It doesn't help that the rules governing.us domains are too hierarchal. I used to have an account on someone's machine which was part of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. He was in group E of it. So his machinename was (machinename).beve.blacksburg.va.us. I'm all for hierarchy when it makes sense, but having overzealous hierarchies makes it laughable.
In the meantime, I miss the days when a site was named with product.company.com or www.company.com/product or whatever. SGI's good about this, but most companies suck, and this has led to peoples' mentalities that a domainname should be www.product.com and oftentimes not understanding that a URL isn't simply www.product.com. One time it took me half an hour to convince someone that Be's BeOS website is at www.be.com and not www.beos.com... and it really didn't help that www.beos.com was a very badly-broken site.
Wow, i've rambled again and lost track of my point. Bad porcupine, no cookie... *smacks self on the forehead* --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As tripe-ish as the sequel series to Rendevezous with Rama is (namely Rama II, Gardens of Rama, and Rama Revealed), they do have a species of benign ultra-intelligent arthroid octopods (called octo-spiders in the books) which do have nanocamera which fly around and record a full-3D holographic memory of everything that happens inside Rama during their stay. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
(Disclaimer: I am a computer scientist, not a chemist. The last chemistry course I took was a few years ago. The following information is likely to be anywhere from marginally-correct to dead wrong.)
You have atoms and molecules reversed, my friend. An atom is the building block from which molecules are formed. The motor is 1 molecule (most likely, or maybe 2 - they didn't say if the bit that turns is separate from the bit that it turns in) formed of 78 atoms. Ionic bonds are a crystal, which isn't really a molecule but a lattice of atoms; for example, table salt (NaCl) isn't a lot of NaCl molecules but a large lattice formed of sodium and chlorine atoms.
As for the motor 'reacting,' a spontaneous reaction is what happens when one higher-energy bond breaks and forms a lower-energy bond, thus releasing energy. This is the kind of reaction that needs to be worried about. (A nonspontaneous reaction requires that energy be added into the system, and even then it tries to release energy.)
As someone else pointed out, if the bond is covalent (which is formed by two atoms sharing electrons and is rather strong), it's not very likely to break from water. Water reactions are very different from dissolution; the nanomachine isn't likely to react with the water, particularly if it's made of silicon. After all, if silicates reacted freely with water, we'd be in a good deal of trouble, since glass (SiO2) is often used to contain water. Though SiO2 has a very low energy potential and doesn't react with much to begin with anyway. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Little known fact: Revolution 9 was by Paul and Linda, who were trying to be trendy and avant-garde, not John and Yoko, who were living in a nice cottage in the countryside. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Wellp, I just tried GZilla. It works, now, but only marginally. It certainly isn't at the point where you can use it to peruse Slashdot (in fact, it gets completely hosed). There's also no keyboard navigation controls (gotta use that damned "mouse" thing people keep talking about), and the interface is beyond spartan. It's definitely making progress, but that's about all I can say for it at this point. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I've tried it on numerous occasions. For me, it usually crashes upon startup or doesn't have needed functionality (such as the ability to submit forms). I don't care about its lack of layout engine (from what I've seen it's basically Lynx with support for IMG and fonts), but thus far it's not at a usable state. Maybe it's been updated since last time I checked, though... I think the latest version I've used is the one included in Debian 2.1. I'd might as well try it again when I get home, since the topic's been brought up... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, and it was just as much art as Beowulf and the Odyssey.
Nope, wouldn't be slashdot without someone bringing up a beowulf no matter what article a thread of conversation is in...;) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not to mention that I'm *still* seeing occasional ads for the movie itself, like with Shmi doing the "he's growing up so fast" thing. And K-Mart seems to just be getting geared up with their TPM Anakin clothes and back-to-school crap... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It'd be hard for anything to be marketed to the extent of TPM. Hell, the movie's been showing for over 3 months now and at work, the office is still full of Pepsi product cans with various TPM characters in it. Not to mention PepsiCo restaurants still doing TPM-based promotions et al... *sigh* --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not everyone works at a desk. Some people need access to their information at work from anywhere. Mechanics, nurses, shipping/receiving folk, and many, many more who work in time-critical environments where they need instant access and can't have terminals everywhere, and certainly can't take the time to log in. Like, if a patient is crashing (in the medical sense) and the nurse on duty needs an instant judgement based on their charts and medical records. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Weird, for some reason when I read his comment the first time it was parented to mine. I feel really silly now... oops. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Wow, I've been replied to by the almighty Bruce. I may now die fulfilled.;)
</silly>
Seriously though, that is a good point; most people in this world aren't programmers, and likely think that software is just churned out of a factory somewhere. They wouldn't understand what source code is about, or what freedom is about; the car-computer analogy that works very well most of the time breaks apart when it comes to source code. You don't need the plans to a car to build a new one (it just helps a lot), you just need to go to a Checker and buy every part except the chassis, which you can get at any junkyard. Source is tangible to programmers (well, to me anyway), but not to the common person.
