A couple of days ago someone posted about having seen the new Harrison Ford movie FireWall. The poster noted Ford supposedly downloads thousands of accounts into an iPod. It looks like this story is a teaser for the movie.
"Abe Usher has created an application that allows an iPod to scan corporate networks for files likely to contain sensitive business data and download them,"
I couldn't be bother to see such a movie. Harrison Ford playing the righteous man who just isn't going to take anymore and singlehandedly wipes out untold numbers of bad guys is too old in and of itself, but to have Hollywood throw out a buzz word like 'firewall' and use it as a lame premise for a lame movie it way too much. Someone somewhere in Hollywood is laughing a/.
"The good people at Rolex would surely have been surprised by Bond's jury-rigged use of his Oyster Perpetual as a knuckle-duster. In chapter 16 of OHMSS Bond switches his watch to his right hand and loops the band around his fist so that the heavy metal and crystal watchcase sits atop his middle knuckles. The metal watch bracelet is clutched in his palm. Just minutes later Bond makes use of this improvised "Q" device when he kills a guard by punching him so hard that the Rolex's crystal shatters against his jaw.
James Bond wore a Rolex Oyster Submariner. In one of the Bond books 007 grips the handle of his razor between his middle fingers making a fist with the head of the razor outward, (an old stainless steel case and handle that took razor blades inserted under the top then screwed down onto the handle), he then wraps his prized Rolex Oyster Submariner around his fist and over the head of the razor. It's the only weapon available to him and he uses it to kill the man guarding him with a single blow.
"The latest findings of experiments to re-create the conditions under which life could emerge from chemical reactions suggest that volcanic springs and marine hydrothermal events are unlikely to have provided the right environment, a leading researcher from the United States will tell an international meeting tomorrow (14 February 2006) at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science."
As an example, you mention that he wanted to be treated like a God...
I stated he was worshipped as a God by many ancient peoples, this for the most part followed upon his death. You are correct though, he did wish to be treated as a God. Although he showed considerable diplomacy, or, perhaps more accurately pragmatism, in treating with the kingdoms he conquered. He kept the ruling parties in power, married into the ruling elite and coerced his generals into taking wives from the conquered elite. Certainly what little that is known about him suggests he was meglomaniacal. There are sources that suggest he murdered his father.
Interestingly Alexander's deification was in some lands blended with the Greek God Dionysus. Dionysus is remarkable as the ancient western archetypal Christ. The Greek God Dionysus was a God of rebirth in some areas and as such was an ancient version of the Christ figure who is reborn. The King reborn was known throughout lands from India to ancient Greece. In part of what is now India the King would rule for eight years then feed his flesh to his people, thus dying but being ritually reborn in the next King. A similar act lies behind the Catholic act of taking Communion. The idea incorporated in the idea of a Christ figure ties in with the idea of transcendent reason, or Logos. Logos was an idea borrowed by the fathers of the Catholic Church. "In the beginning was the word" (I forget which book of the Bible the quote comes from) but in adopting the idea of Logos, or transcedent reason as God like the Catholic Church fostered the critical, accurate reasoning that would give birth to science.
While Alexander spread cultural plasmids throughout the ancient Greek world and the East, his teacher Aristotle, was adopted by the Catholic Church as the epitome of reasoned insight and so influenced the West perhaps more than any other one man.
Alexander, a pupil of Aristotle (neither had much if anything to say about the other), was worshiped as a God by many ancient kingdoms. His conquests to the east, starting with his famous cutting of the Gordian Knot before his conquests in ancient Persia, lead to the adumbration of the Old Silk Road which was to become the first major conduit between the far east and the west.
Upon his death his generals squabbled over the conqured lands, individually taking control of various areas. The Ptolemy reign of Egypt ended with the conquest of Egypt by Julius Ceasar and his taking of Cleopatra as his lover and mother of their child.
The true legacy of Alexander was the Hellenization of the ancient world. The ancient Greek culture was idealized and emulated by the Macedonians, (hence Aristotle as teacher to Alexander), and Alexander spread the idealized version of the ancient Greek culture throughout the lands he conqured.
In Canada I get broadband and +70 TV channels for 80 looney Canadian dollars a month. Posters from other countries like Korea, Japan and some European countries have posted in the past about how, relative to U.S. rates, broadband cable is cheap in their respective countries.
