but they will never reach their goal.
The theory behind quark gluon plasma has one serious flaw: it ignores the effects resulting from the existence of gravitions.
Due to the weakness and long range of gravitation we hvae that the wave functions of gravitions are spread over extremely large areas. That's why it's so hard to prove their existence.
However, they have effects on the quark-gluon plasma. Their wave function couples the state of the plasma with the observer. Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter. Note that this can't happen with the Bose-Einstein condensate, because this effect takes place on a more macroscopic level, gravitons are too weak to have any effects here.
Funnily enough you could use the quark-gluon plasma to create energy, even though it doesn't really exist. With such a plasma you can create rapid (really rapid like nanoseconds) proton decay. So you could use this basically as some advanced particle bomb (effects similar to a neutron bomb).
I wonder if this is the reason why some HEP are sponsored the DARPA.
Rejectng backwards compatibility and/or a proven design is just like saying "let's tear down New York City and rebuild it with wider streets in order to solve traffic problems." It's a rather childish suggestion.
This kind of "professionalism" has lead the IT industry to the state it is today.
I you go into story and by a new Pentium/Athlon, then you get a system which is still compatible with and 25 year old rubbish design - the Intel 8088. And yes, this ain't just a compatibility feature it enforces a crappy instruction set onto modern computers. The microcode thing Intel uses is Intel's confession that CISC is fucked for modern design, so they took a RISC core and added and instruction translation unit. Guess why Intel doesn't have compatibility to x86 for their Itanium systems ?
This compatibility religion has lead MS integrate old 16 bit rubbish into Windows 95 and 98 making the system more unstable and insecure.
It has lead Apple to glue to cooperative multitasking when even Microsoft ditched it. Only Jobs could kick them back into sense.
Sun has still old Java AWT 1.0 support in Java though they admit that it was fucked up beyond all repair.
Companies still have to fuck around with old Cobol code though this language purtefied several decades ago.
No surprise that these dot.com businesses went off like claymore mines with people with your mindset as employees.
Such information could be vital to firefighters battling a blazing skyscraper, or to rescue workers ascertaining the soundness of an earthquake- damaged structure
Do you really believe this rubbish ?
At a decent fire or after a serious earthquake or your fine logic in the bricks will be fucked up and of no use at all.
However, there is use for such logic in bricks. But not when earthquakes are there.
It's rather simple to reprogram the sensors to wiretap people and communication devices. If you are really clever you can get even 3D low-res infrared images from the rooms. Not good for face recognition, but enough for monitoring the location of people. And, hey, you can even couple this with RFID tags. These thing will be on anything you purchase in a few years and they fit prefectly into this setting.
Guess why US Army and NSA are sponsoring research in nanotech.
Only fools believe this "helping building" nonsense. But, hey, these chains are just there to protect us from running away and harming us...
With all their legal, financial and IP power it's very likely. But this we be a huge setback for open source software.
Yes, this opinion might surprise you, but let's look at the fundamental issue of todays open source system: Modern OSS lack original ideas.
Linus created Linux - as he claimed himself - as a Unix clone, to give himself and students access to a decent Unix-like OS on x86 basis. The same goes for many other OSS projects. Usually the ideas of commercial software are copied (of course not the code nobody is that stupid). And this makes exactly OSS always vulnerable to bongus attacks like SCO's nonsense claims.
If SCO would be successful then OSS will be forced to step beyond its inital hobbiest pratices and do original innovation at scientific level. There are some movements in this direction like OpenBSD, but the mass is sticking to the ole power-through-copy concepts like Linux etc.
But we can go beyond this. OSS can make cutting-edge software and the highest innovation level. And we can, indeed much easier than any commercial company, refuse any bounds to old deprecated systems by "compatibility arguments".
People should just stop to emacs and vi onto any crappy platform but do something productive and insightful instead.
The Dollar is falling because the investors don't trust the US economics any more. So they invest e.g. in Europe or Asia. While your products get cheaper the companies won't have enough money to use the advantage. And the US forgein trade deficit makes they situation much worse. Most growth in the last 10 (!) years was based on lended money. Now the creditors want to get their money back. And this will eat up all your positive effects form the cheap dollar.
