available here. The applications of the general techniques they are developing are pretty interesting. Even the further development of SPM's into three dimensional probing is pretty remarkable. Not to mention the greater ends of nanotechniques on manufacture.
Yer.. perhaps I should have put "/sarcasm" in that post. I'm sorta of the opinion that measuring something as monumental as contact with an alien species in terms of "dollars" is pure insanity.
Millions of dollars spent to send test pilots up into low earth orbit. The whole race to the moon. The current hope of sending people to mars. What a waste of time!
Well that's just shows how much you know! I've been working at the local hospital for five years now (started practising when I was 12) and I've saved so many lives that I'm an invaluable member of staff. Next year I hope to complete my med degree in 9 months and then open my own surgery.
First year math, sure. One poorly stripped down english subject so you know how to write a scientific paper, uh huh. literature, humanities, physics, chemistry, biology?? what are you smoking? It aint called a Computer Science degree for nothin'.
You dont make much of an argument. Due to the immoral practices of today's "animal industry" you choose not to partake in the consumption of their product. Is this supposed to achieve anything? I guess you are of the belief that if enough people stop eating their product they will go out of business and all the friendly little animals will be set free. Well it aint happening. The industry neither knows, nor cares about your silent protest, for exactly that reason, it's silent. Believe it or not, there are actually people on this planet who are opposed to the same thing as you (animal cruelty) who proactively do something about it. They infultrate piggery units and get pictures of red neck cowboys beating animals to death. They use this intelligence to convince people to boycott on a massive scale, or have units shut down in countries that have animal cruelty laws.
But that's not what a vegan is about now is it? A vegan doesn't eat any animal products, including milk and cheese. I think you would be hard pressed to find a maltreated dairy animal (with any reasonable definition of exploitation that is). Apparently our vegan friends would have us believe that animal life (at such a low level as their individual cells) are somehow more important than plant life. ie, it's ok to eat a turnip, but it's not ok to drink cow's milk. To be purely reductionist, cell nucleii are sacred. But I submit that if vegans were to somehow achieve their goal of the elimination of the "animal industry" they would have a profoundly negative effect on animal life. Both the chickens in my moral conundrum we bred in captivity. Actually, they were probably bred in cages and had their beaks torn off at an early age so they dont damage each other, but that's your argument, not theirs. Our vegan friends would have us never have brought these chickens into existance in the first place. Apparently our exploitative intentions somehow forfit the animal's chance to have a life (no matter how short or unpleasant that life may be).
If your gripe with the animal industry is limited to the maltreatment of animals I would suggest that you behave proactively about it, but dont support those who would do away with the animal industry in the name of sacred animal rights -- these people want to end animal's lives before they have even started.
But assuming that both the chickens below were (and respectively will be) maltreated, what do you do? What is the moral thing to do? Do you eat the chicken (having consumed meat that came from an animal that suffered) or do you condem the live chicken to die a long horrible death?(note that this is a modification purely for your moral ideology).
I always found it frightening to talk to an Amiga user. There were lots of reasons but probably one of the biggest was this strange opinion towards software developers. I think the reasoning went something like this: If we pay for anything and everything that gets written for our platform, companies will see it is profitable to write applications for our platform and so we'll get a whole lot of applications. This is sort of the "begging for scraps" mentality that BeOS users felt too. It makes sense in a way, but it has some undesirable effects. Firstly, a lot of fly by night companies jump onto the platform and sell really crappy software at rediculous prices and people buy it, not because it is good or even useful, but to "support the platform". Secondly, the majority of developers for the platform become commercially driven. How can I say this about the Amiga platform you may ask? After all, the Amiga was *the* platform of the enthusiast programmer. I think the gaming industry and to a lesser extent the demo scene sucked all them up by the end and you cant really include them in the equation. In my opinion, the real killer is shareware, and in particular "nagware". Firstly it baits you with the illusion that the software doesn't have to be paid for, and then it switches to a "gimme gimme" ultimatum mode that it cant really back up. Strangely, a lot of people even paid for crappy shareware. Not that I'm saying all shareware is crap, but some of it is and if after 30 days you're not satisfied then you should delete it. But that's not the way it worked. Either people would reinstall it for another 30 days or they would actually pay for it out of misplaced guilt or this idea that if you pay for crap you will get something other than crap in return. I've never heard of anyone demanding a bug fix or an extra feature before they sent in the registration fee, have you? But that's the kind of actions that really could make shareware great, I pay you, you supply the product I actually want. The same goes for Free Software, however, in this case I need not pay the original programmer, I can pay anyone to fix my bugs or add features, but does anyone do it? Anyone? No. Both systems fall short of the mark for delivering a feedback loop that can be controlled by the software consumer to deliver great software to an alternate operating system. Maybe in a few years AtheOS will be trying to woo software developers and we'll see it all happen again, but maybe, just maybe, someone will come up with a way to get good software onto the platform in proportion to the enthusiasm that fans feel towards their alternate OS. I cant wait.
