With WMD, Saddam has an extortion tool that he can use - cave to his demands, or we lose Cleveland.
But unlike a terrorist, he has a relatively fixed base of operations. If we 'lost Cleveland', he knows that he would almost immediately lose Baghdad, and probably a few other cities. A nuke first, then conventional bombing, troops, the whole bit. I've seen no sign that he is willing to die to hurt someone else - those myriad lookalike bodyguards indicate someone with a keen interest in living.
He has nothing to gain from direct extortion on the US, and everything to lose. At most he might pose a threat to other nations in the area, but if he actually did more than saber-rattle, then the US has proven that it will walk over and stomp him into the dirt.
I don't like our stupid dependence on foreign oil, which makes us care what happens over there. But I just can't believe that Saddam poses any direct threat to the US, or even much of an indirect threat.
I don't pay $50 for games. Most game prices have approximately a 6-month half-life. After a year or so, they're about a quarter of the original price. The sole exception I've run into is Half-Life itself, but you can find the Blue Shift one for ~$10 various places and then download the rest.
Perhaps I'm unusual in that I don't have enough time to waste playing games 24/7, so they last longer for me, and also I don't have the reflexes to play twitch games online so I don't usually bother.
Well, there's Encap, which handles dependencies but currently only among other Encap packages. It's similar in putting files in one directory and using symlinks.
...are you really suggesting that the attacks of September 11 were justified or acceptable?
'Comprehensible' is not the same as 'justified' or 'acceptable'. Consult your dictionary. (Not that I totally agree with the original poster, but I've seen this stupid idea proposed too many times to ignore it.)
An older species won't have human versatility in sex: sexual responses will be all hard wired.
Huh? I thought one of the key attributes of intelligence is learning and adaptability, the very opposite of hardwiring. The higher-up you get in intelligence on Earth, the less hard-wiring you see. A foal can walk within minutes of birth; a human baby takes several months minimum.
On the other hand, a human can learn Irish dancing, karate, rock climbing, roller skating, ice skating, and driving. An unusually smart horse might be able to learn one, but an average human, given training, could become competent in all of 'em.
Humans even rewire their brains in fundamental ways. We have deep wiring, apparently, to learn spoken language, but we can train those parts of our brain to read writing, and sign language. Helen Keller learned to communicate by touch. I don't know of any animal besides primates that have learned to communicate in other than their "natural" channels.
Humans show wide varieties of behavior in extremely fundamental bodily functions; bathroom habits differ somewhat (my poor wife learning to use those Eastern toilets...) but our sleeping habits differ more, our eating habits differ substantially, and our sexual habits perhaps most of all.
I don't buy it. An 'older' species, that has had longer to develop, would seem likely to have even more variation in sexual habits and most other areas.
You don't have to be black to be picked on by the police..... but it helps. You frequently just have to be young, and male.
We lived in the suburbs outside Detriot. My brother, a white male, used to work as a cook in a restaurant in his teens. He'd be there late on the weekends, frequently as late as 2am cleaning up. Then he'd walk home... approximately 100 yards, down a main street, turn a corner, and then two houses down.
He was twice stopped by police on our front lawn, demanding ID.
"Where do you live?"
"Here. This is my front lawn."
"Give me a break, where do you live?"
"You're holding my ID, read it."
[Pause] "Okay, where are you coming from?"
"I'm coming from work. I'm a cook at a restaurant."
"Where?"
[Points] "Right there."
[Pause, hands ID back] "Well, don't do it again."
Yeah, the cops really said that. Twice. Two different cops.
Later, during college, there was the time he and I were roller-blading late one night, and got stopped by the cops because someone had grafitti'd a school nearby. The cop showed us the markings and said, "What does that mean to you?" The lettering said, "ICP".
My brother said, "Inductively Coupled Plasma?"
The cop stares.
"We use it at work. I work for an environmental chemistry assay company. You heat a sample up to..."
[Breaks in] "So you've never heard of the Insane Clown Posse?"
ALL the nuclear waste in the US would fit in the dimensions of the football field 6 feet deep.
Of course, things would get pretty warm if you actually tried to put them all together like that.(And I have to presume you're not talking about "low-level" waste...)
I always liked the idea of dropping them into the ocean where one continental plate is subducting under another. It'd be a long time before you'd see that stuff again.
When you're writing the portable parts of an application, compile and test on three different platforms. That's what I did; IA32 Linux, 32-bit SPARC Solaris, and OpenVMS Alpha (64-bit). That covers both endians along with 32 and 64-bit. 95% of the portability problems were caught within five minutes of writing them. (Along with the memory access bugs that work on one memory layout but fail on another, the misuse of a library call that works in one implementation but not another, etc.)
