No. Life does not end when you have kids
on
Skiing Down Everest
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· Score: 3
Does anyone else find it irresponsible that he, and any of the other everest climbers, would risk his life for a thrill when he has a family with young children?
That's a damn silly question or statement. If having children meant the end of all challange and risk, having children wouldn't be worth living.
Just about the riskiest thing we do in normal daily life is to drive our cars and/or cross the street, and both of these are very risky in statistical terms despite the fact that we think of them as mundane. Are you suggesting that we give up such dangerous activities when we have children? Are we meant to tuck ourselves away in a cocoon?
For goodness sake. If anything, it's a stronger argument that one could increase exposure to risk if one were so inclined after having children, since one's genetic inheritance is then already released for posterity. Mind you, I don't buy that either. We're not here for long, so we have to make life worth living whatever our stage in life. That almost always involves risk.
There are astronomical data to support the modern understanding of the solar system.
That data wasn't available then.
Telling everybody that he/she is thinking badly and showing him/her a toy is not the same thing as having an answer.
But all the models of science are toys, without exception. That is the whole idea behind science, to produce mathematical toy models that hopefully might approximate the behaviour of reality as determined through empirical tests.
Scientists have never had The Answer, and no competent scientist would ever profess to do so -- the relationship between reality and the models of science are in Science 101, after all. But they're getting damn good at creating models that accurately mimic a lot of reality's behaviours, despite the scientific method not having any ability to determine The Answer or The Truth or whatever.
And that's why it is always good to point out the error of their ways to those "scientists" that waffle on interminably without producing hard testable models based on the hard thinking of logic and mathemetics. It takes more than just mimicking the forms to produce real scientific results. Reality checks may be painful, but they're important.
I don't know why everyone gets so heated about this kind of topic. We're within sight of total positional control of atoms, which translates in the long run into being able to create just about any material structures given the required component elements.
It doesn't take much extrapolation from this to see that human bodies will not remain in their present form for long, and that in fact the word "human" itself has a rather limited lifespan. Total self-transformation for purposes of repair, special function or simply vanity is on its way --- especially the latter for most, but I bet the military is more interested in the former.
In development terms this is a long way off, but the key observation is that the difficulties seem to be just engineering ones: "merely" a lot of handle turning required, like that which turned the first transistor into today's complex computers.
In that context, minor tinkering with our biological systems as in the present topic is, well, utterly minor. If this causes a storm today, we're in for global hurricanes tomorrow.
The peer review process is set up to make sure that the reviewers are anonymous, and un-affiliated with the authors.
Unfortunately, there's a little more to it than that. If you return to the publisher a negative review of a paper written by a respected figure in your scientific community, there is an element of "black mark" against your name in some quarters as a result of the conflict of interest that the publisher has through needing the famous name to appear in his or her journal rather than in a competing one. As a reviewer you're anonymous to the author, but not to the publisher!
And I'm not even going to mention what happens when the journal's editorial board includes researchers interested in the same paradigm or method employed by the famous person, so that publication of that paper validates their own research area...
Peer review is a fairly good process on the whole, but I doubt that anyone who's been involved in it [I have] would suggest it approaches perfection.:-) A dollup of cynicism is always helpful, here as in so many other areas where humans err. Yes, even in hard science.
Hackers as a cross-section of techdom
on
2 Views of Hackers
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· Score: 2
Charles Palmer writes:
We have Ph.D.s in physics, computer scientists, and even one former photographer with a fine arts degree. They are all well-known, highly respected system security professionals from around the world.
And who do you think we have in the hacker community, Charles? Exactly the same. Except that we have a hell of a lot more PhDs and real security professionals (the ones that do the exact same work quietly without writing papers about it) here than you have in your "ethical" team.
The difference seems to be mainly that we know the world isn't black and white, whereas you're quite clearly in possession of The One Truth on the ethical front. Perhaps the interview portrayed you in a bad light, but the image was of your own making. You shouldn't have been playing to the gallery.
Big Business is totally dependent on us
on
2 Views of Hackers
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· Score: 2
This idea that we live in a world of "Big Business versus the hacker" is overly simplistic. Yes, the relationship sometimes seems strained, but not in a remote warring/adversarial sort of way --- it's more like the strains of a marriage!