By way of example, if the object of a game was to teach Euclidean geometry, at what level of abstraction would such a game fail to entertain? If the 'game' was comprised of merely shapes allowing for extrapolation to Euclidean principles then I doubt the 'game' would hold a players interest. If the game were akin to something like Quake with the concepts of Euclidean geometry tied directly into winning strategy then players might learn to quickly implement the principles and deduce tactics.
Sound might be transcribed into music theory. Do the storyline, sound and imagery have to be heroic and embedded in the players mythos before the game is entertaining and entrains the player?
The Catholic Church will likely exercise the extend and embrace strategy it has in the past and canonize Darwin. St. Charles will have spoken the word of God and Darwin's works will find their way into the Bible.
In Canada during the recent federal election campaign an add ran on national TV showing nuclear power as a clean air alternative to existing technology. The ad sported the requisite azure blue skys and big fluffy white clouds while touting nuclear power.
In the UK the BBC website recently ran articles pointing to upcoming reviews of existing nuclear power plants and the impact of bring new plants online.
As noted before the environmentalist camp has had some of it's big guns come out in support of nuclear power as the only alternative available to stave off global warming.
Probably the various political power bases have decided nuclear power is the way to go and have given the spin doctors orders to soften public reaction.
Good news for Canada with a mature nuclear technology, substantial Uranium resources, not to mention being oil and hydro rich.
Q: Let's say the Bush administration wanted to obtain a list of the names or Internet addresses of anyone who typed "how to grow marijuana" or "how to cheat on income taxes" into Google. Could that be done?
Probably. If the Electronic Communications Privacy Act does not apply, all that's required is a subpoena from a prosecutor, and no prior approval from a judge is necessary. One Harvard law professor calls the subpoena power "akin to a blank check."
"The threshold rule is relevance," says Paul Ohm, the University of Colorado law professor. "Relevance has been quite broadly construed. As long as you can show that something's relevant to a case or criminal investigation, I think the litigant would have a pretty good argument."
The suggestion that relevance has been broadly construed is disturbing. The erosion of civil liberties needn't necessarily follow from the enactment of bad laws, but can, just as easily, follow from too broad an interpretation of existing laws and practices.
If the judiciary restrict the interpretation of terms like relevance to as narrow a meaning as possible there is less room for abuse, but in the present environment it's likely judges, not only in America, but in the west generally, will allow broad definitions of such terms to the detriment of civil liberties.
At home over Christmas I ran a straw poll of family members and visitors. The number of people polled was not that great but it did reflect the buying habits of a swatch of the middle class.
The most interesting result was that those home users, who at the turn of the century, couldn't get enough of new 'puter stuff were now satisfied with their home machines and saw no reason to update. Up until a year or so ago these same buyers were in a frenzy to have bigger harddrives and more ram, now Windows XP and a P4 is sufficient for most of their needs. Their primary need seems to have settled on photography, with scanner/printers being their last buy.
Not that a straw poll over Christmas is much to go on but I suspect the rush to new technology is over. The down side is it looks like my source of free PCs is going to dry up.
So remember, we elect our congressmen to represent us , not the people of China. I'd like to see them show more concern for the ebbing of Democracy in our own damn country before they start working on forcing the Chinese to accept our form of government.
"The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But the White House has yet to nominate anyone for the job..."
Further:
"Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies."
It would appear Congress and the Oval Office aren't shy of directing their ire outward while failing to adequately protect the values they pretend to hold so dear to their electorate.
I've taken the time to hunt through used bookstores to find and read Sapir, Boas and Whorf, along with the Danish (?) English master, Otto Jespersen. I enjoyed reading Whorf the most as his thought processes were wonderfully clear to me, and, accordingly, I was able to form an opinion of his ideas satisfactory for my purposes. Whorf was trained as a Chemical Engineer, perhaps this is why I found his writings clear and informed.
One of the ideas I formed was the tendency of many languages ( native north american ) to speak in idea clusters as if one part of an idea was inseparable from the others such that perception was more of a splash pattern of large gestalten.
