I am proud to say that 1/3 of us surf as 9/10 of us live. Used to be, back in the day, that only the more athletic, outgoing types got to have fun, but thanks to the miracles of technology, the pocket-protector and taped glasses set gets to fritter away our lives idly as well. Ah the miracles of technology....
I myself dream of the day when all the people of the world can sit at home in a dark room, untouched by soap or natural light, listlessly reloading slashdot and the onion, and googling in the hopes that they'll find something new and interesting. It is this persistant optimism that there is a better way to be lazy that is at the very heart of American culture, and this is the greatest gift we have to give the world.
I agree, and I think it's incredibly cool. But playing for the high score on a single user system, especially one that doesn't save the high score, not so much.
To some extent, I can see the argument of a lack of a win condition applied to the classic arcade games (Galaga being my current favorite). The sole point of playing these games is to continue playing them, at least in their modern incarnations where high scores tend not to be persistant or viewed by anyone but the sole proprieter of the game. Who cares if you've got the record high score if you're the only one playing? Yet we play anyway, more out of a sense of zen fulfillment than anything else.
Hmm... the path to enlightenment as revealed through video games... there may be something to that...
What the Gnome guys are up to....
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
RMS is a zealot, plain and simple. He wouldn't have been as successful as he has been if he wasn't; remembering we're talking about a man who spends his time passionately extolling the virtues of giving things away in a society that prides itself on its free market traditions. Zealots do not compromise, which leaves the more moderately minded with the feeling that, every now and again, they cross the line.
Creative commons is all about choosing which way is best for you to give away your work. RMS' position is that, unless you're willing to surrender all of yor rights, you are part of the problem. I am afraid I must disagree. As someone who works in the arts, I'm afraid that I have no ability to make a living by providing technical support for my product, and as I am a long cry from being an acknowledged master in the field, I have little chance of deriving an income from teaching others the practice of my art form. That being said, surrendering some of my rights might actually help me gain exposure and profit from what I do.
Let us not forget that the concept of patents and copyrights is good; it enables those who create to profit from their work, and continue to create, which benefits society. We have gone overboard, IMHO, and intellectual property law reform is something that we are sorely in need of.
Meditations on Perl 6
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If the release of Perl 5 was any indication, Perl 6 is the single magic bullet that will kill all of my (Perl) code.
Perl 6 may be more akin to a divine programming language, which makes the implimentation of complex data structures simple and sublime. Then again, it could all be a nasty trick to lead us away from the true path of enlightenment.
Perl 6 is not.NET.
Perl 6 is not controlled by any major corporation; I haven't decided whether this is advantageous or not yet.
If I were to have a child, would it be written in Perl 6?
Can Perl 6 be used to unlock the secret mysteries of the Bible code to reveal the end times?
Is Perl 6 really being developed by the descendants of Jesus Christ? Is the Pope trying to cover it up? Does the Pope know what Perl is? If so, is using Perl 5 a sin? How about Perl 6?
I bought a preview book on Perl 6 a few years ago. Is it still useful? Can I have my money back?
If Ruby was an upgrade to Perl, and Perl 6 is a an upgrade to Perl and Ruby, will Ruby need to changes their name in such a way as to play off of Ruby Tuesdays?
If I enter the Perl 6, can I change my mind later?
If Perl 6 is brillian, but no one uses it, is it still brilliant? What if it's awful and everyone uses it?
You can trust me when I say that this is all pretty damned rural. I can get in my car right now, drive five miles in any direction, and have a decent chance of seeing a cow, or maybe a horse, trying to find some grass underneath the recent snowfall. It's a certainty when the weather's nice. Like just about everywhere else, there is a disparity between the educated and the non-educated of this region, but the educated tend to cluster in one place, and there are a lot of tiny villages and townships between here and civilization. These are the sort of places where, were you to stop for gas in the middle of the day, the toothless folk behind the counter who are selling night crawlers (every gas station in these places doubles as a bait shop/convenience store) break off their conversations with their other customer, and the both of them look at you funny; almost as if they're hoping you'll do something funny so they can say they killed the "city boy." I should mention, to these folks, a "city" tends to be defined as a town with a population of more than 5000. There are a decent number of Amish communities interspersed in the area, and it's not uncommon to pass a horse drawn carriage on the highway, but it is a disturbing commentary on the bulk of the ruralites that the Amish community is, overall, more tolerant than they are. Being uneducated and toothless is a mark of distinction with these people: they're the sort who drive around in rusty pickups with bumper stickers that say "My kid beat up your Honor Student."
