Continuing with the car analogy: it's not against the law to forgo basic car maintenance; rather, it's against the law (AFAIK) to drive an unsafe car on public roads, for some definition of unsafe. My point here would be that you ought to be responsible for operating an unsafe computer on the Internet.
This raises all sorts of issues, namely what is to be considered unsafe. In the US, the definition of unsafe vehicle seems to vary from state to state; at the very least, it's enforced differently. In Texas, for example, I had to get yearly general inspections, which were fairly simple: brake lights, headlights, turn signals, and nothing unreasonably out of place (muffler dragging on the ground, say). In Maryland, I only needed one inspection (albeit more comprehensive), but then I need yearly emission inspections.
For computers, I suspect "unsafe" would be wrangled over in Congress for a while, resulting in a law or laws regulating it, which would then be amended, repealed, and/or expanded as time passes. It certainly ought to be regulated at the federal level, and in fact the world level if we can get there. All assuming, of course, that this car analogy is sound.
One thing that concerns me as an avid computer user is the money I would then have to spend on regular computer maintenance or checkups. I already have to spend money to upkeep my car, my house, my teeth, and my overall health; now there's one more regulatory bill I have to afford if I want to play Evercrack.
Re:Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
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· Score: 1
Build a railway around the moon and have the telescope mounted on a train that makes one revolution of the planet every 29.5 of your puny Earth days.
That is the coolest "telescope on the moon" idea I have ever heard.
It's hard to say whether squiggleslash thought this up on his own or not, but the idea of a railroad ringing an entire celestial body has been used elsewhere. At the very least, I remember Kim Stanley Robinson describing one around Mercury in (I think) Blue Mars. In that case, an entire city was mounted on rails, and was driven forward by the expansion of the track behind it from the sun's heat. They even used the friction from this to generate enough electricity to run the city.
For what it's worth, www.m-w.com supplies "nucular" as a valid pronunciation of "nuclear".
When I played that third WAV file over my speakers, our CEO overheard it and made a gagging sound. I had to kinda symphatize.
I'm also curious as to how GWB pronounces "Venezuela". I had a history teacher (I'm from Texas) who pronounced it "Venzuela", and got upset when I corrected him.
"OWN STUPIDITY" is apparently quite right, though uncharitably put.
He saw "The Matrix", and liked it. Then he formulated the idea afterward that he liked it because it was good, and thus by association, the next two parts of the trilogy should be similarly good.
Now, many people know that there are bad sequels and good sequels, but it's also believed by many that if parts 2 and 3 of a trilogy are written and filmed as a whole, they tend to be good (though the second part tends to suffer). This idea goes back even further, probably to stuff like "Back to the Future" and of course Lord of the Rings, among others.
In any case, these events caused the original poster to fork over money for parts two and three. It was inevitable. As the Oracle said, he had already made his choice. As you probably have, and I have.
I'd hate to see my "call" dropped from one of these towers. Redial!!!! Redial!!!!
Indeed. Fortunately, any aircraft will likely have wings, so it can glide safely down if it "loses the signal". It might even have a small emergency fuel supply so it can get to a better landing site.
One of the major problems with moving anything from place to place is getting energy to move it. That energy typically comes from partial conversion of matter (liquid oxygen, gasoline, coal, hay, etc.), and that matter in turn tends to be carried along with whatever you're moving. That matter in turn needs energy to move it, and in some cases this amounts to a rather offensive amount of overhead (e.g., Saturn V).
There are two ways of handling this. One is to get the most efficient conversion possible, to cut down on the amount of mass needed. The other is to figure out a way to use whatever matter is in the area, so you don't have to bring it along. It's like bringing along a credit card to buy food when you get to Peoria, instead of bringing a bunch of food in your luggage.
A variation is to deliver that energy in some lightweight form, such as photons. Even if the system for generating this energy is huge and weighty, it can just sit on the ground and not move, which is the most important thing.
Far in the future, it may be possible to move objects weighing several hundred pounds this way, at a range of several miles. Specifically, a family and their luggage. They could zip around at 3000 meters up, powered by laser repeater stations every few miles, set up much like cellular phone towers, except perhaps in special air lanes analogous to interstate highways. This would save billions of dollars in fuel that would otherwise have to be moved around along with the important cargo.
Eventually, one might also see goods transported to space this way. As was said earlier, a space elevator could use this to move cars up and down.
