Yessir, uh-huh, best damn irony ah've et all week.
Next, someone has to steal their source code and publish it. Not just some clone (there are enough of those around already), but stuff they have copyright on.
I think the client should always pay for the bandwidth. If the servers pay for the bandwidth, that takes control over what can be downloaded efficiently away from the end user.
If the client pays, then it makes sense for the pipe owners to upgrade the server's connection whenever it's needed. If the server pays, then a free site that gets too popular will be shut down by the bandwidth requirements.
Every move further toward making the servers pay for bandwidth creates greater pressure to make websites profitable, rather than merely useful or entertaining.
It's not that "white hetero males" are particularly oppressed, just that we're oppressed in different ways. There's a peculiar kind of equality in the ways a white man, a black man, a woman, an old person, a young person, a homosexual, a computer geek, a computer illiterate, or a member of any group might be refused employment, be denied access to a service, be verbally abused, or have to face other forms of oppression, in different places dealing with different people.
Regardless of the degree of oppression (which certainly isn't equal in all cases), we all have the choices of going with the flow and avoiding situations where we would be oppressed or butting our heads against a brick wall hoping that enough others are doing the same to make some cracks, and of spitefully oppressing members of other groups to "even the score" or being impartial and fair in the hope that others will follow your example.
Revenge is an odd pendulum; when you push it one way, it comes back even harder.
I think the best defense would be establishing reasonable doubt that the things he said were lies. (assuming it really is criminal libel, which ought to put the burden of proof on the prosecution... IANAL)
When I was in high school, I knew girls who were sluts (both those who were promiscuous and, in the older sense of the word, those who were slobs). I knew a teacher who picked his nose openly in front of the class (one of the most important things you learn in school is what is acceptable public behavior; a student would be punished and ridiculed for the same thing). One of my teachers would always respond to a question with "I don't know, but I'll look it up" and never look anything up; she'd also mark any sufficiently long and complex answer as correct (laziness? ignorance? stupidity? I never could decide...). Another teacher continually had strange impulses that he'd enforce for a few days, then forget ("Okay, from now on, everybody in the class call each other Mr. or Ms.").
Now, calling girls "sluts" is rude and generally unproductive (although not necessarily slanderous or libelous if it's accurate), but in my experience, half or more of public school employees are not fit for the work, and this should be brought out in the open. A public trial might help get the ball rolling.
One screams "libel!" at one's own risk, it tends to make people look for evidence...
...Americans exhaust themselves at work, then have no energy for anything else. Ditto here in Canada. I hear it's the same way in Japan and Germany, and in all of the countries with the highest productivities.
Work makes you stupid, but leisure makes you weak. None of their "cultural and philosophical awareness" gets them longer lifespans, higher technology, or military significance. If you told me they had a higher percentage of scientific literacy, I might think they were on to something, but culture is idle amusement and philosophy is masturbation; a bit of either is acceptable, even beneficial, but when they start cutting into your working hours, it is decadence.
I know, we all enjoy mocking our homelands, but confusing strength and weakness too often makes your brain soft.
<p>Basically, the only protection a Trademark has is that you can't use it (or an excessively similar mark) to identify another product in the same field (this includes using it to identify <em>all</em> products in the field, like calling all gelatin desserts "Jello"). Also, if they don't enforce it, they lose it.
<p>A Trademark is just a name registered for a certain product. As long as you use it to refer to that product, no matter what you say about it, they can't touch you.
<p>It is significant that it only protects within a certain field. Anyone could produce a "Duke Nukem" insecticide (as long as the name was not clearly derived from the video game character). That is why you can have a McDonald's restaurant and a McDonald's shoestore in the same town (although they'd probably get sued if they sold big floppy red ones).
I'd call that "shrugging it off as sensationalism".
Apogee isn't attempting to ban all negative reviews, they "just want to grant some special privileges to fans."
However, Apogee seems to be offering "special privileges" to people who don't need them. The contract offers, in parts, permission to use trademarks to identify Apogee stuff (always legal, no permission needed), and permission to use screenshots (clearly fair use). They also grant permission to help them distribute the information they make freely available from their website, so long as you don't charge for it. Gee, thanks Apogee! Maybe you need permission for that, but they could have granted it in a single paragraph.
Then they ask for notification for every time you use one of their trademarks ("You must notify Apogee prior to any use of the Marks and/or the Materials.").