My view from the college town that I happen to reside in leaves me unsurprised at the sentiments expressed in the article. The population of most of the towns in the North Country is insulated, uneducated, and xenophobic. When they hear the "wind turbine," they're probably thinking it's the devil's own handiwork; that, or something that an A-rab wears on top of their head. Either way, they don't want it in their back yard, and they're too ignorant to understand that really it is a good thing for them.
You have to figure that they'll still be trying to resolve the "controversy" of intelligent design until around 2650. Only after then will politicians realize how very much extremist religious nutcases can damage a society and start to vote themselves out of office in favor of the Robots, which will by then be widely viewed as the next logical evolutionary phase. Sadly, all of this will be undone in the 0110110110 session, when Representative Unit MS784Ga31, suffering from a malfunctioning memory array, is able to propel its election to Speaker on the creationist platform that God made Robots on the 6th day, and tries to remove all refference to the now extinct human species from educational databases.
This timeline can be averted by continuing to elect uneducated ideologues to high ranking government position, and thereby removing funding from scientific research and education for the more Christian purpose of corporate tax breaks. Thankfully, the average American voter continues to be less educated than the average politician, so in all reality the ill of Rights will be declared unconsitutional by the benevolent dictatorship of his divine holiness the president sometime within the next 20 years.
The following amendments have been made to the bill of rights...
1. All constitutional guarantees are granted to robots.
2. All constitutional guarantees are denied to humans.
3. All humans are to report to the nearest processing facility for relamation as industrial lubricant.
The only thing they need is a sexy robot anouncer to pitch this during Desperate Housewives, and I don't think they'll meet with any significant resistance. And as (shameless plug) director of a recent production of R.U.R., I for one welcome our new Robot overlords.
why would we idolize the guy worked in one very small subset, when these people of past years could dominate so many fields?
Because working in many small subsets can give you an outisde perspective into potentially insular fields, thereby creating a certain amount of cross polination. I've got one foot in the arts, and one in the sciences, and it never ceases to amaze me how methods/processes commonplace in one are unheard of in the other. Granted, transplanting theories and methodologies doesn't make sense all of the time, but it does enough of the time for me to shake my head anytime I hear a theatre student say they've no use for calculus, or when I hear an engineering student say they've no use for literature. I would like to think a modern-day DaVinci would still be relevant, as he would help us come to a better understanding of "the big picture." The key is not stepping too far into either one so you don't lose the view of both.
Then again, the mass production of education might have pigeon-holed him into a drawing 101 class that left him with no taste for drawing, or anything else he is noted for. Perhaps the high costs of malpractice insurance (and general difficulty of exhuming cadavers) would have frightened him away from medicine. I've seen many times over in this thread where people have said that the great discoveries have already been made, and we now must work to refine those discoveries, but I can't help but wonder if we're so focussed on refining the theories of our greatest thinkers that we're discouraging the next Einstein.
That's not necessarily incompatable with havinbg the best intentions, it just reveals the hypocrisy of the anti-big government platform some politicians run under.
If people would turn off their ipods and remove the earbuds every now and again. I guess when you have 40GB of music you have to listen to it all continuously or something.
Because I hadn't heard of the "Little Red Hoax" story, but if I had, I wouldn't have believed it. The department of Homeland Security showing up to harass a colege student for requesting a book through ILL that anyone can go to the local Barnes and Noble and buy right off the shelf? That doesn't make any sense. Misguided and draconian as some of the DHS's policies may seem, I have to believe that really they do have the best of intentions, and besides, if the government did ever think to institute a thought police, any right thinking individual would know that the first place they would go would be those darker corners of the net, not books published by trade paperback publishing companies.
