>>The obvious question is: why characterize the jock extreme as genial and average, but depict the geek extreme as the early onset of a disease!?extreme? I graduated salutorian of my high-school class - right behind the most beautiful, and socially graceful girl that has ever lived. I wrestle and was good enough to make it to the state tournament. I was the captain of the cross country team, and at a 185lb was the biggest runner in the league. (I didn't play football because my mother wouldn't let me play a sport where the ambulance showed up before the game started. Besides the coaches were nasty and foul mouthed).
I can be completely graceful, when I wanna. But I usually don't wanna, unless I think there is a posibility of sex being involved. Which there usually isn't, so fsst. I prefer to spend my time digging into the latest technology. I spend a lot of conversational time explaining to the underinformed what the hell I'm talking about.
So, am I a geek, or am I a jock?
Wait a minute now, I used to stumble over my feet a lot. My Dad always said that I would fall over the marks on a basketball court, but I could run down a dried-up riverbed with no problem (maybe that explains the cross country thing). I used to walk to supper with a sci-fi book in my face. My wife is an aerobics instructor, and I'm one of her best students. I program computers for a living. I like to fix things, and discover how they work. I like to throw large parties with lots of friends that work out regularly.
So am I a geek or a jock? Why does there have to be a distinction?
My comments are all of those here claiming that they get beat-up because they're smart geeks that dress funny. My contention is that a smart animal is the one that bends itself and its environment to suit its own needs. If your getting your ass kicked for wearing a black trenchcoat, then it is fairly stupid to keep wearing the black trenchcoat without responding to the violence (by HERF gunning the assailant's car, for example). If you're not smart enough to remove the threat of violence, then you're not very smart.
You people who want to believe that being smart or good a computers, please do so, but quit whining here. Some of the most beautiful people I have ever known have been the smartest (and I participated in 'gifted' classes in school, so I associated with all the smartest in the school). If there is a correlation between intelligence and social grace, I would postulate that it is the opposite of what people on this site claim. Beauty and intelligence usually walk hand in hand.
Trademarks are registered within a geographical area. I've known of several cases where a company had to change its name because it expanded into areas where their name was already registered and in use. We already have a naming system that relates to geographical area. Simply make it the law that com is up for grabs and will hold now sort of weight in any trademark dispute; however, a corporation must defend their registered trademark in domain names that are registered in areas in that they are doing business.
For example, Food Lion used to be Food King or some such name. They expanded into an area that already had a Food King, thus the name change. So Food Lion is a registered trademark in the state of North Carolina in the US. If I register foodlion.nc.us then Food Lion must hunt me down and make me relinquish my hold on the domain, or risk weakening their trademark. Company B can come in and name their corner convenience store Food Lion, and when challenged tell the judge, "Heh, they let HIM do it." So Food Lion would have every right, even the obligation, to make me surrender the name. But they would have no right whatsoever to foodlion.tx.us. Food Lion doesn't operate in Texas. So if the convenience store tried to use that to justify infringing on Food Lion's trademark, the judge would just laugh and fine them for stupidity.
So it's simple. Amend the law to say that TLD names don't hold weight in trademark disputes. Let people squat all over them, let companies pay out the nose to get them, and let NSI make boat loads of money. Only the localized names will mean anything.
People won't be able to remember all of those extra letters you say? Do you know the zip code of where you live (this is for US people)? Do you know any for Raleigh, NC? Of course not, unless you happen to live here. Why is that? Because you don't need to know it. All you really need to memorize is your own. And it'll become the same with domain names. And it'll acutally be more convenient this way.
What do I do if I want to order a pizza? I pick up the phone. But I'm online. What if I could just go to the pizza houses web site? But that means searching the entire WWW to find a local pizza house. Now if I could just search through ra.nc.us...
A lot of people (especially SOZO) are trying to call this 'creative'. Everyone, listen closely. I'll only say this however many times necessary to get the point across.
Different != Creative;
If I pile up some mud and stick a motherboard and other assorted computer parts into it, I have not been creative. I've been silly and (if the parts were any good) wasteful. But I've not made anything that anyone would want.
Now, if they had nixed the display and keyboard, they might have a useful idea. I'd like a nice footrest under my desk. Put a bass speaker in the back and you'd have everthing that I currently have under my desk, but in a much more pleasing setup. THAT would be something new and useful.
Note to all PC designers everywhere: Quit trying to put the PC into things that I use for vegetating. Working with computers is an active pursuit. When I choose to vegetate, I am choosing to be passive. You can't passively cruise the web. The web is something you have to interact with. So just stop trying to put a PC in my TV room!!
No! I hate it when the networks try to do this. Look at what happened to Sliders. The original show was, well, ORIGINAL. It has now morphed into the "young, brash hero saves the day by pulling a totally unbelievable miracle out of his/her ass" thing that corporate TV turns every action show into eventually. The originallity and freshness is gone, and all that is left behind is some stock stories from the backshelves of a Hollywood studio with the names and set replaced. The same was done with Babylon5. I watched one episode of Excalibur and thought, "Why the hell are they trying to be Star Trek?" (Did anyone one else pick up on the 5 year mission thing? How about the military starship with with wide, clean, carpeted walls and expansive living quarters?)
Let the X-Files die an honorable death gracefully. Don't try to pull it back from the brink by reinventing it like some 60yr old man buying a sports car in a lame attempt to prove he's not getting old.
Think of what the government and all the corporations could do with this amount of memory. And you thought data-warehousing was a big thing now. With storage this cheap and small (one of the biggest problems that the government has is where to store millions of CDs and reals of tape) you'll have your whole life recorded and indexed whether you like it or not.
Revelations talks of a beast that will know the whereabouts of every person on the planet. Is that where all of this technology is headed?
