Well, some posts seem to grok what's happening, but not all at once.
It's simple, really:
1. What we need/want/desire is faster Internet connections. Once you're beyond 250MHz and have at least 128MB RAM, who cares about processor speed?
2. Games, games, games. Just bought me another Linux game at Pacific Place EBX. It's games that drive computer purchases. I don't need better, faster, more spiffy stuff right now and, even if I did, I'm not buying W2K games, only Mac and Linux games. OK, I did buy The Sims, but I'm weak. So, until they start making high hardware demand games and drivers for Linux, I have no reason to buy new boxen.
3. Linux. Yes, you heard me right, Linux. When I can take all my old boxen and turn them into new computers, why would I want to spend extra bux on new boxen? Besides, I've already got two dual-processor 450MHz PIIs, and I still have lots of space to cram more RAM into those babies.
4. George Wussy Bush. Yup. Look, he just reminds me that Texas (where I was born, at Lackland AFB, unlike the Wussman who didn't even show up to fly jets for two years as an AWOL draft dodger) is where they make all those chip things. And I'm not subsidizing him. Call me crazy, call me vengeful, but until that scary toad is kicked in the behind by the American public, ain't no money of mine going to Texas. Or any firm (like Seibel) that supports that SOB.
So, you probably agree with at least three of my points, right?
WTF is this "Experience Mucus" monstrosity? It looks like an alien spacecraft that has crash landed next to the Space Needle and like it's morphing into something really UGLY... strike that... UGLIER would be more correct.
Well, when you're as rich as Paul Allen, you can take the money you saved by having the State tax Seattle citizens for your sports stadium and use it to pay for the EMP. Basically, it's the Blob on steroids, and noone wants to tell the MSFT Emporer he has no clothes.
Simulations can help build autonomic reactions, help you to learn to be able to react without thinking, but it's still nothing like actual combat or actual death or dismemberment.
Give me ten soldiers with a shitload of training, but no actual combat experience. My bet is that only two of those will be fully capable in their first real combat situation, six will be partially capable (able to lay down cover fire and fire at half rate), one will be mostly useless (so panicky they're a danger to the rest), and one will be totally incapable of firing.
Example: Normal people off the street will not, unless circumstances are extreme, kill someone. The US Marines need to train people to kill someone when they are not in direct personal danger. So they use pop up targets with the shape of a human. This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.
Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself. Even with training, we still expect that more than half of all combatants will not shoot at another human being, but will miss. This is pretty much a constant.
Playing Quake or Halflife is nothing like using a force-feedback rifle simulator. They used to ban us from paintball games because we actually used weapons and knew about kickback, reactions, wind drift, shadow perception, and all the other factors necessary to complete a real kill. And even a simulator is a far cry from real combat. It's not quiet in real war, it's way more boring and way more exciting, and even the best game is jigged for playability, whereas real combat is a heck of a lot of misses and a lot of unseen targets, regardless of technology.
Violent games and TV shows just help disconnect offenders from the realization of their crimes, after they've been commited.
Yes, but then we wouldn't have a handy scapegoat to blame, would we? After all, if we were to focus societal and economic resources on fixing the discord in the child's home and family life, we might get some real results.
Another example would be the War on Drugs. Back during Nixon's time, we spent two-thirds of federal monies on prevention (demand) and one-third on punishment (supply). Now we keep locking up more and more people, and it still doesn't change the behaviour. Because it's politically easy to be tough on crime, not actually go through, program by program, and see what really delivers results.
And this is to the point that over 50 percent of many counties budgets are spent on the justice system, where they used to be in the 20 to 30 percent range.
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
And I used to be a game designer. In fact, Gary Gygax signed some games for me about a decade ago, when I was a SMOG.
We were talking about RPGs (Role Playing Games). In a role-playing game there is no actual attack going on, only a description in words of it. In a computer simulation, there might be some correlation if we had an electronic gun simulator, in that the neural pathways in the brain would be conditioned due to the actions and visualizations of pulling the trigger, but not in a paper RPG.
Another thing is social acceptability. In any case where you take someone with an amoral bent, they will not be likely to abide by societal restrictions. The more fantastic the event, the less likely they are to carry it through to the real world. If I let my son use his computer mouse to control figures in WarCraft or StarCraft, at an age of 8, and I reinforce that this is a game and that actual war is not that fun (from practical military experience), he becomes much less likely to act out these aggressive roles that are portrayed in standard TV commercials where jocks beat each other up in sports adverts.
