Your voice travels up the copper wire, where it's digitized, and packet switched
through the same routers that make the internet go
I believe that voice traffic in the PSTN is carried over circuit-switched networks. (It's multiplexed onto the line in strange ways, but not really packet-switched.) Control information goes over the packet-switched SS7 network.
People did that for 60+ years and it seemed to work okay.
Well, yes, but not nearly as well as modern 911's automatic tracing, which gets you help even if you're on the verge of unconsciousness, or are calling from a payphone or someone else's house that you don't know the address of, or can't say where you are because if you talk the ax murderer who just broke into your house will here you.
I had no idea our fine university was doing any _serious_ work in it. Fortunately, I appear to have been wrong. Go Terps!
Way back in my undergraduate days (perhaps before some of the youngest/.ers were even born) I had a campus job working at IPST as general office boy. I met Professor Yorke, fixed his PC one time as I recall. Not only brilliant but a nice guy too.
..a recent tour of the electronics district, Akihabara, in Tokyo, shows that every new phone has a camera built in.
Just got back from Kobe, and yep, the darn things are everywhere. I think some Japanese schoolgirls took our picture with a phone on the train - "look at the funny gaijin!"
This thing about being worried over one's photo being snapped in public is overblown...
Actually, while I was in Japan I also saw special "ladies-only" boarding areas for trains. Why? Because they were having problems with "up-skirt" camera shots being taken by people casually holding their phones down in their hands.
When governments artificially interfere with capitalism, it always causes undesired consequences.
Capitalism is a creation of governments, chum. Governments charter the corporations. Governments issue the patents and copyrights. Governments issue the property deeds.
Don't confuse a free market with captialism. A market could in theory exist in an anarchy; capitalism relies on governments to create and enforce artificial "property rights".
As for the case in question - if ideal market conditions existed, and all costs were internalized (you had to pay disposal costs for your throw-away cartridges) and buyers had full knowledge of the products (no hidden chips to prevent refilling), yes, market forces would probably arrive at an efficient solution. But these conditions do not hold, ergo mild intervention is warranted.
This isn't price capping or anything extreme like that, just banning of a bad business practice that would never have evolved if ideal market conditions held.
I like most of Brin's fiction. (At least the older stuff - the new Uplist trilogy, OTOH,...) But when he tries for social commentary, he simply
disconnects from reality.
In this piece, he conflates science with democracy with progress with human rights in a grand "Enlightenment" of western culture. Rubbish!
It was slave-owning Athenians who invented democracy, long before the "Enlightenment", and slave-owning agrarian Americans who revived it. It was the undemocratic Soviets who put the first man into space. It was the Nazis (whom Brin labels as "Romantics"...that's the problem with bifuricating the world, you put Hitler in the same category as Thoreau) who developed jet aircraft and the rocket tech that launched the Space Age. It was the Confuscian, anti-individualist, cultures of the East (the same ones that first invented printing and gunpowder) that cheaply mass-produced transistorized electronics and surrounded us with computers.
Brin has the gall to accuse Tolkein of being some sort of cultural aristocrat, guilty of beleiving that his own culture was the best possible - then goes on to indulge, at length, in exactly the same sin.
Re:Frodo often seen as ``everyman''
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've never understood why people complain of royalty and their perquisites---certainly ``lese majeste'' was balanced by ``oblesse noblige''
The latter always existed more in theory than actuality.
Should we argue for taking away
the wealth of the Kennedys and Rockefellers as well?
Yes, actually, we should. Power should not be hereditary, and wealth is power. Inheritance taxes should be confiscatory above a certain level; millionaireship, say, should not be hereditary.
What are the nuances of the "wind controller" then? Only 1 note a time thus no cords...hmmm
I don't play any wind instruments, so I can only guess. I suppose volume would be controled by breath force, as opposed to the less controllable attack-decay of a plucked string or struck key; that is, you could play a long note and vary its volume up and down.
The sound guy has a guitar hooked up to a computer. He uses it to time when sounds take place. I thought that was a very unusual use for a guitar...
Not at all. I have a guitar synth myself, a Roland GR-50. It has a special pickup that you can attach to pretty much any steel-string guitar; it figures out what string and note is being play and uses that to control the synth and to generate MIDI events.
I've also seen a MIDI "wind controller" that played like a saxaphone, and MIDI "drums" - both standard kit and hand-drums. Each of these input methods has different nuances - for example. with the guitar synth you can only play 6 notes at a time, as opposed to 10 for a keyboard, but bending notes is much easier.
Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" addresses this puzzle with cellular automata.