Maybe someone could write a HOWTO to make things simpler for me. I have several HOWTOs that I've printed, and as I've read them I've edited. Simple things. A misspelling here...reword a sentence for clarity there. Things that have made the text more readable for me.
How do I funnel suggested changes/corrections back to the author with minimal fuss? Shouldn't this be the first HOWTO one should read? Maybe the directions on how to submit changes should be at the top of every howto? Yes the author will be diluged with spelling error notifications for a week or so, but as the corrections are made the notifications will move quickly from 'you misspelled...' to 'the correct syntax for the command is..' or 'a clearer way of saying this is...'
So, make it simple for people (me) to submit editing. And put the directions for doing so on title page of every HOWTO.
>>What stops a programmer from say recording all the quantum states of the gates during an execution of the code in other qubits and after the culculation completes, reviewing what you saved up?
Quantum mechanics. In order to save the states you have to read them. If you read them, you destroy them. If you can't read them until the operation is through, you have a black box.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to program a QC. I'm saying it is very difficult. We work with black boxes all the time (most API's, the C libraries, etc). Someone can design a 'search coprocessor' that could remove the complexity of actually programming one of these beast. The API would in effect harness the power.
Designing a more powerful computer, car, drill, bulldozer, etc, is as much about being able to harness the power as much as it is about creating it in the first place. Harnessing the power of a computer is an excercise in enabling a person to abstract a process and formalize it in code. Programming is made simpler for most people when the abstraction and coding are simple serialized steps. A secretary doesn't find it hard to say, "I do A, then B, then C." It's the recipe mentallity and people are used to thinking that way.
The referenced article takes a page or two to explain how to do a seqential search. Granted it's a new way of thinking about a search, and therefore takes longer to explain. But that IS my point. It's a new way of thinking. It's hard to change the way people think. Add to that a lack of debugging techniques and you get buggy software.
I could install a supercharged dragster engine in my Nissan pickup truck; unfortunately, if the excessive power didn't rip my transmission apart or spin all the rubber off my tires, I doubt that I could control the acceleration. My point is that as a general purpose computer this technology will be useless unless someone developes tools that will make normal developers smarter.
The operation of today's processors are easy to understand. They perform one step at a time progressing from known state to known state. And yet most of the software available is infested with bugs. One of the easiest ways to debug this software is to single step through the code with a debugger in order to completely understand its operation. If we now introduce a system that cannot be read until the final answer is available, how will software improve.
Does anyone remember how 'self-modifying code' was going to save us all? Why aren't genetic algoritmns taking over programmer jobs? It's something that is understood in all engineering circles. More is not always better. If you can't harness and control the energy then it will usually do more harm than good.
Please note that I'm not saying that this technology can't be created. What I'm saying is that if it does become mainstream, the average programmer won't be intelligent enough to write and debug programs with it.
I could install a supercharged dragster engine in my Nissan pickup truck; unfortunately, if the excessive power didn't rip my transmission apart or spin all the rubber off my tires, I doubt that I could control the acceleration. My point is that as a general purpose computer this technology will be useless unless someone developes tools that will make normal developers smarter.
The operation of today's processors are easy to understand. They perform one step at a time progressing from known state to known state. And yet most of the software available is infested with bugs. One of the easiest ways to debug this software is to single step through the code with a debugger in order to completely understand its operation. If we now introduce a system that cannot be read until the final answer is available, how will software improve.
Does anyone remember how 'self-modifying code' was going to save us all? Why aren't genetic algoritmns taking over programmer jobs? It's something that is understood in all engineering circles. More is not always better. If you can't harness and control the energy then it will usually do more harm than good.
Why can't ground based systems be used for the initial acceleration of space vehicles?
I'm thinking of a mag-lev train going up the side of a mountain with a shuttle mounted in a cradle on top. The train accelerates to 200mph then maintains the speed up the mountain. Just as it reaches the top, the rocket motors ignite and lift the shuttle from its cradle. The train decelerates in a long circle that brings it back to it's starting point where another shuttle is loaded.
Or how about a deep hole where steam would force the shuttle mounted on a platform upward? Just as the top is reached, the candle is lit and off it goes, already boosted a mile up.
Why isn't there any investigation into these types of launch systems?
>>What next? Random inspections of everyone's machine to see if there's anything illegal!?
Yes. The government is slowly taking away our rights, one-by-one. I used to drive a truck (18-wheeler). The law requires that trucking companies randomly drug test drivers on a draconian random basis. A friend has been test 3 times in the last 6 months. No warrants. No suspicion. Everyone gets tested. The rules require that the 'target' not be notified. He comes in to work and is told to go directly to a drug testing center. The justification is to make the roads safer since such a large number of trucker are drug addicts. And it has made things safer, too. Don't all of you remember the daily reports of drug crazed truck drivers either barreling through playgrounds full of beautiful young pregnant mothers and their sweet innocent children playing, or running church buses off the road killing all aboard? When is the last time you heard such a report? The politicians had to do something to protect all this goodness.
Now, everyone knows that nearly everyone who uses the internet spends a considerable amount of time searching for and exchanging pictures of these same sweet mothers and children being raped and sodimized. In order to protect all this goodness the politicians will have to implement some sort of constant, yet random, monitoring of the populace. I ask you. What's the difference?
Rights? Privacy? If you're not doing anything wrong, you won't mind the secret police secretly reading everything you type.
sent men to the moon? Built the Boing 737 or the stealth fighter? Even designed a relatively modern car... without the aid of a computer?
The point here is that there are a lot of modern marvels that are made possible through the use of computers. They might not have increased the number of cars their making over at Ford, but those cars ain't Model T's either.
