Yes. I think the Title was The Merchant's War by Fredrick Pohl.
An advertising executive gets kidnapped and shanghi'd into working at a factory in a third world country where they tend to a great mass of chicken muscle, which is fed by a lot of pipes.
One of my favorites - it identifies what would happen in a world where advertisers were let run rampant.
You remind me of a friend of mine who, while living in Chicago, kept asking me to come visit from St. Louis. He said "just hop on I-55 and, like, you're there."
I installed RedHat 7.2 a couple of weeks ago, and it got both my network card and my mouse wrong the first time through. For some reason it assumed that a Logitec Wheelman mouse has to be installed in the USB port. The installation program gave me a long list of options for video, audio, network, mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and insisted that I confirm if its guess were correct. How is the typical user supposed to know this kind of thing?
(FYI, I installed Windows on a different machine at the same time. It was much easier, simply because Windows installs are all virtually identical, while Linux installs vary greatly from one distribution to the next)
Also, I definitely wouldn't call "on the Internet" to be "at my disposal." Finding information on the Internet is easy. Finding information that is both correct and easy for a non-geek to understand is HAAARD.
When was the last time you saw a standard installation of Linux even mention single-user mode? Yes, it exists. No, it ain't easy to get to.
The only package I've every seen for Windows that has dependancies are those that require the latest and greatest ActiveX. Not so for Linux - those rarely come packaged with their dependancies. Compare installing Quicken to installing GnuCash some time.
I don't understand why everyone complicates this so much. If you want to capture the desktop market, then you have to cater to what the desktop market wants. That can be summed up in three words: Easy To Use. Here are a few examples of things that aren't easy to use:
- So many configuration options that you don't know where to start, and need a year's education to finish
- A selection of desktop environments, each with a corp of zealots telling you that theirs is better
- A broad base of information that you have to (a) go out and find on the internet, and (b)search through to find your answers.
- Installations with prerequisites that you have to figure out how to find and install yourself
- User account management
- Video, sound, and network card installations that require you to know the model of your card.
If you're attempting to create an operating system with a broad selection of options, you should remember to include the option to not have to mess with these little details.
Unfortunately, this requires the programmers to figure a few things out for the user, and most of us just don't want to do that. Somehow we're always surprised to find out that the user doesn't want to do our work for us.
I've always loved this kind of thing, from Lincoln Logs to the old erector sets with the metal girders that you could slice your fingers open with.
Another one in that market that most people don't know about is ZomeTools. I've used these things to model molecules, build small pieces of furniture, explain 4d geometry, and decorate my party spaces with cool sculpture.
I think that Sony really misses the point of a pet. Humans like affection and loyalty from an independant entity. A robot will never be independant - it's loyalty is as immaterial as that of your shirt, and its affection is, at best, pre-programmed.
Now, if they could program it to do my laundry, that would be something else...
My personal experience has shown me that online romances _can_ be adultry, although the line is a difficult one to draw.
I was married to a lovely lady somewhere in the midwest. Not too technically adept, she was fascinated with the internet and took to it like a fish to water when she moved in and got 24/7 access to my computer. After a period of time, our relationship grew less intense (like most relationships do), and she turned to chat rooms to suppliment the excitement in her life. No big deal - it wasn't like she didn't have friends in the physical world, and the continuous influx of new names kept her entertained.
I'm certain that you can all see it coming. She met a guy in Canada in one of the chat rooms. Again, no biggie, it's not like she could fool around with the guy, and, hey, I shouldn't be restricting her from harmless friendships, right?
After about two months she was spending more time online with him than talking to me. Eventually they started calling each other on the phone. My first clue that this was going on was when I recieved a notice that the credit card that my phone bill was being charged to had been cancelled for being way over its limit. I eventually discovered that she had averaged about an hour a day on the phone with him for about a month, racking up a total of $850 in phone bills over 28 days. Calling cards on payphones for international calls can be REALLY expensive. I still keep the bills as a souvenier. I understand that this was just the bills for her calling him, and that he had called her just as much, but on a better calling plan.
The funny part of this is that, when the guy heard how pissed off I was at this, he stopped talking to her. I don't believe they ever met. She didn't talk to me for about two weeks because of that. It occasionally takes a large brick to convince people that the love has gone out of a relationship. Her silence was a bigger brick than the phone calls.
A relationship is all about two people enjoying each other's company. When one of those people abandon the other for a third person's company, they are in effect "going out" on the relationship. I can't say it's cheating, because everyone's rules are different. I can say that such abandonment is harmful to a relationship. In my case, it was fatal.