I'm reminded of a question submitted to Marilyn Vos Savant many years ago. The reader asked why computers were called computers, since people usually don't use them to perform computations. Marilyn's answer was something to the effect of the fact that computers use computations in order to do everything. It's somewhat difficult to convey to someone that Microsoft Word is based mostly on addition, subtraction, and moving intangible little bits around, and that you're not typing to the screen but are sending messages, via the keyboard, to the application which then gives the appearance of having typed by using a font rasterizer to move some little bits from one place to another in the computer's memory, that latter place being where your video card's RAMDAC converts those little bits from a representation of dots on the screen into dots on the screen.
Wow, I got knocked way off course there.:)
But basically, yeah, I'll preach to the choir some more by saying "yeah, it's important to let pundits know what they're talking about, rather than just making a soup of words that sounds somewhat like they heard from someone else." --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
First of all, whatever happened to the Sun/AOL thing? Did that go through, or what? Given the lukewarm response Mozilla has led to, I don't think AOL would really want to deal with having "their" source code in the public eye.
Secondly, I can understand where Sun's license is coming from, and really in practicality it's not really any different than most opensource projects, except for the notable difference that only Sun can distribute the source. I mean, most opensource projects just have a single code maintainer and a single codebase when it comes down to it (though most projects using CVS these days does kind of distribute that load). However, this is disregarding the fact that in most opensource projects, the person(s) running that project usually care enough to make sure that it keeps with the freedom that opensource brings, and for the ones which aren't, someone can always fork development and do their own thang, preferrably better.
My main concern with the Sun license is that they may just sit on their asses and never incorporate any changes. At least with the GPL, should Linus suddenly get the stupids, someone else could fork it and release their own source tree. Also, hasn't this technically already happened with the various embedded projects, etc.? Though StarOffice doesn't immediately seem to be the kind of thing that'd need specialization-based forking, it probably could be. StarOffice on a wearable computer, for example, would need to have a completely different interface, which means either hoping the Sun folks would want to maintain multiple source trees (unlikely) or forking the source (not possible right now).
Whatever the case, at least this gives people many more choices. If anything, at least people can feel free to use Linux on any architecture and compile it for it, rather than having to use a supported architecture. What good does StarOffice binary releases for IA32, PPC, RS6k, MIPS, and StrongARM do if you need to run it on a simulated Merced? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
But at the same time, the PSX and N64 are most certainly obsolete, but there are many games being actively developed for both. Just because hardware isn't the best out there doesn't mean it isn't usable; having a stable and adequate hardware base is much more important for console game developers than having a constantly-shifting but cutting-edge hardware base. Look at the kind of stuff that's being done on the PSX now that the developers have had a chance to figure out a lot of the neat tricks... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I doubt they could release something that directly competes with Dreamcast when they are partnering with Sega.
Why not? They had no problem with working on the next version of Windows (which was basically a rewrite) while they were "partnered" with IBM on OS/2... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ooh, that sounds even better! One month it'd be about the beginnings of the Federation, another month it'd be about the first contact between Klingons and Romulans... I like it! --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I'd like to see a ST series based on the Federation at its very beginnings. I mean, most of what happens then is unexplained... TOS covered the Federation when it was already mature, TNG and the first half of DS9 covered a period of stagnation, the second half of DS9 and all of Voyager cover a later period when they've become arrogant and just try to throw better and more expensive toys at every problem... anything set after Voyager would be depressing, anything between TOS and TNG would be boring. But something set between First Contact and TOS would kick ass, IMO. Why did Earth become the center of the Federation? How did people get accustomed to socialistic society? Couldn't have happened overnight... There must have been quite a bit of dissention among the ranks. And so forth.