Cellular automata are exactly what this problem is asking about! A CA is a bunch of FSMs hooked together. More precisely, a quick Googling says:
On a regular lattice (repeated structure of points have the same kind of neighborhood) one puts a finite-state machine at each point. The input to the
machine is the states of all machines in its neighborhood. The behaviour is to change its state based in a determined way, as a function of the states of
its neighbors and its own state. The states of all machines in the lattice are updated synchronously (simultaneously).
The topic is not bribery, it is campaign contributions
Some campaign contributions - the large sort we are talking about here that buy "access" to officeholders - are bribery, pure and simple.
The writer says that the contributers make demands and the Parties make opposite demands.
There's nothing opposite about "we gave you money, we want our favors" and "we gave you favors, we want money to do it again". Just whores and their johns negotiating their transactions.
after all, since FDR, the US has been more or less socialist.
Uh, no.
Socialism refers to an economic system where the capital (the "means of production") are controled by those who actually do the work (the "workers"). It comes in both state-socialist (e.g., Marxism) and libertarian-socialist flavors.
It does not refer to an economic system where capital is concentrated into the hands of a few, and a few inadequate "safety nets" keep the people from beheading their corporate masters.
FDR saved capitalism from itself. He - and the the USA - was no way, no how, a socialist,.
Re:Can CMVC or TeamConnection return from the dead
on
IBM Buys Rational Software
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· Score: 2, Interesting
God I would like to work again with CVMC...
You, sir, are obviously a masochist of the highest order.:-) CMVC ranks as to most convoluted piece of bloatware I've ever been forced to use in a Unix enviroment.
At my current workplace (IBM), a manadate from management that we migrate to CMVC from our home-grown set of SCCS scripts is causing nothing but pain. Every one of our developers would rather go to CVS.
That, to me, is one piece of fairly compelling evidence, and it's supported by historical writing outside the Christian Bible.
It's evidence of their belief, yes. But it's hardly unprecidented or all that extra-ordinary to find people willing to die for their chosen deity or religious leader - indeed, right now you've got Falung Gong members being persecuted in China, and only a few years ago we had the Heaven's Gate folks who first castrated, then killed, themselves.
I can say this with certainty: I have nothing to lose by believing, or at least trying my best to do so.
Yes, you do. First, according to some religions, if you choose the wrong set of beliefs, you're hosed. Choose to follow Zoroaster but it turns out Yaweh was the right pick? Lake of Fire for you, my friend. You might have gotten off lighter if you've picked None of the Above than chosen a false god.
Second, choosing to behave irrationally is not a good habit to develop for the rest of your life.
Third, the faith that you pick may very well require or suggest a lifestyle based on delaying gratification or happiness until after death...which given the lack of evidence for an afterlife, makes Pascal's Wager a sucker's bet.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favor of the mystical experience. Just don't confuse it with objective fact.
There is as much evidence--that is, legal evidence, not scientific evidence--for the existance of God as there is that there was a King Richard of England who fought in a war called the Crusades.
Uh, no. There is much more proof of King Richard's existence.
First, I have abundant proof of the existence of the class of phenomena - human beings - to which King Richard belonged. I have no such evidence of the existence of omnipotent dieties, the class to which the Christian god would belong. (I'm assuming from your sig that by "God" you mean the Christian diety.)
Second, if I assume that all the available reports of King Richard are more or less true, they fit; if I assume they are mistakes or hallucinations or fabrications, I've got a very big puzzle on my hands - a huge conspiracy? Mass hallucination?
If I assume that all the available reports of the Christian god are more or less true, not only don't fit each other (is this an angry or loving diety? how to I reconcile the Quakers with Oral Roberts? not to mention all the biblical contradictions), they contradict equally reliable reports about Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, et cetera deities; while if I assume they are instances of mistaking subjective mystical experiences for objective phenomena, I can explain all of them consistently.
and it's impossible to prove that a being that can read every human thought and takes action only through apparant random chance does or does not exist
It's also impossible to prove that there are not invisible miniature Elvis clones living in my walls and stealing my socks. That doesn't mean that it's a hypothesis that should be seriously considered.
I don't really care what they come up with, I think that I'm mentally sound enough to avoid being hypnotized by whatever ads they put out.
Everyone thinks that. "Advertising doesn't affect me, only those weak-minded people over there." Yet companies contiue to spend millions of dollars on it. Why?
Americans buy all sorts of stuff they don't need, run up huge credit-card debts, slave their lives away to pay for it all. Why?
Why ask why? Just do it.
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags. "You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.
--Bill Hicks
Don't forget that we won the war of 1812 against you yanks
That's an intersting sort of historical revisionism.
Canada was not an independent nation at the time. The War of 1812 was between the U.S. and Great Britian.
While the U.S. invasion of the Bristish colonies in Canada failed, and the British burned D.C, the U.S. ultimately turned the tide (right here in my hometown of Baltimore, Battles of North Point and Fort McHenry, "rockets red glare" and all like that) and repulsed the invading British forces. The British were forced to stop impressing American sailors and to recognize the independance of the U.S.
