Worth noting: yours is a good argument *against* ID: why was the supreme designer asleep at the switch here? Surely he could have made a better food chain: the phyto flourish without starving the oxygen levels utterly or spewing so many poisonous byproducts, then toughed-up zoop's swoop in to eat 'em, then fish eat them, etc...
And while we're at it, couldn't (S)[Hh]e have done something about the stank? Fetid water could smell like daisies, or a steak dinner with cheddar fries on the side.
Instead, everything dies and the whole area smells like someone barfed into my nephew's sweatsocks. Bravo, chief! (golf clap).
Sorry, didn't mean to reply directly to Anaesthetica, but to grandparent. Wasn't logged in when I got snarky, then the new (stupid!) ajax login framework fried my reply and dumped me back at the/. base page. Pissed me off and I was preoccupied with finding my old spot rather than making sure I was replying to the right level.
In short, this is an important advance in automorphic forms, but it is so technical that it doesn't belong on SlashDot.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -- A. Einstein.
Lucky for us, my grandma doesn't read slashdot. But in a long-ago life, I earned a minor degree in math and took much more math en route to a degree in physics (undergrad and grad... but nowhere near this Riemann space stuff). So, I am both curious and competent. And I regret to say you didn't do the best job explaining the topic.
Rather than just bitch... here's where I wish you'd explain more:
give (my grandma) an analogy for a membrane,
What are subtle number-theoretic symmetries? Again, handwavy analogies (for me and my grandma) are fine.
Is there a linkage or relationship between modes and frequencies, akin to physics standing wave equations?
Any pictures you can link to that visualize these in 2-space or 3-space in a way that makes us get a hint of a grasp of 5-space?
Ditto for the symmetries of 2-dim membranes: pics, examples, analogies?
What's this something and why did Gelbart-Jacquet lift it?
What's a native mode?... oh, wait, you did this one: a native mode is one that doesn't look like it merely adds a dimension (of complexity?) by doing something minor to alter a 2d or 3d or 4d case. What exactly would that something be? Is an ok analogy taking a bessel function in 2 or 3d, then adding a 1-d unrelated critter in to the 4th dimension that doesn't add any value that affects the other 3?
So, once I have this 5-d rippling thing that isn't some lazy mashup of a 2d and a 3d or any other easy simplification, are we ready to take on 'to each such mode of vibration there is an associated L-function?
What's automorphic? Messes with itself, literally, but... ?
If it is numerically computed, WHY? Why can't it be solved symbolically? Is this like PDE's or n-body problems, where the problem isn't mathematically solvable but we can get close to the answer via discarding nth terms in series, perturbations, approximations, or the likes?
While I agree that numerical solutions aren't purely 'right' like symbolic proofs, one can use them to do disproofs: if one shows that the error is less than E(x), and that numerical plus error's limit won't ever reach some condition, or that E(x) diverges, or whatever... that's useful and may be a step toward proving the Riemann Hypothesis. Granted, any time a tech journalist (including the slashdot editors) writes a headline, the baby jesus stabs a scientist's voodoo-doll with a long needle...
And what the hell is GRH? General/global/great/ Riemann Hypothesis?
Thanks. Deconstructing this, I now have a (probably WRONG) sense for what you tried to say:
These guys did some computational/numerical work that doesn't really go THAT far to proving the Riemann Hypothesis. They found some 5-d examples that were really 5-d complex (not just stunts to extend 2d, 3d or 4d without the additional dimension of complexity), they did numerical work to find some 'native' 5d modes (insert a better definition of mode than 'a solution set that is like a stable solution or a standing wave or whatever'). So, we now have computationally-done 5d hints, but we're no closer to symbolically solving 5d equations. It's a bit of computational insight, but it isn't a pure proof.
seriously, since this sounds wrong (several ways), where do you say you read this and when?
I've spent ten minutes googling combinations of bolt, shear, torque, substandard, high-strength, fell, factory, saturn, construction, osha, death, died, fall-hazard, snopes, urban-legend and a dozen other word combinations... no sign of this in or out of snopes.
Testing precisely is expensive. Testing within an order of magnitude isn't: twist until the bolt-head shears. As for low-grade metal being substituted in, I know a few pipefitters that can do a so-so job identifying metal composition by looking at how the metal grinds and the color of the sparks coming off the grinder.
