I will not argue with this post because I agree with it entirely. Yes, Science does have a "blind-spot" per-se, but this blind-spot is unavoidable. Science, formulae, theorems, are an approximation of an absolute reality. As an approximation they are off somewhat. Galileo couldn't have accounted for the miniscule effects of mutual gravitation and relativity simply because of his tools of measurement. I accept this, and accept the fact that science should never be accepted blindly as truth - to extend this, NOTHING should blindly be accepted as truth.
But, when you say:
"Seen in this light, very few of us should feel as free as we do to make fun of the "hicks" from Kansas. Believe me that average intelligence is Kansas is not significantly different from that in any other state in the union. Ignorance is bliss and America is a very happy country. All of it, not just Kansas."
You are missing an important point. These "hicks" and religious conservatives, do not come to their acceptance of religion through the process of thought you describe. In most cases I see these people just arbitrarily accept it because ma or paw or the priest told 'em too, and if they do they get Christmas, and everybody loves Christmas right? That they do NOT go through the above thought process to come to their conclusion is indicated in there strenous actions to FORCE others to accept their doctrine. If they had come to their conclusions in the above method, they would naturally have to accept that OTHERS could come to their own conclusions in a similar way, and that they have no right to FORCE their opinion on others. Since they do attempt this my only conclusion is that they accept their religion arbitrarily and because of the popularity it gains them and have not actually THOUGHT about it.
I respect deeply any person who comes to their religion or philosophy through the acceptence that science is not an absolute truth and that there is plenty of room for imagination and faith. In fact, you will find many scientist, chemists, physicists, philosophical and spiritual. To force an arbitrary opinion on others though is entirely different and reprehensible. These types of people can live in blissfull ignorance as long as it is on a sinking iceberg far away from me.
Now if they only offered an alternative chip, they would be opening the door to the brave new world of wintel independence. They could do the next big thing.
"If someone's too friggin' lazy to get their butt to a polling place, do we want them to vote?"
Yes. There are many reasons people may not vote. Making it easier is better. If you make it hard to vote, that will ensure you only get every radical crazy zealot voting for their bizarre cause (probably the reason the religious right have ANY power). Make it easy and they will use it. Face it, it can't be any WORSE to increase the voting percentage...at least then you'd amortize all the wackos.
Also, for some people it is truly hard to vote. Take military members overseas. They have to obtain absentee ballots and correspond across the world via snail mail. Why can't it be made easier for these people? Regardless of what you think, a lot of people with good ideas and intentions don't vote simply because it is made unnecessarily unwelcome and burdensome. Imagine if people in the ghetto and rural areas could vote more easily...they might actually get something done for them for once!
If the 70s was "free love", the 00s should be "free knowledge".
I had a whisper of a hope in the Democratic party, the lesser of two evils, but Gore has abolished it entirely. Religious conservativism disgusts me and I'm really at a loss now.
Well, no, some things can be identified by a specialized compiler/translator.
For instance, in a single task world:
for (i=1;i100;i++) { array1[i]=array2[i]; }
would actually execute 100 times. Why not, then, instead of executing 100 times, execute one 100 processors! Sure, this is a trivial application, but imagine BigHonkingObjects[1].copyTo(array[i]), or a distributed QuickSort or MergeSort or Binary search? Were things are constant over time, they can be parallelized. It doesn't matter if you search or copy the lower or upper half first, it just needs to get done, and neither is dependent on the other. C++ operator overloading of course throws a gigantic monkey-wrench into this though.
"OK, we'll need to do some things to add Athlon support to Linux:"
I'm not a FSF bigot, but shouldn't this really be "support GNU" or "support POSIX" or "support UNIX"? but whatever.
Please please please make Linux, FreeBSD, FOOnix, KILLER on AMD chips. I am currently a pathetic windows junkie (although I've gone cold turkey on Linux before...mostly I'm lazy and want to play my old games). If *nix is killer on AMD, then WHEN I DO switch to AMD (most definately my next chip - Intel bugger off;) then I can ALSO switch to *nix (yay).
