First of all, I think this sounds like a great idea. I went to high school a very long time ago in terms of computers, but if I were in high school now I would want to join the kind of club you're describing. I just have a few suggestions. First, I suggest that you make your club as inclusive as possible; it might be a good idea to invite in not only those who know a lot about computers, but also those who don't know much but are eager to learn some new things. It wouldn't necessarily be bad to have a "computer (geeks only!) club," but on the other hand you might find it more fun to form a club that includes people who don't know all the things you do. Another thing which might help would be to get a non-administration faculty member to back up your idea, and possibly help you get the thing started. The advantage of having a teacher-sponsor is that you would have more clout, and also you might have a better chance to get use of school equipment. My last suggestion is that you not start pushing Linux from day one. Once you have a club, then you can try to generate interest in Free/Open Source software.
... okay, then. ... no, no, not that motherscratcher! ... he was wearin' jammies with yodas and shit! ... not unless circular is funny. ... "Well, what's it gonna be, Sonny? If'n I
freeze, I can't drop, 'cause if'n I drop,
then I'd be in motion."
You've explained the various properties of 'scrith' in the Ringworld novels. Have you or has anyone else ever devised a hypothesis on how such a material could be made? I realize that there are quite a few technologies in your works which are beyond today's science and engineering (General Products hulls, hyperdrive, autodocs, etc.), but for some reason scrith seems to me to be the most fascinating. Also, does the building of the unstable and ostentatious Ringworld betray a flaw in Pak Protector intelligence?
Wrong, sorry. Yes, he was thanking the Mac community, but he did by way of saying that PC users are malicious (they steal, they ruin Christmas) and stupid (they don't know how to use e-mail). This guy did a stupid thing by sending his computer to someone he didn't know without being paid for it first, and then went to great lengths to catch the guy. So he has some guts and went out of his way to catch a thief. He also bashed a lot of intelligent and good people in his account of the events. I think this reflects negatively on his character (though not on the Mac community that helped him). In or out of context, some of his comments were at the very least insulting.
One periodical that regularly runs articles about this issue is Playboy. Yes, it really does have articles and some people actually read them. Playboy's editorial stance is more libertarian than liberal, though it does tend to come down somewhat on the side of gun control. Still, the magazine is a more open forum of debate than most. Unfortunately, none of the magazine's articles are available online. Still, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would probably help you find the articles on this subject.
I'm sorry to see Farscape go, though I am glad that Stargate SG1 is getting a 7th season. Stargate may not be groundbreaking or visionary, but it's not bad compared to much television science fiction. Consider this comparison: in the most recent episode of 'Enterprise,' the ship encountered a black hole which for some unexplained reason turned everybody on the ship into an obsessive-compulsive (maybe the black hole was emitting 'a*s*ole rays'). In the Stargate episode in which the SGC encountered a black hole, what did they experience? Time dilation, gravity waves, tidal forces, increased gravity - and they still made a pretty good story out of it.
The author of this comment has adopted the assumption that in order for a science fiction universe to be "best," its characters must be similar to us in enough ways for us to identify with them. While that is not an unfair assumption, it belies the inherent difficulty of this sort of discussion. The underlying assumptions of the person offering the opinion largely determine what the opinion will be. For example, if I assume that in order for a science fiction universe to be "best," its characters must be as different from the people in my everyday life as possible while still being comprehensible, my "best" would not be the 'Gateway' universe. If I prefer good style and lots of character development, I wouldn't choose anything by Isaac Asimov. In other words, there are no objective criteria, and so this discussion is inevitably doomed to be a battle of tastes.
I suspect that there aren't very many "laymen like you" by which I mean that you're probably brighter than Joe Average. A lot of people think that "A Brief History of Time" is "too hard." Still, it is quite an accomplishment to make contemporary physics comprehensible to non-physicists.
This delay is not good news (except insofar as it improves Hurd in the end). I would sincerely like to see the Hurd kernel get beyond development-stage code, since more competition, variety, and choice in the Free Software/OSS world would be a good thing. Right now there's really only one workable 'GNU' system, and that's GNU/Linux. To me it seems likely that another kernel for use in a GNU operating system would give us users more choice.
