Do you mean "Brave New World", the dystopic novel of a totally planned society written by Aldous Huxely, or "1984", the dytopic novel of surveillance and doublespeak written by George Orwell?
That's also why the Canadian government gives all Amerindians band and individual numbers
You mean like banding birds? Do Mounties really set up big nets to catch Native Americans, put a metal band around their ankle, and then let them go free again? And I thought Canadians were liberal...;)
"no conventionally moving parts" - yeah, that's the best bit of confus-o-matic speech. Then they go on to say it means that every cm^2 has a moving part, but it's not "conventional". I guess if it were a fiber+gear, it would be conventional. As it stands, maybe they just randomly push the fiber around until it illuminates some of the data you want?
So to repeat what every other poster has already said, which putz put this story up? I could point you to stories from The Onion that make more sense.
You're probably right on what the point of the rant was, but unless the Windows API is some sort of magic English-to-C++ converter, people will get some exposure to algorithms and how to do things, even if they don't know it at the time. People in an introductory course don't want to find out how fast they can multiply n matrices, they want to see a program they wrote run. Ideally, the ones that are into it will try to learn more themselves, and the rest will either give up or spend a few thousand dollars to get a VB certification. Even MS isn't dumb enough (I hope!) to actually try to train a generation of coders with no idea of the fundamentals like running time...
That's ridiculous. It's a good thing to teach people to program, regardless of the slant of the instruction (ok, maybe not if it's BASIC/VB etc), because the foundation can be applied to anything.
Sure, moving from a total Windows API education to Solaris or Linux might annoy people when they can't find a specific functionality, just as going from Qt to Windows might have the same problem (yes, this is probably a bad analogy, but I've not written any Windows code and thus can't find a better one). Assuming both environments are decent, a programmer will also find things in the environment they didn't have before.
If I understand correctly, you're saying something like, "is it better to teach people to program, or is it better that they never touch MS product?" and coming down resoundingly for the latter. As much as MS and their products annoy me, I'd rather that more people had the foundations of programming down than to refuse to help anyone who wouldn't swear an oath of loyalty to the GPL. If nothing else, out of the thousands "indoctrinated" by Microsoft, a few will go on to create something useful in another environment. Yeah, MS could win in the short run by opening reeducation camps and forcing everyone older than 5 to learn Visual C++, but note that geeks tend to line up against MS, and what better way to turn someone into a geek than having them track down their segfaults and whatnot?
I suppose that if the idea is to make it more difficult to for most people to get into programming, this works great, but I think the best idea is to make computers more accessable and help people understand their options.
Apathy is a powerful force, especially in public high schools and the sort - giving them the nudge they need to start teaching programming, and most importantly the way of looking at things that comes with it, is more important IMHO than trying to censor MS products from those delicate young eyeballs and brains.
This train is aimed at business travelers - electricity at every seat, room for a laptop and whatnot. The non-express trains, which I believe use the same type of engine and still only take 3.5 hours to get from Boston to NY, are supposed to cost the same $60 as before, but faster.
When I travel from Boston to NY or vice versa, I've started to take the train instead of the bus because it's infinitely more comfortable, although until they finish rolling out Acela the bus is still faster, and will always be cheaper. Driving is nice, of course, mainly because of the flexibility you have, but there's also the 3-5 mindnumbing hours of staring at the road. It's also nice to take the train and get some work done, or at least pretend and play computer games. Of course, the last time I took it, I had nothing to do and was bored out of my mind.
I'd say that if you're going between Boston and NY, the train is one of the nicest ways to go, and will be much better now that it takes less time (currently it takes about 5 hours on the cheap, non-express train - bus takes about 4 depending on traffic). As for Boston to DC, fly, unless you really do want to spend a day in the train. I actually think it's cheaper to fly, if you get a pack of shuttle tickets.
Oh, and surprisingly you can get some vague, markety information on Acela from acela.com.
If they can now hook the monkeys up to a good VR system, imagine the cool things you could do. Since I'm in a particularly sick mood today, the first thing I imagined was giant, monkey-controlled robot combat - hook two monkey up to robots and show them something that gets them really mad. That would be way better than Battle Bots, for my money. Monkeys make everything better.
I'm not just a sicko, though, I'm looking forward to the Nature article. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say about learning to predict the arm movement, and what that shows about brain activity/activation potential stuff.
I don't think this George F. Will column was as good a defence of the electoral college as he hoped. His main argument seems to be, "It's unlikely that someone will win the popular vote and lose the electoral, and it's only happened 3 times."
