good and bad laws would be striken depending on the political wind
We would eventually lose some bad laws, but also lose some great laws designed to protect your freedoms, depending on the political wind. Think things like Roe v Wade.
Roe v. Wade isn't a law, it's a Supreme Court decision. It says, among other things, that the 4th Amendment guarantee of privacy extends to abortion. Constitutional rights (not being "laws") not only never expire, but all laws passed must abide by them. The only way to change them is througha constitutional amendment. Read the US Constitution sometime-- it explains all of this.
Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected?
It was Iran, and anyone who believes the cacamamie "GHW Bush rode an SR-71 to Paris" conspiracy theory is a nut. Besides, Carter lost because he was weak and inept in general, not just because of the hostages.
I think there will be a backlash against technology. We will hit a critical point in our social evolution where we say "enough!"
I don't think we'll ever hit that point. One thing about technology is that it get more subtle. There's never going to be so much technology "in our face" that we'll freak out about it. Luddites will, but they freaked out about the electric light...
He and other futurists might do better to look at what we use computers for now and what we don't, but could, use them for in the future. They could also think way outside the box and think about how computers will physically change (will it still be everything in one box or will the hardware be as distributed as software can be) or how computers will integrate into everyday life.
Yeah, I've heard "futurists" like him before. One goofball suggested that "in the future" we would store ALL our music on a disc the size of a dime that we'd be able to carry around with us everywhere and, when we purchase an album, we'd hand the clerk our disc and they'd add the music to it. Totally fails to take into account the "lose- and steal-ability" of a dime-sized disc. Pure extrapolation only works up to a certain point, then you have to ask yourself, "why?"
Point Of Demarcation. The gray box or green box where the lines terminate at the building. Everything before it is theirs, after it is mine.
That's the term I was looking for! I checked it myself, no dial tone. Exactly what you said is what happened. Eventually a GOOD tech showed up and said the same thing (after 6 or 7 scheduled visits)
Yeah, "POD" is the newfangled acronym being bandied about. Some companies still call it the MPOE (Minimum Point Of Entry), but most have changed to POD to clarify the whole "ours vs. yours" issue. The best way to prove to Repair that you're not a "n00b" when you call in trouble is to refer to it as an MPOE or POD. They automatically assume you're stupid if you don't know the name of the gray box!
Huh? You're answering a question that wasn't asked. I'm not complaining that there's no alternative to DSL, I'm just pointing out that telcos will still control a big chunk of the communications infrastructure even if POTS were to be totally replaced by VOIP.
Maybe it falls under the approach of "there's no such thing as bad publicity" - lord knows ESR won't miss an opportunity to write something where he can work in a way to mention "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." I'm amazed it took him over 1,000 words to get around to it this time.
Heh. Personally, I have to give him this one. The book is his manifesto on open source software. It's not like the discussion was about the poor quality of judging at last years Ninepins World Championship Tournament (damn those Norwegian judges!).
Having all your songs written for you, doing everything the way the producer/engineer/director/marketer during every step of your brief career is not guidance.
That's different than a producer going "album sounds good guys, but what if you lay of the kazoo just a bit in that second song?"
Indeed, a good producer knows when to demand more cowbell.
Umm, if you burn H2, you get H20. Then there is no problem with nitrous-oxides.
You burn propane combined with air (1 C3H8 + 10 O2) and ideally you get 4 H2O + 3 CO2. Air, however, contains nitrogen, about 70% by volume. N2 in the presence of combustion can oxidise, yielding oxides of nitrogen.
You don't know much about nuclear war do you? A large scale nuclear war would most likely kill off all humans and most animal life. See there's this thing called nuclear winter where all the crap from the bombs going off and the smoke from the fires they'd cause, would block out the sun for years. All plant life would die out and it would become extremely cold, without food or heat, humans would have a hard time living.
"Nuclear winter" is yet another piece of alarmist hysteria, this time perpetrated by Carl Sagan. The National Center for Atmospheric Research duplicated his computer model, but came up with very different results. Perhaps that's because they didn't publish a theory in "Parade" as if it were fact first, then build a model that "proves" it to cover their ass. Carl Sagan was a smart guy, but way too prone to straying outside his areas of expertise and shooting his mouth off.
Add to that, they tried to tell me it was an inside wiring problem, because they assured me there was dial tone coming into the house. Mind you there was light snow on the ground for the time period and no tracks in the snow, how did they check? FLY?
They lie. Granted, it's an educated guess of a lie, because they've got an automated system that can remotely monitor the line and tell them whether there's a problem on their side or not. The trouble is, the system depends upon there not having been anything stupid done by a telco technician. I'm a tech for a private telecom interconnect doing inside wiring, and I've had to actually shout at a 611 repair operator to get her to send out a Verizon tech because she swore up and down it was good to the POD* according to her computer. When the Verizon tech showed up the next day, he said the problem was at the local CO. In his words "some fucker working on something else knocked the pair loose and plugged it back in the wrong place".