Linux is for overweight, hairy, asocial gearheads.
FreeBSD is also for overweight, hairy, asocial gearheads.
The point isn't that Creationists, Apollo deniers, and Holocaust deniers, Flat-earthers, etc. are all on the same moral level. The idea here is that all of these groups use distortions, half-truths, mistakes, non-sequiturs, and other "evidence" to "prove" their theories.
HA! Yourself. Windows XP, Debian, Mandrake, and Red Hat don't crash on me either. Oh, and neither does FreeBSD. Being self-righteous about your OS is silly and pointless.
We've heard all this before. I'm still waiting for my 1) Robot butler, 2) Flying car, 3) Fusion reactor, 4) Moon resort hotel, 5) Slidewalk. Futurists always get the future wrong. Whenever anybody, no matter how knowledgeable, makes a prediction about how things are going to be in more than five years, it always turns out differently. I'll believe in the thinking machines when I talk to one. On the other hand, the things that we do get turn out to be a complete surprise. In the 1960s nobody imagined that so many people would have computers in their homes.
They didn't exactly hit the reset button. There hasn't been any resolution to the temporal cold war. We still don't know how things are uptime after Archer got back to the 22nd century, we don't know who the "mystery man" is that the Sulliban are working for, and we really don't know who Daniels is. As far as the "treknobabble" is concerned, I think that this show has been pretty light on technological fixes to storylines, and Daniels has resoltutely refused to explain anything about how his stuff works. I think the show is watchable now; you just seem sour.
I wouldn't call having my name put in an FBI file a 'nonexistent inconvenience.' It's not likely that the FBI would do anything in this case, but in this society a false accusation can be more dangerous than a frivolous lawsuit. If somebody at the Bureau were to decide that this gentleman could be the author of the Klez virus, he could find himself sitting on his steps while the FBI hauls all his stuff down to their lab to be tested as possible evidence (doesn't anybody remember Richard Jewell?). I would say that the uninformed CEO in question needs to be taught a lesson in making hasty accusations.
is what happens when they get to the next full point version. Will it be called Mandrake-Linux X? And after that, will the incremental versions be something like Mandrake-Linux X 10.2 (Cheetah)? Will there then be televeision commercials starring fake ordinary people who used to use another OS and couldn't figure it out so they switched to Mandrake? It's all very confusing.
for a handful the hand would have to be really, really small. By the way, has anybody thought about the fact that even if we could produce antihydrogen in large quantities, it would be pretty useless as a source of energy. Since its charge would be neutral, you couldn't contain it magnetically. You would have to use antiprotons or an anti-element with a positive or negative charge..
The answer to the question "how do I back this up?" is: you don't. You just back up the stuff that can't be replaced or can't be replaced easily. If we're talking about personal data (as opposed to corporate data), I think we mean stuff like DivX;-) movies, porn, every ISO of every Linux distro ever, news articles that you saved, warez, and so on. If you lose it, no big deal. It's a pain to get back, but you can do it. The alternatives are either too expensive or too time consuming.
For a very basic introduction to the ideas and thinkers behind quantum mechanics, check out this url: http://www.symonds.net/~deep/stuff/qp/index.php. You may find it helpful.
Ditto. I had 60 gig Maxtor drive that _just_freaking_stopped_ after about three months of use. Of course they replaced it, but my the data was unrecoverable for less than some thousands of dollars. Everything important on it was backed up, but one of these days I'll be buried in CD-Rs just from backing up unreliable drives.
I can see this happening, with a lot more refinement. You'd need gobs of processing power, hosts of tiny photodetectors and projectors, and a very small but reliable and long-lasting power supply (as somebody else already noted). With today's tech, this idea is pretty useless. The engineering obstacles could be overcome in the future. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy to come up with effective countermeasures. Wouldn't this thing radiate like hell in the infrared?
According to legend, Longinus was the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ with a spear. That spear was for a long time believed to have a role in controlling the destiny of the world. Adolf Hitler spent years and millions of deutschmarks searching for the Spear of Longinus. It's no coincidence that Longinus himself posted this story. The Spear of Longinus was said during the Middle Ages to "havve propertyies of needed to peerce the superparamagnetism barrier," (according to Nostradamus) which will bring on the end times.
