Seriously I just have to say that this is the single funniest comment I've ever read on Slashdot. Laughing, pointing at the screen, drug my wife over here to have her read it funny. Brutal. Absolutely brutal.
From one cynical bastard to another, I salute you.
Nothing edgy about it. It's a *very* old college joke, that's all. Like how to copy from one person is plagiarism but to copy from several is called research. So relax, everyone. Kids these days. Don't know the classics.
I was merely pointing out the fact that these individual stories do add up to make a conversant whole. And the last person you should trust to get an objective viewpoint is a salesman.
Now go ask a thousand other parents what their teenagers want and check back here after you do. I think you'll find iStuff to be consistently high up on the list.
BTW your "industry insider" is more commonly known as a shill. He is selling a product. He - of course - isn't going to say "well our product isn't as good as Apple". He is going to say something positive about his product and negative about the competition. That's his job.
Find a neutral third party with a purely objective viewpoint and you'll have an "industry insider" worth listening to.
I agree we are in a bit of a slump, space-wise. No shuttle anymore. No moon missions.
But I think the original "right stuff" guys wouldn't be surprised by our current state of affairs. They knew it was all based on funding, and PR, and the cold war. Russia not a threat anymore? Space program (aka gigantic propaganda "we're awesome" machine) would be scaled back.
But you're not thinking long term.
How about a thousand years from now, or ten thousand? Or a million? Do you think we'll stagnate that long? I don't. Things will pick back up inside of a couple of hundred years, tops.
Progress does happen because we do things. We'll get back to that soon-ish. And by soon-ish I mean sometime in the next thousand years. There are plenty of good reasons to get back up there. Orbital mining, zero g labs and construction sites, asteroid collision prevention...the list goes on and on.
We're going back. The current slump is just a hiccup in history.
ROFL. Yeah, when we land there. It's ONLY 600 light years after all.
I get it, I really do. We've only barely been to our own moon. We can't even get to mars. If we said we were going to send a probe you'd have every right to laugh, let alone a manned mission.
But hear me out first.
Mankind has only been engaged in industry for a couple of hundred years. And that was enough to get us to the moon. And humanity has no signs of ending anytime soon. What will we be capable of in another thousand years? Ten thousand? A million? Because if we don't do anything stupid we have that time. Our sun has a few billion years left in it.
It's important to look for extrasolar planets. It is important to see if they can maintain human life.
Reason being, that's the first step. We won't ever try to leave this solar system if we have no expectations to be able to survive out there. Now we are finding out that there are planets out there that might be able to support us. Now we have a reason to want to try to reach them. Yes, 600 light years is an uncrossable barrier to us. Today. But if you told the Wright brothers that we'd be walking on the moon in 70 years they would have told you you're nuts. They wouldn't have believed it. Another uncrossable barrier. To them. Not to us.
Finding these planets is exciting. It says that there is a reason to try to go. It kindles a desire to go see them. And given a million years of human progress, the science *will* come. Maybe it won't be as sexy as warp ships. Maybe it'll just be colony ships moving at a fraction of light speed and take a thousand years to get there. But one way or another, we will get there.
"Elements cannot be broken down any further." Which is true but only half the story. "Because if they do, then they become something else." is the other half of the story.
These gigantic atoms are unstable. You can make them but they quickly fall apart into the things they were made of. Like a house of cards in a windy room.
The research teams are taking large atoms and firing them at other large atoms to make these gigantic atoms. They only last for a few moments before they fall back apart into the large atoms they were originally made of.
Currently it is impossible to make another Apple. The current business model is to think of something unique, patent it, and get bought by Apple/Microsoft/Google/Samsung/IBM/Someone Big. Reason being, patents.
You need a patent "war chest" to fight off these big guys and survive in their ecosystem. Typically by buying smaller companies that have patent portfolios already. To get that you need cash. And to get that kind of cash, you already have to be gigantic.
This is why none of these large players are pushing for patent reform. If software patents were to go away the ecosystem would open up and the big companies would have to face new competition.
If my company paid me solely based on how many lines of code I produce, I'd send them the count based on the intermediate assembler code produced in between my C code and the linker.
You want to know the really sad part? If you listen to rap music, the message that is sent is exactly the opposite of what would result in success in your life. Distrust, misogyny, and playing everyone around you to better your position. None of these actually work. They are all handicaps. Success is far more likely if you learn to form bonds with people rather than view them as opponents.