The fact of the matter is that Big Business relies on us utterly. You can put as many venture capitalists, directors, managers, lawyers and politicians together as you like, and not one useful product of the modern age will emerge from their combined talents. In contrast, we produce things that the whole modern world uses as a matter of course, whether or not we're paid to do it. They are merely facilitators for our work and nothing else, and we work for them because we want to be "facilitated" --- more toys please!!:-)
Given this basic symbiotic relationship, they really can't get rid of hackers (hardware or software), because hackers are merely the higher profile representatives of the technical community as a whole. If they tried to clamp down it would very much throw away the baby with the bathwater, because at heart virtually every techie is a hacker and feels for the famous ones. And it's very counter-productive to piss off a good techie, because the world is currently our oyster and becoming ever more so. Moving to another job is almost always synonymous with a pay increase; our skill sets tend to grow with each new employment.
So, if you hear Big Business saying nasty things about us, read between the lines to see who actually wrote them. Almost always it'll be the lawyers and business managers who think they are in control but are utterly clueless about the real underpinnings of their tech-based industry. They're the telephone sanitizers that were packed off in the 'B' Ark in Hitchhikers, although I suspect Douglas Adams was perhaps a little too generous in his portrayal.
We can afford to ignore them, just like the non-public "real" Big Business does, ie. ignoring its own public statements and doing whatever it must in order to keep the cash flow flowing. (For example, paying lip service to the music/film studios while producing MP3 and multi-region capable DVD players in vast quantities.)
That's the real world. The paper pushers think they hold a spoon, but those that actually produce the goods in the billion-dollar industries know that it's just hot air.
The real pecking order in this world is not the one that makes the evening news. The only reason why this is not all that obvious is that the average techie is a bit of a sleeper and so his or her power is latent. I rather suspect that waking that power by being too nasty to us is not in the best interests of Big Business. The modern gold is tech, and we have the Midas touch.
Avatar comms systems mostly a step backwards
on
IRC Improvements
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· Score: 2
C'mon people, we live in a graphical world -- kick those VT220's to the curb!
Er, hello. GUI-based clients for IRC appeared about two milliseconds after the original version. The fact that text-based ones are still around just gives extra capability --- you can chat on IRC while on the move through your mobile, or when connected through a public access telnet. You'd have to forgo communication until you reached a fixed infrastructure if there wasn't a plain text interface to IRC.
The rest of the world has moved on to ICQ, various instant messagers, Yahoo Chat, CheetaChat and other avatar chat programs. IRC is featureless and looks positively dowdy in comparison.
And with all that prettiness, exactly how much communication gets done? Compared to IRC, very little. A picture is only worth a thousand words when the picture is specific to the message, not when it's a prepackaged icon or avatar, otherwise it's merely eye candy.
A top-band communication system would give you text, a whiteboard, and voice. The examples you cite are merely examples of graphics misused.
Analogue to digital conversion is inherently a simple process which doesn't require extreme device linearity, and producing an ADC with a precision much greater than that used in CD and DVD recording is no problem at all. Comparatively speaking, high precision DACs are much more difficult to manufacture, yet despite that, 20-bit stereo DACs now cost just a couple of dollars.
What this adds up to is no light at the end of the tunnel for the RIAA and the MPAA at all, because even if they succeed in making their digital media uncrackable, people will still be able to redigitize it, and without appreciable loss of quality. The march of technology is utterly against them. Sorry.
Mankind has been manipulating its environment since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so, ever more effectively. Evolution ceased to be a natural (in the sense of blind) process from the moment when lifeforms started to think for themselves, and our own evolution is most emphatically in our own hands now.
It is of course your choice not to take part in this science-driven future of our own making, but I have no idea how you could possibly avoid it: almost everything you wear, eat, touch and see around you in daily life is a product of technology (unless you grow your own vegetables, peel them with a flint knife and eat them raw), so if you are sincere you will need to travel to one of the few untouched parts of the planet, throw away all your man-made cloths and implements, and go back to extreme basics and a life on the edge of existence. I doubt that you would succeed in your quest though; even the most primitive groupings of people use modern technology these days. You'd have to be a hermit as well.
On the other hand, you may be happy with modern life up to now and just consider these latest advances as one step too far. Well, in that case you're just a blinkered Luddite and I have no sympathy for you.