It's got to mean something that prominent people and news organizations picked this up. At face value, it could very well mean that they're just gullible, but I think there is something more legitimate going on. In the wake of the revelation of the Bush administration using the NSA to spy on citizens without getting wiretap warrants (when they are fairly easy to obtain) we have had a range of official responses from "so what?" to "yes we did it, don't you like freedom?" Sadly, this kind of wavering and uncertainty where the truth is concerned is the hallmark of this administr~~~~~ persons with power. This leaves those without power in a position where they don't know what to believe, but always feel safe in assuming the worse. DHS stormtroopers showed up to implant your new baby with a RFID chip? Page one above the fold!
Unfortunately the natural paranoia that beaten down feel is only exacerbated by a media all too eager to jump on stories like this. Edward R. Murrough turns in his grave at the concept of this talking head journalism, but it sure does sell papers. Rightwing Extremist Nutcase vs. Leftwing Extremist Nutcase generates the sort of polarizing, us or them, emotional reaction quotes that make headlines. For those of you not paying attention, they make headlines because they sell papers.
So now we have some college student trying to feel good about himself and justify his own existence. With narry a street protest to find to have his head bashed in by the cops (a clear sign that the system has failed when peaceful protests go uninterrupted), and probably not enough initiative to walk downtown to where the proletariat live to participate in one anyway, this anonymous fellow makes up a story that maybe will score him some points with whatever hippy chick in philosophy 101 that he's had his eye on. Really, this kind of story isn't the sort of thing you tell your professor when you're looking for an extension to a paper, nor is it really the sort of thing one admits during an advising session; this is really the sort of thing you say when you're three sheets to the wind drunk and looking to score (score what, exactly, I'll leave to your imagination). So everyone in this thing winds up with egg on their face. The kid who started it, those who believed him, and the journalists who spread the story because it sells papers. Us sane folk who realize we're not living in a police state yet just kind of shake our heads and wonder which is worse, thought police or freedom of stupidity.
Let me first start off by saying that I am a big fan of the Wikipedia project. It stands as a crowning achievement of open source thought, and even creative commons doesn't take the principles of free exchange of ideas as far into non-software related disciplines as much as Wikipedia does. It is something that is widely used in academia, and is generally considered as an acceptable source document.
That being said, any source used deserves to be verified. There are a very few sources that are considered beyond reproach (like the OED, for example), and any citation that is ever used in any sort of scholarly research work ought to be verified against comparable, alternate sources to make sure it is not totally missing the mark. Wikipedia's usefulness comes from the fact that it contains information available from those that know. A traditional encyclopedia might give you the spec the engineer wrote on how a thing should work, whereas Wikipedia gives you the opportunity to read the reports filed by end users and service technicians to give you a more practical sense of how it does. It's strength is that it is a living document that evolved not after a decade and a new publication, but within days of old information becoming obsolete. Generally speaking, the community seems to be fairly upright in their use of the Wikipedia system, but that can be said of any community based system. If Wikipedia were to change the way it functions, it would not be able to function as well as it does.
That being said, if someone were to quote a Wikipedia definition to me, I would probably believe them, but I wouldn't want to put money on their being right without having something to verify their definition against. Smart researchers always check their sources when it counts.
SFII... ah back in the day. Wait, stop the presses... SFIII? I totally missed that one. When I read the title of the piece, I just assumed that all those alpha, editions, and EXs some how added up to three. Then again, the last time I heard, the problem the capcom execs had was that they couldn't count higher than two and got stuck.
Here's something that seems to be a perfectly responsible and non-fascist way of employing it. The basic premise of copyright law, that artists/inventors/etc ought to profit from their work in order to enable them to produce more, is a good one (discussions on corporate corruption of its implimentation some other tmie, please). As we consider the ever evolving methods of digital publishing and information accessability, we must consider this as a way to foster both control over a medium and respect for the authors rights.
As someone who works in the arts, it is somewhat encouraging to know that there are online methods of publishing available that would enable me to profit from my work and make it publicly accessable. This is something that could be employed in the distribution of books, music, and video, and the significance of the ease of distribution, coupled with the genuine legality of this, ought not to be underestimated in its potential to meet the needs of artists, publishers, and society as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I am proud to say that 1/3 of us surf as 9/10 of us live. Used to be, back in the day, that only the more athletic, outgoing types got to have fun, but thanks to the miracles of technology, the pocket-protector and taped glasses set gets to fritter away our lives idly as well. Ah the miracles of technology....
