After you die, there should be a mechanism in the spacecraft to expose you directly and slowly to the vacuum of space. You should be frozen and preserved as best as you can be. Then the ship should gently deposit you on the surface of Mars as intact as you could possibly be. Why?
What if there is an event on Earth like the flame deluge from A Canticle for Leibowitz? A nuclear event where 99% of the world is destroyed and thousands of years later we rediscover science?
Just imagine how surprised they will be to find a human skull on Mars.
This is where it begins, friends. This battle is the beginning of Patent Armageddon.
There is a reason why companies refer to their patent portfolios as a "war chest". Mutually Assured Destruction, kept in reserve to keep the other guy from trying anything. But now? It's an active war. This is where it begins.
The next five years are going to be interesting, if this escalates the way I think it will.
Anything that moves the tech forward is worthwhile.
NASA developed a lot of tech specifically to get us to the moon, and along the way everyone else (who isn't going to the moon) gets to benefit from the advances.
This is like that. The goal was to get Obama elected. But the breakthroughs are something that everyone else can benefit from now that they're here.
I'm sitting here with my newborn daughter. And a couple of weeks ago we had this exact same ultrasound done. They handed me a picture that looked just like a single frame of this animation.
And I couldn't help but think, "She looks like an end level boss from DOOM." Is it just me? These ultrasound pictures are somehow profoundly creepy. I could easily imagine something looking like that howling and throwing gigantic missiles at me.
Really, it does what you're looking for. Here's an example.
I have an old scanner and recently moved to Windows 7. No driver available. I'm hosed, right? Have to buy a new scanner. Or find technical docs, the DDK and write my own driver (painful, time consuming, and awful).
VMware to the rescue!
Make a Windows XP virtual machine, load XP scanner driver into it. Connect scanner, use VMware Player to move the USB device to my VM. Bingo! Works like a charm.
Unless your program is very exotic requiring access to something VMware doesn't emulate, like the PCI bus or some such, you should be good to go. And if your program does bang around on non-emulated hardware you really need to consider just using the OS it was created for. Get a legacy system to run it. And use VNC to get to your desktop on your shiny new x64 system.
It's something Republicans like. I had the concept explained to me once. Something about how there are a lot of social programs designed to help people, but some are less effective than the others. Those are the ones you cut so you can replace them with ones that work better. At least I believe that's the gist.
I picked that one because it's a Republican idea I don't mind.
Pick someone with a tax plan that adds up, low spending, little war-lust, and who understands what a disaster the "personhood" amendment would be, and then you'll have a race.
Someone like that would be branded a screaming liberal by the Tea Partiers and Fox News - and never get the nomination. You need to start your cure a few paces back from that position.
Clean your house.
Ditch the Fox news. Dump the Tea Party. Stop allowing these fundamentalists to tell you what's what. Take your party back. Push for your values (the good ones) like small government. No political party that wants to criminalize abortions can possibly with a straight face tell you that they are for small government.
Stop talking about rape. Just stop it.
Embrace diversity. There is more to the world than 50-something Caucasian southern Baptists. You want to win? Start by representing America, not just your favorite part of it. And by that I don't mean "fake it to get votes", I mean tell the other half of America how you can change the world for the better for them.
And pick better role models. Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Rush Limbaugh are all morons. Sorry, but they are. And we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher. Find some intelligent people for your side. Start with Colin Powell and build from there. Ditch the ones you've got. They're not helping.
Stop with the anti-intellectualism. Science is real. It's why we can read this on the internet. If you had to pick a single reason why the Republicans lost, I feel it is best contained in this graphic. That's your problem in a nutshell right there. Fix that.
Fix your house, dust yourselves off, and come back as someone we can respect and even occasionally admire (which hasn't been since Reagan), and then you guys will see some results.
1) Why should I have to download plugins just to get something working as well as it was before they "upgraded" it? And how exactly is a person on day one of the new interface supposed to know that?
2) And yes, apparently there are ways to get the new interface working. Plugins, middle clicks, Ctrl T. You know what? I didn't spend enough time using it to find out. I just clicked the icon and it didn't give me a second terminal (like it should) and said "you know what, this sucks". Who wants to waste time learning some dippy new interface? Especially when you've got work to do and really, that's all you want to do - get your work done.