The next problem is that a weak Dollar will drive international economics to use other currencies for trading contracts. And with the appearance of the Euro there is a single powerful currency with a strong economic background to take the Dollar's place. The US goverment tries to prevent this by military means (like Irak) but can't wage war on everyone. And have the Dollar as the international trade currency is extremly important for the US, because you can finance all your resource consuption just by printing new money. In fact this was a "money-for-US" tax for other countries but this will be gone soon.
A weak currency is sometimes just a slow poison.
That's the reason why the European are so keen on having a hard Euro.
When you actually read the article you will notice that these laid off guys have all low-level academic titles like bachlors. There is a MBA mentioned but everyone knows that you get these things for a few business seminars and they are nothing to do with real science. Not even economical sciences.
I wouldn't consider these guys as white-collar workers. evryone knows that knowledge standards are raising rapidly and with a BS you are still a blue-collar worker. White-collar starts at least with a MS or a PhD.
So, I wonder if real white-collar workers really have these problems.
..well it's the problem. At least part of the problem. The other part is that both engineers, physicists and computer scientists fail to acknowledge the advances in dynamical systems theory made in the last 50 years.
Anybody who has a clue in mathematics know that the above mentioned disciplines usually work with
a style of mathematics which was state of art 80 years ago. Physicists refuse to write anything down in non-tensorial, coordinate free form, engineers usually don't even know what a manifold or a singularity is (wondering why they can't solve that damn non-linear equation) and CS guys normally work with highschool calculus/prob. theory with a little Fourier transforms from the engineers mixed in (though they won't ever touch the Laplace transform, dunno why; that's really weird).
I must admit that some HEP guys have a clue of mathematics (hey, sometimes they even use the DeRham-cohomology, that's senior year stuff !), but most others won't.
Well, and there their problem starts.
The n-body problem is known to be chaotic with n>2. These problem can be handles but not the naive, ancient ways. You would have to use some non-linear control, Finser space stuff, nonlinear dynamical systems theory maybe even some resolution of singularities.
You might want to throw even some stochastic control, but that's not critical.
The tools are backed by the works of Anosov, Arnol'd, Lobachevski, Thom, Isidori, Cheng, Smale, Picard and Zariski.
However, you must know and understand them to use them. And at this point CS freaks, engineers and physicists usually fail. They claim that "there was this crack" or "we confused metrics" but at the very core of the problem they didn't understood the problem and the tools to solve it.
And NASA the engineers early-retirement bandwagon fails to hire any mathematicians but only engineers, CS guys and physicists instead. Well, we all physicists, CS guys and engineers here, why should we let any mathematicians take over ?
And BOOM there goes another 163 million space probe.
Crime remains crime even if any people are doing it.
There are worldwide much more than 42 million people involved in war and criminal activities. But this doesn't mean that you can go out to rob your neighbour, smash his car and kill his dog. And many people on the world do much worse things.
This "Look ma, but Jim does it, too !" "argument" is pretty infantile and irrelevant.
Copyright holders have rights on their creation.
Would it come into your mind that you can just take your neighbours car just because it should belong to everyone and this guy is a fat, ugly badass ?
The problem with P2P is that it corrupts people views of right and wrong because committing a crime is so easy and seem negligible.
And do you really think that the providers of the P2P networks just want enable people with free data access ?
No these people are common theifs: all P2P system are created to steal the distribution rights from their original owners. Napster was no underdog, it was backed by greedy investors with the morales of leech.
And for KaZaa and co.: Why have these "nice" people ridden the P2P with spyware ?
This is not exactly the behavior of selfless, Gandhi-like saints. In fact this a rather the behavior of greasy, amoralic criminals.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you really think that you'll get stuff for
free by P2P then you ignore the fact that you are paying and paying with the most valueable things you have: morality and integrity.
Form bad things NEVER comes something good.
Animals are sentient being which feel fear, joy and anger like humans.
So why should it be allowed to treat these wonders of the LORD's creation as liveless objects ?
These being have the right for a life in dignity and freedom like human beings.
There is no reason at all why we, being gifted with the abilities of thinking and reflection, should feel superior to these beings.
We are all the same part of the ecological cycle.
Humans are in no way a superior lifeform on this planet.
