You seem to have missed the point. I share the same view as the original poster and it has nothing to do with letting yourself die of cancer. Rather you do have a severe genetic predisposition towards cancer. Should you have children knowing that they will most likely die a horrible death from cancer?
I know a man who has diabetes and he has said that he will not have anymore children because he feels that it's irresponsible to pass on this defect to his children. That being said he got diabetes from not taking care of himself but that was his decision nevertheless. The fact is that if medicine continues along its current path where more and more people sucessfully reproduce when they could not of in the past and we continue our current practices we quickly find that the quality of the human race starts to decline at a startling rate. This means not only various disorders such as cancer, diabetes, or even bad eyesight become more frequent but that people won't be as intelligent and healthy in general. We have two options, one is genetic engineering which certainly isn't a possibility yet, and the other is some sort of natural selection which could mean that if you can't reproduce naturally maybe there is a good reason. Of course there are situations where it's a problem not really related to genetics or you could count on genetic engineering to become available in the future and fix up all those bad genes. This isn't an opinion I'm trying to present here, it's a fact, if we ignore evolution now it may just catch with us later with a vengance.
The course is open to 16 fourth-year students who must work under strict conditions in a secure lab cut off from Internet and cell- phones.
I can see the no internet connections, but no cell phones? I can't think of any viruses that travel over cell phone networks and I think it would be simple enough to ensure that they can't transfer anything to their cellphones so they can't email themselves programs. Also other than containing any viruses let loose in the lab I don't think you can do anything other than teach the students ethics so they don't let anything loose outside the lab. At the end of the day you have to count on responsible students, if you're teaching people you don't even trust with cellphones in the lab you're going to have serious problems.
BTW, I am self-taught. I find it almost scary how much more I know about computer science than the computer scientists do. I'll mention a simple datastructure (hashtable, b-tree, anything!) and watch the eyes of degree holders gloss over.
Where are these schools they're graduating from? I go to the University of Alberta and I learned hash tables in 1st year and b-trees this year and consider both to be fairly simple concepts. I believe the institution makes a huge difference. Normally I would guess that colleges and technical institutes would have a better change of turning out code monkeys than a real University but the people you mentioned have Masters degrees. That being said I think even here it might be possible to get through without knowing code. Past 1st year there aren't any lab exams and although they compare assignments I wonder if some people could get through by obsficating other peoples code. Either way what institutions did these people come from? It would be interesting to know the different quality of education that different places are giving.
For one SCO is deliberatly making this as big a FUD campaign as possible against Linux. Also SCO isn't disclosing the infringing code (possibly because there isn't any), this lawsuit is specifically aimed at damaging Linux as much as possible so that SCO can possibly get bought up or supported by microsoft. If the FSF didn't disclose what code they felt was infringing, turned to have a strong relationship with a competitor of OpenTV and dragged the preceedings out as long as possible ensuring maximum damage to OpenTV's reputation then I would agree and would be against the FSF. But right now these are two drastically different lawsuits and situations with very little in common other than the phrase "licensing violations".
A number of factors. One is well developed characters and huge plot archs. This really helps viewers relate to the characters and is one of the reasons why critics are some of the ones that mention Buffy "in the same breath as shows such as CSI, The West Wing and 24." (I personally prefer Buffy). On the same note the characters are very relatable and sympathetic and do noticably change with time depending on their circumstances. You get to see one character who started out as very nice and unassuming go off the deep end with magic and watch her slow recovery and attempt to control her powers (something that occurs over the entire season rather than a couple episodes) or someone getting left at the alter and the slow rebuilding of that relationship over time. Another character that starts out as pure evil slowly turns good over a number of seasons and is an extremely interesting character. The show has the characters change noticably but slowly over time like would happen in real life, this is something that shows rarely do (static characters == boring).
Humor is another big thing. There's always (not as much in this last season) an irreverent sense of humor that is very similar to the humor young people actually use, ie sexual references (but tasteful), lack of tact, embarassing situations to name a few.
