That's the only way to stop BitCoin, which has a god-awful carbon footprint due to all the pointless farming going on. I'd be happy to see it just go away.
If I were that employee I'd have posted to the account instead of deleting it. What words to put in his mouth, though? I'd be hard-pressed to come up with something offensive enough to shock anyone. Maybe take the other tack, and admit to some of his shit.
Denying that we are in a simulation seems a bit like pre-Galileo conventional wisdom claiming that the Earth was the center of the universe. What is so special about this universe of ours, besides the fact that we're in it?
If a well-financed team of humans could create a simulated "universe" in a computer with sufficient complexity that evolved beings in the simulation exhibit "intelligent" characteristics, then that seems like a good bet that someone could have done that for us. It actually seems much more plausible than the other alternatives. Wait, what are the other alternatives again?
I couldn't quite believe he was aiming us right into the fire. He sure
didn't look suicidal, but whatever he had in mind was beyond me.
At last he grabbed the mutated gearshift. I managed to keep one eye
on his hands as the wildfire bore down on us. Now we'd see something.
The conical hood omament suddenly pronged forward, stretching out
through a widening hole until it looked like a robot anteater snout.
Then it shot out a brilliant sky-blue stream of some glowing, crackling
liquid unlike anything I'd ever seen, all over the onrushing flames.
"Great Zot! What is that stuff?"
"Condensed space-juice. Supercooled fresh-squeezed electron fluid.
Trees can't bum under a high negative charge."
There was a lot more of it firing out from under us through that
nozzle than we could possibly have room for in any concealed tanks.
"Where's it all coming from?"
"We draw it in as needed, and crush-cool it on the spot. No one misses
it; there's at least ten to the ninety-fourth watt-seconds per cubic centimeter, everywhere in space, including space full of matter. The primary
carrier wave of the physical universe is around sixty octaves
higher than an electron's diameter." He switched hands, kept blasting
away and pointed at a spot on the spectrum chart in the upper zone
unknown to me. "The higher the frequency, the greater the energy
density. Establish resonance with space-juice itself and you can obtain
virtually unlimited power."
The sizzling, metallic turquoise liquid was spreading out incredibly
fast wherever it hit, engulfing the flames in big round patches. It
sounded like a cross between distant artillery and huge sails flapping in
a gale as it rolled out over the blaze. The stuff went from shiny to
blurry, and expanded into thick mats of blue-white fog, as if to cool and
soothe whatever might survive of the forest.
We tilted around the western rim of the burned area, mopping up
several hot spots missed by the main volley. The pulses of juice didn't
follow exactly smooth trajectories but seemed to crackle slightly as if
along lightning discharge paths.
The otter didn't appear to be even remotely scared by all this. He just
stood resting a paw against my seat, watching and making chortling
noises.
I found my voice again, "Is this another one of those suppressed
inventions?"
"Not exactly; this one really was a bit ahead of its time. Liquid electricity doesn't have many useful applications until you make available
a virtually unlimited electron supply. The basic idea was developed by
a guy named Richard Diggs back in the late seventies, though he didn't
foresee this embodiment at the time."
StackOverflow is really impressive, and useful. I find myself adding "site:stackoverflow.com" to google queries when I'm troubleshooting some code problem. If there's an answer on there, it's almost always better than the answers on other sites. With none of the horrible multi-page answers, scribd paper, navigation hell that plagues other sites.
Great idea to branch this into other areas, but I wonder how many dedicated users you'll see like jon skeet when it comes to a parenthood advice website.
I don't use their product but http://palantirtech.com/ makes a data visualization tool and has a good blog about it, with some interesting Java dev tips thrown in. It might be overkill for the data discussed in the article summary, but sounds pretty badass.
One really interesting blog article http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/12/12/vizweek-2008-report/ talks about something called the "VAST Interactive Challenge", which as near as I can tell is a competition for data visualization tools to go head-to-head against each other. (Side note - wouldn't it be cool if more software frameworks/applications had shootouts like this?)
The blog article talks about how they had 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data. It's an interesting read, and makes you realize how useful a really good tool like this could be for finding trends in raw data.
Re:MSNBC did a report on this subject back in 2006
on
No Space Porn (For Now)
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I recall reading recently that astronauts on board the space station complained about not being able to get an erection. At all. Reduced blood flow due to zero-g might put a hamper on your porno plans. Now zero-g girl-on-girl is probably possible, and in the end a lot less messy.
Get the source code for the JDK and look through it. The collections classes are well-documented (again, by Mr. Bloch) and interesting to read through. A few other projects seem well-written, like the google collections and jgoodies bindings. Reading through the source code can be fun and informative.