I myself dream of the day when all the people of the world can sit at home in a dark room, untouched by soap or natural light, listlessly reloading slashdot and the onion, and googling in the hopes that they'll find something new and interesting. It is this persistant optimism that there is a better way to be lazy that is at the very heart of American culture, and this is the greatest gift we have to give the world.
I agree, and I think it's incredibly cool. But playing for the high score on a single user system, especially one that doesn't save the high score, not so much.
By how much Zen I achieve while playing, of course :)
To some extent, I can see the argument of a lack of a win condition applied to the classic arcade games (Galaga being my current favorite). The sole point of playing these games is to continue playing them, at least in their modern incarnations where high scores tend not to be persistant or viewed by anyone but the sole proprieter of the game. Who cares if you've got the record high score if you're the only one playing? Yet we play anyway, more out of a sense of zen fulfillment than anything else.
Hmm... the path to enlightenment as revealed through video games... there may be something to that...
I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to
I suspect they don't either.
They weren't all run by drug dealers, my childhood stomping ground was actually a front for illegal gambling.
RMS is a zealot, plain and simple. He wouldn't have been as successful as he has been if he wasn't; remembering we're talking about a man who spends his time passionately extolling the virtues of giving things away in a society that prides itself on its free market traditions. Zealots do not compromise, which leaves the more moderately minded with the feeling that, every now and again, they cross the line.
Creative commons is all about choosing which way is best for you to give away your work. RMS' position is that, unless you're willing to surrender all of yor rights, you are part of the problem. I am afraid I must disagree. As someone who works in the arts, I'm afraid that I have no ability to make a living by providing technical support for my product, and as I am a long cry from being an acknowledged master in the field, I have little chance of deriving an income from teaching others the practice of my art form. That being said, surrendering some of my rights might actually help me gain exposure and profit from what I do.
Let us not forget that the concept of patents and copyrights is good; it enables those who create to profit from their work, and continue to create, which benefits society. We have gone overboard, IMHO, and intellectual property law reform is something that we are sorely in need of.
If the release of Perl 5 was any indication, Perl 6 is the single magic bullet that will kill all of my (Perl) code.
.NET.
Perl 6 may be more akin to a divine programming language, which makes the implimentation of complex data structures simple and sublime. Then again, it could all be a nasty trick to lead us away from the true path of enlightenment.
Perl 6 is not
Perl 6 is not controlled by any major corporation; I haven't decided whether this is advantageous or not yet.
If I were to have a child, would it be written in Perl 6?
Can Perl 6 be used to unlock the secret mysteries of the Bible code to reveal the end times?
Is Perl 6 really being developed by the descendants of Jesus Christ? Is the Pope trying to cover it up? Does the Pope know what Perl is? If so, is using Perl 5 a sin? How about Perl 6?
I bought a preview book on Perl 6 a few years ago. Is it still useful? Can I have my money back?
If Ruby was an upgrade to Perl, and Perl 6 is a an upgrade to Perl and Ruby, will Ruby need to changes their name in such a way as to play off of Ruby Tuesdays?
If I enter the Perl 6, can I change my mind later?
If Perl 6 is brillian, but no one uses it, is it still brilliant? What if it's awful and everyone uses it?
So very tired....
whereas Chrichton is an expert in writing.
Some of us would be inclined to disagree with this assessment.
Obligatory Onion link.
You can trust me when I say that this is all pretty damned rural. I can get in my car right now, drive five miles in any direction, and have a decent chance of seeing a cow, or maybe a horse, trying to find some grass underneath the recent snowfall. It's a certainty when the weather's nice. Like just about everywhere else, there is a disparity between the educated and the non-educated of this region, but the educated tend to cluster in one place, and there are a lot of tiny villages and townships between here and civilization. These are the sort of places where, were you to stop for gas in the middle of the day, the toothless folk behind the counter who are selling night crawlers (every gas station in these places doubles as a bait shop/convenience store) break off their conversations with their other customer, and the both of them look at you funny; almost as if they're hoping you'll do something funny so they can say they killed the "city boy." I should mention, to these folks, a "city" tends to be defined as a town with a population of more than 5000. There are a decent number of Amish communities interspersed in the area, and it's not uncommon to pass a horse drawn carriage on the highway, but it is a disturbing commentary on the bulk of the ruralites that the Amish community is, overall, more tolerant than they are. Being uneducated and toothless is a mark of distinction with these people: they're the sort who drive around in rusty pickups with bumper stickers that say "My kid beat up your Honor Student."
