Why don't you give your green/socialist propaganda a rest. No one I have ever known in America who was willing to work hard ever stayed poor. Some of them lost everything in some venture or another, sure. But they always were able to put things back together through hard work and the good reputation they had created in their lives. One fellow lost everything running a family farm, but later grew wealthy in banking.
This myth of the hard working wage slave is pure garbage. The people you are talking about don't work hard, they just punch in and punch out and make the minimal effort it takes to stay employed, if that. In their off hours they are glued to the tube, out in the club, or messed up on drugs and alcohol. And surprise! They don't make great career advances.
So what is you solution to the "lower class/working poor" issue? Take some random shithead out of the DMV and make him governor? Take some jerk who can't keep a job at McDonald's or as a telephone survey guy and make him CFO of a company? How's that supposed to work when the new CFO in only interested in scoring some meth and buying a Harley?
Hey,/. is a forum where people mostly seem to think that other people's problems mean something to them. Fine. Do something about it. Don't complain to me when the homeless people you take in rob you blind and take off, as happened to me. And don't send more fucking thieves to congress to steal my money and donate it to these same type of assholes. Just open your wallet and do what you think makes sense for your own life.
You think development is overcomplication problems? Are you high? I've worked everywhere from fortune 50 companies to 5 person startups and I have *never* *never* had a project of significance (say, > 4 weeks effort) start and finish with the same requirements. Never.
How would that work in the bean counting world? Line up some outside financing, these are the terms we are looking for. Two weeks later, no, those terms are unacceptable, tell those investors to go away. Now *these* are the terms we are looking for.
Hey, I'm not complaining. Constantly changing requirements are the reason I can make a lot of money as a contractor, because I can actually handle it. I make extensive use of patterns to decouple and modularize in my architectures, and it saves my ass and the project on a reasonably frequent basis.
But don't come in here and tell me that development overcomplicates things out of ego. As far as engineering/development going out of our way to add features when we don't need them - we scarcely have time to meet the schedule for the "top priority" features as it is. Every hand a feature list to a customer and tell them to prioritize - only "1" and "2" will be in the first release. They all come back "1" or "2". The only scope creep we add is making things flexible and modular so that we can cope with the requirements change we *already know is coming*. If I didn't do that, I'd be out of work muy pronto.
Why don't you try asking developers what's going on before spouting off - it makes you look like an asshole. Nothing personal.
The picture for wearable fans is getting steadily better. Consider an Ipaq with wireless package, pcmcia video card, IBM 1Gb Microdrive, a Twiddler2, and one of these HMDs. The specs to hook up a Twiddler2 are already out there. You run linux from here and you're all set.
Well, maybe you might want another battery:)
Sure it has a redundant screen. I used to hate that idea. But now I realize that it just means I can still use the machine in situations where the wearable is not appropriate (like the beach) or when I've already taken it off.
Every year these little handhelds get more powerful and the peripheral market around them gets richer. I think this is the critical mass that will finally allow the normal (non-EE) person to put together usable and powerful wearables. The HMD is really the missing link.
Just as an aside, I wrote the author about modifying my own M1 to his first-gen sunglasses hack some time ago, and he refused to do the job (for money, I mean) because he felt that his current design required too much "tuning" for each person's ergos. I guess he's licked that problem, and it's nice to know that some people really aren't just in it for the money. He's a good guy.
If this is supposed to be sarcasm, and your point is that the dumb broswer/smart site actually did work, let me comment.
The idea behind the web was of course to share research papers. Its design aimed at sharing more or less static text, and offered a way for people reading a paper to submit comments, or a paper of their own. It did not aim at providing a universal, secure platform for downloading and running executables.
Second, making a new platform that has to achieve the kind of adoption rate and penetration of the world wide web to be a success smakcs of hubris. Not many innovations have had the success of the web, primarily because the network infrastructure was in place and a critical mass of computers existed in industry and the home. The web made access to things that already existed far easier. This phone does not.
I'm not saying that no new universal client/server technologies can succeed. I am saying that it is a very difficult proposition, and that a number of recent attempts that provided more features than this does have failed. That's why I don't expect much from this.
I'd really like to see this work. But, I recall too many previous attempts to deploy dumb clients and provide all services from a few central locations to be at all sanguine about this.
