"J2EE isn't for everything, but sometimes it is the only tool for the job."
Sort of like thermonuclear weaponry, right? Massive, utterly impractical to ever deploy, makes no discrimination between friend and foe, but for 'strategic applications'...
"English-speaking with a midwestern accent is generally viewed [BY AMERICANS] as the most easily understood amongst all english accents; And this accent is the one used for many (if not most) [AMERICAN] television reporters, voice recordings intended for mass [AMERICAN] audience, etc. Most other accents are defined [BY AMERICANS] by how they mangle certain syllables."
"Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt."
Heck yes. What we've ended up with is by no means the best or most sensible solution.
I dream of an alternate universe where Ted Nelson was on more coherent drugs and Xanadu (without the crazy maths, pointless neologisms and fascist copyright control) actually got built.
Now, it might be another hundred years before we get there, because people think that 'Web 2.0' is what we always wanted. It's not. I'm still waiting for the worldwide e-grid I thought was 'inevitable' back in the 80s.
"There has been a lot of crap science put forward over the years -- that debacle with cold fusion being foremost in my mind."
You're repeating that hoary old 'cold fusion was a fraud' meme? It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the literature on the subject. You can start educating yourself here.
Just because we don't know what a phenomenon *is* and don't have a physical model for it or the ability to scale it up into working power plants on demand, doesn't give us the right to summarily dismiss the hard core of evidence for its existence. Anomalies are the engine that should drive science, if we actually practiced the scientific method.
"Leave computers, which make everything magical and different, out of it for a second. He received a batch of brand new, stolen TVs off the back of a truck, and fenced them out of his garage. What a hero."
No, see, information *is* magical and different, because it replicates.
He received one brand new, stolen TV off the back of a truck, ran it through his Star Trek replicator, made copies, and gave those copies away free to passers-by out of his garage.
That's why in the Star Trek future everyone has to get central Starfleet permission for replicator coupons to avoid breaking the economy.
Can't have people flooding the market with free TVs. That's food taken right off the TV designer's table. It takes a lot of time and money to design a new TV and if anyone can manufacture one in their garage, that's just like stealing.
If we don't buy new TVs every week, what will all the TV designers do for a living? Huh?
A culture without a fresh new TV design each week just isn't a culture I want to live in, do you?
"It's worth giving your life for a worthy cause, like protecting you & your neighbors' freedoms from a tyrannical non-representative British government"
Imagine if there'd been no American Revolution: we could all be sitting here speaking *English* and drinking tea.
The horror!
And our leaders could be making war and levying taxes without caring that we're opposed to it. Thank goodness we're free of *that*.
"One thing that no Star Trek series has gotten much into is the interaction between military and civilian life. It's really strange if you think much about it. You have this huge fascist/communist state with a seemingly pervasive military presence."
Yes, exactly.
Since the original Star Trek represented the projection of America into space via the British Navy of the 18th century (read James Cook's voyages, or watch Master & Commander to see the same setup: Captain, doctor, science officer), it seems that the 'vision' such as it was was very much of a sprawling, integrated military-industrial-science complex.
Remember that since WW2, the military *has* been one of the largest drivers of science in the USA, and most especially so in the Space Race. The first US manned shots were literally on ICBMs (Atlas boosters). This integration continues to this day; the USA really doesn't have such a thing as a fully independent, 'civilian' science establishment, especially when it comes to space, nuclear and high-energy physics. If the Department of Energy or NORAD don't like what you're doing, you don't get to do it. The Internet was one of the few exceptions that escaped centralised military control, thanks to Gore and Clinton in the 1990s - and even then, 40-bit encryption was export-restricted until 1997 or so. Remember that?
So Starfleet is basically just a projection of the US Cold War space/atomic science system into the future, and that means the military are running things even when they say it's 'civilian'. They're vaguely socialist because of detente and the Great Society; in the 60s, things seemed to be trending that way, toward more central planning and economic integration. Hence why we had lots of bad sci-fi about giant computers ruling the world.
And that's why there were Klingons. Can't have a Starfleet without a cold war with a suitably nasty enemy. The US/USSR rivalry was sublimated and turned outwards so the UFP could claim to be 'peaceful' in exactly the same way the US during the Vietnam War could claim to be, but it's the major subtext for the show.
Can Group Policy now finally apply to Groups? That's a nice change.
When I did my MCSE courses on Windows 2000 I was greatly amused to find out that the one thing Group Policy did *not* apply to was Groups.
(Organizational Units, yes. But compared to Novell's eDirectory and ZenWorks, which we were using at the time, it was pretty simplistic and inflexible. No doubt time has marched on since then though.)
"I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away."
I assume pretty hard if you're trying to become a lens to *focus* those X-rays, and do it within nanoseconds while in the process of being destroyed.
