Scary thought, looks like the patent office needs to take a closer look at all these tech patents they are giving out these days.
Gee, you think?
I have a feeling that somebody in the patent office has got the idea in their head that handing these out is helping the "economic recovery". It's like the cargo cults that Richard Feynman talked about, that arose in the South Pacific after the end of WWII. The planes during the war came with all this wonderful cargo, and then suddenly they disappeared. The people on the islands didn't understand why. So they made fake imitation runways with fires lit along the sides, along with a wooden hut that a man can sit in, with two wooden sticks for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the air traffic controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land. But the planes don't land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. They're handing out stupid patents like mad, with no attention paid to anything resembling common sense at all. Just like during the bubble when nobody had a lick of sense. But the bubble is gone. The planes don't land. Handing out patents like mad isn't going to help.
>> Spam is inherently commercial speech. > Nonsense. Spam is unsolicited bulk email.
Well, it's both (usually). It's unsolicited bulk email that is hawking garbage.
But the fact that it's commercial speech undercuts the idiotic First Amendment arguments that spammers make when they send email that's trying to sell stuff. Many of the laws attempting to shut it down hinge on its commercial speech aspect. Non-commercial spam is still rare. Although I've seen it too. I even got a spam once from someone who was complaining about spam. It was so weird I kept it:
Did you know this mail was sent to you with a free bulk mail program? It's floating around on the Internet just waiting to be downloaded!
Did you know your address was located in a database that we were also allowed to download for free?
Do you hate this garbage? We do! We are network-engineering students and recently we had our entire email server shut down by some scum who dropped millions of pieces of junk mail on our system. Thousands of students and teachers had no email service for hours.
We want to put a stop to this crap or at least be heard! We are planning to send a petition to the lawmakers in the upcoming session of congress. We are hoping to get over 25 million-email addresses for our petition. If you are as tired as we are please help us! All you need to do is hit reply and put your email address in the subject field. Or click here [mailto link deleted] You don't have to enter your name if you want to remain anonymous. We don't know how much affect this will have, but we are hoping someone will notice.
If you have any questions about where we found your address so you can get it removed from these spammers databases just include it and we will be more then happy to give you the information. We can also give you the URL's of web sites dedicated to fighting spam. You can get free software and information on how to shut these people down! Also if you know ways of successfully dealing with these spammers or have a spam fighters site you would like others to know about then feel free to include it. We will get the information out to any that ask. Signed [6 names deleted]
This is probably just someone collecting email addresses, but in itself it's not commercial speech and spam like it wouldn't be affected by some of the laws that are floating around in state legislatures and Congress. I wonder how many email addresses they got for their "petition".
Regardless, the KKK idiot isn't worth your time, or mine, and I'd recommend ignoring him.
I've got a few other degrees, in somewhat diverse fields, and more on the way.
That's interesting. In what, race theory? Are your professors and/or advisors aware of your racist and offensive opinions? And are you as explicit with people you encounter in real life as you are when expressing yourself anonymously here?
As for being interesting... I'm a biased source for that opinion.
As well as for several other opinions. But you're at least good at producing something that looks like maturity, when you want to. How does one get like this? Were you raised this way by your parents? Or was there some traumatic event, like a mugging or a fall? Is it just race with you? Or do you have issues with women too? Do you really buy into this white power bullshit? Or are you merely trying to offend as many people as you can in the most efficient manner possible?
I'll readily admit if/when I'm wrong, and won't hide that fact (unlike a certain spook).
OR a certain honky who's now selling a well-timed novel plagiarized from his real life.
Nor do I typically intend to be a troll or to post flamebait.
Of course not. Why post flamebait when you can be flamebait?
What's up with the duplicate user account, anyway?
Anyway, the point is, if you say something on your website (such as "niggers are great"), I do not have to read it. However, if you send me a nice big jpeg, with a smiling porch-monkey, that says "niggers are great", I end up having to deal with it. If I felt the need for a larger penis and an unaccredited degree, I'll bet Google could help me find places to get that... I don't need someone telling me shit I don't want to know.
You know, I've seen some really good posts from you that get undeserved hostile replies based solely on who you are and what your unpopular political positions represent. (I know you're only karma whoring to keep your score above 0, but that's sort of irrelevant, really.) You recently wrote this excellent post about calculating bolometric luminosity- and the discussion quickly degenerated into a brawl about racism, with people inappropriately screaming at the moderators for marking your post as Informative, followed by Anonymous Cowards putting in their own racist two cents. I even defended you once, and pointed out that a moderation applies to a post and not its author. (Thus whoring some karma for myself in the process, and making it onto your friends list- so if anyone looks at my fans list now, they'll see "I'm a racist" listed there.)
You're certainly a character- a racist with a degree in astrophysics- in fact you seem like you'd be an interesting person to know in real life. But if people start screaming "mod this racist down" this time, I cannot defend you. Your actual post was needlessly and purposefully offensive, which is sad because otherwise it does bring up a valuable and subtle point. You just had to spoil it.
