It's going to take a lot more than recycling, hybrids, and low power computing to avoid the disaster.
I've heard reports of a remarkable new fuel called 'coal' which should last for the next 300 years. If you want to consider the long term, breeder reactors, with current technology, should last for thousands of years. (The upper theoretical threshold is somewhere in the millions or billions of years!)
I think your prediction of a power crunch is a tad premature.
Sure, we will do more harm to the environment. Our money will continue to flow to unstable countries. But forecasting the end of civilization due to peak oil is similar to forecasting the end of civilization due to peak whale oil.
Speaking of punishment-fitting-the-crime, a man in the last area I lived in received a 6 year prison sentence for shooting his soon-to-be-ex wife in the head while she slept, killing her.
Just imagine -- sharing two movies is the same as murder.
Yeah, and they're just factors. If you have a family history of Type 2 diabetes you can develop it while being a fit, slim, health-food nut.
How likely is that? Looking at wikipedia, it seems that the majority of type II diabetes sufferers are obese. It also mentions that "Other research shows that type 2 diabetes causes obesity."
If you think that most scholars place the Gospel of Thomas after 145 AD, then I would suggest finding your references, heading over to wikipedia, and correcting their article.
The wikians seem to think that the Gospel of Thomas was most likely written in the 50s or 90s.
The most famous case being Galilleo being forced to retract und menace of excomunication and worse. Mind you, the church recognized its error... 400 year later in 1995+ if I recall correctly. So we can expect them to recognize the other terrible stuff maybe , by year 23789 or so.
Don't consider Galileo's spat with the church to be a matter of science vs. a matter of religion.
Galileo was often a rather brash, blunt person. One of his writings that attacked the geocentric viewpoint could be interpreted as attacking the pope.
If you google, you can find Galileo's denouncement of the Jesuits for believing that comets are bodies that exist between the earth and the sun: Galileo knew that comets were an artifact of the atmosphere and basically said that the Jesuits had no concept of (natural) philosophy [science].
Combine this personality with a theocracy and its not hard to see why he was put on trial.
1) They don't need evidence to bankrupt you. All it takes is an accusation, and they can steal all your property and all your money. They commonly do this to prevent you from hiring a lawyer. (It's called RICO. What it's called and how they use it are two different things.)
It doesn't even require that. Look at the drug laws . Once drugs is found on/in your property, you can lose that property. It doesn't require being accused of a crime and it doesn't require a trial.
There have been cases where people have purchased vehicles, been pulled over, and the cops have found drugs in the vehicle. Law enforcement has then seized the vehicle.
Quick question: Imagine your vehicle right now. Is there a trace of cocaine under the hubcaps? How about an old joint in the crevice of the back seat? Some meth hidden before the air filter?
How these laws ever survived constitutional challenges puzzles me.
When the grandparent mentioned a 10 minute delay in switching from ACAD to ArcMap running on the same computer, and implies that the delay mostly disappeared when he was on a hyperthreaded system, I had one thought:
The "slow" system was slow due to lack of memory (and perhaps due to slower drive access speed for virtual memory).
For two systems where the only major difference is a hyperthreaded CPU on one machine, I wouldn't expect a 10 minute switching time to mostly disappear.
So if I shoot you it's because I played Doom, and if I stab you it's because I play D&D. What about: Fists and feet Piano Wire Strangulation/Suffocation Drowning Starvation Food poisoning
[Re: A SF short story about a paranoid guy whose computers would panic if the correct password was entered the first time.]
It sounds like a cyberpunk short story by Orson Scott Card called _Dogwalker_.
The main character has half a braincase full of computer crystals, due to an accident at an early age. The combination of crystals and good ol' wetware gives him a knack at guessing passwords.
Why do gun owners seemingly fantasize over the scenarios in which they may use their gun. It always sounds almost masturbatory.
Bunch of freaks.
Now excuse me, I'm going to play CounterStrike:Source on my brand new Intel 3.73GHz Pentium 4EE Processer with 2MB cache, my 10k rpm Raptor SATA drives (raid 0 for speed), 2 GB of PC4800 memory and ATi FireGL X3 256MB GDDR3 memory!
I'm going to cream the competition! Nobody will be left alive -- I can't wait!
Robert Heinlein had a story[1] that concerned this.
Each person should have two copies of the same gene -- a copy from his mother, and a copy from his father. That person will only pass one of those genes to his child, and the child's other copy will come from his partner.