I'm not sure why people like to trot out the 6,000 year old theory every time someone mentions the age of the Universe. Perhaps it is because they're seeking an opportunity to tar the faiths of the world with the brush of ignorance. [mumble mumble] ignorance of religion [mumble mumble] all believers [mumble mumble] getting [mumble] old [mumble] pedantic.
Or perhaps we're getting tired of this (admittedly small) number of vocal, pedantic fsckwits telling us that the universe is only 6000 years old. And that these people keep trying to push that insanity into widespread acceptance.
Don't tell me there aren't otherwise-sane-looking zealots wandering among us. Don't tell me they aren't DAMN vocal about this 6000-year-old claim being truth. I've recently shared an office with one, and met several in the last few years.
Pick a state that has a cliched religiosity and spend time and you can meet a few, too. And then... try to dissuade them. Best bring your 'A' game, low expectations and some waders, though. You'll start on cosmological timelines, swerve to arguing carbon dating's fallibility, swerve to arguing steady-state radiation and radiodecay, struggle to explain doppler shifts in light and RF and sound and how they can be used to measure cosmic aging, flail as you ask 'but why would god create a universe already 25B light-years across and with light already en route and an earth with all these layers and fossils embedded -- is it just to keep us distracted?' Often, you'll find that cosmological aging is being resisted because evolution is wrong. Seriously. I know it's a non-sequiter, but there you have it. In general, expect the debate to swerve viciously and expect to be unable to stick to one topic until resolved. These are believers unwilling to unbelieve, not logicians seeking fundamental truth. And let's face it: nobody is naturally good at logic, and few adults are competent at careful, reasoned debate. Swerving and craptabulistic logical skills are gonna complicate your job immensely.
I understand your frustration. Mocking believers of a 6000-year-old universe seems cruel, but the people these zealots might trust (other religious people, whether they are muslims, christians, jews, mormons, catholics, or whatever) aren't telling them to STFU, so we're left to repeatedly endure the BS or risk being called godless as we try to do somebody else's job.
Personally, I can't think of a single club, sect, profession, or hobby where adherents don't consider themselves modestly responsible to act as guardians of the reputation of their peer group. As an untrusted outsider, it shouldn't be *MY* job to tell these guys to STFU because they're making and by extension all other religions look bad. Put another way, dentists police themselves because a bad dentist makes them all look bad. All us nondentists expect to trust that experts in dentistry and nearby fields (biologists, vets, MD's, whatever) will let us know if a sizeable bloc of dentists starts acting/believing stuff that violates science, or holding views that seem hazardous, damaging to the profession, or unethical.
But for some reason, religious people (possibly you fall into this crowd) aren't doing their duty as theological peers to make these science-denying zealots accept that their faith needn't feel threatened, reminding them that the evidence passes muster, and that they need to adapt their rhetoric so that their religion isn't hideously incompatible with hard science and all the evidence showing timelines where t(now)-t(0) >> 6000y.
I've tried arguing, gentle questioning in the style of Socrates, and just plain ignoring supporters of this crap. None work. And in the end, the cliche about teaching a pig to sing comes to mind: 'don't do it. It wastes your time and annoys the pig'.
Snickering and mockery at least are gratifying. Sucks, but there you have it.
Assuming you didn't overlook exploits involving a power cord (see everyone else's comments), the other practical reality you seem to overlook is that the computer needs the key while doing multimedia and games DRM, encrypted files or file systems, encrypted hard drives, and encrypted communication sessions (SSL, VPN, SSH).
Short-burst key uses like package or signature validation and email/file/doc encryption are what you're talking about -- for them, memory purges can force attacks to require interrupts or dual-memory-access tricks or split-second timing on top of memory-snapshot exploits to get the key in the brief time it is exposed. But the era of short-burst key usage is gone-baby-gone.
What do pics datestamped 2001 (and involving Texas A&M) have to do with the wikileaks UPS fire? The way you reply, you could be saying 'yeah, this *sort* of freak accident can happen', but it comes across as 'here's pics, it wasn't a UPS but a PCU'. Care to fill in a bit more info?