"Well for starters, the G3 can't get clock speeds as high as the PIII."
Actually, I'm not really impressed by the G3 and its "steamrolling pentium toasting" glory. Nevertheless, clock speeds mean absolutely nothing out of context. Now if the typical G3 instruction takes as many cycles as an average PIII instruction, then the statement that they have lower clock speeds would be significant. whatever;p
"Consider this: you have (decent) computer training. Would you take your skills to a low-paying, poorly equipped public school?"
Yes. I'm usually bored on the weekend. I wouldn't mind fostering a computer network once a week or once every other week or something. I just bought a 486 for my girlfriends 10 year old younger brother and am introducing him to Pascal, and VB (easier to get interested in a RAD environment).
Well, unless the OS supported a HALT instruction, the CPU would be eating voltage anyway. The peripherals would probably all power down. These distributed projects use mostly CPU, not peripherals. The difference in energy consumption, if not 0, would be negligable.
My grandfather is the coolest guy. He started playing around with computer kits when they ere first coming out (early 70's). I remember playing Buck Rogers on his Adam (tape cassettes!), and some other funky multi-piece computer thing he had. I believe he had WebTV for a while (I really can't say anything about this because I have no idea what it is like). He is finally "on the net", with a new Dell. I hope he has a rich experience (and despite the absolutely overwhelming amount of vapid crap on the net, there really ARE some site with very worthwhile content...hey slashdot for one;) on the net.
I agree. I saw a small debate a while back, perhaps on some political show, between Clifford Stoll, and a high-ranking educator who was trying to bring computers into the classroom. They both had good arguments, but Clifford Stoll's caught my interest more. Here was this Berkeley hacker/astronomy who had just traced an electronic trail back to a band of crackers in Germany, who was sitting on TV promoting reading books outside under a REAL tree on REAL grass looking up at a REAL sky. Sure, he might have been a bit eccentric and overzealous himself, but the point was still valid. Computing is a not a panacea. Who would have ever thought overloading kids with information (most of it extraneous) would ever help them grow mature and learn? I really wish government would not blow millions, if not billions, of tax payers' dollars to put more computers in schools. It WOULD be nice for every public school to have at least a small computer lab (maybe @10 OLD networked computers), but outfitting kids with laptops? That's insane. It is fitting that Clifford Stoll, as a technologist, is advocating that this NOT happen. People who *understand* the technology know what it is good for and what it is not good for, unlike others who rely on Cyber-this and e-that buzzwords. Please, making our children into Borg, although it may solve some problems;), I don't think is really the solution.
However nice it may be to think of this theoretically, what USE is it? Why would I ever NOT want to use assignment when it is applicable? "Curry"ing looks like it can be done in any language (FOO = "bar"; g(x) { f(x, FOO) }; "Functional" programming looks like a subset of object-oriented programming, in which the only objects are functions...what use is that? I can't help but thinking that this is shooting yourself in the foot. If we banished all circular objects from the RL world, it probably would lead to very interesting solutions and phenomenon, but/why/ would we ever want to do such a thing (besides as an academic thought problem)?
Assertiveness is great. But if the guy(s) is twice as big/tall/heavy you are plain out of luck. And you probably won't have enough friends to gang up. Unfortunately violence is sometimes not a practical solution (no matter how much one my dream of it).
"I'll bet dollars to donuts they have a mential problem that needs to be repaired..."
...That were most probably caused by others with institutionalized mental problems conditioned and condoned by society. ALL THESE people can't simply be having chemical imbalances! Don't just treat the symptom. These kids are acting perfectly NORMAL to the environment they are subjected to. Cure the environment.
Re:Don't give the troublemakers attention
on
Hellmouth Website
·
· Score: 1
Goddamn...I'm the "genious"...I can't even spell...
Re:Don't give the troublemakers attention
on
Hellmouth Website
·
· Score: 1
"They want attention, just like all these psychopaths"
Ah, right genious...and the natural solution is not to FOUND OUT WHY, but to unilaterally scorn and ignore. Good job. No wonder public schools and people in general are more fucked up than ever.