For example, Java. I make a living doing Java architecure, design, and development. But I recall when Java's promise was to make the dumb web browser into any application we wanted it to be. Companies would put specific services up as applets, and we would always have the latest versions. This failed. We can talk about why, but the fact is that it did.
Jini was supposed to do the same thing. It had a UDDI-like feature so that we would all just plug new devices onto our networks and they would all just make efficient use of each other. We wouldn't need to put all the smart technology in one box, we could distribute the intelligence. This failed.
I could easily name others, but these two were the highest profile attempts in the last five years. And both were from Sun, who at least are masters of PR and spin: witness the popularity of Java in the enterprise. This new phone is from AT&T, of whom Jerry Pournelle once observed that they couldn't market eternal life.
So as much as I want one, and want things like this be to successful, I would be surprised to see this take off, or even make to market. Happily surprised, but still.
Neal Boortz, the talk radio libertarian, suggests Operation Terrible Resolve, after the famous quote from Admiral Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy after Pearl Harbor : "We have woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."
But what I really like is his "sidekick" Royal Marshall's idea: Operation Roach in the Corner.
Since the "unelected" jibe prompted about twice as much discussion as the actual intended points of Mr. Stallman's article, I think we can in fact conclude that it was a mistake to include it.
I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Stallman's work, and I even admire his tenacity on specific details such as the distinction between "Free Software" and "Open Source." He harms himself and his cause here, though, by including inflammatory and irrelevant rhetoric.
While I'm posting this, I'd also like to request that people stop posting the liberty/safety quote. Thank you.
Semi-automatics have as many "legitimate" uses as any other firearm. You might be surprised how fast you can accurately fire a lever action or even a bolt action rifle, with only a few sessions of practice. You do have to come off sight a bit, or at least I do, but then if you're just shooting at a crowd of people that makes essentially no difference.
The question of how sporting it is to use a semi-auto while hunting is only raised by people who don't know what the hell they are talking about. This is not an "automatic" rifle, whre rounds are discharged until the trigger is released, it is a semi-auto, meaning one trigger pull gets you one round discharged. Respectful hunters like the semi-auto because it gives them the ability to make a quick second shot, in the cases that they have wounded the animal but not killed it at once. This is an ethical and humane practice. Once the wounded animal is allowed out of sight, you may never find it, and its suffering will be increased.
The notion that semi-autos "most of the time" will be used to kill one's self or a member of one's family is pretty goddamn ludicrous, the more so coming from someone who later wishes to charge the NRA with "inventing bad statistics." Consider the longevity of firearm rights organizations if "most of the time" their own guns were killing their members and their member's families. You may also wish to consider the fact that nearly the entire male population of Switzerland keep an automatic rifle in their homes, and their homicide rate is not substantially different from that of Japan.
If you want to kill lots of people quickly, the most available weapon I know of is an automobile. A quick run down a sidewalk in a Ford Expedition ought to easily outdo some jerk with an AK, not least because the SUV doesn't look all that suspicious until it does something unexpected.
Maybe if you got your facts from someplace besides the performances of tranvestite comedians you would be able to appear more coherent.
I think it's high time that this kind of thing happened. All these script kiddies with their DDOS and rootkit tools, virus kiddies and their kits, are able to do what they are doing because they don't have to suffer for it. Everyone else has to suffer instead. Situations like that are why we make laws in the first place.
I'm certainly against penalizing the authors of the kits, if they don't release viruses. We shouldn't do anything to people who alert us to security vulnerabilities, even to the extent of releasing an exploit, since this is often the only way to get companies to make a patch. But for those people who decide to use this information to steal the time and money of others to gratify their egos, the law is the proper recourse.
If you don't agree, that's fine. See how you feel after having to spend a weekend of your own time wiping and reinstalling the OS and applications on a machine or machines that have been hacked. Then, testing them and having to deploy new security procedures so that you can be live on Monday. It's not fun.
The two things I would say are, when you really reach the point where all the old crap is really clogging up the veins, fix it all at once. Make a clean break. Then people can at least keep in mind what is happening, what works with 2.x and what is still only for 1.x.
The other thing is, try to design to keep this from happening. Expose APIs that don't need to change much instead of the actual functions or objects that you use. One more level of indirection won't kill your performance in almost every case, but it will give you a whole lot more room to re-engineer when you decide you have to.