Me, I haven't even bought a HD set yet and haven't owned a console since the 2600.
And don't we all look to someone so enthusiastic about the gadget industry that they haven't bought a game system since the Atari 2600. (/snark)
My best recall on what 'everybody knew' would happen in the high-def format wars wasn't any sureness that only one could win. Like with the early days of DVD+ and DVD-, there was a lot of shrugging and guessing that we'd probably soon enough see dual-format players, some specialists saying there were insurmountable technical barriers. Lots of fanboy scribbling and uncertainty and speculation. Someone can correct me if they remember hordes of techies saying otherwise with blu vs. HD.
Sorry for mocking you... your comment did make me chuckle at one bit of market irony I might of otherwise overlooked -- when you mentioned Samsung was dumping doomed-format players, it hit me that selling out desperately is a big factor in how Sony snatched a format victory here.
Kudos. Well put. In my experience, this 'most scientists' crap is a phrase uttered by people that have no training and unfounded contempt for science or education or both. I work with one now that claims his dad invented a 'better' way to do calculus, that college is a racket to take all your money, and etc.
And of course, these folks usually don't know beans about logic, scientific method, or any other way to convince them they're wrong. Dissuading them takes MUCH longer than ignoring them, I've found.
The only remotely feasible way I've found to fix their boats is to ask them for written examples of their claims, then send 'em back repeatedly saying stuff like 'what about Lens' Law?' or 'Hmm... that looks like a geometric solution. Technically, that's not calculus. Still, can you ask your dad to show how this method handles 2nd or 3rd order Differential Equations?' The goal isn't to win the argument -- it's TROLLING them (with questions that aren't threatening but make them waste much more effort than you do) so they stop spewing this happy horseshit.
40 gigs free, 100 desktops == 4 terabytes. That's roughly a grand now for a homebrew system, adding in the drive controller or surrounding boxen. DIY, on your own hardware, write it up and we'll all link and blog and rave about the cool hack. Well, we'll be less impressed now that drivespace is at $200 a T, but we'll at least nod approvingly when we see it on your resume.
Outside data introduces risks. Inside data has risks like HR or payroll or company secrets disclosure. Network and power utilization go up expensively. Someone will demand data recovery beyond your ability to provide it. Someone else will complain that your data got corrupted when some end user turned off a system midwrite.
Put another way, imagine trying to make a business case for this to the CEO of your company. If that doesn't turn off your urge to do this, start your way up the food chain until you get every superior's approval or adequately shot down to drop this fool's errand.
Don't forget the depreciation advantage of Macs. Used macs sell for more than equally-aged PC's.
Personally, I just buy 'em because I got tired of 'honey the living room PC's wifi is dead again' after a long day of work. And because the other parents at my school think I'm a video *GOD* because I hand them dvds of kids' performances the next day thanks to iLife. At work I use Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, SuSE and XP. Other hardcore techies here use Gentoo. Nobody here seems remotely interested in Vista, except in the context of accumulating experience or just comparing XP to Vista as they research cybersecurity risks.
No, they can retain trademark by granting permission for limited, revocable use to the BMC. Problem solved. Sane, fan-friendly, and still guards trademark. How freakin' hard is THAT?
Pointing to SSH was the same reaction I had. I wouldn't say 'no-one' uses ssh.com's version, though: I had to invoice a license for a specific project that demanded it. Checking their '06 investor report, ssh.com's current revenue is $9 million per year, but profit/loss is a -0.01 per share.
Frankly, if ssh.com were to market aspects that attracted corporations and governments and enterprise-scale buyers, they'd probably make bank like RSA has done. OpenSSH is nice, but we've all seen PHB's pay six or seven figures for something FOSS can do for free, often just because it needs that ephemeral special sauce, "Support".
Ssh.com's other path back to significance and relevance is to mend fences. A few FOSS projects succeed, but a lot don't. There are also always some new ones trying: the ones that come to mind right now include SourceFire, Tenable, MySQL, Novell... they're all trying to find the magic answer that balances FOSS and profitability, and so far the answer isn't obvious or easily replicated. So, if I were Tatu Ylönen, I would probably wait to alter course until I saw a surer path.