Will they fork, or will they stick with the dippy new interface? Because I have to say I tried the new interface. And I find it doesn't help me much. First thing I do on a new system is to "sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback" and login under the old system.
Oh, and don't think I'm in curmudgeon mode and simply don't like new things. I really tried to like the new system, I really did. But having to right click on Terminal and select "open new session" to get a second shell up is ANNOYING AS FUCK. Come on guys! You know that's not how we work. If you don't have half a dozen command prompts up you're not busy. Why make it harder to do that?
So for me, this is the end of Gnome. I need something that helps me work, not gets in the way of work. I like the system but if you ditch the "classic" aka "useful" mode, well sorry. Gotta go find something else.
Yeah, pretty much. But remember that in a modern OS it's not just your task that is running. The drivers are all running, the virus checker, firewall...there is a lot of code running in the background. It would be nice if all of that was running on some core that your program isn't running on. You can get benefits of parallelism from the os as well as application design.
And Moore's law is a measure of potential. If the programmers are not up to the job, the law still holds. The machine is in fact faster. Whether you and I can fully take advantage of that isn't part of the law. It just says the machines are more capable, and they are. It's up to the programmers to take advantage of that, but the law still holds.
It is just expressing itself differently as we begin to hit the wall with process size decreases and speed increases. If wattage of the cpu goes down, you can pack more cores into the same area. Computing power is still going up.
1) Do you think that makes us any less responsible? If you were to bomb Kansas halfway to hell and remove their infrastructure, destroy their food and water distribution the same thing would happen. It wouldn't be the fault of the people living there. It would be the fault of the people dropping the bombs.
2) Let's say you are right though, and let's say the number is hugely inflated. Let's say we are only directly responsible for one tenth the number. That still means we've done 37/10=3.7 times worse to them than 9/11.
No. We don't get out of it that easily by saying crime went up and therefore we aren't responsible. We are.
You'll find that a good base number for civilian deaths in Iraq is a little over 100,000. That seems to be the average agreed upon number. We'll go with the AP number, 110,600 deaths. AP is reliable, and it's a decent average for the most conservative estimates for loss of life. Now note the time period. "March 2003 to April 2009." That's 6 years and one month. Are you with me so far?
On 9/11, the terrorist attacks accounted for the loss of 2,977 lives. Now let's look at those numbers and see what they mean.
110600 / 2977 is 37.15. So what that means is that we have killed 37 times more civilians than the 9/11 attackers did. The 9/11 victims and the civilians in Iraq are alike - all innocent people that did not deserve to die.
March 2003 to April 2009 is a period spanning 6 years and 1 month. That's 73 months. And 73 / 37.15 is 1.96. That's almost exactly two months. That means that what we've done to Iraq is like a 9/11 style attack every two months for over six years. Remember how pissed off we were after 9/11? Imagine that every two months for six years running.
110,000 families missing a loved one. A child they raised, a mother they loved, a father that will never come home. 110,000 families that have a good solid reason to absolutely poisonously passionately hate our guts.
My point is that it absolutely matters who is President. Decisions will be made that will affect your safety directly. You need someone at the helm that makes good decisions.
Thank you Sweden. It's nice to know that when my generation hands off the torch, there will be some people available that will know what to do with it.
In America the situation is different, or at least it appears to be. I've been a part of the interview process on the hiring side. A lot of kids we get are fantastic on big iron Java and website back ends and SQL, but really couldn't program an 8 bit processor to do anything. It worries me. You ask them how a keyboard works and they panic. They don't know.
Ok age jokes aside, honestly I worry just as much about younger programmers. They have less of an idea where it all comes from. Not many graduates these days are coding in assembly. Or even C anymore which is pretty much the mother language to all other languages.
Drivers and other down-to-the-metal stuff aren't written in Java. Yes, I know that with Google you can find me an experimental counterexample. I know that. But the system you are using right now? It'll all be assembly, C and maybe a little C++. And you're most likely not using a browser written in Java or Python or C#.