All that applies to the case where you control the interface and you need to change it. When you're publishing source code and want to decide what tools you can expect the user to have to make use of it, that's a marketing decision and not a technical one. You're talking about how many people will be excluded from your audience if you use GTK or assume a conformant C++ compiler. Technically the newer tools and libs are generally better, that's pretty clear. I think it's going to be a judgement call on the part of the developers as to how much they care about a lot of people being able to use their code. If they are willing to wait for the world to catch up before being able to use their program, then they can use the latest and greatest. If not, then they have to aim at a realistic profile.
If you want to learn more about ionospheric skip, sporadic-E, transmission by meteor scatter (literally bouncing signals off meteors), moonbounce, and other neat ways to communicate long distances by radio, check out Amateur Radio (often called ham radio). One good place to start learning more is at the American Radio Relay League, www.arrl.org. There's a lot of amateur radio stuff on the web.
Honestly, you can buy or build an inexpensive radio and antenna for peanuts. Some kit radio projects like the "tuna tin" radio can be built in 15 minutes!
While you do need a license, the technician class exam is so easy most slashdotters should be able to pass with no studying. The FCC mandates a fixed question pool from which the questions will be drawn, and these are available on-line. (So are practice tests.) So if you just like to get perfect scores, read all the questions first!:)
And the exam fee is also mandated by the FCC, currently $10.00, so basically this is very easy to get into.
I hope that a lot of people here are intrigued by the fascinating world of long-distance radio wave propagation. From simple chatting with people in your local area, to talking to Africa and even Antarctica, radio is the only communication system that covers the globe.
Also there's the exciting world of amateur satellites, satellite designed, built, and launched by amateur volunteers and funds. These are another great way for a low-power station to communicate DX (long distance) without much special equipment.
I guess I don't need to add how pleased I am to see radio wave propagation stories on/.:)
I should have known that posting a serious attack on the whole idea these "mass protests" for anti-technology on/. would get me moderated as a troll. Maybe it is, since I knew before I posted that this is not the common view held by posters here.
But, to respond to one critic who actually replied cogently, yes, people with more money should have more power. That's what money means, really. What else do we consider it to represent?
And a person makes money by doing something that others consider valuable to them, like giving them something they want, or making something they have better. People who do that well all contributing to society.
Now, what contributions to society are these people lined up in the streets throwing rocks making? What contributions have they made? It looks to me like they are using a lot of organizational tools and planning to give themselves the appearance of a genuine spontaneous protest. If thousands of Seattle residents were upset enough to take to the streets, then we'd have a problem. A problem that is propertly addressed through the electoral system, but a problem nonetheless. But by shipping in thousands of people from all over the world to protest on cue, the anti-progress movement is essentially admitting that not enough people anywhere in particular actually agree with them, and since they can't win at the ballot box they want to win in the court of public intimidation. Godwin be damned, this is exactly the type of street thuggery that marked the end of the Weimar era in Germany.
So yes, I know why some people think that globalisation is a bad idea, and I think they're wrong. Open the borders, let capital flow freely (including a removal of the capital gains tax), and we will spur innovation and progress, while allowing local groups (nations, states, etc.) to set their own standards for how they want to try to live. Maybe their strategy will work, and maybe it won't. Succeed, adapt, or perish.
Anyone who thinks that this river can be dammed is simply ignorant of history.
And finally, I think freedom to trade is an essential human freedom. I have it, you want it, why should anyone else be involved? I think we should have as much human freedom as we can stand, just not "anarchy now" which will more or less instantly turn into despotism. We should have as much freedom as will allow us to have the democratic social structures, like elected bodies of representatives, that we are accustomed to.
I like the bloody, but meaningless rituals we have now. I especially liked that bit in Genoa where the crowd of modern-day Luddites (assorted bums, malcontents, the ignorant, the unemployable, and other various parasites) tried to show their solidarity by attacking a cop. It's amazing how little solidarity they had after Alfonse there took two in the eye.
Let me be the first to tell some of you that a real action group with real tactics and unit cohesion would have taken that cop, even if losses had been incurred. That would be taken seriously, since relatively few of the world's bottom-feeding anti-globalist whiners put anything above their own comfort, much less their lives.
But instead, now we are promised "soft" harmless mechanisms to round up Johnny Hooligan and send him back to his high-rise dorm unscarred. Great.
If these people, and I use the term loosely, want to stage an exercise in raw power by using their bodies and improvised weaponry to disrupt their society, destroy property, endanger lives, and otherwise subvert the normal democratic process (which they hate because it allows a working person to have some say in the way the country should run) then I say, let's let them have a taste of raw power in return. If they want play games designed by Mao, well, we have read that rule book too. It says "power comes out of the barrel of a gun."
