Aldus Huxley would have been proud of us, in so little time we - as a society - have already started to walk down the path he wrote...
Damn, I can imagine several good things from DNA fingerprinting (unrefutable signatures, perfect identity tests, possible location of lost/missing people, etc.) but I can also see ONE single argument as to why this is bad:
Man (as in species, not male) wants power. The ultimate power one person can have over others is the power to take their lives away - not by killing them, but to take away ANY and ALL freedom to do as they please. Think of it, would you prefer to be dead or to be a mindless minion? DNA fingerprinting takes away any means to keep yourself anonymous - that's why I think this is terrible. Normal folks (Janes, Johns and Rupauls) shouldn't have to do this - never.
One may argue that criminals deserve this and on some levels I'd agree - life sentance, repeat rapists or murders (some escape jail you know) and other VERY dangerous prisoners may deserve this but the legal system would have to be VERY VERY VERY trustworthy and apply this sentance only ocassionaly. It's a definate violation of privacy but this could be an intresting form of punishment for the repeat muderer - but not for the average pickpocket!
Anyway, I really don't mind the RIAA screwing Britney (... oh yeah...) or Metallica but the artists and the press forgeting to mention that they are being screwed by the RIAA is just another log for the ever present consipracy bonfire.
No real reason to, it's a problem in the USA - I bought one - as a matter of fact I wear it them to work and I work "for the man" (for a brazilian government organization)...
Maybe MS will release a new "Kernel Feature"(tm) that needs to be installed to be able to use their "MS Linucks"(tm) applications.
Alright, I had my fun but MS creaping up (in the still of the night, in Israel with a French group) and porting apps - either they wanted to be able to deny the fact or they were planing some dastardly devious plot for "Total World Domination, MS Style".
This is neat, a first post about perl that doesn't necessarily flame it to death.
My $5 are on obfuscated, perl can be used to generate really neat and inteligable (sp?) code if you're not too lazy. Since I'm REALLY lazy, I'll submit some of my code.
As a suggestion, they should have a category for the smallest program to serve a webpage - that'll be intresting, coding an http 1.0 daemon and serving a page without using any modules. Just a thought...
I was thinking about what ESR said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and putting it together with the early Linux kernel - Linus (you know, that guy from Finland) only released the first kernel when it was bootable - and just bearly.
Release early is "A Good Thing"(tm) but too early isn't good - I've seen so many useful and intresting projects die because they were released with unusable code.
I've had a similar problem earlier this year, in Febuary to be exact, I pulled through thanks to a few lifestyle changes I've made - not that my previous ways were wrong but taking a new perspective on life is always "A Good Thing"(tm).
First of all I started going to the gym - sure I'm no Hanz and Franz (primitive SNL culture for the contemporary nerds) but it helps me unwind beyond anything that I've ever imagined - pumping iron helps pump some blood around and helped me to cool off from programmer's block - I used to be so stressed that I used to fall asleep on the stationary bikes!
Second, I've gone back to playing some FPS games - sure I've got a massive machine with a Voodoo 3 video board (it helps to have a good machine at these times). I know it's not exactly the most professional thing to do - I FPS at work - but whenever I come to some code that doesn't want to be typed, I load up Unreal Tournament or Quake 3, go into a little deathmatch with the bots until I forget my worries (usually some 10 minutes, I REALLY suck at Quake 3 so it takes a little more there). When I'm done and the Fragrush goes down I feel like I've just arrived at work - I suddenly have a clear head and some more patience with myself.
Oh - another thing - I read A LOT of Slashdot, I browse at -1 just to laugh at the posts that manage to get moderated down, some of those guys are REALLY creative.:)
Rob et. al. does have the technical knowledge, man power, computer power and bandwidth to force a small Slashdot-like site down. After all, Kuro5hin was always said to be better than Slashdot.
... then again...:)
Hey, it's supposed to be funny - I read Kuro5hin to complement Slashdot...
The true spirit of mass human communication?
on
Geek Flavor
·
· Score: 1
My girlfriends calls the world that you and I want Utopia. I agree with you all the way, idiots can ruin great things without a moment's notice.