Just my US$0.02... I haven't read the plot for this 'excellent' series yet, since the server's/.ed. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Have you watched Farscape? (it's on sci-fi channel) They actually do a good job of making the aliens look alien, for the most part, and they do use full-body makeup quite a bit. They also use muppets for some species. The writing on that show kinda sucks, but it's better than Star Trek's in many ways (and they don't rely on deus ex or short attention spans)... They also do a much better job of the 'universal translator' idea; it's somewhat like the babelfish in HHGTTG, and not everything translates properly (idioms and connotative expressions in particular).
They also do a much better job of the science on the show, namely that they don't try to adapt our notions of science to it (badly), but instead have a complete separate set of rules and they stick to it (gee, how about that). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm. When put that way, yeah, lynch-mob tactics don't seem so good anymore... Come to think of it, they didn't work so well for Hobbes either.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I had no idea that having atrocious grammar and spelling didn't make someone appear to be somewhat less intelligent. I'm sorry to have offended you, since you are quite clearly correct. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
First off, let me say that NMSU never put out any official Hobbes CDs... those were all put out by Walnut Creek (and that's a long story) and some of the mirror sites (most notably OS/2 SuperSite). Also, I've never actually been an OS/2 user, except at work when I was archiver@hobbes. I've been a Linux user since 1.1.59 was the "stable" kernel of choice...:) But I digress.
As far as the 'slashdot junkie' problem, that's exactly why I proposed that. If someone gets their/24 block banned from posting and there's a lot of other people on that/24 block, there'll be MAJOR hell to pay for the person getting them banned, and quite a few people will be quickly sending angry comments to their ISP, thereby removing the troll permanently, or at least until they get another ISP.
As far as spoofing, the IP address which is banned won't have been something that would have been validly routed at the time. If the ISP knows what they're doing, they'll realize that someone was spoofing. Unfortunately, most ISPs don't know what they're doing.:/ I don't see TCP/IP spoofing as being a major source of these problems, though. Most of the ACs in question are just (well, seem to be) stupid kids who know nothing but try to shout everything. Most notably being that one (I hope) particular AC in the Rich Stevens article who was spamming the discussion thread with porn sites under the guise of on-topic conversation and is likely the same one who kept on talking about "spraying his petrified face with scalding-hot jizz" or whatever. He made me nauseous with rage, in any case.
Maybe just punishing ACs on the same subnet, then, yeah... or maybe every day posting a list of the banned IP addresses and who caused the ban, if applicable.
And yeah, I know what Pvt Pyle did in that movie.:) But Pyle can't go and blow away Rob (well, actually, Rob's home address *is* easy to find...) and Pyle had other problems to begin with (not that the bad ACs here don't seem to to begin with). But as you said, it was an analogy. Just an analogy.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I asked Daveo about his grammar errors, and he had a pretty good explanation for it. Basically, when he was being raised, his mom had this annoying habit of referring to everyone (herself and him) in the third person, and this kinda mucked up his grammar (though I somehow don't think that's the whole story). In any case, apparently he's seeing a speech therapist about it these days, and I've noticed a marked improvement in his grammar as of late. Hopefully this trend will continue. Daveo appears to be, if nothing else, a good person, who just appears to be an idiot due to unfortunate circumstances. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
Don, you're smoking crack again. Stop it. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
In the meantime, I miss the days when a site was named with product.company.com or www.company.com/product or whatever. SGI's good about this, but most companies suck, and this has led to peoples' mentalities that a domainname should be www.product.com and oftentimes not understanding that a URL isn't simply www.product.com. One time it took me half an hour to convince someone that Be's BeOS website is at www.be.com and not www.beos.com... and it really didn't help that www.beos.com was a very badly-broken site.
Wow, i've rambled again and lost track of my point. Bad porcupine, no cookie... *smacks self on the forehead*
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As tripe-ish as the sequel series to Rendevezous with Rama is (namely Rama II, Gardens of Rama, and Rama Revealed), they do have a species of benign ultra-intelligent arthroid octopods (called octo-spiders in the books) which do have nanocamera which fly around and record a full-3D holographic memory of everything that happens inside Rama during their stay.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
You have atoms and molecules reversed, my friend. An atom is the building block from which molecules are formed. The motor is 1 molecule (most likely, or maybe 2 - they didn't say if the bit that turns is separate from the bit that it turns in) formed of 78 atoms. Ionic bonds are a crystal, which isn't really a molecule but a lattice of atoms; for example, table salt (NaCl) isn't a lot of NaCl molecules but a large lattice formed of sodium and chlorine atoms.
