$30 may be a reasonable surcharge if you paid for the Business Class seats you'll need to be in to get a power jack. Without that power jack, your $30 will get you maybe a couple hours of internet access, and that is still pretty expensive.
Wouldn't it be sweeeeet if they put those 12V DC jacks on every seat in Economy too?
Yeah, I think they got switched by IBM when they brought out the PS/2 systems. I didn't like it at the time, and I don't like it now. But I've become accustomed to it.
For a while, I ran some software that remapped Caps and Ctrl back to the proper way. As an Emacs user, it was absolutely essential that Ctrl be in the right place. The new location is very awkward, requiring much longer stretches to reach some essential combinations.
I think maybe they switched them to be more like traditional mechanical typewriters.
Probably not. Mark Tilden actually builds his robots to a different Three Laws of Robotics, more designed to serve the interests of the robot than of its human masters. Roughly paraphrased thusly:
1. Protect thy ass. 2. Feed thy face. 3. Look for better real estate.
All his robots obey these laws to varying degrees, depending on the sophistication of the robot.
I used to know Mark Tilden back when I was a student at University of Waterloo. He built the computer-controlled model railroad system that was used in the Real-Time Systems course. Quite a cool guy.
If the money I pay to send/receive my bits is not enough to fund the network, then charge me more for my bits. That's fair, and has the added benefit of not destroying the very soul of the Internet.
This problem affects GSM phones much more than CDMA phones. GSM uses a time-division scheme, where the phones transmit in 570ns bursts, at a rate of around 217 bursts/sec.
I have the same experience. It really is very, very annoying.
One of the RF techs at my company apparently modified his computer speakers to filter out the noise. I'd like to find out exactly what it was that he did.
"In particular, what if my mind were willing to make the semantic interpretation that a computer is a device that can both manipulate symbols and can also ascribe semantics to symbols."
I've always found that a computer running MS Visual C++ does a pretty good job of ascribing the correct semantics to the symbols in my source code.
"Semantics" and "symbol" are two rather overloaded terms, which make discussions like this very difficult. And, to me at least, not really worth the trouble.
If I don't patent bubble-sort, somebody else will. If I don't sell arms to terrorists, somebody else will. If I don't sell crack to children, somebody else will.
If I don't take the moral high ground, somebody else will. Or will they?
The bulb starts off. When a prisoner visits the room, he will turn the bulb on if he has been there before. Otherwise, he does not change the state of the bulb.
On the hundredth day, the prisoner checks the state of the bulb. If it is off, then that means a unique prisoner visited the room each of the previous 99 days. If it also his own first visit to the room, then all prisoners have now visited the room and he makes the assertion.
Otherwise, at least one prisoner has been repeated, and at least one missed. In that case, he turns the bulb off, and a new cycle of 100 days will begin.
It could take a long time for the random picks to satisfy this plan, but it must work eventually.
Call mainland China a province of Taiwan. It's not entirely without basis. he government in Taiwan is the older one, once was the government of all China. The mainland just happens to be under the control of communist rebels at the moment.
I have on occasion employed a variant of this ploy.
At my previous employer, I once had a manager that felt it was essential that he "contribute" to technical decisions. He would invariably #$#% them up, but he was the manager, what he says goes.
I learned when preparing a technical proposal to deliberately include something kinda dumb in it. The boss would find this dumb thing, suggest an improvement, and he was happy. This prevented him from $%$@#ing up something really important.
I believe it is best described as a craft, like fine woodworking. It takes skill to do it well, and ingenuity. Many of the results will have practical application, but almost as important are the aesthetics, style and beauty.
Art doesn't really capture it for me. And science is right out, really. Precious little of hacking comes anywhere near the Scientific Method, and without the Method, you're not doing science. I think people who suggest it is science are actually thinking of engineering.
But engineering doesn't really capture it either. Engineering is just a job. Craftsmanship is compulsion, something you are forced to by your own personality. A craftsman cannot accept anything less than his own best effort.