And while we're at it, let's ban all of those rated X movies. We should keep anyone from mentioning the existence of Porn, and take all commercials for those icky 1-900 lines off the air.
Somebody is fearmongering. "Oh, no, we better do something about this." The entire scenario is utterly unrealistic. The "pack our children in cotton" brigade still hasn't gotten any further than to get ratings on anything, including music, movies, and video games. The whole "freedom of speech" thing still holds on art items like video games, just as much as it does for movies.
The original laws against kiddie porn make sense because you have to involve children in order to make it.
Virtual kiddie porn should be illegal, why? Because it encourages people to think about adults having sex with children? Because it arouses the appetite of people who lean that way anyway?
Alright, let's go on the assumption that this is a valid form of thinking. Let's see what other things fall in the category of "encouraging people to think about adults having sex with children". With this thinking, we could then illegalize:
Grown women who wear those cute little Catholic school girl outfits, or dress like highschool cheerleaders.
Grown women who wear bows in their hair (how disgusting!).
Songs like "Hot for Teacher".
The movie "Harold and Maud".
Any movie with a childhood romance.
Any "coming of age" movie.
Most Anime, especially Hentai.
The list is truly endless. Do we want to open this can of worms? I know a few conservatives who would love to.
Scientific American gave a much more scientific review of the Z machine in 1998, and I saw no change in the numbers from that publication. They have been insisting that they are 30 years away from high-yield (read: energy-efficient) nuclear fusion since they came up with the theory in the first place. They are still about 30 years away from it.
I can almost hear Bullwinkle saying "This time, for sure". Every time they take another step forward, someone moves the finish line.
Not meaningless. What "500,000 years" measures is involvement, not results. I think it's pretty cool that they have produced results equivalent to the entire population of the United States giving up a month of their lives.
.... the french courts then went on to rule that other all other countries should stop sending their pollution across French borders. Any air that is scheduled to pass over french territory should have all contaminants removed from it before it gets there, and cleansing plants should be set up on the borders of waterways....
Gore wants to expand federally sponsored drug education and drug treatment programs and support programs to provide prison inmates with drug and alcohol addiction treatment
Bush wants to improve drug interdiction and subsidy programs to reduce drug export from abroad (georgewbush.com, 9/23), support character education in schools, drug prevention programs in communities, and faith-based drug treatment programs (georgewbush.com, 9/23), and prosecute as adults, youths accused of a felony.
2) Minority Religions...
Wow, you really want to get people pissed off at them, don't you?
3) Why give a tax cut?
Because the government has spare money and the people want some. Since one of the candidates is giving away free money, the other one is required to. "If you vote for me, I will personally hand you a fresh, crisp, $100 bill..." Oddly enough, it works.
4) electoral reform
Isn't the electoral college system written into the constitution? Last time I checked, a presidential race was no time to fly in the face of tradition. Besides, both the Republicans and the Democrats rely on the Electoral College to convince people that third-party votes are throw-away votes.
Again, from Quorum, here is how they stand out on other election reform issues:
Gore wants to:
o Require full disclosure of funding sources of issue advocacy commercials which appear within 60 days of an election
o Ban unregulated soft money campaign contributions to political parties or committees
o Prohibit Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions to candidates for federal office
o Strengthen and enforce legislation that encourages full and timely disclosure of campaign finance information
Bush wants to:
o Require unions to get members' permission before using union dues for political advocacy
o Increase the amount individuals are permitted to contribute to federal campaigns
o "Supports instant disclosure of campaign contributions" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
o "Supports banning 'soft money' contributions from labor unions and corporations" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
5)How Do You Feel About Intellectual Property?
Honestly, I'm still on the fence about this one myself, and I think there are at least a dozen issues that are wrapped up in this one question, each which should be addressed separately.
6) Encryption....
The current politicians have the issues so screwed around that talking pro-encryption is like talking pro-drugs or pro-terrorism. I can understand why they wouldn't want to respond to this one.
7) Rising Political Protests
Oh, so you'd want them to bite the hand that feeds them, eh? Just because the World Trade Organization violates our constitution by handing lawmaking power to an extra-national organization is no reason to be concerned. They really have the people's best interests in mind (assuming handing money to large corporations in is our best interest)
8) Asteroid Defenses
I have a friend's daughter that insisted that she should be able to take my mint-condition, still-it-its-box Buzz Lightyear off of the shelf and play with it. "It's a toy" she said "what good is it if you don't play with it."
Unfortunately, building anything that could protect us from asteroid would also mean creating something that could reduce most small countries to a smoking hole in the ground. I have no problem with this, but I'm afraid that many military types might just feel a need to take it off the shelf and play with it.