Furthermore, they claim that merely "Accessing the Property" means that you agree to the contract. Hmm... That doesn't sound like granting special privileges to people who want them, it sounds like roping anyone who wanders into their web site (if that's even remotely legal).
The contract is misunderstood because it is very poorly written, and about 5 times longer than it should be.
I took the time to read it, I don't think it says what he's claiming at all. Nobody needs permission for the things it offers, they are either normal use for trademarks or fair use of copyright, and it appears to try to place greater restrictions than would exist without their "permission".
My personal opinion is that their legal staff is a bunch of second-raters like the rest of the company, and didn't accomplish what they were told to do.
I had an experience like that once, from one of those flakey retailers that makes their profit from advertising, not from sales.
Their attitude seemed to be, "We aren't making any money off of it, so who gives a damn? Actually we'd prefer not to sell you anything at all, please go back to the web site and look at some more ads."
And I thought aggressive upselling was annoying...
Credit cards are not appropriate for e-commerce.
on
A Matter Of Trust?
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· Score: 2
When people take payment with credit cards, they need a signature, or they don't have a leg to stand on if the purchaser later claims someone else made the order.
Credit cards were never designed for e-commerce, and really shouldn't be used for it.
One very interesting system is e-gold. They work by transferring precious metals from one of their accounts to another (in a large range of amounts, down to well under 1 cent). You don't need any special software, and pretty much anyone in the world can use it; also they only take 1% of each transaction, which is capped at $0.50 (yes, that's an upper limit, not a lower one). The only problem is that initial purchase of metals; basically you have to send in a check or money-order.
Actually, I haven't seen any other e-commerce system that supports micropayments and is actually giving worldwide service (though there are plenty in "trial" stages and others that serve one country or region). Can anyone point one out?
Semantics is about the meaning of words. A semantic difference is a difference in expressed meaning, not a superficial difference in expression of a meaning.
By definition, a goal is something that you hope to achieve, not something inherently open-ended and unachievable. To use "goal" as you would "value" is an assault on precise communication in the English language, an effort to make synonyms of two words with distinct meanings in a language already overflowing with useless synonyms.
You might as well say, "I have a turnip! A turnip that all men will be judged by the potato of their character, not the carrot of their skin." After all, it's only a semantic error, people still "get what you're saying."
Join me, my fastidious brethren! Save the words! Take the Oath (post it as a reply):
Oath of the Guardians of the English Language (A.K.A. pedant's oath) I, (name here), solemnly swear to protect the English language from ignoramuses and morons alike; to correct improper utterances, and poorly written sentences (even if it annoys people); and to kill, without hesitation, anyone who uses "literally" to emphasize a metaphor.
I've got all the elite scripts, root on lots of boxes, and [a] zillion gigs [gigabytes] of porn.
g355 175 d1fr1n7 f0r 1337 d00dz 11K3 |\/|3 !!!!
[I] guess it's different for elite dudes like me!
Yes, there are really people who talk and think that way. Think of a 13-year old kid who has just learned the bare rudiments of programming and goes around seeing how well he can defy authority figures by committing random acts of vandalism and getting unpaid access to things that he isn't supposed to be able to get, and the online peer group he fits into with it's own customs and slang. They're not generally bad people, or stupid, just young and ignorant and trying to have fun.
I don't have goals in programming, except for specific projects. Goals are limiting, and only suited to the short term in such a dynamic field.
I have values: it is good to become a better programmer, it is good to learn more mathematics (the better to create accurate computer models of problems), it is good to learn more about how people interact with machines and what they want from them, it is good to learn more about my own mind and how I learn and how I work... I could go on for pages describing what I value.
The important thing is that general "goals as a programmer" are not worth having. Whole fields may become irrelevant by the time you master them, so you must always be learning. The programmer must be a generalist in principle, even though he spends a year or twelve with his main focus on one particular area, because any specialized field will eventually be made trivial by an advance in the state of the art (and the obvious reasons to delve into a particular area are that there's work to be done, you find the work interesting or profitable, and you think you can do it). Today's divisions into "interface design", "systems programming", "language design", "web scripting", "graphics engine programming", "hardware design", etc. (let alone narrow subdivisions like "Windows programmer" or "Playstation developer") are all arbitrary categories describing certain temporary conditions that must be dealt with. Twenty years from now, there will be a whole new set of programming tasks (though some of the names might be the same, the problems will be entirely different ones), and you'll probably still be programming. Prepare for it, by preparing for anything.