As for the motor 'reacting,' a spontaneous reaction is what happens when one higher-energy bond breaks and forms a lower-energy bond, thus releasing energy. This is the kind of reaction that needs to be worried about. (A nonspontaneous reaction requires that energy be added into the system, and even then it tries to release energy.)
As someone else pointed out, if the bond is covalent (which is formed by two atoms sharing electrons and is rather strong), it's not very likely to break from water. Water reactions are very different from dissolution; the nanomachine isn't likely to react with the water, particularly if it's made of silicon. After all, if silicates reacted freely with water, we'd be in a good deal of trouble, since glass (SiO2) is often used to contain water. Though SiO2 has a very low energy potential and doesn't react with much to begin with anyway.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Little known fact: Revolution 9 was by Paul and Linda, who were trying to be trendy and avant-garde, not John and Yoko, who were living in a nice cottage in the countryside.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Wellp, I just tried GZilla. It works, now, but only marginally. It certainly isn't at the point where you can use it to peruse Slashdot (in fact, it gets completely hosed). There's also no keyboard navigation controls (gotta use that damned "mouse" thing people keep talking about), and the interface is beyond spartan. It's definitely making progress, but that's about all I can say for it at this point.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I've tried it on numerous occasions. For me, it usually crashes upon startup or doesn't have needed functionality (such as the ability to submit forms). I don't care about its lack of layout engine (from what I've seen it's basically Lynx with support for IMG and fonts), but thus far it's not at a usable state. Maybe it's been updated since last time I checked, though... I think the latest version I've used is the one included in Debian 2.1. I'd might as well try it again when I get home, since the topic's been brought up...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Nope, wouldn't be slashdot without someone bringing up a beowulf no matter what article a thread of conversation is in... ;)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not to mention that I'm *still* seeing occasional ads for the movie itself, like with Shmi doing the "he's growing up so fast" thing. And K-Mart seems to just be getting geared up with their TPM Anakin clothes and back-to-school crap...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It'd be hard for anything to be marketed to the extent of TPM. Hell, the movie's been showing for over 3 months now and at work, the office is still full of Pepsi product cans with various TPM characters in it. Not to mention PepsiCo restaurants still doing TPM-based promotions et al... *sigh*
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not everyone works at a desk. Some people need access to their information at work from anywhere. Mechanics, nurses, shipping/receiving folk, and many, many more who work in time-critical environments where they need instant access and can't have terminals everywhere, and certainly can't take the time to log in. Like, if a patient is crashing (in the medical sense) and the nurse on duty needs an instant judgement based on their charts and medical records.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
mov ax, 013h
int 10h
with OpenGL. Try something a bit more fair, like Qt or GTK.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Thanks! In that case, was I just being prophetic? :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Weird, for some reason when I read his comment the first time it was parented to mine. I feel really silly now... oops.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Wow, I've been replied to by the almighty Bruce. I may now die fulfilled. ;)
</silly>
Seriously though, that is a good point; most people in this world aren't programmers, and likely think that software is just churned out of a factory somewhere. They wouldn't understand what source code is about, or what freedom is about; the car-computer analogy that works very well most of the time breaks apart when it comes to source code. You don't need the plans to a car to build a new one (it just helps a lot), you just need to go to a Checker and buy every part except the chassis, which you can get at any junkyard. Source is tangible to programmers (well, to me anyway), but not to the common person.
I'm reminded of a question submitted to Marilyn Vos Savant many years ago. The reader asked why computers were called computers, since people usually don't use them to perform computations. Marilyn's answer was something to the effect of the fact that computers use computations in order to do everything. It's somewhat difficult to convey to someone that Microsoft Word is based mostly on addition, subtraction, and moving intangible little bits around, and that you're not typing to the screen but are sending messages, via the keyboard, to the application which then gives the appearance of having typed by using a font rasterizer to move some little bits from one place to another in the computer's memory, that latter place being where your video card's RAMDAC converts those little bits from a representation of dots on the screen into dots on the screen.
Wow, I got knocked way off course there. :)
But basically, yeah, I'll preach to the choir some more by saying "yeah, it's important to let pundits know what they're talking about, rather than just making a soup of words that sounds somewhat like they heard from someone else."