9) The Future of the Country, and of Humanity
Ok, this one is going just a little too far. Not only do you want the candidates to solve all of your problems, you want them to hand you the meaning of life? Presidents aren't supposed to give you the meaning of life - that's what Popes are for. They're just supposed to make your meaning of life possible.
If you really need it, the answer is 42. Just don't go asking for the question.
I actually went out and purchased an antenna for my TV for the presidential debates. It is currently taking up my entire living room, but it feeds signal to the TV downstairs just fine, thankyouverymuch.
When I am in a job interview, I make it a point to ask the employer a few questions. The questions themselves are immaterial, as long as they give the employer a chance to make an answer. The content of the answers aren't nearly as important as the tone, direction, and quantity of information.
In the debates, I listened to the answers that our candidates gave. They both dodged prickly subjects for topics that they were stronger on. Both insisted that the other explain the weak points of his plans, and both cleanly avoided dwelling on this (or making excuses).
Gore liked to listen to himself talk, and explained things in great boring detail, as if talking to a fifth grade class. In my opinion, his "Lady with a poodle" bit at the end was a big mistake.
Bush, on the other hand, described his policies in glossing detail, and spent an inordinate amount of time comparing his strong points to Gore's weak ones. I felt as if he were saying "You're not bright enough to understand the details, but mine is better than his". I found his blatant attacks on Gore to be quite annoying.
On the average, Gore felt like a fifth grade teacher, and Bush felt like a magician or confidence trickster. You can guess which one I prefer.
On the purely content level, I feel that Gore comes off stronger. His policies are obviously more aimed at the public good, while Bush seems to want to sneek more money into the hands of the wealthy. Just my personal view. But remember, Bush is your buddy and Gore is just a rambling politician.
Ok, so MS assumes that anyone who changes their Email addy wants all of their friends to try MSN Explorer, right?
Sure, that makes sense to me. I think I'll assume that anyone who visits my web site wants all of their friends to visit my website. Lesse, where did I put that virus kit...
1. After it's spun up, you have to wait a couple of days for the ripples to subside.
2. Mirror has to be in an effectively sealed room (yes, the fumes are bad, but proper ventilation and general avoidance can prevent health problems)
3. You can't perform adjustments on the surface to adapt for the atmosphere. This is what makes all of the current really large telescopes useful
You can aim one of these suckers by moving the secondary mirror and catching a different area of the reflected light. Kinda like holding a magnifying glass in place and moving your head around behind it. Since they're focused at infinity, the distance to the target is meaningless. Even a regular telecope only has so many degrees of valuable viewing, this is just a bit tighter.
When you work for a not-for-profit organization, one of the things that you learn is that only the organization itself is not allowed to profit. All of the employees, managers, board members, and executives of said organization are allowed to get filthy stinking rich off of it, if they can manage such.
The laws require that employees and contractors of such organizations be paid along the median for any particlar set of services. Have you checked out the median pay for corporate executives lately? They're almost invariably based on the value and revenue of the company. Let's think about this for a moment...
1 million times denser than conventional crystals.
This is a mis-quote. What the article says is:
"And 1 million crystals in Gruen's diamond
film can fit inside the crystal produced by
conventional methods."
This states that the crystals are one millionth as massive, not that they have the same mass at a smaller size. This explains why the film material is so much smoother than previously manufactured materials: Smaller granularity.
It is a common myth that if you make something pass light cleanly that you wind up with something invisible. If that were the case, then glass and plastic would be really tough to find when you set it on a table, and diamonds would be considerably less pretty. You also have to adjust the defraction index of the substance to equal that of air.
One of the ways to demonstrate this is to submerse diamonds in water. Diamonds and water have the same defraction index, so the diamonds literally vanish. You can use this trick on an engagement ring to tell a real diamond from a cubic zirconia or cut glass.
Ten centimeters? Do you realize that this means we can shoot other people's satilites out of orbit? Cool! Unfortunately, even a laser beam would spread out over several feet when shot from the ground - it would be REALLY neat if they could have one of those suckers mounted on the space station itself. It's the NASA deathstar!
Mythological Beast
Looking like the wrong type of freak
on
Techno Jacket
·
· Score: 1
The designers of this have totally missed the point of a good Gargoyle rig. People who do full-body mobile jacking are on the cutting edge of technology, and they want to look like it. Something like the cyclopes in "City of Lost Children" would be more appropriate.
The jacket that they have shown here will make true geeks feel like pathetic freaks with no style, and non-geeks like pathetic wireheads with no lives.