I think it's time for a change. 146 year after the slaves were liberate, it's again to start again a revolution of freedom for opressed beings. As Lincoln said: "If we don't stop this tragedy and foulness, it will take our society apart. There this is not just a fight for liberation. It's a fight to save the union of our society."
Only if this injustice is stopped, our society will come to rest and live in peace. Otherwise the hidden conflict created by these foul deeds will corrupt the morale of our society and everything will be poised to doom.
Combined with PDAs/laptops and WLAN access, terrorists could savely use this to coordinate terroristic attacks, especially Al-Kadia's evergreen of equitemporal suidice attacks on free people.
The mighty PATRIOT act should prohibit such devices, won't it ?
I'm not sure if this would be really a bad thing. Dangerous tools are restricted very often to protect people, even if the are many good/peaceful uses.
Take e.g. guns which are restricted in many countries of the world due to their bad possibilities.
Apple's main profits come from the hardware sector. All this MacOS X/Y/Z stuff are just minor numbers, mainly because Apple has to provide the OS for free on the machines used.
So, why they don't switch to Microsofts Windows ?
Instead of investing millions of bucks into their own properietary system, they could get it from MS for cheap. And also the users would benefit from this action. While the usability of Windows is a little lower than OS X we have on the other hand that there are much more applications on all commerical sector aviable for Windows.
The user could choose from a bigger apllication pool instead of buying expensive OS X apps.
And it would be a great step for the standardization of modern computing with fewer proprietrary systems on this sector.
There is the technical issue with Mac being no Intel Pentium systems, but MS managed to port Windows to the Itanium and many embedded platforms, so they could do the step to the PowerPC, too.
SCO does not do all this, which does not make it look honest.
SCO wants to extract a maximum of revenues from a maximum of userbase. This might not be called "honest", but it's called "capitalism" and "common business practice".
Indeed, the managers might even be liable if they don't extract a maximum of money out of this one.
It's pretty naive to believe that companies can wander around giving donating their IP to the public.
I doubt that Java will succeed.
on
Preview of Java 1.5
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
While the interpreted compile-once-run-everywhere and the garbadge collection scheme and pretty nice and useful, Java will take down the road to oblivion in the long term nevertheless.
Why will this happen ?
The Java system is based on the cleaning of a partly object-orientated language: C++. I know C++ coders will hate me for this, but if you compare C++ to real object-orientated languages like Smalltalk or CLOS, you'll have to admit that it's the plain truth.
Java's goal where to simplify and objectize C++. However during this process some of the most promising parts of C++ where thrown out - operator overloading and generic programming. But this Java's power was seriously crippled and it will never reach the state-of-art level of academic theory of OO-languages.
Secondly the Java interpreter scheme was extremely promising, too. However, SUN fuck this advantage totally up by concentrating on their modified C++ clone. MS did recognize this potential much better with their.NET system providing a platform for a huge range of languages ranging from C++, C#, Java, VB to even Eiffel. Some people will now protest that "There is this Gonzo++ implemenation of the Java VM." This is indeed true, people got stuff from C++ to Lisp running on the Java VM. But this argument is rather pointless: the power of a modern VM system does not lie alone in the interpreter, but in the system libraries, too. And SUN failed unlike MS to provide decent interoperability here, because their Java VM was never really meant to run with other languages.
Personally i think that these design flaws will kill Java in the long term. There might exist many apps with Java these days, but this holds for Cobol, too. Even people in the OSS community start to realize this and move the MS's.NET system with projects like MONO etc.
You are not very clever.
In this case the most effective traffic shaper would be replacing all you brothers pictures by the infamous goatse image.
And as an additional benefit you'll place many people of the path of respectability and cleanliness.
Due to the viral GNU GPL license everything you put on the scanner becomes open source if you use this program.
The main GNU leaders believe the intellectual property has no justification and must therefore turned into open source at any possibility.
Furthermore it's very likely that SCO will claim ownership of everything you scanned (this includes your wife and cat) due to the Unix IP violations in the Linux kernel.
With OSS they can see the source and verify that it's frre of any backdoor. So they can protect their precious secrets about the Oktoberfest and what Bavarian beer is really made of.
Crappy coding style is caused by the main flaw of modern computer science: the failure to recognize the problem of correctness as a mathematical problem.