You know, some years ago I considered going back to college and getting a CompSci degree. When they said that Java was their main language I decided not to. I like Java, write in it, and I plan to get whatever Oracle is calling the SCJP this week someday soon. I'm not dismissive of any of the new technologies. I like them. They are great at the problems they are designed to solve.
But there is something to be said for writing assembly and manually turning on an MMU unit, just once. You can know about computers, or you can know computers. We're missing something by shifting the educational focus to the higher level languages.
I don't think Obama knew how polarizing of a figure he would be. Republicans never like a Democrat, but they positively hate Obama. He didn't anticipate the lengths they would go to make his presidency look weak. Like blocking the Veterans Jobs Bill.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to say that military spending is ok and shouldn't be defunded, start two wars under the last Republican president, and then block a bill to take the survivors of those very same wars and deny them aid. And then claim Obama isn't keeping his promises!
It honestly boggles me how anyone can vote for these people.
I'd call it a good start. Let them catch their breath, think their ordeal is over... then give them 10 hours of They're Taking The Hobbits To Isengard.
There is already a universal virus killer in development. And it doesn't target the virus. Instead it targets the cell hosting the virus. When a cell is virus infected it makes a specific protein, a "help I'm infected" RNA flag.
DRACO is two proteins bound together. When it sees the "help I'm infected" RNA, it breaks in two. Half of DRACO binds to it. The other half is a protein messenger that triggers apoptosis - cell death.
The end result is that any cell that has a virus in it commits suicide before the virus can use the cell to reproduce.
It's nonfiction but still might scratch the same itch. It's told from a storyteller's point of view discussing the personalities and early discoveries in the field, the stubborn resistance encountered, all that. It's a good story as well as being a good book about math.
Slashdot Mirror
After you die, there should be a mechanism in the spacecraft to expose you directly and slowly to the vacuum of space. You should be frozen and preserved as best as you can be. Then the ship should gently deposit you on the surface of Mars as intact as you could possibly be. Why?
What if there is an event on Earth like the flame deluge from A Canticle for Leibowitz? A nuclear event where 99% of the world is destroyed and thousands of years later we rediscover science?
Just imagine how surprised they will be to find a human skull on Mars.
This is where it begins, friends. This battle is the beginning of Patent Armageddon.
There is a reason why companies refer to their patent portfolios as a "war chest". Mutually Assured Destruction, kept in reserve to keep the other guy from trying anything. But now? It's an active war. This is where it begins.
The next five years are going to be interesting, if this escalates the way I think it will.
Anything that moves the tech forward is worthwhile.
NASA developed a lot of tech specifically to get us to the moon, and along the way everyone else (who isn't going to the moon) gets to benefit from the advances.
This is like that. The goal was to get Obama elected. But the breakthroughs are something that everyone else can benefit from now that they're here.
It may be needed, it may not. I am assured she is a beautiful baby, but I think all babies look like Winston Churchill.
I'm sitting here with my newborn daughter. And a couple of weeks ago we had this exact same ultrasound done. They handed me a picture that looked just like a single frame of this animation.
And I couldn't help but think, "She looks like an end level boss from DOOM." Is it just me? These ultrasound pictures are somehow profoundly creepy. I could easily imagine something looking like that howling and throwing gigantic missiles at me.
Really, it does what you're looking for. Here's an example.
I have an old scanner and recently moved to Windows 7. No driver available. I'm hosed, right? Have to buy a new scanner. Or find technical docs, the DDK and write my own driver (painful, time consuming, and awful).
VMware to the rescue!
Make a Windows XP virtual machine, load XP scanner driver into it. Connect scanner, use VMware Player to move the USB device to my VM. Bingo! Works like a charm.
Unless your program is very exotic requiring access to something VMware doesn't emulate, like the PCI bus or some such, you should be good to go. And if your program does bang around on non-emulated hardware you really need to consider just using the OS it was created for. Get a legacy system to run it. And use VNC to get to your desktop on your shiny new x64 system.
It's something Republicans like. I had the concept explained to me once. Something about how there are a lot of social programs designed to help people, but some are less effective than the others. Those are the ones you cut so you can replace them with ones that work better. At least I believe that's the gist.
I picked that one because it's a Republican idea I don't mind.
