Hopefully it really does burn up totally in the atmosphere. An asteroid colliding with the world right now would make a bad economy worse. Speaking of the economy, do you know how this whole meltdown began? It started in 1977 during good ol' Jimmy Carter's presidency (geez, his presidency just keeps on giving so many years later; giving nothing but damage, that is). They wanted to make sure that poor people would be able to own their own homes. So they made up this law about making it possible for these people to get loans. Then this dude named Barack Obama came along some years later, along with some Acorn thing, and they went around and sued banks into complying. What banks did in order to keep making money while making bad loans was this: They'd bundle together lots of good loans with bad loans and sell these bundles to Freddie Mac and Fannie May. Those two government corporations would then bundle together a bunch of these bundles and sell the resulting bigger bundles to investment bankers. That is, 401k's and stuff like that. Then Bill Clinton came along and encouraged even more of this loan-giving, because you see, it's a pyramid scheme, kind of like Social Security. Well the result of all of this was that people who should never have received a loan (since they couldn't conceivably pay it back) did, homes were purchased, demand went up, supply couldn't keep up, prices skyrocketed, people who wanted loans beyond a home's value could get them since the price would "always" continue to rise, and so forth. It was a huge bubble. And that bubble just burst. And now, in order to "fix" the problem, the government is gonna make up even MORE legislation, even MORE regulations, etc., and the banks and CEOs are going to get punished, and everyone is conveniently forgetting that it's the government that started the whole thing and Barack Obama who, through the threat of litigation, forced banks to make these bad loans, which they knew were bad. In other words, what I'm saying is that the government forced the banks, through this ridiculous legislation, to make these loans. The banks did because they didn't have a choice (and Obama was there to make sure of that). And when it failed, everyone blames greed and banks and whatnot. The government walks away scott free, Obama gets elected because one Jimmy Carter isn't enough for a country this size, and the entire American people are left paying the bill -- which will come out to something like SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS PER TAXPAYER! What would YOU do with $7,000? For these reasons, an asteroid crashing on the Earth and driving stock prices even lower is something we really don't have time for right now. Government regulation out of control. Because when Rome is burning down, play a fiddle.
A play on the tree falling in the forest question: If two black holes collide and it makes a hell of a loud "boom" but the sound gets pulled into the black hole and, consequently, nobody hears it, did it make a sound?
Something is a bit unclear to me from the article. What do they mean when they speak of the black hole "retaining" its event horizon? This black hole is the result of two black holes which have collided. Is the "retained" event horizon larger because of the increased mass? Or are the event horizons of all black holes of equal diameter and thus the "retained" event horizon remains of this size? Confusing. It sure would be cool to see such a collision as described here, though.:-)
This is similar to the way those tabloids appear to be full of bullshit, but are really the news for those chasing after dangerous aliens from outer space. I learned that fact from the movie Men In Black.
It's amazing what the technology can do these days. The thought that software can help in the detection of this sort of thing is a testament to the fact that those who build these systems are standing on the shoulders of giants due to the immense amounts of knowledge and experience that have gone into making all parts of this system (besides the part that detects cancer) function. This is at least hundreds of years of engineering in the design and production of the electronics over many iterations, plus the centuries of development of mathematics that had to be developed before electronics were discovered. Now let's get to the software that detects cancer. The people who wrote this software had to be experts both in software and in the relevant medical fields. I think all of this is amazing and we need to be thankful that we live in a time when these sorts of things are possible.
Nucular (as opposed to nuclear) weapons are what keep us safe from crazies like this so-called president A-mad-jihad of Iran. We don't actually use our nukes. We just keep them around for deterrence. But if A-mad-jihad ever gets nukes, I have no doubt he'll use them, if only for his own entertainment. For that reason, we must keep the nukes around, and be prepared to launch one right up A-mad-jihad's rear end if he starts threatening the world with his upcoming weapons.