Everybody who has an university CS degree will agree with me that much time and effort is spend to encourage students to produce nice and correct programs. However this strategy is a failure so far. Again and again bugs, errors and other problems turn up more often these days in spite of the increased educational efforts.
This is because the CS community failed to accept the core of the problem: error in programs are a mathematical problem which must be attacked by mathematical methods. All modern approaches to correct code are indeed management orientated - take programming by contract, extreme programming etc.
But what does it mean that a program fails to execute correctly ?
It means that mapping induced by the program in the trajectory space doesn't agree with mapping induced by the specification. And that is a purely mathematical problem, ladies and gentlemen. The question if two mapping coincide is a basic mathematical question (the equivalence problem) which even dates back to Euclid and Platon.
So instead of throwing more and more management rubbish at poor CS graduates, people should analyze the mathematical structure of the problem and find there the answers they seek.
I think that it's very sad that CS people still ignore this issue and stick to their old established ways. Sometimes I believe this is not motivated by scientific arguments but a rather psychological inferiority complex: as mathematician have the reputation to be smart while CS people only count as code nerds, computer scientists tend to despise most mathematical approaches as "too academic" or "imfeasible".
I'm really tired of people equating the Matrix with christianity. I think it's a disservice to the movie to compare it with a thousand pages of confused hallucinogenic gibberish.
Correction: The "Matrix" is not a book but a movie. Thus it comes as thousands of seconds of confused hallucinogenic gibberish.
The space shuttle is basically the product of a technological penis length contest between the US and Soviet Russia.
Ironically both sides managed only to get the half project done - they wanted a space station (SU got that) with a high tech shuttle system (US got that). Don't mention Buran here - the Russian admitted themselves that they just copied the shuttle.
However the cold war is gone and the US is the only super power left. There are some on the rise - China, EU, Islam - , but it will take some time until the got the super power status.
So there is no need to show the own and forgein people that the US has indeed the biggest dick. If someone doesn't believe this, hey, we can just invade them !
So NASA is in bad luck for some time now.
If they are really clever (but moralically perverted) they would sponsor the education of Chinese/EU PhD students got shorted the period of unchallenged US dominance.
...that young mathematician are forced to spend 10 years or so learning old and flawed terminology and concepts.
After that brainwashing people aren't simply able to do anything outstanding anymore. There are some accidential great scores, but they are very rare.
I think we should change our mathematics education to tackle with this problem. And we should indeed already start in school were the first and the most foul foundations are laid. Instead of teaching children basic counting, set theory and algebra which draws in the whole rubbish of non-intentionistic mathematics, we should start with Lie groups and algebraic varities.
Indeed most "Joe Adverage" problems can be reduced to Lie/algebraic geometry problems.
I can give a simple example why this is necessary:
Imagine the Kleinian bottle in R^4.
You'll say now: "That's not possible nobody can visualized 4 dimensional spaces." But this is only because your basic mathematical education fucked up your brain.
If a decent education would start like mentioned above, we all would have no trouble at all to visualized arbitrary n-dimensional spaces.
And because of using different logical concepts wouldn't have to use the problematic axiom of choice. So, no trouble with the Banach-Tarski paradox, inmesaurable sets and non-holomorphic refractions in H^p_2.
This is even a serious political issue. Anyone into math research will agree with me that in the last 15 years we saw a rise of a generation of brilliant new chinese mathematicians.
And why did we saw it ? Because China went back to its Confucian tradition in teaching which avoids the above mentioned problems in Western math education. So, if we don't act now we'll loose our technological leader within the next 30 years forever.
The whole internet was developed by American taxpayers dollars - the TCP/IP/UDP etc protocols, the everywhere used BSD stack and many more things.
So I don't have a problem when American companies get their IP rights secured by patents such that the invested taxpayers money will give some revenues.
If forgein people don't like this they should invent their own network protocols. The American science community is not a tax financed charity organization.
Computer processors get faster and faster.
You might think that this is a good thing, but I'll explain why it has only negative effects.