Heh... second-hand got me to thinking: imagine a second-hand-smoke victim receiving a countersuit by tobacco companies because they were able to inhale cigarette smoke they hadn't paid for.
This is about that absurd.
Theatrical broadcast implies a desire for an audience to hear the performance leading them to the venue. Charging admission shows enrichment. Venue must reimburse the artists in such a case. Sensible so far.
Muzak (or elevator music or bland background music, for those that don't know the slang) creates mood for a particular commercial location (restaurant, store, elevator, or even music-on-hold). This mood is carefully cultivated for whatever commercial goal by the vendor, so the vendor should be reimbursing artists for their help in making the store/restaurant mood.
But music played by workers at a construction site or a repair shop... that's for the benefit of the employees and usually at the expense of the customer. I'd no sooner wander down to the mechanic's to listen to his boom box than I'd want to eavesdrop off most strangers' ipods. Hell, I thought that was the greatest part of ipods: boomboxes became anachronistic jokes.
Charging royalties for unwanted intrusions of music is the most absurd damn thing I've ever heard of, and tries to claim economic value where none exists. It'd be like demanding royalties from the owners of all those noisy damn cars driving around with mega stereos in their trunks rattling my windows...
Hmm... on the other hand, maybe I'm in *favor* of this, if another wave of unwanted noiseboxes are silenced. Dumbass argument, desirable side effect.
heh, and while you're at it, JL, you might try a bit of the same egocentric and bizarre mathematics:
Hmm... who has done more for (in decreasing order: the universe, all life, humanity, my family, my country, my region, my town, my neighborhood)? javalizard or Anonymous Coward... um...
Everyone knows that slashdot editors is an oxymoron.
OTOH, if they edited *content* out of your submission and yet can't find the three seconds to do keyword checks for dupes and/or to fix typos, heads oughta freakin' roll.
I agree with you about the importance of balancing usability and hackability, but I disagree strongly on where we now stand. Paragraph 4 reads like you just stepped out of a time machine from 2003. IMHO, it should read:
... The Linux subculture is still based around the hacker ethics [but the Ubuntu culture is based on usability] -- and that's why Linux was an OS primarily for people who enjoy compiling programs and manipulating settings. [With Ubuntu] that has changed. The [Ubuntu] culture [has been taking] a critical look at every stage in the process and presenting the user with a set of simple and consistent choices that let people use their computers rather than worrying about getting their machine in a usable state.
... and then you say: Ubuntu's leaning in that direction, but they still have a long way to go -- again, I couldn't disagree more. They've got a *little* way to go, but Ubuntu is roughly as usable as Windows. After all, on non-geek friends' windows boxes, I find myself downloading and installing ad-aware and spybot and a firewall and antivirus and a safer browser and codecs and media players and updated drivers and patches. Then I get to discuss the whats and the why's and the howto's. On Ubuntu, I can shell in, run apt-get, and they're patched.
This next part, there's just one edit I'd make:
The problem is that changing a culture is a hell of a lot harder than just writing software. A culture in which people are expected to navigate the Internet looking for answers will keep Linux marginalized^h^h^h^h us nerds employed forever. A culture that says "this problem is too complicated and needs to be simplified so that the average user gets it" is a culture that can take Linux to the mainstream. Not only that, but it encourages technical development as well -- a good number of the reasons for unnecessary complexity is because there are unnecessary complications in the way a piece of code works. At the end of the day, a solution that's simple for the user is often simple at the code level as well.
Personally, I'd rather be unemployed or solving more interesting stuff, but every SNAFU I fix at work convinces me that things aren't getting better fast enough for this to happen in my lifetime.
yeah, because the sun doesn't move (and shift shadows), camera position isn't utterly impossible to perfectly duplicate, nature doesn't shift water levels and cause trees or dirt or rocks to move significantly (admittedly, minor impact), and there aren't a few thousand animals and a few dozen humans hanging out in this area.... that list is pretty much in order of their impact on image-matching. What you suggest might work for astronomical anomaly detection. But matching two aerial photos taken more than a few seconds apart generates so damn much shift that I doubt eyes would see the 2-pixel difference of a man standing in one frame but not the other (presuming a pixel per square foot).