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Secondly, I can understand where Sun's license is coming from, and really in practicality it's not really any different than most opensource projects, except for the notable difference that only Sun can distribute the source. I mean, most opensource projects just have a single code maintainer and a single codebase when it comes down to it (though most projects using CVS these days does kind of distribute that load). However, this is disregarding the fact that in most opensource projects, the person(s) running that project usually care enough to make sure that it keeps with the freedom that opensource brings, and for the ones which aren't, someone can always fork development and do their own thang, preferrably better.
My main concern with the Sun license is that they may just sit on their asses and never incorporate any changes. At least with the GPL, should Linus suddenly get the stupids, someone else could fork it and release their own source tree. Also, hasn't this technically already happened with the various embedded projects, etc.? Though StarOffice doesn't immediately seem to be the kind of thing that'd need specialization-based forking, it probably could be. StarOffice on a wearable computer, for example, would need to have a completely different interface, which means either hoping the Sun folks would want to maintain multiple source trees (unlikely) or forking the source (not possible right now).
Whatever the case, at least this gives people many more choices. If anything, at least people can feel free to use Linux on any architecture and compile it for it, rather than having to use a supported architecture. What good does StarOffice binary releases for IA32, PPC, RS6k, MIPS, and StrongARM do if you need to run it on a simulated Merced?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
But at the same time, the PSX and N64 are most certainly obsolete, but there are many games being actively developed for both. Just because hardware isn't the best out there doesn't mean it isn't usable; having a stable and adequate hardware base is much more important for console game developers than having a constantly-shifting but cutting-edge hardware base. Look at the kind of stuff that's being done on the PSX now that the developers have had a chance to figure out a lot of the neat tricks...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Why not? They had no problem with working on the next version of Windows (which was basically a rewrite) while they were "partnered" with IBM on OS/2...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ooh, that sounds even better! One month it'd be about the beginnings of the Federation, another month it'd be about the first contact between Klingons and Romulans... I like it!
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Just my US$0.02... I haven't read the plot for this 'excellent' series yet, since the server's /.ed.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They also do a much better job of the science on the show, namely that they don't try to adapt our notions of science to it (badly), but instead have a complete separate set of rules and they stick to it (gee, how about that).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm. When put that way, yeah, lynch-mob tactics don't seem so good anymore... Come to think of it, they didn't work so well for Hobbes either. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I had no idea that having atrocious grammar and spelling didn't make someone appear to be somewhat less intelligent. I'm sorry to have offended you, since you are quite clearly correct.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As far as the 'slashdot junkie' problem, that's exactly why I proposed that. If someone gets their /24 block banned from posting and there's a lot of other people on that /24 block, there'll be MAJOR hell to pay for the person getting them banned, and quite a few people will be quickly sending angry comments to their ISP, thereby removing the troll permanently, or at least until they get another ISP.
As far as spoofing, the IP address which is banned won't have been something that would have been validly routed at the time. If the ISP knows what they're doing, they'll realize that someone was spoofing. Unfortunately, most ISPs don't know what they're doing. :/ I don't see TCP/IP spoofing as being a major source of these problems, though. Most of the ACs in question are just (well, seem to be) stupid kids who know nothing but try to shout everything. Most notably being that one (I hope) particular AC in the Rich Stevens article who was spamming the discussion thread with porn sites under the guise of on-topic conversation and is likely the same one who kept on talking about "spraying his petrified face with scalding-hot jizz" or whatever. He made me nauseous with rage, in any case.
Maybe just punishing ACs on the same subnet, then, yeah... or maybe every day posting a list of the banned IP addresses and who caused the ban, if applicable.
And yeah, I know what Pvt Pyle did in that movie. :) But Pyle can't go and blow away Rob (well, actually, Rob's home address *is* easy to find...) and Pyle had other problems to begin with (not that the bad ACs here don't seem to to begin with). But as you said, it was an analogy. Just an analogy. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I asked Daveo about his grammar errors, and he had a pretty good explanation for it. Basically, when he was being raised, his mom had this annoying habit of referring to everyone (herself and him) in the third person, and this kinda mucked up his grammar (though I somehow don't think that's the whole story). In any case, apparently he's seeing a speech therapist about it these days, and I've noticed a marked improvement in his grammar as of late. Hopefully this trend will continue. Daveo appears to be, if nothing else, a good person, who just appears to be an idiot due to unfortunate circumstances.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.