what happened to tha harrier jet they promised to the pepsi drinkers a little while back? it was supposed to be a bargain (if you bought 10 million dollars worth of pepsi, i think), but i don't remember if anyone actually got it.
was it careless-ness? or no-way-i-was-gonna-get-out-of-the-trap-they-set-me ?
any advice for people who don't want to get caught, but still might want to trade warez, for economical (poor college kids) or idealogical (all software must be free! as in beer!) reasons?
"The Sims," a franchise that has sold more than 19 million units worldwide, making it the best-selling PC game of all time.
Gosh... remember back when Deer Hunter was like the best selling game for several years in a roll. not Doom, not Quake, not Warcraft / starcraft budged it from the throne. It was humiliating to be a PC gamer, with that kind of statistics.
I think somebody should port Solitare and FreeCell to Mac. FreeCell already got the name figure out -- or would that be OpenFreeCell? FreeFreeCell? hmm...
but anyway. I swear Jobs can increase Apple's market share by 300% if he included Solitare with it. I mean, a windows machine usually spend 50% of its useable life on that program.
at any rate... I think one of the "very important" aspect of this has to do with multi (>3) dimentional physics. I can't remember where I read it, but physicists are theorizing that at millimeter (or less) distances, we will see gravity suddenly becomes disobedient of the inverse square law (which would prove the "we live in half dozen dimentions) theory. Now -- measuring gravity on a millimetre scale is hard enough, but when you throw in all these "fluctuation forces" (Van der Waal, Casmir, whatever), you will seriously screw up any chance you have on the Nobel prize... so people are trying to get all these things sorted out and verify some gravity, etc.
The communication people want has been increasing from 56kbps a few years ago to 54Mbps now," Sceats says. "In five to 10 years we will talk about how to connect people up at 100-1000Mbps. That's what we need to prepare for.
from 56k->54M is ~1000x speed. the "future" they are preparing for is only a 2-20x jump. I'd say they should prepare for 54Gbit connections to people's homes, but hey, whatever.
at the same time, who here actually connects at 54Mbits, anyway?
In your post you continue to elude to the "long way off" as a saving grace to the fact that it is not something to be worried about. That is about as wise as only washing the clothes you will wear tomorrow everyday but no more. Just because things are a long way off does not mean we should not consider the possible negative effects of it and consider possible solutions, technologically, psychologically, or otherwise. It is bad enough that it takes a decade or so for the public to really *grasp* the dangers that are possibly involved in a new technology without whipping everyone into a freakish paranoia, let alone a thorough understanding its impact on the society and earth as a whole. Take AIDS as an example of "a bad effect", it's been around for a while now (decades), and guess what, people out there are STILL having unprotected sex, STILL sharing dirty needles, STILL saying dumb things like "oh it won't happen to me." If it takes this long for people to really understand the true meaning of a 100% bad thing, how long do you think it will take people to sort out ethnical issues of things with mixed results (like cloning, etc?).
What are you implying anyway? That we shouldn't develop this technology because one of the possable future uses is bad? never mind that it could also do a lot of good...
No i do not think that is what the original post had in mind at all, in fact far from it. There is a stark difference between blindly pursueing technology and cautiously proceed and master technology. Whilst I agree that unfortunately there have been things which have been strangled for the wrong fears (most nuclear stuff) in the past, but that is no excuse to just "research it and worry about it later." It's like going out to catch a gorilla, for example. If I know the thing can bend quarter inch steel bars, do I bring a cage made of wood? It's not the fear of the unknown, its the fear of what we know it will probabbly be capable of. and jutifiably so, to a certain degree.
while I have belief in the human capabilityes and all that -- I do not really think that a nano-scale "universal constructor" can be realistically created. it took billions of years for nature to come up with self-replicable stuff (single-cell organisms) and they are more than a battery and micro-gears. but that's a fundamentally different platform. If we assume nano-tech (in the classical sense) is possible, grey-goo is very much of a danger, as they will inevitably mutate and go awry.
Microsoft was found to have several pieces of software (including the ever popular BOB) which had licenses that looked suspiciously like GPL. However, after being called the "prince of open source movement," Company spokesdrones declared that it was in fact a clerical error, and Microsoft has every intention to continue on the path of Evil Empire (tm), and promptly put very restrictive licenses onto the aforementioned software, therefore continuing to be a force of evil in the world.