Mikeb's piece is excellent, but notice his first sentence describing what happened before he gained his experience:
I found myself having to switch from development into management about 15 years ago.
*HAVING* to switch? The circumstances pressured him into doing this before he was experienced enough to know that it was going to be the most unpleasant experience of his professional life -- with the benefit of hindsight he might never have taken that step. (Whether Mikeb would have or not is not important, what's important is his observation about what such a transition entails.)
The moral here is pretty damn obvious. If you're a good tech person, it's not just a waste of your skills and often a waste of your life to go into management, it's also a pretty monumental professional downgrade. Unless you enjoy the slumming experience of being crap at something, just don't do it.
If you're a good tech in computing or Internet technologies, you can easily earn 3-5 times as much as many a good manager by becoming a freelance contractor, and it's an extremely pleasurable experience too. So there's no financial reason to fall into management either.
And if you would rather stay with your present company because of friends or other fringe benefits, then if they value your contribution they'll let you stay technical and perform only the minimalist "management" role of an advisor. (If the company doesn't value you enough to be flexible on this then it doesn't deserve your loyalty anyway.)
You definitely don't "HAVE" to go into management. If you were a good tech in the first place, in the vast majority of cases you will regret doing so. Take the advice of many an experienced voice here on Slashdot and choose an alternative path.
Is there anything that can play DVDs that can't play SVCDs???
Yes -- almost everything. DVD players can all play VCD, not SVCD. SVCD uses a completely different format on the medium and also requires completely different decoding.
Anyway, I wasn't talking about playing SVCD but about playing and recording SVCD, like the newer Chinese players. Excellent for capturing episodes of Buffy!:-)
By "X10 Mouse remote", you you mean an X10 RF + IR TV-style remote like the Marmitek? Presumably that could allow one to navigate menus as one does with a DVD remote. If so, how do you use it as a mouse?
Or is an "X10 Mouse" an actual product? If so, who makes them?
If they haven't included Super Video CD recording on CDR media in the unit then they've missed out on a golden opportunity.
This format is huge in the far east, effectively being a sort of "poor man's recordable DVD", and companies like Shinco, Mico and Amoisonic are gearing up to market SVCD player/recorders over here (they all play MP3 as well). If the ZapStation doesn't handle SVCD, it'll soon lose market share to those that do.
But the Ocaml guys won't win: they've used comments quite blatently on at least a couple of lines, and as soon as the functional community notices, they'll be excommunicated and ostracized for life.
Just imagine what would happen if it caught on and comments in functional programs became commonplace. People would actually be able to figure out what functions were intended to do, and decades of good work would go down the drain. Heaven forbid!
But it gets worse: this team has even used descriptive identifiers in a couple of places. Shock horror, whatever next -- code walkthroughs?!
[PS. This comment may actually be a half-serious answer to the question of why FP has never had an impact outside of academia. Apparently FP programmers don't consider that the "software crisis" and maintainability have any relevance to them.]
[PPS. I like ML. Languages aren't obscure, only programmers.]
That's a good idea, but to make it even better, how about implementing such decryption code in the form of decryption plugins with a defined API that designers of players could use without getting themselves compromised, as I wrote elsewhere in this thread.
That would be as unstoppable as Usenet, which is pretty darn unstoppable.
If DVD decryption were handled by plugins having a simple streaming-filter interface then the MPAA's regressive actions would have almost no impact whatsoever. Player designers would be able to release their software with just a no-crypto plugin (so that you can play unencrypted DVDs, of which there are many), and couldn't be taken to task for dependency on DeCSS, since they wouldn't be.
And then, users wishing to watch their own encrypted DVDs on such a player would have merely to acquire and load a little plugin, which could easily be circulated on Usenet in the traditional way. Easy.
It'd be great if DeCSS (or another clean-room implementation of DVD decryption) were given such a treatment. The dlopen(3) interface is trivial to use. Does anyone know whether the current DeCSS is amenable to such conversion?
Isn't this like showing a list of addresses to a child molester...?
That's not a very charitable thing to call the lawyer present, but it pretty much explains the RIAA/MP3 and MPAA/DeCSS sagas, and the whole rotten mess with patents. (:-)
More seriously though, if you're asked to sign an NDA at the interview then I'd say stay well clear of the company, as it's a sure sign that it's totally ruled by its paper pushers.