* Point Of Demarcation. The gray box or green box where the lines terminate at the building. Everything before it is theirs, after it is mine.
Mom and Pop can become the local equivalent of a cellular phone company for the price of $79 Wifi router. Now how is Verizon going to compete with that?
What a silly question. Verizon owns the copper. The ISP you're getting your DSL from is leasing the pair and a slot in the DSLAM from Verizon. It's not like they're totally cut out of the action by VOIP. If POTS dies out (which I doubt it will), they'll simply shift their business model to one of "last mile broadband provider".
The clips are never inserted into the magazine, they are attached to it while all the cartridges are pushed into the magazine.
The exception, of course, being the en-bloc wraparound type clips used by rifles like the M-1 Garand. Those were, however, merely an evolutionary half-step between stripper clips and removable magazines. But yeah, people who say "stick a clip in an M-16" are lame.
1. Do the Americans really have enough nukes to destroy the world ten times over?
This one I hear a lot. First of all, despite what you may have heard, really the majority of the energy of a nuclear explosion turns into heat and blast immediately, NOT radiation. The only exception to this is the so-called Neutron bomb, designed specifically with radiation (more specifically fast neutrons and gamma rays) in mind. But realistically, although the Americans have built approximately 70,000 warheads of almost 70 different types, they now possess a stockpile of around 9600 warheads. Surprising as it may sound, this is NOT enough to 'destroy' the world. Even hitting every city in the world with everything in every country's arsenal would not be able to 'destroy' the world. The world is still a
BIG place. Keep in mind the Russians have around the same numbers of warheads.
The whole "we can destroy the world X times over" has bugged me for years. What is it about people (anti-nuke types in particular) that they feel the need to exaggerate the horrors of nuclear war? I suppose it's just wishful thinking on their part: if (for example) there were exactly enough nukes to "destroy the entire world", it would be impossible to justify building any additional warheads. It's just part of the "wasted money" rhetoric, I guess. All it does is make them sound like hysterical uninformed fools, though. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate awful things about nuclear war to cite without resorting to hyperbole.
Of course, if you point this out, they "amend" their argument to something about destroying "civilization as we know it X times over". This is also nonsense. A nuclear war would probably put the brakes on advancing research for a while, but I'd wager we wouldn't slip more than a decade or two backwards in average standard of living.
Well there's your problem right there: kazaa. The kazaa and gnutella networks are filled with tons of crappy small files. Edonkey on the hand handles large files very well and it's easy to find trusted hashes...
Wow. Just DL'd the client. Very much NOT the same wasteland as usual. Thanks.
File sharing isn't hurting the adult industry, but what WILL hurt it in the not-too-distant future is "virtual actors" who perform for free. AI and immersive rendering still isn't up to snuff tho.
It'll be interesting to see how far the tech has to advance before people can't tell the difference. It'll have to get pretty good, I imagine. Virtual porn nowadays is about as exciting as watching someone stick a gas pump nozzle into their car.
This is one place I will give props to the military. They require Quality Assurance and testing by the user before they will sign off on something.
...and big companies don't do this...okaayy..
Not to the extent that the military does. The problem the military has with functionality is that it tends to be explicitly described in the contract, limiting the designers' options. Straight QA, though, is unparalleled. If something comes out unusable, it was usually spec'd badly.
Paul Graham said that all languages hope to become Lisp. This sounds like just another attempt.
Why not just use Lisp?
I've always thought that quote could be more accurately rephrased "All non-Lisp languages are non-Lisp because most people don't NEED Lisp; the few advocating moving them towards Lisp need to just go discover Lisp"
Anyone know of any good books on Chaos theory? I've been thinking a lot about what it might mean for games like blackjack and poker. I've spent a lot of time playing blackjack this week, and it seems inevitable that the cards go on good and bad swings ( and I've made a lot of money this week by playing accordingly).
Don't get me wrong, I am an engineer, but I can't hep wondering if there is some broader priciple at work.
The only thing learning about "chaos theory" will get you is an understanding that cards are predictably unpredictable. You can always count on not knowing what's coming up next.
a finely honed balance between maximizing casino profit per game played and maximizing total number of games played. But video poker?!?!...I can't see that having odds much better than slots even for optimal play.
I heard this from a guy who serviced gaming machines in Vegas when I lived there ten years ago: The average hand of video poker takes twice as long as the average spin on a slot machine. That being the case, poker pays off about twice as often as slots, but it pays off about half as much. The most important thing (just as you said) is keeping players from becoming discouraged. The ultimate goal is, given a couple full bank of occupied machines, to have the sound of quarters hitting the payout pan happening continuously. The true evil of the poker machines is the 1:1 payout. It sounds like a win, but it's really just a minimized loss.