My platinum card does not even go through the "here is your balance" crap anymore -- connects through me to somebody directly (it's a chase platinum, btw):
AND RIGHTLY SO. I *NEVER* used the numbers on the back to check balances and all that. I got internet for it. I think there are probabbly people who uses the phone system in the other ways oftenly (press button for this, or that, or whatever) -- but if a psuedo smart phone system knows about the person's calling habits (and profile it based on the callerid or something), we'd be all happy(er).
as for the web-based IM type customer service: I am not that into it. just not the same ya know. besides seem like the dude / gal is always handling a couple people at once -- and you can tell -- so the experience is just "very inpersonal human contact". not much better than phone systems.
The guys that do real stuff at ISS will get an extra cargo package the weight of the unlucky pop singer.
It's like 5am EST and i am still awake -- or at least in SOME state of semi-consciousness; and I have suddenly realized something phenomenal:
when they say "extra cargo package" and "weight of blah blah" -- what do you think weights around the same "the unlucky pop singer"? why ANOTHER pop singer, of course...
i bet 5:1 that the "guys that do real stuff at ISS" are gonna be getting some pussy. 10:1 that it's britney spears. ha! how's that for an early-morning enlightment?
...I kept playing through post-production for six months and my final score [for BattleZone] was somewhere around five million...
by the monitor's "radiation king" standards back then -- that's 5 inches of hairline you won't be getting back. we will just leave alone the effects on the cornea and skin cancer and the coughwastedtimecough...
I was six when i first heard of the term "male" and "female" connectors. Even though I keep pestering my dad about 1) which one is male / female, and 2) why they name it something stupid like that
he just kept "umm... ahhh"-ing and never answered.
I was like 17 when it finally dawned on me why they named it that way. ha! then it all made sense.
moral of the story are: a) who says electrical engineers / connector designers are not perverted? b) to save yourself trouble, don't talk about male/femail connectors in front of little kids.
We already have an effective vaccine for HIV: education.
true, but only to a very limited extent. the unfortunate fact is that education does not make the disease *safer*, it just means that it transmits less -- but still very dangerous.
it is very important to note that to effectively contain the disease, reproduction between uninfected individuals and infected individuals must be completely eliminated. This basically erases a large portion of population who are unfortunate enough to contract HIV from the gene pool. Furthermore, even when you do eliminate this disease for this generation, it can still cause trouble later on (because frankly -- let's face it, you won't make HIV *extinct*). whereas a true vaccine will not have any of these troublesome side effects.
More importantly, however, my point is that we will have epidemics with 90% mortality sooner or later.
maybe. however, even if it is "inevitable" as you say -- it does not decrease its "scariness" (hereas defined along the line of "causing traumatic effects"). Instead of thinking if *you* are afraid of dying -- imagine what a horrible thing it would be if out of every 10 people you know, 9 died. (family members and all). to many, that really IS scary -- not in the childish "scared of death" sense, but rather "scared / worried of harm comming to loved ones" sense. Maybe you would understand better if you had children.
lastly, i agree with you that education of the dangers of HIV/AIDS is extremely important -- but to say that it is our only options -- that would be a dark day if it was true. I still keep my hopes up for the medical breakthroughs, because otherwise you are not combating the disease, but merely running away from it.
right up there with the "wrap the asteroid in reflective material so that the solar wind will surely push it to a safe distance.
i mean, just a FEW considerations here:
* asteroid comming in will be damn hot, burn-through bag * inflation rate * leakage? * where you planning on putting it, if a metropolis like NYC, if it was gonna be hit? * make it out of what? * transport it how?
that's it; if this is the best our scientists can come up with; i am starting to dig my hole and buying canned soup.
You don't become a billionaire by writing a lot of checks.
maybe. but when you are ALREADY a billioniare, it writing million-dollar checks certainly does not hurt as much. or, at all.
sony had SALES of ~64 billion last year. they have 6.2 billion of *cash* hanging around. this is not mentioning their assets (don't even want to quote), and their brand image value (~30 billion last i checked). so, you tell me... 30 million check is worth _what_ to them exactly?
putting it into perspective: if Sony was a person, who made 64k yearly income (reasonable example), he would have 6200 dollars in the bank, and the 30 million? that's a 30 dollar steak dinner.
the most beautiful experiment is, has been, and always will be the practical aspects of
* photons gets converted to electric impulses; * these electric impulsese are stored, usually by dielectric tunneling, into a floating gate (Flash memory) * the information is then read back, sent through 7 (read it, it's SEVEN) layers of network stack, to a physical link * the data is digitized into more packets of light, and sent across the atlantic from RUSSIA to the US. * after more routing (some in light-packets, some in electrical), it climbs back up the 7-layers. * mozilla interprets them, and through some seriously complex transistor networks, the signals cause some polymers to twist just the right amount * and i see some pr0n.
wait a sec; that would probabbly be "the most beautiful engineering feat"... ahh fsck it.