A better point of his is that it will discourage candidates from visiting states with fewer voters. Valid, but his own statistics bother me - Wyoming gave out 1 electoral vote per 70K votes in 1996, and California gave 1 per 185K votes. This is obviously not a "one person, one vote" scenario, which is the central tenet of democracy.
Another bad argument: the Electoral College would "not survive the abandonment of [the] winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes." I didn't know that our main goal was insuring the survival of the Electoral College...
Further, he claims that this would allow minor candidates to take away electoral votes from the two main parties. Again, so what? Americans should not be forced to choose between only two parties, especially as they move closer together every election. Very few governments run on a two-party democracy.
With the internet and ubiquitous media, candidates should be free to campaign where the people are, and can be confident that their message is being transmitted to places with less population.
This would also make pandering more difficult - instead of sucking up to a few key states, a candidate would have pander to NYC, Washington, LA, Chicago, etc - a more difficult task, and although they have a high population density, they do not hold the majority of the population. Viola - now you need issues that affect everyone, not just midwestern soccer moms.
Digital Convergence won't tell anyone, but they're working on a new - better - "revenue model." They release free hardware, set up sites about hacking it, and then sick their lawyers on the pretend owners of those sites. Thanks to/., they get hundreds of thousands of ad impressions a day, and then everyone's happy - DC makes a few bucks, and Slashdot gets to stay outraged at this violation of our basic human right to take things apart, guaranteed by our Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Or something.
This mini-howto may be a little outdated, but its record for most BogoMIPS is 57648.96, with 144 PII's at 400MHz. Granted, that's substantially more processors...
Oh, it's too bad this didn't happen last week... For about a week I had been getting spammed by someone claiming to work for idealab!, and how much fun! it! is! They were having a recruiting party at some bar near MIT. Since I assumed it would not include a free and open bar, and be full of slimy "internet incubator" types, I went elsewhere. But this would have been great - getting sloppy drunk and interrogating everyone there about why they were suing! Until I were forcibly removed, of course...
why people have stopped hacking the::CueCat:: simply because they received
threatening letter from the company.
Because receiving the threat of a lawsuit from a company is a scary thing. J. Random Hacker does not have a legal budget, let a lone an entire legal department. We've already seen that corporations use litigation as a stalling tactic, and try to drag the case out until the defendant has to give up due to lack of resources. Aside from the massive amount of money you could lose (without even losing the trial, just on legal fees), this is something that will dominate your life for an indefinite amount of time - if you're spending all you time in court or preparing for court, how do you work?
Litigation, or threat of it, is unfortunately a very effective tactic from a corporate point of view. It's a rare kind of person that can push crappy laws like the DMCA to the limit and still have the time and desire to go to court to obtain their rights for the rest of the country.
given the incredibly high-tech, complex programming they had to do to work around this problem. From the article:
Fink said N2H2 had devised its own fix to the problem. That patch would detect Web
addresses included in Akamai URLs and filter based on those nested addresses. It will
ship with the next version of Bess.
Woah... you mean, like, parse the rest of the URL? Dude, no wonder you're CTO.
The chip is tiny, but I don't think the nuclear magnetic resonance machine they use to read/write will fit into a laptop... nor will its power consumption compare with a Crusoe. Also, you might not want to put radioactive isotopes in your pocket, if you catch my drift;)
On a related note, what about overclocking? Can I add my own atoms to get better frame rates for Quantum Quake, or do some quantum mechanic-y stuff? Although now instead of crashes if you go too dar, now I guess the CPU undergoes fusion and destroys the neighborhood, or rips the fabric of space-time with similar effects.
I go
to work, I pay my taxes, I don't hurt other people, I obey the law. Beyond that,
whatever else I do is none of anyone's business.
In an ideal world, this would all work out - everyone would be responsible and reasonable and the government could shrivel up and die. Unfortunately, a large democracy like the US doesn't have the means to evaluate everyone to see if they're conscientious enough to not need supervision, and it becomes an all-or-nothing deal. You can live in total anarchy - and I know the response will be, "I have guns, I'm safe," but remember a vast majority of Americans are probably poorer and more desperate than you. Without some societal checks, eventually someone is going to find you asleep and those guns won't help.
I wish there was some Utopia where everyone was industrious and responsible, but being in a large group of people fosters a feeling of anonymity (anonymity is not a bad thing overall, though), which some will use an excuse to be criminals.
I've done my shopping for political ideologies, but in my view none of them take into account human nature and group dynamics - libertarianism would work great, socialism would work great, if not for the pesky tendancy of governments to become corrupt (in the latter case) and people to shun responsibility (in both cases).
Granted, current systems are also far from perfect, but the way I see it's the best there is for now, so now I'm just hoping for a revolution in political thought to come along sometime.