That app has since been ported to FreeBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, and Netware. The Netware was tough (no pthreads) but the Unixes were, like, five minutes to get the right link statements and such into the Makefile.
Well, the 6x4x16 that I had failed (laser stopped working, not a software problem) just after the warranty expired and they were singularly useless about getting it replaced or fixed. Basically, they offered me $50 off a new one, but it still would have cost more than other brands.
I went and got a Teac SCSI burner and it's been fine (except for a buggy firmware release that broke cdrecord). Of course, its warranty hasn't expired yet...
Uhh, and John Carmack does not understand every ounce of the quake code. And Linus torvalds does not understand every ounce of the Linux core.
No, they don't. Those codebases are split into well-defined modules, and they are able to understand how those modules fit together. And they can look inside one of those modules and know how it's put together.
That's why you have a core engine that can have software, Glide, and OpenGL renderers; or a filesystem core that can work with ext2, ext3, reiserFS, XFS, etc.
But neither of even these prodigiously talented gentlemen can visualize the entire state of their respective systems. Else why would you have, e.g., the Quake physics bugs or any number of kernel bugs? Their horizons may be quite a bit broader than average but they are still limited.
Being able to abstract chunks of a program or system out and not worry about implementation is utterly vital. No human, however gifted, is capable of understanding the entirety of more than a trivial system at once.
Now, the amount of abstraction possible does differ depending on what you're doing. Embedded systems programming is hard, and you do have to know details of the machine. But I ask you - do you insist on a gate-level understanding of the embedded CPU, or will you settle for knowing the opcodes and their timing characteristics?
Because, in embedded programming, you need to know more about the device, it's proportionately harder to do. That's one reason, apart from power and cost considerations, that embedded systems tend to be simple - the simpler the system, the easier it is to think about, to prove correctness or to at least enumerate possible pathways and handle them.
But even in that case, you need to be able to ignore some implementation issues or you can't do it at all.
But the current spacesuits suck for doing useful work. They have little flexibility and have a hinge in the palm that makes hands nearly useless. Better spacesuits would make EVA's quicker and more productive...
... the book by Don Libes. Out of print, I think, and doesn't cover more recent contests, but still very interesting. Alternates chapters of analysis of IOCCC programs with chapters that deal with obscure corners of C and programming in general. I've actually used it as a reference on occasion.
...with pervasive FPGAs, and perhaps some kind of pervasive "universal connector" wired to the FPGA, you can reconfigure a device to do things it wasn't specifically designed for.
Oooh, imagine what a virus could do with that kind of flexibility...
Man, I got into such an argument with my wife about that movie. Almost nothing the aliens did made any kind of sense, and the rank stupdity of trying to take a planet with is hopelessly deadly to you is so glaringly obvious I don't know how anyone could take that remotely seriously.
I suppose all the people who were living where it rained had a nice, quiet Invasion Day. Or maybe, just possibly, the aliens in rainy areas wore some kind of hazard suit.
Maybe it's my fault, but is it too much to ask for them to make a movie with even a minimal effort to help the audience suspend disbelief?
I used to work for an industrial robot company...
on
Robocoaster
·
· Score: 2
...and the primary thing we worried about was safety. These things are strong and can kill someone if they get in the way. When I left they were looking into allowing people to 'teach' paths by allowing users to 'push' on the robot.
It was damn tough - it needed to have active feedback, those motors can't be moved by hand, and you need external sensors 'cause the feedback from the current in the motors would only notice if you smacked into metal.
And, of course, the programming needed to be perfect. One guy said, "we don't want someone getting their arm broken because somebody forgot to convert to unsigned."
It can probably be made safe, but I'd never ride in one. My trained reflexes won't let me get near a robot without a deadman switch in my hand.
Too bad they cheated in the credits. Many of the anagrams were wrong. For example, a bit of thought shows that "Universal Studios" could not be rearranged to "A Turnip Cures Elvis". It adds "p" and "c" and removes "d", for starters.
Just for fun, my favorite anagram:
"electrical engineering" to "rectilinear negligence".
"The chief power... was the prevention or slowing of decay... the preservation of what is desired or loved... also they enhanced the natural powers of a possessor... rendering invisible the material body, and making things of the invisible world visible."
A buddy of mine pointed out that the chief way the rings seemed to work was by creating/enhancing telepathy in the wearer. The Ringwraiths, aside from any physical, martial prowess, acted by destroying the morale of their opposition. See, e.g., Boromir's report of the 'strange fear' that had descended upon their forces, or the depression and gloom when the Ringwraiths are above as the troops march to confront Sauron's troops at the gate.