Humans CAN'T get along, people are impaired from helping each other, one would rather kill his friend to get the big bag of money than save his friend and get a lesser bag. I came across a site yesterday that talks about The Prisoner's Dilemma - very intresting reading about human nature. This Geekflavor incident is a clear demonstration of this, script kiddiots and e-tards working together to blast "A Good Thing"(tm) clear out of the water.
Well, on the other hand, it did come out on Slashdot...
Give an e-tard a shell account on a public system so he can build an empire and the first thing the e-tard will do is upload a rootkit - he probably doesn't even KNOW how to upload the kit, he'll probably run some script to set the system up and go around giving sh0uts that he's so 31337 or even better, he's 1337...
It is snowing in Hell! I repeat, it is snowing in hell! Hell has frozen over! Satan and Saddam have been seen looking for blankets...
Seriously - that must be "A Good Thing"(tm).... BUT... we can't forget that we _are_ talking about Microsoft - the makers of MS Bob and Clippy the Paperclip from Hell...
... maybe all those personal homepages at Yahoo/Geocities are plotting to overthrow the WTO or the WWF or something...:)
Seriously, that wouldn't be all that bad - maybe even using Slashdot - post something on one of the hidden discussion boards or in one of the articles as a certain user or even as an AC - could work...
Then again, Slashdot is free speech so maybe somewhere else...
I use Netscape 4.74 on Windows NT 4.0 (SP5, pt_BR - damn), Windows 98 (home_pc) and Connectiva Linux (my work's network heavy-duty proxy and the same distro I use at home) under KDE and kernel 2.2.16. It works just fine on all of them. Sure, none of them has less than 256Mb of RAM and 2 of the 3 computers listed are dual Pentium II-500 - but I'm just bragging...:)
Netscape 4.74 (came out a few days ago I think) is just fine for me! Sure it isn't the best thing around but it doesn't crash that much on me, as a matter of fact it crashes less than the rest of the software I use.
On the development side, I HATE bloat sites - since Netscape 4.74 doesn't render MS-Bloat(tm) I get along just fine. I REALLY don't see what the whole fuss is about.
I know you mentioned that you're willing to put a fair amount of money on the system but a while ago I wanted to get rid of all the noise my computer made and didn't want to invest more than I had so I came up with a few cheaper solutions:
1 - I came up with the idea of putting my box under my desk inside a double cardboard box (a 14" monitor box inside a 17" monitor box with that weird foam/sponge from my old pillows in between them)
2 - The box was set on it's side and put next to the coolest wall in the house (hopefully the cold wall would cool the air and to let it recirculate) . The cables were all sent out through the handle openings to my desk.
3 - For audio, I bought a cheap (US$ 30) wireless (radio) headphone set - works like a charm, a gazillion times better than my other set. BTW, I use headphones cause when I'm gaming I don't want ANYTHING to bother me. For line out and mic I bought some 2 meter (about 7 feet for you non-metric geeks) headphone cables and made a pair of extension cords that are next to my monitor - I plug it into my surround sound system (for heavy duty gaming).
That's about it - it's very quiet, not silent. I've been running it since and so far so good - I've overclocked my processor, added a 20gig 7200 RPM HD (with fans) and added a pair of old 486 cooler fans to blow the hot air out the top.
I have an external Zipdrive and I've got an internal one at work (with more bandwith) so I just ditched my 3.5 drive. My CD-ROM drive is internal so I have to sit on the cold floor once in a while to change a CD or whatever...
My rambling probably didn't help you out but my dumb little setup is quiet enough for me and only set me back some $ 45.
They already have http://www.corinthians.com.br/ in BRAZIL now they also want it under the infamous dotcom? Damn, why don't they go all the f**kin way and register under ALL the other TLD in ALL the other countries?
Sorry for the rant but I get p***ed off whenever brazilian companies register dotcoms "just to be cool"... Well they can just "tomar no cÃ"!
BTW, gasoline around here is some US$ 0.65 (USA Dollars) per LITER (not gallon) and ethanol is US$ 0.35 per liter. A nice saving but the differance between the two is always fluctuating.
As a brazilian and as a user of both types of engines (my own car is methanol based, 1.6 l engine and my boss' car - gasoline based 1.6 l engine also) - both get me to where I wanna go but the methanol based one saves me some 40% to 50% on my gas expenses.