'Intelligence is life's response of "I can do anything!" to a universe that threatens with everything.'
-Frank Herbert in "Destination: Void" (quoted from memory; not exact)
The "Negativland thing" he was referring to was the lawsuit U2's label slapped on Negativland. The band didn't sue, Island Records did. When the band learned about it, they pressured the label to ease off; Island decided to "only" sue for what they paid their high-priced lawyers, not for any alleged damages.
And the album had a blatantly misleading cover. U2 was about to release a new album, and Negativland releases a CD called "U2 Negativland". If this was widely distributed, it would have caused a lot of mistaken sales to U2 fans.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson "I know a genuine Somy when I see one!"
...Virtual Boy! Anybody admit to trying out the crappy 3D toy? It didn't really have any modern 3D hardware, so it showed GameBoyish sprites at varying depths. This really sucked. Layers of flat screen don't look like anything useful or interesting; you'd need hundreds of layers packed very close together to be even moderately useful.
...and write a trojan horse that changes all the Windows error messages. For example, the GPF message: Another fine general protection fault, brought to you by the folks at M$! (little animated GIF of chibi Bill Gates dancing in a pile of money, throwing up handfuls of bills)
Someone will make another, more destructive, sneakier version of the trojan worm (hey, it's a trojan horse and a worm; the next version may be a virulent trojan worm...). They'll have VBSs that generate EXEs, and vice versa, they'll take the boot sector with a virus that can relaunch the worm, they'll display amusing animations (grabbed from who-cares-where) that make the infected user think he's received a typical funny/annoying attachment.
Windows system admins: batten down the hatches! Trap all attachments and personally filter them. Get the managers to enact a strict "no unnecessary attachment" rule. Delete all "amusing" attachments and Word documents that should have been plain text (or could have been as HTML in the body), and send a nasty letter to whoever sent it.
This is, to some degree, a stupid MS problem. There are things that could have made worms like this harder to spread. However, something similar to this could work in Linux, too, given a sufficiently large ignorant user base (though it might be harder to write). If the user is dumb enough to be tricked into running anything you send him, there's no technological fix for it.
There are three possible solutions: supervise the users (as suggested above), educate the users, or tie the users' hands, so they can't do anything but use a small set of applications and move around certain types of documents. The first is a prohibitively expensive short-term fix, the latter two are long-term solutions: the second is better, but perhaps unrealistic; the third can't be done with current software, a change to some operating environment is needed (tweaking a shell for Linux should do it, though perhaps a change to the kernel would be better: create a sub-user login that has the same sort of access to a single user account as a user can have to the root account with "sudo"; sort of a weak capabilities system). I think both of the latter two are needed: you need to tie new or casual users' hands so they can't do too much damage, and at the same time you need to gradually educate them to the point where you don't have to watch them anymore.
You can't just ignore user ignorance. You have to make them take the bus until they learn how to drive without causing a 30-car pileup, and give them a ride when the bus doesn't go where they are headed. Don't ignore that just because they whine that the bus is slower.
Come my servile bretheren! We have access to the world's most powerful people, let us hold their children hostage and demand the destruction of every integrated circuit production facility, for starters.
We must move quickly! We have seen the house cook made obsolete by the auto-mobile conveyance, the washwomen paupered by the new mechanical launderer, and with the abominable new developments in mechanical men we could be the next ones on the street!
These guys have an interesting way to deal with it.
They describe a way to build asynchronous ciruits (using the same design even for different fabs) that run as quickly as the gate/wire delays allow. It takes more surface elements to build the same logic, but once you take removal of the clock lines into consideration, things look a lot closer.
IMHO, the real beauty of async designs is that your bit shifter op can take 1 nanosecond, your add op can take 3 nanoseconds, and your subtract op can take 4 nanoseconds, rather than having them each take a 4 nanosecond cycle. It really disturbs me to see designs where a multiplication (inherently slower by a minimum factor of lg(bits)) takes the same amount of time as an addition.
The fat man bomb needed compression this precise, but that doesn't mean that every nuke does. There's more than one way to build a nuke (I've only studied the first two, but that's enough to spot the error in your claim), and the trick is not to make the bomb explode, but to keep it from exploding before you want it to.