Get a good IDE like IntelliJ, and pay attention to the little warnings it displays about your code. I've learned a few things just from the refactoring suggestions it pops up. Plus, Java (being typed) is really ideally suited for a powerful IDE, not like scripting languages.
Or, just get a desk you stand up at. Be sure to get one of those squishy mats to stand on. You'll find that you move around more, and burn more calories, and actually get hungry around lunch time.
When I worked sitting in a chair all day, I could go all day without eating or moving, like some kind of befingered slug. Now I'll pace around when I'm thinking, and it actually feels like a break to sit down and have lunch.
I use Earthlink as ISP and phone service (note: I would not recommend this to any sane person who doesn't enjoy long phone conversations with tech support types).
I assumed that the error pages at least had a 404 error code, but nope, they return a 200, with their own "helpful" content.
Look at this crap:
[twonky:~] sbarnum% curl -v "http://zzzslashdot.org" * About to connect() to zzzslashdot.org port 80 (#0) * Trying 209.86.66.95... connected * Connected to zzzslashdot.org (209.86.66.95) port 80 (#0) > GET / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.16.3 (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0) libcurl/7.16.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3 > Host: zzzslashdot.org > Accept: */* > < HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:13:54 GMT < Server: Apache < Content-Length: 774 < Connection: close < Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 < <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> <noscript> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;http://earthlink-help.com/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.3.1el&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=xj6e3468k634hy3945zg3zkhfn7zfgf6&ClientLocation=us&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fzzzslashdot.org%2F"/> </noscript> <script type="text/javascript"> window.location.replace("http://earthlink-help.com/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.3.1el&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=xj6e3468k634hy3945zg3zkhfn7zfgf6&ClientLocation=us&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fzzzslashdot.org%2F"); </script> </head> <body> </body> </html> * Closing connection #0 </pre>
This whole contest seems flawed. There's obviously some limit to how accurate an algorithm can be, you'll never completely predict how some person will rate a movie. You might as well try to predict what someone is going to type in a slashdot post. Sure, "First Post" is easy, and some people are more predictable than others. I'm sure there are patterns in the movie ratings of individuals, but they're not going by any strict rule of human nature.
For the Java coders out there, Google is also releasing google collections, which looks quite nice. There's a new interview here with the authors. It's fun stuff to poke around in, and appears to be extremely well-written code.
Once this stabilizes, I'll probably be using it. It's nice to see such a direct impact on my work from their contributions. Thanks guys!
Sounds like a well-executed idea. The servos are located behing the headstock where the gear boxes are. There's a separate piezo pickup used to get the individual string frequencies. When you pull up on one of the knobs, the current is sent over the strings to the servo motors to tune the strings. Very clever!
I'm skeptical how well it does, but if it works well I'd definitely use it. People are complaining that tuning is an important part of a live performance, that seems like saying broken strings and tripping over cables are an important part of a live performance.
Sounds like the exploit relies on auto-enter password fields for a domain, and then using javascript to transmit the value of thte password field to the attacker's machine.
So, not so much a coding error as a flaw in the thinking that any password field on a site should be auto-filled in. Requiring some action on the part of the user would help with this, but a better solution would be to move to openID.
It's quite conceivable that the youtube app is actually a widget, and doesn't rely on any native API at all.
Compare it to the weather and stocks widgets, which also appears on the main screen. You can certainly write a widget with an embedded video player (it's basically HTML with some optional Safari-specific drawing code).
I was going to say the same thing about LaunchBar. It's what spotlight should have been. When I'm on a computer without it I'm constantly cursing. Or installing it.
But it's ok if you get villified by the scientific community, because you're a famous author, and have your critics make guest appearances in your books as child rapists! No, not kidding.
Not the most mature response to having your ideas attacked, hey?
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center-exampl e.html
should do the trick, although I tend to be among those ridiculing the CSS zealots who resort to obscene hacks to get around using tables. This example seems like kind of a copout, since it uses the display:table functionality in CSS. So, you can't use a table, but it's perfectly fine to use a
and tell the browser to render it like a table:P
For this to work, the open source projects need to be:
Single-purpose and well-defined
Well documented
Rated/reviewed
I've been using some open source components for a recent project, so this seems pretty relevant. I needed to upload a file from Java, so used the jakarta HttpClient. Works pretty well! Likewise, I needed to handle uploads, and javamail was stripping unescaped backslashes sent by IE/WIN. Jakarta to the rescue again, they've got a handy project just for parsing multipart form data.
Both of these were things I could have implemented myself, but certainly ended up saving a lot of time and probably bugs. I was impressed with the level of documentation on the apache jakarta site, it gave me the information I needed to start using the things right away. Plus, having the jakarta project name attached to them gave me some confidence that they weren't utter garbage.