Besides, I can't imagine getting an email saying "niggers are great". It simply makes no sense. Unless it's a white supremacist being sarcastic. And it doesn't fit this situation, since it's political speech. Spam is inherently commercial speech. For your analogy to work, the spam would have to be offering them for sale, not simply saying they were "great".
Kudos for simultaneously karma-whoring and slipping the words "nigger" and "porch monkey" into your post. I rarely see anyone pull that off.
I work for the author of Art of Illusion so I'll give him a plug. It's GPL and cross platform, and he's been working on it for several years. He's a physics PhD from Stanford and is one of the geekiest, smartest people I've ever met. He goes home and works on this thing all the time (he likes to brag about how he has no TV). I think he's starting to get contributions from other coders.
AoI is a modeler and raytracer. It includes global illumination, subdivision surfaces, soft shadows, and procedural textures. I've used it as a front end for POV-Ray (it generates.pov files now).
Internet Explorer drives me totally bonkers by trying to force me to accept its wrong suggestions.
There's one particular porn site I like that I can't visit with IE (if autocomplete is on). As soon as it's in the browser history, IE will always suggest it as soon as someone merely types "www" into the URL field. Just try it now- type "www" into IE and see what suggestion comes up. Right now, IE is suggesting "http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc.html" which is a site I visited a week or two ago when the SBC "patent on frames" story (on topic, ironically!) came up on Slashdot. It's throwing away all candidates where the next character would be a period, so "www2" sites are the only viable candidates left at that point. Still, WTF? Isn't "www" a little too early to be making suggestions? (The same stuff happens with "http".)
Not that my wife cares when she sees porn sites in the autocomplete. She's cool about stuff like that. And we have no kids so that's not an issue either. But still, it's embarrassing and I wipe the browser history anyway. You would think Microsoft would be more careful. A lot of guys are married to shrill bitches who equate porn with cheating. And most of them won't think to turn off the autocomplete feature. Makes me wonder how many incidents of domestic violence are caused by autocompletion.
I'd switch to Mozilla if it weren't for inertia. That, and the fact that IE parks its own fat ass in RAM on startup anyway whether you want it to or not. BTW, museumtour.com seems to have dropped frames for tables. I guess frames were just too "expensive".
Here's a data point. As of 8 PM Pacific time (11 PM Eastern) on Sunday night, user dknj has 12 people listed as "freaks" (vs. 4 fans).
I'll have to check back in a few hours- but I suspect that after that parent post up there, the freak to fan ratio may be rising very soon. It might be interesting to watch.
... but it's Saturday night, I'm tired, and had too much beer... so I'll type these random keypresses and hope I'm saying something intelligent. After I post this I think I will bang on the keyboard with a rock and then piss on it.
> Comparing Kosovo to Iraq is stupid. Actually, it's not. The arguement is that innocent people will die from the bombs. This happens in either case, Iraq or Kosovo. You say the purpose was to eliminate ethnic cleansing. If war is bad because it kills people, then your Kosovo war is just as bad. Selling it as a way to end ethnic cleansing is pretty much on the same level as ending Saddam's gassing of the Kurds and the torture of innocent civilians. Tell, why would you care only about people in Kosovo dying, but not the people dead at the hand of Saddam Hussein? Are you a racist?
In Kosovo, genocide was happening up to and including the actual time of the war. The gassing of the Kurds happened in 1988, and Saddam's political repression, while reprehensible, was in no way comparable to what was going on in Kosovo and in fact that level of human rights abuse is still occurring in almost a hundred countries. But I suppose pointing out simple facts like that makes me a "racist".
Actually I believe all objects are type-checked at run-time, even if the casts were determined to be safe at compile time, but maybe there's a way to optimize that out.
The JVM executes a checkcast bytecode instruction wherever there is a cast. It either does nothing or it throws a ClassCastException at you. (The instanceof instruction works the same way, except it puts a boolean on the stack instead.) But with generics, a runtime cast is never required IIRC. The compiler generates a one-shot collection class based on the generic that ONLY handles members of the type you've specified (e.g. String) and returns objects of that type, so the type checking is done statically. The entire purpose was to eliminate the runtime cast.
This looks to me like they are changing a language so that existing apps no longer compile which is a bad idea.
Huh? Where did you see that?
It looks like they're making changes so that new apps won't compile on older compilers, not that old apps won't compile on newer compilers.
They risked a backwards compatibility problem when they introduced that "assert" keyword in 1.4 but there is a compiler switch to turn it off if you have variables with that name. Before that, they haven't messed with the syntax since 1.1, when they added class literals (syntactic sugar) and inner classes (a major change). The new syntax was so bizarre that no older programs were affected. I don't see how the 1.5 changes are any different. Some of them look like a cat walked across someone's keyboard.