The answer to this question is "very Little, but not none at all". Programming languages aren't really based on the English language - they are based on predicate logic. In predicate logic, you break down any statement into a relationship (sometimes an "action" relationship) between two entities with a set of qualifiers which often have defaults. For a thorough description of predicate logic, visit the Lojban site, where they have gone the other direction, creating a human language from predicate logic.
For those of you who just want a quick answer, we'll use the following example:
The processor saves the data to file X.
We have an obvious object, verb, subject, and prepositional phrase here. In predicate logic, this is broken down to the relationship (in this case, "to save") and the entities involved in this relationship (the processor and the data), with an instructional details. Japanese changes the ordering of subject, verb, etc., but they still have all of those structures.
This brings us to a possible lingual difference. In English, we have implied imperitives which obviate the use of a subject ("You Run!" is usually just "Run!"), which bleeds heavily into our use of programming languages, i.e. print("this stuff"), because we can assume that the processor is going to do the work. I couldn't tell you if this is a practice in all other languages. It is interesting that object oriented programming begins to blur this assumption with the implication that any of many objects might "do" something.
So the question is, what differences are there in the editing of predicate logic between languages?
The first-year students of the Colorado School of Arts have finished their review of the FBI's "carnivore" system.
"It is definitely a creative masterpiece," stated Rufus Niederman, spokesperson for the 20 student review team, "we feel that it will be a real attention getter in the years to come. Although the plotline is really just a re-hashing of a standard theme, the powerful new twist should be quite an audience grabber."
The FBI was enthused by this accolade, and intends to shoot for the widest possible distribution. Look for it, comming soon, to a screen near you.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could trade our computer cycles in for, say, a tax deduction for donating my computer's time to charity. The Cancer Foundation is a charity, right? I have to admit that I can't imagine that a micropayment would induce me to rent out my spare cycles. I doubt that such a thing would even pay me enough to be worth the extra headache come tax time. Donations to charity are easy to list, income becomes a pain.
This kind of thing is done because someone is too cheap to purchase their own computers (or clusters). In the case of SETI, there is no profit, so there's no money for computers. In the case of a Pharmaceutical company, they're just trimming their bottom line.
The primary advantage to Open Source is distribution of effort, the primary dangers are diffusion of purpose and logarithmically increasing communications overhead. Release time needs to be a balance of these.
Unless I'm missing something (been known to happen, of course) there are three basic reasons for open sourcing a project.
The first and foremost is to allow code-savvy users to hunt down that niggling bug, fix it, and send you instructions on how to adjust the code base. If this is your intent, then releasing it before Beta is just asking to have everyone who picks up a copy of it saying "hey, wouldn't it be great if the code did _THIS_?" It is impossible to resist ALL of these, especially when the person offers to write it himself, and then you're stuck integrating it into the whole. Suddenly, the beta is pushed back six months to a year while you tell yourself that it'll be well worth it when the product eventually gets released.
The second reason is because you're trolling for developers. If you're not too terribly picky about what goes into your product, this can be a great way to get some free work out of the Internet. In this case, you should probably start by publishing a few of your design plans, then releasing the code to coders who show Interest, possibly having them sign a non-disclosure to prevent them from running off and founding their own company with it. Free (speech) doesn't have to be free (beer).
The third reason is as a publicity stunt. In this case, definitely wait until just before you have a sellable product (post-beta, pre-release). This gives you a well-timed media boost, and gives the purchasers the warm fuzzy about their ability to work with the software on an up-close-and-personal basis. This is also the optimal point to start getting "hey, with a little effort, it could do this" kind of information, which can be blissfully rolled into the 2.0 release.
> The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works.
Ok, let's take a step back here and ask the pertinent question: What exactly is the purpose of writing software? To produce a product that performs a whole bunch of cool tasks about 30% of the time that you try them? Is this an exercise in feature packing? Probably not. If you can't produce something that someone else can use, you're just stroking your own ego.
I would say that the writer on Suck wants at least a product that works.
> But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other > products/standards?
How about the ability to hook up to the web from my environment (which happens to be behind a firewall) and present most of the content that currently exists on the web without crashing. This would be nice.
> There are a tremendous number of outside developers > who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here. > Why should anyone stop?
Integration slowdown. Read the first chapter of The Mythical Man Month some time, the one about the Tar Pit, and it will give you an idea about how time-costly integrating the efforts of a bunch of outside developers can be.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I think the Title was The Merchant's War by Fredrick Pohl.
An advertising executive gets kidnapped and shanghi'd into working at a factory in a third world country where they tend to a great mass of chicken muscle, which is fed by a lot of pipes.