Pick someone with a tax plan that adds up, low spending, little war-lust, and who understands what a disaster the "personhood" amendment would be, and then you'll have a race.
Someone like that would be branded a screaming liberal by the Tea Partiers and Fox News - and never get the nomination. You need to start your cure a few paces back from that position.
Clean your house.
Ditch the Fox news. Dump the Tea Party. Stop allowing these fundamentalists to tell you what's what. Take your party back. Push for your values (the good ones) like small government. No political party that wants to criminalize abortions can possibly with a straight face tell you that they are for small government.
Stop talking about rape. Just stop it.
Embrace diversity. There is more to the world than 50-something Caucasian southern Baptists. You want to win? Start by representing America, not just your favorite part of it. And by that I don't mean "fake it to get votes", I mean tell the other half of America how you can change the world for the better for them.
And pick better role models. Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Rush Limbaugh are all morons. Sorry, but they are. And we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher. Find some intelligent people for your side. Start with Colin Powell and build from there. Ditch the ones you've got. They're not helping.
Stop with the anti-intellectualism. Science is real. It's why we can read this on the internet. If you had to pick a single reason why the Republicans lost, I feel it is best contained in this graphic. That's your problem in a nutshell right there. Fix that.
Fix your house, dust yourselves off, and come back as someone we can respect and even occasionally admire (which hasn't been since Reagan), and then you guys will see some results.
1) Why should I have to download plugins just to get something working as well as it was before they "upgraded" it? And how exactly is a person on day one of the new interface supposed to know that?
2) And yes, apparently there are ways to get the new interface working. Plugins, middle clicks, Ctrl T. You know what? I didn't spend enough time using it to find out. I just clicked the icon and it didn't give me a second terminal (like it should) and said "you know what, this sucks". Who wants to waste time learning some dippy new interface? Especially when you've got work to do and really, that's all you want to do - get your work done.
Will they fork, or will they stick with the dippy new interface? Because I have to say I tried the new interface. And I find it doesn't help me much. First thing I do on a new system is to "sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback" and login under the old system.
Oh, and don't think I'm in curmudgeon mode and simply don't like new things. I really tried to like the new system, I really did. But having to right click on Terminal and select "open new session" to get a second shell up is ANNOYING AS FUCK. Come on guys! You know that's not how we work. If you don't have half a dozen command prompts up you're not busy. Why make it harder to do that?
So for me, this is the end of Gnome. I need something that helps me work, not gets in the way of work. I like the system but if you ditch the "classic" aka "useful" mode, well sorry. Gotta go find something else.
Yeah, pretty much. But remember that in a modern OS it's not just your task that is running. The drivers are all running, the virus checker, firewall...there is a lot of code running in the background. It would be nice if all of that was running on some core that your program isn't running on. You can get benefits of parallelism from the os as well as application design.
And Moore's law is a measure of potential. If the programmers are not up to the job, the law still holds. The machine is in fact faster. Whether you and I can fully take advantage of that isn't part of the law. It just says the machines are more capable, and they are. It's up to the programmers to take advantage of that, but the law still holds.
It is just expressing itself differently as we begin to hit the wall with process size decreases and speed increases. If wattage of the cpu goes down, you can pack more cores into the same area. Computing power is still going up.
Two points.
1) Do you think that makes us any less responsible? If you were to bomb Kansas halfway to hell and remove their infrastructure, destroy their food and water distribution the same thing would happen. It wouldn't be the fault of the people living there. It would be the fault of the people dropping the bombs.
2) Let's say you are right though, and let's say the number is hugely inflated. Let's say we are only directly responsible for one tenth the number. That still means we've done 37/10=3.7 times worse to them than 9/11.
No. We don't get out of it that easily by saying crime went up and therefore we aren't responsible. We are.
I don't think anything that has been done has actually added any significant safety.
How about ending our presence in Iraq? Do you think that has anything to do with your safety? It does. Allow me to explain.
Check out this wiki page. Give it a good once-over, then let's talk about the contents.
You'll find that a good base number for civilian deaths in Iraq is a little over 100,000. That seems to be the average agreed upon number. We'll go with the AP number, 110,600 deaths. AP is reliable, and it's a decent average for the most conservative estimates for loss of life. Now note the time period. "March 2003 to April 2009." That's 6 years and one month. Are you with me so far?