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First of all, I think this sounds like a great idea. I went to high school a very long time ago in terms of computers, but if I were in high school now I would want to join the kind of club you're describing. I just have a few suggestions. First, I suggest that you make your club as inclusive as possible; it might be a good idea to invite in not only those who know a lot about computers, but also those who don't know much but are eager to learn some new things. It wouldn't necessarily be bad to have a "computer (geeks only!) club," but on the other hand you might find it more fun to form a club that includes people who don't know all the things you do. Another thing which might help would be to get a non-administration faculty member to back up your idea, and possibly help you get the thing started. The advantage of having a teacher-sponsor is that you would have more clout, and also you might have a better chance to get use of school equipment. My last suggestion is that you not start pushing Linux from day one. Once you have a club, then you can try to generate interest in Free/Open Source software.
I'm so fed up with all of this, I'm going back to my wax cylinders.
... okay, then.
... no, no, not that motherscratcher!
... he was wearin' jammies with yodas and shit!
... not unless circular is funny.
... "Well, what's it gonna be, Sonny? If'n I
freeze, I can't drop, 'cause if'n I drop,
then I'd be in motion."
You've explained the various properties of 'scrith' in the Ringworld novels. Have you or has anyone else ever devised a hypothesis on how such a material could be made? I realize that there are quite a few technologies in your works which are beyond today's science and engineering (General Products hulls, hyperdrive, autodocs, etc.), but for some reason scrith seems to me to be the most fascinating. Also, does the building of the unstable and ostentatious Ringworld betray a flaw in Pak Protector intelligence?
My boss is always asking me to writ Perl scripts. Unfortunately, I'm the janitor.
What is a chick-head? Is that supposed to be nerdish for a straight man or a gay woman?
Wrong, sorry. Yes, he was thanking the Mac community, but he did by way of saying that PC users are malicious (they steal, they ruin Christmas) and stupid (they don't know how to use e-mail). This guy did a stupid thing by sending his computer to someone he didn't know without being paid for it first, and then went to great lengths to catch the guy. So he has some guts and went out of his way to catch a thief. He also bashed a lot of intelligent and good people in his account of the events. I think this reflects negatively on his character (though not on the Mac community that helped him). In or out of context, some of his comments were at the very least insulting.
One periodical that regularly runs articles about this issue is Playboy. Yes, it really does have articles and some people actually read them. Playboy's editorial stance is more libertarian than liberal, though it does tend to come down somewhat on the side of gun control. Still, the magazine is a more open forum of debate than most. Unfortunately, none of the magazine's articles are available online. Still, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would probably help you find the articles on this subject.
I'm sorry to see Farscape go, though I am glad that Stargate SG1 is getting a 7th season. Stargate may not be groundbreaking or visionary, but it's not bad compared to much television science fiction. Consider this comparison: in the most recent episode of 'Enterprise,' the ship encountered a black hole which for some unexplained reason turned everybody on the ship into an obsessive-compulsive (maybe the black hole was emitting 'a*s*ole rays'). In the Stargate episode in which the SGC encountered a black hole, what did they experience? Time dilation, gravity waves, tidal forces, increased gravity - and they still made a pretty good story out of it.
The author of this comment has adopted the assumption that in order for a science fiction universe to be "best," its characters must be similar to us in enough ways for us to identify with them. While that is not an unfair assumption, it belies the inherent difficulty of this sort of discussion. The underlying assumptions of the person offering the opinion largely determine what the opinion will be. For example, if I assume that in order for a science fiction universe to be "best," its characters must be as different from the people in my everyday life as possible while still being comprehensible, my "best" would not be the 'Gateway' universe. If I prefer good style and lots of character development, I wouldn't choose anything by Isaac Asimov. In other words, there are no objective criteria, and so this discussion is inevitably doomed to be a battle of tastes.
Where's all this free beer I keep hearing about?
Linux is for overweight, hairy, asocial gearheads.
FreeBSD is also for overweight, hairy, asocial gearheads.