Maybe we should drill holes in their heads to let the "evil spirits" out, eh?
Damn...do these people have an unusually hard time keeping boxen up or what!!?? I guess they're lucky this isn't "break the ms campus network" because they seem to have done that already.
"8/6/99 Events
9:20am - Router back up, traffic hitting site. SYN attack filter appears to be working. Receiving an average of 600 datagrams/sec, 100 fragments/sec. 9:00am - Reset TCP to handle SYN attacks, and rebooted.
See http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q 142/6/41.asp."
Sure thing.
"Set Valid Retransmission Times Elapsed to 3 seconds Set Enable Dynamic Backlog to 1 (enabled) 6:00am - All network traffic stopped. Router down."
BTW, is Slashdot slashdotted? terrible response time...
Yeah...BTW, while everybody is castigating this poor guy for being so "stupid" and laffing their arses off...explain to me how such a "stupid" lummox could have raised $700,000 and convinced investors to fund his legal case?
I would think that Slashdot of all places, would be the place where people blamed the media for trying to pull a fast one, instead of the person for calling them on it.
Yes, and I think making noxious smelling commercials is also one of the most unrespectable employments. When Pepsi and everybody else is busy trying to entice us with smoke and mirrors, their trick should actually be called.
Before: "Oh yeah, here's a bazillion dollars if you buy our product!"
After: "Oh, did you REALLY think you'd get a bazillion dollars from us! how UNREASONABLE laff laff Sorry stupid consumer! HARDEHAR"
Doesn't matter. Remember a while ago that guy bought a nuclear reactor and the government had to buy it back from him? Same thing. It's Pepsi's fault. Give the man his aircraft.
Slashdot Mirror
I will not argue with this post because I agree with it entirely. Yes, Science does have a "blind-spot" per-se, but this blind-spot is unavoidable. Science, formulae, theorems, are an approximation of an absolute reality. As an approximation they are off somewhat. Galileo couldn't have accounted for the miniscule effects of mutual gravitation and relativity simply because of his tools of measurement. I accept this, and accept the fact that science should never be accepted blindly as truth - to extend this, NOTHING should blindly be accepted as truth.
But, when you say:
"Seen in this light, very few of us should feel as free as we do to make fun of the "hicks" from Kansas. Believe me that average intelligence is Kansas is not significantly different from that in any other state in the union. Ignorance is bliss and America is a very happy country. All of it, not just Kansas."
You are missing an important point. These "hicks" and religious conservatives, do not come to their acceptance of religion through the process of thought you describe. In most cases I see these people just arbitrarily accept it because ma or paw or the priest told 'em too, and if they do they get Christmas, and everybody loves Christmas right? That they do NOT go through the above thought process to come to their conclusion is indicated in there strenous actions to FORCE others to accept their doctrine. If they had come to their conclusions in the above method, they would naturally have to accept that OTHERS could come to their own conclusions in a similar way, and that they have no right to FORCE their opinion on others. Since they do attempt this my only conclusion is that they accept their religion arbitrarily and because of the popularity it gains them and have not actually THOUGHT about it.
I respect deeply any person who comes to their religion or philosophy through the acceptence that science is not an absolute truth and that there is plenty of room for imagination and faith. In fact, you will find many scientist, chemists, physicists, philosophical and spiritual. To force an arbitrary opinion on others though is entirely different and reprehensible. These types of people can live in blissfull ignorance as long as it is on a sinking iceberg far away from me.
um...duh
Um...we should be taking it with a mountain of salt...of course this data means little, it's just funny...
Now if they only offered an alternative chip, they would be opening the door to the brave new world of wintel independence. They could do the next big thing.
"If someone's too friggin' lazy to get their butt to a polling place, do we want them to vote?"