My view from the college town that I happen to reside in leaves me unsurprised at the sentiments expressed in the article. The population of most of the towns in the North Country is insulated, uneducated, and xenophobic. When they hear the "wind turbine," they're probably thinking it's the devil's own handiwork; that, or something that an A-rab wears on top of their head. Either way, they don't want it in their back yard, and they're too ignorant to understand that really it is a good thing for them.
You have to figure that they'll still be trying to resolve the "controversy" of intelligent design until around 2650. Only after then will politicians realize how very much extremist religious nutcases can damage a society and start to vote themselves out of office in favor of the Robots, which will by then be widely viewed as the next logical evolutionary phase. Sadly, all of this will be undone in the 0110110110 session, when Representative Unit MS784Ga31, suffering from a malfunctioning memory array, is able to propel its election to Speaker on the creationist platform that God made Robots on the 6th day, and tries to remove all refference to the now extinct human species from educational databases.
This timeline can be averted by continuing to elect uneducated ideologues to high ranking government position, and thereby removing funding from scientific research and education for the more Christian purpose of corporate tax breaks. Thankfully, the average American voter continues to be less educated than the average politician, so in all reality the ill of Rights will be declared unconsitutional by the benevolent dictatorship of his divine holiness the president sometime within the next 20 years.
The following amendments have been made to the bill of rights...
1. All constitutional guarantees are granted to robots.
2. All constitutional guarantees are denied to humans.
3. All humans are to report to the nearest processing facility for relamation as industrial lubricant.
The only thing they need is a sexy robot anouncer to pitch this during Desperate Housewives, and I don't think they'll meet with any significant resistance. And as (shameless plug) director of a recent production of R.U.R., I for one welcome our new Robot overlords.
why would we idolize the guy worked in one very small subset, when these people of past years could dominate so many fields?
Because working in many small subsets can give you an outisde perspective into potentially insular fields, thereby creating a certain amount of cross polination. I've got one foot in the arts, and one in the sciences, and it never ceases to amaze me how methods/processes commonplace in one are unheard of in the other. Granted, transplanting theories and methodologies doesn't make sense all of the time, but it does enough of the time for me to shake my head anytime I hear a theatre student say they've no use for calculus, or when I hear an engineering student say they've no use for literature. I would like to think a modern-day DaVinci would still be relevant, as he would help us come to a better understanding of "the big picture." The key is not stepping too far into either one so you don't lose the view of both.
Then again, the mass production of education might have pigeon-holed him into a drawing 101 class that left him with no taste for drawing, or anything else he is noted for. Perhaps the high costs of malpractice insurance (and general difficulty of exhuming cadavers) would have frightened him away from medicine. I've seen many times over in this thread where people have said that the great discoveries have already been made, and we now must work to refine those discoveries, but I can't help but wonder if we're so focussed on refining the theories of our greatest thinkers that we're discouraging the next Einstein.
But remember, I'm no expert.
what exactly is the gist of timecube.com ??
Schizophrenia, I would say.
That's not necessarily incompatable with havinbg the best intentions, it just reveals the hypocrisy of the anti-big government platform some politicians run under.
If people would turn off their ipods and remove the earbuds every now and again. I guess when you have 40GB of music you have to listen to it all continuously or something.
Because I hadn't heard of the "Little Red Hoax" story, but if I had, I wouldn't have believed it. The department of Homeland Security showing up to harass a colege student for requesting a book through ILL that anyone can go to the local Barnes and Noble and buy right off the shelf? That doesn't make any sense. Misguided and draconian as some of the DHS's policies may seem, I have to believe that really they do have the best of intentions, and besides, if the government did ever think to institute a thought police, any right thinking individual would know that the first place they would go would be those darker corners of the net, not books published by trade paperback publishing companies.