The essence of my work is building something functional, but also beautiful. Something I can be proud of.
I'm sure somebody else can answer this much more eloquently than I. But I will offer a couple observations.
Evolutionary theories are, in fact, quite testable and falsifiable, and thus fall perfectly comfortably under the umbrella of science. You don't need a parallel earth to conduct experiments on, you only need to look for things in the fossil record you haven't looked for before. You look for the "missing links" that your theory predicts should be there. If you find them, that is evidence for your theory; if you don't, evidence against. And other people can look in other places to confirm your experiment (another basic requirement of good science.) All science works this way.
This is why Intelligent Design is not science. Even if it is wrong, it is impossible to prove it wrong. I'm not saying there's nothing of value coming from the ID people, they do raise interesting questions. But the answer they offer to those questions ("God did it!") is not a scientific answer. That's not the same as saying it's wrong (maybe God did do it, I don't know), but it's not an answer that helps us develop a better understanding of our world. It's a dead-end. It's not science.
The only ink-jet manufacturer that has not gone out of their way to piss me off is Canon. I have a Canon printer now, it's got everything I need. I love it.
Canon's only serious failing is that they too sell their ink for more than Dom Perignon. The ink-jet makers all have that in common. But only Canon has not resorted to sleazy legal shit to prop up their ink cartridge business.
I can no longer sit back and allow Chinese infiltration, Chinese indoctrination, Chinese subversion, and the international Chinese conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious computers.
Re:spammer's low-tech way
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The thing is, then, the porn site asking you to solve the captcha doesn't know the answer themselves. You can screw 'em by giving the wrong answer.
They'll waste their resources trying to spam with the wrong answer, and you'll still get your porn fix.
If this is true (and I'm guessing that YANAL), then perhaps the specific patent reform required to silence all the Slashdot critics would be the explicit addition of "non-trivial" to the requirements for a patent.
Rather than simply banning all software patents (which feels a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, surely there are some truly genius software inventions; but if that's the only way to get rid of that horrible bathwater, then so be it), or public review periods, or any of the other proposed band-aids (TM), if we could just do away with trivial patents entirely, from all fields of endeavour, wouldn't we all be happy?
The stated purpose of patent protection is to provide an inventor with a means to recoup his R&D expenses and make a little green on the side, but still allow the world to benefit from his knowledge. But a trivial invention, by definition, has trivial R&D expenses. Trivial inventions to do not need nor deserve patent protection, whatever the current wording of the law may be.
If non-triviality is the outcome we seek, why not just make that the specific reform we seek?
"Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail."
The whole point of the GPL is that users can make modify the code. If the deriviative code they have released cannot be loaded without rendering the unit unusable, then they have clearly violated the spirit of the GPL. Maybe they've found some kind of loophole, I don't know.
If the device will not work without linking in proprietary code, well, then they gots themselves a problem. But it's their problem, not the GPL's. Either the proprietary code goes, or the GPL code goes.
"Ameritrade has every reason to believe that the tape has either been destroyed or is being held by the shipper."
And now, every bored minimum-wage handler in every depot, while not busy drop-kicking packages marked "Fragile", will be searching every corner for this extremely lucrative opportunity.
Somewhere I have a magazine from when I was in high-school in the 80's that talks about the coming technology of Perpendicular Recording. BYTE or Popular Science or something like that.
Man, that's a long gestation period...
Around the same time, people were also talking about holographic storage on crystals. I think "bubble memory" has come and gone, but hopefully the data crystals are still on the way.
The viscosity of the air right at the surface might be even higher than the air around it, because of skin effect (the phenomenon that makes fluidics work.)
Slashdot Mirror
$30 may be a reasonable surcharge if you paid for the Business Class seats you'll need to be in to get a power jack. Without that power jack, your $30 will get you maybe a couple hours of internet access, and that is still pretty expensive.