My bad - I wasn't paying close attention to the user name... didn't mean to feed the imposter troll. And I'm usually so good about these things... perhaps more beer would help. Heh - either way I think I'll have some.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean "Brave New World", the dystopic novel of a totally planned society written by Aldous Huxely, or "1984", the dytopic novel of surveillance and doublespeak written by George Orwell?
You mean like banding birds? Do Mounties really set up big nets to catch Native Americans, put a metal band around their ankle, and then let them go free again? And I thought Canadians were liberal... ;)
Sorry, I've been awake for too long.
So to repeat what every other poster has already said, which putz put this story up? I could point you to stories from The Onion that make more sense.
(at a job interview)
Well, sir, this "Messiah" position you have open looks interesting. How are the hours?
You're probably right on what the point of the rant was, but unless the Windows API is some sort of magic English-to-C++ converter, people will get some exposure to algorithms and how to do things, even if they don't know it at the time. People in an introductory course don't want to find out how fast they can multiply n matrices, they want to see a program they wrote run. Ideally, the ones that are into it will try to learn more themselves, and the rest will either give up or spend a few thousand dollars to get a VB certification. Even MS isn't dumb enough (I hope!) to actually try to train a generation of coders with no idea of the fundamentals like running time...
Sure, moving from a total Windows API education to Solaris or Linux might annoy people when they can't find a specific functionality, just as going from Qt to Windows might have the same problem (yes, this is probably a bad analogy, but I've not written any Windows code and thus can't find a better one). Assuming both environments are decent, a programmer will also find things in the environment they didn't have before.
If I understand correctly, you're saying something like, "is it better to teach people to program, or is it better that they never touch MS product?" and coming down resoundingly for the latter. As much as MS and their products annoy me, I'd rather that more people had the foundations of programming down than to refuse to help anyone who wouldn't swear an oath of loyalty to the GPL. If nothing else, out of the thousands "indoctrinated" by Microsoft, a few will go on to create something useful in another environment. Yeah, MS could win in the short run by opening reeducation camps and forcing everyone older than 5 to learn Visual C++, but note that geeks tend to line up against MS, and what better way to turn someone into a geek than having them track down their segfaults and whatnot?
I suppose that if the idea is to make it more difficult to for most people to get into programming, this works great, but I think the best idea is to make computers more accessable and help people understand their options.
Apathy is a powerful force, especially in public high schools and the sort - giving them the nudge they need to start teaching programming, and most importantly the way of looking at things that comes with it, is more important IMHO than trying to censor MS products from those delicate young eyeballs and brains.
When I travel from Boston to NY or vice versa, I've started to take the train instead of the bus because it's infinitely more comfortable, although until they finish rolling out Acela the bus is still faster, and will always be cheaper. Driving is nice, of course, mainly because of the flexibility you have, but there's also the 3-5 mindnumbing hours of staring at the road. It's also nice to take the train and get some work done, or at least pretend and play computer games. Of course, the last time I took it, I had nothing to do and was bored out of my mind.
I'd say that if you're going between Boston and NY, the train is one of the nicest ways to go, and will be much better now that it takes less time (currently it takes about 5 hours on the cheap, non-express train - bus takes about 4 depending on traffic). As for Boston to DC, fly, unless you really do want to spend a day in the train. I actually think it's cheaper to fly, if you get a pack of shuttle tickets.
Oh, and surprisingly you can get some vague, markety information on Acela from acela.com.
I'm not just a sicko, though, I'm looking forward to the Nature article. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say about learning to predict the arm movement, and what that shows about brain activity/activation potential stuff.
After all, Bush is the only candidate who knows "how hard it is to put food on your family," and he's pledged to "make the pie higher."
A better point of his is that it will discourage candidates from visiting states with fewer voters. Valid, but his own statistics bother me - Wyoming gave out 1 electoral vote per 70K votes in 1996, and California gave 1 per 185K votes. This is obviously not a "one person, one vote" scenario, which is the central tenet of democracy.
Another bad argument: the Electoral College would "not survive the abandonment of [the] winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes." I didn't know that our main goal was insuring the survival of the Electoral College...
Further, he claims that this would allow minor candidates to take away electoral votes from the two main parties. Again, so what? Americans should not be forced to choose between only two parties, especially as they move closer together every election. Very few governments run on a two-party democracy.
With the internet and ubiquitous media, candidates should be free to campaign where the people are, and can be confident that their message is being transmitted to places with less population.