Use the right frequency of laser or microwave, and clouds needn't be much of a problem. Come to think of it, if the thing (or part of it) were tunable, it could probably be used to make clouds disappear... And birds... And airplanes... And ICBMs...:)
If it can make clouds disappear, I imagine it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to have it (1) make clouds appear, and (2) make air currents hotter/colder, and thus have a shot at making tornadoes and hurricanes disappear... no doubt it's a huge amount of power being called for, but that's just engineering. That power is kinda sorta already there.
Part of me thinks the court system would find the truth, if the case got that far. That same part of me thinks that cases often don't get that far because the "underdog" party can't afford a lawyer, or has been bamboozled by the other party into thinking that they won't win, and so they settle out of court, pretty much on the other side's terms.
What are the problems here?
I may not have a full understanding of the law, and so I'm uncertain of my case. Maybe there's some obscure law I'm breaking, or that the other side is following, that makes me vulnerable or them unassailable. And they have more money to find it than I do.
The waiting is killing me. The other side knows that, and is dragging its feet or busily making motion after motion; either that, or the court system is simply so backlogged that my case wouldn't be heard for months or years. Meanwhile, I'm unable to plan for the future, or I'm losing business and/or investors because of this huge unknown.
I feel really certain about my case, but the jury can't be convinced, or can be misled by the opposing side, through sheer argumentation and presentation skill.
The judge/system is crooked/biased.
Personally, I feel least uneasy about the last one (thank you, America!). I'm much more concerned about the first three. I've always felt that in an ideal system, anyone with a high school degree or equivalent should know enough to defend himself in a court if needed. Both parties should be respectful enough of each other to trust that a fair deal can be worked out without involving a court at all, thus freeing the system for really tough cases. Both parties should be able to count on the jury being educated enough to think rationally and thoroughly, and not fall sway to a slickly marketed argument.
This really is the key phrase: fair deal. If you're objectively in the wrong, but the damages you owe will ruin you, I'll be inclined to cut you some slack. At the same time, we're both obligated to be honest about our situation, and entitled to an assurance that a fair deal will result.
I blame two things, mostly. One, our civilization has somewhat outgrown the court system. You can't get a speedy trial anymore. It takes months or more. It was meant to accomodate a society without rapid transit, where you'd be likely to know your opponent in a dispute, and hence be willing to settle face-to-face, no lawyers, no courts. Two, we can no longer count on our education system to prepare everyone to think rationally. Incentives have moved toward influencing people with marketing and adversarialism, rather than a presentation of the truth and an appeal to reason. This is one of the most lethal poisons to a democracy.
Hmm. I'm not exactly seeing much biting military satire in Beetle Bailey. In recent memory, there's a handful of Otto gags, Beetle's-always-sleeping gags, Sarge's-diet gags, Halftrack-answers-to-his-wife gags, Chip Gizmo in some worn-out tech gags, and some Lt. Fuzz brownnosing weenie gags. The strip's felt like the doldrums to me, lately. All the jokes are about the characters (as opposed to the situation), and yet nothing's actually happening to the characters. No storylines.
As for missing the Far Side, I'm finding Mother Goose and Grimm to be a nice substitute, from time to time. Every once in a while there's a one-shot goofy cartoon, like the cats signing the Declaration of Indifference. It'll never be what Far Side was, but I like it all the same.
For Better or For Worse is pretty cool, I agree. Especially when I finally learned out to tell April, Elizabeth, and their mom apart. I can't stand Non Sequitur when it's yet another rag on corporate greed, legal shenanigans, or media spin, but the Sunday storyline about Homer was kinda cool. Dilbert's hilarious, as usual.
Other strips I'm finding rather good: One Big Happy (the kids are spot on); Mark Trail (esp. the Sunday strips); Prince Valiant (love the art); Curtis (incredible detail, even in the weekday strips); Luann (soapy, but witty); Jump Start (I liked the chess bit).
And that's just the paper. Naturally, the online strips can be edgier, and hence really click with the right audience. Penny Arcade, PvP, and User Friendly are wonderful. There's probably a dozen more I'd like in the online world, but I'm just starting to explore it, and free time's at a premium lately.
Easiest way to make a cube unsolvable: take a solved cube, and rotate one of the corner "cubies" 120 degrees. Not only is it unsolvable, but it may take a while to spot the problem on a scrambled cube. (You could just stick two red stickers on two sides of an edge or corner cubie, but that's easy to spot.)