Western Culture benefited from the ancient Greeks implementing vowels in the written word and tautological reasoning as seen in Euclid's 'The Elements'. It's been suggested that perspective drawing derived from Euclidean geometry enabled the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution through design drawing. I suspect that the reductionist, deterministic reasoning that drove western Science is supportive of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I read in a few/. posts that Solaris is likely the best 64bit OS available. On other sites I've read Solaris referred to as Slowiris when run on a single CPU, but the Sun site suggests Solaris is no slower than Linux on a single CPU machine.
How much of a cachet does Solaris have and how will Sun attempt to capitalize on any cachet Solaris does have, especially on dual cores? Is going Open Source with GPL v3 an attempt to move into Linux territory and sell services while trying to maintain sales of their high priced hardware?
I downloaded Sol 10 looking forward to doing a dual install with Ubuntu on a Athlon 3800+ workstation, but stupidly bought a SATA drive which Solaris doesn't support. So I'll have to go back to an ide drive to do the install.
Re:Thank god it's just audio visual
on
IT Crowd On-line
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· Score: 1
Can someone please explain the "fat computer geek" meme?
Tracing the linage of memes is tricky business. My guess would be one part Dudley 'Booger' Dawson played by Curtis Armstrong in Revenge of the Nerds, and one part derived from the archetypal nerd, R.M. Stallman. IIRC RMS use to partake in folk dancing, but injured an ankle, had to quit dancing and acquired a paunch, where RMS is concerned the hairy part is apparent.
Best guess on my part.
Thank god it's just audio visual
on
IT Crowd On-line
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A realistic 'IT Crowd' would just shows fat, oily, pimply, hairy geeks. Fortunately Smell-O-Vision didn't become a hit, or the 'IT Crowd' would have been, literally, an olfactory bomb.
It's possible there might be a mutually opportunistic dialogue between the Conservatives and the Bloc. The Conservatives currently see a possibility of opening inroads into Que. While the Conservatives making inroads into Que should put them a loggerheads with the Bloc, it's possible both the Conservatives and the Bloc will see mutually agreeable ground where the Conservatives serve up legislation beneficial to Que and the Bloc support other items in the Conservative agenda while both parties curry favour with the Que voters.
First there's the requirement to define normal. Measuring IQ, not a straightforward task, places highly intelligent people out on the tail of a bell curve, but many highly intelligent people are emotionally stable and vibrant.
There's a public conception that assigns eccentricities to highly intelligent people. From Disney's 'The Nutty Proffesor' to real life cases like Paul Erdös, to the idea of genius and madness, recently portrayed in 'A Beautiful Mind'. I doubt there's any weighty corellation between high intelligence and eccentricity.
Reasoning toward rigorous, elegant and robust conclusions is just plain old hard work requiring a tool set that in itself is difficult to acquire.
Recently there has been a spate of stories about growing meat for human consumption. In growing meat for consumption there is a need for the tissue to be stretched to provide the 'exercise' for the growing muscles. Presently the cost to manufacture a single burger would run into the millions of dollars.
Growing heart tissue would be much more demanding requring "exercising" the muscle, plus as the article pointed out there are problems of tissue acceptance, adhesion and syncing the pulse of the muscle patch to the existing heart tissue. Given these hurtles it looks like this technology has many hurtles to jump.
Pursuing an interest in Dictyostelium amoebae provides an starting point to studying chemotaxis and cellular communication.
As a Canadian I'm reminded of reading that, IIRC, the 7th President... "President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of A Supreme court ruling he opposed: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."
Again IIRC, the Supreme Court backed down. Certainly the power of the Supreme Court has increased substantially since Jackson's remark. I doubt any president would repeat the remark.
There may well be a streak in the American character that sees in the presidency something akin to the British Monarchy. Afterall the JFK presidency was called Camelot.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the ideal hugger.
"Abe Usher has created an application that allows an iPod to scan corporate networks for files likely to contain sensitive business data and download them,"
I couldn't be bother to see such a movie. Harrison Ford playing the righteous man who just isn't going to take anymore and singlehandedly wipes out untold numbers of bad guys is too old in and of itself, but to have Hollywood throw out a buzz word like 'firewall' and use it as a lame premise for a lame movie it way too much. Someone somewhere in Hollywood is laughing a /.