Without societal feedback, we all are in danger of Lord of the Flies responses, especially from those children who are amoral or immoral. If there is inadequate parenting, you're pretty much in danger of getting an unstable kid, and all the mental health professionals in the world can only reduce the likely violent outcomes.
An example is the recent capture in Seattle of one of the youths who beat up a man in Belltown. The first one that was caught was avoiding child welfare and some counsellors had remarked that he was very bright. But because we spend money on punishment and not correction at an early stage, it was probably way too late by the time he received any useful societal feedback.
We did. That's how they got rusted, all the blood from the savage owners of the cars spilled all over.
We also used their hair to tie down the magnetic cores to the planar boards, which we hand painted with resin that we scraped from the trees with our toenails and stained green with plant juices from local flora.
Then we wired it up to windmills we fashioned from old blender parts - and we liked it!
We've gained control of the arm, it's now stabbing the knee where the opponent base is! Ok who want to be the battlefield?
Sorry, my english is crapy.
That's alright, you're Canadian. Here, I'll translate:
Yank: Actually, fighting NanoBots would be even cooler.
Canuck: I've heard that hockey-playing NanoBots would be real keen, especially in colour, eh?
Quebecker: Supehr keen, NanoBots avec les batons de microtuer, non?
Brit: I say, good show. Pity they don't do anything, whot?
In my day we didn't even have hands. We used rocks.
Hell, we didn't even have wire.
Did I mention we hand smelted the wire in forges we built from rusted out cars, spun it out by rotating the smelting pot at high velocity, and caught the cooling wire in our bare hands?
And we didn't have capacitors, we spit lightning into potentiometers between our teeth, after polishing the wire with our teeth.
To sum up: to say that there is no woman *qualified* to be part of the BSD core group is blatantly false, I know too many female programmers myself. However, to say that there is a disproportionate ratio of women users vs. women hackers is undeniably true, and thereby leads to a shortage of women in *every* corner of Alt. Os. land. The qualified women are undoubtably programming some routers for Cisco, putting in 80 hour weeks like the rest of us, and just plain don't have the time. I, on the other hand, have the time and interest, but not the skill:-)
Two things:
1. it is also highly likely that a man will overestimate his abilities and qualifications and submit himself and that a woman will underestimate her abilities and qualifications and not submit herself (recent Psychology Today article). In addition, if there are other qualified applicants, a man will still tend to apply, but a woman will frequently not apply.
2. I think you're right that most of the qualified women are putting in 80 hour weeks, going home and doing another 20 hours, and just plain don't have the time.
the reason there aren't any female members of the core team is because there aren't currently any females who contribute on a regular enough basis to be considered.
Define regular. I've served on boards with women, and even been the token white male at times, and one thing I noticed was that, in general, women have stuff happen. They have kids, their parents get sick, whatever. The net amount of work produced by the women is pretty much the same as that of the men, but it's taken as an indicator by men that the women aren't serious enough.
So, maybe you need to ask - is this a reasonable restriction?
Well, if you look at the recent listing of Infoworld Innovators, you'll notice the only woman on it is Hedy Lamar. I think it was just cause they liked her movies.
So, we shouldn't be surprised when BSD ends up electing "guys who look like me". This is why I normally vote against Old White Guys on Boards of Directors, even if some day I'll be one of those people. Since I know most other voters will vote for them.
Why is control of the DNS system and IP allocation a legitimate function of the US Government?
And my question is, do we trust anyone else to handle it, given all that is happening in China and the UK (examples) with their attempts to control even email?
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms.
Well, as a friend of mine says, "in the end, politics is always about spite and class envy".
Did anyone notice the Oct. 9, 2000, Infoworld poll of IT execs as to who would be better on various high-tech issues? The only one Bush wins is support for UCITA, in that Gore was perceived as being more likely to support UCITA. Couldn't find the poll on the Infoworld web site, but it's page 12 of the print issue.