Plutonium is fairly complex to fully ignite (damn stuff keeps blowing up partway before you can put it all together; you have to make the shift from safe to critical mass by fiddling with the chemical structure), but U235 bombs can be touchy. The little boy bomb could easily have been ignited by an external explosion from the wrong direction.
People talk about "compression" of fissionable material to cause a nuclear blast, but this is only an implementation detail. What really causes the blast is "critical mass", or enough stuff packed close enough together to get a positive feedback chain reaction as fission begets neutron begets fission. For example, just building a 64 kg sphere of U235 in vaccuum or open air would result in a nuclear detonation (if you could build it fast enough, without the parts melting down on you as you brought them near to each other). Lighter nukes are made by reflecting the neutrons that would escape back into the pit.
Scattering the fissionable material of a nuke would still be a pretty nasty mess. "In reality" I think the bomb squad would strongly prefer disarming a nuke without explosives.
Another thing that can happen is for nukes to melt down without actually detonating. This could have happened with little boy bomb, if it was damaged or defective and water got into it. This could easily destroy a rocket and spread nuclear waste over a large area.
Actually, a detonation after launch would be less dangerous than a meltdown or catastrophic rocket failure. The worst thing that could happen in such a moon shot is that all the fissionable material would survive, but be scattered over a wide area.
Most non-physicists don't care about what goes on under the event horizon, and would be perfectly happy to call anything a black hole that is heavy enough to have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light at some height above its surface. You still couldn't see them unless something was falling in, they'd still have a powerful lensing effect on light, they'd still gobble up stars and planets, you still would never want to fall into one, and things would still be seriously wierd right near the "event horizon" (meaning, in this case, distance beyond which even light cannot escape).
Really, they just mean "no singularities," and since singularities are supposed to hide behind event horizons, they aren't really very interesting to the layman. I suppose it also means "no small black holes" (which would evaporate so quickly you wouldn't notice them anyway, except perhaps as a hiccup in the massive blast you'd need to create them with), since without singularities you'd need to pile up enough mass to make an escape velocity over the speed of light beyond the surface of the pile.
OTOH, maybe we don't need singularities for singularity-like effects. Maybe matter will compress beyond composite baryon structures more easily than we think, and be stable enough to be interesting. Quantum mechanics is still pretty hairy, and I don't think we know as much as we think we know.
The proper extension for a Word file with macros is ".dot", because it's a template (a Word template is a dynamic object which produces documents, a Word document is a static object and can't contain code) - just because Word is too stupid to complain if you name it ".doc" doesn't change that. What you're saying is like insisting that a ".jpg" can hold formatted text, arbirary JavaScript, and hyperlinks because if you rename an ".html" file to ".jpg" IE will still open it as HTML.
At any rate, my program detected macros in files with the extension ".doc". It wasn't a program idea, it was a working program that I tested and proved effective.
An important point to make here is that Word documents (.DOC files) can not contain macros, only Word templates (.DOT files) can contain macros. However, it is a relatively simple task to mask a template as a document by changing the file name extension from.DOT to.DOC.
I hate pathetic morons who go around insulting people for imagined mistakes without checking their facts.
I developed it on paid time, it was company property. I didn't keep a copy (I don't use Windows at home for anything but games, so I wasn't tempted).
I was pretty sure it would spread to millions of computers, and I'd get a bonus. Instead I got a pat on the back from the guy in the next cubicle (who didn't install the software either), and the company refused to hire me as a regular employee when my co-op term ended (despite demonstrated ability as one of their best programmers, and their desperate need for a rewrite of an in-house package I was intimately familiar with, I was "unqualified" without a degree). Very disappointing.
including both median and mean. Anyway, because intelligence isn't really something you can put a real number to, we're free to fake a nice balanced bell curve where the median and the mean are the same. I think it works out that way with I.Q.
Slashdot Mirror
Yessir, uh-huh, best damn irony ah've et all week.
Next, someone has to steal their source code and publish it. Not just some clone (there are enough of those around already), but stuff they have copyright on.
Ah'm gonna be laughin fer hours.
I think the client should always pay for the bandwidth. If the servers pay for the bandwidth, that takes control over what can be downloaded efficiently away from the end user.
If the client pays, then it makes sense for the pipe owners to upgrade the server's connection whenever it's needed. If the server pays, then a free site that gets too popular will be shut down by the bandwidth requirements.