"Naturally, it was Ian Fleming who started it all. He knew that a gentleman's choice of timepiece says as much about him as does his Saville Row suit. He took the time to specify Bond's choice. According to Fleming, and he should know, Bond wears a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Chronometer on an expanding metal bracelet. He tells us so in chapter 15 of On Her Majesty's Secret Service ."
"The good people at Rolex would surely have been surprised by Bond's jury-rigged use of his Oyster Perpetual as a knuckle-duster. In chapter 16 of OHMSS Bond switches his watch to his right hand and loops the band around his fist so that the heavy metal and crystal watchcase sits atop his middle knuckles. The metal watch bracelet is clutched in his palm. Just minutes later Bond makes use of this improvised "Q" device when he kills a guard by punching him so hard that the Rolex's crystal shatters against his jaw.
The Rolex Blackface Oyster is coveted worldwide.
Life on Earth 'unlikely to have emerged in volcanic springs'
13 Feb 2006
"The latest findings of experiments to re-create the conditions under which life could emerge from chemical reactions suggest that volcanic springs and marine hydrothermal events are unlikely to have provided the right environment, a leading researcher from the United States will tell an international meeting tomorrow (14 February 2006) at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science."
In the alternative Plos ran an interestin article titled Jump-Starting a Cellular World: Investigating the Origin of Life, from Soup to Networks which touches on the front running theories on the origin of life.
I stated he was worshipped as a God by many ancient peoples, this for the most part followed upon his death. You are correct though, he did wish to be treated as a God. Although he showed considerable diplomacy, or, perhaps more accurately pragmatism, in treating with the kingdoms he conquered. He kept the ruling parties in power, married into the ruling elite and coerced his generals into taking wives from the conquered elite. Certainly what little that is known about him suggests he was meglomaniacal. There are sources that suggest he murdered his father.
Interestingly Alexander's deification was in some lands blended with the Greek God Dionysus. Dionysus is remarkable as the ancient western archetypal Christ. The Greek God Dionysus was a God of rebirth in some areas and as such was an ancient version of the Christ figure who is reborn. The King reborn was known throughout lands from India to ancient Greece. In part of what is now India the King would rule for eight years then feed his flesh to his people, thus dying but being ritually reborn in the next King. A similar act lies behind the Catholic act of taking Communion. The idea incorporated in the idea of a Christ figure ties in with the idea of transcendent reason, or Logos. Logos was an idea borrowed by the fathers of the Catholic Church. "In the beginning was the word" (I forget which book of the Bible the quote comes from) but in adopting the idea of Logos, or transcedent reason as God like the Catholic Church fostered the critical, accurate reasoning that would give birth to science.
While Alexander spread cultural plasmids throughout the ancient Greek world and the East, his teacher Aristotle, was adopted by the Catholic Church as the epitome of reasoned insight and so influenced the West perhaps more than any other one man.
Upon his death his generals squabbled over the conqured lands, individually taking control of various areas. The Ptolemy reign of Egypt ended with the conquest of Egypt by Julius Ceasar and his taking of Cleopatra as his lover and mother of their child.
The true legacy of Alexander was the Hellenization of the ancient world. The ancient Greek culture was idealized and emulated by the Macedonians, (hence Aristotle as teacher to Alexander), and Alexander spread the idealized version of the ancient Greek culture throughout the lands he conqured.
Source code
In Canada I get broadband and +70 TV channels for 80 looney Canadian dollars a month. Posters from other countries like Korea, Japan and some European countries have posted in the past about how, relative to U.S. rates, broadband cable is cheap in their respective countries.
So what's up south of the border?
Sound might be transcribed into music theory. Do the storyline, sound and imagery have to be heroic and embedded in the players mythos before the game is entertaining and entrains the player?
The Catholic Church will likely exercise the extend and embrace strategy it has in the past and canonize Darwin. St. Charles will have spoken the word of God and Darwin's works will find their way into the Bible.
In the UK the BBC website recently ran articles pointing to upcoming reviews of existing nuclear power plants and the impact of bring new plants online.
As noted before the environmentalist camp has had some of it's big guns come out in support of nuclear power as the only alternative available to stave off global warming.
Probably the various political power bases have decided nuclear power is the way to go and have given the spin doctors orders to soften public reaction.
Good news for Canada with a mature nuclear technology, substantial Uranium resources, not to mention being oil and hydro rich.