What is our frame of reference here.... Are we still assuming we are the center of the universe, even after all the progress we've made in a variety of sciences???
If it helps, think of it this way: the universe isn't actually expanding by everything moving apart. It's expanding by the distances between things getting bigger. Another way to look at it is as if everything in the universe-- the stuff, as it were-- is shrinking. Imagine two oranges side by side, touching. If those oranges shrank to the size of grapes they'd end up being farther apart, not touching. If everything shrank, it'd look like everything was getting farther apart and with no outside reference, it wouldn't be apparent that everything was shrinking.
No, but you can figure out exactly where ALL of the Porches are. Any self respecting car theft ring (yes they do exist) steal specific makes and models, not just expensive cars.
They aren't "all" anywhere, at least not anywhere specific. Besides, photos of front yards aren't going to get you any more info than knowing "where the good neighborhoods are" gets you.
Also, don't most owners of very expensive cars put them in their GARAGE?
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Roe v. Wade isn't a law, it's a Supreme Court decision. It says, among other things, that the 4th Amendment guarantee of privacy extends to abortion. Constitutional rights (not being "laws") not only never expire, but all laws passed must abide by them. The only way to change them is througha constitutional amendment. Read the US Constitution sometime-- it explains all of this.
Remember how the republicans got Iraq to hold off releasing hostages until Reagan was elected?
It was Iran, and anyone who believes the cacamamie "GHW Bush rode an SR-71 to Paris" conspiracy theory is a nut. Besides, Carter lost because he was weak and inept in general, not just because of the hostages.
I don't think we'll ever hit that point. One thing about technology is that it get more subtle. There's never going to be so much technology "in our face" that we'll freak out about it. Luddites will, but they freaked out about the electric light...
Yeah, I've heard "futurists" like him before. One goofball suggested that "in the future" we would store ALL our music on a disc the size of a dime that we'd be able to carry around with us everywhere and, when we purchase an album, we'd hand the clerk our disc and they'd add the music to it. Totally fails to take into account the "lose- and steal-ability" of a dime-sized disc. Pure extrapolation only works up to a certain point, then you have to ask yourself, "why?"
$DEITY=Cthulhu heh. Good sig.
That's the term I was looking for! I checked it myself, no dial tone. Exactly what you said is what happened. Eventually a GOOD tech showed up and said the same thing (after 6 or 7 scheduled visits)
Yeah, "POD" is the newfangled acronym being bandied about. Some companies still call it the MPOE (Minimum Point Of Entry), but most have changed to POD to clarify the whole "ours vs. yours" issue. The best way to prove to Repair that you're not a "n00b" when you call in trouble is to refer to it as an MPOE or POD. They automatically assume you're stupid if you don't know the name of the gray box!
Huh? You're answering a question that wasn't asked. I'm not complaining that there's no alternative to DSL, I'm just pointing out that telcos will still control a big chunk of the communications infrastructure even if POTS were to be totally replaced by VOIP.
Heh. Personally, I have to give him this one. The book is his manifesto on open source software. It's not like the discussion was about the poor quality of judging at last years Ninepins World Championship Tournament (damn those Norwegian judges!).
That's different than a producer going "album sounds good guys, but what if you lay of the kazoo just a bit in that second song?"
Indeed, a good producer knows when to demand more cowbell.
You burn propane combined with air (1 C3H8 + 10 O2) and ideally you get 4 H2O + 3 CO2. Air, however, contains nitrogen, about 70% by volume. N2 in the presence of combustion can oxidise, yielding oxides of nitrogen.
"Nuclear winter" is yet another piece of alarmist hysteria, this time perpetrated by Carl Sagan. The National Center for Atmospheric Research duplicated his computer model, but came up with very different results. Perhaps that's because they didn't publish a theory in "Parade" as if it were fact first, then build a model that "proves" it to cover their ass. Carl Sagan was a smart guy, but way too prone to straying outside his areas of expertise and shooting his mouth off.
They lie. Granted, it's an educated guess of a lie, because they've got an automated system that can remotely monitor the line and tell them whether there's a problem on their side or not. The trouble is, the system depends upon there not having been anything stupid done by a telco technician. I'm a tech for a private telecom interconnect doing inside wiring, and I've had to actually shout at a 611 repair operator to get her to send out a Verizon tech because she swore up and down it was good to the POD* according to her computer. When the Verizon tech showed up the next day, he said the problem was at the local CO. In his words "some fucker working on something else knocked the pair loose and plugged it back in the wrong place".