One of my favorites - it identifies what would happen in a world where advertisers were let run rampant.
Mythological Beast
You remind me of a friend of mine who, while living in Chicago, kept asking me to come visit from St. Louis. He said "just hop on I-55 and, like, you're there."
I installed RedHat 7.2 a couple of weeks ago, and it got both my network card and my mouse wrong the first time through. For some reason it assumed that a Logitec Wheelman mouse has to be installed in the USB port. The installation program gave me a long list of options for video, audio, network, mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and insisted that I confirm if its guess were correct. How is the typical user supposed to know this kind of thing?
(FYI, I installed Windows on a different machine at the same time. It was much easier, simply because Windows installs are all virtually identical, while Linux installs vary greatly from one distribution to the next)
Also, I definitely wouldn't call "on the Internet" to be "at my disposal." Finding information on the Internet is easy. Finding information that is both correct and easy for a non-geek to understand is HAAARD.
When was the last time you saw a standard installation of Linux even mention single-user mode? Yes, it exists. No, it ain't easy to get to.
The only package I've every seen for Windows that has dependancies are those that require the latest and greatest ActiveX. Not so for Linux - those rarely come packaged with their dependancies. Compare installing Quicken to installing GnuCash some time.
Time to throw a little karma to the wind.
I don't understand why everyone complicates this so much. If you want to capture the desktop market, then you have to cater to what the desktop market wants. That can be summed up in three words: Easy To Use. Here are a few examples of things that aren't easy to use:
- So many configuration options that you don't know where to start, and need a year's education to finish
- A selection of desktop environments, each with a corp of zealots telling you that theirs is better
- A broad base of information that you have to (a) go out and find on the internet, and (b)search through to find your answers.
- Installations with prerequisites that you have to figure out how to find and install yourself
- User account management
- Video, sound, and network card installations that require you to know the model of your card.
If you're attempting to create an operating system with a broad selection of options, you should remember to include the option to not have to mess with these little details.
Unfortunately, this requires the programmers to figure a few things out for the user, and most of us just don't want to do that. Somehow we're always surprised to find out that the user doesn't want to do our work for us.
Mythological Beast
I've always loved this kind of thing, from Lincoln Logs to the old erector sets with the metal girders that you could slice your fingers open with.
Another one in that market that most people don't know about is ZomeTools. I've used these things to model molecules, build small pieces of furniture, explain 4d geometry, and decorate my party spaces with cool sculpture.
I think that Sony really misses the point of a pet. Humans like affection and loyalty from an independant entity. A robot will never be independant - it's loyalty is as immaterial as that of your shirt, and its affection is, at best, pre-programmed.
Now, if they could program it to do my laundry, that would be something else...
My personal experience has shown me that online romances _can_ be adultry, although the line is a difficult one to draw.
I was married to a lovely lady somewhere in the midwest. Not too technically adept, she was fascinated with the internet and took to it like a fish to water when she moved in and got 24/7 access to my computer. After a period of time, our relationship grew less intense (like most relationships do), and she turned to chat rooms to suppliment the excitement in her life. No big deal - it wasn't like she didn't have friends in the physical world, and the continuous influx of new names kept her entertained.
I'm certain that you can all see it coming. She met a guy in Canada in one of the chat rooms. Again, no biggie, it's not like she could fool around with the guy, and, hey, I shouldn't be restricting her from harmless friendships, right?
After about two months she was spending more time online with him than talking to me. Eventually they started calling each other on the phone. My first clue that this was going on was when I recieved a notice that the credit card that my phone bill was being charged to had been cancelled for being way over its limit. I eventually discovered that she had averaged about an hour a day on the phone with him for about a month, racking up a total of $850 in phone bills over 28 days. Calling cards on payphones for international calls can be REALLY expensive. I still keep the bills as a souvenier. I understand that this was just the bills for her calling him, and that he had called her just as much, but on a better calling plan.
The funny part of this is that, when the guy heard how pissed off I was at this, he stopped talking to her. I don't believe they ever met. She didn't talk to me for about two weeks because of that. It occasionally takes a large brick to convince people that the love has gone out of a relationship. Her silence was a bigger brick than the phone calls.
A relationship is all about two people enjoying each other's company. When one of those people abandon the other for a third person's company, they are in effect "going out" on the relationship. I can't say it's cheating, because everyone's rules are different. I can say that such abandonment is harmful to a relationship. In my case, it was fatal.
Mythological Beast
And while we're at it, let's ban all of those rated X movies. We should keep anyone from mentioning the existence of Porn, and take all commercials for those icky 1-900 lines off the air.