My company is stuck with having to support Java 1.1 because of Mac OS 9. (In fact, according to our demo download stats, the number and percentage of Mac OS 9 users is only going up.) So we use modern compilers when developing (no decent IDE works well with 1.1) but the nightly build script uses 1.1.8.
Inner classes were an immense change compared to most of this sugary 1.5 stuff (except generics). Work here a few months and you learn about all the bugs in the 1.1.8 compiler with respect to inner classes. There are a number of perfectly legal constructs that get flagged as errors. But I bet the same kind of thing will happen with generics.
They'll keep switching ratios until they make TVs with adjustable screens that you can pull up and down. That's when the triangular movies are going to start coming out.
Eventually all movies will be shown on a torus, "as the director intended". There will be a big hole in the middle of the round screen, and the actors never stand in it.
The problem with widescreen at the moment is that TV is not broadcasted in widescreen.
Which only makes sense, given that widescreen owes its existence to the invention of television in the fifties. It was a typical fearful Hollywood reaction to advancing technology. They were scared green that people were going to stay home and watch TV instead of going out to the movies. By making the screen wider, they figured they had a selling point over television- you're getting "more movie" along the edges! Not to mention the fact that they could screw up the aspect ratio between the two formats this way. You have to choose between truncated edges, stretched faces, or black bars on your TV screen. That was quite intentional.
Of course, another way of looking at it is that they decreased the height, rather than increased the width. They made the movie screen shorter than the TV screen, not wider. That's why you get those black bars. There's no inherent reason why a wider aspect ratio is any better in the first place. It's like saying it's better to have a volume knob that goes up to 11.
This means that quite a lot of your $10,000 TV is not being used when watching regular broadcast tv. Granted, I love widescreen for movies, but I also would like to see televion broadcasts switch over.
If TV broadcasts switch to 2.35:1 to catch up, movies will start coming out with 4:1 and 5:1 aspect ratios. They'll film their stuff on a thin horizontal strip if that's what it takes to screw you over.
It would be nice if Slashcode simply kept track of the number of the post attributable to a change in friend/foe status (when one is, from a user clicking on the little sphere that appears above a post). Without any context, the friend/foe system really isn't that interesting. I have no idea what so-and-so said to make them my friend. I have lots of fans, some friends, some foes, and a few freaks, and I don't know why any of them are there.
If ebay were held responsible for unmoderated feedback other users left, that would set a very bad precedent. There's not much difference between that and modding a post down on slashdot.
Well, sorta. Ebay feedback is an evaluation of you as someone to do business with. Ebay owes its existence and success to the establishment of trust via the feedback system. Moderation on Slashdot, OTOH, is something that applies to an individual post, not its author. The purpose is to make good posts visible above the background noise. It has nothing to do with securing trust.
Except there are some secondary Slashdot features that work a little better with your analogy, such as accumulation of karma, the +2 posting bonus, etc. So there is a small guarantee of trust involved- as in "you're posting at +2 so I trust this isn't a goatsex link I'm about to click on". But these are secondary features of the moderation system and don't even apply to Anonymous Cowards.
Heard a funny joke on SNL tonight (paraphrasing)- If Syria doesn't behave, we might have to "liberate their asses".
Re:This disease is blown way out of proportion.
on
SARS and the Internet
·
· Score: 1
Just imagine if the first hundred people with AIDS were quarantined. How many lives would that have saved?
Almost all of them, minus 100.
Of course you have to identify who these hundred people are, or else you can't really quarantine them. By the time 100 people have been identified as having a disease, a couple thousand people might be walking around with it.
That said, "Finalize" in Java and destructors in C# aren't particularly useful. You can't be sure that any managed objects you reference are available during this period, and if you have any unmanaged resources left over, the destructor is a suboptimal place to clean them up, for the 40 second rule and due to the unpredictable time the garbage collector will call these methods.
The only use I've found for Java's finalize() is overriding it on expensive "hub" objects (which have lots of references and are referenced frequently by other code). The garbage collector thread prints a little note to the console in our nonrelease version. That way if the QA guys never see it after those objects are expected to leave scope, we're tipped off to a possible memory leak.
Although you'd be surprised by how late they show up. Much later than you would think. I wouldn't use finalization for anything more important than diagnostics. People also use them as a failsafe for resource recovery, but even that is dangerous if the failsafe is silently doing resource recovery for you during development and testing. You can mask bugs that way if you're not careful.
I am no fan of the RIAA. But the reactions here are surprisingly hostile for what they're doing. If I'm reading this article correctly, they're sending instant messages to people who are offering files to upload (based on song titles), warning them about their traceability and legal liability.
So what?
This is rotten behavior but it is an improvement. Remember, these are people who would much rather communicate with you via certified mail on legal letterhead. If I get an instant message on Kazaa I don't start pacing around in a sweat wondering if I should contact a lawyer.