* Point Of Demarcation. The gray box or green box where the lines terminate at the building. Everything before it is theirs, after it is mine.
What a silly question. Verizon owns the copper. The ISP you're getting your DSL from is leasing the pair and a slot in the DSLAM from Verizon. It's not like they're totally cut out of the action by VOIP. If POTS dies out (which I doubt it will), they'll simply shift their business model to one of "last mile broadband provider".
The exception, of course, being the en-bloc wraparound type clips used by rifles like the M-1 Garand. Those were, however, merely an evolutionary half-step between stripper clips and removable magazines. But yeah, people who say "stick a clip in an M-16" are lame.
This one I hear a lot. First of all, despite what you may have heard, really the majority of the energy of a nuclear explosion turns into heat and blast immediately, NOT radiation. The only exception to this is the so-called Neutron bomb, designed specifically with radiation (more specifically fast neutrons and gamma rays) in mind. But realistically, although the Americans have built approximately 70,000 warheads of almost 70 different types, they now possess a stockpile of around 9600 warheads. Surprising as it may sound, this is NOT enough to 'destroy' the world. Even hitting every city in the world with everything in every country's arsenal would not be able to 'destroy' the world. The world is still a BIG place. Keep in mind the Russians have around the same numbers of warheads.
The whole "we can destroy the world X times over" has bugged me for years. What is it about people (anti-nuke types in particular) that they feel the need to exaggerate the horrors of nuclear war? I suppose it's just wishful thinking on their part: if (for example) there were exactly enough nukes to "destroy the entire world", it would be impossible to justify building any additional warheads. It's just part of the "wasted money" rhetoric, I guess. All it does is make them sound like hysterical uninformed fools, though. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate awful things about nuclear war to cite without resorting to hyperbole.
Of course, if you point this out, they "amend" their argument to something about destroying "civilization as we know it X times over". This is also nonsense. A nuclear war would probably put the brakes on advancing research for a while, but I'd wager we wouldn't slip more than a decade or two backwards in average standard of living.
Wow. Just DL'd the client. Very much NOT the same wasteland as usual. Thanks.
File sharing isn't hurting the adult industry, but what WILL hurt it in the not-too-distant future is "virtual actors" who perform for free. AI and immersive rendering still isn't up to snuff tho.
It'll be interesting to see how far the tech has to advance before people can't tell the difference. It'll have to get pretty good, I imagine. Virtual porn nowadays is about as exciting as watching someone stick a gas pump nozzle into their car.
Sheesh, am I my brother's keeper?
Not to the extent that the military does. The problem the military has with functionality is that it tends to be explicitly described in the contract, limiting the designers' options. Straight QA, though, is unparalleled. If something comes out unusable, it was usually spec'd badly.
To be fair, the cell phone probably boots up nearly instantaneously also-- it's likely the network connection that you're waiting for.
Why not just use Lisp?
I've always thought that quote could be more accurately rephrased "All non-Lisp languages are non-Lisp because most people don't NEED Lisp; the few advocating moving them towards Lisp need to just go discover Lisp"
The only thing learning about "chaos theory" will get you is an understanding that cards are predictably unpredictable. You can always count on not knowing what's coming up next.
I heard this from a guy who serviced gaming machines in Vegas when I lived there ten years ago: The average hand of video poker takes twice as long as the average spin on a slot machine. That being the case, poker pays off about twice as often as slots, but it pays off about half as much. The most important thing (just as you said) is keeping players from becoming discouraged. The ultimate goal is, given a couple full bank of occupied machines, to have the sound of quarters hitting the payout pan happening continuously. The true evil of the poker machines is the 1:1 payout. It sounds like a win, but it's really just a minimized loss.
Pretty good rundown on quick-and-dirty odds. One minor error in the "Flush Twice" section, though:
1/4 * 1/4 = 1/8 = 12.5%
It should be 1/4 * 1/4 = 1/16 = 6.25%
Other than that, you've outlined it pretty well.
If it helps, think of it this way: the universe isn't actually expanding by everything moving apart. It's expanding by the distances between things getting bigger. Another way to look at it is as if everything in the universe-- the stuff, as it were-- is shrinking. Imagine two oranges side by side, touching. If those oranges shrank to the size of grapes they'd end up being farther apart, not touching. If everything shrank, it'd look like everything was getting farther apart and with no outside reference, it wouldn't be apparent that everything was shrinking.
They aren't "all" anywhere, at least not anywhere specific. Besides, photos of front yards aren't going to get you any more info than knowing "where the good neighborhoods are" gets you.
Also, don't most owners of very expensive cars put them in their GARAGE?
No, it's the United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command's (USAISEC) area of expertise.
Exactly. I knew someone would know the correct alphabet-soup. I only knew it wasn't the CoE. :)