circuit design is a perfect example of where an open source calabrative solution should have been long coming but hasnt. A lot of circuit design is done in academic settings and by people who can (hopefully) wield a compiler, yet the tools continue to be grossly overpriced and frankly, suck.
you could always write your own software. I can understand people bitching about consumer electronics companies dicking you over software after you've purchased their hardware (after all, it's costing them money to write the drivers, why not let me do it?) but really, if you dont like random software company's upgrade cycle then whip out your compiler and write your own. Oh you cant? Then I guess you'll just have to wear it man.
If the content in question is sexually violent, an R rating wont help you in Australia. You would require an X rating (of which I believe only the ACT has on shelf) and you are really opening a pandora's box by going after such a rating. If every possible sequence of game play has to be scrutinized to get a rating (the maximal set of violence if you will) then what happens when we have truely mulible worlds? What happens when we have NPCs in games that can converse with us about any topic we choose (before we shoot them). Not only is it an unanswerable question, it's also an NP-hard problem. I would really like to have some confirmation that the OFLC did indeed refuse classification because of the posibility of certain game play. That's a story.
hmm, now there's a moral dilemia
on
Aussies Ban GTA3
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· Score: 2
I'm sure no-one put it forward that way for the people at the OFLC. Neither am I completely convinced that such acts of deprevity are immoral (after all, it's just a game folks). As games become more like free form environments is there a requirement that programmers add restrictions to conform to a rating? Maybe rather than har haring about all this classification stuff we should be getting in there and asking the hard questions of people like the OFLC.
Cant say I'm too disappointed here.
on
Aussies Ban GTA3
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· Score: 1, Troll
The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) refused classification for Grand Theft Auto 3 because of a scene in which the player can bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her.
Even with an R rating this would not be permissible content for a movie, let alone a game. WTF is up with the sick fucks over DMA Design?
If you happen to be talking with someone via radio who has never seen a clock, try to explain to him what "clockwise" works. Maybe you would turn to the rising and falling of the sun and moon as a reference point, but if this person has never been outside or lives in a different solar system? Where is the common reference point?
I dont *want* to wait, I want my computer booted *now*. I dont want to wait for it to power down. I dont want to wait for it to power up. When the trivial bit of code main() { while (1) fork(); } run from userland can cause me to need to hit the reset switch I dont wanna lose data and I dont wanna have to wait for 15 minutes for it to boot back up.
Besides, I have exclusive rights on dissin' Worldforge's procrastination, and even I'm sure that one day (2010?) someone is gunna idly say to me "I was playing worldforge last night and.." and I'm just gunna stare blankly at them and say "you were what?" and they'll repeat themselves and I'll say "but it was slow/broken/lame right?" and they'll say "no, it kicks arse man, it's a triumph of open source development" or something and I'm just gunna freak the hell out and start stabbing myself with a fork or something.
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it, to have you all jumping, shouting saying it. Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder, in a system that is closed, like with a border. It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness, proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress. "What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming, it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break? You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake. But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true, if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y, the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die. Order from disorder is a scientific rarity, allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity. Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility, at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy. That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it, if you are here's your membership.
You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! Who's down with entropy? Every last homey!
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete, 'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat. So my first definition I would now like to withdraw, and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law. First we need to understand that entropy is energy, energy that can't be used to state it more specifically. In a closed system entropy always goes up, that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game, 'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame. The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state, that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun! That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about, you're now down with a discount.
You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! Who's down with entropy? Every last homey!
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Did it piss anyone else off to read how Johnny was apparently uploading data "into his brain". No. Read Gibson's short story. Listen to what is actually said in the movie. Johnny was uploading data into a chip in his head that was intended to treat his autism. By misusing his chip he could transport data that would otherwise be detected by law enforcement or pirates. What happened in the story was that he misused the chip for too long and his autism wasn't being treated, so he was experiencing symptoms (he was losing childhood memories at an alarming rate).