Guys like Jay Z and P Diddy are actually pretty savvy businessmen. They do not follow their own rhetoric. That's how they made it out. But they'll sell it because it sounds cool and thereby sabotage every single fan. "This is how I made it big." Except it isn't. It's the opposite.
And as for the failure to succeed being their own damn fault, it isn't. At least not as much as you think. I live in a large-ish city near the suburb line. The house behind mine is a rental so I have an influx of city people that come and go. This summer I had a black family behind me. They had a cookout.
Nice looking crew. Dockers and polo shirts. Better than I usually dress to tell the truth. Banners and games and barbecue. Wives in party dresses, kids on tricycles. A lovely scene.
And then there was the music.
The music was the most abysmal racist ignorant misogynistic drek you've ever heard. There was one song about how someone was going to drink booze until they threw up. Another one was about watermelon and fried chicken. Bitch this, slut that, and F bombs throughout, and some of the kids at the party were toddlers. I am not making any of this up.
Until these people police and fix their culture, they're screwed.
Exactly! That is the entire problem. How you define "success". Each culture does it differently.
Yes, Jay Z has a ton of money. But your odds of being that guy are less than your odds of winning the lottery. Cool or street or gangsta has a low ceiling, with only a few dozen or so counterexamples. But the culture says "you can be that guy if you are gangsta enough". So the hordes try. And all they wind up being are single parents, poor and on welfare, and betrayed by a culture that promised them diamond studded limousines if they were only cool enough.
First off, whoever modded you Troll - I think they're wrong. I think you're asking a serious question. So I'll give you my serious answer.
The problem is cultural. The culture that a great many black children grow up in is simply broken. Are you familiar with the term "Uncle Tom"? It's an insult that black people aim at other black people that used to mean "sucks up to white people" but these days means "act too white", i.e. speaking proper English and getting good grades. It's actually frowned upon.
I'm not making this up. Here is an example. The one person is "less black" and an Uncle Tom because they grew up not poor, in a middle class area with both parents married. Less black. Think about that one for a bit.
And the submitter is wondering why you don't get a lot of scholastic achievement from this culture.
Black people are NOT denied education. My university has a list of grants and help as long as my arm for anyone who isn't Caucasian. The problem is that black people (in this area anyways, YMMV) are taught from birth that you are "less black" and something of a traitor to your people if you get good grades and act "too white". There is your real reason.
Do a google search for "pic usb hid" and you'll see dozens of projects that use the 18F series of pic chips configured to be keyboard/mouse like devices. From there it's simple to interface your application to the device. Easy peasy.
I've got a back burner project for something like this for a MAME cabinet I'm planning. Yes, I know you can just buy USB pinboards for mame cabinets already. I want to build my own.
Although Zynga's decision might be met with some criticism, the firm's executives reportedly justified their strategy by saying it was best for the company. With the unvested shares, the executives believed they could attract more top talent with the promise of stock.
Who in their right mind would trust their upper management to actually deliver?
"Hey! We lured in our initial staff with some stock options, but then we strongarmed it back from them once it looked like it might be worth something. They took the gamble and we got the payoff. Now we would like to offer it to you! No, really, honest - we wouldn't do that to you! Just the people we initially hired. Hey...wait...where are you going?"
That music isn't ugly. It does happen to be optimally dissonant, but ugly and dissonance are not the same thing. Related - but not same thing.
If you want some truly ugly music I recommend you get to YouTube and check out The Residents. They work hard to bring you the ugly.
Here is an example. It is the Residents covering the Rolling Stones Satisfaction. FAR more ugly than this mathematical oddity. You'll note that it is fairly repetitive and still PLENTY ugly.
Exactly, brother. Exactly. The Amiga made me love computers.
I'll never forget the first day I had my 500 hooked up. I ran the demo that drew boxes. Then ran another copy, then another, then another...had dozens of them up. You could watch the OS switch attention between dozens of them. I was amazed. My previous machine was a C64. The leap was magical, amazing...I would simply watch the Amiga run demos and be blown away.
Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and elegant machine code out there. Reads almost like english. It was beautiful.
I hacked the 86 pin port on the side of my A500 and installed a GVPII card. Put a 120 meg hard drive in there and 4 megs of memory. It was my first serious hard hack. Worked like a champ too.
Being an Amiga person back in the early days was a time of pure magic. Nothing since has even come close. I've got an i7 2600k with 8 gigs of memory and a 300 dollar graphics card. It came with a graphics demo of islands in an ocean of water, and it looks perfect. And for some reason it's just not as impressive.
