First it needs an escrow which would enable greater trust between transacting parties. It also needs the ability to reverse a payment for when transactions are not fulfilled to satisfaction.
Paypal has the first, but the second leaves much to be desired. Once the payment is made, there is little recourse if it turns out that the transaction was bogus. If Google can implement something like this, it would push it way over the top.
Not to take away from the submitter or from anyone playing the game, but this story is pretty much a non-starter. Either you are playing or not, and if you aren't then there's really nothing to discuss.
But I think we've all played Monopoly (R), so there is some level of commonality in our experiences. We used to have a "lottery" system where all taxes and fees paid were paid to the "pot" and anyone landing on Free Parking would win the pot. It gave losing players a chance to suddenly make a quick turnaround and made the game more interesting.
What were the types of rule changes did you make to Monopoly when you played with your friends?
While the space inside the cab was spacious, I can't say I appreciated the attitude of the driver. From the time I walked up to the queue, he was already trying to jump to the front without waiting, then during the ride he was blabbering on about something (he was apparently speaking Manchesterese or something, but it wasn't English), and when we got the destination he wouldn't make change nor give a receipt.
I doubt that all cabbies in London are like that, but considering the relatively small area that London encompasses and the ease of using public transportation, I wonder how often people find themselves using cabs.
A more interesting game would be to try to pick which cab takes the longest route between any two places. I don't think I've seen drivers in other countries so eager to rip off passengers by taking the scenic route through the heart of traffic than I've seen in England.
More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.
Obviously it would need to be non-toxic to existing wildlife and ideally it would be able to compress and become coal or oil for future generations, but the main goal would be to clean up our messes.
With small amounts of electrical wiring as byproducts of the "biological" process of the microbe, we may even be able to "harvest" our wiring needs in much the same way we harvest seaweed or shellfish today for consumption.
This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.
Microsoft has the right to restrict product updates to only their paying customers.
However, the installed base is huge and the illegally installed base is also huge. Microsoft, because it is their OS, has a moral responsibility to prevent internet worms and viruses by releasing patches to all users, regardless of the legality of the installation.
Can MS really be held at fault when illegal usage of the OS results in a huge failure of the Internet?
Despite all this computing power, computers still can't think like humans. They can perform calculations faster, but can't perform optimized heuristics or even form optimized heuristics like humans.
Computers are pretty dumb. Humans are amazingly smart.
Let's say this happened in the US. The entire project would be shitcanned and study after study would be performed to show why and how the rocket exploded. Then it would be years before another rocket was sent up.
Meanwhile, the Russians dust themselves off and prepare the next launch vehicle for the earliest possible sendup of the sail.
We go to the moon in this decade... The space race was won by people with drive and ambition. These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
I (badly) tried to make the point that a common language runtime ought to be made available for the Free Software community. That means that the runtime must be unencumbered by patents and licensing issues, it must be open source, and it's got to be cross-platform.
In the most obvious case, Mono fulfills most of the requirements, but like Java it has issues that really preclude it from being acceptable for free software.
The other obvious library is the Perl 6 Parrot runtime which is similar to.Net in that it is multi-language and multi-platform. The problem is that Parrot is simply not here yet and may not be ambitious enough to be a satisfactory Mono replacement.
Obviously benchmarks try to measure as much as possible, but there are limits. The most significant limit is that the benchmarks simply can't emulate every aspect of every game.
However, more horsepower is always good and this year's chips are faster than last year's, so unless you're trying to differentiate between a few microseconds difference in processing time between equivalent competing cards, you're better off just looking at the grand scheme of things and just realize that things are getting better and faster (and more expensive).
In some respects, laptops will always lag behind desktops as it always takes longer to miniaturize than to develop in the first place. So I wonder what the best graphics chips are for laptops and how much of a time lag we can expect between the release of a new card and the time it takes to put it into a portable machine.
Desktops are very cumbersome and difficult to carry to LAN parties and elsewhere, which is why I prefer laptops (even desktop-replacement laptops are more portable than true desktop computer). Gaming is one aspect that suffers on laptops because of the lag between CPU/graphics card release and eventual laptop release.
Is there a general rule of thumb regarding how long this lag takes? Does either NVidia or ATI seem to keep this lag to a minimum?
I suppose it also makes sense to ask whether anyone bases their laptop purchases on what graphics chips are built into the machine.