Fits with Galadriel's talk of having "to train your will to the domination of others". Rivendell and Lothlorien are nice places to be because their rulers, who wear Rings, project the desire to be nice onto those within range. I'll have to look and see if it's actually clear that Elrond used the ring to cause the flood or not.
Even the invisibility effect can almost be interpreted as a desire on the part of Bilbo and Frodo to not be seen, which the Ring projects. Of course, being untrained in its use, their new, uncontrolled telepathy makes them highly visible to Sauron. One of the chief threats that the One Ring would pose in Sauron's hands would be revealing to him the thoughts and deeds of the wearers of the Three Rings... again, telepathy.
Obviously, it's not telepathy alone; unless life extension is a side-effect of amplifying someone's 'mental power'. But the ability of the Ring to tempt people, and twist them to be like Sauron, makes sense in that context, too. Perhaps it has an imprint of his personality, and aligns the wearer to it over time, like how steel in a strong magnetic field can be magnetized.
Wireless security is still many inovations away from being as secure as a land line.
Yup, and securing based on location can throw away the key benefit of wireless access. If you have to be in a particular area to access certain apps or information, what's the benefit of going wireless? Just hook up to a wire and get better bandwidth.
Yes, okay, it'd be nice wander all over our corporate headquarters and still keep access to my files and such, but Xterms and thin clients already offer that, with much less risk of wardriving.
The other story "Carthaginian Rose" completely ignores the existence of an immortal soul. You can't transfer a soul into a machine (Tracy Kidder's tome notwithstanding). Sorry, patently absurd.
Um, what, exactly, does an immortal soul do? Name something that it provides, or function it performs, or some means that it makes its presence felt.
Damage to the brain damages self and consciousness in fundamental ways. People who suffer some kinds of strokes lose half their world, literally. They lose, for example, the concept of 'left'. They only eat half of what's on their plates. Ask them to imagine walking down their street, they only describe the houses on the right. Ask them to mentally "turn around", and they forget the houses they just described and start talking about the ones on the other side of the street.
Look up Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia can understand language, but can't speak. Damage another part of the brain, and you get Wernicke's aphasia, where they can speak, but can't understand. They speak in "word salad". They don't
even realize they aren't making sense. Put two of them together and they'll have a whole conversation of nonsense.
The more you read up on neurological problems, the weirder it gets. (Almost any book by Oliver Sacks is good for this.) I don't know of an intellectual faculty that can't be damaged, if not eliminated, by damage to the brain.
If there is a soul, what can it do? Moreover, how can whatever's left after my brain is gone be called "me" in any real sense? Why should I care what happens to the soul when I die? All my memories, emotions, and consciousness seem tied up in my brain.
"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car."
- Frank Zindler
(This leads to a whole different problem with 'transmigrating' to a machine - that might be a perfect copy of me, but I would still be dead. But that's separate from any 'immortal soul' speculation.)
As has been noted, "they" is perfectly acceptable as "him or her", and has been so for at least a century or more.
Of course, it's really interesting that people feel it terribly necessary to de-gender English, which is one of the most gender-neutral languages out there. I mean, take French, Italian, Spanish, etc., etc., where every single noun has a gender! In French, for example, you have to remember that cars are feminine ("la voiture"), but tables are masculine ("le table").
Why isn't it vital that we add a neutral "it"-style pronoun and such to those languages?
(Okay, fine, mod me offtopic, but it's a pet peeve of mine.)
Slashdot Mirror
But unlike a terrorist, he has a relatively fixed base of operations. If we 'lost Cleveland', he knows that he would almost immediately lose Baghdad, and probably a few other cities. A nuke first, then conventional bombing, troops, the whole bit. I've seen no sign that he is willing to die to hurt someone else - those myriad lookalike bodyguards indicate someone with a keen interest in living.
He has nothing to gain from direct extortion on the US, and everything to lose. At most he might pose a threat to other nations in the area, but if he actually did more than saber-rattle, then the US has proven that it will walk over and stomp him into the dirt.
I don't like our stupid dependence on foreign oil, which makes us care what happens over there. But I just can't believe that Saddam poses any direct threat to the US, or even much of an indirect threat.
Perhaps I'm unusual in that I don't have enough time to waste playing games 24/7, so they last longer for me, and also I don't have the reflexes to play twitch games online so I don't usually bother.
Well, there's Encap, which handles dependencies but currently only among other Encap packages. It's similar in putting files in one directory and using symlinks.