Interestingly, one of the most famous battles of the war - the Battle of New Orleans, which made the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson into a war hero and launched him to the Presidency - happened after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed by the British; but delays in communication meant that the U.S. had not yet signed. Faster communications would have prevented that battle - and possibly Jackson would not have become President. It could have made for a very different history.
Windows is not worse, because Windows costs money and, more importantly, is not an ideology.
I may be feeding the trolls here, but what the hell...
Windows is not an ideology, but it - and all proprietary software - is based on one. The belief that the state should grant monopolies on copying or using information, that people who engage in unauthorized copying should be marched at gunpoint into cages, is very much an ideology.
In fact, the GPL is best viewed not as an ideology, but as a reaction to this ideology - an anti-ideology, if you will.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that voice traffic in the PSTN is carried over circuit-switched networks. (It's multiplexed onto the line in strange ways, but not really packet-switched.) Control information goes over the packet-switched SS7 network.
Well, yes, but not nearly as well as modern 911's automatic tracing, which gets you help even if you're on the verge of unconsciousness, or are calling from a payphone or someone else's house that you don't know the address of, or can't say where you are because if you talk the ax murderer who just broke into your house will here you.
Actually, Control-Z brings to mind the old DOS EOF character.
The proper "undo" is either "u" or Control-Shift-_, depending on if you're a vi or emacs person.
Way back in my undergraduate days (perhaps before some of the youngest /.ers were even born) I had a campus job working at IPST as general office boy. I met Professor Yorke, fixed his PC one time as I recall. Not only brilliant but a nice guy too.
Just got back from Kobe, and yep, the darn things are everywhere. I think some Japanese schoolgirls took our picture with a phone on the train - "look at the funny gaijin!"
Actually, while I was in Japan I also saw special "ladies-only" boarding areas for trains. Why? Because they were having problems with "up-skirt" camera shots being taken by people casually holding their phones down in their hands.
Capitalism is a creation of governments, chum. Governments charter the corporations. Governments issue the patents and copyrights. Governments issue the property deeds.
Don't confuse a free market with captialism. A market could in theory exist in an anarchy; capitalism relies on governments to create and enforce artificial "property rights".
As for the case in question - if ideal market conditions existed, and all costs were internalized (you had to pay disposal costs for your throw-away cartridges) and buyers had full knowledge of the products (no hidden chips to prevent refilling), yes, market forces would probably arrive at an efficient solution. But these conditions do not hold, ergo mild intervention is warranted.
This isn't price capping or anything extreme like that, just banning of a bad business practice that would never have evolved if ideal market conditions held.
"An eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind." - Gandhi
I'm all for self-defense. (Not only am I for it, I teach it.) Retribution, however, is counterproductive.
I like most of Brin's fiction. (At least the older stuff - the new Uplist trilogy, OTOH,...) But when he tries for social commentary, he simply disconnects from reality.
In this piece, he conflates science with democracy with progress with human rights in a grand "Enlightenment" of western culture. Rubbish!
It was slave-owning Athenians who invented democracy, long before the "Enlightenment", and slave-owning agrarian Americans who revived it. It was the undemocratic Soviets who put the first man into space. It was the Nazis (whom Brin labels as "Romantics"...that's the problem with bifuricating the world, you put Hitler in the same category as Thoreau) who developed jet aircraft and the rocket tech that launched the Space Age. It was the Confuscian, anti-individualist, cultures of the East (the same ones that first invented printing and gunpowder) that cheaply mass-produced transistorized electronics and surrounded us with computers.
Brin has the gall to accuse Tolkein of being some sort of cultural aristocrat, guilty of beleiving that his own culture was the best possible - then goes on to indulge, at length, in exactly the same sin.
The latter always existed more in theory than actuality.
Yes, actually, we should. Power should not be hereditary, and wealth is power. Inheritance taxes should be confiscatory above a certain level; millionaireship, say, should not be hereditary.
Not at all. I have a guitar synth myself, a Roland GR-50. It has a special pickup that you can attach to pretty much any steel-string guitar; it figures out what string and note is being play and uses that to control the synth and to generate MIDI events.
I've also seen a MIDI "wind controller" that played like a saxaphone, and MIDI "drums" - both standard kit and hand-drums. Each of these input methods has different nuances - for example. with the guitar synth you can only play 6 notes at a time, as opposed to 10 for a keyboard, but bending notes is much easier.
Cellular automata are exactly what this problem is asking about! A CA is a bunch of FSMs hooked together. More precisely, a quick Googling says:
Send them to GreenDisk for recycling.