As to the environmental issues, this is a tropical country that's tipically hot and humid (at least around where I live), I've never heard of any major side effects due to the methanol engine - as a matter of fact my university studies this region very intensively and the only major ecological impact this region has had in the last 25 years was the construction of a dam which increased local average yearly moisture in 5%.
My observations - I've got no ideia how MP3s are supposed to be but this is how it works for me:
I've rigged an icecast server on a machine streaming voice audio and another machine capturing the stream and saving it to an MP3 file. I use netcat to listen and redirect the output straight to the target file, VERY simple and VERY reliable (believe it or not).
Opening the MP3 file with WinAmp as it's being written to causes the player to ignore the file (like it's malformed). After the recording, opening it in WinAmp plays the file exactly like it's supposed to, it reads the correct bitrate and time. Reading the strings in the file I get a little plaintext header (the icecast server data) and that's about it, no other info.
Anyway, I've never worried about any proper MP3 header but all I know is that these stream-saved MP3s work perfectly with aparently no header.
Hey, what about the probe Galileu dropped to take a few snapshots? Hasn't NASA finished processing the data yet? If they need some extra FLOPS, why not create a new distributed project?
Most countries use mil and gov TLD as a SLD (second level domain(tm)). For example: brasil.gov.br (brazilian government).
I don't think it's such a bad thing, if brazil was an english speaking language and our president lived in a white palace, we could have a perfectly legal and valid: whitehouse.gov.br.
Alright - this isn't about the UK but I have the same problem.
Anyway, I've found a pseudo-substitute, it's a candy called "Coffee-Go", it's american but it's pretty common around here (in Brazil) - two of them are enough to give me a 5 minute rush. Other acceptable caffine rich alternatives that I've tried are "Red Bull"-like drinks (kind of expensive though) and Guaraná (it's a Brazilian softdrink that you can buy in powder around here, VERY good stuff).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's great to interact with other humans in the Simcities or in The Sims - but wait till someone finds out how to PK...
Aldus Huxley would have been proud of us, in so little time we - as a society - have already started to walk down the path he wrote...
Damn, I can imagine several good things from DNA fingerprinting (unrefutable signatures, perfect identity tests, possible location of lost/missing people, etc.) but I can also see ONE single argument as to why this is bad:
Man (as in species, not male) wants power. The ultimate power one person can have over others is the power to take their lives away - not by killing them, but to take away ANY and ALL freedom to do as they please. Think of it, would you prefer to be dead or to be a mindless minion? DNA fingerprinting takes away any means to keep yourself anonymous - that's why I think this is terrible. Normal folks (Janes, Johns and Rupauls) shouldn't have to do this - never.
One may argue that criminals deserve this and on some levels I'd agree - life sentance, repeat rapists or murders (some escape jail you know) and other VERY dangerous prisoners may deserve this but the legal system would have to be VERY VERY VERY trustworthy and apply this sentance only ocassionaly. It's a definate violation of privacy but this could be an intresting form of punishment for the repeat muderer - but not for the average pickpocket!
That's my rant... Mod as you wish.
Sorry, but this is another repeat article.
...) or Metallica but the artists and the press forgeting to mention that they are being screwed by the RIAA is just another log for the ever present consipracy bonfire.
Anyway, I really don't mind the RIAA screwing Britney (... oh yeah
No real reason to, it's a problem in the USA - I bought one - as a matter of fact I wear it them to work and I work "for the man" (for a brazilian government organization)...
BTW, I'm brazilian too...
How much are the applications going to cost?
Maybe MS will release a new "Kernel Feature"(tm) that needs to be installed to be able to use their "MS Linucks"(tm) applications.
Alright, I had my fun but MS creaping up (in the still of the night, in Israel with a French group) and porting apps - either they wanted to be able to deny the fact or they were planing some dastardly devious plot for "Total World Domination, MS Style".
This is neat, a first post about perl that doesn't necessarily flame it to death.
My $5 are on obfuscated, perl can be used to generate really neat and inteligable (sp?) code if you're not too lazy. Since I'm REALLY lazy, I'll submit some of my code.
As a suggestion, they should have a category for the smallest program to serve a webpage - that'll be intresting, coding an http 1.0 daemon and serving a page without using any modules. Just a thought...