Presumably, anyone using Kazaa for non-infringing uses shouldn't get one of these instant messages anyway (unless the RIAA is lying about examining song titles first, or there's a name collision with a copyrighted work in a user's upload directory). Running a file sharing node doesn't expose you to liability unless you've got copyrighted stuff on it. We always emphasize how file sharing networks have non-infringing uses. I don't see how this would have a chilling effect on such use unless the messages are sent to people in error, are used for DoS attacks, or are indiscriminately sent to all users of the network whether their node contains copyrighted content or not.
Frankly I would almost give them points for cleverness. Compared to their typical antics this is quite tame. It will probably be more effective for them, too. Most people probably don't care enough about file sharing to risk liability, and it's only natural for the average user to presume his own anonymity on Kazaa. In fact I bet most people who use Kazaa aren't even conscious of the fact that their IP is exposed and traceable to them, and might very well stop using Kazaa once they realize it. The message is clearly targeted at such people. The RIAA might just effect a greater dent in file sharing with this stupid instant messaging than they have so far with all their lawyers, lobbyists, and hired network saboteurs. If so, we should only hope the lesson sinks into their thick heads. This is the best behavior we can realistically expect from them. They don't understand anything but threats and intimidation. Let's all hope they stick to instant messaging.
Yes they're corporate vultures, cultural parasites, etc., and this is clearly an act of a desperate industry that just lost a huge court case and has sunk to the point of threatening individual file traders, but the shrill tone and accusations of hypocrisy is a bit much for what they're doing here. It's a frigging instant message. What do you expect from the RIAA, a love letter? You should already be aware of the risks you're taking. If you didn't know before, now you do. Just click OK and keep downloading.
Shuttle makes garbage. I bought a Shuttle barebones system (an SS40G) back in September, with an AMD Athlon XP chip. One day after 3 months of use the system just crapped out and died for no apparent reason. No video signal, nothing. Fans and lights are on, but nobody is home. Thinking it might be the CPU, I got a replacement. Nope, that wasn't it.
So I got an RMA number from Shuttle and sent it to their RMA center. It came back with paperwork indicating they replaced the power supply (which didn't seem to be broken). I put the chip back in, and the system still didn't work. The guy on the phone blamed my CPU. "Your bad power supply must have blown out that CPU sir... and we always test them before we send them back. So if you send it in to us again we'll just send it right back to you."
To complete the required mental masturbation, I tried a new (third) AMD CPU today. Of course it didn't work. This thing is going back with a nasty note. I wouldn't recommend Shuttle at all.
At least I know the names of all the single women in my neighborhood now.
Dude! This is your chance. Get those MSN CDROMs together, and personally deliver them to all these women. Single women love a guy who shows up with an MSN CDROM! Just ring the doorbell and tell them about MSN's "advanced features", including "patented junk e-mail protection", "e-mail virus protection services", parental controls, "rich e-mail", and online bill pay. They'll melt like butter all over you.
I question your 4% fatality rate. The fatality rate in Toronto is 10%.
Interesting. Well, then, that bolsters my point.
A tertiary infection is almost always muuch less severe that primary infection. This does not seem to be hapening with SARS.
Or AIDS, or most other infectious diseases I've heard of for that matter. Are you sure that's correct?
Finally, how can you possibly say that an illness transmitted as easily as the flu with a 4 to 12% fatality rate di=oesn't seem that deadly.
I didn't say that at all. The guy I was replying to said it, and I quoted him in italics. I think you replied to the wrong post.
Remember, the cases we have seen so far are in healthy people travelling on business and healthy medical personnel. A 4-12% fatality rate among that population will increase dramaticaly when the young and elderly start to be infected.
This might not be the case. I don't know about SARS, but viruses don't always automatically target children and the elderly. In the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, people aged 20-40 were disproportionately affected. (Which is why WWI soldiers were such effective carriers- the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 were a public health disaster because everyone gathered to watch a parade of infected soldiers just back from Europe.) Strangely enough, the young and elderly seemed to be relatively immune.
I read that an exotic open-air animal market in Guangzhou, China is being investigated by WHO as possibly having something to do with the origin of the illness. (That story taught me a new word I didn't even know- zoonosis. It sounds like a good name for a band.)
Which isn't too hard to believe. Anyone who has watched any Nature episode on an endangered animal species has seen the part at the end that goes like this:
Unfortunately, the future of the [insert weird species here] is far from certain, because it is considered a delicacy in certain Asian countries.
(There's also a less common variant of the Nature show ending, where the species is an aphrodisiac and not a delicacy.)
Basically, the issue is that in Guangzhou, China there is a famous wet market where dozens of different animal species are for sale- rodents, birds, alligators, cats, badgers, dogs, porcupines, pigs, snakes, turtles, and other delicacies. They come from all over the world. They aren't frozen and packed or anything like that- they're running and fluttering around in their cages when you pick them out. Some of them have chewed their limbs off in attempts to escape traps. They are either butchered on the spot or you take them home still alive and kill them yourself. The emphasis is on freshness.