A big problem with many books (this does NOT appear to be one of them) is that the information is either way too advanced, or way too simple. You go from a chapter explaining how to move the mouse pointer around the screen directly to a chapter on how to machine code something. Just like modern user interfaces. They're designed for complete and utter idiots, where everything is "smart" and "automatic" yet doesn't do what you want, and then you click on the "Advanced" button to get some control and you get a window that asks you to enter the machine code instructions to accomplish what you want. As with anything computer related, it's either for complete idiots or for expert programmers.
All I know is that I click the big shiny "e" and I'm in this thing called the Internet. Because the word "Internet" starts with an "e." The Internet must have been invented by Microsoft, when Al Gore still worked there.
This robot sounds pretty advanced, knowing where to cut and making 3D moving organs appear to stand still. The word "autonomous" raises an interesting question: Why not program it to perform a number of surgeries, store them all in a database, and simply select from a list the one appropriate for each patient? This way, only more complex surgeries would need to be performed by a human surgeon, which means that any hospital with one of these robots would be able to perform a great variety of "simpler" surgical routines.
providing potential habitats? This is a confusing statement. Do they mean potential habitats for life that might be hiding in there currently, or potential habitats for humans who might travel there in the future? And would these habitats actually need to be inside a hollow underwater dome beneath the icy surface? This sounds cool actually.
I saw a 3D camera once. This is a one-of-a-kind system that a friend of mine built to make 3D maps of small objects. It works by the same general principle as your own depth perception, by using two cameras simultaneously. This unit is controlled by a custom made USB device. The cameras each take a photo of the object at the same instant, and then the software he wrote compares the images and somehow figures out the depth where each pixel is located by using that information. I don't know if this is what Stanford is trying to do. As an added note, many common digital cameras figure out the focus by shining some kind of red light and measuring how far away certain objects are. That's when you get those little green squares around one or more parts of your viewfinder, to show you what will be in focus. If Stanford found a way to make this work throughout the photo, they may be able to take only a single photo with a single camera, and use Z information gathered by this technique to reconstruct the depth of the photo after the fact.
I would think the correct behavior IS to clear the flag before performing one of those operations. Assuming that it is set will cause all kinds of havoc. What's better? Making sure the setup for string routines is correct in ONE place (the compiler) or in a zillion places (every single program that uses string operations)? I don't understand why the earlier behavior was considered a compiler problem.
I love how seemingly every single thing that shows up on Wikileaks is reported in a story here on/.
It's almost as if/. is the RSS feed for Wikileaks or something. Seriously, I've seen half a dozen stories here about stories on Wikileaks. I doubt that half the stories on Wikileaks report that a story appeared on/.
Instead of wasting time developing this quantum nonsense, we need to find a way to send an avian carriers around the globe in the time it takes a photon to bounce off a satellite.
I remember JLG (the fearless leader of BeOS fame) once saying something to the effect that Windows has five billion lines of code in it and that he "loves every single one of those lines." I also seem to recall Bill Gates once saying that IBM liked software to be measured in k-locs, while he debated that it should be measured by what it does. He said something that I don't quite remember, but the jist was, "why would we do something in thousands of lines of code if it could be done in just a few?" How ironic. Hmmm... if JLG's comment was made a decade ago, and our dance teacher has 30,000 monkeys adding a k-loc or two to those five billion lines every day, then there are now about 21,500,000,000 lines of code to love, which seems about right, given how many different "please wait" messages there are.
Dude. All you have to do to avoid virus problems on the Mac:
Run in a "normal" user account, as opposed to administrator. If you need to do something administrative, it simply prompts you for an admin name and password. That's easy enough to do on the rare occasion that it's needed. Most things that "normal" users need to do are possible without admin privileges due to the well thought out design of the OS.
Only execute software that appears to be from a reputable source. This is easy enough to do because Mac OS X warns you whenever you try to run a program that was downloaded.