On 9/11, the terrorist attacks accounted for the loss of 2,977 lives. Now let's look at those numbers and see what they mean.
110600 / 2977 is 37.15. So what that means is that we have killed 37 times more civilians than the 9/11 attackers did. The 9/11 victims and the civilians in Iraq are alike - all innocent people that did not deserve to die.
March 2003 to April 2009 is a period spanning 6 years and 1 month. That's 73 months. And 73 / 37.15 is 1.96. That's almost exactly two months. That means that what we've done to Iraq is like a 9/11 style attack every two months for over six years. Remember how pissed off we were after 9/11? Imagine that every two months for six years running.
110,000 families missing a loved one. A child they raised, a mother they loved, a father that will never come home. 110,000 families that have a good solid reason to absolutely poisonously passionately hate our guts.
Still feel safe? It took only 19 guys to carry out the 9/11 attacks.
My point is that it absolutely matters who is President. Decisions will be made that will affect your safety directly. You need someone at the helm that makes good decisions.
It matters. A lot.
Thank you Sweden. It's nice to know that when my generation hands off the torch, there will be some people available that will know what to do with it.
In America the situation is different, or at least it appears to be. I've been a part of the interview process on the hiring side. A lot of kids we get are fantastic on big iron Java and website back ends and SQL, but really couldn't program an 8 bit processor to do anything. It worries me. You ask them how a keyboard works and they panic. They don't know.
Ok age jokes aside, honestly I worry just as much about younger programmers. They have less of an idea where it all comes from. Not many graduates these days are coding in assembly. Or even C anymore which is pretty much the mother language to all other languages.
Drivers and other down-to-the-metal stuff aren't written in Java. Yes, I know that with Google you can find me an experimental counterexample. I know that. But the system you are using right now? It'll all be assembly, C and maybe a little C++. And you're most likely not using a browser written in Java or Python or C#.
You know, some years ago I considered going back to college and getting a CompSci degree. When they said that Java was their main language I decided not to. I like Java, write in it, and I plan to get whatever Oracle is calling the SCJP this week someday soon. I'm not dismissive of any of the new technologies. I like them. They are great at the problems they are designed to solve.
But there is something to be said for writing assembly and manually turning on an MMU unit, just once. You can know about computers, or you can know computers. We're missing something by shifting the educational focus to the higher level languages.
I don't think Obama knew how polarizing of a figure he would be. Republicans never like a Democrat, but they positively hate Obama. He didn't anticipate the lengths they would go to make his presidency look weak. Like blocking the Veterans Jobs Bill.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to say that military spending is ok and shouldn't be defunded, start two wars under the last Republican president, and then block a bill to take the survivors of those very same wars and deny them aid. And then claim Obama isn't keeping his promises!
It honestly boggles me how anyone can vote for these people.
For one thing Canada won't have to put up with Americans abusing their socialized healthcare system.
This deep, my friend. This deep.
I'd call it a good start. Let them catch their breath, think their ordeal is over... then give them 10 hours of They're Taking The Hobbits To Isengard.
There is already a universal virus killer in development. And it doesn't target the virus. Instead it targets the cell hosting the virus. When a cell is virus infected it makes a specific protein, a "help I'm infected" RNA flag.
DRACO is two proteins bound together. When it sees the "help I'm infected" RNA, it breaks in two. Half of DRACO binds to it. The other half is a protein messenger that triggers apoptosis - cell death.
The end result is that any cell that has a virus in it commits suicide before the virus can use the cell to reproduce.
Here is a quick story on DRACO.
Check out James Gleik's Chaos.
It's nonfiction but still might scratch the same itch. It's told from a storyteller's point of view discussing the personalities and early discoveries in the field, the stubborn resistance encountered, all that. It's a good story as well as being a good book about math.
No points today and this is the best post in this thread I've read so far. Mods! Attack!
Well if I'm a lousy engineer you must be a lousy manager. You hate my idea, but don't have one of your own to offer.
Best idea yet. I wish I could give you my mod points. Brilliant notion.