It's got to mean something that prominent people and news organizations picked this up. At face value, it could very well mean that they're just gullible, but I think there is something more legitimate going on. In the wake of the revelation of the Bush administration using the NSA to spy on citizens without getting wiretap warrants (when they are fairly easy to obtain) we have had a range of official responses from "so what?" to "yes we did it, don't you like freedom?" Sadly, this kind of wavering and uncertainty where the truth is concerned is the hallmark of this administr~~~~~ persons with power. This leaves those without power in a position where they don't know what to believe, but always feel safe in assuming the worse. DHS stormtroopers showed up to implant your new baby with a RFID chip? Page one above the fold!
Unfortunately the natural paranoia that beaten down feel is only exacerbated by a media all too eager to jump on stories like this. Edward R. Murrough turns in his grave at the concept of this talking head journalism, but it sure does sell papers. Rightwing Extremist Nutcase vs. Leftwing Extremist Nutcase generates the sort of polarizing, us or them, emotional reaction quotes that make headlines. For those of you not paying attention, they make headlines because they sell papers.
So now we have some college student trying to feel good about himself and justify his own existence. With narry a street protest to find to have his head bashed in by the cops (a clear sign that the system has failed when peaceful protests go uninterrupted), and probably not enough initiative to walk downtown to where the proletariat live to participate in one anyway, this anonymous fellow makes up a story that maybe will score him some points with whatever hippy chick in philosophy 101 that he's had his eye on. Really, this kind of story isn't the sort of thing you tell your professor when you're looking for an extension to a paper, nor is it really the sort of thing one admits during an advising session; this is really the sort of thing you say when you're three sheets to the wind drunk and looking to score (score what, exactly, I'll leave to your imagination). So everyone in this thing winds up with egg on their face. The kid who started it, those who believed him, and the journalists who spread the story because it sells papers. Us sane folk who realize we're not living in a police state yet just kind of shake our heads and wonder which is worse, thought police or freedom of stupidity.
Let me first start off by saying that I am a big fan of the Wikipedia project. It stands as a crowning achievement of open source thought, and even creative commons doesn't take the principles of free exchange of ideas as far into non-software related disciplines as much as Wikipedia does. It is something that is widely used in academia, and is generally considered as an acceptable source document.
That being said, any source used deserves to be verified. There are a very few sources that are considered beyond reproach (like the OED, for example), and any citation that is ever used in any sort of scholarly research work ought to be verified against comparable, alternate sources to make sure it is not totally missing the mark. Wikipedia's usefulness comes from the fact that it contains information available from those that know. A traditional encyclopedia might give you the spec the engineer wrote on how a thing should work, whereas Wikipedia gives you the opportunity to read the reports filed by end users and service technicians to give you a more practical sense of how it does. It's strength is that it is a living document that evolved not after a decade and a new publication, but within days of old information becoming obsolete. Generally speaking, the community seems to be fairly upright in their use of the Wikipedia system, but that can be said of any community based system. If Wikipedia were to change the way it functions, it would not be able to function as well as it does.
That being said, if someone were to quote a Wikipedia definition to me, I would probably believe them, but I wouldn't want to put money on their being right without having something to verify their definition against. Smart researchers always check their sources when it counts.
with anything that might result in me hearing or seeing anything having to do with The Princess Bride can't possibly be a good thing.
I wish I could make movies so bad they earned $380 million in box office sales alone.
Back during that whole spy plane thing, when all of China's script kiddies were targeting US computers is when I started.
SFII... ah back in the day. Wait, stop the presses... SFIII? I totally missed that one. When I read the title of the piece, I just assumed that all those alpha, editions, and EXs some how added up to three. Then again, the last time I heard, the problem the capcom execs had was that they couldn't count higher than two and got stuck.
Man... now I feel old.
Here's something that seems to be a perfectly responsible and non-fascist way of employing it. The basic premise of copyright law, that artists/inventors/etc ought to profit from their work in order to enable them to produce more, is a good one (discussions on corporate corruption of its implimentation some other tmie, please). As we consider the ever evolving methods of digital publishing and information accessability, we must consider this as a way to foster both control over a medium and respect for the authors rights.
As someone who works in the arts, it is somewhat encouraging to know that there are online methods of publishing available that would enable me to profit from my work and make it publicly accessable. This is something that could be employed in the distribution of books, music, and video, and the significance of the ease of distribution, coupled with the genuine legality of this, ought not to be underestimated in its potential to meet the needs of artists, publishers, and society as a whole.
Cats chase string and the sun is hot.