Some campaign contributions - the large sort we are talking about here that buy "access" to officeholders - are bribery, pure and simple.
There's nothing opposite about "we gave you money, we want our favors" and "we gave you favors, we want money to do it again". Just whores and their johns negotiating their transactions.
How does the fact that everybody knows that (to take a hypothetical example) Mr. Burns is bribing Mayor Quimby, make it any less of a bribe?
Uh, no.
Socialism refers to an economic system where the capital (the "means of production") are controled by those who actually do the work (the "workers"). It comes in both state-socialist (e.g., Marxism) and libertarian-socialist flavors.
It does not refer to an economic system where capital is concentrated into the hands of a few, and a few inadequate "safety nets" keep the people from beheading their corporate masters.
FDR saved capitalism from itself. He - and the the USA - was no way, no how, a socialist,.
You, sir, are obviously a masochist of the highest order. :-) CMVC ranks as to most convoluted piece of bloatware I've ever been forced to use in a Unix enviroment.
At my current workplace (IBM), a manadate from management that we migrate to CMVC from our home-grown set of SCCS scripts is causing nothing but pain. Every one of our developers would rather go to CVS.
It's evidence of their belief, yes. But it's hardly unprecidented or all that extra-ordinary to find people willing to die for their chosen deity or religious leader - indeed, right now you've got Falung Gong members being persecuted in China, and only a few years ago we had the Heaven's Gate folks who first castrated, then killed, themselves.
Yes, you do. First, according to some religions, if you choose the wrong set of beliefs, you're hosed. Choose to follow Zoroaster but it turns out Yaweh was the right pick? Lake of Fire for you, my friend. You might have gotten off lighter if you've picked None of the Above than chosen a false god.
Second, choosing to behave irrationally is not a good habit to develop for the rest of your life.
Third, the faith that you pick may very well require or suggest a lifestyle based on delaying gratification or happiness until after death...which given the lack of evidence for an afterlife, makes Pascal's Wager a sucker's bet.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favor of the mystical experience. Just don't confuse it with objective fact.
Uh, no. There is much more proof of King Richard's existence.
First, I have abundant proof of the existence of the class of phenomena - human beings - to which King Richard belonged. I have no such evidence of the existence of omnipotent dieties, the class to which the Christian god would belong. (I'm assuming from your sig that by "God" you mean the Christian diety.)
Second, if I assume that all the available reports of King Richard are more or less true, they fit; if I assume they are mistakes or hallucinations or fabrications, I've got a very big puzzle on my hands - a huge conspiracy? Mass hallucination?
If I assume that all the available reports of the Christian god are more or less true, not only don't fit each other (is this an angry or loving diety? how to I reconcile the Quakers with Oral Roberts? not to mention all the biblical contradictions), they contradict equally reliable reports about Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, et cetera deities; while if I assume they are instances of mistaking subjective mystical experiences for objective phenomena, I can explain all of them consistently.
It's also impossible to prove that there are not invisible miniature Elvis clones living in my walls and stealing my socks. That doesn't mean that it's a hypothesis that should be seriously considered.
The dignity in question is not that of the deceased, but that of the surviving relatives or community.
If you dig my grandfather up to stare at his skull, that will upset my family. (Whether it "should" is a moot point; it is a common human reaction.)
Everyone thinks that. "Advertising doesn't affect me, only those weak-minded people over there." Yet companies contiue to spend millions of dollars on it. Why?
Americans buy all sorts of stuff they don't need, run up huge credit-card debts, slave their lives away to pay for it all. Why?
Why ask why? Just do it.
That's an intersting sort of historical revisionism.
Canada was not an independent nation at the time. The War of 1812 was between the U.S. and Great Britian.
While the U.S. invasion of the Bristish colonies in Canada failed, and the British burned D.C, the U.S. ultimately turned the tide (right here in my hometown of Baltimore, Battles of North Point and Fort McHenry, "rockets red glare" and all like that) and repulsed the invading British forces. The British were forced to stop impressing American sailors and to recognize the independance of the U.S.
Interestingly, one of the most famous battles of the war - the Battle of New Orleans, which made the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson into a war hero and launched him to the Presidency - happened after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed by the British; but delays in communication meant that the U.S. had not yet signed. Faster communications would have prevented that battle - and possibly Jackson would not have become President. It could have made for a very different history.
They're not using Harlan Ellison's script. So I expect that this will suck rocks.
I may be feeding the trolls here, but what the hell...
Windows is not an ideology, but it - and all proprietary software - is based on one. The belief that the state should grant monopolies on copying or using information, that people who engage in unauthorized copying should be marched at gunpoint into cages, is very much an ideology.
In fact, the GPL is best viewed not as an ideology, but as a reaction to this ideology - an anti-ideology, if you will.