It does, however, speak volumes for the *increased* value of just sitting tight and making an SOS on the ground, if you're stranded. Given that, ten minutes after we learned that lesson as boy scouts, we started making bogus SOS markers every time we went hiking, the SOS idea always seemed like a colossal waste of time. No more...
(PS: I live a few hrs north of the area where Fossett is lost, so if you see an SOS... oops, my bad).
As most good conservative writers would note, today's conservatism is classicially liberalism, yes, that's absolutely right. But today's liberals are really socialists, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, even if they think they do.
Hmm... interestingly put. But it seems you're using doublespeak to redefine the opposition, while in your GP post claiming that your own personal ideology is somehow *different* and thus exempt from commonsense criticism we might levy against 'conservatives' and how far from their Lincolnesque origins they've strayed. It's a nice bob-n-weave, and your GP post shows you care about this very schism as much as I do, but your argument still seems a bit thin as a result.
To really convey what I mean, how 'bout I take a stab at this word game of yours...
As most liberals would quickly note, today's liberalism is classical liberalism, tempered to overcome the failings of classical libertarianism (environmental libertarianism, the tragedy of the commons, and many libertarians' habit of ignoring the vast array of benefits a modern civil society has heaped on them when they're successful and choose to suddenly gabble about claiming themselves 'self-made').
Contemporary liberalism has become more complex, but liberals assuredly still value freedom. And liberals don't rely on Orwellian doublespeak. After all, today's conservatives are really corporatists, which is just an opaque way of saying fascist, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, no matter how much they claim they do.
(Incidentally, Wikipedia's liberalism article, paragraph 3 pretty much sums up you and I as archtypes of the two liberal factions. But the entry on conservative bears scant resemblance to your described ideology... care to comment?)
Slashdot Mirror
Worth noting: yours is a good argument *against* ID: why was the supreme designer asleep at the switch here? Surely he could have made a better food chain: the phyto flourish without starving the oxygen levels utterly or spewing so many poisonous byproducts, then toughed-up zoop's swoop in to eat 'em, then fish eat them, etc...
And while we're at it, couldn't (S)[Hh]e have done something about the stank? Fetid water could smell like daisies, or a steak dinner with cheddar fries on the side.
Instead, everything dies and the whole area smells like someone barfed into my nephew's sweatsocks. Bravo, chief! (golf clap).
Sorry, didn't mean to reply directly to Anaesthetica, but to grandparent. Wasn't logged in when I got snarky, then the new (stupid!) ajax login framework fried my reply and dumped me back at the /. base page. Pissed me off and I was preoccupied with finding my old spot rather than making sure I was replying to the right level.
They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.
I can't find any point in time where apple sold at 1/1500'th of current prices.
Dec '97, it was $3.20, which would be a *damn* respectable 60x growth. But nothing gets it to the numbers you saw (1k becoming 1.5M).
Sorry to be a buzzkill.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -- A. Einstein.
Lucky for us, my grandma doesn't read slashdot. But in a long-ago life, I earned a minor degree in math and took much more math en route to a degree in physics (undergrad and grad... but nowhere near this Riemann space stuff). So, I am both curious and competent. And I regret to say you didn't do the best job explaining the topic.
Rather than just bitch... here's where I wish you'd explain more:
Thanks. Deconstructing this, I now have a (probably WRONG) sense for what you tried to say:
These guys did some computational/numerical work that doesn't really go THAT far to proving the Riemann Hypothesis. They found some 5-d examples that were really 5-d complex (not just stunts to extend 2d, 3d or 4d without the additional dimension of complexity), they did numerical work to find some 'native' 5d modes (insert a better definition of mode than 'a solution set that is like a stable solution or a standing wave or whatever'). So, we now have computationally-done 5d hints, but we're no closer to symbolically solving 5d equations. It's a bit of computational insight, but it isn't a pure proof.
Um, how did I do?
seriously, since this sounds wrong (several ways), where do you say you read this and when?
I've spent ten minutes googling combinations of bolt, shear, torque, substandard, high-strength, fell, factory, saturn, construction, osha, death, died, fall-hazard, snopes, urban-legend and a dozen other word combinations... no sign of this in or out of snopes.
Testing precisely is expensive. Testing within an order of magnitude isn't: twist until the bolt-head shears. As for low-grade metal being substituted in, I know a few pipefitters that can do a so-so job identifying metal composition by looking at how the metal grinds and the color of the sparks coming off the grinder.
