> I thought the English/Imperial unit of mass was the slug, not the pound.
The slug is a unit of mass, with the pound as the corresponding unit of force AND the pound is a unit of mass, with a poundal as the corresponding unit of force. Yes, the Imperial system does suck for science and engineering compared with the metric system.
In practice the pound gets used for both force and mass without too much confusion, just as people talk about their weight in kilograms.
> well the above sounds nice but it also sounds like a mess... different types of data are all neatly partitioned
That's why the Amiga has FONTS: LIBS: and so on.
LIBS: does the same sort of thing as LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but "dir FONTS:" works transparently, and "ls $LD_LIBRARY_PATH" doesn't.
Union filesystems don't do exactly the same thing, because different Amiga processes could have different assigns (just as different Unix processes can have different PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.). Apollo allowed environment variables in the filesystem, so e.g./bin was a symlink to either/sysv/bin or/bsd/bin depending on your environment (the default main system lived in/cmd, but it had fairly good Unix emulation), and you might be able to combine that idea with the union system.
> But tomorrow we just might have a (sigh) Beowulf cluster of machines that could brute force a 256 length key in a matter of hours.
You'll need to get close to perfect reversible computation working first, or thermodynamic constraints mean you'll need the power output of superclusters of galaxies to power your machine.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~cvieri/reversible.html
Among other problems.
Working quantum computers would bring a 256 bit key down to the strength of a conventional 128 bit key, i.e. still safe for a very long time.
> Languages such as this are called prototype-based languages, and are generally seen as the successor to object-oriented programming. However, no prototype-based language has, to my knowledge, actually gone anywhere
The guy I knew who wrote one called it an exemplar-based language, which is probably clearer. He didn't necessarily think they were going to take over from class-based OOL, just that it suited his purposes well - the proprietary language within one particular company's product (where I gather it worked very well, but "general acceptance" was never a goal).
> probably LISP's CLOS
See "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". Worth a read even if you never expect to program in LISP, just for exposure to the ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026261074 4/ 104-5424839-3447106
Re:From the pictures...
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
> Anyone who is *TRUELY* 1337 dosnt drink Starbucks *anything*.
Why isn't there an "off-topic but informative enough to be worthwhile" option?
> Nice try, but at the core of UCANT's rulings is the principle that Jane Surfer is a dribbling AOL-Time-Warner-Microserf who is too stupid to figure anything out and needs to be protected from her own idiocy.
I was Christmas shopping this weekend when I saw a toy Harry Potter broom. It had a fairly prominent notice on the box, repeated, saying "broom does not really fly".
> RIAA Represents the Recording Industry...
Exactly. http://riaa.com/About-Who.cfm
> It wasn't that long ago when artists... didn't expect to get rich off royalties and licensing fees.
Most artists don't. Even relatively successful artists who thought they were going to make money sometimes find it doesn't work that way - the RIAA members make the money, the bands don't.
This article - http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic. html - was written in 1994, before Napster or the DCMA.
"The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
Re:Man, where's the "%" key...?
on
Virtual Keyboard
·
· Score: 2
> Great... if you can FULLY touch-type. What about the other 99.995% of us that can't?
Get your VR glasses to show you a keyboard?
(Though actually I think a chording device might work better than a flat board in that sort of context.)
> > only 0-9, a-z, dots, and it should end by two characters or com/net/org/edu
> No, you cannot enforce this. How about non-English character domain name?
What part of "new conventions like non-ascii characters" don't you understand?
> there's nothing quite so uncomfortable as watching a nude sex scene with your mom
A friend of mine is the daughter of an actress who appeared years ago in a TV series that has been repeated. Try watching your mom's sex scene with your mom....
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY01/q401 .h tm
"Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $25.30 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2001"
http://www.ibm.com/investor/data/irdacf.phtml
"Annual Results: Revenue (in millions): 2000 Year End: $88,396"
Which is fine if you are in the habit of frequently asking witnesses to note that you have your ATM cards with you just in case someone is creating a fraudulent transactions supposedly using it at the time. Most people aren't.
(Or the fake transaction clashing with a real transaction somewhere else, which requires luck and the person creating the fake transaction not being able to see the real ones).