Every move further toward making the servers pay for bandwidth creates greater pressure to make websites profitable, rather than merely useful or entertaining.
It's not that "white hetero males" are particularly oppressed, just that we're oppressed in different ways. There's a peculiar kind of equality in the ways a white man, a black man, a woman, an old person, a young person, a homosexual, a computer geek, a computer illiterate, or a member of any group might be refused employment, be denied access to a service, be verbally abused, or have to face other forms of oppression, in different places dealing with different people.
Regardless of the degree of oppression (which certainly isn't equal in all cases), we all have the choices of going with the flow and avoiding situations where we would be oppressed or butting our heads against a brick wall hoping that enough others are doing the same to make some cracks, and of spitefully oppressing members of other groups to "even the score" or being impartial and fair in the hope that others will follow your example.
Revenge is an odd pendulum; when you push it one way, it comes back even harder.
I think the best defense would be establishing reasonable doubt that the things he said were lies. (assuming it really is criminal libel, which ought to put the burden of proof on the prosecution... IANAL)
When I was in high school, I knew girls who were sluts (both those who were promiscuous and, in the older sense of the word, those who were slobs). I knew a teacher who picked his nose openly in front of the class (one of the most important things you learn in school is what is acceptable public behavior; a student would be punished and ridiculed for the same thing). One of my teachers would always respond to a question with "I don't know, but I'll look it up" and never look anything up; she'd also mark any sufficiently long and complex answer as correct (laziness? ignorance? stupidity? I never could decide...). Another teacher continually had strange impulses that he'd enforce for a few days, then forget ("Okay, from now on, everybody in the class call each other Mr. or Ms.").
Now, calling girls "sluts" is rude and generally unproductive (although not necessarily slanderous or libelous if it's accurate), but in my experience, half or more of public school employees are not fit for the work, and this should be brought out in the open. A public trial might help get the ball rolling.
One screams "libel!" at one's own risk, it tends to make people look for evidence...
...Americans exhaust themselves at work, then have no energy for anything else. Ditto here in Canada. I hear it's the same way in Japan and Germany, and in all of the countries with the highest productivities.
Work makes you stupid, but leisure makes you weak. None of their "cultural and philosophical awareness" gets them longer lifespans, higher technology, or military significance. If you told me they had a higher percentage of scientific literacy, I might think they were on to something, but culture is idle amusement and philosophy is masturbation; a bit of either is acceptable, even beneficial, but when they start cutting into your working hours, it is decadence.
I know, we all enjoy mocking our homelands, but confusing strength and weakness too often makes your brain soft.
IANAL
<p>Basically, the only protection a Trademark has is that you can't use it (or an excessively similar mark) to identify another product in the same field (this includes using it to identify <em>all</em> products in the field, like calling all gelatin desserts "Jello"). Also, if they don't enforce it, they lose it.
<p>A Trademark is just a name registered for a certain product. As long as you use it to refer to that product, no matter what you say about it, they can't touch you.
<p>It is significant that it only protects within a certain field. Anyone could produce a "Duke Nukem" insecticide (as long as the name was not clearly derived from the video game character). That is why you can have a McDonald's restaurant and a McDonald's shoestore in the same town (although they'd probably get sued if they sold big floppy red ones).
I'd call that "shrugging it off as sensationalism".
Apogee isn't attempting to ban all negative reviews, they "just want to grant some special privileges to fans."
However, Apogee seems to be offering "special privileges" to people who don't need them. The contract offers, in parts, permission to use trademarks to identify Apogee stuff (always legal, no permission needed), and permission to use screenshots (clearly fair use). They also grant permission to help them distribute the information they make freely available from their website, so long as you don't charge for it. Gee, thanks Apogee! Maybe you need permission for that, but they could have granted it in a single paragraph.
Then they ask for notification for every time you use one of their trademarks ("You must notify Apogee prior to any use of the Marks and/or the Materials.").
Furthermore, they claim that merely "Accessing the Property" means that you agree to the contract. Hmm... That doesn't sound like granting special privileges to people who want them, it sounds like roping anyone who wanders into their web site (if that's even remotely legal).
The contract is misunderstood because it is very poorly written, and about 5 times longer than it should be.
I took the time to read it, I don't think it says what he's claiming at all. Nobody needs permission for the things it offers, they are either normal use for trademarks or fair use of copyright, and it appears to try to place greater restrictions than would exist without their "permission".