In the Heinlein story, a couple would go to the doctor's office when they wanted a child, and the doctor would choose the best genes from each couple from each baby. So if the father had one gene for type I diabetes, and one normal gene, the normal gene would be passed on to the child. However, no genes were added -- if the mother was colorblind (a trait that requires two defective X chromosomes) her children would receive one defective gene, but the gene would probably be weeded out by her grandchildren's generation. There were also couples who'd receive benefits for having children the old fashioned way -- the "backup plan" in case the "good" genes had some unknown destructive trait.
I can't say I see much of a problem with that. My grandmother died in her 80s without losing any of her adult teeth -- her genes led to strong, hard teeth. I'm not so lucky -- I already have more of my fair share of cavities in my mid 20s.
With current medical science, those genes are unlikely to weed themselves out of the human race. Thousands of years ago, my poor teeth would have resulted in a decreased ability to eat, which would have resulted in malnutrition and the resulting health problems and, in short, I'd probably end up as tiger food, reducing the number of bad-teeth genes in the population. With current medical science, I can get nice white fillings and my teeth look great. Odds are good that I'll survive long enough to pass my bad teeth genes to my offspring.
Under the idea of selecting the "best" genes, we would be encouraging a more intelligent evolution without the need for any of us to be eaten by those pesky tigers.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
[1] It was the one with rugged men, beautiful women, a libertarian government, and shooting.
If the "features" are insecure, would you want them?
User: I want to be able to log in without a user name or a password! Remotely!
Tech: That's horribly insecure
User: I don't care! Its easier that way!
Tech: * finds rusty knife and commits seppuku *
And that, boys and girls, is one of the reasons why Microsoft is the 800 lb gorilla. It understands that users are more than willing to sacrifice security on the altar of 'its easier that way'.
Currently, my understanding of MMORPGs is that they keep a copy of the world on each server. When a player logs into that server, that player exists only in that server's copy of the world.
Why can't MMORPGs set up the server-clusters so that the world is partitioned into seperate zones on the servers, depending on load. So a player can (say) log onto the European server cluster, enter zone Foo, and the zones Foo, Bar, and Baz are currently located on server #5. If zone Bar gets too many players on it, zone Bar is seemlessly transferred to a mostly idle server along with all of its players.
What's preventing this?
Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Now, I'm sure a buncha people are going to get up-in-arms screaming 'Men
are not better than women!'. To which I wholeheartedly agree. However,
people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on
computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who
spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be
men.
I was trying to explain male geekery to my wife the other day.
Her: "Women aren't encouraged to be nerds. If they are interested in
geeky things, they are teased and degraded."
We all remember Episodes I - III with fond memories from our childhood, and
they seemed to have stood up well to the test of time. The slowly building
arc of Anakin's fall from the dark side against the backdrop of the crumbling
republic made for some good cinema. Sure, there were a few mistakes
(Jar Jar), but none as annoying as the new trilogy (Episode IV-VI) that
Lucas started producing a few years ago.
Compare: The multi-facetted Anakin vs the rather shallow Luke who has the
depth of the average parking lot puddle. Or what about this 'Han Solo'
character which seems right out of a John Wayne western? Instead of
political intrigue, we have straight shoot-em-up space battles. And don't
get me started on the third movie -- according to the leaks, not only is
it going to have Luke blowing up the Death Star yet again, but it will have
these cute cuddly teddy bear aliens that are an obvious ploy to appeal to
the youngsters.
Lucas! Stop raping my childhood! Ugh, you should have stopped with
Episode III back in the 80s. How dare you ruin all that was good in your
quest for more money!
(This post brought to you by an alternative-timeline slashdot)
In this case, the large object was a land attack, so fixing the pipe and
noting that shoving a large object through the pipe did not break it would
be expected. However, windows is not a leaky pipe, and it doesn't suffer
from cold weather or any other sort of physical degradation. Put simply,
this is a known vulnerability that should have been tested as part of QA.
It wasn't.
I was reading `The Pragmatic Programmer' last night, and I believe it
mentions that one a bug is found and fixed, your automatic testing
scripts should be modified to test for that bug.
This is going to make a pretty good example for the next edition.;)
Please explain why. New laws suck. 99% of the time the old existing laws
are completely capable of handling the problem... just enforce the laws we
have.
Here's my theory what happens:
Imagine a congressman or congresswoman wants to appear to be doing something.
Or perhaps they are just naive. Either way, they come up with a new law
which more or less covers an existing law. We'll use a hypothetical
"Violence against Women Act 2005", which makes kidnapping a woman across
state lines a federal offense.