This would also make pandering more difficult - instead of sucking up to a few key states, a candidate would have pander to NYC, Washington, LA, Chicago, etc - a more difficult task, and although they have a high population density, they do not hold the majority of the population. Viola - now you need issues that affect everyone, not just midwestern soccer moms.
Digital Convergence won't tell anyone, but they're working on a new - better - "revenue model." They release free hardware, set up sites about hacking it, and then sick their lawyers on the pretend owners of those sites. Thanks to /., they get hundreds of thousands of ad impressions a day, and then everyone's happy - DC makes a few bucks, and Slashdot gets to stay outraged at this violation of our basic human right to take things apart, guaranteed by our Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Or something.
This mini-howto may be a little outdated, but its record for most BogoMIPS is 57648.96, with 144 PII's at 400MHz. Granted, that's substantially more processors...
Oh, it's too bad this didn't happen last week... For about a week I had been getting spammed by someone claiming to work for idealab!, and how much fun! it! is! They were having a recruiting party at some bar near MIT. Since I assumed it would not include a free and open bar, and be full of slimy "internet incubator" types, I went elsewhere. But this would have been great - getting sloppy drunk and interrogating everyone there about why they were suing! Until I were forcibly removed, of course...
You can lead a dead horse to water, but you can't make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke. (With apologies to Bloom County)
Because receiving the threat of a lawsuit from a company is a scary thing. J. Random Hacker does not have a legal budget, let a lone an entire legal department. We've already seen that corporations use litigation as a stalling tactic, and try to drag the case out until the defendant has to give up due to lack of resources. Aside from the massive amount of money you could lose (without even losing the trial, just on legal fees), this is something that will dominate your life for an indefinite amount of time - if you're spending all you time in court or preparing for court, how do you work?
Litigation, or threat of it, is unfortunately a very effective tactic from a corporate point of view. It's a rare kind of person that can push crappy laws like the DMCA to the limit and still have the time and desire to go to court to obtain their rights for the rest of the country.
Fink said N2H2 had devised its own fix to the problem. That patch would detect Web addresses included in Akamai URLs and filter based on those nested addresses. It will ship with the next version of Bess.
Woah... you mean, like, parse the rest of the URL? Dude, no wonder you're CTO.
More nitpicking:
So what do you call people who live in North and South America collectively?
How doth the VAX's C compiler
Imrove its object code.
And even as we speak does it
Increase the system load.
How patiently it seems to run
And spit out error flags.
While users, with frustration,
Tear all their clothes to rags.
Or better yet,
Speak roughly to your little VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
It knows that one cannot relax
Because the paging thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!
I speak severely to my VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
In spite of all my favorite hacks
My jobs it always thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!
Yes, I spend too much time running "fortune."
The chip is tiny, but I don't think the nuclear magnetic resonance machine they use to read/write will fit into a laptop... nor will its power consumption compare with a Crusoe. Also, you might not want to put radioactive isotopes in your pocket, if you catch my drift ;)
Too late - this was already being funded by the NSA and DoD, sez this Yahoo article.
On a related note, what about overclocking? Can I add my own atoms to get better frame rates for Quantum Quake, or do some quantum mechanic-y stuff? Although now instead of crashes if you go too dar, now I guess the CPU undergoes fusion and destroys the neighborhood, or rips the fabric of space-time with similar effects.
Sounds more like two for the price of two... but for a lot of government agencies that's a bargain!
Does this mean companies should be paying people to put out their abandonware?!
Gotta go, need to set up an abandonware site right now, then hire an economist and a few lawyers...
In an ideal world, this would all work out - everyone would be responsible and reasonable and the government could shrivel up and die. Unfortunately, a large democracy like the US doesn't have the means to evaluate everyone to see if they're conscientious enough to not need supervision, and it becomes an all-or-nothing deal. You can live in total anarchy - and I know the response will be, "I have guns, I'm safe," but remember a vast majority of Americans are probably poorer and more desperate than you. Without some societal checks, eventually someone is going to find you asleep and those guns won't help.
I wish there was some Utopia where everyone was industrious and responsible, but being in a large group of people fosters a feeling of anonymity (anonymity is not a bad thing overall, though), which some will use an excuse to be criminals.
I've done my shopping for political ideologies, but in my view none of them take into account human nature and group dynamics - libertarianism would work great, socialism would work great, if not for the pesky tendancy of governments to become corrupt (in the latter case) and people to shun responsibility (in both cases).
Granted, current systems are also far from perfect, but the way I see it's the best there is for now, so now I'm just hoping for a revolution in political thought to come along sometime.
My bad - I wasn't paying close attention to the user name... didn't mean to feed the imposter troll. And I'm usually so good about these things... perhaps more beer would help. Heh - either way I think I'll have some.