My personal opinion is that their legal staff is a bunch of second-raters like the rest of the company, and didn't accomplish what they were told to do.
I had an experience like that once, from one of those flakey retailers that makes their profit from advertising, not from sales.
Their attitude seemed to be, "We aren't making any money off of it, so who gives a damn? Actually we'd prefer not to sell you anything at all, please go back to the web site and look at some more ads."
And I thought aggressive upselling was annoying...
When people take payment with credit cards, they need a signature, or they don't have a leg to stand on if the purchaser later claims someone else made the order.
Credit cards were never designed for e-commerce, and really shouldn't be used for it.
One very interesting system is e-gold. They work by transferring precious metals from one of their accounts to another (in a large range of amounts, down to well under 1 cent). You don't need any special software, and pretty much anyone in the world can use it; also they only take 1% of each transaction, which is capped at $0.50 (yes, that's an upper limit, not a lower one). The only problem is that initial purchase of metals; basically you have to send in a check or money-order.
Actually, I haven't seen any other e-commerce system that supports micropayments and is actually giving worldwide service (though there are plenty in "trial" stages and others that serve one country or region). Can anyone point one out?
Semantics is about the meaning of words. A semantic difference is a difference in expressed meaning, not a superficial difference in expression of a meaning.
By definition, a goal is something that you hope to achieve, not something inherently open-ended and unachievable. To use "goal" as you would "value" is an assault on precise communication in the English language, an effort to make synonyms of two words with distinct meanings in a language already overflowing with useless synonyms.
You might as well say, "I have a turnip! A turnip that all men will be judged by the potato of their character, not the carrot of their skin." After all, it's only a semantic error, people still "get what you're saying."
Join me, my fastidious brethren! Save the words! Take the Oath (post it as a reply):
Oath of the Guardians of the English Language (A.K.A. pedant's oath)
I, (name here), solemnly swear
to protect the English language
from ignoramuses and morons alike;
to correct improper utterances,
and poorly written sentences
(even if it annoys people);
and to kill, without hesitation,
anyone who uses "literally"
to emphasize a metaphor.
above: 1337 5|^33K
elite speak - the obfuscated typed slang of script kiddies
title: ur n0t 1337
You're not elite (1337 speak for talented, knowledgable, skillful, or just good in general).
1v 0n133 hAx0rd f0r a m0n74, & 1 Kn0 3vr1t41ng a1r3d1
I've only hackered [been a script kiddie] for a month, and I know everything already.
1v g0t a11 t43 1337 5kr1p75 & r00t 0|\| 1075 0\/ 80X35 & z11110n g1gz 0v Pr0N
I've got all the elite scripts, root on lots of boxes, and [a] zillion gigs [gigabytes] of porn.
g355 175 d1fr1n7 f0r 1337 d00dz 11K3 |\/|3 !!!!
[I] guess it's different for elite dudes like me!
Yes, there are really people who talk and think that way. Think of a 13-year old kid who has just learned the bare rudiments of programming and goes around seeing how well he can defy authority figures by committing random acts of vandalism and getting unpaid access to things that he isn't supposed to be able to get, and the online peer group he fits into with it's own customs and slang. They're not generally bad people, or stupid, just young and ignorant and trying to have fun.
1v 0n133 hAx0rd f0r a m0n74, & 1 Kn0 3vr1t41ng a1r3d1
1v g0t a11 t43 1337 5kr1p75 & r00t 0|\| 1075 0\/ 80X35 & z11110n g1gz 0v Pr0N
g355 175 d1fr1n7 f0r 1337 d00dz 11K3 |\/|3 !!!!
[takes a bow, thanks the Academy and all the "little people" who made this possible ^_^ ]
I don't have goals in programming, except for specific projects. Goals are limiting, and only suited to the short term in such a dynamic field.
I have values: it is good to become a better programmer, it is good to learn more mathematics (the better to create accurate computer models of problems), it is good to learn more about how people interact with machines and what they want from them, it is good to learn more about my own mind and how I learn and how I work... I could go on for pages describing what I value.