Or perhaps we're getting tired of this (admittedly small) number of vocal, pedantic fsckwits telling us that the universe is only 6000 years old. And that these people keep trying to push that insanity into widespread acceptance.
Don't tell me there aren't otherwise-sane-looking zealots wandering among us. Don't tell me they aren't DAMN vocal about this 6000-year-old claim being truth. I've recently shared an office with one, and met several in the last few years.
Pick a state that has a cliched religiosity and spend time and you can meet a few, too. And then... try to dissuade them. Best bring your 'A' game, low expectations and some waders, though. You'll start on cosmological timelines, swerve to arguing carbon dating's fallibility, swerve to arguing steady-state radiation and radiodecay, struggle to explain doppler shifts in light and RF and sound and how they can be used to measure cosmic aging, flail as you ask 'but why would god create a universe already 25B light-years across and with light already en route and an earth with all these layers and fossils embedded -- is it just to keep us distracted?' Often, you'll find that cosmological aging is being resisted because evolution is wrong. Seriously. I know it's a non-sequiter, but there you have it. In general, expect the debate to swerve viciously and expect to be unable to stick to one topic until resolved. These are believers unwilling to unbelieve, not logicians seeking fundamental truth. And let's face it: nobody is naturally good at logic, and few adults are competent at careful, reasoned debate. Swerving and craptabulistic logical skills are gonna complicate your job immensely.
I understand your frustration. Mocking believers of a 6000-year-old universe seems cruel, but the people these zealots might trust (other religious people, whether they are muslims, christians, jews, mormons, catholics, or whatever) aren't telling them to STFU, so we're left to repeatedly endure the BS or risk being called godless as we try to do somebody else's job.
Personally, I can't think of a single club, sect, profession, or hobby where adherents don't consider themselves modestly responsible to act as guardians of the reputation of their peer group. As an untrusted outsider, it shouldn't be *MY* job to tell these guys to STFU because they're making and by extension all other religions look bad. Put another way, dentists police themselves because a bad dentist makes them all look bad. All us nondentists expect to trust that experts in dentistry and nearby fields (biologists, vets, MD's, whatever) will let us know if a sizeable bloc of dentists starts acting/believing stuff that violates science, or holding views that seem hazardous, damaging to the profession, or unethical.
But for some reason, religious people (possibly you fall into this crowd) aren't doing their duty as theological peers to make these science-denying zealots accept that their faith needn't feel threatened, reminding them that the evidence passes muster, and that they need to adapt their rhetoric so that their religion isn't hideously incompatible with hard science and all the evidence showing timelines where t(now)-t(0) >> 6000y.
I've tried arguing, gentle questioning in the style of Socrates, and just plain ignoring supporters of this crap. None work. And in the end, the cliche about teaching a pig to sing comes to mind: 'don't do it. It wastes your time and annoys the pig'.
Snickering and mockery at least are gratifying. Sucks, but there you have it.
Assuming you didn't overlook exploits involving a power cord (see everyone else's comments), the other practical reality you seem to overlook is that the computer needs the key while doing multimedia and games DRM, encrypted files or file systems, encrypted hard drives, and encrypted communication sessions (SSL, VPN, SSH).
Short-burst key uses like package or signature validation and email/file/doc encryption are what you're talking about -- for them, memory purges can force attacks to require interrupts or dual-memory-access tricks or split-second timing on top of memory-snapshot exploits to get the key in the brief time it is exposed. But the era of short-burst key usage is gone-baby-gone.
Not so fast, commander airbag. You did see the part where you have to press the torn parts together and... and... *hold* them together for an hour?
Yup. You'll now be expected to cuddle your companion after sex.
What do pics datestamped 2001 (and involving Texas A&M) have to do with the wikileaks UPS fire? The way you reply, you could be saying 'yeah, this *sort* of freak accident can happen', but it comes across as 'here's pics, it wasn't a UPS but a PCU'. Care to fill in a bit more info?