> The banks can do the opposite. All ATMs are fittable with a camera,
Only relevent if the cash was actually taken out of an ATM. If the bank are trying to cover up a fraudulent transaction by an insider, which was the context under discussion, there will be no photo. But since not all ATMs actually have cameras taking pictures of every transaction, the banks failure to produce a photo doesn't help you prove the withdrawal didn't happen.
> While I believe in evolution, it is only a theory. Without distinct proof it would be dishonest to block opposing views.
In schools? No. No more than it would be dishonest to omit flat earth theories, or the idea that the sun rises in the west occasionally. Creationism might deserve a mention in comparative religion classes, but not in science.
Newton's theory of gravity is "only a theory". That doesn't mean gravity doesn't happen, it means he might have been wrong about some of the details - and indeed he was, as Einstein showed (similarly relativity is "only a theory").
Evolution is an observed fact. There are various theories about how it happens.
> you can prove you were not in the location you said you were in at the time the withdrawal
That doesn't help if the banks response is "then you must have given your PIN to someone else - our system is perfect so the money must have been withdrawn by someone with your PIN".
_You_ know they are lying, but how do you prove it?
Back to this attack, there are details at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/ and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mkb23/research.html
> Tipped over vending machines have killed more people in the past 10 years than Anthrax has killed in the past 50 years.
No one has been deliberately trying to infect people with anthrax for the past 50 years, so they are hardly relevent to the current situation. It's pretty obvious how to avoid being killed by a vending machine (don't tip large heavy objects towards yourself). It's not so obvious how to avoid anthrax. I can believe the US media have overreacted (it's a major story here in the UK, but not saturation coverage), but it isn't really in the same league as coke machines.
> we should get rid of cars because they cost more to maintain than bicycles
No, we should avoid making the huge number of car journeys that could easily be made by bike because it costs less, pollutes less, and kills fewer people. Which doesn't carry over to broadband vs. modem.
> they are $20,000. [...]
> The gas savings could pay for this car very quickly.
Only if you were planning on buying a new car anyway. My car (Subaru L-series) cost £750. It's nothing like as cool as a new Prius, but it's not a complete mess like my £250 cars (UK Ford Escort Mk2) were. My wife's Ka is newer (£3000), but that's still a lot of gas to save.
> the corner logos have been there for literally years before PVRs became popular.
I figured they were there in part so when you watched something you taped, you got a reminder of which channel had shown it in the first place (and to encourage you to buy a tape instead if you are going to watch multiple times, not just timeshift).
Windsurfers, small dinghys, and sea kayaks aren't, and are among the target applications. Some windsurfers and dinghy sailers absolutely want a boat ahead of its time so long as it's legal in their racing class (for values of "ahead of its time" that mean "faster", which this might not).
If he can really make a sail that instantly reefs to best suit conditions while retaining efficiency, there might be a market. I'm dubious, but it's possible.
Then again, your arguments certainly seem to apply to rigid wingsails. Boats like
http://www.linfield-yachts.com/lnfield-yachts/ze fy r43/technology.html exist, but are hardly common.
(See http://www.baloghsaildesigns.com/pro.html for an existing "batwing" (non-folding) kayak sail. Is it really any more elegant than the new one?)
> Well, if there can only be one license, it would have to be BSD (or something similar), because it allows more freedom with the way you can use the code than the GPL does.
That's exactly why BSD is less plausible than GPL as a stable one-and-only license.
In a world full of BSD code, you have the freedom to reuse it under a commercial or other non-BSD licence, and someone almost certainly will (and if they won't, why do you care about the freedom to do so?). In a world full of GPL code, you can only reuse it under GPL, so any non-GPL project has to start entirely from scratch.
> Swift? The same person who thought that eating children was a good way to end poverty
You haven't really grasped this "satirist" concept have you? He no more thought eating children was a good idea than he thought there was really a island floating in the air where people tried to bottle sunlight in cucumbers.
Slashdot Mirror
> I thought the English/Imperial unit of mass was the slug, not the pound.
The slug is a unit of mass, with the pound as the corresponding unit of force AND the pound is a unit of mass, with a poundal as the corresponding unit of force. Yes, the Imperial system does suck for science and engineering compared with the metric system.
In practice the pound gets used for both force and mass without too much confusion, just as people talk about their weight in kilograms.
