Apparently the government favors ISP-level censorship, and I'd be worried about our point of contact with an alien civilization being behind a filter that scrubs all evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence because the very existence of aliens is "unpatriotic" or "offensive to certain religions." On the other hand, the do have the ability to use elephants to fight invasive species. Tough call.
Since they agree that they're split, they should build half in Cape Town and the other half in Perth. That way they can have an 8690-Kilometre Array. Unless they've already printed their SKA stationary and the cost of reprinting it as 8690KA would be prohibitive.
Running Software Update today to update Java will prevent you from getting flashback going forward, but that's not going to do anything if you already have it.
Here's how to figure out if you have it (from Gizmodo):
1.Run the following command in Terminal: defaults read/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
2. Take note of the value, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
3. Proceed to step 8 if you got the following error message:
"The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist"
If you don't get that error message, well, time to head to F-Secure for your fix. If you're clean so far, you can move on to step eight:
8. Run the following command in Terminal: defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
9. Take note of the result. Your system is already clean of this variant if you got an error message similar to the following: "The domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist"
In other words: "does not exist" means you've got a healthy rig. Anything else, just keep following F-Secure's instructions to vanquish the intruder.
April 17th is the day everyone's federal taxes are due. It's almost as if they're celebrating tax day by saying, "come everyone and see what your taxes are paying for! We're going to fly a space shuttle we can't afford to fly anymore around the capital with fuel bought by your tax dollars!" Or perhaps the government didn't have enough money to fly it in until everyone paid their taxes. I'm not saying it's not a cool spectacle... it's just an interesting day for NASA to choose.
I'm sure they considered it, but then they realized the ambiance would be all wrong. No matter how loud the red alert and "deck plate hum" sounds were, they wouldn't be able to drown out the sound of nerds running around yelling, "This is my 10th time here! Push that button, Ensign! Engage! Engage! Energize! Make it so!" The appeal of an attraction like this would be as an escape, but people would be running for the shuttle pods to escape all the other guests. It would be even more obnoxious than having Lwaxana Troy follow you around telling you all about the Holy Rings of Betazed and how your haircut doesn't suit you.
It wasn't hackers from another country. It was just a test run of the new NSA Utah Data Center. The Utah Department of Health just happened to be the nearest available guinea pig from which to steal sensitive personal data on thousands of Americans. It did what it was supposed to do.
I know it sounds crazy, but remember: You can't spell insane without the NSA.
The fundamental problem here is the condition that "each person thinks they get a fair share." Everyone's perception of "fair" is different. There is always going to be someone who thinks the definition of "their fair share" is the largest piece in an inevitably-unevenly-cut cake. Even if you did divide it into perfectly equal pieces, they'd feel cheated. Or they'd develop a derivatives-trading scheme to get a few extra crumbs from someone else's plate (they've been doing it with rice for centuries... why not cake?). Or they'd wait for you to cut the first piece, then they'd take the rest of the cake.
Unless the mathematical solution includes an unquestionable, spatula-wielding, hand-slapping matron who defines the term "fair portion," this won't work.
Best part: "if you're going to be sitting six feet away, you need at least a 42-inch TV. Preferably a 47-inch."
I've had a 37-inch HDTV for 5 years and I sit about 10-12 feet away and it's fine. When I first got it I set it at the foot of my bed (6 feet away) because I wanted to experiment with the immersive experience, and it was just too much. That lasted a day or two before I had to move it.
Later on he talks about how "Internet connected TVs are going to be just incredible." And that's when I decided he wasn't just dishonest, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Don't spend $1,000 on some TV with built-in software that locks you in to certain services or providers, because when you discover that those services suck, or they change their content, or "upgrade" the service, making your built-in software (which the manufacturer claims will be upgradeable... But they'll never release an update because they want you to buy a new TV) obsolete, you're going to have a big, expensive picture frame. Hook the TV up to a computer (even the basic ones typically have at least 2-4 HDMI inputs) or a cheap box like the Apple TV or its competitors that you can replace without buying a whole new TV.
This guy talks like a TV salesman. Buy now, buy big, buy the latest crap, you're taking the manufacturers to the cleaners, etc. He's clueless.
This is the 21st century. A lot of 16-year-olds think of their phone when you say the word "clock," so instructors have had to update their lesson: "you grip the steering wheel at the signal strength and battery life positions. Remember STRENGTH and LIFE. You may get signal attenuation if you dont have a bumper, but you'll live longer."