Well make up your mind. Does global warming cause rain or does it cause drought, because it can't cause both because both happen all the time, global warming or none.
Actually yes it can. Adding heat (energy) to a system can sometimes drive it into oscillations, like the pendulum under an old clock. More energy, more oscillation. The system isn't necessarily linear like you are supposing.
So it's entirely possible that adding heat energy to the weather system could make it do all sorts of crazy things, like snow in July. The weather system is chaotic and terribly complex and complicated and driven by energy inputs - and that's what has people worried. It's hard to tell what the results of futzing with it will be.
I know you get sick of this whole geek worship thing you've got going on, but come on. It seems like you treat your place in history with a mix of protectiveness and contempt.
Those deaths are the ones attributable to us, directly or indirectly:
This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies.
Emphasis mine. So yeah, us. That's what we did.
But if you disagree - if you're looking for people with American lead in them directly, just keep reading:
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[9] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005." The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
So if you are choosing to ignore the people that have died because we removed the infrastructure and want to focus solely on the people who died with American bullets and shrapnel in them - you're right. It's not 100,000. It's only 37,000.
Which BTW is 37000/3000=12.3. Only 12 times worse than 9/11. Whew! That's a huge relief. I'll sleep much better tonight.
We've killed approximately 100,000 civilians in Iraq since the start of our military actions there. On 9/11 we lost about 3,000. So we've done about 33 times worse than we received.
That's 100,000 people in approximately 9 years. 9 years is 108 months. 33 times the loss in that many months. So that's 108/33=3.27.
That means Iraq has suffered, at our hands, a 9/11 style loss (3000 civilians killed) every three months and a week or so for the last 9 years running.
Slashdot Mirror
I found this gem in the other metrics thread the other day.
-2000 lines of code.
Seriously I just have to say that this is the single funniest comment I've ever read on Slashdot. Laughing, pointing at the screen, drug my wife over here to have her read it funny. Brutal. Absolutely brutal.
From one cynical bastard to another, I salute you.
Nothing edgy about it. It's a *very* old college joke, that's all. Like how to copy from one person is plagiarism but to copy from several is called research. So relax, everyone. Kids these days. Don't know the classics.
I was merely pointing out the fact that these individual stories do add up to make a conversant whole. And the last person you should trust to get an objective viewpoint is a salesman.
The plural of anecdote is data.
Now go ask a thousand other parents what their teenagers want and check back here after you do. I think you'll find iStuff to be consistently high up on the list.
BTW your "industry insider" is more commonly known as a shill. He is selling a product. He - of course - isn't going to say "well our product isn't as good as Apple". He is going to say something positive about his product and negative about the competition. That's his job.
Find a neutral third party with a purely objective viewpoint and you'll have an "industry insider" worth listening to.
It's a good thing his belief system doesn't believe in karma.
I agree we are in a bit of a slump, space-wise. No shuttle anymore. No moon missions.
But I think the original "right stuff" guys wouldn't be surprised by our current state of affairs. They knew it was all based on funding, and PR, and the cold war. Russia not a threat anymore? Space program (aka gigantic propaganda "we're awesome" machine) would be scaled back.
But you're not thinking long term.
How about a thousand years from now, or ten thousand? Or a million? Do you think we'll stagnate that long? I don't. Things will pick back up inside of a couple of hundred years, tops.
Progress does happen because we do things. We'll get back to that soon-ish. And by soon-ish I mean sometime in the next thousand years. There are plenty of good reasons to get back up there. Orbital mining, zero g labs and construction sites, asteroid collision prevention...the list goes on and on.
We're going back. The current slump is just a hiccup in history.
ROFL. Yeah, when we land there. It's ONLY 600 light years after all.
I get it, I really do. We've only barely been to our own moon. We can't even get to mars. If we said we were going to send a probe you'd have every right to laugh, let alone a manned mission.
But hear me out first.
Mankind has only been engaged in industry for a couple of hundred years. And that was enough to get us to the moon. And humanity has no signs of ending anytime soon. What will we be capable of in another thousand years? Ten thousand? A million? Because if we don't do anything stupid we have that time. Our sun has a few billion years left in it.
It's important to look for extrasolar planets. It is important to see if they can maintain human life.
Reason being, that's the first step. We won't ever try to leave this solar system if we have no expectations to be able to survive out there. Now we are finding out that there are planets out there that might be able to support us. Now we have a reason to want to try to reach them. Yes, 600 light years is an uncrossable barrier to us. Today. But if you told the Wright brothers that we'd be walking on the moon in 70 years they would have told you you're nuts. They wouldn't have believed it. Another uncrossable barrier. To them. Not to us.