Spin up a gyroscope with its axis at 45 degrees to the horizontal, then balance the lowest point of its axle on your finger. Now imagine a black box around the system, ie. with the gyroscope spinning inside it. The centre of gravity of the black box lies beyond the point of support, yet the black box doesn't topple over.
You can call the future vision part "wishful thinking" if you like,but many would disagree with you. Fans have always been extremely supportive of their favourite bands, and in an environment where they didn't have to pay today's extorionate prices into label coffers there's every likelihood that a very different business model would deliver just as much money into the musicians' pockets, if not a lot more.
However, you can't pin the label of "wishful thinking" to the article's analysis of what was and what is, because it's right on the mark, not just in the author's view but in the view of musicians worldwide, often expressed by them in the music papers. They may not all have the eloquence of Courtney Love, but they feel the financial pain just the same. In brief, they're being sucked dry by the biggest and most cold-blooded pirate organization on the planet, the label/studio system. Anything is better than that kind of slavery.
But it does raise a real question: given that quite a lot of space debris will probably be reflective simply because space equipment is quite often reflective in order not to absorb heat from the sun, how is this laser going to deal with it?
The most likely outcome of this seems to be that the space station's sensors are going to be burned out because of unwanted reflections from the targetted junk.
I couldn't agree more with all your points, especially the importance of battery life --- the iPAQ is packed with features, yet it would be totally worthless to me because it needs recharging every day. The Agenda doesn't make that mistake.
Hmmm... are you suggesting to replace X11 with Squeak? What an intriguing idea. Among other benefits, it ought to cut down app size by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
Actually, looking at both sites and comparing the two units on features, the Agenda seems to beat the VTech in almost every area of hardware. And on software, VTech doesn't even acknowledge the existence of PocketLinux, whereas for the Agenda, Linux is a feature they're proud of. [As you can see, I'm ignoring the iPAQ entirely --- I consider a PDA that you have to recharge every day as worthless. The 2 AAA batteries in my Palm last 3 months.]
Given the above, what was the basis for your statement suggesting the opposite?
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Does anyone else find it irresponsible that he, and any of the other everest climbers, would risk his life for a thrill when he has a family with young children?
That's a damn silly question or statement. If having children meant the end of all challange and risk, having children wouldn't be worth living.
Just about the riskiest thing we do in normal daily life is to drive our cars and/or cross the street, and both of these are very risky in statistical terms despite the fact that we think of them as mundane. Are you suggesting that we give up such dangerous activities when we have children? Are we meant to tuck ourselves away in a cocoon?
For goodness sake. If anything, it's a stronger argument that one could increase exposure to risk if one were so inclined after having children, since one's genetic inheritance is then already released for posterity. Mind you, I don't buy that either. We're not here for long, so we have to make life worth living whatever our stage in life. That almost always involves risk.
There are astronomical data to support the modern understanding of the solar system.
That data wasn't available then.
Telling everybody that he/she is thinking badly and showing him/her a toy is not the same thing as having an answer.
But all the models of science are toys, without exception. That is the whole idea behind science, to produce mathematical toy models that hopefully might approximate the behaviour of reality as determined through empirical tests.
Scientists have never had The Answer, and no competent scientist would ever profess to do so -- the relationship between reality and the models of science are in Science 101, after all. But they're getting damn good at creating models that accurately mimic a lot of reality's behaviours, despite the scientific method not having any ability to determine The Answer or The Truth or whatever.
And that's why it is always good to point out the error of their ways to those "scientists" that waffle on interminably without producing hard testable models based on the hard thinking of logic and mathemetics. It takes more than just mimicking the forms to produce real scientific results. Reality checks may be painful, but they're important.
I don't know why everyone gets so heated about this kind of topic. We're within sight of total positional control of atoms, which translates in the long run into being able to create just about any material structures given the required component elements.
It doesn't take much extrapolation from this to see that human bodies will not remain in their present form for long, and that in fact the word "human" itself has a rather limited lifespan. Total self-transformation for purposes of repair, special function or simply vanity is on its way --- especially the latter for most, but I bet the military is more interested in the former.
In development terms this is a long way off, but the key observation is that the difficulties seem to be just engineering ones: "merely" a lot of handle turning required, like that which turned the first transistor into today's complex computers.