If a free and democratic society is what you want, then you don't want what these malingerers want. They may use such a phrase, but their actions reveal them to be nothing but a tiny revolutionary minority that should be stamped out exactly as they try to stamp out free dialogue in democratic countries.
Poul Anderson touched many people as a writer, as a storyteller. He did not write abstruse literary fiction aimed only at those who wished to decode the symbolism and disregarded the story. His gift was an ancient one, that of drawing others into the web of his imagination and holding them there until he had said his peace.
Whatever his beliefs about the nature of man, Poul will live on in his work and in the hearts of those he inspired and enchanted both as a writer and as a man.
Northern skies, behold! A noble comes forth to take his place among you.
Information about Setianism and the Temple of Set can be found at http://www.xeper.org.
Setianism is fundamentally about becoming more conscious. Methods include rigorous scientific method as well as introspective and magical techniques, each supporting the other. (IOW that great "insight" you just had - any evidence for it? Mark it "hypothesis".)
Have them do an emulator for, say, an 8086. It should accept a file that contains 8086 machine code and run the code.
We did one of those and its a great project. It teaches about opcode, good program structure, how a computer works, how a a compiler can save cycles, how assembler works etc.
Another thought for the open source/free software community: how about making a file-sharing program in the spirit of gnutella which, in addition to allowing file sharing, also makes each client a pass-through stage in a ZKS/mixmaster style IP transfer? See the ZKS website for architecure docs on how cryptographically sealed "envelopes" prevent intermediate hosts from knowing both the final destination and original source of the packet.
Why don't I write it? Believe me, I'm thinking about it.
I am so pleased to see this come to reality. All the years of developers being screwed by MS, forced to stop interesting developments because they didn't conform to an MS vision of how things should be, small innovative companies destroyed by MS legal threats, buying their developers, etc. etc., now is at an end. When this is all over, assuming these terms are enforced, there will be new cultures at the MS spinoffs, not vicious predatory rapist cultures as now exist, but one accustomed to working (competing AND cooperating) within the bounds of the law.
It will no longer be true that MS is not the biggest fish in the ocean, but instead that MS *is* the ocean, as one of Andrew Schulmann's "Undocumented" books stated.
The thing is, the core unix functionality doesn't specify interfaces, unlike some other program loaders/OSs one could name. The layering of X on top of command-line unix is an excellent example of this. If future interfaces require voice recognition, passive sensor-triggered operation, or whatever, it can be added as a layer.
Since a unix core install can be made very small,. suitable for embedded systems, I don't see a reason to throw away a perfectly good model with a well-understood API and many thousands of man-years of refinement.
Unix is being used successfully on systems from mainframes to wearables, from super graphics boxes to the tiniest pinhead sized embedded systems. What design criteria do you envision that would contraindicate the use of Unix?
Based on your projections and knowledge of the market, when can we expect linux to be a first tier platform for game releases? I believe market share is up there with macintosh now, but I don't see that level of commitment from the industry. I'm sure you guys follow that type of thing closely.
This win is due to the administration interpreting a statute enacted by Congress. This is the same august body that has kowtowed to big money by extending copyright, passing the digital milennium copyright act, and so forth.
To prevent these kinds of problems entirely in future, I suggest a intellectual property / privacy amendment to the Constitution. It should specify in general language what rights people have to privacy and to information that they have paid to use.
What I hear people saying they want is access to their music all the time, long power cycle, ability to easily add or remove music, trade with friends, etc. The price point is too high for a dedicated player? Then get or build a wearable. It's not that hard, you have all your stuff with you all the time, and the marginal price increase to add any particular feature, like IR or a camera, is much smaller then to add this same function with a dedicated unit.
Have a lathe or grinding wheel and a little bit of soft metal? You can make little straight bars that can pick locks. But guess what? Sometimes it can be a crime to have these. When? When you're using them to commit a crime, then having them is another crime. If an arrangement of atoms can be illegal depending on what you are doing when you have it, why not a collection of bits?
The same thing BTW is true for water pipes a lot of places. Use it to smoke tobacco or to ornament your living room (think big Indian hookah) fine, but if you have some pot around then it's possesion of drug paraphenalia.
It was a rhetorical quesion, but debuggers should be subject to the same reasoning.