Slashdot Mirror
available here. The applications of the general techniques they are developing are pretty interesting. Even the further development of SPM's into three dimensional probing is pretty remarkable. Not to mention the greater ends of nanotechniques on manufacture.
old school cyberpunk repackaged for the youngens.
Yer.. perhaps I should have put "/sarcasm" in that post. I'm sorta of the opinion that measuring something as monumental as contact with an alien species in terms of "dollars" is pure insanity.
Millions of dollars spent to send test pilots up into low earth orbit. The whole race to the moon. The current hope of sending people to mars. What a waste of time!
sigh.
Trig and calc are high school math. Statistics wasnt compulsory. Discrete math, yep, and theorem proving.
Well that's just shows how much you know! I've been working at the local hospital for five years now (started practising when I was 12) and I've saved so many lives that I'm an invaluable member of staff. Next year I hope to complete my med degree in 9 months and then open my own surgery.
First year math, sure. One poorly stripped down english subject so you know how to write a scientific paper, uh huh. literature, humanities, physics, chemistry, biology?? what are you smoking? It aint called a Computer Science degree for nothin'.
only to be parrelled by the Verisign business model. Per bit they have to be the most sucessful digital product vendors on the planet.
You dont make much of an argument. Due to the immoral practices of today's "animal industry" you choose not to partake in the consumption of their product. Is this supposed to achieve anything? I guess you are of the belief that if enough people stop eating their product they will go out of business and all the friendly little animals will be set free. Well it aint happening. The industry neither knows, nor cares about your silent protest, for exactly that reason, it's silent. Believe it or not, there are actually people on this planet who are opposed to the same thing as you (animal cruelty) who proactively do something about it. They infultrate piggery units and get pictures of red neck cowboys beating animals to death. They use this intelligence to convince people to boycott on a massive scale, or have units shut down in countries that have animal cruelty laws.
But that's not what a vegan is about now is it? A vegan doesn't eat any animal products, including milk and cheese. I think you would be hard pressed to find a maltreated dairy animal (with any reasonable definition of exploitation that is). Apparently our vegan friends would have us believe that animal life (at such a low level as their individual cells) are somehow more important than plant life. ie, it's ok to eat a turnip, but it's not ok to drink cow's milk. To be purely reductionist, cell nucleii are sacred. But I submit that if vegans were to somehow achieve their goal of the elimination of the "animal industry" they would have a profoundly negative effect on animal life. Both the chickens in my moral conundrum we bred in captivity. Actually, they were probably bred in cages and had their beaks torn off at an early age so they dont damage each other, but that's your argument, not theirs. Our vegan friends would have us never have brought these chickens into existance in the first place. Apparently our exploitative intentions somehow forfit the animal's chance to have a life (no matter how short or unpleasant that life may be).
If your gripe with the animal industry is limited to the maltreatment of animals I would suggest that you behave proactively about it, but dont support those who would do away with the animal industry in the name of sacred animal rights -- these people want to end animal's lives before they have even started.
But assuming that both the chickens below were (and respectively will be) maltreated, what do you do? What is the moral thing to do? Do you eat the chicken (having consumed meat that came from an animal that suffered) or do you condem the live chicken to die a long horrible death?(note that this is a modification purely for your moral ideology).