Somebody is fearmongering. "Oh, no, we better do something about this." The entire scenario is utterly unrealistic. The "pack our children in cotton" brigade still hasn't gotten any further than to get ratings on anything, including music, movies, and video games. The whole "freedom of speech" thing still holds on art items like video games, just as much as it does for movies.
Mythological Beast
The original laws against kiddie porn make sense because you have to involve children in order to make it.
Virtual kiddie porn should be illegal, why? Because it encourages people to think about adults having sex with children? Because it arouses the appetite of people who lean that way anyway?
Alright, let's go on the assumption that this is a valid form of thinking. Let's see what other things fall in the category of "encouraging people to think about adults having sex with children". With this thinking, we could then illegalize:
Grown women who wear those cute little Catholic school girl outfits, or dress like highschool cheerleaders.
Grown women who wear bows in their hair (how disgusting!).
Songs like "Hot for Teacher".
The movie "Harold and Maud".
Any movie with a childhood romance.
Any "coming of age" movie.
Most Anime, especially Hentai.
The list is truly endless. Do we want to open this can of worms? I know a few conservatives who would love to.
Mythological Beast
Scientific American gave a much more scientific review of the Z machine in 1998, and I saw no change in the numbers from that publication. They have been insisting that they are 30 years away from high-yield (read: energy-efficient) nuclear fusion since they came up with the theory in the first place. They are still about 30 years away from it.
I can almost hear Bullwinkle saying "This time, for sure". Every time they take another step forward, someone moves the finish line.
It's a really cool story, though.
Not meaningless. What "500,000 years" measures is involvement, not results. I think it's pretty cool that they have produced results equivalent to the entire population of the United States giving up a month of their lives.
.... the french courts then went on to rule that other all other countries should stop sending their pollution across French borders. Any air that is scheduled to pass over french territory should have all contaminants removed from it before it gets there, and cleansing plants should be set up on the borders of waterways ....
Mythological Beast
1) War on Drugs
The Candidate Comparitor on Quorum gives these answers:
Gore wants to expand federally sponsored drug education and drug treatment programs and support programs to provide prison inmates with drug and alcohol addiction treatment
Bush wants to improve drug interdiction and subsidy programs to reduce drug export from abroad (georgewbush.com, 9/23), support character education in schools, drug prevention programs in communities, and faith-based drug treatment programs (georgewbush.com, 9/23), and prosecute as adults, youths accused of a felony.
2) Minority Religions...
Wow, you really want to get people pissed off at them, don't you?
3) Why give a tax cut?
Because the government has spare money and the people want some. Since one of the candidates is giving away free money, the other one is required to. "If you vote for me, I will personally hand you a fresh, crisp, $100 bill..." Oddly enough, it works.
4) electoral reform
Isn't the electoral college system written into the constitution? Last time I checked, a presidential race was no time to fly in the face of tradition. Besides, both the Republicans and the Democrats rely on the Electoral College to convince people that third-party votes are throw-away votes.
Again, from Quorum, here is how they stand out on other election reform issues:
Gore wants to:
o Require full disclosure of funding sources of issue advocacy commercials which appear within 60 days of an election
o Ban unregulated soft money campaign contributions to political parties or committees
o Prohibit Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions to candidates for federal office
o Strengthen and enforce legislation that encourages full and timely disclosure of campaign finance information
Bush wants to:
o Require unions to get members' permission before using union dues for political advocacy
o Increase the amount individuals are permitted to contribute to federal campaigns
o "Supports instant disclosure of campaign contributions" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
o "Supports banning 'soft money' contributions from labor unions and corporations" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
5)How Do You Feel About Intellectual Property?
Honestly, I'm still on the fence about this one myself, and I think there are at least a dozen issues that are wrapped up in this one question, each which should be addressed separately.
6) Encryption....
The current politicians have the issues so screwed around that talking pro-encryption is like talking pro-drugs or pro-terrorism. I can understand why they wouldn't want to respond to this one.
7) Rising Political Protests
Oh, so you'd want them to bite the hand that feeds them, eh? Just because the World Trade Organization violates our constitution by handing lawmaking power to an extra-national organization is no reason to be concerned. They really have the people's best interests in mind (assuming handing money to large corporations in is our best interest)
8) Asteroid Defenses
I have a friend's daughter that insisted that she should be able to take my mint-condition, still-it-its-box Buzz Lightyear off of the shelf and play with it. "It's a toy" she said "what good is it if you don't play with it."
Unfortunately, building anything that could protect us from asteroid would also mean creating something that could reduce most small countries to a smoking hole in the ground. I have no problem with this, but I'm afraid that many military types might just feel a need to take it off the shelf and play with it.