A memo used to mean a white sheet of paper with some black text. 'Formatting' meant some word were underlined and that the left hand column was aligned. When's the last time you saw one of those? A memo must now have multicolored text and at least 5 different typefaces in varying sizes interspersed through at least 3 colored graphics. The same piece of information is conveyed (the company picnic is Saturday at noon), but people are pleased so much more by the professional quality of the note.
If I were made God, or even just office manager, for a day, the first order of business would be to delete every font off of every computer except for one fixed size system font. Of course, then I would have to install a bigger pipe to the net to handle all the extra surfing from the idle secretaries.
Another point everyone misses. People a not trained as well. The call center for an insurance claims division often consist of a welfare mothers whose 2 years have run out and have been forced into work. They got 30 minutes of OJT on how to use both the computer system and phone. If they have to pay childcare, the mother is making less than the welfare and the corporation is looking for ways to cut back on their pay. Meanwhile the company is reporting record dividends, buyouts and execs with golden parachutes.
The point here is not to denigrate anyone, just to point out that computers are being used to replace proper training and education. So that you have a smarter machine with a dumber operator. It's a wash.
This whole episode exposes the major flaw at Micrsoft concerning secure and mission critical systems. They don't know what one is. Being secure and mission critical implies near %100 availability. It's an obsessive attitude.
A thunderstorm took out the server? A periodic, naturally occuring, predictable phenomenon? Puh_lease!? They've never heard of a UPS? Backup telecom links? Give me a break. Microsoft wouldn't know a mission critical system if they had one.
for $15 US. The average garden sprayer. It uses an adjustable sprayer that can go from small to large, and a large tank that will last for hours. Some even have lever handles that make pumping a breaze.
for $2 US. A warm 2 liter cola. punch a hole in the lid and off you go. Doesn't last long.
for $5 US. Mount a car tire nipple in the lid of a 2 liter cola bottle using a good epoxy. Drill a hole in a piece of 2x1 and insert the nipple through the board and epoxy it down. Fill the bottle half full, screw onto the cap, and then pump air in through the nipple using a bike pump. Aim over the heads of the enemy, and unscrew the bottle until it explodes into the air. Multiple bottles can be mounted on the same board for a full barrage.
Didn't get the letter, but isn't this SEC rule just a way to limit the participation in IPO's to those who are already rich? Sure, IPO's are some of the riskiest investments that can be made, but they're also provide some of the highest returns. If I know that the RedHat IPO is a good deal, why can't I invest my life savings in it? Who is the SEC to say that I'm not rich enough to play in the game? As it stands, the SEC is acting as the muscle for some fat cats who don't like the unwashed masses moving in on their exclusive territory.
I read all these comments on how everyone one wants to be able to buy the latest sound card and not have to upgrade the entire computer. How much do you pay for a decent sound card? $150 US? How much do you pay for a decent processor $150 US?
The logistics of seperately making and then integrating all of the items in a modern PC drives the cost way up. Parts have to be placed on printed circuit boards (which are fairly expensive to make), then the whole shebang heated to flow the solder (which is basically lead. Have you seen the environmental regulations for using hazardous materials like lead?), all the while the slightest bump will completely destroy the board. Expensive connectory have to be attached (check you favorite electronics shop for the cost of and ISA slot connector).
If all of the components were in the same IC, possibly even from the same die, cost will take a nosedive, because the manufacturing process is ONE step--make the IC. So you upgrade your sound? You get a faster processor, better network card and scsi controller, and the lastest holographic generator to boot. All for the same price that you would put out for a sound card today.
Imagine it's 2008 and everyone uses Linux, which is free (as in beer). Imagine some entrepreneur raising a case that this "predatory pricing" prevents him developing a new OS and narrows consumer choice. Some bureaucrat might just go for it... and once again we'd have know-nothing governmental noses in our world.
Well, just WHO would you sue.
Heh look, there are people out there BREATHING for free. Dammit, I want to develop an AIR product and sell it, but all of this free air stuff is narrowing consumer choice and stifling innovation in the air market. Let's sue God.
First we get everyone used to collecting factoids and storing them in a remote though accessible location. There will follow a push to make everyones databases available, and trials, contract disputes, etc. will become little more than ceremonial as all the facts will be laid out for everyone to see.
The technology improves so that more data is collected until every experience is recorded to the ultimate detail. ("Mr Jones, you say that you did not cheat on your wife. And yet on May 21 at 11:03am, EST, you visited Joey's Happy House. At 11:15 Mary Juicy entered your personal space and at 11:26 there was a sharp rise in your heartbeat and hormonal output which would indicate an orgasm.")
The final and ultimate innovation will be the introduction of viable neural interfaces. Everything I do and feel is recorded and stored in a central location. Want to climb Mt. Everest, but you're paralyzed from the neck down? No problem, access the database for the life recording of someone who has and experience their climb. We'll see the whole world networked as one huge mind. The Collective. Learning will be a thing of the past as everyone will know everything. Genetically engineered people will be raised to be 'clusters', nothing more than computing power in limp lifeless bodies.
Privacy is dead, because everyone knows everything about you and you know everything about everyone else. Prejudice is dead, because how can you PREjudge someone when you know everything about them. Conflict and injustice are dead, because people will not be able to distance themselves from and redefine other people as sub-human. Is it heaven, or hell?
I thought they did a very good job of showing that the people who supposedly made the biggest impact in the micro-computer era, Jobs and Gates, weren't the guys who actually made anything. I loved the way they had Balmer's character sneering at the way Gates sold something he didn't have (DOS) to IBM. Woz actually created the Apple, but Steve didn't mind taking credit for it. In the same way that Paul seemed to be the technical driving force behind Microsoft.
I think this movie should help to finish scraping the boy genius inventor image off of Bill Gates that the has been polishing for so many years.
what an evil dirty word... What makes you loosers think you deserve to go into a library to get your dose of porn? What's to stop you from getting your OWN PC and ISP? Can afford it? Well then, get a JOB!! Maybe then you can enter the real world and not have so much time to complain about my taxes not paying for your habits.