'Comprehensible' is not the same as 'justified' or 'acceptable'. Consult your dictionary. (Not that I totally agree with the original poster, but I've seen this stupid idea proposed too many times to ignore it.)
Huh? I thought one of the key attributes of intelligence is learning and adaptability, the very opposite of hardwiring. The higher-up you get in intelligence on Earth, the less hard-wiring you see. A foal can walk within minutes of birth; a human baby takes several months minimum.
On the other hand, a human can learn Irish dancing, karate, rock climbing, roller skating, ice skating, and driving. An unusually smart horse might be able to learn one, but an average human, given training, could become competent in all of 'em.
Humans even rewire their brains in fundamental ways. We have deep wiring, apparently, to learn spoken language, but we can train those parts of our brain to read writing, and sign language. Helen Keller learned to communicate by touch. I don't know of any animal besides primates that have learned to communicate in other than their "natural" channels.
Humans show wide varieties of behavior in extremely fundamental bodily functions; bathroom habits differ somewhat (my poor wife learning to use those Eastern toilets...) but our sleeping habits differ more, our eating habits differ substantially, and our sexual habits perhaps most of all.
I don't buy it. An 'older' species, that has had longer to develop, would seem likely to have even more variation in sexual habits and most other areas.
We lived in the suburbs outside Detriot. My brother, a white male, used to work as a cook in a restaurant in his teens. He'd be there late on the weekends, frequently as late as 2am cleaning up. Then he'd walk home... approximately 100 yards, down a main street, turn a corner, and then two houses down.
He was twice stopped by police on our front lawn, demanding ID.
"Where do you live?"
"Here. This is my front lawn."
"Give me a break, where do you live?"
"You're holding my ID, read it."
[Pause] "Okay, where are you coming from?"
"I'm coming from work. I'm a cook at a restaurant."
"Where?"
[Points] "Right there."
[Pause, hands ID back] "Well, don't do it again."
Yeah, the cops really said that. Twice. Two different cops.
Later, during college, there was the time he and I were roller-blading late one night, and got stopped by the cops because someone had grafitti'd a school nearby. The cop showed us the markings and said, "What does that mean to you?" The lettering said, "ICP".
My brother said, "Inductively Coupled Plasma?"
The cop stares.
"We use it at work. I work for an environmental chemistry assay company. You heat a sample up to..."
[Breaks in] "So you've never heard of the Insane Clown Posse?"
Of course, things would get pretty warm if you actually tried to put them all together like that.(And I have to presume you're not talking about "low-level" waste...)
I always liked the idea of dropping them into the ocean where one continental plate is subducting under another. It'd be a long time before you'd see that stuff again.
That app has since been ported to FreeBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, and Netware. The Netware was tough (no pthreads) but the Unixes were, like, five minutes to get the right link statements and such into the Makefile.
Boromir was the son of Denethor. Faramir was his brother. Just FYI.
I went and got a Teac SCSI burner and it's been fine (except for a buggy firmware release that broke cdrecord). Of course, its warranty hasn't expired yet...
No, they don't. Those codebases are split into well-defined modules, and they are able to understand how those modules fit together. And they can look inside one of those modules and know how it's put together. That's why you have a core engine that can have software, Glide, and OpenGL renderers; or a filesystem core that can work with ext2, ext3, reiserFS, XFS, etc.
But neither of even these prodigiously talented gentlemen can visualize the entire state of their respective systems. Else why would you have, e.g., the Quake physics bugs or any number of kernel bugs? Their horizons may be quite a bit broader than average but they are still limited.
Now, the amount of abstraction possible does differ depending on what you're doing. Embedded systems programming is hard, and you do have to know details of the machine. But I ask you - do you insist on a gate-level understanding of the embedded CPU, or will you settle for knowing the opcodes and their timing characteristics?
Because, in embedded programming, you need to know more about the device, it's proportionately harder to do. That's one reason, apart from power and cost considerations, that embedded systems tend to be simple - the simpler the system, the easier it is to think about, to prove correctness or to at least enumerate possible pathways and handle them.
But even in that case, you need to be able to ignore some implementation issues or you can't do it at all.
But the current spacesuits suck for doing useful work. They have little flexibility and have a hinge in the palm that makes hands nearly useless. Better spacesuits would make EVA's quicker and more productive...
Aw, that's easy. He may be fully divine, but he's also fully human, so he'd be subject to both the "toy" and "doll" duties!
Man, I got into such an argument with my wife about that movie. Almost nothing the aliens did made any kind of sense, and the rank stupdity of trying to take a planet with is hopelessly deadly to you is so glaringly obvious I don't know how anyone could take that remotely seriously.