(/snark)
My best recall on what 'everybody knew' would happen in the high-def format wars wasn't any sureness that only one could win. Like with the early days of DVD+ and DVD-, there was a lot of shrugging and guessing that we'd probably soon enough see dual-format players, some specialists saying there were insurmountable technical barriers. Lots of fanboy scribbling and uncertainty and speculation. Someone can correct me if they remember hordes of techies saying otherwise with blu vs. HD.
Sorry for mocking you... your comment did make me chuckle at one bit of market irony I might of otherwise overlooked -- when you mentioned Samsung was dumping doomed-format players, it hit me that selling out desperately is a big factor in how Sony snatched a format victory here.
Kudos. Well put. In my experience, this 'most scientists' crap is a phrase uttered by people that have no training and unfounded contempt for science or education or both. I work with one now that claims his dad invented a 'better' way to do calculus, that college is a racket to take all your money, and etc.
And of course, these folks usually don't know beans about logic, scientific method, or any other way to convince them they're wrong. Dissuading them takes MUCH longer than ignoring them, I've found.
The only remotely feasible way I've found to fix their boats is to ask them for written examples of their claims, then send 'em back repeatedly saying stuff like 'what about Lens' Law?' or 'Hmm... that looks like a geometric solution. Technically, that's not calculus. Still, can you ask your dad to show how this method handles 2nd or 3rd order Differential Equations?' The goal isn't to win the argument -- it's TROLLING them (with questions that aren't threatening but make them waste much more effort than you do) so they stop spewing this happy horseshit.
My advice?
Don't.
40 gigs free, 100 desktops == 4 terabytes. That's roughly a grand now for a homebrew system, adding in the drive controller or surrounding boxen. DIY, on your own hardware, write it up and we'll all link and blog and rave about the cool hack. Well, we'll be less impressed now that drivespace is at $200 a T, but we'll at least nod approvingly when we see it on your resume.
Outside data introduces risks. Inside data has risks like HR or payroll or company secrets disclosure. Network and power utilization go up expensively. Someone will demand data recovery beyond your ability to provide it. Someone else will complain that your data got corrupted when some end user turned off a system midwrite.
Put another way, imagine trying to make a business case for this to the CEO of your company. If that doesn't turn off your urge to do this, start your way up the food chain until you get every superior's approval or adequately shot down to drop this fool's errand.
Did I mention you can get fired for this?
Don't forget the depreciation advantage of Macs. Used macs sell for more than equally-aged PC's.
Personally, I just buy 'em because I got tired of 'honey the living room PC's wifi is dead again' after a long day of work. And because the other parents at my school think I'm a video *GOD* because I hand them dvds of kids' performances the next day thanks to iLife. At work I use Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, SuSE and XP. Other hardcore techies here use Gentoo. Nobody here seems remotely interested in Vista, except in the context of accumulating experience or just comparing XP to Vista as they research cybersecurity risks.
No, they can retain trademark by granting permission for limited, revocable use to the BMC. Problem solved. Sane, fan-friendly, and still guards trademark. How freakin' hard is THAT?
My God, it's full of (porn)STARS
There, I fixed that typo for you.
Isn't this easily bypassed by MAC spoofing, or at least a trigger usable as a DOS (for pranks or against one's enemies?)
Pointing to SSH was the same reaction I had. I wouldn't say 'no-one' uses ssh.com's version, though: I had to invoice a license for a specific project that demanded it. Checking their '06 investor report, ssh.com's current revenue is $9 million per year, but profit/loss is a -0.01 per share.
Frankly, if ssh.com were to market aspects that attracted corporations and governments and enterprise-scale buyers, they'd probably make bank like RSA has done. OpenSSH is nice, but we've all seen PHB's pay six or seven figures for something FOSS can do for free, often just because it needs that ephemeral special sauce, "Support".
Ssh.com's other path back to significance and relevance is to mend fences. A few FOSS projects succeed, but a lot don't. There are also always some new ones trying: the ones that come to mind right now include SourceFire, Tenable, MySQL, Novell... they're all trying to find the magic answer that balances FOSS and profitability, and so far the answer isn't obvious or easily replicated. So, if I were Tatu Ylönen, I would probably wait to alter course until I saw a surer path.
Heh... second-hand got me to thinking: imagine a second-hand-smoke victim receiving a countersuit by tobacco companies because they were able to inhale cigarette smoke they hadn't paid for.