> well the above sounds nice but it also sounds like a mess ... different types of data are all neatly partitioned
/bin was a symlink to either /sysv/bin or /bsd/bin depending on your environment (the default main system lived in /cmd, but it had fairly good Unix emulation), and you might be able to combine that idea with the union system.
That's why the Amiga has FONTS: LIBS: and so on.
LIBS: does the same sort of thing as LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but "dir FONTS:" works transparently, and "ls $LD_LIBRARY_PATH" doesn't.
Union filesystems don't do exactly the same thing, because different Amiga processes could have different assigns (just as different Unix processes can have different PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.). Apollo allowed environment variables in the filesystem, so e.g.
> But tomorrow we just might have a (sigh) Beowulf cluster of machines that could brute force a 256 length key in a matter of hours.
You'll need to get close to perfect reversible computation working first, or thermodynamic constraints mean you'll need the power output of superclusters of galaxies to power your machine.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~cvieri/reversible.html
Among other problems.
Working quantum computers would bring a 256 bit key down to the strength of a conventional 128 bit key, i.e. still safe for a very long time.
> ..at least, I *think* that's how you spell it...
Yes.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?demagogue
> Languages such as this are called prototype-based languages, and are generally seen as the successor to object-oriented programming. However, no prototype-based language has, to my knowledge, actually gone anywhere
4 4/ 104-5424839-3447106
The guy I knew who wrote one called it an exemplar-based language, which is probably clearer. He didn't necessarily think they were going to take over from class-based OOL, just that it suited his purposes well - the proprietary language within one particular company's product (where I gather it worked very well, but "general acceptance" was never a goal).
> probably LISP's CLOS
See "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". Worth a read even if you never expect to program in LISP, just for exposure to the ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/02626107
> Anyone who is *TRUELY* 1337 dosnt drink Starbucks *anything*.
Why isn't there an "off-topic but informative enough to be worthwhile" option?
> Nice try, but at the core of UCANT's rulings is the principle that Jane Surfer is a dribbling AOL-Time-Warner-Microserf who is too stupid to figure anything out and needs to be protected from her own idiocy.
I was Christmas shopping this weekend when I saw a toy Harry Potter broom. It had a fairly prominent notice on the box, repeated, saying "broom does not really fly".
> RIAA Represents the Recording Industry...
... didn't expect to get rich off royalties and licensing fees.
. html - was written in 1994, before Napster or the DCMA.
Exactly. http://riaa.com/About-Who.cfm
> It wasn't that long ago when artists
Most artists don't. Even relatively successful artists who thought they were going to make money sometimes find it doesn't work that way - the RIAA members make the money, the bands don't.
This article - http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic
"The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
> Great... if you can FULLY touch-type. What about the other 99.995% of us that can't?
Get your VR glasses to show you a keyboard?
(Though actually I think a chording device might work better than a flat board in that sort of context.)
> > only 0-9, a-z, dots, and it should end by two characters or com/net/org/edu
> No, you cannot enforce this. How about non-English character domain name?
What part of "new conventions like non-ascii characters" don't you understand?
> there's nothing quite so uncomfortable as watching a nude sex scene with your mom
A friend of mine is the daughter of an actress who appeared years ago in a TV series that has been repeated. Try watching your mom's sex scene with your mom....
Psion Series 7 might be relevent too.
. sh tml#series7
http://www.psion.com/series7/
Linux on Psion information:
http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/distributions
http://www.aleph1.co.uk/armlinux/pda/psion.html
> Many forget how immensely wealthy IBM is still
1 .h tm
Yep, revenue over 3 times Microsoft's.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY01/q40
"Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $25.30 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2001"
http://www.ibm.com/investor/data/irdacf.phtml
"Annual Results: Revenue (in millions): 2000 Year End: $88,396"
> It's akin to having a Drug Fuhrer
Or, closer, a Drug Kaiser. But poor name choice doesn't necessarily mean the post is going to involve an abuse of power.
> I can prove where all copies of my card were
Which is fine if you are in the habit of frequently asking witnesses to note that you have your ATM cards with you just in case someone is creating a fraudulent transactions supposedly using it at the time. Most people aren't.
(Or the fake transaction clashing with a real transaction somewhere else, which requires luck and the person creating the fake transaction not being able to see the real ones).