I suppose all the people who were living where it rained had a nice, quiet Invasion Day. Or maybe, just possibly, the aliens in rainy areas wore some kind of hazard suit.
Maybe it's my fault, but is it too much to ask for them to make a movie with even a minimal effort to help the audience suspend disbelief?
It was damn tough - it needed to have active feedback, those motors can't be moved by hand, and you need external sensors 'cause the feedback from the current in the motors would only notice if you smacked into metal. And, of course, the programming needed to be perfect. One guy said, "we don't want someone getting their arm broken because somebody forgot to convert to unsigned."
It can probably be made safe, but I'd never ride in one. My trained reflexes won't let me get near a robot without a deadman switch in my hand.
Just for fun, my favorite anagram: "electrical engineering" to "rectilinear negligence".
"The chief power... was the prevention or slowing of decay... the preservation of what is desired or loved... also they enhanced the natural powers of a possessor... rendering invisible the material body, and making things of the invisible world visible."
A buddy of mine pointed out that the chief way the rings seemed to work was by creating/enhancing telepathy in the wearer. The Ringwraiths, aside from any physical, martial prowess, acted by destroying the morale of their opposition. See, e.g., Boromir's report of the 'strange fear' that had descended upon their forces, or the depression and gloom when the Ringwraiths are above as the troops march to confront Sauron's troops at the gate.
Fits with Galadriel's talk of having "to train your will to the domination of others". Rivendell and Lothlorien are nice places to be because their rulers, who wear Rings, project the desire to be nice onto those within range. I'll have to look and see if it's actually clear that Elrond used the ring to cause the flood or not.
Even the invisibility effect can almost be interpreted as a desire on the part of Bilbo and Frodo to not be seen, which the Ring projects. Of course, being untrained in its use, their new, uncontrolled telepathy makes them highly visible to Sauron. One of the chief threats that the One Ring would pose in Sauron's hands would be revealing to him the thoughts and deeds of the wearers of the Three Rings... again, telepathy.
Obviously, it's not telepathy alone; unless life extension is a side-effect of amplifying someone's 'mental power'. But the ability of the Ring to tempt people, and twist them to be like Sauron, makes sense in that context, too. Perhaps it has an imprint of his personality, and aligns the wearer to it over time, like how steel in a strong magnetic field can be magnetized.
If these aliens are so magically powerful, how come you never see forest circles?
Yup, and securing based on location can throw away the key benefit of wireless access. If you have to be in a particular area to access certain apps or information, what's the benefit of going wireless? Just hook up to a wire and get better bandwidth.
Yes, okay, it'd be nice wander all over our corporate headquarters and still keep access to my files and such, but Xterms and thin clients already offer that, with much less risk of wardriving.
It's here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/lang.html.
Um, what, exactly, does an immortal soul do? Name something that it provides, or function it performs, or some means that it makes its presence felt.
Damage to the brain damages self and consciousness in fundamental ways. People who suffer some kinds of strokes lose half their world, literally. They lose, for example, the concept of 'left'. They only eat half of what's on their plates. Ask them to imagine walking down their street, they only describe the houses on the right. Ask them to mentally "turn around", and they forget the houses they just described and start talking about the ones on the other side of the street.
Look up Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia can understand language, but can't speak. Damage another part of the brain, and you get Wernicke's aphasia, where they can speak, but can't understand. They speak in "word salad". They don't even realize they aren't making sense. Put two of them together and they'll have a whole conversation of nonsense.
The more you read up on neurological problems, the weirder it gets. (Almost any book by Oliver Sacks is good for this.) I don't know of an intellectual faculty that can't be damaged, if not eliminated, by damage to the brain.
If there is a soul, what can it do? Moreover, how can whatever's left after my brain is gone be called "me" in any real sense? Why should I care what happens to the soul when I die? All my memories, emotions, and consciousness seem tied up in my brain.
"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car." - Frank Zindler
(This leads to a whole different problem with 'transmigrating' to a machine - that might be a perfect copy of me, but I would still be dead. But that's separate from any 'immortal soul' speculation.)
Of course, it's really interesting that people feel it terribly necessary to de-gender English, which is one of the most gender-neutral languages out there. I mean, take French, Italian, Spanish, etc., etc., where every single noun has a gender! In French, for example, you have to remember that cars are feminine ("la voiture"), but tables are masculine ("le table").
Why isn't it vital that we add a neutral "it"-style pronoun and such to those languages?
(Okay, fine, mod me offtopic, but it's a pet peeve of mine.)