In that context, minor tinkering with our biological systems as in the present topic is, well, utterly minor. If this causes a storm today, we're in for global hurricanes tomorrow.
Anyone can see why that attitude is potentially offensive.
And suggesting that the earth went around the sun was extremely offensive to the bulk of the scientific community of the day.
The peer review process is set up to make sure that the reviewers are anonymous, and un-affiliated with the authors.
...
:-) A dollup of cynicism is always helpful, here as in so many other areas where humans err. Yes, even in hard science.
Unfortunately, there's a little more to it than that. If you return to the publisher a negative review of a paper written by a respected figure in your scientific community, there is an element of "black mark" against your name in some quarters as a result of the conflict of interest that the publisher has through needing the famous name to appear in his or her journal rather than in a competing one. As a reviewer you're anonymous to the author, but not to the publisher!
And I'm not even going to mention what happens when the journal's editorial board includes researchers interested in the same paradigm or method employed by the famous person, so that publication of that paper validates their own research area
Peer review is a fairly good process on the whole, but I doubt that anyone who's been involved in it [I have] would suggest it approaches perfection.
Charles Palmer writes:
We have Ph.D.s in physics, computer scientists, and even one former photographer with a fine arts degree. They are all well-known, highly respected system security professionals from around the world.
And who do you think we have in the hacker community, Charles? Exactly the same. Except that we have a hell of a lot more PhDs and real security professionals (the ones that do the exact same work quietly without writing papers about it) here than you have in your "ethical" team.
The difference seems to be mainly that we know the world isn't black and white, whereas you're quite clearly in possession of The One Truth on the ethical front. Perhaps the interview portrayed you in a bad light, but the image was of your own making. You shouldn't have been playing to the gallery.
This idea that we live in a world of "Big Business versus the hacker" is overly simplistic. Yes, the relationship sometimes seems strained, but not in a remote warring/adversarial sort of way --- it's more like the strains of a marriage!
:-)
The fact of the matter is that Big Business relies on us utterly. You can put as many venture capitalists, directors, managers, lawyers and politicians together as you like, and not one useful product of the modern age will emerge from their combined talents. In contrast, we produce things that the whole modern world uses as a matter of course, whether or not we're paid to do it. They are merely facilitators for our work and nothing else, and we work for them because we want to be "facilitated" --- more toys please!!
Given this basic symbiotic relationship, they really can't get rid of hackers (hardware or software), because hackers are merely the higher profile representatives of the technical community as a whole. If they tried to clamp down it would very much throw away the baby with the bathwater, because at heart virtually every techie is a hacker and feels for the famous ones. And it's very counter-productive to piss off a good techie, because the world is currently our oyster and becoming ever more so. Moving to another job is almost always synonymous with a pay increase; our skill sets tend to grow with each new employment.
So, if you hear Big Business saying nasty things about us, read between the lines to see who actually wrote them. Almost always it'll be the lawyers and business managers who think they are in control but are utterly clueless about the real underpinnings of their tech-based industry. They're the telephone sanitizers that were packed off in the 'B' Ark in Hitchhikers, although I suspect Douglas Adams was perhaps a little too generous in his portrayal.
We can afford to ignore them, just like the non-public "real" Big Business does, ie. ignoring its own public statements and doing whatever it must in order to keep the cash flow flowing. (For example, paying lip service to the music/film studios while producing MP3 and multi-region capable DVD players in vast quantities.)
That's the real world. The paper pushers think they hold a spoon, but those that actually produce the goods in the billion-dollar industries know that it's just hot air.
The real pecking order in this world is not the one that makes the evening news. The only reason why this is not all that obvious is that the average techie is a bit of a sleeper and so his or her power is latent. I rather suspect that waking that power by being too nasty to us is not in the best interests of Big Business. The modern gold is tech, and we have the Midas touch.
C'mon people, we live in a graphical world -- kick those VT220's to the curb!
Er, hello. GUI-based clients for IRC appeared about two milliseconds after the original version. The fact that text-based ones are still around just gives extra capability --- you can chat on IRC while on the move through your mobile, or when connected through a public access telnet. You'd have to forgo communication until you reached a fixed infrastructure if there wasn't a plain text interface to IRC.