This is about that absurd.
Theatrical broadcast implies a desire for an audience to hear the performance leading them to the venue. Charging admission shows enrichment. Venue must reimburse the artists in such a case. Sensible so far.
Muzak (or elevator music or bland background music, for those that don't know the slang) creates mood for a particular commercial location (restaurant, store, elevator, or even music-on-hold). This mood is carefully cultivated for whatever commercial goal by the vendor, so the vendor should be reimbursing artists for their help in making the store/restaurant mood.
But music played by workers at a construction site or a repair shop... that's for the benefit of the employees and usually at the expense of the customer. I'd no sooner wander down to the mechanic's to listen to his boom box than I'd want to eavesdrop off most strangers' ipods. Hell, I thought that was the greatest part of ipods: boomboxes became anachronistic jokes.
Charging royalties for unwanted intrusions of music is the most absurd damn thing I've ever heard of, and tries to claim economic value where none exists. It'd be like demanding royalties from the owners of all those noisy damn cars driving around with mega stereos in their trunks rattling my windows...
Hmm... on the other hand, maybe I'm in *favor* of this, if another wave of unwanted noiseboxes are silenced. Dumbass argument, desirable side effect.
heh, and while you're at it, JL, you might try a bit of the same egocentric and bizarre mathematics:
Hmm... who has done more for (in decreasing order: the universe, all life, humanity, my family, my country, my region, my town, my neighborhood)? javalizard or Anonymous Coward... um...
'nuff said.
Moontanans. Big sky country and all that.
Um, baloney.
Everyone knows that slashdot editors is an oxymoron.
OTOH, if they edited *content* out of your submission and yet can't find the three seconds to do keyword checks for dupes and/or to fix typos, heads oughta freakin' roll.
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Still waiting for a better slashdot.
This next part, there's just one edit I'd make:
Personally, I'd rather be unemployed or solving more interesting stuff, but every SNAFU I fix at work convinces me that things aren't getting better fast enough for this to happen in my lifetime.
yeah, because the sun doesn't move (and shift shadows), camera position isn't ... that list is pretty much in order of their impact on image-matching.
utterly impossible to perfectly duplicate, nature doesn't shift water levels
and cause trees or dirt or rocks to move significantly (admittedly, minor
impact), and there aren't a few thousand animals and a few dozen humans
hanging out in this area.
What you suggest might work for astronomical anomaly detection. But
matching two aerial photos taken more than a few seconds apart generates
so damn much shift that I doubt eyes would see the 2-pixel difference
of a man standing in one frame but not the other (presuming a pixel per
square foot).
It does, however, speak volumes for the *increased* value of just
sitting tight and making an SOS on the ground, if you're stranded. Given
that, ten minutes after we learned that lesson as boy scouts, we started
making bogus SOS markers every time we went hiking, the SOS idea always
seemed like a colossal waste of time. No more...
(PS: I live a few hrs north of the area where Fossett is lost, so if you
see an SOS... oops, my bad).
Hmm... interestingly put. But it seems you're using doublespeak to redefine the opposition, while in your GP post claiming that your own personal ideology is somehow *different* and thus exempt from commonsense criticism we might levy against 'conservatives' and how far from their Lincolnesque origins they've strayed. It's a nice bob-n-weave, and your GP post shows you care about this very schism as much as I do, but your argument still seems a bit thin as a result.
To really convey what I mean, how 'bout I take a stab at this word game of yours...
As most liberals would quickly note, today's liberalism is classical liberalism, tempered to overcome the failings of classical libertarianism (environmental libertarianism, the tragedy of the commons, and many libertarians' habit of ignoring the vast array of benefits a modern civil society has heaped on them when they're successful and choose to suddenly gabble about claiming themselves 'self-made').
Contemporary liberalism has become more complex, but liberals assuredly still value freedom. And liberals don't rely on Orwellian doublespeak. After all, today's conservatives are really corporatists, which is just an opaque way of saying fascist, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, no matter how much they claim they do.
(Incidentally, Wikipedia's liberalism article, paragraph 3 pretty much sums up you and I as archtypes of the two liberal factions. But the entry on conservative bears scant resemblance to your described ideology... care to comment?)