Finding these planets is exciting. It says that there is a reason to try to go. It kindles a desire to go see them. And given a million years of human progress, the science *will* come. Maybe it won't be as sexy as warp ships. Maybe it'll just be colony ships moving at a fraction of light speed and take a thousand years to get there. But one way or another, we will get there.
We will most likely visit this planet. Someday.
"Elements cannot be broken down any further." Which is true but only half the story. "Because if they do, then they become something else." is the other half of the story.
These gigantic atoms are unstable. You can make them but they quickly fall apart into the things they were made of. Like a house of cards in a windy room.
The research teams are taking large atoms and firing them at other large atoms to make these gigantic atoms. They only last for a few moments before they fall back apart into the large atoms they were originally made of.
Currently it is impossible to make another Apple. The current business model is to think of something unique, patent it, and get bought by Apple/Microsoft/Google/Samsung/IBM/Someone Big. Reason being, patents.
You need a patent "war chest" to fight off these big guys and survive in their ecosystem. Typically by buying smaller companies that have patent portfolios already. To get that you need cash. And to get that kind of cash, you already have to be gigantic.
This is why none of these large players are pushing for patent reform. If software patents were to go away the ecosystem would open up and the big companies would have to face new competition.
If my company paid me solely based on how many lines of code I produce, I'd send them the count based on the intermediate assembler code produced in between my C code and the linker.
I did produce those lines, did I not?
You want to know the really sad part? If you listen to rap music, the message that is sent is exactly the opposite of what would result in success in your life. Distrust, misogyny, and playing everyone around you to better your position. None of these actually work. They are all handicaps. Success is far more likely if you learn to form bonds with people rather than view them as opponents.
Guys like Jay Z and P Diddy are actually pretty savvy businessmen. They do not follow their own rhetoric. That's how they made it out. But they'll sell it because it sounds cool and thereby sabotage every single fan. "This is how I made it big." Except it isn't. It's the opposite.
And as for the failure to succeed being their own damn fault, it isn't. At least not as much as you think. I live in a large-ish city near the suburb line. The house behind mine is a rental so I have an influx of city people that come and go. This summer I had a black family behind me. They had a cookout.
Nice looking crew. Dockers and polo shirts. Better than I usually dress to tell the truth. Banners and games and barbecue. Wives in party dresses, kids on tricycles. A lovely scene.
And then there was the music.
The music was the most abysmal racist ignorant misogynistic drek you've ever heard. There was one song about how someone was going to drink booze until they threw up. Another one was about watermelon and fried chicken. Bitch this, slut that, and F bombs throughout, and some of the kids at the party were toddlers. I am not making any of this up.
Until these people police and fix their culture, they're screwed.
That's ok man it's not a film for everybody.
Exactly! That is the entire problem. How you define "success". Each culture does it differently.
Yes, Jay Z has a ton of money. But your odds of being that guy are less than your odds of winning the lottery. Cool or street or gangsta has a low ceiling, with only a few dozen or so counterexamples. But the culture says "you can be that guy if you are gangsta enough". So the hordes try. And all they wind up being are single parents, poor and on welfare, and betrayed by a culture that promised them diamond studded limousines if they were only cool enough.
It's tragic. So many good lives wasted.
I'm just throwing this out there for the other five people that have seen this movie and know what I am talking about.
First off, whoever modded you Troll - I think they're wrong. I think you're asking a serious question. So I'll give you my serious answer.
The problem is cultural. The culture that a great many black children grow up in is simply broken. Are you familiar with the term "Uncle Tom"? It's an insult that black people aim at other black people that used to mean "sucks up to white people" but these days means "act too white", i.e. speaking proper English and getting good grades. It's actually frowned upon.
I'm not making this up. Here is an example. The one person is "less black" and an Uncle Tom because they grew up not poor, in a middle class area with both parents married. Less black. Think about that one for a bit.
And the submitter is wondering why you don't get a lot of scholastic achievement from this culture.
Black people are NOT denied education. My university has a list of grants and help as long as my arm for anyone who isn't Caucasian. The problem is that black people (in this area anyways, YMMV) are taught from birth that you are "less black" and something of a traitor to your people if you get good grades and act "too white". There is your real reason.
Think I'm kidding? Watch this bit from Chris Rock (nsfw). Why is everyone laughing? Because it *hits home*.