The rest of the world has moved on to ICQ, various instant messagers, Yahoo Chat, CheetaChat and other avatar chat programs. IRC is featureless and looks positively dowdy in comparison.
And with all that prettiness, exactly how much communication gets done? Compared to IRC, very little. A picture is only worth a thousand words when the picture is specific to the message, not when it's a prepackaged icon or avatar, otherwise it's merely eye candy.
A top-band communication system would give you text, a whiteboard, and voice. The examples you cite are merely examples of graphics misused.
Analogue to digital conversion is inherently a simple process which doesn't require extreme device linearity, and producing an ADC with a precision much greater than that used in CD and DVD recording is no problem at all. Comparatively speaking, high precision DACs are much more difficult to manufacture, yet despite that, 20-bit stereo DACs now cost just a couple of dollars.
What this adds up to is no light at the end of the tunnel for the RIAA and the MPAA at all, because even if they succeed in making their digital media uncrackable, people will still be able to redigitize it, and without appreciable loss of quality. The march of technology is utterly against them. Sorry.
Mankind has been manipulating its environment since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so, ever more effectively. Evolution ceased to be a natural (in the sense of blind) process from the moment when lifeforms started to think for themselves, and our own evolution is most emphatically in our own hands now.
It is of course your choice not to take part in this science-driven future of our own making, but I have no idea how you could possibly avoid it: almost everything you wear, eat, touch and see around you in daily life is a product of technology (unless you grow your own vegetables, peel them with a flint knife and eat them raw), so if you are sincere you will need to travel to one of the few untouched parts of the planet, throw away all your man-made cloths and implements, and go back to extreme basics and a life on the edge of existence. I doubt that you would succeed in your quest though; even the most primitive groupings of people use modern technology these days. You'd have to be a hermit as well.
On the other hand, you may be happy with modern life up to now and just consider these latest advances as one step too far. Well, in that case you're just a blinkered Luddite and I have no sympathy for you.
Mikeb's piece is excellent, but notice his first sentence describing what happened before he gained his experience:
I found myself having to switch from development into management about 15 years ago.
*HAVING* to switch? The circumstances pressured him into doing this before he was experienced enough to know that it was going to be the most unpleasant experience of his professional life -- with the benefit of hindsight he might never have taken that step. (Whether Mikeb would have or not is not important, what's important is his observation about what such a transition entails.)
The moral here is pretty damn obvious. If you're a good tech person, it's not just a waste of your skills and often a waste of your life to go into management, it's also a pretty monumental professional downgrade. Unless you enjoy the slumming experience of being crap at something, just don't do it.
If you're a good tech in computing or Internet technologies, you can easily earn 3-5 times as much as many a good manager by becoming a freelance contractor, and it's an extremely pleasurable experience too. So there's no financial reason to fall into management either.
And if you would rather stay with your present company because of friends or other fringe benefits, then if they value your contribution they'll let you stay technical and perform only the minimalist "management" role of an advisor. (If the company doesn't value you enough to be flexible on this then it doesn't deserve your loyalty anyway.)
You definitely don't "HAVE" to go into management. If you were a good tech in the first place, in the vast majority of cases you will regret doing so. Take the advice of many an experienced voice here on Slashdot and choose an alternative path.
Is there anything that can play DVDs that can't play SVCDs???
:-)
Yes -- almost everything. DVD players can all play VCD, not SVCD. SVCD uses a completely different format on the medium and also requires completely different decoding.
Anyway, I wasn't talking about playing SVCD but about playing and recording SVCD, like the newer Chinese players. Excellent for capturing episodes of Buffy!
By "X10 Mouse remote", you you mean an X10 RF + IR TV-style remote like the Marmitek? Presumably that could allow one to navigate menus as one does with a DVD remote. If so, how do you use it as a mouse?
Or is an "X10 Mouse" an actual product? If so, who makes them?
If they haven't included Super Video CD recording on CDR media in the unit then they've missed out on a golden opportunity.
This format is huge in the far east, effectively being a sort of "poor man's recordable DVD", and companies like Shinco, Mico and Amoisonic are gearing up to market SVCD player/recorders over here (they all play MP3 as well). If the ZapStation doesn't handle SVCD, it'll soon lose market share to those that do.
That seems to follow.