Wouldn't it be sweeeeet if they put those 12V DC jacks on every seat in Economy too?
Yeah, I think they got switched by IBM when they brought out the PS/2 systems. I didn't like it at the time, and I don't like it now. But I've become accustomed to it.
For a while, I ran some software that remapped Caps and Ctrl back to the proper way. As an Emacs user, it was absolutely essential that Ctrl be in the right place. The new location is very awkward, requiring much longer stretches to reach some essential combinations.
I think maybe they switched them to be more like traditional mechanical typewriters.
Probably not. Mark Tilden actually builds his robots to a different Three Laws of Robotics, more designed to serve the interests of the robot than of its human masters. Roughly paraphrased thusly:
1. Protect thy ass.
2. Feed thy face.
3. Look for better real estate.
All his robots obey these laws to varying degrees, depending on the sophistication of the robot.
I used to know Mark Tilden back when I was a student at University of Waterloo. He built the computer-controlled model railroad system that was used in the Real-Time Systems course. Quite a cool guy.
If the money I pay to send/receive my bits is not enough to fund the network, then charge me more for my bits. That's fair, and has the added benefit of not destroying the very soul of the Internet.
This kinda reminds me of the Synthaxe Drumitar, played by Future Man of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.
This problem affects GSM phones much more than CDMA phones. GSM uses a time-division scheme, where the phones transmit in 570ns bursts, at a rate of around 217 bursts/sec.
I have the same experience. It really is very, very annoying.
One of the RF techs at my company apparently modified his computer speakers to filter out the noise. I'd like to find out exactly what it was that he did.
"In particular, what if my mind were willing to make the semantic interpretation that a computer is a device that can both manipulate symbols and can also ascribe semantics to symbols."
I've always found that a computer running MS Visual C++ does a pretty good job of ascribing the correct semantics to the symbols in my source code.
"Semantics" and "symbol" are two rather overloaded terms, which make discussions like this very difficult. And, to me at least, not really worth the trouble.
If I don't patent bubble-sort, somebody else will. If I don't sell arms to terrorists, somebody else will. If I don't sell crack to children, somebody else will.
If I don't take the moral high ground, somebody else will. Or will they?
Ok, here's my solution.
The bulb starts off. When a prisoner visits the room, he will turn the bulb on if he has been there before. Otherwise, he does not change the state of the bulb.
On the hundredth day, the prisoner checks the state of the bulb. If it is off, then that means a unique prisoner visited the room each of the previous 99 days. If it also his own first visit to the room, then all prisoners have now visited the room and he makes the assertion.
Otherwise, at least one prisoner has been repeated, and at least one missed. In that case, he turns the bulb off, and a new cycle of 100 days will begin.
It could take a long time for the random picks to satisfy this plan, but it must work eventually.
Call mainland China a province of Taiwan. It's not entirely without basis. he government in Taiwan is the older one, once was the government of all China. The mainland just happens to be under the control of communist rebels at the moment.
Or am I thinking of something else? I'm not sure now. I better go check. No interruptions for 10 minutes, please.
I have on occasion employed a variant of this ploy.
At my previous employer, I once had a manager that felt it was essential that he "contribute" to technical decisions. He would invariably #$#% them up, but he was the manager, what he says goes.
I learned when preparing a technical proposal to deliberately include something kinda dumb in it. The boss would find this dumb thing, suggest an improvement, and he was happy. This prevented him from $%$@#ing up something really important.
I believe it is best described as a craft, like fine woodworking. It takes skill to do it well, and ingenuity. Many of the results will have practical application, but almost as important are the aesthetics, style and beauty.
Art doesn't really capture it for me. And science is right out, really. Precious little of hacking comes anywhere near the Scientific Method, and without the Method, you're not doing science. I think people who suggest it is science are actually thinking of engineering.
But engineering doesn't really capture it either. Engineering is just a job. Craftsmanship is compulsion, something you are forced to by your own personality. A craftsman cannot accept anything less than his own best effort.