With faster processors we get less efficient programs. 10 Years ago you could do internet/email/word processing/spread sheets with just a 33MHz Intel 386 with 16 MB RAM. Today you need for the very same things a Pentium IV with 2 GHZ and 128 MB RAM. There are some niece applications which need a lots of CPU Power like Quake or Nurmerical Simulations, but must Joe Adverage apps don't really need it. The programs need it due to sloppy coding. And the faster CPUs gave rise to the OOP paradigm. While it primarily is a nice theoretical concept for safer and more secure program, it's used these days just for code-bloat and GUI overload. Inpedendent studies show that in fact 73 percent of all "OOP" code is just imperative with C++ class bloat added.
Further the higher compiler and debugger speeds introduced much more sloppy coding styles. In the 60/70ies the computers of the Apollo program hadn't a single computer crash, which is completely unthinkable these days. The reason why the NASA is keeping old 8080 Intels in their shuttles is that they won't get decent code quality form modern processors these days.
Personally I think that the whole CS community must rethink their position towards computers speeds. Instead of the todays faster-is-better point we need a paradigm change towards just-as-fast-as-necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
but they will never reach their goal.
The theory behind quark gluon plasma has one serious flaw: it ignores the effects resulting from the existence of gravitions. Due to the weakness and long range of gravitation we hvae that the wave functions of gravitions are spread over extremely large areas. That's why it's so hard to prove their existence.
However, they have effects on the quark-gluon plasma. Their wave function couples the state of the plasma with the observer. Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter. Note that this can't happen with the Bose-Einstein condensate, because this effect takes place on a more macroscopic level, gravitons are too weak to have any effects here.
Funnily enough you could use the quark-gluon plasma to create energy, even though it doesn't really exist. With such a plasma you can create rapid (really rapid like nanoseconds) proton decay. So you could use this basically as some advanced particle bomb (effects similar to a neutron bomb).
I wonder if this is the reason why some HEP are sponsored the DARPA.
This kind of "professionalism" has lead the IT industry to the state it is today.
I you go into story and by a new Pentium/Athlon, then you get a system which is still compatible with and 25 year old rubbish design - the Intel 8088. And yes, this ain't just a compatibility feature it enforces a crappy instruction set onto modern computers. The microcode thing Intel uses is Intel's confession that CISC is fucked for modern design, so they took a RISC core and added and instruction translation unit. Guess why Intel doesn't have compatibility to x86 for their Itanium systems ?
This compatibility religion has lead MS integrate old 16 bit rubbish into Windows 95 and 98 making the system more unstable and insecure.
It has lead Apple to glue to cooperative multitasking when even Microsoft ditched it. Only Jobs could kick them back into sense.
Sun has still old Java AWT 1.0 support in Java though they admit that it was fucked up beyond all repair.
Companies still have to fuck around with old Cobol code though this language purtefied several decades ago.
No surprise that these dot.com businesses went off like claymore mines with people with your mindset as employees.
Do you really believe this rubbish ?
At a decent fire or after a serious earthquake or your fine logic in the bricks will be fucked up and of no use at all.
However, there is use for such logic in bricks. But not when earthquakes are there.
It's rather simple to reprogram the sensors to wiretap people and communication devices. If you are really clever you can get even 3D low-res infrared images from the rooms. Not good for face recognition, but enough for monitoring the location of people. And, hey, you can even couple this with RFID tags. These thing will be on anything you purchase in a few years and they fit prefectly into this setting.
Guess why US Army and NSA are sponsoring research in nanotech.
Only fools believe this "helping building" nonsense. But, hey, these chains are just there to protect us from running away and harming us...
With all their legal, financial and IP power it's very likely. But this we be a huge setback for open source software.
Yes, this opinion might surprise you, but let's look at the fundamental issue of todays open source system:
Modern OSS lack original ideas. Linus created Linux - as he claimed himself - as a Unix clone, to give himself and students access to a decent Unix-like OS on x86 basis. The same goes for many other OSS projects. Usually the ideas of commercial software are copied (of course not the code nobody is that stupid). And this makes exactly OSS always vulnerable to bongus attacks like SCO's nonsense claims.
If SCO would be successful then OSS will be forced to step beyond its inital hobbiest pratices and do original innovation at scientific level. There are some movements in this direction like OpenBSD, but the mass is sticking to the ole power-through-copy concepts like Linux etc.