Of course this grossed out the tourists, not to mention the people who make Nature documentaries. So the Chinese authorities (in typical fashion) cracked down on the market two years ago by forcing it to move out of sight of foreigners. It was moved from an outdoor park setting into an enclosed building two years ago. WHO thinks the move to an indoor setting would have made the risk of zoonosis worse.
The first known SARS patient got sick in November. He lived 12 miles away, but had been in Guangzhou and received treatment there.
Slashdot Mirror
Scary thought, looks like the patent office needs to take a closer look at all these tech patents they are giving out these days.
Gee, you think?
I have a feeling that somebody in the patent office has got the idea in their head that handing these out is helping the "economic recovery". It's like the cargo cults that Richard Feynman talked about, that arose in the South Pacific after the end of WWII. The planes during the war came with all this wonderful cargo, and then suddenly they disappeared. The people on the islands didn't understand why. So they made fake imitation runways with fires lit along the sides, along with a wooden hut that a man can sit in, with two wooden sticks for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the air traffic controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land. But the planes don't land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. They're handing out stupid patents like mad, with no attention paid to anything resembling common sense at all. Just like during the bubble when nobody had a lick of sense. But the bubble is gone. The planes don't land. Handing out patents like mad isn't going to help.
> Nonsense. Spam is unsolicited bulk email.
Well, it's both (usually). It's unsolicited bulk email that is hawking garbage.
But the fact that it's commercial speech undercuts the idiotic First Amendment arguments that spammers make when they send email that's trying to sell stuff. Many of the laws attempting to shut it down hinge on its commercial speech aspect.
Non-commercial spam is still rare. Although I've seen it too. I even got a spam once from someone who was complaining about spam. It was so weird I kept it:This is probably just someone collecting email addresses, but in itself it's not commercial speech and spam like it wouldn't be affected by some of the laws that are floating around in state legislatures and Congress. I wonder how many email addresses they got for their "petition".
Regardless, the KKK idiot isn't worth your time, or mine, and I'd recommend ignoring him.
I suspect you may be right.
I've got a few other degrees, in somewhat diverse fields, and more on the way.
That's interesting. In what, race theory? Are your professors and/or advisors aware of your racist and offensive opinions? And are you as explicit with people you encounter in real life as you are when expressing yourself anonymously here?
As for being interesting... I'm a biased source for that opinion.
As well as for several other opinions. But you're at least good at producing something that looks like maturity, when you want to. How does one get like this? Were you raised this way by your parents? Or was there some traumatic event, like a mugging or a fall? Is it just race with you? Or do you have issues with women too? Do you really buy into this white power bullshit? Or are you merely trying to offend as many people as you can in the most efficient manner possible?
I'll readily admit if/when I'm wrong, and won't hide that fact (unlike a certain spook).
OR a certain honky who's now selling a well-timed novel plagiarized from his real life.
Nor do I typically intend to be a troll or to post flamebait.
Of course not. Why post flamebait when you can be flamebait?
What's up with the duplicate user account, anyway?
Anyway, the point is, if you say something on your website (such as "niggers are great"), I do not have to read it. However, if you send me a nice big jpeg, with a smiling porch-monkey, that says "niggers are great", I end up having to deal with it. If I felt the need for a larger penis and an unaccredited degree, I'll bet Google could help me find places to get that... I don't need someone telling me shit I don't want to know.
You know, I've seen some really good posts from you that get undeserved hostile replies based solely on who you are and what your unpopular political positions represent. (I know you're only karma whoring to keep your score above 0, but that's sort of irrelevant, really.) You recently wrote this excellent post about calculating bolometric luminosity- and the discussion quickly degenerated into a brawl about racism, with people inappropriately screaming at the moderators for marking your post as Informative, followed by Anonymous Cowards putting in their own racist two cents. I even defended you once, and pointed out that a moderation applies to a post and not its author. (Thus whoring some karma for myself in the process, and making it onto your friends list- so if anyone looks at my fans list now, they'll see "I'm a racist" listed there.)
You're certainly a character- a racist with a degree in astrophysics- in fact you seem like you'd be an interesting person to know in real life. But if people start screaming "mod this racist down" this time, I cannot defend you. Your actual post was needlessly and purposefully offensive, which is sad because otherwise it does bring up a valuable and subtle point. You just had to spoil it.
Besides, I can't imagine getting an email saying "niggers are great". It simply makes no sense. Unless it's a white supremacist being sarcastic. And it doesn't fit this situation, since it's political speech. Spam is inherently commercial speech. For your analogy to work, the spam would have to be offering them for sale, not simply saying they were "great".
Kudos for simultaneously karma-whoring and slipping the words "nigger" and "porch monkey" into your post. I rarely see anyone pull that off.
I work for the author of Art of Illusion so I'll give him a plug. It's GPL and cross platform, and he's been working on it for several years. He's a physics PhD from Stanford and is one of the geekiest, smartest people I've ever met. He goes home and works on this thing all the time (he likes to brag about how he has no TV). I think he's starting to get contributions from other coders.