> The banks can do the opposite. All ATMs are fittable with a camera,
Only relevent if the cash was actually taken out of an ATM. If the bank are trying to cover up a fraudulent transaction by an insider, which was the context under discussion, there will be no photo. But since not all ATMs actually have cameras taking pictures of every transaction, the banks failure to produce a photo doesn't help you prove the withdrawal didn't happen.
> While I believe in evolution, it is only a theory. Without distinct proof it would be dishonest to block opposing views.
In schools? No. No more than it would be dishonest to omit flat earth theories, or the idea that the sun rises in the west occasionally. Creationism might deserve a mention in comparative religion classes, but not in science.
Newton's theory of gravity is "only a theory". That doesn't mean gravity doesn't happen, it means he might have been wrong about some of the details - and indeed he was, as Einstein showed (similarly relativity is "only a theory").
Evolution is an observed fact. There are various theories about how it happens.
> you can prove you were not in the location you said you were in at the time the withdrawal
That doesn't help if the banks response is "then you must have given your PIN to someone else - our system is perfect so the money must have been withdrawn by someone with your PIN".
_You_ know they are lying, but how do you prove it?
Back to this attack, there are details at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/ and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mkb23/research.html
> Tipped over vending machines have killed more people in the past 10 years than Anthrax has killed in the past 50 years.
No one has been deliberately trying to infect people with anthrax for the past 50 years, so they are hardly relevent to the current situation. It's pretty obvious how to avoid being killed by a vending machine (don't tip large heavy objects towards yourself). It's not so obvious how to avoid anthrax. I can believe the US media have overreacted (it's a major story here in the UK, but not saturation coverage), but it isn't really in the same league as coke machines.
> we should get rid of cars because they cost more to maintain than bicycles
No, we should avoid making the huge number of car journeys that could easily be made by bike because it costs less, pollutes less, and kills fewer people. Which doesn't carry over to broadband vs. modem.
> they are $20,000. [...]
> The gas savings could pay for this car very quickly.
Only if you were planning on buying a new car anyway. My car (Subaru L-series) cost £750. It's nothing like as cool as a new Prius, but it's not a complete mess like my £250 cars (UK Ford Escort Mk2) were. My wife's Ka is newer (£3000), but that's still a lot of gas to save.
> the corner logos have been there for literally years before PVRs became popular.
I figured they were there in part so when you watched something you taped, you got a reminder of which channel had shown it in the first place (and to encourage you to buy a tape instead if you are going to watch multiple times, not just timeshift).
> BTW my teacher who showed me that paper of Swift about the children. My teacher presented it as if Swift had been serious/insane when he wrote it.
/ Au thors/S/Swift,_Jonathan/Biography/
No, it was published in 1729.
http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Literature
He was serious, in that the paper wasn't supposed to be funny. It was supposed to make people think seriously about Irish poverty.
> Boats are purchased with 30-year loans
e fy r43/technology.html exist, but are hardly common.
Windsurfers, small dinghys, and sea kayaks aren't, and are among the target applications. Some windsurfers and dinghy sailers absolutely want a boat ahead of its time so long as it's legal in their racing class (for values of "ahead of its time" that mean "faster", which this might not).
If he can really make a sail that instantly reefs to best suit conditions while retaining efficiency, there might be a market. I'm dubious, but it's possible.
Then again, your arguments certainly seem to apply to rigid wingsails. Boats like
http://www.linfield-yachts.com/lnfield-yachts/z
(See http://www.baloghsaildesigns.com/pro.html for an existing "batwing" (non-folding) kayak sail. Is it really any more elegant than the new one?)
> Well, if there can only be one license, it would have to be BSD (or something similar), because it allows more freedom with the way you can use the code than the GPL does.
That's exactly why BSD is less plausible than GPL as a stable one-and-only license.
In a world full of BSD code, you have the freedom to reuse it under a commercial or other non-BSD licence, and someone almost certainly will (and if they won't, why do you care about the freedom to do so?). In a world full of GPL code, you can only reuse it under GPL, so any non-GPL project has to start entirely from scratch.
> Swift? The same person who thought that eating children was a good way to end poverty
You haven't really grasped this "satirist" concept have you? He no more thought eating children was a good idea than he thought there was really a island floating in the air where people tried to bottle sunlight in cucumbers.