I get sick of hearing all these ingrates whining whenever our leaders decide to restrict handouts. Here's a clue or two. Cruising the web for free in a public or school library is NOT guaranteed by the Constitution. It is very unlikely that the valuable data that would be restricted by filtering software isn't available in other places! It is possible, even easy, to get what would be restricted in other places. And finally, it is not your RIGHT to have me and other American taxpayers pay for your entertainment (apologies to all my international aquaintances 8*).
It is your right to speak. It is not your right to have your speech dissiminated by either me or the government. Limiting what can be viewed with government funded facilities doesn't limit anyones ability to speak out. Does this mean that duly appointed government leaders and officials get to decide what is proper to be destributed on government funded networks? Yeah, so what? He who pays the piper gets to call the tune.
So cut the bitching and whining and go hire your own piper!!
The only intelligent solution is to wipe the all drive clean of any program that will run any untrusted code without user intervention. It is the ludicrous to allow code from anonymous email to execute code on my machine, and with the current unsecure state of the Internet all email can be considered anonymous for all pratical purposes. There is simply no way to reliably verify most email unless some type of security is used above and beyond the norm.
The current crop of 'macro-virii' isn't just a problem of a monoculture computing environment. It's a problem of a daffy, head-in-the-sand, bare-butt-stuck-in-the-air-for-script-kiddies-to-k ick, non-resilient monoculture. The current monoculture is akin to bread mould. Take it out of its closed, warm, secure environment and expose it to the light of the sun and it just dries up and dies.
A culture that has a better immune system, and is designed to weather a variety of environments would not wither and die nearly as quickly as what people are using now.
I'm just glad that _someone_ out there admits when they're wrong or clueless.
I just wish they were more forthcoming with phrases like 'our THEORY is' and 'we BELIEVE'. In so many of the sciences, there is so much faith (belief without demonstrable proof) put into conjectures. So the equations all add up? What happens when you factor in the constant that you didn't know about because it had such a small effect withing your test cases? For learned people this isn't a problem. A good college trains to be skeptical -- both from our explicit studies, and by exposing us to some of the most idiotic people in the world who come up with 'scientific' garbage.
Excuse the rant, but I get bothered when people derive an large amount of otherwise unsupportable 'facts' from some tiny amount of energy. Think about it. You see some light, determine that it was emitted from a start 7.5 eons ago, determine how big, bright that star is. Even through a relatively empty universe, light has got to run through quite a bit of space junk in 7500 years. How did any of it reach Earth. My theory is that it isn't a star at all, but an alien monitoring outpost. The outpost radiates the Earth and monitors the return signal to see what we're up to. A while back they had a new protectionist adminstration move into place that wanted to cut funding on emerging species expenses, so they had to cut the power output to their observation deck. Now the old power is back in control, so their turning their sensory devices back on us. Without a whole lot more information, my theory is just as valid as a list of esoteric equations no matter how much faith some put into them.
I respect the guy who claims that he doesn't know what is going on. I will stop respecting him when he has no more empirical evidence, and yet claims to know because he has done some math that would prove such-n-such.
Deep Computers might help us sort through still confusing statistics on issues like homelessness: how many and where?
If only we had a super computer to solve all of our problems? You forget that most of the problems in the world occur because of greed and avarice couple with uneven policies. Once all the data is present, can you really expect the politicians to do the right thing with it? How will the validity of the data be confirmed?
Deep computing will do little to solve any real problems.
then these women would be widowed by something else. The men aren't getting what they need at home, so they go searching.
I've been married for a decade, so I can talk from 'some' experience. Whenever I've had an 'obsession' that has pulled on our relationship, it has been because the relationship was weakening--not because computer, trucks or boats are/were so great. A little work on the relationship (talking, working together, etc.), and my priorities quickly changed.
Since a major part of the/. readership is college age a presumably pre-married, I will give a little free advice. If you find your future mate to be obsessing over something other than you, take a good long look at yourself. What inner need is the partner trying to fill with the object of the obsession. Then ask yourself, why the hell ain't I filling that need. It may turn out that you can't fill it. In which case, you need to get out of the way, or even encourage your partner (i.e., join him/her). Too many good marriages end nowadays because people who've pledged to love one another refuse to look deep inside their partner, find out what is missing, and then reach deep inside themselves to give of what they have.
The one case in the article where the girlfriend had never seen the movie, the guy finally got her to watch it, and then she says its 'OK'. The relationship was doomed from the start, because the girl obviously didn't give a shit. My wife's an aerobics instructor. I'd rather play Doom and drink vodka. But still I drag my fat, uncoordinated ass into the gym to take a kickboxing class. Afterwards, I tell my wife what I think she did well--and not so well. I show interest in what she loves. She even condescends to help me work on my car or computer on occassion. I like to create things, she knows that, and will push me to make things she likes. We've learned to work so well together that I'm positive that we'll be married another decade or four.
To sum it up without making an over generalization. The Star Wars Widows could actually be Black Widows. It's just that in their case they killed their mates by ignoring them.
Of course, the guys in the article could just be jerks who don't realize that they're married...
Let me put it this way. In order for the university to convey 'honor' on Linus (or anyone else), it must first have some authority. If I give Linus an honorary doctorate would anyone (including Linus) care? I really doubt it.
By accepting the 'honor' Linus accepts the authority of the presenter. I say Linus should reject it out of hand, because in the end you have to ask yourself, "Is the university honoring me, or am I honoring the university?"