Other than the large subsidy of the GOP by the tech industry in the current election, and the realization by campaigns that web sites allow them to do media pushes into rural America, the only difference between Gore and Bush is that Gore actually knows what the Net is (as Vincent Cerf can attest) as it's political and funding shepherd, whilst Bush thinks the Net is something you catch oil-soaked dolphins with when you're zipping along the coast in your cigarette speed boat.
In today's news, primitive life was found on Mars. The mono-cellular creatures, thought to be remnants of ancient life on mars, predate humanity.
Jon Katz, when asked to comment on the discovery, said: "You can see how the ubergeek protozoans of ancient mars must have had an inner connectivity with TCP/IP and implemented IPv6 on a grand scale in their daily lives. Part of the rebellious nature of these mono-cellular proto-geeks was evidenced in their advanced insight into survival in the barren wastes of Mars, just as the cyber children of the 21st Century will one day rule in political circles, due to their innate advantage in dialing 1-800-COLLECT with touch-tone phone phreak PDAs."
In other news, George W Bush revealed that Jon is his love child with Charro.
Piping was popular on suits in the 70's. Now it's on laptops? Could it be uglier? I personally want silver piping around my TV. It would give it that polyester look I so cherish.
I'm holding out for gold and black piping for my HDTV set. Totally retro, totally now. Then I'll pop a G4 cube on top, with yellow and blue plastic flower decals on the case, and partially immerse it in a bubble flow pipe fish tank.
Did I mention I live in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, some posts seem to grok what's happening, but not all at once.
It's simple, really:
1. What we need/want/desire is faster Internet connections. Once you're beyond 250MHz and have at least 128MB RAM, who cares about processor speed?
2. Games, games, games. Just bought me another Linux game at Pacific Place EBX. It's games that drive computer purchases. I don't need better, faster, more spiffy stuff right now and, even if I did, I'm not buying W2K games, only Mac and Linux games. OK, I did buy The Sims, but I'm weak. So, until they start making high hardware demand games and drivers for Linux, I have no reason to buy new boxen.
3. Linux. Yes, you heard me right, Linux. When I can take all my old boxen and turn them into new computers, why would I want to spend extra bux on new boxen? Besides, I've already got two dual-processor 450MHz PIIs, and I still have lots of space to cram more RAM into those babies.
4. George Wussy Bush. Yup. Look, he just reminds me that Texas (where I was born, at Lackland AFB, unlike the Wussman who didn't even show up to fly jets for two years as an AWOL draft dodger) is where they make all those chip things. And I'm not subsidizing him. Call me crazy, call me vengeful, but until that scary toad is kicked in the behind by the American public, ain't no money of mine going to Texas. Or any firm (like Seibel) that supports that SOB.
So, you probably agree with at least three of my points, right?
Gads you are a dolt. Not everyone in Canada is French-Canadian, i.e. in Quebec.
That's why I translated into Canadian English and Quebecois.
Parce que j'ai quatre langues, et tu n'as rien a dire a moi.
I think you meant to say Albertans wish they were Yanks, well Texans, but we won't let them.
No hair, eh? NanoBots could fix that ...
WTF is this "Experience Mucus" monstrosity? It looks like an alien spacecraft that has crash landed next to the Space Needle and like it's morphing into something really UGLY... strike that... UGLIER would be more correct.
Well, when you're as rich as Paul Allen, you can take the money you saved by having the State tax Seattle citizens for your sports stadium and use it to pay for the EMP. Basically, it's the Blob on steroids, and noone wants to tell the MSFT Emporer he has no clothes.
Simulations can help build autonomic reactions, help you to learn to be able to react without thinking, but it's still nothing like actual combat or actual death or dismemberment.
Give me ten soldiers with a shitload of training, but no actual combat experience. My bet is that only two of those will be fully capable in their first real combat situation, six will be partially capable (able to lay down cover fire and fire at half rate), one will be mostly useless (so panicky they're a danger to the rest), and one will be totally incapable of firing.
It's just not the same.
Example: Normal people off the street will not, unless circumstances are extreme, kill someone. The US Marines need to train people to kill someone when they are not in direct personal danger. So they use pop up targets with the shape of a human. This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.
Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself. Even with training, we still expect that more than half of all combatants will not shoot at another human being, but will miss. This is pretty much a constant.