Now, its already illegal to kidnap someone across state lines, as we all
should know. However, considering that there is a 2006 election just around
the corner, the average member of congress will not vote against this act --
just imagine the attack ads if he did!
Look at the AARP -- they are being attacked by USA Next for supporting
gay marriage. What really happened is that Ohio was passing a
constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The bill was broad enough
to apply to unmarried cohabiting heterosexual seniors. The AARP, acting
in the best interests of its members opposed the bill, and now we see
ads about how AARP is for gay marriage.
So, let me ask you one question: Why are you against punishing criminals?
Your opponent will be asking you this question in 2006.
As always, there is a Simpson's quote for this. Episode 2F11, where Bart
discovers a comet that happens to be directly headed towards Springfield:
KENT BROCKMAN
With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into
action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States
congress.
SPEAKER
Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of
Springfield in the great state of--
CONGRESSMAN
Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill - $30 million of taxpayer
money to support the perverted arts.
SPEAKER
All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
One thing that has bugged me a long time about a lot of games (this has
particular relevence to multi-player games, but also single player games to
some extent) is the 'game loading' screen. Or rather, the fact that during
the 'loading' screen I lose all control of, and ability to interact, with
the program.
It has always seemed to me, that it should be possible, with a sufficiently
clever multi-threaded approach, to create a game engine where I could, for
example, keep chatting with other players while the level/zone/map that I'm
transitioning to is being loaded.
You don't technically need multithreading to make the game seem responsive
while its doing something.
Imagine:
while ( load_tiny_bit_of_map() ) { if ( check_input() ) { process_input(); } }
Assuming that the function 'load_tiny_bit_of_map()' takes only a few
dozen milliseconds, you won't notice it.
Being multithreaded makes that a bit easier, but other parts of the game
may grow in complexity (depending on the game). The reason why that's not
done is lazyness/lack of time/poor feedback. (I always thought there
should be a minigame or something while maps load...)
And what if we told
more young women about the likes of Grace Hopper and Augusta Ada Byron?
Lets avoid emphasizing the Countess of Lovelace, since there is some controversy over her role in Babbage's engine. There is good evidence that the was a translater, not a programmer.
Err, the Swiss army knife of networking is netcat.
While netcat describes itself as a swiss-army knife, ssh has a
nice set of tools.
Lets say I bring my laptop to a cybercafe, and I realize I want to check
my email at home. I can ssh to my server (all ports blocked except 22),
and forward ports 25 and 143 to my laptop.
After I'm done reading my email, I may want to launch an X client from
my desktop. 'ssh -X -C server', then on the server, 'ssh -X desktop'
and launch my client.
What about doing someting on that pesky win32 box with vnc running?
Its on its own private subnet. ssh myserver.com -L 5900:10.0.0.1:5900.
Guess where port 5900 on my local machine is pointing to now?
Combine all of that with scp and ssh-agent and you have a powerful
set of tools.
netcat is nice, but it lacks encryption. nc + ssh is a nice duo -- letting
ssh set up an encrypted tunnel, and using nc to communicate through that
tunnel.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard reports of a remarkable new fuel called 'coal' which should last for the next 300 years. If you want to consider the long term, breeder reactors, with current technology, should last for thousands of years. (The upper theoretical threshold is somewhere in the millions or billions of years!)
I think your prediction of a power crunch is a tad premature.
Sure, we will do more harm to the environment. Our money will continue to flow to unstable countries. But forecasting the end of civilization due to peak oil is similar to forecasting the end of civilization due to peak whale oil.
Willow? Willow?
Can you name 10 sword & sorcery fantasy movies[1] that were better than Willow?
(I hope I'm wrong. I want a list of 10 decent sword & sorcery fantasy movies.)
PS: I have yet to understand the appeal of THX-1138.
[1] Series count as one movie.
Speaking of punishment-fitting-the-crime, a man in the last area I lived in received a 6 year prison sentence for shooting his soon-to-be-ex wife in the head while she slept, killing her.
Just imagine -- sharing two movies is the same as murder.
*boggles at the concept*
How likely is that? Looking at wikipedia, it seems that the majority of type II diabetes sufferers are obese. It also mentions that "Other research shows that type 2 diabetes causes obesity."
If you think that most scholars place the Gospel of Thomas after 145 AD, then I would suggest finding your references, heading over to wikipedia, and correcting their article.
The wikians seem to think that the Gospel of Thomas was most likely written in the 50s or 90s.