Of course, as with the honorary doctorate, no one really cares what I have to say 8*)
Slashdot Mirror
>>The obvious question is: why characterize the jock extreme as genial and average, but depict the geek extreme as the early onset of a disease!?extreme? I graduated salutorian of my high-school class - right behind the most beautiful, and socially graceful girl that has ever lived. I wrestle and was good enough to make it to the state tournament. I was the captain of the cross country team, and at a 185lb was the biggest runner in the league. (I didn't play football because my mother wouldn't let me play a sport where the ambulance showed up before the game started. Besides the coaches were nasty and foul mouthed).
I can be completely graceful, when I wanna. But I usually don't wanna, unless I think there is a posibility of sex being involved. Which there usually isn't, so fsst. I prefer to spend my time digging into the latest technology. I spend a lot of conversational time explaining to the underinformed what the hell I'm talking about.
So, am I a geek, or am I a jock?
Wait a minute now, I used to stumble over my feet a lot. My Dad always said that I would fall over the marks on a basketball court, but I could run down a dried-up riverbed with no problem (maybe that explains the cross country thing). I used to walk to supper with a sci-fi book in my face. My wife is an aerobics instructor, and I'm one of her best students. I program computers for a living. I like to fix things, and discover how they work. I like to throw large parties with lots of friends that work out regularly.
So am I a geek or a jock? Why does there have to be a distinction?
My comments are all of those here claiming that they get beat-up because they're smart geeks that dress funny. My contention is that a smart animal is the one that bends itself and its environment to suit its own needs. If your getting your ass kicked for wearing a black trenchcoat, then it is fairly stupid to keep wearing the black trenchcoat without responding to the violence (by HERF gunning the assailant's car, for example). If you're not smart enough to remove the threat of violence, then you're not very smart.
You people who want to believe that being smart or good a computers, please do so, but quit whining here. Some of the most beautiful people I have ever known have been the smartest (and I participated in 'gifted' classes in school, so I associated with all the smartest in the school). If there is a correlation between intelligence and social grace, I would postulate that it is the opposite of what people on this site claim. Beauty and intelligence usually walk hand in hand.
Trademarks are registered within a geographical area. I've known of several cases where a company had to change its name because it expanded into areas where their name was already registered and in use. We already have a naming system that relates to geographical area. Simply make it the law that com is up for grabs and will hold now sort of weight in any trademark dispute; however, a corporation must defend their registered trademark in domain names that are registered in areas in that they are doing business.
For example, Food Lion used to be Food King or some such name. They expanded into an area that already had a Food King, thus the name change. So Food Lion is a registered trademark in the state of North Carolina in the US. If I register foodlion.nc.us then Food Lion must hunt me down and make me relinquish my hold on the domain, or risk weakening their trademark. Company B can come in and name their corner convenience store Food Lion, and when challenged tell the judge, "Heh, they let HIM do it." So Food Lion would have every right, even the obligation, to make me surrender the name. But they would have no right whatsoever to foodlion.tx.us. Food Lion doesn't operate in Texas. So if the convenience store tried to use that to justify infringing on Food Lion's trademark, the judge would just laugh and fine them for stupidity.
So it's simple. Amend the law to say that TLD names don't hold weight in trademark disputes. Let people squat all over them, let companies pay out the nose to get them, and let NSI make boat loads of money. Only the localized names will mean anything.
People won't be able to remember all of those extra letters you say? Do you know the zip code of where you live (this is for US people)? Do you know any for Raleigh, NC? Of course not, unless you happen to live here. Why is that? Because you don't need to know it. All you really need to memorize is your own. And it'll become the same with domain names. And it'll acutally be more convenient this way.
What do I do if I want to order a pizza? I pick up the phone. But I'm online. What if I could just go to the pizza houses web site? But that means searching the entire WWW to find a local pizza house. Now if I could just search through ra.nc.us...
A lot of people (especially SOZO) are trying to call this 'creative'. Everyone, listen closely. I'll only say this however many times necessary to get the point across.
Different != Creative;
If I pile up some mud and stick a motherboard and other assorted computer parts into it, I have not been creative. I've been silly and (if the parts were any good) wasteful. But I've not made anything that anyone would want.
Now, if they had nixed the display and keyboard, they might have a useful idea. I'd like a nice footrest under my desk. Put a bass speaker in the back and you'd have everthing that I currently have under my desk, but in a much more pleasing setup. THAT would be something new and useful.
Note to all PC designers everywhere: Quit trying to put the PC into things that I use for vegetating. Working with computers is an active pursuit. When I choose to vegetate, I am choosing to be passive. You can't passively cruise the web. The web is something you have to interact with. So just stop trying to put a PC in my TV room!!
>>They could reinvent themselves
No! I hate it when the networks try to do this. Look at what happened to Sliders. The original show was, well, ORIGINAL. It has now morphed into the "young, brash hero saves the day by pulling a totally unbelievable miracle out of his/her ass" thing that corporate TV turns every action show into eventually. The originallity and freshness is gone, and all that is left behind is some stock stories from the backshelves of a Hollywood studio with the names and set replaced. The same was done with Babylon5. I watched one episode of Excalibur and thought, "Why the hell are they trying to be Star Trek?" (Did anyone one else pick up on the 5 year mission thing? How about the military starship with with wide, clean, carpeted walls and expansive living quarters?)
Let the X-Files die an honorable death gracefully. Don't try to pull it back from the brink by reinventing it like some 60yr old man buying a sports car in a lame attempt to prove he's not getting old.
Think of what the government and all the corporations could do with this amount of memory. And you thought data-warehousing was a big thing now. With storage this cheap and small (one of the biggest problems that the government has is where to store millions of CDs and reals of tape) you'll have your whole life recorded and indexed whether you like it or not.
Revelations talks of a beast that will know the whereabouts of every person on the planet. Is that where all of this technology is headed?