Back up your data frequently! This is a good thing to do on any computer, whether Mac, Windows, Linux, *BSD, or the world's most widely used operating system, Sendla. But on a Mac with Leopard, it's easy. Just get a Firewire or USB drive, plug it in, tell it to use that for backups, and that's it. Just remember to plug it in once every few days.
Beyond that, if, by some extremely rare circumstance, you happen to be an unlucky enough soul to actually get a virus on a Mac, just blow everything off the hard drive, reinstall Mac OS X, and restore your crap from the Time Machine backup.
There is no need to run some stupid garbage virus protection software. All those programs do is sit around, waste resources, slow your whole system down, and fail to recognize any real viruses while your PC endlessly grinds away with thousands of spam/spyware/adware/viruses, and runs at speeds that make snail mail look like subspace communications.
By extrapolating these results, I assume that those shown a Windows logo got into their car, drove extremely slowly while telling those behind them to "please wait," and then crashed into a telephone pole due to a driver problem.
This is the kind of thing that really upsets me. I mean, if someone has the 1337z sk1llz to do this sort of thing, why aren't they using those skills to make a fortune, instead of using them to fsck up other peoples' websites? that sort of behavior ain't cool. in fact, it's decidedly uncool and people who act that way should be banished to a big island for criminals, like Australia.
i have nothing to say, but my parents never taught me that if you have nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all, so here i am trolling/. so mod me -1 troll.
I think the behemoth is definitely in the right on this one, as always. They are always doing the right thing. Like running this multi-zillion dollar advertising campaign for Apple Macs, which is codenamed Vista or something like that.
It's really ingenious. Want to advertise something cool? Make a competing product that really sucks, and then people will buy the cool product. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.
dude, if you need to get something done at work and their retarded bass-ackwards network doesn't do it for you, then plug something in and get the job done! that's what it's there for. any idiot who thinks that's bad is an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully it really does burn up totally in the atmosphere. An asteroid colliding with the world right now would make a bad economy worse. Speaking of the economy, do you know how this whole meltdown began? It started in 1977 during good ol' Jimmy Carter's presidency (geez, his presidency just keeps on giving so many years later; giving nothing but damage, that is). They wanted to make sure that poor people would be able to own their own homes. So they made up this law about making it possible for these people to get loans. Then this dude named Barack Obama came along some years later, along with some Acorn thing, and they went around and sued banks into complying. What banks did in order to keep making money while making bad loans was this: They'd bundle together lots of good loans with bad loans and sell these bundles to Freddie Mac and Fannie May. Those two government corporations would then bundle together a bunch of these bundles and sell the resulting bigger bundles to investment bankers. That is, 401k's and stuff like that. Then Bill Clinton came along and encouraged even more of this loan-giving, because you see, it's a pyramid scheme, kind of like Social Security. Well the result of all of this was that people who should never have received a loan (since they couldn't conceivably pay it back) did, homes were purchased, demand went up, supply couldn't keep up, prices skyrocketed, people who wanted loans beyond a home's value could get them since the price would "always" continue to rise, and so forth. It was a huge bubble. And that bubble just burst. And now, in order to "fix" the problem, the government is gonna make up even MORE legislation, even MORE regulations, etc., and the banks and CEOs are going to get punished, and everyone is conveniently forgetting that it's the government that started the whole thing and Barack Obama who, through the threat of litigation, forced banks to make these bad loans, which they knew were bad. In other words, what I'm saying is that the government forced the banks, through this ridiculous legislation, to make these loans. The banks did because they didn't have a choice (and Obama was there to make sure of that). And when it failed, everyone blames greed and banks and whatnot. The government walks away scott free, Obama gets elected because one Jimmy Carter isn't enough for a country this size, and the entire American people are left paying the bill -- which will come out to something like SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS PER TAXPAYER! What would YOU do with $7,000? For these reasons, an asteroid crashing on the Earth and driving stock prices even lower is something we really don't have time for right now. Government regulation out of control. Because when Rome is burning down, play a fiddle.