"The threshold rule is relevance," says Paul Ohm, the University of Colorado law professor. "Relevance has been quite broadly construed. As long as you can show that something's relevant to a case or criminal investigation, I think the litigant would have a pretty good argument."
The suggestion that relevance has been broadly construed is disturbing. The erosion of civil liberties needn't necessarily follow from the enactment of bad laws, but can, just as easily, follow from too broad an interpretation of existing laws and practices.
If the judiciary restrict the interpretation of terms like relevance to as narrow a meaning as possible there is less room for abuse, but in the present environment it's likely judges, not only in America, but in the west generally, will allow broad definitions of such terms to the detriment of civil liberties.
The most interesting result was that those home users, who at the turn of the century, couldn't get enough of new 'puter stuff were now satisfied with their home machines and saw no reason to update. Up until a year or so ago these same buyers were in a frenzy to have bigger harddrives and more ram, now Windows XP and a P4 is sufficient for most of their needs. Their primary need seems to have settled on photography, with scanner/printers being their last buy.
Not that a straw poll over Christmas is much to go on but I suspect the rush to new technology is over. The down side is it looks like my source of free PCs is going to dry up.
Shouldn't that read: Gecko's Feet Feat...?
Interestingly Wired is reporting 'Bush Keeps Privacy Posts Vacant.'
From the article:
"The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But the White House has yet to nominate anyone for the job..."
Further:
"Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies."
It would appear Congress and the Oval Office aren't shy of directing their ire outward while failing to adequately protect the values they pretend to hold so dear to their electorate.
One of the ideas I formed was the tendency of many languages ( native north american ) to speak in idea clusters as if one part of an idea was inseparable from the others such that perception was more of a splash pattern of large gestalten.
Western Culture benefited from the ancient Greeks implementing vowels in the written word and tautological reasoning as seen in Euclid's 'The Elements'. It's been suggested that perspective drawing derived from Euclidean geometry enabled the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution through design drawing. I suspect that the reductionist, deterministic reasoning that drove western Science is supportive of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
2. Sugar
3. Water
How much of a cachet does Solaris have and how will Sun attempt to capitalize on any cachet Solaris does have, especially on dual cores? Is going Open Source with GPL v3 an attempt to move into Linux territory and sell services while trying to maintain sales of their high priced hardware?
I downloaded Sol 10 looking forward to doing a dual install with Ubuntu on a Athlon 3800+ workstation, but stupidly bought a SATA drive which Solaris doesn't support. So I'll have to go back to an ide drive to do the install.
Tracing the linage of memes is tricky business. My guess would be one part Dudley 'Booger' Dawson played by Curtis Armstrong in Revenge of the Nerds, and one part derived from the archetypal nerd, R.M. Stallman. IIRC RMS use to partake in folk dancing, but injured an ankle, had to quit dancing and acquired a paunch, where RMS is concerned the hairy part is apparent.
Best guess on my part.
A realistic 'IT Crowd' would just shows fat, oily, pimply, hairy geeks. Fortunately Smell-O-Vision didn't become a hit, or the 'IT Crowd' would have been, literally, an olfactory bomb.
Just a thought
Cheers
There's a public conception that assigns eccentricities to highly intelligent people. From Disney's 'The Nutty Proffesor' to real life cases like Paul Erdös, to the idea of genius and madness, recently portrayed in 'A Beautiful Mind'. I doubt there's any weighty corellation between high intelligence and eccentricity.
Reasoning toward rigorous, elegant and robust conclusions is just plain old hard work requiring a tool set that in itself is difficult to acquire.
Growing heart tissue would be much more demanding requring "exercising" the muscle, plus as the article pointed out there are problems of tissue acceptance, adhesion and syncing the pulse of the muscle patch to the existing heart tissue. Given these hurtles it looks like this technology has many hurtles to jump.
Pursuing an interest in Dictyostelium amoebae provides an starting point to studying chemotaxis and cellular communication.
Again IIRC, the Supreme Court backed down. Certainly the power of the Supreme Court has increased substantially since Jackson's remark. I doubt any president would repeat the remark.
There may well be a streak in the American character that sees in the presidency something akin to the British Monarchy. Afterall the JFK presidency was called Camelot.