"Unless there is something they aren't telling us;)"
A nuclear power withholding detailed descriptions of how their mega-kill-bombs work? Unpossible.
First you take out massively leveraged call options on a representative index of current stocks.
You then butter-side-up the kittens and connect them to a central axle, leaving sufficient unbuttered fur to act as an electrostatic homopolar generator. The kittens will spin, generating power. You feed them the sprinkles to accelerate their metabolism to near-lightspeed.
The massive magnetic/electrostatic field generated by the spinning kittens creates a gravitational spacetime warp to 1929. We then dump all our national stockpile of HOPE(tm) and CHANGE(tm) into the Great Depression, causing a time ripple effect to raise all the stock indexes.
You use the call options to buy and then do a quick round of profit-taking before the time ripple completes, because a side effect is that World War II unhappens, resulting in the Fifty Years US-USSR War of 1949-1989 and the corresponding fall of capitalism in the early 1990s - twenty years before schedule.
"Or are you saying that there is some magic body count number that Israel should have to wait for until it is permitted to respond by force?"
Yes. Here's the formula. It's very simple. It's called 'tit for tat' and it involves one magic number.
If you want to unleash a military operation that you estimate will kill X foreign civilians, you had better wait until X of *your* civilians have been killed first.
We'll assume for the moment that military personnel are perfectly 'fair game' to target and don't have grieving families who count as 'civilians'. It's a false assumption, but it simplifies the maths, and tilts it in favour of those who prefer massive retaliation. Even then, run the numbers and see.
If you want to bomb an apartment block and kill 100 civilians, wait until 100 of your civilians have been killed. Now you're even.
If you want to fly an airliner into an apartment block and kill 3,000 civilians, wait until 3,000 of your civilians have been killed first. Now you're even.
If you want to nuke a city and kill 2,000,000 civilians, wait until 2,000,000 of your civilians have been killed first. Now you're even.
Yes, you have to suffer some casualties first before retaliating rather than striking pre-emptively. That puts some resiliency into the system: it prevents accidental pre-emptive escalation toward mutual genocide. If you want to actually scale down from escalation, you also need to apply a discount factor, so you 'forgive' some past atrocities in order to extend the possibility of reconciliation in future.
See also: Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, 'The Evolution of Cooperation', TIT FOR TAT algorithm.
I'm wincing at the announcement of eight vulnerabilities. Firefox or IE, it sucks.
Imagine if they sold planes the same way.
'The new Boeing 787 - fixed a critical vulnerability where a kid on the ground with a laser pointer could blind the pilot and kill everyone, fixed a vulnerability where the toilet can explode if a cellphone rings in Afghanistan...'
Actually, you know - maybe those comparisons aren't so far-fetched. It's just that a browser is connected to *every computer on the planet simultaneously* while the risks on an aeroplane can be managed a little.
"why not start by killing the concept of the exclusive contract and the equally nefarious "work for hire" clauses that are cropping up around the world... Meaning that NO MATTER WHAT an author retains the right to his/her own work"
Where by "right" you mean "exclusivity"? (Since that's what it means: the ability to deny other people from publishing).
So you want all "authors" to have the absolute right of exclusivity... yet at the same time you don't want exclusivity to exist at all. Uh-huh. How's that going to work out?
What about works created by more than one person? Like, say, a film. Who's the "author"? The director? The actors? The scriptwriter? The producer?
"Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down?"
You mean like how fan favourite Falstaff got killed off in Henry V so the eight-play historical cycle could suddenly turn all serious?
Yeah, a real artist like Shakespeare would never do something like that.
"you can bet that there will be unmarked vans going around the city in the night picking up people with their "SubversiveRank (TM)" above an arbitrary threshold with a one-way ticket to either a slave labor camp... "
Utterly ridiculous idea.
On a completely unrelated note, I wonder when Google plans to introduce their version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
Slashdot Mirror
"How many people who think they are information literate produce incomprehensible spreadsheets and graphs that conceal reality? "
You say that as if revealing reality were what corporate reports were about in the first place.
"J2EE isn't for everything, but sometimes it is the only tool for the job."
Sort of like thermonuclear weaponry, right? Massive, utterly impractical to ever deploy, makes no discrimination between friend and foe, but for 'strategic applications'...
"English-speaking with a midwestern accent is generally viewed [BY AMERICANS] as the most easily understood amongst all english accents; And this accent is the one used for many (if not most) [AMERICAN] television reporters, voice recordings intended for mass [AMERICAN] audience, etc. Most other accents are defined [BY AMERICANS] by how they mangle certain syllables."
Fexed thaht fah yah.
"Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt."
Heck yes. What we've ended up with is by no means the best or most sensible solution.
I dream of an alternate universe where Ted Nelson was on more coherent drugs and Xanadu (without the crazy maths, pointless neologisms and fascist copyright control) actually got built.
Now, it might be another hundred years before we get there, because people think that 'Web 2.0' is what we always wanted. It's not. I'm still waiting for the worldwide e-grid I thought was 'inevitable' back in the 80s.
"There has been a lot of crap science put forward over the years -- that debacle with cold fusion being foremost in my mind."
You're repeating that hoary old 'cold fusion was a fraud' meme? It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the literature on the subject. You can start educating yourself here.
http://www.newenergytimes.com/Reports/Start.htm
Just because we don't know what a phenomenon *is* and don't have a physical model for it or the ability to scale it up into working power plants on demand, doesn't give us the right to summarily dismiss the hard core of evidence for its existence. Anomalies are the engine that should drive science, if we actually practiced the scientific method.
"Leave computers, which make everything magical and different, out of it for a second. He received a batch of brand new, stolen TVs off the back of a truck, and fenced them out of his garage. What a hero."
No, see, information *is* magical and different, because it replicates.
He received one brand new, stolen TV off the back of a truck, ran it through his Star Trek replicator, made copies, and gave those copies away free to passers-by out of his garage.
That's why in the Star Trek future everyone has to get central Starfleet permission for replicator coupons to avoid breaking the economy.
Can't have people flooding the market with free TVs. That's food taken right off the TV designer's table. It takes a lot of time and money to design a new TV and if anyone can manufacture one in their garage, that's just like stealing.
If we don't buy new TVs every week, what will all the TV designers do for a living? Huh?
A culture without a fresh new TV design each week just isn't a culture I want to live in, do you?
"It's worth giving your life for a worthy cause, like protecting you & your neighbors' freedoms from a tyrannical non-representative British government"
Imagine if there'd been no American Revolution: we could all be sitting here speaking *English* and drinking tea.
The horror!
And our leaders could be making war and levying taxes without caring that we're opposed to it. Thank goodness we're free of *that*.
"Also, there are four lights."
You know that was ripped straight from George Orwell, right?
"It could also have a side like X-Files, with conspiracies about UFOs etc, which are later resolved."
Good luck with that. There's plenty of documented evidence for UFOs which will blow your mind - but we still don't know what they are.
http://www.dailykos.com/user/two%20roads
The reality is FAR more fascinating than the X-Files fiction.
"One thing that no Star Trek series has gotten much into is the interaction between military and civilian life. It's really strange if you think much about it. You have this huge fascist/communist state with a seemingly pervasive military presence."
Yes, exactly.
Since the original Star Trek represented the projection of America into space via the British Navy of the 18th century (read James Cook's voyages, or watch Master & Commander to see the same setup: Captain, doctor, science officer), it seems that the 'vision' such as it was was very much of a sprawling, integrated military-industrial-science complex.
Remember that since WW2, the military *has* been one of the largest drivers of science in the USA, and most especially so in the Space Race. The first US manned shots were literally on ICBMs (Atlas boosters). This integration continues to this day; the USA really doesn't have such a thing as a fully independent, 'civilian' science establishment, especially when it comes to space, nuclear and high-energy physics. If the Department of Energy or NORAD don't like what you're doing, you don't get to do it. The Internet was one of the few exceptions that escaped centralised military control, thanks to Gore and Clinton in the 1990s - and even then, 40-bit encryption was export-restricted until 1997 or so. Remember that?
So Starfleet is basically just a projection of the US Cold War space/atomic science system into the future, and that means the military are running things even when they say it's 'civilian'. They're vaguely socialist because of detente and the Great Society; in the 60s, things seemed to be trending that way, toward more central planning and economic integration. Hence why we had lots of bad sci-fi about giant computers ruling the world.
And that's why there were Klingons. Can't have a Starfleet without a cold war with a suitably nasty enemy. The US/USSR rivalry was sublimated and turned outwards so the UFP could claim to be 'peaceful' in exactly the same way the US during the Vietnam War could claim to be, but it's the major subtext for the show.
"Let's just take that 800b and put it towards applied sciences and a golden age ye shall have!"
Because space is just teeming with exotic lands and spices, right?
How do you construct a golden age from 1) vacuum and 2) rock when we're struggling to do it with a whole planet's worth of biosphere?
"Lord know I don't respect Norton, but they're not setting the world ablaze with their fascist thugs."
I read that as "fascist hugs" for a moment there.
Can Group Policy now finally apply to Groups? That's a nice change.
When I did my MCSE courses on Windows 2000 I was greatly amused to find out that the one thing Group Policy did *not* apply to was Groups.
(Organizational Units, yes. But compared to Novell's eDirectory and ZenWorks, which we were using at the time, it was pretty simplistic and inflexible. No doubt time has marched on since then though.)