A play on the tree falling in the forest question: If two black holes collide and it makes a hell of a loud "boom" but the sound gets pulled into the black hole and, consequently, nobody hears it, did it make a sound?
Something is a bit unclear to me from the article. What do they mean when they speak of the black hole "retaining" its event horizon? This black hole is the result of two black holes which have collided. Is the "retained" event horizon larger because of the increased mass? Or are the event horizons of all black holes of equal diameter and thus the "retained" event horizon remains of this size? Confusing. It sure would be cool to see such a collision as described here, though. :-)
This is similar to the way those tabloids appear to be full of bullshit, but are really the news for those chasing after dangerous aliens from outer space. I learned that fact from the movie Men In Black.
It's amazing what the technology can do these days. The thought that software can help in the detection of this sort of thing is a testament to the fact that those who build these systems are standing on the shoulders of giants due to the immense amounts of knowledge and experience that have gone into making all parts of this system (besides the part that detects cancer) function. This is at least hundreds of years of engineering in the design and production of the electronics over many iterations, plus the centuries of development of mathematics that had to be developed before electronics were discovered. Now let's get to the software that detects cancer. The people who wrote this software had to be experts both in software and in the relevant medical fields. I think all of this is amazing and we need to be thankful that we live in a time when these sorts of things are possible.
Totally OT but worthwhile IMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntus7nevNM0 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k10c11uSVzA
'Nuf said
Nucular (as opposed to nuclear) weapons are what keep us safe from crazies like this so-called president A-mad-jihad of Iran. We don't actually use our nukes. We just keep them around for deterrence. But if A-mad-jihad ever gets nukes, I have no doubt he'll use them, if only for his own entertainment. For that reason, we must keep the nukes around, and be prepared to launch one right up A-mad-jihad's rear end if he starts threatening the world with his upcoming weapons.
A big problem with many books (this does NOT appear to be one of them) is that the information is either way too advanced, or way too simple. You go from a chapter explaining how to move the mouse pointer around the screen directly to a chapter on how to machine code something. Just like modern user interfaces. They're designed for complete and utter idiots, where everything is "smart" and "automatic" yet doesn't do what you want, and then you click on the "Advanced" button to get some control and you get a window that asks you to enter the machine code instructions to accomplish what you want. As with anything computer related, it's either for complete idiots or for expert programmers.
All I know is that I click the big shiny "e" and I'm in this thing called the Internet. Because the word "Internet" starts with an "e." The Internet must have been invented by Microsoft, when Al Gore still worked there.
This robot sounds pretty advanced, knowing where to cut and making 3D moving organs appear to stand still. The word "autonomous" raises an interesting question: Why not program it to perform a number of surgeries, store them all in a database, and simply select from a list the one appropriate for each patient? This way, only more complex surgeries would need to be performed by a human surgeon, which means that any hospital with one of these robots would be able to perform a great variety of "simpler" surgical routines.
providing potential habitats? This is a confusing statement. Do they mean potential habitats for life that might be hiding in there currently, or potential habitats for humans who might travel there in the future? And would these habitats actually need to be inside a hollow underwater dome beneath the icy surface? This sounds cool actually.
I saw a 3D camera once. This is a one-of-a-kind system that a friend of mine built to make 3D maps of small objects. It works by the same general principle as your own depth perception, by using two cameras simultaneously. This unit is controlled by a custom made USB device. The cameras each take a photo of the object at the same instant, and then the software he wrote compares the images and somehow figures out the depth where each pixel is located by using that information. I don't know if this is what Stanford is trying to do. As an added note, many common digital cameras figure out the focus by shining some kind of red light and measuring how far away certain objects are. That's when you get those little green squares around one or more parts of your viewfinder, to show you what will be in focus. If Stanford found a way to make this work throughout the photo, they may be able to take only a single photo with a single camera, and use Z information gathered by this technique to reconstruct the depth of the photo after the fact.