Personally, I still fail to see the need for this. Take KDE's Window Manager for example. If you *can* scroll both ways, just rest your cursor on the scroll bar in the direction you want to go and start wheeling. Up, down, left, right. It'll do it. One wheel.
Arrrrgh. I've never used KDE, and I can understand if KDE is trying to work around an inherent limitation here, but I would hate, hate, hate to have to position the mouse on something as small as a scrollbar, to do something as common as scrolling. It defeats the entire purpose. If I'm going to move my mouse there, I may as well drag the scrollbar. (In fact, I'm inclined to think I misunderstood what you're saying here, but that's the way it reads...)
I've noticed a few Windows apps that scroll horizontally if you hold down the Alt key. But it seems to be only sparsely supported.
As for scrolling horizontally instead, when vertical scrolling isn't needed - it's kinda good, and it's kinda not. It's good in that it delegates one more feature to an otherwise unusable knob, but it's bad in that it isn't completely intuitive. That is, I have to think about the translation from up-down to left-right, respectively.
No kidding. RTF? WTF?
on
Assembly '03
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· Score: 1
It's Assembly, people. Instead of a 1-meg RTF document, they could've instead made a 60k program that blasts the press release text to your screen using 3D rendering, Gouraud shading, plasma balls, etc... and 50k of it would've been the Skaven music.
Oddly, Java in a Nutshell is exactly where I learned Java. For that matter, I learned Perl from an O'Reilly book as well. I enjoyed the process a lot, and consider myself really good at both (well, proportional to the amount of time I spend programming in each).
By that time, however, I had learned a dozen or so major languages already, so that may have helped. Once you've learned BASIC, Pascal, C, LISP, Prolog, and some assembly language, picking up any other programming language is quite painless. When I finally get around to learning Python, I could probably pull it off of Egyptian hieroglyphics with little trouble.
The NCM is just NW of Fort Meade (NSA), between it and the BW Parkway (aka 295). You can get to it via an exit off Route 32. It's pretty cool, especially if you get the old guy with pictures of his family on his tie; probably their most entertaining guide.
Slashdot Mirror
The day I need only one button on my mouse is the day I only need one finger on my hand.
Continuing with the car analogy: it's not against the law to forgo basic car maintenance; rather, it's against the law (AFAIK) to drive an unsafe car on public roads, for some definition of unsafe. My point here would be that you ought to be responsible for operating an unsafe computer on the Internet.
This raises all sorts of issues, namely what is to be considered unsafe. In the US, the definition of unsafe vehicle seems to vary from state to state; at the very least, it's enforced differently. In Texas, for example, I had to get yearly general inspections, which were fairly simple: brake lights, headlights, turn signals, and nothing unreasonably out of place (muffler dragging on the ground, say). In Maryland, I only needed one inspection (albeit more comprehensive), but then I need yearly emission inspections.
For computers, I suspect "unsafe" would be wrangled over in Congress for a while, resulting in a law or laws regulating it, which would then be amended, repealed, and/or expanded as time passes. It certainly ought to be regulated at the federal level, and in fact the world level if we can get there. All assuming, of course, that this car analogy is sound.
One thing that concerns me as an avid computer user is the money I would then have to spend on regular computer maintenance or checkups. I already have to spend money to upkeep my car, my house, my teeth, and my overall health; now there's one more regulatory bill I have to afford if I want to play Evercrack.
Build a railway around the moon and have the telescope mounted on a train that makes one revolution of the planet every 29.5 of your puny Earth days.
That is the coolest "telescope on the moon" idea I have ever heard.
It's hard to say whether squiggleslash thought this up on his own or not, but the idea of a railroad ringing an entire celestial body has been used elsewhere. At the very least, I remember Kim Stanley Robinson describing one around Mercury in (I think) Blue Mars. In that case, an entire city was mounted on rails, and was driven forward by the expansion of the track behind it from the sun's heat. They even used the friction from this to generate enough electricity to run the city.
For what it's worth, www.m-w.com supplies "nucular" as a valid pronunciation of "nuclear".
When I played that third WAV file over my speakers, our CEO overheard it and made a gagging sound. I had to kinda symphatize.
I'm also curious as to how GWB pronounces "Venezuela". I had a history teacher (I'm from Texas) who pronounced it "Venzuela", and got upset when I corrected him.