Playing Quake or Halflife is nothing like using a force-feedback rifle simulator. They used to ban us from paintball games because we actually used weapons and knew about kickback, reactions, wind drift, shadow perception, and all the other factors necessary to complete a real kill. And even a simulator is a far cry from real combat. It's not quiet in real war, it's way more boring and way more exciting, and even the best game is jigged for playability, whereas real combat is a heck of a lot of misses and a lot of unseen targets, regardless of technology.
Violent games and TV shows just help disconnect offenders from the realization of their crimes, after they've been commited.
Yes, but then we wouldn't have a handy scapegoat to blame, would we? After all, if we were to focus societal and economic resources on fixing the discord in the child's home and family life, we might get some real results.
Another example would be the War on Drugs. Back during Nixon's time, we spent two-thirds of federal monies on prevention (demand) and one-third on punishment (supply). Now we keep locking up more and more people, and it still doesn't change the behaviour. Because it's politically easy to be tough on crime, not actually go through, program by program, and see what really delivers results.
And this is to the point that over 50 percent of many counties budgets are spent on the justice system, where they used to be in the 20 to 30 percent range.
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
And I used to be a game designer. In fact, Gary Gygax signed some games for me about a decade ago, when I was a SMOG.
We were talking about RPGs (Role Playing Games). In a role-playing game there is no actual attack going on, only a description in words of it. In a computer simulation, there might be some correlation if we had an electronic gun simulator, in that the neural pathways in the brain would be conditioned due to the actions and visualizations of pulling the trigger, but not in a paper RPG.
Another thing is social acceptability. In any case where you take someone with an amoral bent, they will not be likely to abide by societal restrictions. The more fantastic the event, the less likely they are to carry it through to the real world. If I let my son use his computer mouse to control figures in WarCraft or StarCraft, at an age of 8, and I reinforce that this is a game and that actual war is not that fun (from practical military experience), he becomes much less likely to act out these aggressive roles that are portrayed in standard TV commercials where jocks beat each other up in sports adverts.
Without societal feedback, we all are in danger of Lord of the Flies responses, especially from those children who are amoral or immoral. If there is inadequate parenting, you're pretty much in danger of getting an unstable kid, and all the mental health professionals in the world can only reduce the likely violent outcomes.
An example is the recent capture in Seattle of one of the youths who beat up a man in Belltown. The first one that was caught was avoiding child welfare and some counsellors had remarked that he was very bright. But because we spend money on punishment and not correction at an early stage, it was probably way too late by the time he received any useful societal feedback.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these killer robots!
... wait for it ... BSD.
Do they run Linux?
Nope, most of them use
(for i: i cInfinity: i++; cout"grin "; end)
You had *rusted cars*???
We would have killed for that.
We did. That's how they got rusted, all the blood from the savage owners of the cars spilled all over.
We also used their hair to tie down the magnetic cores to the planar boards, which we hand painted with resin that we scraped from the trees with our toenails and stained green with plant juices from local flora.
Then we wired it up to windmills we fashioned from old blender parts - and we liked it!
However, the large breasted women are fine, although they'd get my attention a hell of a lot more if they knew what they were talking about!
I think they're stars in some kind of wrestling thing that non-geeks watch.
We have better lighting for the cameras.
...
So, in short, nothing like Robot Wars
Space Corps Directive 1001001: First, run away. Then, blame Rimmer, the smeghead.
Is BattleBots roughly similar to, or the same as, Robot Wars, made by BBC and hosted by the guy who plays Lister on Red Dwarf (Craig Charles)?
Nope, totally different. We have cool music and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Funny story, met Bill Nye at breakfast Wednesday morning. Man, he is ultra-geek in person.
We've gained control of the arm, it's now stabbing the knee where the opponent base is! Ok who want to be the battlefield?
Sorry, my english is crapy.
That's alright, you're Canadian. Here, I'll translate:
Yank: Actually, fighting NanoBots would be even cooler.
Canuck: I've heard that hockey-playing NanoBots would be real keen, especially in colour, eh?
Quebecker: Supehr keen, NanoBots avec les batons de microtuer, non?
Brit: I say, good show. Pity they don't do anything, whot?
In my day we didn't even have hands. We used rocks.
Hell, we didn't even have wire.
Did I mention we hand smelted the wire in forges we built from rusted out cars, spun it out by rotating the smelting pot at high velocity, and caught the cooling wire in our bare hands?