.pov files now).
AoI is a modeler and raytracer. It includes global illumination, subdivision surfaces, soft shadows, and procedural textures. I've used it as a front end for POV-Ray (it generates
Internet Explorer drives me totally bonkers by trying to force me to accept its wrong suggestions.
There's one particular porn site I like that I can't visit with IE (if autocomplete is on). As soon as it's in the browser history, IE will always suggest it as soon as someone merely types "www" into the URL field. Just try it now- type "www" into IE and see what suggestion comes up. Right now, IE is suggesting "http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc.html" which is a site I visited a week or two ago when the SBC "patent on frames" story (on topic, ironically!) came up on Slashdot. It's throwing away all candidates where the next character would be a period, so "www2" sites are the only viable candidates left at that point. Still, WTF? Isn't "www" a little too early to be making suggestions? (The same stuff happens with "http".)
Not that my wife cares when she sees porn sites in the autocomplete. She's cool about stuff like that. And we have no kids so that's not an issue either. But still, it's embarrassing and I wipe the browser history anyway. You would think Microsoft would be more careful. A lot of guys are married to shrill bitches who equate porn with cheating. And most of them won't think to turn off the autocomplete feature. Makes me wonder how many incidents of domestic violence are caused by autocompletion.
I'd switch to Mozilla if it weren't for inertia. That, and the fact that IE parks its own fat ass in RAM on startup anyway whether you want it to or not. BTW, museumtour.com seems to have dropped frames for tables. I guess frames were just too "expensive".
Here's a data point. As of 8 PM Pacific time (11 PM Eastern) on Sunday night, user dknj has 12 people listed as "freaks" (vs. 4 fans).
I'll have to check back in a few hours- but I suspect that after that parent post up there, the freak to fan ratio may be rising very soon. It might be interesting to watch.
... but it's Saturday night, I'm tired, and had too much beer... so I'll type these random keypresses and hope I'm saying something intelligent. After I post this I think I will bang on the keyboard with a rock and then piss on it.
Greetings from typing monkeys everywhere.
> Comparing Kosovo to Iraq is stupid.
Actually, it's not. The arguement is that innocent people will die from the bombs. This happens in either case, Iraq or Kosovo. You say the purpose was to eliminate ethnic cleansing. If war is bad because it kills people, then your Kosovo war is just as bad. Selling it as a way to end ethnic cleansing is pretty much on the same level as ending Saddam's gassing of the Kurds and the torture of innocent civilians. Tell, why would you care only about people in Kosovo dying, but not the people dead at the hand of Saddam Hussein? Are you a racist?
In Kosovo, genocide was happening up to and including the actual time of the war. The gassing of the Kurds happened in 1988, and Saddam's political repression, while reprehensible, was in no way comparable to what was going on in Kosovo and in fact that level of human rights abuse is still occurring in almost a hundred countries. But I suppose pointing out simple facts like that makes me a "racist".
Actually I believe all objects are type-checked at run-time, even if the casts were determined to be safe at compile time, but maybe there's a way to optimize that out.
The JVM executes a checkcast bytecode instruction wherever there is a cast. It either does nothing or it throws a ClassCastException at you. (The instanceof instruction works the same way, except it puts a boolean on the stack instead.) But with generics, a runtime cast is never required IIRC. The compiler generates a one-shot collection class based on the generic that ONLY handles members of the type you've specified (e.g. String) and returns objects of that type, so the type checking is done statically. The entire purpose was to eliminate the runtime cast.
This looks to me like they are changing a language so that existing apps no longer compile which is a bad idea.
Huh? Where did you see that?
It looks like they're making changes so that new apps won't compile on older compilers, not that old apps won't compile on newer compilers.
They risked a backwards compatibility problem when they introduced that "assert" keyword in 1.4 but there is a compiler switch to turn it off if you have variables with that name. Before that, they haven't messed with the syntax since 1.1, when they added class literals (syntactic sugar) and inner classes (a major change). The new syntax was so bizarre that no older programs were affected. I don't see how the 1.5 changes are any different. Some of them look like a cat walked across someone's keyboard.
My company is stuck with having to support Java 1.1 because of Mac OS 9. (In fact, according to our demo download stats, the number and percentage of Mac OS 9 users is only going up.) So we use modern compilers when developing (no decent IDE works well with 1.1) but the nightly build script uses 1.1.8.
Inner classes were an immense change compared to most of this sugary 1.5 stuff (except generics). Work here a few months and you learn about all the bugs in the 1.1.8 compiler with respect to inner classes. There are a number of perfectly legal constructs that get flagged as errors. But I bet the same kind of thing will happen with generics.
They'll keep switching ratios until they make TVs with adjustable screens that you can pull up and down. That's when the triangular movies are going to start coming out.