But we can go beyond this. OSS can make cutting-edge software and the highest innovation level. And we can, indeed much easier than any commercial company, refuse any bounds to old deprecated systems by "compatibility arguments". People should just stop to emacs and vi onto any crappy platform but do something productive and insightful instead.
The next problem is that a weak Dollar will drive international economics to use other currencies for trading contracts. And with the appearance of the Euro there is a single powerful currency with a strong economic background to take the Dollar's place. The US goverment tries to prevent this by military means (like Irak) but can't wage war on everyone. And have the Dollar as the international trade currency is extremly important for the US, because you can finance all your resource consuption just by printing new money. In fact this was a "money-for-US" tax for other countries but this will be gone soon.
A weak currency is sometimes just a slow poison. That's the reason why the European are so keen on having a hard Euro.
When you actually read the article you will notice that these laid off guys have all low-level academic titles like bachlors. There is a MBA mentioned but everyone knows that you get these things for a few business seminars and they are nothing to do with real science. Not even economical sciences.
I wouldn't consider these guys as white-collar workers. evryone knows that knowledge standards are raising rapidly and with a BS you are still a blue-collar worker. White-collar starts at least with a MS or a PhD.
So, I wonder if real white-collar workers really have these problems.
Is it save to ditch EXT3 in favour of ReiserFS ?
Anybody who has a clue in mathematics know that the above mentioned disciplines usually work with a style of mathematics which was state of art 80 years ago. Physicists refuse to write anything down in non-tensorial, coordinate free form, engineers usually don't even know what a manifold or a singularity is (wondering why they can't solve that damn non-linear equation) and CS guys normally work with highschool calculus/prob. theory with a little Fourier transforms from the engineers mixed in (though they won't ever touch the Laplace transform, dunno why; that's really weird).
I must admit that some HEP guys have a clue of mathematics (hey, sometimes they even use the DeRham-cohomology, that's senior year stuff !), but most others won't.
Well, and there their problem starts. The n-body problem is known to be chaotic with n>2. These problem can be handles but not the naive, ancient ways. You would have to use some non-linear control, Finser space stuff, nonlinear dynamical systems theory maybe even some resolution of singularities. You might want to throw even some stochastic control, but that's not critical.
The tools are backed by the works of Anosov, Arnol'd, Lobachevski, Thom, Isidori, Cheng, Smale, Picard and Zariski.
However, you must know and understand them to use them. And at this point CS freaks, engineers and physicists usually fail. They claim that "there was this crack" or "we confused metrics" but at the very core of the problem they didn't understood the problem and the tools to solve it.
And NASA the engineers early-retirement bandwagon fails to hire any mathematicians but only engineers, CS guys and physicists instead. Well, we all physicists, CS guys and engineers here, why should we let any mathematicians take over ?
And BOOM there goes another 163 million space probe.
There are worldwide much more than 42 million people involved in war and criminal activities. But this doesn't mean that you can go out to rob your neighbour, smash his car and kill his dog.
And many people on the world do much worse things.
This "Look ma, but Jim does it, too !" "argument" is pretty infantile and irrelevant.
Copyright holders have rights on their creation. Would it come into your mind that you can just take your neighbours car just because it should belong to everyone and this guy is a fat, ugly badass ?
The problem with P2P is that it corrupts people views of right and wrong because committing a crime is so easy and seem negligible.
And do you really think that the providers of the P2P networks just want enable people with free data access ?
No these people are common theifs: all P2P system are created to steal the distribution rights from their original owners. Napster was no underdog, it was backed by greedy investors with the morales of leech.
And for KaZaa and co.: Why have these "nice" people ridden the P2P with spyware ?
This is not exactly the behavior of selfless, Gandhi-like saints. In fact this a rather the behavior of greasy, amoralic criminals.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you really think that you'll get stuff for free by P2P then you ignore the fact that you are paying and paying with the most valueable things you have: morality and integrity.
Form bad things NEVER comes something good.
So why should it be allowed to treat these wonders of the LORD's creation as liveless objects ?
These being have the right for a life in dignity and freedom like human beings.
There is no reason at all why we, being gifted with the abilities of thinking and reflection, should feel superior to these beings.
We are all the same part of the ecological cycle. Humans are in no way a superior lifeform on this planet.