"I thought the goal of the foam was to just become completely ionized and become transparent to X-rays? How hard can that really be when a fission weapon is exploding a few feet away."
I assume pretty hard if you're trying to become a lens to *focus* those X-rays, and do it within nanoseconds while in the process of being destroyed.
"Unless there is something they aren't telling us ;)"
A nuclear power withholding detailed descriptions of how their mega-kill-bombs work? Unpossible.
" * HOPE(tm)
* CHANGE(tm)
* Butter
* Sprinkles
* Kittens "
Here's how it works.
First you take out massively leveraged call options on a representative index of current stocks.
You then butter-side-up the kittens and connect them to a central axle, leaving sufficient unbuttered fur to act as an electrostatic homopolar generator. The kittens will spin, generating power. You feed them the sprinkles to accelerate their metabolism to near-lightspeed.
The massive magnetic/electrostatic field generated by the spinning kittens creates a gravitational spacetime warp to 1929. We then dump all our national stockpile of HOPE(tm) and CHANGE(tm) into the Great Depression, causing a time ripple effect to raise all the stock indexes.
You use the call options to buy and then do a quick round of profit-taking before the time ripple completes, because a side effect is that World War II unhappens, resulting in the Fifty Years US-USSR War of 1949-1989 and the corresponding fall of capitalism in the early 1990s - twenty years before schedule.
But no plan is perfect.
"Or are you saying that there is some magic body count number that Israel should have to wait for until it is permitted to respond by force?"
Yes. Here's the formula. It's very simple. It's called 'tit for tat' and it involves one magic number.
If you want to unleash a military operation that you estimate will kill X foreign civilians, you had better wait until X of *your* civilians have been killed first.
We'll assume for the moment that military personnel are perfectly 'fair game' to target and don't have grieving families who count as 'civilians'. It's a false assumption, but it simplifies the maths, and tilts it in favour of those who prefer massive retaliation. Even then, run the numbers and see.
If you want to bomb an apartment block and kill 100 civilians, wait until 100 of your civilians have been killed. Now you're even.
If you want to fly an airliner into an apartment block and kill 3,000 civilians, wait until 3,000 of your civilians have been killed first. Now you're even.
If you want to nuke a city and kill 2,000,000 civilians, wait until 2,000,000 of your civilians have been killed first. Now you're even.
Yes, you have to suffer some casualties first before retaliating rather than striking pre-emptively. That puts some resiliency into the system: it prevents accidental pre-emptive escalation toward mutual genocide. If you want to actually scale down from escalation, you also need to apply a discount factor, so you 'forgive' some past atrocities in order to extend the possibility of reconciliation in future.
See also: Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, 'The Evolution of Cooperation', TIT FOR TAT algorithm.
Q: How many bones are in the human body?
A: There are 215 bones in the human body. That's one. Now don't move.
"Perhaps TV has lost for the same reason blogs have lost."
Blogs lost? when?
I'm wincing at the announcement of eight vulnerabilities. Firefox or IE, it sucks.
Imagine if they sold planes the same way.
'The new Boeing 787 - fixed a critical vulnerability where a kid on the ground with a laser pointer could blind the pilot and kill everyone, fixed a vulnerability where the toilet can explode if a cellphone rings in Afghanistan...'
Actually, you know - maybe those comparisons aren't so far-fetched. It's just that a browser is connected to *every computer on the planet simultaneously* while the risks on an aeroplane can be managed a little.
You've heard this, I assume?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WfoccRna6I
"why not start by killing the concept of the exclusive contract and the equally nefarious "work for hire" clauses that are cropping up around the world... Meaning that NO MATTER WHAT an author retains the right to his/her own work"
Where by "right" you mean "exclusivity"? (Since that's what it means: the ability to deny other people from publishing).
So you want all "authors" to have the absolute right of exclusivity... yet at the same time you don't want exclusivity to exist at all. Uh-huh. How's that going to work out?
What about works created by more than one person? Like, say, a film. Who's the "author"? The director? The actors? The scriptwriter? The producer?
"Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down?"
You mean like how fan favourite Falstaff got killed off in Henry V so the eight-play historical cycle could suddenly turn all serious?
Yeah, a real artist like Shakespeare would never do something like that.
"you can bet that there will be unmarked vans going around the city in the night picking up people with their "SubversiveRank (TM)" above an arbitrary threshold with a one-way ticket to either a slave labor camp... "
Utterly ridiculous idea.
On a completely unrelated note, I wonder when Google plans to introduce their version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
"That's like saying someone who connects a blimp to a camper has invented a flying home."
I'd buy one of those!
Airstream meets Gulfstream.
Forth Conficker powerful very is to used getting some takes but.