Maybe someone could write a HOWTO to make things simpler for me. I have several HOWTOs that I've printed, and as I've read them I've edited. Simple things. A misspelling here...reword a sentence for clarity there. Things that have made the text more readable for me.
How do I funnel suggested changes/corrections back to the author with minimal fuss? Shouldn't this be the first HOWTO one should read? Maybe the directions on how to submit changes should be at the top of every howto? Yes the author will be diluged with spelling error notifications for a week or so, but as the corrections are made the notifications will move quickly from 'you misspelled...' to 'the correct syntax for the command is..' or 'a clearer way of saying this is...'
So, make it simple for people (me) to submit editing. And put the directions for doing so on title page of every HOWTO.
>>What stops a programmer from say recording all the quantum states of the gates during an execution of the code in other qubits and after the culculation completes, reviewing what you saved up?
Quantum mechanics. In order to save the states you have to read them. If you read them, you destroy them. If you can't read them until the operation is through, you have a black box.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to program a QC. I'm saying it is very difficult. We work with black boxes all the time (most API's, the C libraries, etc). Someone can design a 'search coprocessor' that could remove the complexity of actually programming one of these beast. The API would in effect harness the power.
Designing a more powerful computer, car, drill, bulldozer, etc, is as much about being able to harness the power as much as it is about creating it in the first place. Harnessing the power of a computer is an excercise in enabling a person to abstract a process and formalize it in code. Programming is made simpler for most people when the abstraction and coding are simple serialized steps. A secretary doesn't find it hard to say, "I do A, then B, then C." It's the recipe mentallity and people are used to thinking that way.
The referenced article takes a page or two to explain how to do a seqential search. Granted it's a new way of thinking about a search, and therefore takes longer to explain. But that IS my point. It's a new way of thinking. It's hard to change the way people think. Add to that a lack of debugging techniques and you get buggy software.
I could install a supercharged dragster engine in my Nissan pickup truck; unfortunately, if the excessive power didn't rip my transmission apart or spin all the rubber off my tires, I doubt that I could control the acceleration. My point is that as a general purpose computer this technology will be useless unless someone developes tools that will make normal developers smarter.
The operation of today's processors are easy to understand. They perform one step at a time progressing from known state to known state. And yet most of the software available is infested with bugs. One of the easiest ways to debug this software is to single step through the code with a debugger in order to completely understand its operation. If we now introduce a system that cannot be read until the final answer is available, how will software improve.
Does anyone remember how 'self-modifying code' was going to save us all? Why aren't genetic algoritmns taking over programmer jobs? It's something that is understood in all engineering circles. More is not always better. If you can't harness and control the energy then it will usually do more harm than good.
Please note that I'm not saying that this technology can't be created. What I'm saying is that if it does become mainstream, the average programmer won't be intelligent enough to write and debug programs with it.
I could install a supercharged dragster engine in my Nissan pickup truck; unfortunately, if the excessive power didn't rip my transmission apart or spin all the rubber off my tires, I doubt that I could control the acceleration. My point is that as a general purpose computer this technology will be useless unless someone developes tools that will make normal developers smarter.
The operation of today's processors are easy to understand. They perform one step at a time progressing from known state to known state. And yet most of the software available is infested with bugs. One of the easiest ways to debug this software is to single step through the code with a debugger in order to completely understand its operation. If we now introduce a system that cannot be read until the final answer is available, how will software improve.
Does anyone remember how 'self-modifying code' was going to save us all? Why aren't genetic algoritmns taking over programmer jobs? It's something that is understood in all engineering circles. More is not always better. If you can't harness and control the energy then it will usually do more harm than good.
Why can't ground based systems be used for the initial acceleration of space vehicles?
I'm thinking of a mag-lev train going up the side of a mountain with a shuttle mounted in a cradle on top. The train accelerates to 200mph then maintains the speed up the mountain. Just as it reaches the top, the rocket motors ignite and lift the shuttle from its cradle. The train decelerates in a long circle that brings it back to it's starting point where another shuttle is loaded.
Or how about a deep hole where steam would force the shuttle mounted on a platform upward? Just as the top is reached, the candle is lit and off it goes, already boosted a mile up.
Why isn't there any investigation into these types of launch systems?
>>What next? Random inspections of everyone's machine to see if there's anything illegal!?
Yes. The government is slowly taking away our rights, one-by-one. I used to drive a truck (18-wheeler). The law requires that trucking companies randomly drug test drivers on a draconian random basis. A friend has been test 3 times in the last 6 months. No warrants. No suspicion. Everyone gets tested. The rules require that the 'target' not be notified. He comes in to work and is told to go directly to a drug testing center. The justification is to make the roads safer since such a large number of trucker are drug addicts. And it has made things safer, too. Don't all of you remember the daily reports of drug crazed truck drivers either barreling through playgrounds full of beautiful young pregnant mothers and their sweet innocent children playing, or running church buses off the road killing all aboard? When is the last time you heard such a report? The politicians had to do something to protect all this goodness.
Now, everyone knows that nearly everyone who uses the internet spends a considerable amount of time searching for and exchanging pictures of these same sweet mothers and children being raped and sodimized. In order to protect all this goodness the politicians will have to implement some sort of constant, yet random, monitoring of the populace. I ask you. What's the difference?
Rights? Privacy? If you're not doing anything wrong, you won't mind the secret police secretly reading everything you type.
sent men to the moon? Built the Boing 737 or the stealth fighter? Even designed a relatively modern car ... without the aid of a computer?
The point here is that there are a lot of modern marvels that are made possible through the use of computers. They might not have increased the number of cars their making over at Ford, but those cars ain't Model T's either.