8.4 billion miles = about half a light day.
So as of this writing, no, it can't hear you.
"OWN STUPIDITY" is apparently quite right, though uncharitably put.
He saw "The Matrix", and liked it. Then he formulated the idea afterward that he liked it because it was good, and thus by association, the next two parts of the trilogy should be similarly good.
Now, many people know that there are bad sequels and good sequels, but it's also believed by many that if parts 2 and 3 of a trilogy are written and filmed as a whole, they tend to be good (though the second part tends to suffer). This idea goes back even further, probably to stuff like "Back to the Future" and of course Lord of the Rings, among others.
In any case, these events caused the original poster to fork over money for parts two and three. It was inevitable. As the Oracle said, he had already made his choice. As you probably have, and I have.
Kinda eerie if you ask me.
I'd hate to see my "call" dropped from one of these towers. Redial!!!! Redial!!!!
Indeed. Fortunately, any aircraft will likely have wings, so it can glide safely down if it "loses the signal". It might even have a small emergency fuel supply so it can get to a better landing site.
One of the major problems with moving anything from place to place is getting energy to move it. That energy typically comes from partial conversion of matter (liquid oxygen, gasoline, coal, hay, etc.), and that matter in turn tends to be carried along with whatever you're moving. That matter in turn needs energy to move it, and in some cases this amounts to a rather offensive amount of overhead (e.g., Saturn V).
There are two ways of handling this. One is to get the most efficient conversion possible, to cut down on the amount of mass needed. The other is to figure out a way to use whatever matter is in the area, so you don't have to bring it along. It's like bringing along a credit card to buy food when you get to Peoria, instead of bringing a bunch of food in your luggage.
A variation is to deliver that energy in some lightweight form, such as photons. Even if the system for generating this energy is huge and weighty, it can just sit on the ground and not move, which is the most important thing.
Far in the future, it may be possible to move objects weighing several hundred pounds this way, at a range of several miles. Specifically, a family and their luggage. They could zip around at 3000 meters up, powered by laser repeater stations every few miles, set up much like cellular phone towers, except perhaps in special air lanes analogous to interstate highways. This would save billions of dollars in fuel that would otherwise have to be moved around along with the important cargo.
Eventually, one might also see goods transported to space this way. As was said earlier, a space elevator could use this to move cars up and down.
Use the right frequency of laser or microwave, and clouds needn't be much of a problem. Come to think of it, if the thing (or part of it) were tunable, it could probably be used to make clouds disappear... And birds... And airplanes... And ICBMs... :)
If it can make clouds disappear, I imagine it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to have it (1) make clouds appear, and (2) make air currents hotter/colder, and thus have a shot at making tornadoes and hurricanes disappear... no doubt it's a huge amount of power being called for, but that's just engineering. That power is kinda sorta already there.
What are the problems here?
Personally, I feel least uneasy about the last one (thank you, America!). I'm much more concerned about the first three. I've always felt that in an ideal system, anyone with a high school degree or equivalent should know enough to defend himself in a court if needed. Both parties should be respectful enough of each other to trust that a fair deal can be worked out without involving a court at all, thus freeing the system for really tough cases. Both parties should be able to count on the jury being educated enough to think rationally and thoroughly, and not fall sway to a slickly marketed argument.
This really is the key phrase: fair deal. If you're objectively in the wrong, but the damages you owe will ruin you, I'll be inclined to cut you some slack. At the same time, we're both obligated to be honest about our situation, and entitled to an assurance that a fair deal will result.
I blame two things, mostly. One, our civilization has somewhat outgrown the court system. You can't get a speedy trial anymore. It takes months or more. It was meant to accomodate a society without rapid transit, where you'd be likely to know your opponent in a dispute, and hence be willing to settle face-to-face, no lawyers, no courts. Two, we can no longer count on our education system to prepare everyone to think rationally. Incentives have moved toward influencing people with marketing and adversarialism, rather than a presentation of the truth and an appeal to reason. This is one of the most lethal poisons to a democracy.
Y'know, serendipity being what it is, it's surprising there aren't more inventions throughout recorded history which involve beer.
...the Brianna-Aid Benefit Concert.