I think it's time for a change. 146 year after the slaves were liberate, it's again to start again a revolution of freedom for opressed beings. As Lincoln said: "If we don't stop this tragedy and foulness, it will take our society apart. There this is not just a fight for liberation. It's a fight to save the union of our society."
Only if this injustice is stopped, our society will come to rest and live in peace. Otherwise the hidden conflict created by these foul deeds will corrupt the morale of our society and everything will be poised to doom.
Combined with PDAs/laptops and WLAN access, terrorists could savely use this to coordinate terroristic attacks, especially Al-Kadia's evergreen of equitemporal suidice attacks on free people.
The mighty PATRIOT act should prohibit such devices, won't it ?
I'm not sure if this would be really a bad thing. Dangerous tools are restricted very often to protect people, even if the are many good/peaceful uses.
Take e.g. guns which are restricted in many countries of the world due to their bad possibilities.
So, why they don't switch to Microsofts Windows ?
Instead of investing millions of bucks into their own properietary system, they could get it from MS for cheap. And also the users would benefit from this action. While the usability of Windows is a little lower than OS X we have on the other hand that there are much more applications on all commerical sector aviable for Windows. The user could choose from a bigger apllication pool instead of buying expensive OS X apps.
And it would be a great step for the standardization of modern computing with fewer proprietrary systems on this sector.
There is the technical issue with Mac being no Intel Pentium systems, but MS managed to port Windows to the Itanium and many embedded platforms, so they could do the step to the PowerPC, too.
SCO wants to extract a maximum of revenues from a maximum of userbase. This might not be called "honest", but it's called "capitalism" and "common business practice".
Indeed, the managers might even be liable if they don't extract a maximum of money out of this one.
It's pretty naive to believe that companies can wander around giving donating their IP to the public.
Why will this happen ?
The Java system is based on the cleaning of a partly object-orientated language: C++. I know C++ coders will hate me for this, but if you compare C++ to real object-orientated languages like Smalltalk or CLOS, you'll have to admit that it's the plain truth.
Java's goal where to simplify and objectize C++. However during this process some of the most promising parts of C++ where thrown out - operator overloading and generic programming. But this Java's power was seriously crippled and it will never reach the state-of-art level of academic theory of OO-languages.
Secondly the Java interpreter scheme was extremely promising, too. However, SUN fuck this advantage totally up by concentrating on their modified C++ clone. MS did recognize this potential much better with their
Some people will now protest that "There is this Gonzo++ implemenation of the Java VM." This is indeed true, people got stuff from C++ to Lisp running on the Java VM. But this argument is rather pointless: the power of a modern VM system does not lie alone in the interpreter, but in the system libraries, too. And SUN failed unlike MS to provide decent interoperability here, because their Java VM was never really meant to run with other languages.
Personally i think that these design flaws will kill Java in the long term. There might exist many apps with Java these days, but this holds for Cobol, too. Even people in the OSS community start to realize this and move the MS's .NET system with projects like MONO etc.
You are not very clever.
In this case the most effective traffic shaper would be replacing all you brothers pictures by the infamous goatse image.
And as an additional benefit you'll place many people of the path of respectability and cleanliness.
Due to the viral GNU GPL license everything you put on the scanner becomes open source if you use this program.
The main GNU leaders believe the intellectual property has no justification and must therefore turned into open source at any possibility.
Furthermore it's very likely that SCO will claim ownership of everything you scanned (this includes your wife and cat) due to the Unix IP violations in the Linux kernel.
From insider sources I've heard that they want to rename IPv6 to IP Hurd.
With OSS they can see the source and verify that it's frre of any backdoor. So they can protect their precious secrets about the Oktoberfest and what Bavarian beer is really made of.
Everybody who has an university CS degree will agree with me that much time and effort is spend to encourage students to produce nice and correct programs. However this strategy is a failure so far. Again and again bugs, errors and other problems turn up more often these days in spite of the increased educational efforts.
This is because the CS community failed to accept the core of the problem: error in programs are a mathematical problem which must be attacked by mathematical methods. All modern approaches to correct code are indeed management orientated - take programming by contract, extreme programming etc.
But what does it mean that a program fails to execute correctly ?