Breaking of genre is another since it always tries to be origional. 2 great examples are "Hush" an episode that for the most part has no talking (won an Emmy I think) and "Once More with Feeling" a very well done musical episode. It was also possibly the first show on American network TV to develop a long-term lesbian relationship. It's easily one of the most origional shows on television.
Finally there's the fun involved dealing with fighting demons and magic and all that but the appeal there is obvious enough. My advice is try a couple more episodes if you feel like it (not from this last season though as this was the weakest season up till this last ep:), it becomes MUCH better once you learn the different characters. But in the end it just comes down to taste, I personally can't stand CSI and have never really cared for either of those other 2 either. Maybe you'll start to like it maybe you won't.
ps. Never saw Charmed so can't comment on that but in general I've heard Buffy is much better.
The show on the other hand in actually pretty good. If you want to know what happens when a studio is allowed to ruin something watch the movie. If you want to know what happens when they don't, watch the TV show.
I watched it and it ended as well as it could have. The problem with this season has been the lack of definition. The fact that the First appears as dead people means that it doesn't really seem to have any strong characters of its own. They tried to have intermediate baddies like the Seekers. the uber-vamp, and finally Caleb but none of them really developed. Also there was alot of ambiguity in what the First wanted to do other than kill all the potential slayers and do general evil, along with any clear idea about what they were actually fighting. Many of the episodes suffered because there was no clearly defined goal or threat. In addition there were a lot of writing problems earlier in the season like everyone leaving town in fear of an apocalypse that wasn't manifesting itself at all. Over all this has probably been the weakest season due to these problems. That being said Joss Whedon did a very good job of pulling it up for the last episode and bringing the show to a good conclusion. Not one of their best episode but certainly one of the best this season, either way regardless of what I say you'll watch it anyways for the closure if nothing else:)
I personally find KDE to be better than Explorer for me. Of course windows on a whole is still far more user friendly when one considers program instillation, learning curve, and generally things working. However if one were to consider the desktop environment of windows compared to KDE I do find KDE to be superior.
Configurability: KDE hands down, the Control Center simply allows so much to be configured, my system is currently set up to respond precisely how I want it. Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.
Look & Feel: Used to give it to Windows but now I think I like KDE better. Basically a function of familiarity of the system combined with actual looks, themability helps KDE here.
Usability: Both have a fairly comprehensive start menu. I'll discount the points I could give KDE for a greater amount of software initially since this isn't necessarily a long term effect as you'll fill both with software you need eventually. However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for. Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.
Either way overall I prefer KDE but after a certain level it comes down to familiarity. I used to use Windows alot and prefered that but recently I've almost entirely switched over to Linux, just found that the things I did alot were just as good and easy in Linux. Actually it's mostly multiple desktops that gets me. Frankly Gaim still isn't up to par with Trillian and Evolution isn't as nice as Eudora but the entire environment is nicer to work in. But either way that isn't directly pretaining to the Window Manager.
Is that after about 3 months of running only Linux I tried running windows XP again for a week. At the end of the week it was still only 70% done downloading all the piled up updates. Either way I'm back in Linux:)
If I recall correctly here in Canada at least it's illegal to sell your product below cost with the purpose of driving your competitors out of buisness. Now this is also traditionally very hard to prove expecially when you take annual licensing costs and support into the equation, and I guess the competitors would have to be some of the distro vendors (Redhat, Mandrake, etc.). Do other nations (US and European nations) have similar laws that might come into play here?
A few years ago, BEFORE the Episode 1 came out, we named our soccer team "The Jedi". I played fullback and during one game I was having a particularly easy time thwarting the the opposing teams attempts to get by me. Finally one play I miscalculated and a player with the ball slipped by me and started to rush up the field, about 2 seconds after he got by he collapsed with a leg cramp and had to roll himself off the field. For the rest of the season my team was convinced I had used The Force:)
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.