I'm really starting to believe that we need a consitutional amendment to handle additional guarantees of freedom, ones that wouldn't be needed without the proliferation of cheap drive space and computational power. Since that would never pass in the US, I've started fooling with a totally new consitution. My plan is to set its goals explictly, write a draft, and then open it to discussion. Maybe we can get some small countyr like Tobago to adopt it hoping to attract hi-tech industry, and then away we go!
It seems to me that nanotechnology is the current research area most likely to transform the way human live. But since that's so, and since so many of the actual technologies that have revolutionised human life have come out of nowhere to surprise everyone, maybe nanotech will not be the next Great Change after all. Or maybe I just need more sleep.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you give your green/socialist propaganda a rest. No one I have ever known in America who was willing to work hard ever stayed poor. Some of them lost everything in some venture or another, sure. But they always were able to put things back together through hard work and the good reputation they had created in their lives. One fellow lost everything running a family farm, but later grew wealthy in banking.
/. is a forum where people mostly seem to think that other people's problems mean something to them. Fine. Do something about it. Don't complain to me when the homeless people you take in rob you blind and take off, as happened to me. And don't send more fucking thieves to congress to steal my money and donate it to these same type of assholes. Just open your wallet and do what you think makes sense for your own life.
This myth of the hard working wage slave is pure garbage. The people you are talking about don't work hard, they just punch in and punch out and make the minimal effort it takes to stay employed, if that. In their off hours they are glued to the tube, out in the club, or messed up on drugs and alcohol. And surprise! They don't make great career advances.
So what is you solution to the "lower class/working poor" issue? Take some random shithead out of the DMV and make him governor? Take some jerk who can't keep a job at McDonald's or as a telephone survey guy and make him CFO of a company? How's that supposed to work when the new CFO in only interested in scoring some meth and buying a Harley?
Hey,
You think development is overcomplication problems? Are you high? I've worked everywhere from fortune 50 companies to 5 person startups and I have *never* *never* had a project of significance (say, > 4 weeks effort) start and finish with the same requirements. Never.
How would that work in the bean counting world? Line up some outside financing, these are the terms we are looking for. Two weeks later, no, those terms are unacceptable, tell those investors to go away. Now *these* are the terms we are looking for.
Hey, I'm not complaining. Constantly changing requirements are the reason I can make a lot of money as a contractor, because I can actually handle it. I make extensive use of patterns to decouple and modularize in my architectures, and it saves my ass and the project on a reasonably frequent basis.
But don't come in here and tell me that development overcomplicates things out of ego. As far as engineering/development going out of our way to add features when we don't need them - we scarcely have time to meet the schedule for the "top priority" features as it is. Every hand a feature list to a customer and tell them to prioritize - only "1" and "2" will be in the first release. They all come back "1" or "2". The only scope creep we add is making things flexible and modular so that we can cope with the requirements change we *already know is coming*. If I didn't do that, I'd be out of work muy pronto.
Why don't you try asking developers what's going on before spouting off - it makes you look like an asshole. Nothing personal.
1 comment and already the site is slow... so I guess early morning wasn't enough.
The picture for wearable fans is getting steadily better. Consider an Ipaq with wireless package, pcmcia video card, IBM 1Gb Microdrive, a Twiddler2, and one of these HMDs. The specs to hook up a Twiddler2 are already out there. You run linux from here and you're all set.
:)
Well, maybe you might want another battery
Sure it has a redundant screen. I used to hate that idea. But now I realize that it just means I can still use the machine in situations where the wearable is not appropriate (like the beach) or when I've already taken it off.
Every year these little handhelds get more powerful and the peripheral market around them gets richer. I think this is the critical mass that will finally allow the normal (non-EE) person to put together usable and powerful wearables. The HMD is really the missing link.
Just as an aside, I wrote the author about modifying my own M1 to his first-gen sunglasses hack some time ago, and he refused to do the job (for money, I mean) because he felt that his current design required too much "tuning" for each person's ergos. I guess he's licked that problem, and it's nice to know that some people really aren't just in it for the money. He's a good guy.
If this is supposed to be sarcasm, and your point is that the dumb broswer/smart site actually did work, let me comment.
The idea behind the web was of course to share research papers. Its design aimed at sharing more or less static text, and offered a way for people reading a paper to submit comments, or a paper of their own. It did not aim at providing a universal, secure platform for downloading and running executables.
