming burden and they are frequently considered as runnable specifications. I bet if you wrote a memo suggesting that the company look into it, you will be promoted to just doing design and business analysis!
In all seriousness, wouldn't that be a good model for development? Have the analysts write applications in functional languages and then outsource the rewriting of key routines in C? QA issues with offshoring would disappear...
Slashdot Mirror
...You can walk over to the adult section and pick up some books there, too. Seriously: Ender's Game might be a fun escapist read for kids, but it's not even good as far as science fiction is concerned. And personally, I'd instead encourage kids to read Mein Kampf.
Jack, you dumbass: user-made content = open source
Just because you aren't smart enough to figure out how to get value out of your users' labour doesn't mean it's not worth anything! I'd expect better from a company with a service-based business model...
Can someone parse this and tell me: does this qualify as a new form of matter? And if so, doesn't that mean there are an infinite number of forms?
Are you sure they don't recognise they're sinking and this is the best response they can come up with? After all, it's pretty obvious: they're a hardware-OS company whose two key product lines (SPARC and Solaris) cannot compete with the free/commodity competition. What else are they supposed to do but flail around looking for a market?
/.er.
At the very least, announcing something to do with IBM will keep their stock afloat since the average stockholders probably knows even less about Solaris' market position than the average
Why do you think the Canadian government is so against the weaponisation of space? So when the space-mechs are launched, there will be nothing that can stop them. And what do you think we've been doing with all that money we're not putting into conventional military equipment?
Similarly, the X-Prize is just a front for the daVinci Project, the real purpose is so we can continue to launch space-mechs when all the rest of the worlds' launch pads are smoking holes.
Curves? You must be talking about a different actress.
Seriously, I doubt a Keira Knightley projection will have problems making any woman appear to have the body of a teenage boy.
It's not like anything is forcing him to be wealthy and powerful: if he gave all his money away, no one would bother kidnapping him.
It's like music and movie celebrities who complain about paparazzi: their salary is based on their worship by the masses, but they expect the masses to worship them without idols?
Ah interesting, I would certainly concede that Calgary has the best potential for IT grow in Canada. So why doesn't it have more of the other IT things, like software companies? Is it possible that its because Calgary is lacking in the Creative Class? (Whether it's true or not, even urban Alberta has a serious redneck image; could this be keeping IT talent away?)
I'm sorry, but what are the top three IT hubs and how are you measuring them?
My understanding is that what little IT there is in Alberta is almost entirely internal stuff for company HQs in Calgary (ie: no software companies). And I could find any number of measures that consistently put Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa above anywhere in Alberta.
Actually in the 2001 census, 17% of the population listed their ethnic origin as being partially Canadian and 23% entirely Canadian. "North American Indian" was a separate category.
I'm not sure that ethnic origin and "race" should be considered synonymous, but I think this is enough evidence to demonstrate your ignorance.
Simple solution: setup a firewall to block outgoing connections from the free accounts. The person using it to develop doesn't need any outside access at all, for email you open just that port. Think like chroot: protect your box from the users on it just as well as from the users off.
Similarly, doesn't the Bush Administration support an expansionist and defiant Isreal because it is a necessary condition for the Second Coming?
Are we supposed to follow through with your OS = GMO analogy to conclude that operating systems should be banned?! I wouldn't complain if Monsanto's corporate charter were struck down, but I think that banning their class of product is not the right way to curtail their behaviour.
You're right, however, that we are more likely to know the pesticides used on GMOs because they are designed with companion chemicals. This is at least partially beneficial because then there's only one pesticide I need to worry about. Also, this suggests that mandatory chemical labelling would be a superset of GMO labelling, which would be significantly more beneficial to consumers.
The question was what to give to a student already in CS. If we were being asked about highschool students I probably would have encouraged GEB.
Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.
I agree that GMO developers are gearing up to be just as damaging to society as pharmaceutical developers are now; so maybe we need open source GMOs developed by nationalised R&D labs, but we don't need to ban GMOs.
Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.
I realise there is enough food now, but many anti-GMO advocates claim there would still be enough food if we stopped using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. I've never heard these claims backed up, though...
Genetic patents, agro marketing, and everything Monsanto does is bad, but it's irrational to deduce from those issues that GMOs are the problem. Much agriculture today is overly reliant on heavily marketed and patented chemicals, but I don't see anyone complaining about that. Maybe agro R&D should be open source, maybe countries should offer tax incentives against monoculture, regardless, we are asking the wrong question if banning GMOs is the answer.
Believe it or not, I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while. Right now I'm painfully crawling through my Master's thesis, but when (or if?) I finish, I'll definitely give a project like this some serious consideration. Of course, even a mediocre book like GEB takes more effort than I may be able to muster, so don't get your hopes up too high. :)
If anybody is interested in discussing this a few months from now, please post a comment in my journal.
Escher and Bach are only given lip-service in order to make the book seem more balanced. You cannot learn about music or visual art by just reading text! Sure Hoftstader seems to know some stuff about Bach, but unless you augment the book with some serious listening and/or music reading he might as well just be making it all up. And Escher's art, as you can conclude from how well it sells, is more pop than profound: sure he had an amazing intuition for the Golden Ratio and similar mathematical series, but the recursion is all pretty basic. (If you want to learn about advanced tesselation, you're better off reading The Emperor's New Mind.)
Teach me to use Google as a spell check! (3 million hits seemed good enough for /. checking. :)
Forget biological WMDs, we have been under attack by chemical WMDs for decades. GMO food is the only reasonable* way to reduce pesticide use, which is actually causing health problems right now, as opposed to the vague danger of GMOs. Ingestion of weird DNA does nothing but entertain your stomach acids, so the only potential health threat is that GMOs may produce weird chemicals -- but surely they won't be as bad as the franken-pollutents in our environment right now!
* I'd like to believe the claims that organic food can feed the world, but it's an extraordinary claim and I have yet to see even weak evidence.
A good Computer Science program will cover everything in GEB with more depth and without all the stupid-writing-tricks and dumbing down that Hofstadter employs. As someone who forced myself through GEB (to see what all the fuss was about) after graduating from a good CS program, I would describe it as a must-read book only for highschool-educated Perl hackers without any exposure to theoretical computing.
So maybe the problem is the US system, hmm? Isn't it a double-standard to blacklist these banana republics because their law enforcement isn't cracking down on fraud or whatever but let Americans companies do whatever they want because "that's just how capitalism is". If your country's part of the Internet has rampant problems, maybe you should consider nationalising it?
Does the buck stop anywhere in your country? Nearly 50% of you voted for the current executive -- probably more than that for the legislative -- and the rest of you haven't done all that much to fight it, so if your country is democratic, as Americans seem to claim, then all American citizens are responsible for their government's actions.
Sorry, but I doubt our new Chinese masters (who I welcome, BTW), will be willing to allow Engrish to continue to be the lingua franca of the Net. If they're generous enough to continue to use our crude alphabet, I expect the TLDs will be .yueliang, .diqiou, .huoxing But it's more likely we'll just end up using Unicode.
Like say a language where you declare what functions do rather than specify how they do them? In a very precise and well-defined language? Believe it or not, such languages already exist! In academia we call them "functional programming languages". These exotic beasts significantly reduce the programming burden and they are frequently considered as runnable specifications. I bet if you wrote a memo suggesting that the company look into it, you will be promoted to just doing design and business analysis!
In all seriousness, wouldn't that be a good model for development? Have the analysts write applications in functional languages and then outsource the rewriting of key routines in C? QA issues with offshoring would disappear...