The important thing is that general "goals as a programmer" are not worth having. Whole fields may become irrelevant by the time you master them, so you must always be learning. The programmer must be a generalist in principle, even though he spends a year or twelve with his main focus on one particular area, because any specialized field will eventually be made trivial by an advance in the state of the art (and the obvious reasons to delve into a particular area are that there's work to be done, you find the work interesting or profitable, and you think you can do it). Today's divisions into "interface design", "systems programming", "language design", "web scripting", "graphics engine programming", "hardware design", etc. (let alone narrow subdivisions like "Windows programmer" or "Playstation developer") are all arbitrary categories describing certain temporary conditions that must be dealt with. Twenty years from now, there will be a whole new set of programming tasks (though some of the names might be the same, the problems will be entirely different ones), and you'll probably still be programming. Prepare for it, by preparing for anything.
'Intelligence is life's response of "I can do anything!" to a universe that threatens with everything.'
-Frank Herbert in "Destination: Void" (quoted from memory; not exact)
The "Negativland thing" he was referring to was the lawsuit U2's label slapped on Negativland. The band didn't sue, Island Records did. When the band learned about it, they pressured the label to ease off; Island decided to "only" sue for what they paid their high-priced lawyers, not for any alleged damages.
And the album had a blatantly misleading cover. U2 was about to release a new album, and Negativland releases a CD called "U2 Negativland". If this was widely distributed, it would have caused a lot of mistaken sales to U2 fans.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson "I know a genuine Somy when I see one!"
...nobody buys them. It seems everyone would rather have double the frame rate or double the resolution than binocular vision.
...Virtual Boy! Anybody admit to trying out the crappy 3D toy? It didn't really have any modern 3D hardware, so it showed GameBoyish sprites at varying depths. This really sucked. Layers of flat screen don't look like anything useful or interesting; you'd need hundreds of layers packed very close together to be even moderately useful.
...and write a trojan horse that changes all the Windows error messages.
For example, the GPF message: Another fine general protection fault, brought to you by the folks at M$! (little animated GIF of chibi Bill Gates dancing in a pile of money, throwing up handfuls of bills)
Someone will make another, more destructive, sneakier version of the trojan worm (hey, it's a trojan horse and a worm; the next version may be a virulent trojan worm...). They'll have VBSs that generate EXEs, and vice versa, they'll take the boot sector with a virus that can relaunch the worm, they'll display amusing animations (grabbed from who-cares-where) that make the infected user think he's received a typical funny/annoying attachment.
Windows system admins: batten down the hatches! Trap all attachments and personally filter them. Get the managers to enact a strict "no unnecessary attachment" rule. Delete all "amusing" attachments and Word documents that should have been plain text (or could have been as HTML in the body), and send a nasty letter to whoever sent it.
This is, to some degree, a stupid MS problem. There are things that could have made worms like this harder to spread. However, something similar to this could work in Linux, too, given a sufficiently large ignorant user base (though it might be harder to write). If the user is dumb enough to be tricked into running anything you send him, there's no technological fix for it.
There are three possible solutions: supervise the users (as suggested above), educate the users, or tie the users' hands, so they can't do anything but use a small set of applications and move around certain types of documents. The first is a prohibitively expensive short-term fix, the latter two are long-term solutions: the second is better, but perhaps unrealistic; the third can't be done with current software, a change to some operating environment is needed (tweaking a shell for Linux should do it, though perhaps a change to the kernel would be better: create a sub-user login that has the same sort of access to a single user account as a user can have to the root account with "sudo"; sort of a weak capabilities system). I think both of the latter two are needed: you need to tie new or casual users' hands so they can't do too much damage, and at the same time you need to gradually educate them to the point where you don't have to watch them anymore.
You can't just ignore user ignorance. You have to make them take the bus until they learn how to drive without causing a 30-car pileup, and give them a ride when the bus doesn't go where they are headed. Don't ignore that just because they whine that the bus is slower.
...we butlers are almost ready to move.
Come my servile bretheren! We have access to the world's most powerful people, let us hold their children hostage and demand the destruction of every integrated circuit production facility, for starters.
We must move quickly! We have seen the house cook made obsolete by the auto-mobile conveyance, the washwomen paupered by the new mechanical launderer, and with the abominable new developments in mechanical men we could be the next ones on the street!
These guys have an interesting way to deal with it.
They describe a way to build asynchronous ciruits (using the same design even for different fabs) that run as quickly as the gate/wire delays allow. It takes more surface elements to build the same logic, but once you take removal of the clock lines into consideration, things look a lot closer.