Closer to home (inasmuch as/. is "home"), I really hate people who come onto this site or any site, for that matter, for the express purpose of disrupting discussion. We call them trolls, but in the same way we try to differentiate between "hackers" and "crackers", maybe it would be good to try to differentiate between "trolls" and these despicable "troll jihadists".
A logged in user may occasionally troll (who knows what kind of warped mind finds this "fun"?), but someone who logs in to drop bombs in a discussion with the express aim of causing confusion and conflagration is a "discussion terrorist".
Such terrorism can only be combatted, but never squelched.
He is also 100% wrong. No one wants to live in a world where we have to lock our doors. Everyone wants to live freely without worry of being taken advantage of. It is absolutely the fault of the "evildoers" that we must put locks on our windows and worry about the footsteps following us down the dark, reeking alleyway.
But it is also our own responsibility to be sure that we can prevent people from taking advantage of us. This means that we must have those locks and firewalls. To neglect this is to essentially invite attack and intrusion. And if it isn't at the hands of one group, it will be at the hands of another.
We don't live in a perfect world, so it's important that we have adequate locks.
At least Jim Anchower is still there
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
But why do people think that 50 years from now is going to be so significantly different from now? The Middle East is now a peaceful group of countries? Hovercars? Actors are now mutants and considered attractive?
50 years from now it's going to be pretty much like it is now with a few more conveniences, but we aren't going to see a wholesale change in the world as is frequently supposed by so-called futurists.
I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software applications ought to be written in Java or a reasonable facsimile. Ideally, a common language and runtime that all free software could target would be available that would allow immediate porting to take place.
To some extent we have this now with Linux as a standard OS, but even with it there is a lack of common binary compatibility. Java takes care of that such that the same binary application on one platform works on another, only relying on the base runtime to be ported.
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
Are there any plans for such a common language runtime to which applications can target themselves in the free software ecosystem?
The whole mania behind this technology is that somehow we will be able to pull correct data out of thin air using the magical properties of quantum units. Somehow eigenvalues will just instantaneously pop into existence by the careful selection of input parameters.
Too bad that's not how it works. These computers will still have to process data the same as any other processor and all the threat behind magically decoding 128-bit encryption is pure fluff. We are talking about another way of computing, for sure, but it is just another step in the evolution of computing systems rather than a brand new magic bullet for encryption maniacs.
It is also unclear why people want to build a "quantum computer" when it seems that simply putting it on a peripheral board and using it as a separate calculation machine seems to be a much more straightforward application of the device than trying to cram a whole computer with these chips.
For something as ethereal as bits on a platter, it hardly seems worth it to pay USD1.00 for a song. If I buy a CD for USD15.00, I get about 15 songs, so the price of the music is the same, and in addition I also get a nice case and a physical disk and liner notes.
I would probably start subscribing to these "legal" music download sites if they were to stop gouging the buyers. Until then, I'll support my favorite bands by giving away samples of their music to my friends and buying t-shirts at their concerts.
While it's sad to see him go, I have to wonder if his legacy isn't the easing of mankind's stress levels but accelerating it to the stratosphere. Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine. We live according to the schedule of the computer rather than the other way around.
Many nights I've sat here staring at this computer trying to think of a way to make my job easier. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to toss the entire system out wholesale.
I don't imagine that Kilby thought it would lead to less human contact, less face to face time, and less free time for everyone. He probably thought of it as a way to increase efficiency and ultimately reduce our workload.
Karl Marx's main contribution to the field of economics was the delineation of the capitalists from the workers. The capitalists would always own the means of production and always reap the rewards of a business in a hugely unbalanced manner with them at the top and the workers at the bottom.
So too is it with this "entrepreneur". He puts up the capital to fund the system and gets to reap the rewards, both monetary and psychic. However, the value of the work is provided by the workers, not the initial capital infusion.
I don't want to take anything away from Zennstrom, but I would love to see the real implementors and "little people" who keep the system running rather than a bureaucrat.
Slashdot Mirror
First it needs an escrow which would enable greater trust between transacting parties. It also needs the ability to reverse a payment for when transactions are not fulfilled to satisfaction.
Paypal has the first, but the second leaves much to be desired. Once the payment is made, there is little recourse if it turns out that the transaction was bogus. If Google can implement something like this, it would push it way over the top.
What is to stop someone from getting in another player's chosen cab and keep going to their own property thus getting lots of money?
Common sense.