The essence of my work is building something functional, but also beautiful. Something I can be proud of.
I'm sure somebody else can answer this much more eloquently than I. But I will offer a couple observations.
Evolutionary theories are, in fact, quite testable and falsifiable, and thus fall perfectly comfortably under the umbrella of science. You don't need a parallel earth to conduct experiments on, you only need to look for things in the fossil record you haven't looked for before. You look for the "missing links" that your theory predicts should be there. If you find them, that is evidence for your theory; if you don't, evidence against. And other people can look in other places to confirm your experiment (another basic requirement of good science.) All science works this way.
This is why Intelligent Design is not science. Even if it is wrong, it is impossible to prove it wrong. I'm not saying there's nothing of value coming from the ID people, they do raise interesting questions. But the answer they offer to those questions ("God did it!") is not a scientific answer. That's not the same as saying it's wrong (maybe God did do it, I don't know), but it's not an answer that helps us develop a better understanding of our world. It's a dead-end. It's not science.
Oh, I assure you, he's fully baked.
HP??? Screw 'em. Screw Epson, too. Hard.
The only ink-jet manufacturer that has not gone out of their way to piss me off is Canon. I have a Canon printer now, it's got everything I need. I love it.
Canon's only serious failing is that they too sell their ink for more than Dom Perignon. The ink-jet makers all have that in common. But only Canon has not resorted to sleazy legal shit to prop up their ink cartridge business.
I can no longer sit back and allow Chinese infiltration, Chinese indoctrination, Chinese subversion, and the international Chinese conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious computers.
The thing is, then, the porn site asking you to solve the captcha doesn't know the answer themselves. You can screw 'em by giving the wrong answer.
They'll waste their resources trying to spam with the wrong answer, and you'll still get your porn fix.
If this is true (and I'm guessing that YANAL), then perhaps the specific patent reform required to silence all the Slashdot critics would be the explicit addition of "non-trivial" to the requirements for a patent.
Rather than simply banning all software patents (which feels a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, surely there are some truly genius software inventions; but if that's the only way to get rid of that horrible bathwater, then so be it), or public review periods, or any of the other proposed band-aids (TM), if we could just do away with trivial patents entirely, from all fields of endeavour, wouldn't we all be happy?
The stated purpose of patent protection is to provide an inventor with a means to recoup his R&D expenses and make a little green on the side, but still allow the world to benefit from his knowledge. But a trivial invention, by definition, has trivial R&D expenses. Trivial inventions to do not need nor deserve patent protection, whatever the current wording of the law may be.
If non-triviality is the outcome we seek, why not just make that the specific reform we seek?
"Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail."
The whole point of the GPL is that users can make modify the code. If the deriviative code they have released cannot be loaded without rendering the unit unusable, then they have clearly violated the spirit of the GPL. Maybe they've found some kind of loophole, I don't know.
If the device will not work without linking in proprietary code, well, then they gots themselves a problem. But it's their problem, not the GPL's. Either the proprietary code goes, or the GPL code goes.
It took Hitler 10 years to get all his pieces in place. And he was a master at it, not like the bumbling clods running the US now.
Linux is... a cancer. And we... are the cure.
"Ameritrade has every reason to believe that the tape has either been destroyed or is being held by the shipper."
And now, every bored minimum-wage handler in every depot, while not busy drop-kicking packages marked "Fragile", will be searching every corner for this extremely lucrative opportunity.
Somewhere I have a magazine from when I was in high-school in the 80's that talks about the coming technology of Perpendicular Recording. BYTE or Popular Science or something like that. Man, that's a long gestation period... Around the same time, people were also talking about holographic storage on crystals. I think "bubble memory" has come and gone, but hopefully the data crystals are still on the way.
The viscosity of the air right at the surface might be even higher than the air around it, because of skin effect (the phenomenon that makes fluidics work.)