But the Ocaml guys won't win: they've used comments quite blatently on at least a couple of lines, and as soon as the functional community notices, they'll be excommunicated and ostracized for life.
Just imagine what would happen if it caught on and comments in functional programs became commonplace. People would actually be able to figure out what functions were intended to do, and decades of good work would go down the drain. Heaven forbid!
But it gets worse: this team has even used descriptive identifiers in a couple of places. Shock horror, whatever next -- code walkthroughs?!
[PS. This comment may actually be a half-serious answer to the question of why FP has never had an impact outside of academia. Apparently FP programmers don't consider that the "software crisis" and maintainability have any relevance to them.]
[PPS. I like ML. Languages aren't obscure, only programmers.]
And the two parts should of course be stored in files with names of the general form "The_MPAA_are_a_bunch_of_*********************".
:-)
It would then definitely be worth going to court just to hear it read out repeatedly by everyone!
That's a good idea, but to make it even better, how about implementing such decryption code in the form of decryption plugins with a defined API that designers of players could use without getting themselves compromised, as I wrote elsewhere in this thread.
That would be as unstoppable as Usenet, which is pretty darn unstoppable.
If DVD decryption were handled by plugins having a simple streaming-filter interface then the MPAA's regressive actions would have almost no impact whatsoever. Player designers would be able to release their software with just a no-crypto plugin (so that you can play unencrypted DVDs, of which there are many), and couldn't be taken to task for dependency on DeCSS, since they wouldn't be.
And then, users wishing to watch their own encrypted DVDs on such a player would have merely to acquire and load a little plugin, which could easily be circulated on Usenet in the traditional way. Easy.
It'd be great if DeCSS (or another clean-room implementation of DVD decryption) were given such a treatment. The dlopen(3) interface is trivial to use. Does anyone know whether the current DeCSS is amenable to such conversion?
Isn't this like showing a list of addresses to a child molester ...?
That's not a very charitable thing to call the lawyer present, but it pretty much explains the RIAA/MP3 and MPAA/DeCSS sagas, and the whole rotten mess with patents. (:-)
More seriously though, if you're asked to sign an NDA at the interview then I'd say stay well clear of the company, as it's a sure sign that it's totally ruled by its paper pushers.
Spin up a gyroscope with its axis at 45 degrees to the horizontal, then balance the lowest point of its axle on your finger. Now imagine a black box around the system, ie. with the gyroscope spinning inside it. The centre of gravity of the black box lies beyond the point of support, yet the black box doesn't topple over.
... indeed.
Internal forces acting externally
You can call the future vision part "wishful thinking" if you like,but many would disagree with you. Fans have always been extremely supportive of their favourite bands, and in an environment where they didn't have to pay today's extorionate prices into label coffers there's every likelihood that a very different business model would deliver just as much money into the musicians' pockets, if not a lot more.
However, you can't pin the label of "wishful thinking" to the article's analysis of what was and what is, because it's right on the mark, not just in the author's view but in the view of musicians worldwide, often expressed by them in the music papers. They may not all have the eloquence of Courtney Love, but they feel the financial pain just the same. In brief, they're being sucked dry by the biggest and most cold-blooded pirate organization on the planet, the label/studio system. Anything is better than that kind of slavery.
Just kidding ... I hope.
But it does raise a real question: given that quite a lot of space debris will probably be reflective simply because space equipment is quite often reflective in order not to absorb heat from the sun, how is this laser going to deal with it?
The most likely outcome of this seems to be that the space station's sensors are going to be burned out because of unwanted reflections from the targetted junk.
I couldn't agree more with all your points, especially the importance of battery life --- the iPAQ is packed with features, yet it would be totally worthless to me because it needs recharging every day. The Agenda doesn't make that mistake.
... are you suggesting to replace X11 with Squeak? What an intriguing idea. Among other benefits, it ought to cut down app size by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
Hmmm
Actually, looking at both sites and comparing the two units on features, the Agenda seems to beat the VTech in almost every area of hardware. And on software, VTech doesn't even acknowledge the existence of PocketLinux, whereas for the Agenda, Linux is a feature they're proud of. [As you can see, I'm ignoring the iPAQ entirely --- I consider a PDA that you have to recharge every day as worthless. The 2 AAA batteries in my Palm last 3 months.]
Given the above, what was the basis for your statement suggesting the opposite?