And we didn't have capacitors, we spit lightning into potentiometers between our teeth, after polishing the wire with our teeth.
Actually, fighting NanoBots would be even cooler.
in my day, we hand wound our magnetic cores, and we liked it!
To sum up: to say that there is no woman *qualified* to be part of the BSD core group is blatantly false, I know too many female programmers myself. However, to say that there is a disproportionate ratio of women users vs. women hackers is undeniably true, and thereby leads to a shortage of women in *every* corner of Alt. Os. land. The qualified women are undoubtably programming some routers for Cisco, putting in 80 hour weeks like the rest of us, and just plain don't have the time. I, on the other hand, have the time and interest, but not the skill :-)
Two things:
1. it is also highly likely that a man will overestimate his abilities and qualifications and submit himself and that a woman will underestimate her abilities and qualifications and not submit herself (recent Psychology Today article). In addition, if there are other qualified applicants, a man will still tend to apply, but a woman will frequently not apply.
2. I think you're right that most of the qualified women are putting in 80 hour weeks, going home and doing another 20 hours, and just plain don't have the time.
there was some problem about exhausting the money supply and a suggestion I look into the REAL_GREEN_THIRD_PARTY stack instead.
the reason there aren't any female members of the core team is because there aren't currently any females who contribute on a regular enough basis to be considered.
...
Define regular. I've served on boards with women, and even been the token white male at times, and one thing I noticed was that, in general, women have stuff happen. They have kids, their parents get sick, whatever. The net amount of work produced by the women is pretty much the same as that of the men, but it's taken as an indicator by men that the women aren't serious enough.
So, maybe you need to ask - is this a reasonable restriction?
Just being a Devil's Advocate, after all
Well, if you look at the recent listing of Infoworld Innovators, you'll notice the only woman on it is Hedy Lamar. I think it was just cause they liked her movies.
So, we shouldn't be surprised when BSD ends up electing "guys who look like me". This is why I normally vote against Old White Guys on Boards of Directors, even if some day I'll be one of those people. Since I know most other voters will vote for them.
Why is control of the DNS system and IP allocation a legitimate function of the US Government?
And my question is, do we trust anyone else to handle it, given all that is happening in China and the UK (examples) with their attempts to control even email?
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms.
"Let's have a Class War Again...."
Well, as a friend of mine says, "in the end, politics is always about spite and class envy".
Did anyone notice the Oct. 9, 2000, Infoworld poll of IT execs as to who would be better on various high-tech issues? The only one Bush wins is support for UCITA, in that Gore was perceived as being more likely to support UCITA. Couldn't find the poll on the Infoworld web site, but it's page 12 of the print issue.
Other than the large subsidy of the GOP by the tech industry in the current election, and the realization by campaigns that web sites allow them to do media pushes into rural America, the only difference between Gore and Bush is that Gore actually knows what the Net is (as Vincent Cerf can attest) as it's political and funding shepherd, whilst Bush thinks the Net is something you catch oil-soaked dolphins with when you're zipping along the coast in your cigarette speed boat.
In today's news, primitive life was found on Mars. The mono-cellular creatures, thought to be remnants of ancient life on mars, predate humanity.
Jon Katz, when asked to comment on the discovery, said: "You can see how the ubergeek protozoans of ancient mars must have had an inner connectivity with TCP/IP and implemented IPv6 on a grand scale in their daily lives. Part of the rebellious nature of these mono-cellular proto-geeks was evidenced in their advanced insight into survival in the barren wastes of Mars, just as the cyber children of the 21st Century will one day rule in political circles, due to their innate advantage in dialing 1-800-COLLECT with touch-tone phone phreak PDAs."
In other news, George W Bush revealed that Jon is his love child with Charro.
Um, yeah. You also forgot to use BLANK spaces
between
your paragraphs.
Piping was popular on suits in the 70's. Now it's on laptops? Could it be uglier? I personally want silver piping around my TV. It would give it that polyester look I so cherish.
I'm holding out for gold and black piping for my HDTV set. Totally retro, totally now. Then I'll pop a G4 cube on top, with yellow and blue plastic flower decals on the case, and partially immerse it in a bubble flow pipe fish tank.
Did I mention I live in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle?