Classic Atari 2600 game Yar's Revenge does something similar -- when you beat the bad guy on any given level, the screen explodes with what looks like random static, but is actually the program code for the game represented as a bitmap.
Um, so: Curiosity? Multiple orders of magnitude more sophisticated hardware. Not to mention we are still -- simultaneously -- running Opportunity!
More competition in space is a good thing for everyone, though, so long as we're not completely redundant in our efforts.
The programmer appears to be confusing the 'eq' and '==' operators; the 'eq' operator in Perl is used for string comparison, while == is used for numerical comparison. The result of using '==' on two strings, e.g. "M" == "F" will always be true, in the sense that 0 == 0. The 'eq' operator *can* be used to test whether 1 == 1, but will report that "1.0" does not equal "1".
Example:
$ perl -e 'print "M" == "F", "\n";'
1
Recommend developing a battery of tests using Test::More to verify the author's assumptions.
Not to mention that we haven't developed faster-than-light communications yet. Maybe there's a party line on subspace/ansible/quantum-radio where alien scientists from all over the galaxy talk shop while trying to level-up their weird non-pointy-eared fantasy characters...
I've had a Mi-Fi (dedicated 3G Wi-Fi access point) from Verizon since the summer. Works great (trouble-free video conferencing from rural Virginia!), but there are consistently charges for SMS messages "received" -- which are not from anyone I know -- given that there's no way to retrieve them, seems kinda disingenuous.
I'm sorry that today isn't April 1st. I remember signing a petition to get the Sci-Fi channel carried by our local cable operator way back in the early 1990s. It's sad that they don't want to stick with us geeks who helped get them started.
Abandoning their niche isn't the way to gain ground, they should be bettering their niche instead. With the budget they currently spend on the CG equivalent of rubber monster movies, they could hire real SF writers to create high-quality Science Fiction -- less frequently than the crap, sure, but it would build an audience. Imagine two BSG series and no weekly monster movie. I think that's a win-win.
Seems like it's too late now. The old Sci-Fi is dead. Long live the new Sci-Fi (pass the petition, willya?).
Yup. I did this for my family when they first hooked their Windows PCs up to a persistent network; they don't have a password on the admin account, but they all know not to run programs there; they only use it if they can't install an app under their user accounts. It's been over a decade now, and no virus or malware issues. The only really annoying thing was that they started with XP home, and I had to configure their file perms with cacls and its bevy of ugly switches. *barf*
I do think Stephenson "gets it" but Cryptonomicon is less technically impressive after you notice how much of it was a fictionalization of David Kahn's excellent non-fiction work, The Codebreakers. Read them one after the other and you'll see what I mean.
Stephenson's one of my favorite authors; I've felt a compulsion to read passages from his books aloud to friends and family on many occasions. He has some bad habits, like the way his last chapters tend to splice all the loose ends together (no matter how insignificant) in the last chapter in a usually unsatisfying meltdown. FWIW, Anathem's ending is better than that -- and if you're interested in words and their origins, you shouldn't listen to the detractors, the vocabulary is part of the fun.
Uh, Israel has large minorities of non-Jews. It's not a pure culture, and it doesn't herd people (though it does keep them out). Compare with the Muslim theocracies nearby (most of which *used* to have minority populations, especially of Zoroastrians and Jews in Persia (Iran)). See who you think is really doing the ethnic cleansing.
Well, I know that by posting this I officially brand myself as a corporate shill, but here's a device that runs Linux, has a touch screen, has an open API, and already exists and can be yours for $239:
Beween 1999 and 2001 I worked at a local Washington, DC ISP, and I was impressed with the number of sites we hosted that carefully encrypted their customers' credit card information as it traveled to our server racks, then delivered it to the site operators by plaintext email to an AOL account.
Sure, times have changed, but short of auditing the offices of your favorite e-commerce sites, how do you know what they do with your data after you carefully check that all their forms submit with "https://"?
Au contraire! It would be best if HOV lanes were better controlled. Then, buses carrying 40 passengers each (and other transit vehicles) could speed ahead to the Metro train stations, making mass transportation more enticing for commuters. You could restrict non-transit vehicles from using those lanes altogether, but if only legitimate carpoolers were using them, I'm guessing they wouldn't block up the transit vehicles too much, but I'd rather they ditched HOV in favor of bus-only lanes than simply added one more lane to the parking lot that is I-66.
The other way to get more people riding is to increase the frequency with which buses and trains run; if you can walk to the bus stop on the corner and get a ride within 10-15 minutes, it's not much of a change to your schedule compared with hopping in a car. You still have the ease of movement that cars offer, and you don't have to worry about what to do with your 3500 pounds of steel, plastic, and rubber when you get where you're going.
BTW, drivers are actually subsidized on DC's Metro -- parking structures and systems still cost more than they rake in. People who use buses, or walk or bicycle to Metro stations are paying more than their fair share. So, yeah, transit users should pay less, and drivers should pay more...if drivers aren't just on their way to Metro, but are going downtown, they're probably parking in "free" (subsidized) spaces, so again, removing that subsidy would encourage riding the train, which would alleviate traffic (and encourage Metro to increase the frequency of service).
As everyone knows, PYTHON stands for Please, Your Tabs Have Overflowed NANO. The importance of this one text editor in naming the language is still something of a mystery to me, and no doubt later versions of NANO were able to cope with the number and significance of tabs in PYTHON code, but the acronym has become ingrained at this point.
As clearly demonstrated by the following, many other *nix systems are acronyms, too. Amazing!
TIME(1) BSD General Commands Manual TIME(1)
NAME time -- time command execution
SYNOPSIS time [-lp] utility
DESCRIPTION The time utility executes and times utility. After the utility finishes, time writes the total time elapsed, the time consumed by system overhead, and the time used to execute utility to the standard error stream.
LESS(1) LESS(1)
NAME less - opposite of more
SYNOPSIS less -? less --help less -V less --version less [-[+]aBcCdeEfFgGiIJLmMnNqQrRsSuUVwWX~] [-b space] [-h lines] [-j line] [-k keyfile] [-{oO} logfile] [-p pattern] [-P prompt] [-t tag] [-T tagsfile] [-x tab,...] [-y lines] [-[z] lines] [-# shift] [+[+]cmd] [--] [filename]... (See the OPTIONS section for alternate option syntax with long option names.)
DESCRIPTION Less is a program similar to more (1), but which allows backward move- ment in the file as well as forward movement.
NANO(1) NANO(1)
NAME nano - Nano's ANOther editor, an enhanced free Pico clone
SYNOPSIS nano [+LINE] [options] [file]
DESCRIPTION This manual page documents briefly the nano command.
nano is a small, free and friendly editor which aims to replace Pico, the default editor included in the non-free Pine package.
BUGS After difficulty processing large Python scripts in early versions, later revisions incorporated asynchronous indentation-compression tech- nology, reducing the impact of Python's tab-based block grouping.
There is Mac software now, and it's a one-time setup. After that, you configure the frame through the eStarling web site -- including setting up RSS feeds, email filters, etc.
Adobe Type Manager, with font smoothing, was out on Macs in 1991, long before ClearType, which was touted as one of XP's new features when it shipped in 2002. ATM was even available as an add-on to Windows by 1993, nine years ahead of ClearType. Furthermore, Mac OS 8.5 shipped with Apple's own built-in font smoothing in 1998. Whether or not M$ has done much innovating, that example doesn't exactly help his case.
Dagnabbit! The votes was supposed to get changed AFTER the confirmation thingy. Shifty foreign programmers just had to go and screw this up, didn't they? Hey Hayden! What do we have that can link 9-11 to Outsourceistan? We'll show THEM how to be democratistic!
Make the law require the design of every voting machine in the US include a verifiable and separate voting record (such as a paper tape).
Then the president of the voting machine company can do whatever he likes, because we'll know it won't affect the outcome of the race in Ohio^H^H^H^Hany election.
It's a SECRET vote. That means nobody has the right to know how you voted. INCLUDING the mobsters and union bosses you are so sure are stealing the election. That's why you should never expect a receipt with the vote you cast on it (though you should, IMHO, be shown evidence that your vote has been recorded correctly before you leave the polling place, such as a paper tape with a print out of your vote on it rolling past a window on its way to a lockbox, where it should later be tallied and compared with the computer record to ensure that they are consistent).
I just downloaded the PDF and subject number 26.1399 reads, "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology, Other." Does this mean someone has put it back since the time this was slashdotted?
I was curious about how the 1.75 million kWH produced by a single 1500-cow farm stacked up, so I checked the Hoover Dam - that facility produces "over 4 billion kWH," or roughly the output of 2285 such farms. So, how many of these bovine bioreactors do they have in Vermont? According to the Vermont State House of Representatives, there were 160,000 dairy cows in the state in 2001. If they were all participating in the project (an unattainable goal, unless the technology can scale to the individual cow), it would still be less than 5% of the output of the Hoover Dam, at 186 million kWH.
But we need more distributed, small sources of power like this. This 5% plus another 5% from solar rooves and another 5% from landfill gas and another 5% from windmills and another 5% from tidal power and another 5% from somewhere else...that's lots of redundancy, and lots of hands-on, local knowledge of how to produce power, that would secure the energy supply if widespread.
A failure or, sadly, an attack could take out power to over a million people if it shut down the Hoover Dam. If one dairy's local methane power plant goes out temporarily in a world where nearly everything is used as a source of energy, it's no big deal (well, except to the farmer who's losing money every minute he's out of operation, and that's a motivation to every power producer to keep things going).
Slashdot Mirror
Classic Atari 2600 game Yar's Revenge does something similar -- when you beat the bad guy on any given level, the screen explodes with what looks like random static, but is actually the program code for the game represented as a bitmap.
Um, so: Curiosity? Multiple orders of magnitude more sophisticated hardware. Not to mention we are still -- simultaneously -- running Opportunity! More competition in space is a good thing for everyone, though, so long as we're not completely redundant in our efforts.
The programmer appears to be confusing the 'eq' and '==' operators; the 'eq' operator in Perl is used for string comparison, while == is used for numerical comparison. The result of using '==' on two strings, e.g. "M" == "F" will always be true, in the sense that 0 == 0. The 'eq' operator *can* be used to test whether 1 == 1, but will report that "1.0" does not equal "1".
Example:
Recommend developing a battery of tests using Test::More to verify the author's assumptions.
Not to mention that we haven't developed faster-than-light communications yet. Maybe there's a party line on subspace/ansible/quantum-radio where alien scientists from all over the galaxy talk shop while trying to level-up their weird non-pointy-eared fantasy characters...
I've had a Mi-Fi (dedicated 3G Wi-Fi access point) from Verizon since the summer. Works great (trouble-free video conferencing from rural Virginia!), but there are consistently charges for SMS messages "received" -- which are not from anyone I know -- given that there's no way to retrieve them, seems kinda disingenuous.
I'm sorry that today isn't April 1st. I remember signing a petition to get the Sci-Fi channel carried by our local cable operator way back in the early 1990s. It's sad that they don't want to stick with us geeks who helped get them started.
Abandoning their niche isn't the way to gain ground, they should be bettering their niche instead. With the budget they currently spend on the CG equivalent of rubber monster movies, they could hire real SF writers to create high-quality Science Fiction -- less frequently than the crap, sure, but it would build an audience. Imagine two BSG series and no weekly monster movie. I think that's a win-win.
Seems like it's too late now. The old Sci-Fi is dead. Long live the new Sci-Fi (pass the petition, willya?).
Yup. I did this for my family when they first hooked their Windows PCs up to a persistent network; they don't have a password on the admin account, but they all know not to run programs there; they only use it if they can't install an app under their user accounts. It's been over a decade now, and no virus or malware issues. The only really annoying thing was that they started with XP home, and I had to configure their file perms with cacls and its bevy of ugly switches. *barf*
Jamie Zawinsky talked about the dirt under the shiny Yelp logo recently: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html
I do think Stephenson "gets it" but Cryptonomicon is less technically impressive after you notice how much of it was a fictionalization of David Kahn's excellent non-fiction work, The Codebreakers. Read them one after the other and you'll see what I mean.
Stephenson's one of my favorite authors; I've felt a compulsion to read passages from his books aloud to friends and family on many occasions. He has some bad habits, like the way his last chapters tend to splice all the loose ends together (no matter how insignificant) in the last chapter in a usually unsatisfying meltdown. FWIW, Anathem's ending is better than that -- and if you're interested in words and their origins, you shouldn't listen to the detractors, the vocabulary is part of the fun.
Uh, Israel has large minorities of non-Jews. It's not a pure culture, and it doesn't herd people (though it does keep them out). Compare with the Muslim theocracies nearby (most of which *used* to have minority populations, especially of Zoroastrians and Jews in Persia (Iran)). See who you think is really doing the ethnic cleansing.
Well, I know that by posting this I officially brand myself as a corporate shill, but here's a device that runs Linux, has a touch screen, has an open API, and already exists and can be yours for $239:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-photo-frames/b425/
And you can use it as a picture frame out of the box. =)
Beween 1999 and 2001 I worked at a local Washington, DC ISP, and I was impressed with the number of sites we hosted that carefully encrypted their customers' credit card information as it traveled to our server racks, then delivered it to the site operators by plaintext email to an AOL account.
Sure, times have changed, but short of auditing the offices of your favorite e-commerce sites, how do you know what they do with your data after you carefully check that all their forms submit with "https://"?
Since Zelnick and his mom are both Jewish, comparing him to the Hitler Youth is pretty offensive. I hope they can bring him up on hate crimes charges.
Au contraire! It would be best if HOV lanes were better controlled. Then, buses carrying 40 passengers each (and other transit vehicles) could speed ahead to the Metro train stations, making mass transportation more enticing for commuters. You could restrict non-transit vehicles from using those lanes altogether, but if only legitimate carpoolers were using them, I'm guessing they wouldn't block up the transit vehicles too much, but I'd rather they ditched HOV in favor of bus-only lanes than simply added one more lane to the parking lot that is I-66.
The other way to get more people riding is to increase the frequency with which buses and trains run; if you can walk to the bus stop on the corner and get a ride within 10-15 minutes, it's not much of a change to your schedule compared with hopping in a car. You still have the ease of movement that cars offer, and you don't have to worry about what to do with your 3500 pounds of steel, plastic, and rubber when you get where you're going.
BTW, drivers are actually subsidized on DC's Metro -- parking structures and systems still cost more than they rake in. People who use buses, or walk or bicycle to Metro stations are paying more than their fair share. So, yeah, transit users should pay less, and drivers should pay more...if drivers aren't just on their way to Metro, but are going downtown, they're probably parking in "free" (subsidized) spaces, so again, removing that subsidy would encourage riding the train, which would alleviate traffic (and encourage Metro to increase the frequency of service).
And, BTW, this is high-speed video of the second jaws in action.
Halfway down on the left side: "Watch the Moray Eel"
y Id=14194579
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
As everyone knows, PYTHON stands for Please, Your Tabs Have Overflowed NANO. The importance of this one text editor in naming the language is still something of a mystery to me, and no doubt later versions of NANO were able to cope with the number and significance of tabs in PYTHON code, but the acronym has become ingrained at this point.
As clearly demonstrated by the following, many other *nix systems are acronyms, too. Amazing!
TIME(1) BSD General Commands Manual TIME(1)
NAME
time -- time command execution
SYNOPSIS
time [-lp] utility
DESCRIPTION
The time utility executes and times utility. After the utility finishes,
time writes the total time elapsed, the time consumed by system overhead,
and the time used to execute utility to the standard error stream.