Boss: you workin'? You: YEAH... working on that driver bug as we speak (NASCAR TV noise gets muted); will have that to you in a day.
but seriously though -- i know a lot of people who would be more productive at home, and then it relieves you of the commuting time that would be otherwise wasted.
And if you can get the project defined not in "hours" but in, say, "features," you may well be finishing the "15 hours" of work within a couple long-hauls M,T,W and have yourself a 4-day weekend.
and from my experience, ppl can pull 15 hours much more easily when in their underwear at home, rather than in cubes.
Slashdot Mirror
since they pay britney spears a LOT of cash, apparently. how about a "drink pepsi, get laid (by teen sensation)" promotion.
only THEN, will pepsi be better than coke. and only until you see the "morning after" spears.
what happened to tha harrier jet they promised to the pepsi drinkers a little while back? it was supposed to be a bargain (if you bought 10 million dollars worth of pepsi, i think), but i don't remember if anyone actually got it.
was it careless-ness? or no-way-i-was-gonna-get-out-of-the-trap-they-set-me ?
any advice for people who don't want to get caught, but still might want to trade warez, for economical (poor college kids) or idealogical (all software must be free! as in beer!) reasons?
Gosh... remember back when Deer Hunter was like the best selling game for several years in a roll. not Doom, not Quake, not Warcraft / starcraft budged it from the throne. It was humiliating to be a PC gamer, with that kind of statistics.
I mean, after all, while the US keeps talking about "we want peace," we still got more nukes than anybody out there, combined, right?
I think somebody should port Solitare and FreeCell to Mac. FreeCell already got the name figure out -- or would that be OpenFreeCell? FreeFreeCell? hmm...
but anyway. I swear Jobs can increase Apple's market share by 300% if he included Solitare with it. I mean, a windows machine usually spend 50% of its useable life on that program.
hmm... is "importances" a word?
at any rate... I think one of the "very important" aspect of this has to do with multi (>3) dimentional physics. I can't remember where I read it, but physicists are theorizing that at millimeter (or less) distances, we will see gravity suddenly becomes disobedient of the inverse square law (which would prove the "we live in half dozen dimentions) theory. Now -- measuring gravity on a millimetre scale is hard enough, but when you throw in all these "fluctuation forces" (Van der Waal, Casmir, whatever), you will seriously screw up any chance you have on the Nobel prize... so people are trying to get all these things sorted out and verify some gravity, etc.
Only if Taco had spelling like that!
from 56k->54M is ~1000x speed. the "future" they are preparing for is only a 2-20x jump. I'd say they should prepare for 54Gbit connections to people's homes, but hey, whatever.
at the same time, who here actually connects at 54Mbits, anyway?
but such trouble is still a long way off...
In your post you continue to elude to the "long way off" as a saving grace to the fact that it is not something to be worried about. That is about as wise as only washing the clothes you will wear tomorrow everyday but no more. Just because things are a long way off does not mean we should not consider the possible negative effects of it and consider possible solutions, technologically, psychologically, or otherwise. It is bad enough that it takes a decade or so for the public to really *grasp* the dangers that are possibly involved in a new technology without whipping everyone into a freakish paranoia, let alone a thorough understanding its impact on the society and earth as a whole. Take AIDS as an example of "a bad effect", it's been around for a while now (decades), and guess what, people out there are STILL having unprotected sex, STILL sharing dirty needles, STILL saying dumb things like "oh it won't happen to me." If it takes this long for people to really understand the true meaning of a 100% bad thing, how long do you think it will take people to sort out ethnical issues of things with mixed results (like cloning, etc?).
What are you implying anyway? That we shouldn't develop this technology because one of the possable future uses is bad? never mind that it could also do a lot of good...
No i do not think that is what the original post had in mind at all, in fact far from it. There is a stark difference between blindly pursueing technology and cautiously proceed and master technology. Whilst I agree that unfortunately there have been things which have been strangled for the wrong fears (most nuclear stuff) in the past, but that is no excuse to just "research it and worry about it later." It's like going out to catch a gorilla, for example. If I know the thing can bend quarter inch steel bars, do I bring a cage made of wood? It's not the fear of the unknown, its the fear of what we know it will probabbly be capable of. and jutifiably so, to a certain degree.
while I have belief in the human capabilityes and all that -- I do not really think that a nano-scale "universal constructor" can be realistically created. it took billions of years for nature to come up with self-replicable stuff (single-cell organisms) and they are more than a battery and micro-gears. but that's a fundamentally different platform. If we assume nano-tech (in the classical sense) is possible, grey-goo is very much of a danger, as they will inevitably mutate and go awry.