The culture itself is broken. Fix the culture and allow success to be defined as "gets good grades" and the numbers will change as if by magic.
Do a google search for "pic usb hid" and you'll see dozens of projects that use the 18F series of pic chips configured to be keyboard/mouse like devices. From there it's simple to interface your application to the device. Easy peasy.
I've got a back burner project for something like this for a MAME cabinet I'm planning. Yes, I know you can just buy USB pinboards for mame cabinets already. I want to build my own.
I'm not making this up! They seriously said this:
Although Zynga's decision might be met with some criticism, the firm's executives reportedly justified their strategy by saying it was best for the company. With the unvested shares, the executives believed they could attract more top talent with the promise of stock.
Who in their right mind would trust their upper management to actually deliver?
"Hey! We lured in our initial staff with some stock options, but then we strongarmed it back from them once it looked like it might be worth something. They took the gamble and we got the payoff. Now we would like to offer it to you! No, really, honest - we wouldn't do that to you! Just the people we initially hired. Hey...wait...where are you going?"
That music isn't ugly. It does happen to be optimally dissonant, but ugly and dissonance are not the same thing. Related - but not same thing.
If you want some truly ugly music I recommend you get to YouTube and check out The Residents. They work hard to bring you the ugly.
Here is an example. It is the Residents covering the Rolling Stones Satisfaction. FAR more ugly than this mathematical oddity. You'll note that it is fairly repetitive and still PLENTY ugly.
Exactly, brother. Exactly. The Amiga made me love computers.
I'll never forget the first day I had my 500 hooked up. I ran the demo that drew boxes. Then ran another copy, then another, then another...had dozens of them up. You could watch the OS switch attention between dozens of them. I was amazed. My previous machine was a C64. The leap was magical, amazing...I would simply watch the Amiga run demos and be blown away.
Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and elegant machine code out there. Reads almost like english. It was beautiful.
I hacked the 86 pin port on the side of my A500 and installed a GVPII card. Put a 120 meg hard drive in there and 4 megs of memory. It was my first serious hard hack. Worked like a champ too.
Being an Amiga person back in the early days was a time of pure magic. Nothing since has even come close. I've got an i7 2600k with 8 gigs of memory and a 300 dollar graphics card. It came with a graphics demo of islands in an ocean of water, and it looks perfect. And for some reason it's just not as impressive.
Well make up your mind. Does global warming cause rain or does it cause drought, because it can't cause both because both happen all the time, global warming or none.
Actually yes it can. Adding heat (energy) to a system can sometimes drive it into oscillations, like the pendulum under an old clock. More energy, more oscillation. The system isn't necessarily linear like you are supposing.
So it's entirely possible that adding heat energy to the weather system could make it do all sorts of crazy things, like snow in July. The weather system is chaotic and terribly complex and complicated and driven by energy inputs - and that's what has people worried. It's hard to tell what the results of futzing with it will be.
Currently out of points and he's spot-on. This is exactly right. We are in a patent bubble - it'll be the next thing to tank.
Billions of dollars of bogus estimated worth is just getting ready to evaporate. Gonna be a rough ride.
Skynet IS the virus!
Yeah, I got a question for you. Why did you have to be a jackass to Wil Wheaton? He was just a kid for chrissakes.
I know you get sick of this whole geek worship thing you've got going on, but come on. It seems like you treat your place in history with a mix of protectiveness and contempt.
So which is it?
Those deaths are the ones attributable to us, directly or indirectly:
This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies.
Emphasis mine. So yeah, us. That's what we did.
But if you disagree - if you're looking for people with American lead in them directly, just keep reading:
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[9] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005." The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
So if you are choosing to ignore the people that have died because we removed the infrastructure and want to focus solely on the people who died with American bullets and shrapnel in them - you're right. It's not 100,000. It's only 37,000.
Which BTW is 37000/3000=12.3. Only 12 times worse than 9/11. Whew! That's a huge relief. I'll sleep much better tonight.
Here's your link: Iraq Body Count Project
We've killed approximately 100,000 civilians in Iraq since the start of our military actions there. On 9/11 we lost about 3,000. So we've done about 33 times worse than we received.
That's 100,000 people in approximately 9 years. 9 years is 108 months. 33 times the loss in that many months. So that's 108/33=3.27.
That means Iraq has suffered, at our hands, a 9/11 style loss (3000 civilians killed) every three months and a week or so for the last 9 years running.
Sorry man, but those are the facts.