Sure they'll need some basic programming to be made autonomous but judging from a lot of what I've seen of professional soccer these robots should be able to give a human team a pretty good game!
The others look like office contacts but this looks like the address for a residence. The office contact should be sufficient for leting them know about your feelings on the issue. Yes I know that we all hate spammers and lawyers who represent spammers seem like too good a target to be true but we should be careful that we don't cross the line. Yes they may deserve it, both spammers and lawyers, but should we really stoop to their level with harrassment and even death threats?
I have to say that I don't fully mind the "spamming" of the spammers themselves. They knew what they were getting into and know that what they're doing is wrong (even if they don't admit it), they're not quite tobbaco exec brand of evil but they're still pretty bad. The lawyers however are just doing a job and like it or not everybody deserves to be represented. Now if they are doing this dishonestly than I'm sure there are steps that can be taken but be careful what we do in the meanwhile. If won't help our cause if we come across as a bunch of juvinile trolls lashing out indiscriminatly at anyone who happens to be associated with those we don't like. We can leave that to the Ashcofts and the mob, lets maintain perspective and not become the bad guys.
Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
The computer was never actually hacked... hmm cracked... err broken into... was not taken over by a human remote attacker with their own computer trying to gain unauthorized privaleges on the machine! So we have conclusivly proven that six monkeys are more effective than MSCAs at keeping a computer intact^H^H^Hsecure!
Everyone's complaining that the headline and posting was incorrect. But notice
South Africa Bans Plastic Bags
Technically it's still correct! Sure someone may assume that it means all plastic bags but it can just as easily mean all bags below a certain thickness. It's not/.s fault that you're making ungrounded assumptions. Come on it's just like CNN saying they're giving unbiased reports, it's your fault if you assume the unbiased reports they're given are on anything more important than the availability of napkins at McDonalds or that with Microsoft's "secure" systems "secure" doesn't refer to hackers but in fact to giant sequoias. Once again it's your fault if you assume anything else.
They need to include an option to not include bounds checking in arrays. Right now Java is becoming very popular in physics because it's easy to use and portable across systems. I know a lot of people in physics who program in Java and I've worked the past two summers as a summer student writing code for physicists. The biggest complaint both they and I have in the bounds checking it does. It's a great option for debugging, testing, and for running most applications. But when you are running a large program the overhead of bounds checks in arrays can be prohibative. Ideally I would like either a runtime or compiler option where you can specify to run it without bounds checks. Obviously this wouldn't be a good idea for a great many apps but it would be extremely useful when running an array heavy application that takes hours or days to complete.
Geek: wow, aren't you timothy? you stopped the Mozilla crashing page, right? how did you do it?
timothy: it was simple really. Web pages have a preset "bandwidth limit", once they reach this limit, they shut down. knowing their weakness, i just sent wave after wave of our own browsers into view them, once they crashed them all, they were effectively shut down.
Does Bill Gates know that Linus Torvalds works for Transmeta?
Well he does now ya big tool! You know the big G reads./ regularily, who do you think started the goatse trolls (Ballmer does most of the work but Bill's in it too). Well there goes the approval and AMD can't expect squat from M$. Thanks a lot!!
This Can't Be Right!
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I mean SCO seems allright now. And besides I can't imagine that anyone would stoop so low as to deliberatly overload their servers. Besides just look at their site. Which is running so well as I look at it now. It would truly be a shame if their servers happended to get./ed, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have missed the point. I share the same view as the original poster and it has nothing to do with letting yourself die of cancer. Rather you do have a severe genetic predisposition towards cancer. Should you have children knowing that they will most likely die a horrible death from cancer?