Eventually all movies will be shown on a torus, "as the director intended". There will be a big hole in the middle of the round screen, and the actors never stand in it.
The problem with widescreen at the moment is that TV is not broadcasted in widescreen.
Which only makes sense, given that widescreen owes its existence to the invention of television in the fifties. It was a typical fearful Hollywood reaction to advancing technology. They were scared green that people were going to stay home and watch TV instead of going out to the movies. By making the screen wider, they figured they had a selling point over television- you're getting "more movie" along the edges! Not to mention the fact that they could screw up the aspect ratio between the two formats this way. You have to choose between truncated edges, stretched faces, or black bars on your TV screen. That was quite intentional.
Of course, another way of looking at it is that they decreased the height, rather than increased the width. They made the movie screen shorter than the TV screen, not wider. That's why you get those black bars. There's no inherent reason why a wider aspect ratio is any better in the first place. It's like saying it's better to have a volume knob that goes up to 11.
This means that quite a lot of your $10,000 TV is not being used when watching regular broadcast tv. Granted, I love widescreen for movies, but I also would like to see televion broadcasts switch over.
If TV broadcasts switch to 2.35:1 to catch up, movies will start coming out with 4:1 and 5:1 aspect ratios. They'll film their stuff on a thin horizontal strip if that's what it takes to screw you over.
It would be nice if Slashcode simply kept track of the number of the post attributable to a change in friend/foe status (when one is, from a user clicking on the little sphere that appears above a post). Without any context, the friend/foe system really isn't that interesting. I have no idea what so-and-so said to make them my friend.
I have lots of fans, some friends, some foes, and a few freaks, and I don't know why any of them are there.
If ebay were held responsible for unmoderated feedback other users left, that would set a very bad precedent. There's not much difference between that and modding a post down on slashdot.
Well, sorta. Ebay feedback is an evaluation of you as someone to do business with. Ebay owes its existence and success to the establishment of trust via the feedback system. Moderation on Slashdot, OTOH, is something that applies to an individual post, not its author. The purpose is to make good posts visible above the background noise. It has nothing to do with securing trust.
Except there are some secondary Slashdot features that work a little better with your analogy, such as accumulation of karma, the +2 posting bonus, etc. So there is a small guarantee of trust involved- as in "you're posting at +2 so I trust this isn't a goatsex link I'm about to click on". But these are secondary features of the moderation system and don't even apply to Anonymous Cowards.
Heard a funny joke on SNL tonight (paraphrasing)-
If Syria doesn't behave, we might have to "liberate their asses".
Just imagine if the first hundred people with AIDS were quarantined. How many lives would that have saved?
Almost all of them, minus 100.
Of course you have to identify who these hundred people are, or else you can't really quarantine them. By the time 100 people have been identified as having a disease, a couple thousand people might be walking around with it.
I have a better idea- quarantine patient zero!
> sorry, at least a million americans died in the world wars.
From enemy fire or is that all deaths including disease?
That said, "Finalize" in Java and destructors in C# aren't particularly useful. You can't be sure that any managed objects you reference are available during this period, and if you have any unmanaged resources left over, the destructor is a suboptimal place to clean them up, for the 40 second rule and due to the unpredictable time the garbage collector will call these methods.
The only use I've found for Java's finalize() is overriding it on expensive "hub" objects (which have lots of references and are referenced frequently by other code). The garbage collector thread prints a little note to the console in our nonrelease version. That way if the QA guys never see it after those objects are expected to leave scope, we're tipped off to a possible memory leak.
Although you'd be surprised by how late they show up. Much later than you would think. I wouldn't use finalization for anything more important than diagnostics. People also use them as a failsafe for resource recovery, but even that is dangerous if the failsafe is silently doing resource recovery for you during development and testing. You can mask bugs that way if you're not careful.
OK, I have to play devil's advocate here.
I am no fan of the RIAA. But the reactions here are surprisingly hostile for what they're doing. If I'm reading this article correctly, they're sending instant messages to people who are offering files to upload (based on song titles), warning them about their traceability and legal liability.
So what?
This is rotten behavior but it is an improvement. Remember, these are people who would much rather communicate with you via certified mail on legal letterhead. If I get an instant message on Kazaa I don't start pacing around in a sweat wondering if I should contact a lawyer.
Presumably, anyone using Kazaa for non-infringing uses shouldn't get one of these instant messages anyway (unless the RIAA is lying about examining song titles first, or there's a name collision with a copyrighted work in a user's upload directory). Running a file sharing node doesn't expose you to liability unless you've got copyrighted stuff on it. We always emphasize how file sharing networks have non-infringing uses. I don't see how this would have a chilling effect on such use unless the messages are sent to people in error, are used for DoS attacks, or are indiscriminately sent to all users of the network whether their node contains copyrighted content or not.