Second, making a new platform that has to achieve the kind of adoption rate and penetration of the world wide web to be a success smakcs of hubris. Not many innovations have had the success of the web, primarily because the network infrastructure was in place and a critical mass of computers existed in industry and the home. The web made access to things that already existed far easier. This phone does not.
I'm not saying that no new universal client/server technologies can succeed. I am saying that it is a very difficult proposition, and that a number of recent attempts that provided more features than this does have failed. That's why I don't expect much from this.
I'd really like to see this work. But, I recall too many previous attempts to deploy dumb clients and provide all services from a few central locations to be at all sanguine about this.
For example, Java. I make a living doing Java architecure, design, and development. But I recall when Java's promise was to make the dumb web browser into any application we wanted it to be. Companies would put specific services up as applets, and we would always have the latest versions. This failed. We can talk about why, but the fact is that it did.
Jini was supposed to do the same thing. It had a UDDI-like feature so that we would all just plug new devices onto our networks and they would all just make efficient use of each other. We wouldn't need to put all the smart technology in one box, we could distribute the intelligence. This failed.
I could easily name others, but these two were the highest profile attempts in the last five years. And both were from Sun, who at least are masters of PR and spin: witness the popularity of Java in the enterprise. This new phone is from AT&T, of whom Jerry Pournelle once observed that they couldn't market eternal life.
So as much as I want one, and want things like this be to successful, I would be surprised to see this take off, or even make to market. Happily surprised, but still.
Neal Boortz, the talk radio libertarian, suggests Operation Terrible Resolve, after the famous quote from Admiral Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy after Pearl Harbor : "We have woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."
But what I really like is his "sidekick" Royal Marshall's idea: Operation Roach in the Corner.
:)
Since the "unelected" jibe prompted about twice as much discussion as the actual intended points of Mr. Stallman's article, I think we can in fact conclude that it was a mistake to include it.
I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Stallman's work, and I even admire his tenacity on specific details such as the distinction between "Free Software" and "Open Source." He harms himself and his cause here, though, by including inflammatory and irrelevant rhetoric.
While I'm posting this, I'd also like to request that people stop posting the liberty/safety quote. Thank you.
Semi-automatics have as many "legitimate" uses as any other firearm. You might be surprised how fast you can accurately fire a lever action or even a bolt action rifle, with only a few sessions of practice. You do have to come off sight a bit, or at least I do, but then if you're just shooting at a crowd of people that makes essentially no difference.
The question of how sporting it is to use a semi-auto while hunting is only raised by people who don't know what the hell they are talking about. This is not an "automatic" rifle, whre rounds are discharged until the trigger is released, it is a semi-auto, meaning one trigger pull gets you one round discharged. Respectful hunters like the semi-auto because it gives them the ability to make a quick second shot, in the cases that they have wounded the animal but not killed it at once. This is an ethical and humane practice. Once the wounded animal is allowed out of sight, you may never find it, and its suffering will be increased.
The notion that semi-autos "most of the time" will be used to kill one's self or a member of one's family is pretty goddamn ludicrous, the more so coming from someone who later wishes to charge the NRA with "inventing bad statistics." Consider the longevity of firearm rights organizations if "most of the time" their own guns were killing their members and their member's families. You may also wish to consider the fact that nearly the entire male population of Switzerland keep an automatic rifle in their homes, and their homicide rate is not substantially different from that of Japan.
If you want to kill lots of people quickly, the most available weapon I know of is an automobile. A quick run down a sidewalk in a Ford Expedition ought to easily outdo some jerk with an AK, not least because the SUV doesn't look all that suspicious until it does something unexpected.
Maybe if you got your facts from someplace besides the performances of tranvestite comedians you would be able to appear more coherent.
I think it's high time that this kind of thing happened. All these script kiddies with their DDOS and rootkit tools, virus kiddies and their kits, are able to do what they are doing because they don't have to suffer for it. Everyone else has to suffer instead. Situations like that are why we make laws in the first place.
I'm certainly against penalizing the authors of the kits, if they don't release viruses. We shouldn't do anything to people who alert us to security vulnerabilities, even to the extent of releasing an exploit, since this is often the only way to get companies to make a patch. But for those people who decide to use this information to steal the time and money of others to gratify their egos, the law is the proper recourse.