I know a man who has diabetes and he has said that he will not have anymore children because he feels that it's irresponsible to pass on this defect to his children. That being said he got diabetes from not taking care of himself but that was his decision nevertheless. The fact is that if medicine continues along its current path where more and more people sucessfully reproduce when they could not of in the past and we continue our current practices we quickly find that the quality of the human race starts to decline at a startling rate. This means not only various disorders such as cancer, diabetes, or even bad eyesight become more frequent but that people won't be as intelligent and healthy in general. We have two options, one is genetic engineering which certainly isn't a possibility yet, and the other is some sort of natural selection which could mean that if you can't reproduce naturally maybe there is a good reason. Of course there are situations where it's a problem not really related to genetics or you could count on genetic engineering to become available in the future and fix up all those bad genes. This isn't an opinion I'm trying to present here, it's a fact, if we ignore evolution now it may just catch with us later with a vengance.
please come by and take a look
/. effect!
Obviously someone who does not fully understand the
The course is open to 16 fourth-year students who must work under strict conditions in a secure lab cut off from Internet and cell- phones.
I can see the no internet connections, but no cell phones? I can't think of any viruses that travel over cell phone networks and I think it would be simple enough to ensure that they can't transfer anything to their cellphones so they can't email themselves programs. Also other than containing any viruses let loose in the lab I don't think you can do anything other than teach the students ethics so they don't let anything loose outside the lab. At the end of the day you have to count on responsible students, if you're teaching people you don't even trust with cellphones in the lab you're going to have serious problems.
BTW, I am self-taught. I find it almost scary how much more I know about computer science than the computer scientists do. I'll mention a simple datastructure (hashtable, b-tree, anything!) and watch the eyes of degree holders gloss over.
Where are these schools they're graduating from? I go to the University of Alberta and I learned hash tables in 1st year and b-trees this year and consider both to be fairly simple concepts. I believe the institution makes a huge difference. Normally I would guess that colleges and technical institutes would have a better change of turning out code monkeys than a real University but the people you mentioned have Masters degrees. That being said I think even here it might be possible to get through without knowing code. Past 1st year there aren't any lab exams and although they compare assignments I wonder if some people could get through by obsficating other peoples code. Either way what institutions did these people come from? It would be interesting to know the different quality of education that different places are giving.
Seriously, what is the difference?
For one SCO is deliberatly making this as big a FUD campaign as possible against Linux. Also SCO isn't disclosing the infringing code (possibly because there isn't any), this lawsuit is specifically aimed at damaging Linux as much as possible so that SCO can possibly get bought up or supported by microsoft. If the FSF didn't disclose what code they felt was infringing, turned to have a strong relationship with a competitor of OpenTV and dragged the preceedings out as long as possible ensuring maximum damage to OpenTV's reputation then I would agree and would be against the FSF. But right now these are two drastically different lawsuits and situations with very little in common other than the phrase "licensing violations".
A number of factors. One is well developed characters and huge plot archs. This really helps viewers relate to the characters and is one of the reasons why critics are some of the ones that mention Buffy "in the same breath as shows such as CSI, The West Wing and 24." (I personally prefer Buffy). On the same note the characters are very relatable and sympathetic and do noticably change with time depending on their circumstances. You get to see one character who started out as very nice and unassuming go off the deep end with magic and watch her slow recovery and attempt to control her powers (something that occurs over the entire season rather than a couple episodes) or someone getting left at the alter and the slow rebuilding of that relationship over time. Another character that starts out as pure evil slowly turns good over a number of seasons and is an extremely interesting character. The show has the characters change noticably but slowly over time like would happen in real life, this is something that shows rarely do (static characters == boring).
Humor is another big thing. There's always (not as much in this last season) an irreverent sense of humor that is very similar to the humor young people actually use, ie sexual references (but tasteful), lack of tact, embarassing situations to name a few.
Breaking of genre is another since it always tries to be origional. 2 great examples are "Hush" an episode that for the most part has no talking (won an Emmy I think) and "Once More with Feeling" a very well done musical episode. It was also possibly the first show on American network TV to develop a long-term lesbian relationship. It's easily one of the most origional shows on television.