I was thinking about what ESR said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and putting it together with the early Linux kernel - Linus (you know, that guy from Finland) only released the first kernel when it was bootable - and just bearly.
Release early is "A Good Thing"(tm) but too early isn't good - I've seen so many useful and intresting projects die because they were released with unusable code.
As said by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Ooops, typos on the subject are worse than da onez inzaide da comment!
I've had a similar problem earlier this year, in Febuary to be exact, I pulled through thanks to a few lifestyle changes I've made - not that my previous ways were wrong but taking a new perspective on life is always "A Good Thing"(tm).
:)
First of all I started going to the gym - sure I'm no Hanz and Franz (primitive SNL culture for the contemporary nerds) but it helps me unwind beyond anything that I've ever imagined - pumping iron helps pump some blood around and helped me to cool off from programmer's block - I used to be so stressed that I used to fall asleep on the stationary bikes!
Second, I've gone back to playing some FPS games - sure I've got a massive machine with a Voodoo 3 video board (it helps to have a good machine at these times). I know it's not exactly the most professional thing to do - I FPS at work - but whenever I come to some code that doesn't want to be typed, I load up Unreal Tournament or Quake 3, go into a little deathmatch with the bots until I forget my worries (usually some 10 minutes, I REALLY suck at Quake 3 so it takes a little more there). When I'm done and the Fragrush goes down I feel like I've just arrived at work - I suddenly have a clear head and some more patience with myself.
Oh - another thing - I read A LOT of Slashdot, I browse at -1 just to laugh at the posts that manage to get moderated down, some of those guys are REALLY creative.
Maybe Slashdot forced them down?
... :)
Rob et. al. does have the technical knowledge, man power, computer power and bandwidth to force a small Slashdot-like site down. After all, Kuro5hin was always said to be better than Slashdot.
... then again
Hey, it's supposed to be funny - I read Kuro5hin to complement Slashdot...
My girlfriends calls the world that you and I want Utopia. I agree with you all the way, idiots can ruin great things without a moment's notice.
Humans CAN'T get along, people are impaired from helping each other, one would rather kill his friend to get the big bag of money than save his friend and get a lesser bag. I came across a site yesterday that talks about The Prisoner's Dilemma - very intresting reading about human nature. This Geekflavor incident is a clear demonstration of this, script kiddiots and e-tards working together to blast "A Good Thing"(tm) clear out of the water.
Well, on the other hand, it did come out on Slashdot...
... it's those damn script kiddiots...
Give an e-tard a shell account on a public system so he can build an empire and the first thing the e-tard will do is upload a rootkit - he probably doesn't even KNOW how to upload the kit, he'll probably run some script to set the system up and go around giving sh0uts that he's so 31337 or even better, he's 1337...
It is snowing in Hell! I repeat, it is snowing in hell! Hell has frozen over! Satan and Saddam have been seen looking for blankets...
:)
Seriously - that must be "A Good Thing"(tm).... BUT... we can't forget that we _are_ talking about Microsoft - the makers of MS Bob and Clippy the Paperclip from Hell...
That's all, my conspiracy theory for the day...
... maybe all those personal homepages at Yahoo/Geocities are plotting to overthrow the WTO or the WWF or something... :)
Seriously, that wouldn't be all that bad - maybe even using Slashdot - post something on one of the hidden discussion boards or in one of the articles as a certain user or even as an AC - could work...
Then again, Slashdot is free speech so maybe somewhere else...
I use Netscape 4.74 on Windows NT 4.0 (SP5, pt_BR - damn), Windows 98 (home_pc) and Connectiva Linux (my work's network heavy-duty proxy and the same distro I use at home) under KDE and kernel 2.2.16. It works just fine on all of them. Sure, none of them has less than 256Mb of RAM and 2 of the 3 computers listed are dual Pentium II-500 - but I'm just bragging... :)
Netscape 4.74 (came out a few days ago I think) is just fine for me! Sure it isn't the best thing around but it doesn't crash that much on me, as a matter of fact it crashes less than the rest of the software I use.
On the development side, I HATE bloat sites - since Netscape 4.74 doesn't render MS-Bloat(tm) I get along just fine. I REALLY don't see what the whole fuss is about.