If you don't agree, that's fine. See how you feel after having to spend a weekend of your own time wiping and reinstalling the OS and applications on a machine or machines that have been hacked. Then, testing them and having to deploy new security procedures so that you can be live on Monday. It's not fun.
The two things I would say are, when you really reach the point where all the old crap is really clogging up the veins, fix it all at once. Make a clean break. Then people can at least keep in mind what is happening, what works with 2.x and what is still only for 1.x.
The other thing is, try to design to keep this from happening. Expose APIs that don't need to change much instead of the actual functions or objects that you use. One more level of indirection won't kill your performance in almost every case, but it will give you a whole lot more room to re-engineer when you decide you have to.
All that applies to the case where you control the interface and you need to change it. When you're publishing source code and want to decide what tools you can expect the user to have to make use of it, that's a marketing decision and not a technical one. You're talking about how many people will be excluded from your audience if you use GTK or assume a conformant C++ compiler. Technically the newer tools and libs are generally better, that's pretty clear. I think it's going to be a judgement call on the part of the developers as to how much they care about a lot of people being able to use their code. If they are willing to wait for the world to catch up before being able to use their program, then they can use the latest and greatest. If not, then they have to aim at a realistic profile.
If you want to learn more about ionospheric skip, sporadic-E, transmission by meteor scatter (literally bouncing signals off meteors), moonbounce, and other neat ways to communicate long distances by radio, check out Amateur Radio (often called ham radio). One good place to start learning more is at the American Radio Relay League, www.arrl.org. There's a lot of amateur radio stuff on the web.
:)
/. :)
Honestly, you can buy or build an inexpensive radio and antenna for peanuts. Some kit radio projects like the "tuna tin" radio can be built in 15 minutes!
While you do need a license, the technician class exam is so easy most slashdotters should be able to pass with no studying. The FCC mandates a fixed question pool from which the questions will be drawn, and these are available on-line. (So are practice tests.) So if you just like to get perfect scores, read all the questions first!
And the exam fee is also mandated by the FCC, currently $10.00, so basically this is very easy to get into.
I hope that a lot of people here are intrigued by the fascinating world of long-distance radio wave propagation. From simple chatting with people in your local area, to talking to Africa and even Antarctica, radio is the only communication system that covers the globe.
Also there's the exciting world of amateur satellites, satellite designed, built, and launched by amateur volunteers and funds. These are another great way for a low-power station to communicate DX (long distance) without much special equipment.
I guess I don't need to add how pleased I am to see radio wave propagation stories on
See you on the air!
Hi-
/. would get me moderated as a troll. Maybe it is, since I knew before I posted that this is not the common view held by posters here.
I should have known that posting a serious attack on the whole idea these "mass protests" for anti-technology on
But, to respond to one critic who actually replied cogently, yes, people with more money should have more power. That's what money means, really. What else do we consider it to represent?
And a person makes money by doing something that others consider valuable to them, like giving them something they want, or making something they have better. People who do that well all contributing to society.
Now, what contributions to society are these people lined up in the streets throwing rocks making? What contributions have they made? It looks to me like they are using a lot of organizational tools and planning to give themselves the appearance of a genuine spontaneous protest. If thousands of Seattle residents were upset enough to take to the streets, then we'd have a problem. A problem that is propertly addressed through the electoral system, but a problem nonetheless. But by shipping in thousands of people from all over the world to protest on cue, the anti-progress movement is essentially admitting that not enough people anywhere in particular actually agree with them, and since they can't win at the ballot box they want to win in the court of public intimidation. Godwin be damned, this is exactly the type of street thuggery that marked the end of the Weimar era in Germany.
So yes, I know why some people think that globalisation is a bad idea, and I think they're wrong. Open the borders, let capital flow freely (including a removal of the capital gains tax), and we will spur innovation and progress, while allowing local groups (nations, states, etc.) to set their own standards for how they want to try to live. Maybe their strategy will work, and maybe it won't. Succeed, adapt, or perish.
Anyone who thinks that this river can be dammed is simply ignorant of history.
And finally, I think freedom to trade is an essential human freedom. I have it, you want it, why should anyone else be involved? I think we should have as much human freedom as we can stand, just not "anarchy now" which will more or less instantly turn into despotism. We should have as much freedom as will allow us to have the democratic social structures, like elected bodies of representatives, that we are accustomed to.
That's enough for now. This is not a troll.