9) The Future of the Country, and of Humanity
Ok, this one is going just a little too far. Not only do you want the candidates to solve all of your problems, you want them to hand you the meaning of life? Presidents aren't supposed to give you the meaning of life - that's what Popes are for. They're just supposed to make your meaning of life possible.
If you really need it, the answer is 42. Just don't go asking for the question.
Mythological Beast
I actually went out and purchased an antenna for my TV for the presidential debates. It is currently taking up my entire living room, but it feeds signal to the TV downstairs just fine, thankyouverymuch.
When I am in a job interview, I make it a point to ask the employer a few questions. The questions themselves are immaterial, as long as they give the employer a chance to make an answer. The content of the answers aren't nearly as important as the tone, direction, and quantity of information.
In the debates, I listened to the answers that our candidates gave. They both dodged prickly subjects for topics that they were stronger on. Both insisted that the other explain the weak points of his plans, and both cleanly avoided dwelling on this (or making excuses).
Gore liked to listen to himself talk, and explained things in great boring detail, as if talking to a fifth grade class. In my opinion, his "Lady with a poodle" bit at the end was a big mistake.
Bush, on the other hand, described his policies in glossing detail, and spent an inordinate amount of time comparing his strong points to Gore's weak ones. I felt as if he were saying "You're not bright enough to understand the details, but mine is better than his". I found his blatant attacks on Gore to be quite annoying.
On the average, Gore felt like a fifth grade teacher, and Bush felt like a magician or confidence trickster. You can guess which one I prefer.
On the purely content level, I feel that Gore comes off stronger. His policies are obviously more aimed at the public good, while Bush seems to want to sneek more money into the hands of the wealthy. Just my personal view. But remember, Bush is your buddy and Gore is just a rambling politician.
Mythological Beast
Ok, so MS assumes that anyone who changes their Email addy wants all of their friends to try MSN Explorer, right?
Sure, that makes sense to me. I think I'll assume that anyone who visits my web site wants all of their friends to visit my website. Lesse, where did I put that virus kit...
Mythological Beast
Various known problems with mercury lenses:
1. After it's spun up, you have to wait a couple of days for the ripples to subside.
2. Mirror has to be in an effectively sealed room (yes, the fumes are bad, but proper ventilation and general avoidance can prevent health problems)
3. You can't perform adjustments on the surface to adapt for the atmosphere. This is what makes all of the current really large telescopes useful
You can aim one of these suckers by moving the secondary mirror and catching a different area of the reflected light. Kinda like holding a magnifying glass in place and moving your head around behind it. Since they're focused at infinity, the distance to the target is meaningless. Even a regular telecope only has so many degrees of valuable viewing, this is just a bit tighter.
Mythological Beast
When you work for a not-for-profit organization, one of the things that you learn is that only the organization itself is not allowed to profit. All of the employees, managers, board members, and executives of said organization are allowed to get filthy stinking rich off of it, if they can manage such.
The laws require that employees and contractors of such organizations be paid along the median for any particlar set of services. Have you checked out the median pay for corporate executives lately? They're almost invariably based on the value and revenue of the company. Let's think about this for a moment...
Mythological Beast
1 million times denser than conventional crystals.
This is a mis-quote. What the article says is:
"And 1 million crystals in Gruen's diamond
film can fit inside the crystal produced by
conventional methods."
This states that the crystals are one millionth as massive, not that they have the same mass at a smaller size. This explains why the film material is so much smoother than previously manufactured materials: Smaller granularity.
Mythological Beast
It is a common myth that if you make something pass light cleanly that you wind up with something invisible. If that were the case, then glass and plastic would be really tough to find when you set it on a table, and diamonds would be considerably less pretty. You also have to adjust the defraction index of the substance to equal that of air.
One of the ways to demonstrate this is to submerse diamonds in water. Diamonds and water have the same defraction index, so the diamonds literally vanish. You can use this trick on an engagement ring to tell a real diamond from a cubic zirconia or cut glass.
Mythological Beast
Ten centimeters? Do you realize that this means we can shoot other people's satilites out of orbit? Cool! Unfortunately, even a laser beam would spread out over several feet when shot from the ground - it would be REALLY neat if they could have one of those suckers mounted on the space station itself. It's the NASA deathstar!
Mythological Beast
The designers of this have totally missed the point of a good Gargoyle rig. People who do full-body mobile jacking are on the cutting edge of technology, and they want to look like it. Something like the cyclopes in "City of Lost Children" would be more appropriate.