A memo used to mean a white sheet of paper with some black text. 'Formatting' meant some word were underlined and that the left hand column was aligned. When's the last time you saw one of those? A memo must now have multicolored text and at least 5 different typefaces in varying sizes interspersed through at least 3 colored graphics. The same piece of information is conveyed (the company picnic is Saturday at noon), but people are pleased so much more by the professional quality of the note.
If I were made God, or even just office manager, for a day, the first order of business would be to delete every font off of every computer except for one fixed size system font. Of course, then I would have to install a bigger pipe to the net to handle all the extra surfing from the idle secretaries.
Another point everyone misses. People a not trained as well. The call center for an insurance claims division often consist of a welfare mothers whose 2 years have run out and have been forced into work. They got 30 minutes of OJT on how to use both the computer system and phone. If they have to pay childcare, the mother is making less than the welfare and the corporation is looking for ways to cut back on their pay. Meanwhile the company is reporting record dividends, buyouts and execs with golden parachutes.
The point here is not to denigrate anyone, just to point out that computers are being used to replace proper training and education. So that you have a smarter machine with a dumber operator. It's a wash.
This whole episode exposes the major flaw at Micrsoft concerning secure and mission critical systems. They don't know what one is. Being secure and mission critical implies near %100 availability. It's an obsessive attitude.
A thunderstorm took out the server? A periodic, naturally occuring, predictable phenomenon? Puh_lease!? They've never heard of a UPS? Backup telecom links? Give me a break. Microsoft wouldn't know a mission critical system if they had one.
for $15 US. The average garden sprayer. It uses an adjustable sprayer that can go from small to large, and a large tank that will last for hours. Some even have lever handles that make pumping a breaze.
for $2 US. A warm 2 liter cola. punch a hole in the lid and off you go. Doesn't last long.
for $5 US. Mount a car tire nipple in the lid of a 2 liter cola bottle using a good epoxy. Drill a hole in a piece of 2x1 and insert the nipple through the board and epoxy it down. Fill the bottle half full, screw onto the cap, and then pump air in through the nipple using a bike pump. Aim over the heads of the enemy, and unscrew the bottle until it explodes into the air. Multiple bottles can be mounted on the same board for a full barrage.
Didn't get the letter, but isn't this SEC rule just a way to limit the participation in IPO's to those who are already rich? Sure, IPO's are some of the riskiest investments that can be made, but they're also provide some of the highest returns. If I know that the RedHat IPO is a good deal, why can't I invest my life savings in it? Who is the SEC to say that I'm not rich enough to play in the game? As it stands, the SEC is acting as the muscle for some fat cats who don't like the unwashed masses moving in on their exclusive territory.
I read all these comments on how everyone one wants to be able to buy the latest sound card and not have to upgrade the entire computer. How much do you pay for a decent sound card? $150 US? How much do you pay for a decent processor $150 US?
The logistics of seperately making and then integrating all of the items in a modern PC drives the cost way up. Parts have to be placed on printed circuit boards (which are fairly expensive to make), then the whole shebang heated to flow the solder (which is basically lead. Have you seen the environmental regulations for using hazardous materials like lead?), all the while the slightest bump will completely destroy the board. Expensive connectory have to be attached (check you favorite electronics shop for the cost of and ISA slot connector).
If all of the components were in the same IC, possibly even from the same die, cost will take a nosedive, because the manufacturing process is ONE step--make the IC. So you upgrade your sound? You get a faster processor, better network card and scsi controller, and the lastest holographic generator to boot. All for the same price that you would put out for a sound card today.
Now, tell me, how can that be bad?
Imagine it's 2008 and everyone uses Linux, which is free (as in beer). Imagine some entrepreneur raising a case that this "predatory pricing" prevents him developing a new OS and narrows consumer choice. Some bureaucrat might just go for it... and once again we'd have know-nothing governmental noses in our world.
Well, just WHO would you sue.
Heh look, there are people out there BREATHING for free. Dammit, I want to develop an AIR product and sell it, but all of this free air stuff is narrowing consumer choice and stifling innovation in the air market. Let's sue God.
First we get everyone used to collecting factoids and storing them in a remote though accessible location. There will follow a push to make everyones databases available, and trials, contract disputes, etc. will become little more than ceremonial as all the facts will be laid out for everyone to see.
The technology improves so that more data is collected until every experience is recorded to the ultimate detail. ("Mr Jones, you say that you did not cheat on your wife. And yet on May 21 at 11:03am, EST, you visited Joey's Happy House. At 11:15 Mary Juicy entered your personal space and at 11:26 there was a sharp rise in your heartbeat and hormonal output which would indicate an orgasm.")
The final and ultimate innovation will be the introduction of viable neural interfaces. Everything I do and feel is recorded and stored in a central location. Want to climb Mt. Everest, but you're paralyzed from the neck down? No problem, access the database for the life recording of someone who has and experience their climb. We'll see the whole world networked as one huge mind. The Collective. Learning will be a thing of the past as everyone will know everything. Genetically engineered people will be raised to be 'clusters', nothing more than computing power in limp lifeless bodies.
Privacy is dead, because everyone knows everything about you and you know everything about everyone else. Prejudice is dead, because how can you PREjudge someone when you know everything about them. Conflict and injustice are dead, because people will not be able to distance themselves from and redefine other people as sub-human. Is it heaven, or hell?
I thought they did a very good job of showing that the people who supposedly made the biggest impact in the micro-computer era, Jobs and Gates, weren't the guys who actually made anything. I loved the way they had Balmer's character sneering at the way Gates sold something he didn't have (DOS) to IBM. Woz actually created the Apple, but Steve didn't mind taking credit for it. In the same way that Paul seemed to be the technical driving force behind Microsoft.
I think this movie should help to finish scraping the boy genius inventor image off of Bill Gates that the has been polishing for so many years.
what an evil dirty word...