Hmm. I'm not exactly seeing much biting military satire in Beetle Bailey. In recent memory, there's a handful of Otto gags, Beetle's-always-sleeping gags, Sarge's-diet gags, Halftrack-answers-to-his-wife gags, Chip Gizmo in some worn-out tech gags, and some Lt. Fuzz brownnosing weenie gags. The strip's felt like the doldrums to me, lately. All the jokes are about the characters (as opposed to the situation), and yet nothing's actually happening to the characters. No storylines.
As for missing the Far Side, I'm finding Mother Goose and Grimm to be a nice substitute, from time to time. Every once in a while there's a one-shot goofy cartoon, like the cats signing the Declaration of Indifference. It'll never be what Far Side was, but I like it all the same.
For Better or For Worse is pretty cool, I agree. Especially when I finally learned out to tell April, Elizabeth, and their mom apart. I can't stand Non Sequitur when it's yet another rag on corporate greed, legal shenanigans, or media spin, but the Sunday storyline about Homer was kinda cool. Dilbert's hilarious, as usual.
Other strips I'm finding rather good: One Big Happy (the kids are spot on); Mark Trail (esp. the Sunday strips); Prince Valiant (love the art); Curtis (incredible detail, even in the weekday strips); Luann (soapy, but witty); Jump Start (I liked the chess bit).
And that's just the paper. Naturally, the online strips can be edgier, and hence really click with the right audience. Penny Arcade, PvP, and User Friendly are wonderful. There's probably a dozen more I'd like in the online world, but I'm just starting to explore it, and free time's at a premium lately.
Hey, the MPAA is welcome to send a ship up there and get 'em if they want 'em so bad.
If you think that cloud is heavy, you should see the weight of the air underneath it...
Too lewd. Try "Uranus for Dummies".
Easiest way to make a cube unsolvable: take a solved cube, and rotate one of the corner "cubies" 120 degrees. Not only is it unsolvable, but it may take a while to spot the problem on a scrambled cube. (You could just stick two red stickers on two sides of an edge or corner cubie, but that's easy to spot.)
Poor $27-per-month-earning bastard...
I, for one, welcome our new techie masters!
Oh wait, I am a techie. SUFFER, WORMS! MUAHAHAHAAA!
Hey! I already patented the idea of sticking an M80 in my mouth!
See you in court, buddy!
Personally, I still fail to see the need for this. Take KDE's Window Manager for example. If you *can* scroll both ways, just rest your cursor on the scroll bar in the direction you want to go and start wheeling. Up, down, left, right. It'll do it. One wheel.
Arrrrgh. I've never used KDE, and I can understand if KDE is trying to work around an inherent limitation here, but I would hate, hate, hate to have to position the mouse on something as small as a scrollbar, to do something as common as scrolling. It defeats the entire purpose. If I'm going to move my mouse there, I may as well drag the scrollbar. (In fact, I'm inclined to think I misunderstood what you're saying here, but that's the way it reads...)
I've noticed a few Windows apps that scroll horizontally if you hold down the Alt key. But it seems to be only sparsely supported.
As for scrolling horizontally instead, when vertical scrolling isn't needed - it's kinda good, and it's kinda not. It's good in that it delegates one more feature to an otherwise unusable knob, but it's bad in that it isn't completely intuitive. That is, I have to think about the translation from up-down to left-right, respectively.
It's Assembly, people. Instead of a 1-meg RTF document, they could've instead made a 60k program that blasts the press release text to your screen using 3D rendering, Gouraud shading, plasma balls, etc... and 50k of it would've been the Skaven music.
Oddly, Java in a Nutshell is exactly where I learned Java. For that matter, I learned Perl from an O'Reilly book as well. I enjoyed the process a lot, and consider myself really good at both (well, proportional to the amount of time I spend programming in each).
By that time, however, I had learned a dozen or so major languages already, so that may have helped. Once you've learned BASIC, Pascal, C, LISP, Prolog, and some assembly language, picking up any other programming language is quite painless. When I finally get around to learning Python, I could probably pull it off of Egyptian hieroglyphics with little trouble.
The NCM is just NW of Fort Meade (NSA), between it and the BW Parkway (aka 295). You can get to it via an exit off Route 32. It's pretty cool, especially if you get the old guy with pictures of his family on his tie; probably their most entertaining guide.
You might get a kick out of their computer room.
So are they saying an announcer used up an hour of air-time on TechTV to read off a list of nearly 1000 names?
No wonder I don't bother paying for cable!
Oh, I dunno. Wouldn't you love to have a videotape of the guy as he reads "munkeyspanker21"?