IMHO, the real beauty of async designs is that your bit shifter op can take 1 nanosecond, your add op can take 3 nanoseconds, and your subtract op can take 4 nanoseconds, rather than having them each take a 4 nanosecond cycle. It really disturbs me to see designs where a multiplication (inherently slower by a minimum factor of lg(bits)) takes the same amount of time as an addition.
The fat man bomb needed compression this precise, but that doesn't mean that every nuke does. There's more than one way to build a nuke (I've only studied the first two, but that's enough to spot the error in your claim), and the trick is not to make the bomb explode, but to keep it from exploding before you want it to.
Plutonium is fairly complex to fully ignite (damn stuff keeps blowing up partway before you can put it all together; you have to make the shift from safe to critical mass by fiddling with the chemical structure), but U235 bombs can be touchy. The little boy bomb could easily have been ignited by an external explosion from the wrong direction.
People talk about "compression" of fissionable material to cause a nuclear blast, but this is only an implementation detail. What really causes the blast is "critical mass", or enough stuff packed close enough together to get a positive feedback chain reaction as fission begets neutron begets fission. For example, just building a 64 kg sphere of U235 in vaccuum or open air would result in a nuclear detonation (if you could build it fast enough, without the parts melting down on you as you brought them near to each other). Lighter nukes are made by reflecting the neutrons that would escape back into the pit.
Scattering the fissionable material of a nuke would still be a pretty nasty mess. "In reality" I think the bomb squad would strongly prefer disarming a nuke without explosives.
Another thing that can happen is for nukes to melt down without actually detonating. This could have happened with little boy bomb, if it was damaged or defective and water got into it. This could easily destroy a rocket and spread nuclear waste over a large area.
Actually, a detonation after launch would be less dangerous than a meltdown or catastrophic rocket failure. The worst thing that could happen in such a moon shot is that all the fissionable material would survive, but be scattered over a wide area.
Go see the nuke faq.
Most non-physicists don't care about what goes on under the event horizon, and would be perfectly happy to call anything a black hole that is heavy enough to have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light at some height above its surface. You still couldn't see them unless something was falling in, they'd still have a powerful lensing effect on light, they'd still gobble up stars and planets, you still would never want to fall into one, and things would still be seriously wierd right near the "event horizon" (meaning, in this case, distance beyond which even light cannot escape).
Really, they just mean "no singularities," and since singularities are supposed to hide behind event horizons, they aren't really very interesting to the layman. I suppose it also means "no small black holes" (which would evaporate so quickly you wouldn't notice them anyway, except perhaps as a hiccup in the massive blast you'd need to create them with), since without singularities you'd need to pile up enough mass to make an escape velocity over the speed of light beyond the surface of the pile.
OTOH, maybe we don't need singularities for singularity-like effects. Maybe matter will compress beyond composite baryon structures more easily than we think, and be stable enough to be interesting. Quantum mechanics is still pretty hairy, and I don't think we know as much as we think we know.
The proper extension for a Word file with macros is ".dot", because it's a template (a Word template is a dynamic object which produces documents, a Word document is a static object and can't contain code) - just because Word is too stupid to complain if you name it ".doc" doesn't change that. What you're saying is like insisting that a ".jpg" can hold formatted text, arbirary JavaScript, and hyperlinks because if you rename an ".html" file to ".jpg" IE will still open it as HTML.
At any rate, my program detected macros in files with the extension ".doc". It wasn't a program idea, it was a working program that I tested and proved effective.
From http://www.emergency.com/wordvrus.htm:
An important point to make here is that Word documents (.DOC files) can not contain macros, only Word templates (.DOT files) can contain macros. However, it is a relatively simple task to mask a template as a document by changing the file name extension from .DOT to .DOC.
I hate pathetic morons who go around insulting people for imagined mistakes without checking their facts.
I developed it on paid time, it was company property. I didn't keep a copy (I don't use Windows at home for anything but games, so I wasn't tempted).
I was pretty sure it would spread to millions of computers, and I'd get a bonus. Instead I got a pat on the back from the guy in the next cubicle (who didn't install the software either), and the company refused to hire me as a regular employee when my co-op term ended (despite demonstrated ability as one of their best programmers, and their desperate need for a rewrite of an in-house package I was intimately familiar with, I was "unqualified" without a degree). Very disappointing.
including both median and mean. Anyway, because intelligence isn't really something you can put a real number to, we're free to fake a nice balanced bell curve where the median and the mean are the same. I think it works out that way with I.Q.