Yes. There are many reasons people may not vote. Making it easier is better. If you make it hard to vote, that will ensure you only get every radical crazy zealot voting for their bizarre cause (probably the reason the religious right have ANY power). Make it easy and they will use it. Face it, it can't be any WORSE to increase the voting percentage...at least then you'd amortize all the wackos.
Also, for some people it is truly hard to vote. Take military members overseas. They have to obtain absentee ballots and correspond across the world via snail mail. Why can't it be made easier for these people? Regardless of what you think, a lot of people with good ideas and intentions don't vote simply because it is made unnecessarily unwelcome and burdensome. Imagine if people in the ghetto and rural areas could vote more easily...they might actually get something done for them for once!
If the 70s was "free love", the 00s should be "free knowledge".
I had a whisper of a hope in the Democratic party, the lesser of two evils, but Gore has abolished it entirely. Religious conservativism disgusts me and I'm really at a loss now.
Well, no, some things can be identified by a specialized compiler/translator.
;)
For instance, in a single task world:
for (i=1;i100;i++) {
array1[i]=array2[i];
}
would actually execute 100 times. Why not, then, instead of executing 100 times, execute one 100 processors! Sure, this is a trivial application, but imagine BigHonkingObjects[1].copyTo(array[i]), or a distributed QuickSort or MergeSort or Binary search? Were things are constant over time, they can be parallelized. It doesn't matter if you search or copy the lower or upper half first, it just needs to get done, and neither is dependent on the other. C++ operator overloading of course throws a gigantic monkey-wrench into this though.
This would be much nicer in Java
"OK, we'll need to do some things to add Athlon support to Linux:"
;) then I can ALSO switch to *nix (yay).
I'm not a FSF bigot, but shouldn't this really be "support GNU" or "support POSIX" or "support UNIX"? but whatever.
Please please please make Linux, FreeBSD, FOOnix, KILLER on AMD chips. I am currently a pathetic windows junkie (although I've gone cold turkey on Linux before...mostly I'm lazy and want to play my old games). If *nix is killer on AMD, then WHEN I DO switch to AMD (most definately my next chip - Intel bugger off
Make it and I will come.
"Well for starters, the G3 can't get clock speeds as high as the PIII."
;p
Actually, I'm not really impressed by the G3 and its "steamrolling pentium toasting" glory. Nevertheless, clock speeds mean absolutely nothing out of context. Now if the typical G3 instruction takes as many cycles as an average PIII instruction, then the statement that they have lower clock speeds would be significant. whatever
"Consider this: you have (decent) computer training. Would you take your skills to a low-paying, poorly equipped public school?"
;)
Yes. I'm usually bored on the weekend. I wouldn't mind fostering a computer network once a week or once every other week or something. I just bought a 486 for my girlfriends 10 year old younger brother and am introducing him to Pascal, and VB (easier to get interested in a RAD environment).
Then again I'm a loser with no life
Well, unless the OS supported a HALT instruction, the CPU would be eating voltage anyway. The peripherals would probably all power down. These distributed projects use mostly CPU, not peripherals. The difference in energy consumption, if not 0, would be negligable.
My grandfather is the coolest guy. He started playing around with computer kits when they ere first coming out (early 70's). I remember playing Buck Rogers on his Adam (tape cassettes!), and some other funky multi-piece computer thing he had. I believe he had WebTV for a while (I really can't say anything about this because I have no idea what it is like). He is finally "on the net", with a new Dell. I hope he has a rich experience (and despite the absolutely overwhelming amount of vapid crap on the net, there really ARE some site with very worthwhile content...hey slashdot for one ;) on the net.