How is that "better" than a browser open you can Alt-Tab to and refresh in two keystrokes?
It's not. It's just a pretty animation designed to make people think it's better because it looks fancy. This should appeal to people who buy "hologram wristbands" to promote health and wellness. Or people who consider Dreamweaver experience a "skill."
Cognitively it looks like a mess, and I don't see the benefits, even after RTFA and WTFV.
It reminds me of the shell game. You make a change and then see if your eyes can follow the element while it slides around. Most real world HTML files are going to be long enough that you won't fit all the code on one page, so the element you're trying to find will keep sliding off the screen. You'd be far better off just using CTRL-F or CMD-F to find the element in the code.
Or use a "real-time" HTML editor that updates your view of the page in a separate frame as you type. The only downside to this is that you can't use the tab key to indent lines, because it'll switch you to the other frame.
As a side note, it would be nice if the Gliimpse software could also do spell checking. You press the hot key, and your misspelled words morphs into a hand that facepalms the screen with an option on each finger you can choose to replace them with real words that are similar. For instance, if you're naming your app, and you type "Gliimpse," a hand appears, facepalms the screen and appears to have words tattooed on each finger: Glimpse, Gimps, Gimp, Goatse, and "Click here for $1 off a sandwich at Blimpie's."
Doing the right thing always seems logical, but when you look at the bigger picture it's not always effective.
Take your commute, for instance. If the people around you did the right thing, they would leave three seconds between their bumper and the car in front of them. Everyone would hit their brakes less frequently, traffic would flow more smoothly, there would be fewer accidents, less wear and tear on the road, and everyone would get where they were going faster and with less stress. Makes sense, right? But then some asshole will exploit the spaces that each of them have left, weaving in and out, forcing people to hit their brakes, causing waves of slowdowns and possibly accidents.
This is nothing new. Alexander Hamilton observed that people act mostly out of self-interest. The solution is to create a system that makes it in one's self-interest to do the right thing.
In theory, the solution here is to create a system where it is in the interest of a company to hold a large stable of software patents and not use them. In other words, if you can demonstrate that you hold a significant patent and have allowed small competitors to do things that don't blatantly violate your patent but might be in a grey area, for every year you do not use it like a hammer to crush competition, you get a tax break or some other incentive. But if you have a challenge from some significant threat, you still have the option to exercise your right to litigate... you just forfeit your tax break. The system should also make it more difficult to successfully litigate with a software patent. Therefore the company is forced to make a choice and decide which is in their best interest: litigation or the incentive to not litigate. In the process, the greater good is served because the patent is effectively held in trust by a company that is not likely to use it unless it's absolutely necessary, and this protects everyone from patent trolls.
Companies really shouldn't focus on patents as much as they do, because the idea that a patent really protects your intellectual property is flawed. At the end of the day, anything you patent here is just going to be copied and sold in China or India, anyway. India recentlyallowed a local drug company to copy a cancer drug patented by Bayer so it can sell it for 97% less, so long as it pays a portion of the proceeds to Bayer, effectively ignoring Bayer's R&D costs. And China... well... anything goes in China with regard to patents and copyright as long as it's not deemed a threat to the Party. I couldn't find an e-book copy of K&R anywhere for sale... but you can download it in PDF format for free from Chinese universities.
...but the last season of Doctor Who stunk so bad that I almost completely lost interest.
Funny you should mention it. Last year they officially renamed the show "Doctor Who Stunk So Bad That I Almost Completely Lost Interest" and collected huge product placement fees from a deodorant company until they realized no one noticed the change.
...
'80 DnD
'90 Video games
'00 Guns / Homosexuality
'10 The '00 decade
These days we blame the world's problems on the decade that preceded this one, and our inability to understand what the hell we were collectively thinking for most of those years.
Imagine a man in an orange jumpsuit with black lettering that reads "enemy combatant." He's wandering around a cell at Guantanamo Bay, alternately bumping into a U.S. military judge, a civilian judge and an official from his home country, who keep shoving him back toward the others.
A friend of mine in California had his house broken into. His iPad and a shotgun were stolen. He tracked the phone to the trunk of a car, told the police, and they did nothing.
Perhaps they were skeptical because he seemed to believe that either his iPad or his shotgun was a phone.
"Based on the mathematical constant number that represents the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle"
In case you're reading slashdot and don't know what pi is.
As a long-time reader of slashdot, I thought it was the ratio between the circumference of the dot and the length the slash would have to be to fit inside the dot.
Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...
The staff at Encyclopædia Britannica... for failing to mention that it is an American company in its own article about itself. (They only mention that it has "editorial offices in Chicago and thousands of contributors worldwide.")
Wikipedia's Article on Britannica
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.
Britannica's Article on Wikipedia
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.
American Businessman (via translated phone call): "I think we can safely say our company would like to use your factory to produce our useless stuff people think they need." Chinese Businessman (via translated phone call): "An excellent idea! I suggest we sign the papers over dinner at Translate Server Error. They have the best HuMan chicken in town. And the owner prides himself on his bilingual staff."
So, two problems.
One, our text translation software isn't foolproof, but people expect it to be. What happens when the software confuses "galleta" (Spanish for "cookie") with "callate" (Spanish for "shut up"). They do sound similar if you say them out loud, but no one notices because you'd almost never use both in the same conversation. I foresee someone attempting a friendly gesture by offering to share her mother's recipe for "shut up."
Two, live conversations depend upon both parties building on a shared experience. If each one has a different account of the experience, conversations break down very quickly. Ever tried to carry on a conversation with a schizophrenic? And that's just assuming the errors are innocent. What happens when corporations start using this? Your bank requires you to call a number to activate your new card and during the call they have the software "translate" some required disclosure for you, only the translation doesn't really convey what they are supposed to be disclosing. Don't think it won't happen... whoever implements this first on purpose will be running the company one day.
Then again, this whole discussion is purely academic. Gene Roddenberry's estate will just claim prior art and prevent this from ever becoming a reality. Hopefully.
A 1-penny tax (assuming it was paid) would not make him as rich as Germany. It would make the U.S. as rich as... well... the U.S. before the second Bush administration. And still have money left over to rescue the U.S. Postal Service.
For Nathaniel Borenstein to get rich off this, it would have to be a 1-penny licensing fee.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the government favors ISP-level censorship, and I'd be worried about our point of contact with an alien civilization being behind a filter that scrubs all evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence because the very existence of aliens is "unpatriotic" or "offensive to certain religions." On the other hand, the do have the ability to use elephants to fight invasive species. Tough call.
Since they agree that they're split, they should build half in Cape Town and the other half in Perth. That way they can have an 8690-Kilometre Array. Unless they've already printed their SKA stationary and the cost of reprinting it as 8690KA would be prohibitive.
Here's how to figure out if you have it (from Gizmodo):
1.Run the following command in Terminal: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
defaults read
2. Take note of the value, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
3. Proceed to step 8 if you got the following error message:
"The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist"
If you don't get that error message, well, time to head to F-Secure for your fix. If you're clean so far, you can move on to step eight:
8. Run the following command in Terminal:
defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
9. Take note of the result. Your system is already clean of this variant if you got an error message similar to the following:
"The domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist"
In other words: "does not exist" means you've got a healthy rig. Anything else, just keep following F-Secure's instructions to vanquish the intruder.
April 17th is the day everyone's federal taxes are due. It's almost as if they're celebrating tax day by saying, "come everyone and see what your taxes are paying for! We're going to fly a space shuttle we can't afford to fly anymore around the capital with fuel bought by your tax dollars!" Or perhaps the government didn't have enough money to fly it in until everyone paid their taxes. I'm not saying it's not a cool spectacle... it's just an interesting day for NASA to choose.
In 3D? Whatever. Wake me up when Cameron releases a version filmed in Feel-Around
I'm sure they considered it, but then they realized the ambiance would be all wrong. No matter how loud the red alert and "deck plate hum" sounds were, they wouldn't be able to drown out the sound of nerds running around yelling, "This is my 10th time here! Push that button, Ensign! Engage! Engage! Energize! Make it so!" The appeal of an attraction like this would be as an escape, but people would be running for the shuttle pods to escape all the other guests. It would be even more obnoxious than having Lwaxana Troy follow you around telling you all about the Holy Rings of Betazed and how your haircut doesn't suit you.
It wasn't hackers from another country. It was just a test run of the new NSA Utah Data Center. The Utah Department of Health just happened to be the nearest available guinea pig from which to steal sensitive personal data on thousands of Americans. It did what it was supposed to do.
I know it sounds crazy, but remember: You can't spell insane without the NSA.