What makes you loosers think you deserve to go into a library to get your dose of porn? What's to stop you from getting your OWN PC and ISP? Can afford it? Well then, get a JOB!! Maybe then you can enter the real world and not have so much time to complain about my taxes not paying for your habits.
I get sick of hearing all these ingrates whining whenever our leaders decide to restrict handouts. Here's a clue or two. Cruising the web for free in a public or school library is NOT guaranteed by the Constitution. It is very unlikely that the valuable data that would be restricted by filtering software isn't available in other places! It is possible, even easy, to get what would be restricted in other places. And finally, it is not your RIGHT to have me and other American taxpayers pay for your entertainment (apologies to all my international aquaintances 8*).
It is your right to speak. It is not your right to have your speech dissiminated by either me or the government. Limiting what can be viewed with government funded facilities doesn't limit anyones ability to speak out. Does this mean that duly appointed government leaders and officials get to decide what is proper to be destributed on government funded networks? Yeah, so what? He who pays the piper gets to call the tune.
So cut the bitching and whining and go hire your own piper!!
The only intelligent solution is to wipe the all drive clean of any program that will run any untrusted code without user intervention. It is the ludicrous to allow code from anonymous email to execute code on my machine, and with the current unsecure state of the Internet all email can be considered anonymous for all pratical purposes. There is simply no way to reliably verify most email unless some type of security is used above and beyond the norm.
k ick, non-resilient monoculture. The current monoculture is akin to bread mould. Take it out of its closed, warm, secure environment and expose it to the light of the sun and it just dries up and dies.
The current crop of 'macro-virii' isn't just a problem of a monoculture computing environment. It's a problem of a daffy, head-in-the-sand, bare-butt-stuck-in-the-air-for-script-kiddies-to-
A culture that has a better immune system, and is designed to weather a variety of environments would not wither and die nearly as quickly as what people are using now.
I'm just glad that _someone_ out there admits when they're wrong or clueless.
I just wish they were more forthcoming with phrases like 'our THEORY is' and 'we BELIEVE'. In so many of the sciences, there is so much faith (belief without demonstrable proof) put into conjectures. So the equations all add up? What happens when you factor in the constant that you didn't know about because it had such a small effect withing your test cases? For learned people this isn't a problem. A good college trains to be skeptical -- both from our explicit studies, and by exposing us to some of the most idiotic people in the world who come up with 'scientific' garbage.
Excuse the rant, but I get bothered when people derive an large amount of otherwise unsupportable 'facts' from some tiny amount of energy. Think about it. You see some light, determine that it was emitted from a start 7.5 eons ago, determine how big, bright that star is. Even through a relatively empty universe, light has got to run through quite a bit of space junk in 7500 years. How did any of it reach Earth. My theory is that it isn't a star at all, but an alien monitoring outpost. The outpost radiates the Earth and monitors the return signal to see what we're up to. A while back they had a new protectionist adminstration move into place that wanted to cut funding on emerging species expenses, so they had to cut the power output to their observation deck. Now the old power is back in control, so their turning their sensory devices back on us. Without a whole lot more information, my theory is just as valid as a list of esoteric equations no matter how much faith some put into them.
I respect the guy who claims that he doesn't know what is going on. I will stop respecting him when he has no more empirical evidence, and yet claims to know because he has done some math that would prove such-n-such.
Deep Computers might help us sort through still confusing statistics on issues like homelessness: how many and where?
If only we had a super computer to solve all of our problems? You forget that most of the problems in the world occur because of greed and avarice couple with uneven policies. Once all the data is present, can you really expect the politicians to do the right thing with it? How will the validity of the data be confirmed?
Deep computing will do little to solve any real problems.
then these women would be widowed by something else. The men aren't getting what they need at home, so they go searching.
/. readership is college age a presumably pre-married, I will give a little free advice. If you find your future mate to be obsessing over something other than you, take a good long look at yourself. What inner need is the partner trying to fill with the object of the obsession. Then ask yourself, why the hell ain't I filling that need. It may turn out that you can't fill it. In which case, you need to get out of the way, or even encourage your partner (i.e., join him/her). Too many good marriages end nowadays because people who've pledged to love one another refuse to look deep inside their partner, find out what is missing, and then reach deep inside themselves to give of what they have.
I've been married for a decade, so I can talk from 'some' experience. Whenever I've had an 'obsession' that has pulled on our relationship, it has been because the relationship was weakening--not because computer, trucks or boats are/were so great. A little work on the relationship (talking, working together, etc.), and my priorities quickly changed.
Since a major part of the
The one case in the article where the girlfriend had never seen the movie, the guy finally got her to watch it, and then she says its 'OK'. The relationship was doomed from the start, because the girl obviously didn't give a shit. My wife's an aerobics instructor. I'd rather play Doom and drink vodka. But still I drag my fat, uncoordinated ass into the gym to take a kickboxing class. Afterwards, I tell my wife what I think she did well--and not so well. I show interest in what she loves. She even condescends to help me work on my car or computer on occassion. I like to create things, she knows that, and will push me to make things she likes. We've learned to work so well together that I'm positive that we'll be married another decade or four.
To sum it up without making an over generalization. The Star Wars Widows could actually be Black Widows. It's just that in their case they killed their mates by ignoring them.
Of course, the guys in the article could just be jerks who don't realize that they're married...
Let me put it this way. In order for the university to convey 'honor' on Linus (or anyone else), it must first have some authority. If I give Linus an honorary doctorate would anyone (including Linus) care? I really doubt it.
By accepting the 'honor' Linus accepts the authority of the presenter. I say Linus should reject it out of hand, because in the end you have to ask yourself, "Is the university honoring me, or am I honoring the university?"
Of course, as with the honorary doctorate, no one really cares what I have to say 8*)