Don't consider Galileo's spat with the church to be a matter of science vs. a matter of religion.
Galileo was often a rather brash, blunt person. One of his writings that attacked the geocentric viewpoint could be interpreted as attacking the pope.
If you google, you can find Galileo's denouncement of the Jesuits for believing that comets are bodies that exist between the earth and the sun: Galileo knew that comets were an artifact of the atmosphere and basically said that the Jesuits had no concept of (natural) philosophy [science].
Combine this personality with a theocracy and its not hard to see why he was put on trial.
It doesn't even require that. Look at the drug laws . Once drugs is found on/in your property, you can lose that property. It doesn't require being accused of a crime and it doesn't require a trial.
There have been cases where people have purchased vehicles, been pulled over, and the cops have found drugs in the vehicle. Law enforcement has then seized the vehicle.
Quick question: Imagine your vehicle right now. Is there a trace of cocaine under the hubcaps? How about an old joint in the crevice of the back seat? Some meth hidden before the air filter?
How these laws ever survived constitutional challenges puzzles me.
When the grandparent mentioned a 10 minute delay in switching from ACAD to ArcMap running on the same computer, and implies that the delay mostly disappeared when he was on a hyperthreaded system, I had one thought:
The "slow" system was slow due to lack of memory (and perhaps due to slower drive access speed for virtual memory).
For two systems where the only major difference is a hyperthreaded CPU on one machine, I wouldn't expect a 10 minute switching time to mostly disappear.
Dev: "Here's a version of GIMP that acts like photoshop."
User: "Wahhhh! Why can't the Open Source community ever do anything innovative instead of just copying commercial software!"
I think its PHB speak for 'checks every byte of the application.'
The feature list seems to indicate that it just checks byte-for-byte of the binary, with some allowance for blocks being shifted.
From the page:
Looks like "UltraCompare" has no more ability to check if binaries are from the same code than a decent implimentation of cmp or diff.
I call it bloatware.
Nethack.
Everyone knows that D&D only caused murders in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, it was metal music.
In the post-2000 world, Grand Theft Auto is the cause of all crime.
It sounds like a cyberpunk short story by Orson Scott Card called _Dogwalker_.
The main character has half a braincase full of computer crystals, due to an accident at an early age. The combination of crystals and good ol' wetware gives him a knack at guessing passwords.
Not a bad short story.
Bunch of freaks.
Now excuse me, I'm going to play CounterStrike:Source on my brand new Intel 3.73GHz Pentium 4EE Processer with 2MB cache, my 10k rpm Raptor SATA drives (raid 0 for speed), 2 GB of PC4800 memory and ATi FireGL X3 256MB GDDR3 memory!
I'm going to cream the competition! Nobody will be left alive -- I can't wait!
Robert Heinlein had a story[1] that concerned this.
Each person should have two copies of the same gene -- a copy from his mother, and a copy from his father. That person will only pass one of those genes to his child, and the child's other copy will come from his partner.
In the Heinlein story, a couple would go to the doctor's office when they wanted a child, and the doctor would choose the best genes from each couple from each baby. So if the father had one gene for type I diabetes, and one normal gene, the normal gene would be passed on to the child. However, no genes were added -- if the mother was colorblind (a trait that requires two defective X chromosomes) her children would receive one defective gene, but the gene would probably be weeded out by her grandchildren's generation. There were also couples who'd receive benefits for having children the old fashioned way -- the "backup plan" in case the "good" genes had some unknown destructive trait.
I can't say I see much of a problem with that. My grandmother died in her 80s without losing any of her adult teeth -- her genes led to strong, hard teeth. I'm not so lucky -- I already have more of my fair share of cavities in my mid 20s.
With current medical science, those genes are unlikely to weed themselves out of the human race. Thousands of years ago, my poor teeth would have resulted in a decreased ability to eat, which would have resulted in malnutrition and the resulting health problems and, in short, I'd probably end up as tiger food, reducing the number of bad-teeth genes in the population. With current medical science, I can get nice white fillings and my teeth look great. Odds are good that I'll survive long enough to pass my bad teeth genes to my offspring.
Under the idea of selecting the "best" genes, we would be encouraging a more intelligent evolution without the need for any of us to be eaten by those pesky tigers.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
[1] It was the one with rugged men, beautiful women, a libertarian government, and shooting.
User: I want to be able to log in without a user name or a password! Remotely!
Tech: That's horribly insecure
User: I don't care! Its easier that way!