I agree. I saw a small debate a while back, perhaps on some political show, between Clifford Stoll, and a high-ranking educator who was trying to bring computers into the classroom. They both had good arguments, but Clifford Stoll's caught my interest more. Here was this Berkeley hacker/astronomy who had just traced an electronic trail back to a band of crackers in Germany, who was sitting on TV promoting reading books outside under a REAL tree on REAL grass looking up at a REAL sky. Sure, he might have been a bit eccentric and overzealous himself, but the point was still valid. Computing is a not a panacea. Who would have ever thought overloading kids with information (most of it extraneous) would ever help them grow mature and learn? I really wish government would not blow millions, if not billions, of tax payers' dollars to put more computers in schools. It WOULD be nice for every public school to have at least a small computer lab (maybe @10 OLD networked computers), but outfitting kids with laptops? That's insane. It is fitting that Clifford Stoll, as a technologist, is advocating that this NOT happen. People who *understand* the technology know what it is good for and what it is not good for, unlike others who rely on Cyber-this and e-that buzzwords. Please, making our children into Borg, although it may solve some problems ;), I don't think is really the solution.
Isn't PERL the Practical Extraction and Report Language?
I'd imagine it's good for exactly what it is used for...text manipulation, database/network interaction, data extraction, etc.
However nice it may be to think of this theoretically, what USE is it? Why would I ever NOT want to use assignment when it is applicable? "Curry"ing looks like it can be done in any language (FOO = "bar"; g(x) { f(x, FOO) }; /why/ would we ever want to do such a thing (besides as an academic thought problem)?
"Functional" programming looks like a subset of object-oriented programming, in which the only objects are functions...what use is that? I can't help but thinking that this is shooting yourself in the foot. If we banished all circular objects from the RL world, it probably would lead to very interesting solutions and phenomenon, but
Assertiveness is great. But if the guy(s) is twice as big/tall/heavy you are plain out of luck. And you probably won't have enough friends to gang up. Unfortunately violence is sometimes not a practical solution (no matter how much one my dream of it).
"I'll bet dollars to donuts they have a mential problem that needs to be repaired..."
...That were most probably caused by others with institutionalized mental problems conditioned and condoned by society. ALL THESE people can't simply be having chemical imbalances! Don't just treat the symptom. These kids are acting perfectly NORMAL to the environment they are subjected to. Cure the environment.
Goddamn...I'm the "genious"...I can't even spell...
"They want attention, just like all these psychopaths"
Ah, right genious...and the natural solution is not to FOUND OUT WHY, but to unilaterally scorn and ignore. Good job. No wonder public schools and people in general are more fucked up than ever.
Maybe we should drill holes in their heads to let the "evil spirits" out, eh?
Damn...do these people have an unusually hard time keeping boxen up or what!!?? I guess they're lucky this isn't "break the ms campus network" because they seem to have done that already.
q 142/6/41.asp."
"8/6/99 Events
9:20am - Router back up, traffic hitting site. SYN attack filter appears to be working. Receiving an average of 600 datagrams/sec, 100 fragments/sec. 9:00am - Reset TCP to handle SYN attacks, and rebooted.
See http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/
Sure thing.
"Set Valid Retransmission Times Elapsed to 3 seconds
Set Enable Dynamic Backlog to 1 (enabled)
6:00am - All network traffic stopped. Router down."
BTW, is Slashdot slashdotted? terrible response time...
Yeah...BTW, while everybody is castigating this poor guy for being so "stupid" and laffing their arses off...explain to me how such a "stupid" lummox could have raised $700,000 and convinced investors to fund his legal case?
I would think that Slashdot of all places, would be the place where people blamed the media for trying to pull a fast one, instead of the person for calling them on it.
Yes, and I think making noxious smelling commercials is also one of the most unrespectable employments. When Pepsi and everybody else is busy trying to entice us with smoke and mirrors, their trick should actually be called.
Before:
"Oh yeah, here's a bazillion dollars if you buy our product!"
After:
"Oh, did you REALLY think you'd get a bazillion dollars from us! how UNREASONABLE laff laff Sorry stupid consumer! HARDEHAR"
NO it would ENCOURAGE companies to STOP making STUPID MINDLESS false advertising commercials!
Don't punish the person for calling their bluff!
Punish the company for bluffing.
Doesn't matter. Remember a while ago that guy bought a nuclear reactor and the government had to buy it back from him? Same thing. It's Pepsi's fault. Give the man his aircraft.
Give the man his damn Harrier.