I like the bloody, but meaningless rituals we have now. I especially liked that bit in Genoa where the crowd of modern-day Luddites (assorted bums, malcontents, the ignorant, the unemployable, and other various parasites) tried to show their solidarity by attacking a cop. It's amazing how little solidarity they had after Alfonse there took two in the eye.
Let me be the first to tell some of you that a real action group with real tactics and unit cohesion would have taken that cop, even if losses had been incurred. That would be taken seriously, since relatively few of the world's bottom-feeding anti-globalist whiners put anything above their own comfort, much less their lives.
But instead, now we are promised "soft" harmless mechanisms to round up Johnny Hooligan and send him back to his high-rise dorm unscarred. Great.
If these people, and I use the term loosely, want to stage an exercise in raw power by using their bodies and improvised weaponry to disrupt their society, destroy property, endanger lives, and otherwise subvert the normal democratic process (which they hate because it allows a working person to have some say in the way the country should run) then I say, let's let them have a taste of raw power in return. If they want play games designed by Mao, well, we have read that rule book too. It says "power comes out of the barrel of a gun."
If a free and democratic society is what you want, then you don't want what these malingerers want. They may use such a phrase, but their actions reveal them to be nothing but a tiny revolutionary minority that should be stamped out exactly as they try to stamp out free dialogue in democratic countries.
Poul Anderson touched many people as a writer, as a storyteller. He did not write abstruse literary fiction aimed only at those who wished to decode the symbolism and disregarded the story. His gift was an ancient one, that of drawing others into the web of his imagination and holding them there until he had said his peace.
Whatever his beliefs about the nature of man, Poul will live on in his work and in the hearts of those he inspired and enchanted both as a writer and as a man.
Northern skies, behold! A noble comes forth to take his place among you.
Information about Setianism and the Temple of Set can be found at http://www.xeper.org.
Setianism is fundamentally about becoming more conscious. Methods include rigorous scientific method as well as introspective and magical techniques, each supporting the other. (IOW that great "insight" you just had - any evidence for it? Mark it "hypothesis".)
We did one of those and its a great project. It teaches about opcode, good program structure, how a computer works, how a a compiler can save cycles, how assembler works etc.
Another thought for the open source/free software community: how about making a file-sharing program in the spirit of gnutella which, in addition to allowing file sharing, also makes each client a pass-through stage in a ZKS/mixmaster style IP transfer? See the ZKS website for architecure docs on how cryptographically sealed "envelopes" prevent intermediate hosts from knowing both the final destination and original source of the packet.
Why don't I write it? Believe me, I'm thinking about it.
It will no longer be true that MS is not the biggest fish in the ocean, but instead that MS *is* the ocean, as one of Andrew Schulmann's "Undocumented" books stated.
Hurray!
Since a unix core install can be made very small,. suitable for embedded systems, I don't see a reason to throw away a perfectly good model with a well-understood API and many thousands of man-years of refinement.
Unix is being used successfully on systems from mainframes to wearables, from super graphics boxes to the tiniest pinhead sized embedded systems. What design criteria do you envision that would contraindicate the use of Unix?
Based on your projections and knowledge of the market, when can we expect linux to be a first tier platform for game releases? I believe market share is up there with macintosh now, but I don't see that level of commitment from the industry. I'm sure you guys follow that type of thing closely.
To prevent these kinds of problems entirely in future, I suggest a intellectual property / privacy amendment to the Constitution. It should specify in general language what rights people have to privacy and to information that they have paid to use.
The same thing BTW is true for water pipes a lot of places. Use it to smoke tobacco or to ornament your living room (think big Indian hookah) fine, but if you have some pot around then it's possesion of drug paraphenalia.
It was a rhetorical quesion, but debuggers should be subject to the same reasoning.
I'm really starting to believe that we need a consitutional amendment to handle additional guarantees of freedom, ones that wouldn't be needed without the proliferation of cheap drive space and computational power. Since that would never pass in the US, I've started fooling with a totally new consitution. My plan is to set its goals explictly, write a draft, and then open it to discussion. Maybe we can get some small countyr like Tobago to adopt it hoping to attract hi-tech industry, and then away we go!
(Score 2: Unrealistic)
It seems to me that nanotechnology is the current research area most likely to transform the way human live. But since that's so, and since so many of the actual technologies that have revolutionised human life have come out of nowhere to surprise everyone, maybe nanotech will not be the next Great Change after all. Or maybe I just need more sleep. ;)