Tech: * finds rusty knife and commits seppuku *
And that, boys and girls, is one of the reasons why Microsoft is the 800 lb gorilla. It understands that users are more than willing to sacrifice security on the altar of 'its easier that way'.
Currently, my understanding of MMORPGs is that they keep a copy of the world on each server. When a player logs into that server, that player exists only in that server's copy of the world.
Why can't MMORPGs set up the server-clusters so that the world is partitioned into seperate zones on the servers, depending on load. So a player can (say) log onto the European server cluster, enter zone Foo, and the zones Foo, Bar, and Baz are currently located on server #5. If zone Bar gets too many players on it, zone Bar is seemlessly transferred to a mostly idle server along with all of its players.
What's preventing this?
I was trying to explain male geekery to my wife the other day.
Her: "Women aren't encouraged to be nerds. If they are interested in geeky things, they are teased and degraded."
Me: "What do you think happens to male nerds?"
We all remember Episodes I - III with fond memories from our childhood, and they seemed to have stood up well to the test of time. The slowly building arc of Anakin's fall from the dark side against the backdrop of the crumbling republic made for some good cinema. Sure, there were a few mistakes (Jar Jar), but none as annoying as the new trilogy (Episode IV-VI) that Lucas started producing a few years ago.
Compare: The multi-facetted Anakin vs the rather shallow Luke who has the depth of the average parking lot puddle. Or what about this 'Han Solo' character which seems right out of a John Wayne western? Instead of political intrigue, we have straight shoot-em-up space battles. And don't get me started on the third movie -- according to the leaks, not only is it going to have Luke blowing up the Death Star yet again, but it will have these cute cuddly teddy bear aliens that are an obvious ploy to appeal to the youngsters.
Lucas! Stop raping my childhood! Ugh, you should have stopped with Episode III back in the 80s. How dare you ruin all that was good in your quest for more money!
(This post brought to you by an alternative-timeline slashdot)
I was reading `The Pragmatic Programmer' last night, and I believe it mentions that one a bug is found and fixed, your automatic testing scripts should be modified to test for that bug.
This is going to make a pretty good example for the next edition. ;)
Here's my theory what happens:
Imagine a congressman or congresswoman wants to appear to be doing something. Or perhaps they are just naive. Either way, they come up with a new law which more or less covers an existing law. We'll use a hypothetical "Violence against Women Act 2005", which makes kidnapping a woman across state lines a federal offense.
Now, its already illegal to kidnap someone across state lines, as we all should know. However, considering that there is a 2006 election just around the corner, the average member of congress will not vote against this act -- just imagine the attack ads if he did!
Look at the AARP -- they are being attacked by USA Next for supporting gay marriage. What really happened is that Ohio was passing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The bill was broad enough to apply to unmarried cohabiting heterosexual seniors. The AARP, acting in the best interests of its members opposed the bill, and now we see ads about how AARP is for gay marriage.
So, let me ask you one question: Why are you against punishing criminals? Your opponent will be asking you this question in 2006.
As always, there is a Simpson's quote for this. Episode 2F11, where Bart discovers a comet that happens to be directly headed towards Springfield:
You don't technically need multithreading to make the game seem responsive while its doing something.
Imagine:
Assuming that the function 'load_tiny_bit_of_map()' takes only a few dozen milliseconds, you won't notice it.
Being multithreaded makes that a bit easier, but other parts of the game may grow in complexity (depending on the game). The reason why that's not done is lazyness/lack of time/poor feedback. (I always thought there should be a minigame or something while maps load...)
Lets avoid emphasizing the Countess of Lovelace, since there is some controversy over her role in Babbage's engine. There is good evidence that the was a translater, not a programmer.
Grace Hopper makes a much better heroine.
While netcat describes itself as a swiss-army knife, ssh has a nice set of tools.
Lets say I bring my laptop to a cybercafe, and I realize I want to check my email at home. I can ssh to my server (all ports blocked except 22), and forward ports 25 and 143 to my laptop.
After I'm done reading my email, I may want to launch an X client from my desktop. 'ssh -X -C server', then on the server, 'ssh -X desktop' and launch my client.
What about doing someting on that pesky win32 box with vnc running? Its on its own private subnet. ssh myserver.com -L 5900:10.0.0.1:5900. Guess where port 5900 on my local machine is pointing to now?
Combine all of that with scp and ssh-agent and you have a powerful set of tools.
netcat is nice, but it lacks encryption. nc + ssh is a nice duo -- letting ssh set up an encrypted tunnel, and using nc to communicate through that tunnel.