Finally there's the fun involved dealing with fighting demons and magic and all that but the appeal there is obvious enough. My advice is try a couple more episodes if you feel like it (not from this last season though as this was the weakest season up till this last ep:), it becomes MUCH better once you learn the different characters. But in the end it just comes down to taste, I personally can't stand CSI and have never really cared for either of those other 2 either. Maybe you'll start to like it maybe you won't.
ps. Never saw Charmed so can't comment on that but in general I've heard Buffy is much better.
I haven't even seen the MOVIE yet...
Consider youself lucky.
The show on the other hand in actually pretty good. If you want to know what happens when a studio is allowed to ruin something watch the movie. If you want to know what happens when they don't, watch the TV show.
I watched it and it ended as well as it could have. The problem with this season has been the lack of definition. The fact that the First appears as dead people means that it doesn't really seem to have any strong characters of its own. They tried to have intermediate baddies like the Seekers. the uber-vamp, and finally Caleb but none of them really developed. Also there was alot of ambiguity in what the First wanted to do other than kill all the potential slayers and do general evil, along with any clear idea about what they were actually fighting. Many of the episodes suffered because there was no clearly defined goal or threat. In addition there were a lot of writing problems earlier in the season like everyone leaving town in fear of an apocalypse that wasn't manifesting itself at all. Over all this has probably been the weakest season due to these problems. That being said Joss Whedon did a very good job of pulling it up for the last episode and bringing the show to a good conclusion. Not one of their best episode but certainly one of the best this season, either way regardless of what I say you'll watch it anyways for the closure if nothing else :)
I personally find KDE to be better than Explorer for me. Of course windows on a whole is still far more user friendly when one considers program instillation, learning curve, and generally things working. However if one were to consider the desktop environment of windows compared to KDE I do find KDE to be superior.
Configurability: KDE hands down, the Control Center simply allows so much to be configured, my system is currently set up to respond precisely how I want it. Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.
Look & Feel: Used to give it to Windows but now I think I like KDE better. Basically a function of familiarity of the system combined with actual looks, themability helps KDE here.
Usability: Both have a fairly comprehensive start menu. I'll discount the points I could give KDE for a greater amount of software initially since this isn't necessarily a long term effect as you'll fill both with software you need eventually. However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for. Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.
Either way overall I prefer KDE but after a certain level it comes down to familiarity. I used to use Windows alot and prefered that but recently I've almost entirely switched over to Linux, just found that the things I did alot were just as good and easy in Linux. Actually it's mostly multiple desktops that gets me. Frankly Gaim still isn't up to par with Trillian and Evolution isn't as nice as Eudora but the entire environment is nicer to work in. But either way that isn't directly pretaining to the Window Manager.
Is that after about 3 months of running only Linux I tried running windows XP again for a week. At the end of the week it was still only 70% done downloading all the piled up updates. Either way I'm back in Linux :)
If I recall correctly here in Canada at least it's illegal to sell your product below cost with the purpose of driving your competitors out of buisness. Now this is also traditionally very hard to prove expecially when you take annual licensing costs and support into the equation, and I guess the competitors would have to be some of the distro vendors (Redhat, Mandrake, etc.). Do other nations (US and European nations) have similar laws that might come into play here?
A few years ago, BEFORE the Episode 1 came out, we named our soccer team "The Jedi". I played fullback and during one game I was having a particularly easy time thwarting the the opposing teams attempts to get by me. Finally one play I miscalculated and a player with the ball slipped by me and started to rush up the field, about 2 seconds after he got by he collapsed with a leg cramp and had to roll himself off the field. For the rest of the season my team was convinced I had used The Force :)
How else can you explain all the Americans who can't figgure out where the heck Canada is! And yes I'm Canadian :)
p.s. This isn't the country you're looking for.
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.