The jacket that they have shown here will make true geeks feel like pathetic freaks with no style, and non-geeks like pathetic wireheads with no lives.
Mythological Beast
The answer to this question is "very Little, but not none at all". Programming languages aren't really based on the English language - they are based on predicate logic. In predicate logic, you break down any statement into a relationship (sometimes an "action" relationship) between two entities with a set of qualifiers which often have defaults. For a thorough description of predicate logic, visit the Lojban site, where they have gone the other direction, creating a human language from predicate logic.
For those of you who just want a quick answer, we'll use the following example:
The processor saves the data to file X.
We have an obvious object, verb, subject, and prepositional phrase here. In predicate logic, this is broken down to the relationship (in this case, "to save") and the entities involved in this relationship (the processor and the data), with an instructional details. Japanese changes the ordering of subject, verb, etc., but they still have all of those structures.
This brings us to a possible lingual difference. In English, we have implied imperitives which obviate the use of a subject ("You Run!" is usually just "Run!"), which bleeds heavily into our use of programming languages, i.e. print("this stuff"), because we can assume that the processor is going to do the work. I couldn't tell you if this is a practice in all other languages. It is interesting that object oriented programming begins to blur this assumption with the implication that any of many objects might "do" something.
So the question is, what differences are there in the editing of predicate logic between languages?
Mythological Beast
The first-year students of the Colorado School of Arts have finished their review of the FBI's "carnivore" system.
"It is definitely a creative masterpiece," stated Rufus Niederman, spokesperson for the 20 student review team, "we feel that it will be a real attention getter in the years to come. Although the plotline is really just a re-hashing of a standard theme, the powerful new twist should be quite an audience grabber."
The FBI was enthused by this accolade, and intends to shoot for the widest possible distribution. Look for it, comming soon, to a screen near you.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could trade our computer cycles in for, say, a tax deduction for donating my computer's time to charity. The Cancer Foundation is a charity, right? I have to admit that I can't imagine that a micropayment would induce me to rent out my spare cycles. I doubt that such a thing would even pay me enough to be worth the extra headache come tax time. Donations to charity are easy to list, income becomes a pain.
This kind of thing is done because someone is too cheap to purchase their own computers (or clusters). In the case of SETI, there is no profit, so there's no money for computers. In the case of a Pharmaceutical company, they're just trimming their bottom line.
Mythological Beast
The primary advantage to Open Source is distribution of effort, the primary dangers are diffusion of purpose and logarithmically increasing communications overhead. Release time needs to be a balance of these.
Unless I'm missing something (been known to happen, of course) there are three basic reasons for open sourcing a project.
The first and foremost is to allow code-savvy users to hunt down that niggling bug, fix it, and send you instructions on how to adjust the code base. If this is your intent, then releasing it before Beta is just asking to have everyone who picks up a copy of it saying "hey, wouldn't it be great if the code did _THIS_?" It is impossible to resist ALL of these, especially when the person offers to write it himself, and then you're stuck integrating it into the whole. Suddenly, the beta is pushed back six months to a year while you tell yourself that it'll be well worth it when the product eventually gets released.
The second reason is because you're trolling for developers. If you're not too terribly picky about what goes into your product, this can be a great way to get some free work out of the Internet. In this case, you should probably start by publishing a few of your design plans, then releasing the code to coders who show Interest, possibly having them sign a non-disclosure to prevent them from running off and founding their own company with it. Free (speech) doesn't have to be free (beer).
The third reason is as a publicity stunt. In this case, definitely wait until just before you have a sellable product (post-beta, pre-release). This gives you a well-timed media boost, and gives the purchasers the warm fuzzy about their ability to work with the software on an up-close-and-personal basis. This is also the optimal point to start getting "hey, with a little effort, it could do this" kind of information, which can be blissfully rolled into the 2.0 release.
Mythological Beast
> The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works.
Ok, let's take a step back here and ask the pertinent question: What exactly is the purpose of writing software? To produce a product that performs a whole bunch of cool tasks about 30% of the time that you try them? Is this an exercise in feature packing? Probably not. If you can't produce something that someone else can use, you're just stroking your own ego.
I would say that the writer on Suck wants at least a product that works.
> But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other
> products/standards?
How about the ability to hook up to the web from my environment (which happens to be behind a firewall) and present most of the content that currently exists on the web without crashing. This would be nice.
> There are a tremendous number of outside developers
> who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here.
> Why should anyone stop?
Integration slowdown. Read the first chapter of The Mythical Man Month some time, the one about the Tar Pit, and it will give you an idea about how time-costly integrating the efforts of a bunch of outside developers can be.
Mythological Beast