The point isn't that Creationists, Apollo deniers, and Holocaust deniers, Flat-earthers, etc. are all on the same moral level. The idea here is that all of these groups use distortions, half-truths, mistakes, non-sequiturs, and other "evidence" to "prove" their theories.
HA! Yourself. Windows XP, Debian, Mandrake, and Red Hat don't crash on me either. Oh, and neither does FreeBSD. Being self-righteous about your OS is silly and pointless.
We've heard all this before. I'm still waiting for my 1) Robot butler, 2) Flying car, 3) Fusion reactor, 4) Moon resort hotel, 5) Slidewalk. Futurists always get the future wrong. Whenever anybody, no matter how knowledgeable, makes a prediction about how things are going to be in more than five years, it always turns out differently. I'll believe in the thinking machines when I talk to one. On the other hand, the things that we do get turn out to be a complete surprise. In the 1960s nobody imagined that so many people would have computers in their homes.
They didn't exactly hit the reset button. There hasn't been any resolution to the temporal cold war. We still don't know how things are uptime after Archer got back to the 22nd century, we don't know who the "mystery man" is that the Sulliban are working for, and we really don't know who Daniels is. As far as the "treknobabble" is concerned, I think that this show has been pretty light on technological fixes to storylines, and Daniels has resoltutely refused to explain anything about how his stuff works. I think the show is watchable now; you just seem sour.
I wouldn't call having my name put in an FBI file a 'nonexistent inconvenience.' It's not likely that the FBI would do anything in this case, but in this society a false accusation can be more dangerous than a frivolous lawsuit. If somebody at the Bureau were to decide that this gentleman could be the author of the Klez virus, he could find himself sitting on his steps while the FBI hauls all his stuff down to their lab to be tested as possible evidence (doesn't anybody remember Richard Jewell?). I would say that the uninformed CEO in question needs to be taught a lesson in making hasty accusations.
is what happens when they get to the next full point version. Will it be called Mandrake-Linux X? And after that, will the incremental versions be something like Mandrake-Linux X 10.2 (Cheetah)? Will there then be televeision commercials starring fake ordinary people who used to use another OS and couldn't figure it out so they switched to Mandrake? It's all very confusing.
for a handful the hand would have to be really, really small. By the way, has anybody thought about the fact that even if we could produce antihydrogen in large quantities, it would be pretty useless as a source of energy. Since its charge would be neutral, you couldn't contain it magnetically. You would have to use antiprotons or an anti-element with a positive or negative charge..
The answer to the question "how do I back this up?" is: you don't. You just back up the stuff that can't be replaced or can't be replaced easily. If we're talking about personal data (as opposed to corporate data), I think we mean stuff like DivX;-) movies, porn, every ISO of every Linux distro ever, news articles that you saved, warez, and so on. If you lose it, no big deal. It's a pain to get back, but you can do it. The alternatives are either too expensive or too time consuming.
For a very basic introduction to the ideas and thinkers behind quantum mechanics, check out this url: http://www.symonds.net/~deep/stuff/qp/index.php. You may find it helpful.
It's a good point. I usually keep my important stuff on more than one HD, and the really important stuff also on CDs.
Ditto. I had 60 gig Maxtor drive that _just_freaking_stopped_ after about three months of use. Of course they replaced it, but my the data was unrecoverable for less than some thousands of dollars. Everything important on it was backed up, but one of these days I'll be buried in CD-Rs just from backing up unreliable drives.
I can see this happening, with a lot more refinement. You'd need gobs of processing power, hosts of tiny photodetectors and projectors, and a very small but reliable and long-lasting power supply (as somebody else already noted). With today's tech, this idea is pretty useless. The engineering obstacles could be overcome in the future. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy to come up with effective countermeasures. Wouldn't this thing radiate like hell in the infrared?
According to legend, Longinus was the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ with a spear. That spear was for a long time believed to have a role in controlling the destiny of the world. Adolf Hitler spent years and millions of deutschmarks searching for the Spear of Longinus. It's no coincidence that Longinus himself posted this story. The Spear of Longinus was said during the Middle Ages to "havve propertyies of needed to peerce the superparamagnetism barrier," (according to Nostradamus) which will bring on the end times.