But most importantly, each of the libs is small and single-purpose, and doesn't try to be a swiss army knife. It was very nice to find two existing frameworks that did what I want, and not much more.
I kind of wish I'd done something like that XROST thing. I tried out allofmp3.com a while ago, bought 2 albums, but didn't like all the hassle of downloading them. However, the one-time email I gave to them started being inundated with spam shortly thereafter. Makes me wonder about their scruples, and how long before my credit card info follows my email address.
I guess that's an obvious lesson about doing business with shady companies. Cover thine arse.
In Carl Sagan's book 'Dragons of Eden', he links intelligence not with brain size, but with the ratio of brain size to body mass. He backs this up with some reasonable-seeming examples. I found a few here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm. Hm, except this makes mice out to be smarter than men. Explains the Douglas Adams worldview, I suppose.
It's a good read. He then goes on to analyze the Genesis story, and how the curse God inflicts on human females to endure painful childbirth after eating of the tree of knowledge is linked to the fact that our oversized noggins make the birthing process more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the only way to stop BitCoin, which has a god-awful carbon footprint due to all the pointless farming going on. I'd be happy to see it just go away.
If I were that employee I'd have posted to the account instead of deleting it. What words to put in his mouth, though? I'd be hard-pressed to come up with something offensive enough to shock anyone. Maybe take the other tack, and admit to some of his shit.
Denying that we are in a simulation seems a bit like pre-Galileo conventional wisdom claiming that the Earth was the center of the universe. What is so special about this universe of ours, besides the fact that we're in it?
If a well-financed team of humans could create a simulated "universe" in a computer with sufficient complexity that evolved beings in the simulation exhibit "intelligent" characteristics, then that seems like a good bet that someone could have done that for us. It actually seems much more plausible than the other alternatives. Wait, what are the other alternatives again?
How about a 1980's Subgenius Pulp Story?
From "Bob and The Oxygen Wars"
view-source:http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/classic/classictales/OxygenWars1.html
One of my favorite rants on C++: http://bit.ly/bchSYy
StackOverflow is really impressive, and useful. I find myself adding "site:stackoverflow.com" to google queries when I'm troubleshooting some code problem. If there's an answer on there, it's almost always better than the answers on other sites. With none of the horrible multi-page answers, scribd paper, navigation hell that plagues other sites.
Great idea to branch this into other areas, but I wonder how many dedicated users you'll see like jon skeet when it comes to a parenthood advice website.
I don't use their product but http://palantirtech.com/ makes a data visualization tool and has a good blog about it, with some interesting Java dev tips thrown in. It might be overkill for the data discussed in the article summary, but sounds pretty badass.
One really interesting blog article http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/12/12/vizweek-2008-report/ talks about something called the "VAST Interactive Challenge", which as near as I can tell is a competition for data visualization tools to go head-to-head against each other. (Side note - wouldn't it be cool if more software frameworks/applications had shootouts like this?)
The blog article talks about how they had 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data. It's an interesting read, and makes you realize how useful a really good tool like this could be for finding trends in raw data.
I recall reading recently that astronauts on board the space station complained about not being able to get an erection. At all. Reduced blood flow due to zero-g might put a hamper on your porno plans. Now zero-g girl-on-girl is probably possible, and in the end a lot less messy.
Read Josh Bloch's book "Effective Java", some parts of it deal specifically with how to switch from C++ to Java. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/
Get the source code for the JDK and look through it. The collections classes are well-documented (again, by Mr. Bloch) and interesting to read through. A few other projects seem well-written, like the google collections and jgoodies bindings. Reading through the source code can be fun and informative.
Get a good IDE like IntelliJ, and pay attention to the little warnings it displays about your code. I've learned a few things just from the refactoring suggestions it pops up. Plus, Java (being typed) is really ideally suited for a powerful IDE, not like scripting languages.
Have fun!
Or, just get a desk you stand up at. Be sure to get one of those squishy mats to stand on. You'll find that you move around more, and burn more calories, and actually get hungry around lunch time.
When I worked sitting in a chair all day, I could go all day without eating or moving, like some kind of befingered slug. Now I'll pace around when I'm thinking, and it actually feels like a break to sit down and have lunch.
I use Earthlink as ISP and phone service (note: I would not recommend this to any sane person who doesn't enjoy long phone conversations with tech support types).
/>
I assumed that the error pages at least had a 404 error code, but nope, they return a 200, with their own "helpful" content.