Frankly I would almost give them points for cleverness. Compared to their typical antics this is quite tame. It will probably be more effective for them, too. Most people probably don't care enough about file sharing to risk liability, and it's only natural for the average user to presume his own anonymity on Kazaa. In fact I bet most people who use Kazaa aren't even conscious of the fact that their IP is exposed and traceable to them, and might very well stop using Kazaa once they realize it. The message is clearly targeted at such people. The RIAA might just effect a greater dent in file sharing with this stupid instant messaging than they have so far with all their lawyers, lobbyists, and hired network saboteurs. If so, we should only hope the lesson sinks into their thick heads. This is the best behavior we can realistically expect from them. They don't understand anything but threats and intimidation. Let's all hope they stick to instant messaging.
Yes they're corporate vultures, cultural parasites, etc., and this is clearly an act of a desperate industry that just lost a huge court case and has sunk to the point of threatening individual file traders, but the shrill tone and accusations of hypocrisy is a bit much for what they're doing here. It's a frigging instant message. What do you expect from the RIAA, a love letter? You should already be aware of the risks you're taking. If you didn't know before, now you do. Just click OK and keep downloading.
THX1138 was the best movie George Lucas ever made. No other science fiction movie has ever done such a good job of capturing the seventies.
Shuttle makes garbage. I bought a Shuttle barebones system (an SS40G) back in September, with an AMD Athlon XP chip. One day after 3 months of use the system just crapped out and died for no apparent reason. No video signal, nothing. Fans and lights are on, but nobody is home. Thinking it might be the CPU, I got a replacement. Nope, that wasn't it.
So I got an RMA number from Shuttle and sent it to their RMA center. It came back with paperwork indicating they replaced the power supply (which didn't seem to be broken). I put the chip back in, and the system still didn't work. The guy on the phone blamed my CPU. "Your bad power supply must have blown out that CPU sir... and we always test them before we send them back. So if you send it in to us again we'll just send it right back to you."
To complete the required mental masturbation, I tried a new (third) AMD CPU today. Of course it didn't work. This thing is going back with a nasty note. I wouldn't recommend Shuttle at all.
At least I know the names of all the single women in my neighborhood now.
Dude! This is your chance. Get those MSN CDROMs together, and personally deliver them to all these women. Single women love a guy who shows up with an MSN CDROM! Just ring the doorbell and tell them about MSN's "advanced features", including "patented junk e-mail protection", "e-mail virus protection services", parental controls, "rich e-mail", and online bill pay. They'll melt like butter all over you.
"I got fewer busy signals for you baby!"
I question your 4% fatality rate. The fatality rate in Toronto is 10%.
Interesting. Well, then, that bolsters my point.
A tertiary infection is almost always muuch less severe that primary infection. This does not seem to be hapening with SARS.
Or AIDS, or most other infectious diseases I've heard of for that matter. Are you sure that's correct?
Finally, how can you possibly say that an illness transmitted as easily as the flu with a 4 to 12% fatality rate di=oesn't seem that deadly.
I didn't say that at all. The guy I was replying to said it, and I quoted him in italics. I think you replied to the wrong post.
Remember, the cases we have seen so far are in healthy people travelling on business and healthy medical personnel. A 4-12% fatality rate among that population will increase dramaticaly when the young and elderly start to be infected.
This might not be the case. I don't know about SARS, but viruses don't always automatically target children and the elderly. In the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, people aged 20-40 were disproportionately affected. (Which is why WWI soldiers were such effective carriers- the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 were a public health disaster because everyone gathered to watch a parade of infected soldiers just back from Europe.) Strangely enough, the young and elderly seemed to be relatively immune.
I read that an exotic open-air animal market in Guangzhou, China is being investigated by WHO as possibly having something to do with the origin of the illness. (That story taught me a new word I didn't even know- zoonosis. It sounds like a good name for a band.)
Which isn't too hard to believe. Anyone who has watched any Nature episode on an endangered animal species has seen the part at the end that goes like this:
Unfortunately, the future of the [insert weird species here] is far from certain, because it is considered a delicacy in certain Asian countries.
(There's also a less common variant of the Nature show ending, where the species is an aphrodisiac and not a delicacy.)
Basically, the issue is that in Guangzhou, China there is a famous wet market where dozens of different animal species are for sale- rodents, birds, alligators, cats, badgers, dogs, porcupines, pigs, snakes, turtles, and other delicacies. They come from all over the world. They aren't frozen and packed or anything like that- they're running and fluttering around in their cages when you pick them out. Some of them have chewed their limbs off in attempts to escape traps. They are either butchered on the spot or you take them home still alive and kill them yourself. The emphasis is on freshness.
Of course this grossed out the tourists, not to mention the people who make Nature documentaries. So the Chinese authorities (in typical fashion) cracked down on the market two years ago by forcing it to move out of sight of foreigners. It was moved from an outdoor park setting into an enclosed building two years ago. WHO thinks the move to an indoor setting would have made the risk of zoonosis worse.
The first known SARS patient got sick in November. He lived 12 miles away, but had been in Guangzhou and received treatment there.