Not to take away from the submitter or from anyone playing the game, but this story is pretty much a non-starter. Either you are playing or not, and if you aren't then there's really nothing to discuss.
But I think we've all played Monopoly (R), so there is some level of commonality in our experiences. We used to have a "lottery" system where all taxes and fees paid were paid to the "pot" and anyone landing on Free Parking would win the pot. It gave losing players a chance to suddenly make a quick turnaround and made the game more interesting.
What were the types of rule changes did you make to Monopoly when you played with your friends?
And you have to send them your email address to sign up.
Apparently I've been receiving notices about this game for the past year or so and just didn't realize it was Hasbro.
Stop spam!
While the space inside the cab was spacious, I can't say I appreciated the attitude of the driver. From the time I walked up to the queue, he was already trying to jump to the front without waiting, then during the ride he was blabbering on about something (he was apparently speaking Manchesterese or something, but it wasn't English), and when we got the destination he wouldn't make change nor give a receipt.
I doubt that all cabbies in London are like that, but considering the relatively small area that London encompasses and the ease of using public transportation, I wonder how often people find themselves using cabs.
A more interesting game would be to try to pick which cab takes the longest route between any two places. I don't think I've seen drivers in other countries so eager to rip off passengers by taking the scenic route through the heart of traffic than I've seen in England.
More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.
Obviously it would need to be non-toxic to existing wildlife and ideally it would be able to compress and become coal or oil for future generations, but the main goal would be to clean up our messes.
With small amounts of electrical wiring as byproducts of the "biological" process of the microbe, we may even be able to "harvest" our wiring needs in much the same way we harvest seaweed or shellfish today for consumption.
This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.
Microsoft has the right to restrict product updates to only their paying customers.
However, the installed base is huge and the illegally installed base is also huge. Microsoft, because it is their OS, has a moral responsibility to prevent internet worms and viruses by releasing patches to all users, regardless of the legality of the installation.
Can MS really be held at fault when illegal usage of the OS results in a huge failure of the Internet?
Despite all this computing power, computers still can't think like humans. They can perform calculations faster, but can't perform optimized heuristics or even form optimized heuristics like humans.
Computers are pretty dumb. Humans are amazingly smart.
Let's say this happened in the US. The entire project would be shitcanned and study after study would be performed to show why and how the rocket exploded. Then it would be years before another rocket was sent up.
Meanwhile, the Russians dust themselves off and prepare the next launch vehicle for the earliest possible sendup of the sail.
We go to the moon in this decade... The space race was won by people with drive and ambition. These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
I (badly) tried to make the point that a common language runtime ought to be made available for the Free Software community. That means that the runtime must be unencumbered by patents and licensing issues, it must be open source, and it's got to be cross-platform.
.Net in that it is multi-language and multi-platform. The problem is that Parrot is simply not here yet and may not be ambitious enough to be a satisfactory Mono replacement.
In the most obvious case, Mono fulfills most of the requirements, but like Java it has issues that really preclude it from being acceptable for free software.
The other obvious library is the Perl 6 Parrot runtime which is similar to
Obviously benchmarks try to measure as much as possible, but there are limits. The most significant limit is that the benchmarks simply can't emulate every aspect of every game.
We've got NVidia releasing their new card, but ATI is planning their next one soon too.
However, more horsepower is always good and this year's chips are faster than last year's, so unless you're trying to differentiate between a few microseconds difference in processing time between equivalent competing cards, you're better off just looking at the grand scheme of things and just realize that things are getting better and faster (and more expensive).
"Scrilla" is a term used to denote "money" in BAE.
In some respects, laptops will always lag behind desktops as it always takes longer to miniaturize than to develop in the first place. So I wonder what the best graphics chips are for laptops and how much of a time lag we can expect between the release of a new card and the time it takes to put it into a portable machine.
Desktops are very cumbersome and difficult to carry to LAN parties and elsewhere, which is why I prefer laptops (even desktop-replacement laptops are more portable than true desktop computer). Gaming is one aspect that suffers on laptops because of the lag between CPU/graphics card release and eventual laptop release.
Is there a general rule of thumb regarding how long this lag takes? Does either NVidia or ATI seem to keep this lag to a minimum?
I suppose it also makes sense to ask whether anyone bases their laptop purchases on what graphics chips are built into the machine.
Closer to home (inasmuch as /. is "home"), I really hate people who come onto this site or any site, for that matter, for the express purpose of disrupting discussion. We call them trolls, but in the same way we try to differentiate between "hackers" and "crackers", maybe it would be good to try to differentiate between "trolls" and these despicable "troll jihadists".