The fundamental problem here is the condition that "each person thinks they get a fair share." Everyone's perception of "fair" is different. There is always going to be someone who thinks the definition of "their fair share" is the largest piece in an inevitably-unevenly-cut cake. Even if you did divide it into perfectly equal pieces, they'd feel cheated. Or they'd develop a derivatives-trading scheme to get a few extra crumbs from someone else's plate (they've been doing it with rice for centuries... why not cake?). Or they'd wait for you to cut the first piece, then they'd take the rest of the cake.
Unless the mathematical solution includes an unquestionable, spatula-wielding, hand-slapping matron who defines the term "fair portion," this won't work.
Best part: "if you're going to be sitting six feet away, you need at least a 42-inch TV. Preferably a 47-inch."
I've had a 37-inch HDTV for 5 years and I sit about 10-12 feet away and it's fine. When I first got it I set it at the foot of my bed (6 feet away) because I wanted to experiment with the immersive experience, and it was just too much. That lasted a day or two before I had to move it.
Later on he talks about how "Internet connected TVs are going to be just incredible." And that's when I decided he wasn't just dishonest, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Don't spend $1,000 on some TV with built-in software that locks you in to certain services or providers, because when you discover that those services suck, or they change their content, or "upgrade" the service, making your built-in software (which the manufacturer claims will be upgradeable... But they'll never release an update because they want you to buy a new TV) obsolete, you're going to have a big, expensive picture frame. Hook the TV up to a computer (even the basic ones typically have at least 2-4 HDMI inputs) or a cheap box like the Apple TV or its competitors that you can replace without buying a whole new TV.
This guy talks like a TV salesman. Buy now, buy big, buy the latest crap, you're taking the manufacturers to the cleaners, etc. He's clueless.
This is the 21st century. A lot of 16-year-olds think of their phone when you say the word "clock," so instructors have had to update their lesson: "you grip the steering wheel at the signal strength and battery life positions. Remember STRENGTH and LIFE. You may get signal attenuation if you dont have a bumper, but you'll live longer."
How is that "better" than a browser open you can Alt-Tab to and refresh in two keystrokes?
It's not. It's just a pretty animation designed to make people think it's better because it looks fancy. This should appeal to people who buy "hologram wristbands" to promote health and wellness. Or people who consider Dreamweaver experience a "skill."
Cognitively it looks like a mess, and I don't see the benefits, even after RTFA and WTFV.
It reminds me of the shell game. You make a change and then see if your eyes can follow the element while it slides around. Most real world HTML files are going to be long enough that you won't fit all the code on one page, so the element you're trying to find will keep sliding off the screen. You'd be far better off just using CTRL-F or CMD-F to find the element in the code.
Or use a "real-time" HTML editor that updates your view of the page in a separate frame as you type. The only downside to this is that you can't use the tab key to indent lines, because it'll switch you to the other frame.
As a side note, it would be nice if the Gliimpse software could also do spell checking. You press the hot key, and your misspelled words morphs into a hand that facepalms the screen with an option on each finger you can choose to replace them with real words that are similar. For instance, if you're naming your app, and you type "Gliimpse," a hand appears, facepalms the screen and appears to have words tattooed on each finger: Glimpse, Gimps, Gimp, Goatse, and "Click here for $1 off a sandwich at Blimpie's."
Doing the right thing always seems logical, but when you look at the bigger picture it's not always effective.
Take your commute, for instance. If the people around you did the right thing, they would leave three seconds between their bumper and the car in front of them. Everyone would hit their brakes less frequently, traffic would flow more smoothly, there would be fewer accidents, less wear and tear on the road, and everyone would get where they were going faster and with less stress. Makes sense, right? But then some asshole will exploit the spaces that each of them have left, weaving in and out, forcing people to hit their brakes, causing waves of slowdowns and possibly accidents.
This is nothing new. Alexander Hamilton observed that people act mostly out of self-interest. The solution is to create a system that makes it in one's self-interest to do the right thing.
In theory, the solution here is to create a system where it is in the interest of a company to hold a large stable of software patents and not use them. In other words, if you can demonstrate that you hold a significant patent and have allowed small competitors to do things that don't blatantly violate your patent but might be in a grey area, for every year you do not use it like a hammer to crush competition, you get a tax break or some other incentive. But if you have a challenge from some significant threat, you still have the option to exercise your right to litigate... you just forfeit your tax break. The system should also make it more difficult to successfully litigate with a software patent. Therefore the company is forced to make a choice and decide which is in their best interest: litigation or the incentive to not litigate. In the process, the greater good is served because the patent is effectively held in trust by a company that is not likely to use it unless it's absolutely necessary, and this protects everyone from patent trolls.