I would think the correct behavior IS to clear the flag before performing one of those operations. Assuming that it is set will cause all kinds of havoc. What's better? Making sure the setup for string routines is correct in ONE place (the compiler) or in a zillion places (every single program that uses string operations)? I don't understand why the earlier behavior was considered a compiler problem.
I love how seemingly every single thing that shows up on Wikileaks is reported in a story here on /.
It's almost as if /. is the RSS feed for Wikileaks or something. Seriously, I've seen half a dozen stories here about stories on Wikileaks. I doubt that half the stories on Wikileaks report that a story appeared on /.
Instead of wasting time developing this quantum nonsense, we need to find a way to send an avian carriers around the globe in the time it takes a photon to bounce off a satellite.
I remember JLG (the fearless leader of BeOS fame) once saying something to the effect that Windows has five billion lines of code in it and that he "loves every single one of those lines." I also seem to recall Bill Gates once saying that IBM liked software to be measured in k-locs, while he debated that it should be measured by what it does. He said something that I don't quite remember, but the jist was, "why would we do something in thousands of lines of code if it could be done in just a few?" How ironic. Hmmm... if JLG's comment was made a decade ago, and our dance teacher has 30,000 monkeys adding a k-loc or two to those five billion lines every day, then there are now about 21,500,000,000 lines of code to love, which seems about right, given how many different "please wait" messages there are.
- Run in a "normal" user account, as opposed to administrator. If you need to do something administrative, it simply prompts you for an admin name and password. That's easy enough to do on the rare occasion that it's needed. Most things that "normal" users need to do are possible without admin privileges due to the well thought out design of the OS.
- Only execute software that appears to be from a reputable source. This is easy enough to do because Mac OS X warns you whenever you try to run a program that was downloaded.
- Back up your data frequently! This is a good thing to do on any computer, whether Mac, Windows, Linux, *BSD, or the world's most widely used operating system, Sendla. But on a Mac with Leopard, it's easy. Just get a Firewire or USB drive, plug it in, tell it to use that for backups, and that's it. Just remember to plug it in once every few days.
Beyond that, if, by some extremely rare circumstance, you happen to be an unlucky enough soul to actually get a virus on a Mac, just blow everything off the hard drive, reinstall Mac OS X, and restore your crap from the Time Machine backup.There is no need to run some stupid garbage virus protection software. All those programs do is sit around, waste resources, slow your whole system down, and fail to recognize any real viruses while your PC endlessly grinds away with thousands of spam/spyware/adware/viruses, and runs at speeds that make snail mail look like subspace communications.
I would have thought that Perens was already on the board. I don't understand why this should take any effort on his part. It goes without saying.
By extrapolating these results, I assume that those shown a Windows logo got into their car, drove extremely slowly while telling those behind them to "please wait," and then crashed into a telephone pole due to a driver problem.
I love Bill Gates too!
The next step after Ruby on Rails is to go airborne: Ruby on Wings.
This is the kind of thing that really upsets me. I mean, if someone has the 1337z sk1llz to do this sort of thing, why aren't they using those skills to make a fortune, instead of using them to fsck up other peoples' websites? that sort of behavior ain't cool. in fact, it's decidedly uncool and people who act that way should be banished to a big island for criminals, like Australia.
mod this -1 troll, please
i have nothing to say, but my parents never taught me that if you have nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all, so here i am trolling /. so mod me -1 troll.
it's a good thing a settlement was reached. people should respect software licenses, and the GPL is definitely no exception to that rule.
when are they gonna come out with a processor capable of performing the way processors will in, say, the year 3000?
I think the behemoth is definitely in the right on this one, as always. They are always doing the right thing. Like running this multi-zillion dollar advertising campaign for Apple Macs, which is codenamed Vista or something like that.
It's really ingenious. Want to advertise something cool? Make a competing product that really sucks, and then people will buy the cool product. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.
dude, if you need to get something done at work and their retarded bass-ackwards network doesn't do it for you, then plug something in and get the job done! that's what it's there for. any idiot who thinks that's bad is an idiot.