A logged in user may occasionally troll (who knows what kind of warped mind finds this "fun"?), but someone who logs in to drop bombs in a discussion with the express aim of causing confusion and conflagration is a "discussion terrorist".
Such terrorism can only be combatted, but never squelched.
He is also 100% wrong. No one wants to live in a world where we have to lock our doors. Everyone wants to live freely without worry of being taken advantage of. It is absolutely the fault of the "evildoers" that we must put locks on our windows and worry about the footsteps following us down the dark, reeking alleyway.
But it is also our own responsibility to be sure that we can prevent people from taking advantage of us. This means that we must have those locks and firewalls. To neglect this is to essentially invite attack and intrusion. And if it isn't at the hands of one group, it will be at the hands of another.
We don't live in a perfect world, so it's important that we have adequate locks.
But why do people think that 50 years from now is going to be so significantly different from now? The Middle East is now a peaceful group of countries? Hovercars? Actors are now mutants and considered attractive?
50 years from now it's going to be pretty much like it is now with a few more conveniences, but we aren't going to see a wholesale change in the world as is frequently supposed by so-called futurists.
I have begun to think that most, if not all, free software applications ought to be written in Java or a reasonable facsimile. Ideally, a common language and runtime that all free software could target would be available that would allow immediate porting to take place.
To some extent we have this now with Linux as a standard OS, but even with it there is a lack of common binary compatibility. Java takes care of that such that the same binary application on one platform works on another, only relying on the base runtime to be ported.
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
Are there any plans for such a common language runtime to which applications can target themselves in the free software ecosystem?
Getting talked down to by someone with a higher UID than me? Don't make me put you on the Naughty list!
The whole mania behind this technology is that somehow we will be able to pull correct data out of thin air using the magical properties of quantum units. Somehow eigenvalues will just instantaneously pop into existence by the careful selection of input parameters.
Too bad that's not how it works. These computers will still have to process data the same as any other processor and all the threat behind magically decoding 128-bit encryption is pure fluff. We are talking about another way of computing, for sure, but it is just another step in the evolution of computing systems rather than a brand new magic bullet for encryption maniacs.
It is also unclear why people want to build a "quantum computer" when it seems that simply putting it on a peripheral board and using it as a separate calculation machine seems to be a much more straightforward application of the device than trying to cram a whole computer with these chips.
Didn't realize the moderators were Michael Jackson supporters.
Which reminds me of why Michael Jackson likes twenty eight year-olds. Because there's twenty of them.
Michael Jackson was heard breathing a sigh of relief. He thought it was where they sent Petafiles.
R. Kelly was scrambling to find the company's phone number.
For something as ethereal as bits on a platter, it hardly seems worth it to pay USD1.00 for a song. If I buy a CD for USD15.00, I get about 15 songs, so the price of the music is the same, and in addition I also get a nice case and a physical disk and liner notes.
I would probably start subscribing to these "legal" music download sites if they were to stop gouging the buyers. Until then, I'll support my favorite bands by giving away samples of their music to my friends and buying t-shirts at their concerts.
history is just about the only thing you actually learn in those training days when you first start a job at a company like Texas Instruments
I don't know firsthand, but I've heard that at the Arthur Andersen training days they teach you how to hold your liquor.
While it's sad to see him go, I have to wonder if his legacy isn't the easing of mankind's stress levels but accelerating it to the stratosphere. Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine. We live according to the schedule of the computer rather than the other way around.
Many nights I've sat here staring at this computer trying to think of a way to make my job easier. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to toss the entire system out wholesale.
I don't imagine that Kilby thought it would lead to less human contact, less face to face time, and less free time for everyone. He probably thought of it as a way to increase efficiency and ultimately reduce our workload.
How incredibly wrong he was.
Karl Marx's main contribution to the field of economics was the delineation of the capitalists from the workers. The capitalists would always own the means of production and always reap the rewards of a business in a hugely unbalanced manner with them at the top and the workers at the bottom.
So too is it with this "entrepreneur". He puts up the capital to fund the system and gets to reap the rewards, both monetary and psychic. However, the value of the work is provided by the workers, not the initial capital infusion.
I don't want to take anything away from Zennstrom, but I would love to see the real implementors and "little people" who keep the system running rather than a bureaucrat.