I know you mentioned that you're willing to put a fair amount of money on the system but a while ago I wanted to get rid of all the noise my computer made and didn't want to invest more than I had so I came up with a few cheaper solutions:
1 - I came up with the idea of putting my box under my desk inside a double cardboard box (a 14" monitor box inside a 17" monitor box with that weird foam/sponge from my old pillows in between them)
2 - The box was set on it's side and put next to the coolest wall in the house (hopefully the cold wall would cool the air and to let it recirculate) . The cables were all sent out through the handle openings to my desk.
3 - For audio, I bought a cheap (US$ 30) wireless (radio) headphone set - works like a charm, a gazillion times better than my other set. BTW, I use headphones cause when I'm gaming I don't want ANYTHING to bother me. For line out and mic I bought some 2 meter (about 7 feet for you non-metric geeks) headphone cables and made a pair of extension cords that are next to my monitor - I plug it into my surround sound system (for heavy duty gaming).
That's about it - it's very quiet, not silent. I've been running it since and so far so good - I've overclocked my processor, added a 20gig 7200 RPM HD (with fans) and added a pair of old 486 cooler fans to blow the hot air out the top.
I have an external Zipdrive and I've got an internal one at work (with more bandwith) so I just ditched my 3.5 drive. My CD-ROM drive is internal so I have to sit on the cold floor once in a while to change a CD or whatever...
My rambling probably didn't help you out but my dumb little setup is quiet enough for me and only set me back some $ 45.
Alright, this has gone WAY to far...
They already have http://www.corinthians.com.br/ in BRAZIL now they also want it under the infamous dotcom? Damn, why don't they go all the f**kin way and register under ALL the other TLD in ALL the other countries?
Sorry for the rant but I get p***ed off whenever brazilian companies register dotcoms "just to be cool"... Well they can just "tomar no cÃ"!
It's ethanol... the other poster was right... :)
BTW, gasoline around here is some US$ 0.65 (USA Dollars) per LITER (not gallon) and ethanol is US$ 0.35 per liter. A nice saving but the differance between the two is always fluctuating.
(PoV as in Point of View)
As a brazilian and as a user of both types of engines (my own car is methanol based, 1.6 l engine and my boss' car - gasoline based 1.6 l engine also) - both get me to where I wanna go but the methanol based one saves me some 40% to 50% on my gas expenses.
As to the environmental issues, this is a tropical country that's tipically hot and humid (at least around where I live), I've never heard of any major side effects due to the methanol engine - as a matter of fact my university studies this region very intensively and the only major ecological impact this region has had in the last 25 years was the construction of a dam which increased local average yearly moisture in 5%.
My observations - I've got no ideia how MP3s are supposed to be but this is how it works for me:
I've rigged an icecast server on a machine streaming voice audio and another machine capturing the stream and saving it to an MP3 file. I use netcat to listen and redirect the output straight to the target file, VERY simple and VERY reliable (believe it or not).
Opening the MP3 file with WinAmp as it's being written to causes the player to ignore the file (like it's malformed). After the recording, opening it in WinAmp plays the file exactly like it's supposed to, it reads the correct bitrate and time. Reading the strings in the file I get a little plaintext header (the icecast server data) and that's about it, no other info.
Anyway, I've never worried about any proper MP3 header but all I know is that these stream-saved MP3s work perfectly with aparently no header.
Hey, what about the probe Galileu dropped to take a few snapshots? Hasn't NASA finished processing the data yet? If they need some extra FLOPS, why not create a new distributed project?
Yeah, that's it, NASA@Home!!
Most countries use mil and gov TLD as a SLD (second level domain(tm)). For example: brasil.gov.br (brazilian government).
I don't think it's such a bad thing, if brazil was an english speaking language and our president lived in a white palace, we could have a perfectly legal and valid: whitehouse.gov.br.
Just my $0,02...
Alright - this isn't about the UK but I have the same problem.
Anyway, I've found a pseudo-substitute, it's a candy called "Coffee-Go", it's american but it's pretty common around here (in Brazil) - two of them are enough to give me a 5 minute rush. Other acceptable caffine rich alternatives that I've tried are "Red Bull"-like drinks (kind of expensive though) and Guaraná (it's a Brazilian softdrink that you can buy in powder around here, VERY good stuff).