I always found it frightening to talk to an Amiga user. There were lots of reasons but probably one of the biggest was this strange opinion towards software developers. I think the reasoning went something like this: If we pay for anything and everything that gets written for our platform, companies will see it is profitable to write applications for our platform and so we'll get a whole lot of applications. This is sort of the "begging for scraps" mentality that BeOS users felt too. It makes sense in a way, but it has some undesirable effects. Firstly, a lot of fly by night companies jump onto the platform and sell really crappy software at rediculous prices and people buy it, not because it is good or even useful, but to "support the platform". Secondly, the majority of developers for the platform become commercially driven. How can I say this about the Amiga platform you may ask? After all, the Amiga was *the* platform of the enthusiast programmer. I think the gaming industry and to a lesser extent the demo scene sucked all them up by the end and you cant really include them in the equation. In my opinion, the real killer is shareware, and in particular "nagware". Firstly it baits you with the illusion that the software doesn't have to be paid for, and then it switches to a "gimme gimme" ultimatum mode that it cant really back up. Strangely, a lot of people even paid for crappy shareware. Not that I'm saying all shareware is crap, but some of it is and if after 30 days you're not satisfied then you should delete it. But that's not the way it worked. Either people would reinstall it for another 30 days or they would actually pay for it out of misplaced guilt or this idea that if you pay for crap you will get something other than crap in return. I've never heard of anyone demanding a bug fix or an extra feature before they sent in the registration fee, have you? But that's the kind of actions that really could make shareware great, I pay you, you supply the product I actually want. The same goes for Free Software, however, in this case I need not pay the original programmer, I can pay anyone to fix my bugs or add features, but does anyone do it? Anyone? No. Both systems fall short of the mark for delivering a feedback loop that can be controlled by the software consumer to deliver great software to an alternate operating system. Maybe in a few years AtheOS will be trying to woo software developers and we'll see it all happen again, but maybe, just maybe, someone will come up with a way to get good software onto the platform in proportion to the enthusiasm that fans feel towards their alternate OS. I cant wait.
circuit design is a perfect example of where an open source calabrative solution should have been long coming but hasnt. A lot of circuit design is done in academic settings and by people who can (hopefully) wield a compiler, yet the tools continue to be grossly overpriced and frankly, suck.
you could always write your own software. I can understand people bitching about consumer electronics companies dicking you over software after you've purchased their hardware (after all, it's costing them money to write the drivers, why not let me do it?) but really, if you dont like random software company's upgrade cycle then whip out your compiler and write your own. Oh you cant? Then I guess you'll just have to wear it man.
If the content in question is sexually violent, an R rating wont help you in Australia. You would require an X rating (of which I believe only the ACT has on shelf) and you are really opening a pandora's box by going after such a rating. If every possible sequence of game play has to be scrutinized to get a rating (the maximal set of violence if you will) then what happens when we have truely mulible worlds? What happens when we have NPCs in games that can converse with us about any topic we choose (before we shoot them). Not only is it an unanswerable question, it's also an NP-hard problem. I would really like to have some confirmation that the OFLC did indeed refuse classification because of the posibility of certain game play. That's a story.
I'm sure no-one put it forward that way for the people at the OFLC. Neither am I completely convinced that such acts of deprevity are immoral (after all, it's just a game folks). As games become more like free form environments is there a requirement that programmers add restrictions to conform to a rating? Maybe rather than har haring about all this classification stuff we should be getting in there and asking the hard questions of people like the OFLC.
The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) refused classification for Grand Theft Auto 3 because of a scene in which the player can bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her.
Even with an R rating this would not be permissible content for a movie, let alone a game. WTF is up with the sick fucks over DMA Design?
If you happen to be talking with someone via radio who has never seen a clock, try to explain to him what "clockwise" works. Maybe you would turn to the rising and falling of the sun and moon as a reference point, but if this person has never been outside or lives in a different solar system? Where is the common reference point?
I dont *want* to wait, I want my computer booted *now*. I dont want to wait for it to power down. I dont want to wait for it to power up. When the trivial bit of code main() { while (1) fork(); } run from userland can cause me to need to hit the reset switch I dont wanna lose data and I dont wanna have to wait for 15 minutes for it to boot back up.
If Redhat wants to donate millions to charity, then will, they dont need a microsoft settlement to do it.
Besides, I have exclusive rights on dissin' Worldforge's procrastination, and even I'm sure that one day (2010?) someone is gunna idly say to me "I was playing worldforge last night and.." and I'm just gunna stare blankly at them and say "you were what?" and they'll repeat themselves and I'll say "but it was slow/broken/lame right?" and they'll say "no, it kicks arse man, it's a triumph of open source development" or something and I'm just gunna freak the hell out and start stabbing myself with a fork or something.
As sung by the infamous Mc Hawking.
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Moderation Totals: Underrated=2, Total=2
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
You might wanna read it sometime.
and VMWare virtualizes hardware, it doesn't emulate anything.
Did it piss anyone else off to read how Johnny was apparently uploading data "into his brain". No. Read Gibson's short story. Listen to what is actually said in the movie. Johnny was uploading data into a chip in his head that was intended to treat his autism. By misusing his chip he could transport data that would otherwise be detected by law enforcement or pirates. What happened in the story was that he misused the chip for too long and his autism wasn't being treated, so he was experiencing symptoms (he was losing childhood memories at an alarming rate).