It means that mapping induced by the program in the trajectory space doesn't agree with mapping induced by the specification. And that is a purely mathematical problem, ladies and gentlemen. The question if two mapping coincide is a basic mathematical question (the equivalence problem) which even dates back to Euclid and Platon.
So instead of throwing more and more management rubbish at poor CS graduates, people should analyze the mathematical structure of the problem and find there the answers they seek.
I think that it's very sad that CS people still ignore this issue and stick to their old established ways. Sometimes I believe this is not motivated by scientific arguments but a rather psychological inferiority complex: as mathematician have the reputation to be smart while CS people only count as code nerds, computer scientists tend to despise most mathematical approaches as "too academic" or "imfeasible".
Correction: The "Matrix" is not a book but a movie. Thus it comes as thousands of seconds of confused hallucinogenic gibberish.
Ironically both sides managed only to get the half project done - they wanted a space station (SU got that) with a high tech shuttle system (US got that). Don't mention Buran here - the Russian admitted themselves that they just copied the shuttle.
However the cold war is gone and the US is the only super power left. There are some on the rise - China, EU, Islam - , but it will take some time until the got the super power status.
So there is no need to show the own and forgein people that the US has indeed the biggest dick.
If someone doesn't believe this, hey, we can just invade them !
So NASA is in bad luck for some time now.
If they are really clever (but moralically perverted) they would sponsor the education of Chinese/EU PhD students got shorted the period of unchallenged US dominance.
After that brainwashing people aren't simply able to do anything outstanding anymore. There are some accidential great scores, but they are very rare.
I think we should change our mathematics education to tackle with this problem. And we should indeed already start in school were the first and the most foul foundations are laid. Instead of teaching children basic counting, set theory and algebra which draws in the whole rubbish of non-intentionistic mathematics, we should start with Lie groups and algebraic varities. Indeed most "Joe Adverage" problems can be reduced to Lie/algebraic geometry problems.
I can give a simple example why this is necessary:
Imagine the Kleinian bottle in R^4.
You'll say now: "That's not possible nobody can visualized 4 dimensional spaces."
But this is only because your basic mathematical education fucked up your brain.
If a decent education would start like mentioned above, we all would have no trouble at all to visualized arbitrary n-dimensional spaces.
And because of using different logical concepts wouldn't have to use the problematic axiom of choice. So, no trouble with the Banach-Tarski paradox, inmesaurable sets and non-holomorphic refractions in H^p_2.
This is even a serious political issue. Anyone into math research will agree with me that in the last 15 years we saw a rise of a generation of brilliant new chinese mathematicians. And why did we saw it ? Because China went back to its Confucian tradition in teaching which avoids the above mentioned problems in Western math education. So, if we don't act now we'll loose our technological leader within the next 30 years forever.
The whole internet was developed by American taxpayers dollars - the TCP/IP/UDP etc protocols, the everywhere used BSD stack and many more things.
So I don't have a problem when American companies get their IP rights secured by patents such that the invested taxpayers money will give some revenues.
If forgein people don't like this they should invent their own network protocols. The American science community is not a tax financed charity organization.
Well, she was good-looking and touched him which made the whole scene quite surreal.
But hey, it was an illuisionary world full of lies.
With faster processors we get less efficient programs. 10 Years ago you could do internet/email/word processing/spread sheets with just a 33MHz Intel 386 with 16 MB RAM. Today you need for the very same things a Pentium IV with 2 GHZ and 128 MB RAM. There are some niece applications which need a lots of CPU Power like Quake or Nurmerical Simulations, but must Joe Adverage apps don't really need it. The programs need it due to sloppy coding. And the faster CPUs gave rise to the OOP paradigm. While it primarily is a nice theoretical concept for safer and more secure program, it's used these days just for code-bloat and GUI overload. Inpedendent studies show that in fact 73 percent of all "OOP" code is just imperative with C++ class bloat added.
Further the higher compiler and debugger speeds introduced much more sloppy coding styles. In the 60/70ies the computers of the Apollo program hadn't a single computer crash, which is completely unthinkable these days. The reason why the NASA is keeping old 8080 Intels in their shuttles is that they won't get decent code quality form modern processors these days.
Personally I think that the whole CS community must rethink their position towards computers speeds. Instead of the todays faster-is-better point we need a paradigm change towards just-as-fast-as-necessary.