Sure they'll need some basic programming to be made autonomous but judging from a lot of what I've seen of professional soccer these robots should be able to give a human team a pretty good game!
The others look like office contacts but this looks like the address for a residence. The office contact should be sufficient for leting them know about your feelings on the issue. Yes I know that we all hate spammers and lawyers who represent spammers seem like too good a target to be true but we should be careful that we don't cross the line. Yes they may deserve it, both spammers and lawyers, but should we really stoop to their level with harrassment and even death threats?
I have to say that I don't fully mind the "spamming" of the spammers themselves. They knew what they were getting into and know that what they're doing is wrong (even if they don't admit it), they're not quite tobbaco exec brand of evil but they're still pretty bad. The lawyers however are just doing a job and like it or not everybody deserves to be represented. Now if they are doing this dishonestly than I'm sure there are steps that can be taken but be careful what we do in the meanwhile. If won't help our cause if we come across as a bunch of juvinile trolls lashing out indiscriminatly at anyone who happens to be associated with those we don't like. We can leave that to the Ashcofts and the mob, lets maintain perspective and not become the bad guys.
Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
The computer was never actually hacked... hmm cracked... err broken into... was not taken over by a human remote attacker with their own computer trying to gain unauthorized privaleges on the machine! So we have conclusivly proven that six monkeys are more effective than MSCAs at keeping a computer intact^H^H^Hsecure!
Everyone's complaining that the headline and posting was incorrect. But notice
/.s fault that you're making ungrounded assumptions. Come on it's just like CNN saying they're giving unbiased reports, it's your fault if you assume the unbiased reports they're given are on anything more important than the availability of napkins at McDonalds or that with Microsoft's "secure" systems "secure" doesn't refer to hackers but in fact to giant sequoias. Once again it's your fault if you assume anything else.
South Africa Bans Plastic Bags
Technically it's still correct! Sure someone may assume that it means all plastic bags but it can just as easily mean all bags below a certain thickness. It's not
Whoa! I didn't know /. got a new Editor!
They need to include an option to not include bounds checking in arrays. Right now Java is becoming very popular in physics because it's easy to use and portable across systems. I know a lot of people in physics who program in Java and I've worked the past two summers as a summer student writing code for physicists. The biggest complaint both they and I have in the bounds checking it does. It's a great option for debugging, testing, and for running most applications. But when you are running a large program the overhead of bounds checks in arrays can be prohibative. Ideally I would like either a runtime or compiler option where you can specify to run it without bounds checks. Obviously this wouldn't be a good idea for a great many apps but it would be extremely useful when running an array heavy application that takes hours or days to complete.
Geek: wow, aren't you timothy? you stopped the Mozilla crashing page, right? how did you do it?
timothy: it was simple really. Web pages have a preset "bandwidth limit", once they reach this limit, they shut down. knowing their weakness, i just sent wave after wave of our own browsers into view them, once they crashed them all, they were effectively shut down.
That's good
But patenting a fairly obvious practice is inherintly evil
That's bad
He's also a big figure in the on-line porn industry
That's good
He also has a method for making audio ads that can't be shut off
That's bad
But he has a patent on that too which means most sites won't use them
That's good
He also has a lot of other patents pending
That's bad
Can I go now?
Does Bill Gates know that Linus Torvalds works for Transmeta?
./ regularily, who do you think started the goatse trolls (Ballmer does most of the work but Bill's in it too). Well there goes the approval and AMD can't expect squat from M$.
Well he does now ya big tool! You know the big G reads
Thanks a lot!!
Actually that should be
GNUooooooooooooooo!
I mean SCO seems allright now. And besides I can't imagine that anyone would stoop so low as to deliberatly overload their servers. Besides just look at their site. Which is running so well as I look at it now. It would truly be a shame if their servers happended to get ./ed, wouldn't it?
Just make sure it isn't somethnig you'll have to call up in the middle of a presentation, could take a lot of explaining...