Look at this crap:
[twonky:~] sbarnum% curl -v "http://zzzslashdot.org"
* About to connect() to zzzslashdot.org port 80 (#0)
* Trying 209.86.66.95... connected
* Connected to zzzslashdot.org (209.86.66.95) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.16.3 (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0) libcurl/7.16.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
> Host: zzzslashdot.org
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:13:54 GMT
< Server: Apache
< Content-Length: 774
< Connection: close
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
<
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
<noscript>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;http://earthlink-help.com/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.3.1el&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=xj6e3468k634hy3945zg3zkhfn7zfgf6&ClientLocation=us&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fzzzslashdot.org%2F"/>
</noscript>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.location.replace("http://earthlink-help.com/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.3.1el&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=xj6e3468k634hy3945zg3zkhfn7zfgf6&ClientLocation=us&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fzzzslashdot.org%2F");
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
* Closing connection #0
</pre>
This whole contest seems flawed. There's obviously some limit to how accurate an algorithm can be, you'll never completely predict how some person will rate a movie. You might as well try to predict what someone is going to type in a slashdot post. Sure, "First Post" is easy, and some people are more predictable than others. I'm sure there are patterns in the movie ratings of individuals, but they're not going by any strict rule of human nature.
Once this stabilizes, I'll probably be using it. It's nice to see such a direct impact on my work from their contributions. Thanks guys!
Sounds like a well-executed idea. The servos are located behing the headstock where the gear boxes are. There's a separate piezo pickup used to get the individual string frequencies. When you pull up on one of the knobs, the current is sent over the strings to the servo motors to tune the strings. Very clever!
I'm skeptical how well it does, but if it works well I'd definitely use it. People are complaining that tuning is an important part of a live performance, that seems like saying broken strings and tripping over cables are an important part of a live performance.
Sounds like the exploit relies on auto-enter password fields for a domain, and then using javascript to transmit the value of thte password field to the attacker's machine. So, not so much a coding error as a flaw in the thinking that any password field on a site should be auto-filled in. Requiring some action on the part of the user would help with this, but a better solution would be to move to openID.
Bill Hicks said it best, humanity is like a virus with shoes. These guys wrote the screenplay.
It's quite conceivable that the youtube app is actually a widget, and doesn't rely on any native API at all. Compare it to the weather and stocks widgets, which also appears on the main screen. You can certainly write a widget with an embedded video player (it's basically HTML with some optional Safari-specific drawing code).
I was going to say the same thing about LaunchBar. It's what spotlight should have been. When I'm on a computer without it I'm constantly cursing. Or installing it.
Why do I have the feeling that this whole story was written so that for once the "itsatrap" tag guy could be relevant?
Not the most mature response to having your ideas attacked, hey?
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center-exampl e.html
should do the trick, although I tend to be among those ridiculing the CSS zealots who resort to obscene hacks to get around using tables. This example seems like kind of a copout, since it uses the display:table functionality in CSS. So, you can't use a table, but it's perfectly fine to use a
and tell the browser to render it like a table :P
I've been using some open source components for a recent project, so this seems pretty relevant. I needed to upload a file from Java, so used the jakarta HttpClient. Works pretty well! Likewise, I needed to handle uploads, and javamail was stripping unescaped backslashes sent by IE/WIN. Jakarta to the rescue again, they've got a handy project just for parsing multipart form data.
Both of these were things I could have implemented myself, but certainly ended up saving a lot of time and probably bugs. I was impressed with the level of documentation on the apache jakarta site, it gave me the information I needed to start using the things right away. Plus, having the jakarta project name attached to them gave me some confidence that they weren't utter garbage.
But most importantly, each of the libs is small and single-purpose, and doesn't try to be a swiss army knife. It was very nice to find two existing frameworks that did what I want, and not much more.
These are projects I would happily contribute to.
I kind of wish I'd done something like that XROST thing. I tried out allofmp3.com a while ago, bought 2 albums, but didn't like all the hassle of downloading them. However, the one-time email I gave to them started being inundated with spam shortly thereafter. Makes me wonder about their scruples, and how long before my credit card info follows my email address.
I guess that's an obvious lesson about doing business with shady companies. Cover thine arse.
"Innocent until suspected guilty"
In Carl Sagan's book 'Dragons of Eden', he links intelligence not with brain size, but with the ratio of brain size to body mass. He backs this up with some reasonable-seeming examples. I found a few here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm . Hm, except this makes mice out to be smarter than men. Explains the Douglas Adams worldview, I suppose.
It's a good read. He then goes on to analyze the Genesis story, and how the curse God inflicts on human females to endure painful childbirth after eating of the tree of knowledge is linked to the fact that our oversized noggins make the birthing process more difficult.