LESS(1) LESS(1)
NAME
less - opposite of more
SYNOPSIS
less -?
less --help
less -V
less --version
less [-[+]aBcCdeEfFgGiIJLmMnNqQrRsSuUVwWX~]
[-b space] [-h lines] [-j line] [-k keyfile]
[-{oO} logfile] [-p pattern] [-P prompt] [-t tag]
[-T tagsfile] [-x tab,...] [-y lines] [-[z] lines]
[-# shift] [+[+]cmd] [--] [filename]...
(See the OPTIONS section for alternate option syntax with long option
names.)
DESCRIPTION
Less is a program similar to more (1), but which allows backward move-
ment in the file as well as forward movement.
NANO(1) NANO(1)
NAME
nano - Nano's ANOther editor, an enhanced free Pico clone
SYNOPSIS
nano [+LINE] [options] [file]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the nano command.
nano is a small, free and friendly editor which aims to replace Pico,
the default editor included in the non-free Pine package.
BUGS
After difficulty processing large Python scripts in early versions,
later revisions incorporated asynchronous indentation-compression tech-
nology, reducing the impact of Python's tab-based block grouping.
There is Mac software now, and it's a one-time setup. After that, you configure the frame through the eStarling web site -- including setting up RSS feeds, email filters, etc.
Adobe Type Manager, with font smoothing, was out on Macs in 1991, long before ClearType, which was touted as one of XP's new features when it shipped in 2002. ATM was even available as an add-on to Windows by 1993, nine years ahead of ClearType. Furthermore, Mac OS 8.5 shipped with Apple's own built-in font smoothing in 1998. Whether or not M$ has done much innovating, that example doesn't exactly help his case.
Dagnabbit! The votes was supposed to get changed AFTER the confirmation thingy. Shifty foreign programmers just had to go and screw this up, didn't they? Hey Hayden! What do we have that can link 9-11 to Outsourceistan? We'll show THEM how to be democratistic!
Make the law require the design of every voting machine in the US include a verifiable and separate voting record (such as a paper tape).
Then the president of the voting machine company can do whatever he likes, because we'll know it won't affect the outcome of the race in Ohio^H^H^H^Hany election.
It's a SECRET vote. That means nobody has the right to know how you voted. INCLUDING the mobsters and union bosses you are so sure are stealing the election. That's why you should never expect a receipt with the vote you cast on it (though you should, IMHO, be shown evidence that your vote has been recorded correctly before you leave the polling place, such as a paper tape with a print out of your vote on it rolling past a window on its way to a lockbox, where it should later be tallied and compared with the computer record to ensure that they are consistent).
[blockquote]there are tree reasons...[/blockquote]
No, no, no: elm, pine, and oak are all e-mail readers, not IM clients!
I just downloaded the PDF and subject number 26.1399 reads, "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology, Other." Does this mean someone has put it back since the time this was slashdotted?
I was curious about how the 1.75 million kWH produced by a single 1500-cow farm stacked up, so I checked the Hoover Dam - that facility produces "over 4 billion kWH," or roughly the output of 2285 such farms. So, how many of these bovine bioreactors do they have in Vermont? According to the Vermont State House of Representatives, there were 160,000 dairy cows in the state in 2001. If they were all participating in the project (an unattainable goal, unless the technology can scale to the individual cow), it would still be less than 5% of the output of the Hoover Dam, at 186 million kWH.
But we need more distributed, small sources of power like this. This 5% plus another 5% from solar rooves and another 5% from landfill gas and another 5% from windmills and another 5% from tidal power and another 5% from somewhere else...that's lots of redundancy, and lots of hands-on, local knowledge of how to produce power, that would secure the energy supply if widespread.
A failure or, sadly, an attack could take out power to over a million people if it shut down the Hoover Dam. If one dairy's local methane power plant goes out temporarily in a world where nearly everything is used as a source of energy, it's no big deal (well, except to the farmer who's losing money every minute he's out of operation, and that's a motivation to every power producer to keep things going).