Companies really shouldn't focus on patents as much as they do, because the idea that a patent really protects your intellectual property is flawed. At the end of the day, anything you patent here is just going to be copied and sold in China or India, anyway. India recently allowed a local drug company to copy a cancer drug patented by Bayer so it can sell it for 97% less, so long as it pays a portion of the proceeds to Bayer, effectively ignoring Bayer's R&D costs. And China... well... anything goes in China with regard to patents and copyright as long as it's not deemed a threat to the Party. I couldn't find an e-book copy of K&R anywhere for sale... but you can download it in PDF format for free from Chinese universities.
Given the recent SCOTUS decision about the patentability of "laws of nature" (Mayo v Prometheus)...
I've long said that when condiments start suing mythological figures over whether the laws of nature are imaginary property, we can officially say that things have gotten out of hand. Everyone thought I was joking, but apparently, we have reached that point.
...but the last season of Doctor Who stunk so bad that I almost completely lost interest.
Funny you should mention it. Last year they officially renamed the show "Doctor Who Stunk So Bad That I Almost Completely Lost Interest" and collected huge product placement fees from a deodorant company until they realized no one noticed the change.
It's called primary season. Note how the massive cloud of hot air seems to appear over states just before the vote.
Actually, you left one decade out:
...
'80 DnD
'90 Video games
'00 Guns / Homosexuality
'10 The '00 decade
These days we blame the world's problems on the decade that preceded this one, and our inability to understand what the hell we were collectively thinking for most of those years.
What does 21st century pong look like?
Imagine a man in an orange jumpsuit with black lettering that reads "enemy combatant." He's wandering around a cell at Guantanamo Bay, alternately bumping into a U.S. military judge, a civilian judge and an official from his home country, who keep shoving him back toward the others.
It's accurate, but not much fun.
I will be watching this closely, as I have often wondered what on Earth is at the center of a Danish.
What is a hipster
According to a post somewhere else on slashdot the other day (I'm paraphrasing):
hipster n
a person is likely to burn his mouth by eating pizza before it is cool
With apologies to the originator of the joke I have now butchered.
A friend of mine in California had his house broken into. His iPad and a shotgun were stolen. He tracked the phone to the trunk of a car, told the police, and they did nothing.
Perhaps they were skeptical because he seemed to believe that either his iPad or his shotgun was a phone.
"Based on the mathematical constant number that represents the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle"
In case you're reading slashdot and don't know what pi is.
As a long-time reader of slashdot, I thought it was the ratio between the circumference of the dot and the length the slash would have to be to fit inside the dot.
Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...
The staff at Encyclopædia Britannica... for failing to mention that it is an American company in its own article about itself . (They only mention that it has "editorial offices in Chicago and thousands of contributors worldwide.")
Wikipedia's Article on Britannica
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.
Britannica's Article on Wikipedia
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.
American Businessman (via translated phone call): "I think we can safely say our company would like to use your factory to produce our useless stuff people think they need."
Chinese Businessman (via translated phone call): "An excellent idea! I suggest we sign the papers over dinner at Translate Server Error. They have the best HuMan chicken in town. And the owner prides himself on his bilingual staff."
So, two problems.
One, our text translation software isn't foolproof, but people expect it to be. What happens when the software confuses "galleta" (Spanish for "cookie") with "callate" (Spanish for "shut up"). They do sound similar if you say them out loud, but no one notices because you'd almost never use both in the same conversation. I foresee someone attempting a friendly gesture by offering to share her mother's recipe for "shut up."
Two, live conversations depend upon both parties building on a shared experience. If each one has a different account of the experience, conversations break down very quickly. Ever tried to carry on a conversation with a schizophrenic? And that's just assuming the errors are innocent. What happens when corporations start using this? Your bank requires you to call a number to activate your new card and during the call they have the software "translate" some required disclosure for you, only the translation doesn't really convey what they are supposed to be disclosing. Don't think it won't happen... whoever implements this first on purpose will be running the company one day.
Then again, this whole discussion is purely academic. Gene Roddenberry's estate will just claim prior art and prevent this from ever becoming a reality. Hopefully.
A 1-penny tax (assuming it was paid) would not make him as rich as Germany. It would make the U.S. as rich as... well... the U.S. before the second Bush administration. And still have money left over to rescue the U.S. Postal Service.
For Nathaniel Borenstein to get rich off this, it would have to be a 1-penny licensing fee.