Microsoft was found to have several pieces of software (including the ever popular BOB) which had licenses that looked suspiciously like GPL. However, after being called the "prince of open source movement," Company spokesdrones declared that it was in fact a clerical error, and Microsoft has every intention to continue on the path of Evil Empire (tm), and promptly put very restrictive licenses onto the aforementioned software, therefore continuing to be a force of evil in the world.
My platinum card does not even go through the "here is your balance" crap anymore -- connects through me to somebody directly (it's a chase platinum, btw):
AND RIGHTLY SO. I *NEVER* used the numbers on the back to check balances and all that. I got internet for it. I think there are probabbly people who uses the phone system in the other ways oftenly (press button for this, or that, or whatever) -- but if a psuedo smart phone system knows about the person's calling habits (and profile it based on the callerid or something), we'd be all happy(er).
as for the web-based IM type customer service: I am not that into it. just not the same ya know. besides seem like the dude / gal is always handling a couple people at once -- and you can tell -- so the experience is just "very inpersonal human contact". not much better than phone systems.
first reaction: [in wise-man voice] what goes around comes around... yeah...
second reaction: so THAT's what a critical mass of dumbasses can do...
and then it dawned on me: so the legends of "lawyers with head in ass" is really true after all...
I would want it to do the taunts for me.
nothing like have somebody (the computer, in this case) talk smack to your opponents when your hands can still be occupied kicking his / her ass.
speaking of which... AI to find "my style of pr0n" while hands are occupied with other stuff might be useful too. hmmmmm...
It's like 5am EST and i am still awake -- or at least in SOME state of semi-consciousness; and I have suddenly realized something phenomenal:
when they say "extra cargo package" and "weight of blah blah" -- what do you think weights around the same "the unlucky pop singer"? why ANOTHER pop singer, of course...
i bet 5:1 that the "guys that do real stuff at ISS" are gonna be getting some pussy. 10:1 that it's britney spears. ha! how's that for an early-morning enlightment?
by the monitor's "radiation king" standards back then -- that's 5 inches of hairline you won't be getting back. we will just leave alone the effects on the cornea and skin cancer and the coughwastedtimecough...
I was six when i first heard of the term "male" and "female" connectors. Even though I keep pestering my dad about
1) which one is male / female, and
2) why they name it something stupid like that
he just kept "umm... ahhh"-ing and never answered.
I was like 17 when it finally dawned on me why they named it that way. ha! then it all made sense.
moral of the story are:
a) who says electrical engineers / connector designers are not perverted?
b) to save yourself trouble, don't talk about male/femail connectors in front of little kids.
Yahoo BB in Japan has DSL for 12Mbit downstream.
for 30 bux nontheless.
thought that's something people in the US could find interesting to drool on...
p.s. last i checked, 802.11 speeds drops off drastically when
* distance between nodes gets far
* many people sharing freq. spectrum
and 3G is nowhere NEAR the m-bit speeds on an individual basis.
so yeah... sticking w/ DSL for all my pr0n needs.
true, but only to a very limited extent. the unfortunate fact is that education does not make the disease *safer*, it just means that it transmits less -- but still very dangerous.
it is very important to note that to effectively contain the disease, reproduction between uninfected individuals and infected individuals must be completely eliminated. This basically erases a large portion of population who are unfortunate enough to contract HIV from the gene pool. Furthermore, even when you do eliminate this disease for this generation, it can still cause trouble later on (because frankly -- let's face it, you won't make HIV *extinct*). whereas a true vaccine will not have any of these troublesome side effects.
More importantly, however, my point is that we will have epidemics with 90% mortality sooner or later.
maybe. however, even if it is "inevitable" as you say -- it does not decrease its "scariness" (hereas defined along the line of "causing traumatic effects"). Instead of thinking if *you* are afraid of dying -- imagine what a horrible thing it would be if out of every 10 people you know, 9 died. (family members and all). to many, that really IS scary -- not in the childish "scared of death" sense, but rather "scared / worried of harm comming to loved ones" sense. Maybe you would understand better if you had children.
lastly, i agree with you that education of the dangers of HIV/AIDS is extremely important -- but to say that it is our only options -- that would be a dark day if it was true. I still keep my hopes up for the medical breakthroughs, because otherwise you are not combating the disease, but merely running away from it.
That is really, really dumb!
right up there with the "wrap the asteroid in reflective material so that the solar wind will surely push it to a safe distance.
i mean, just a FEW considerations here:
* asteroid comming in will be damn hot, burn-through bag
* inflation rate
* leakage?
* where you planning on putting it, if a metropolis like NYC, if it was gonna be hit?
* make it out of what?
* transport it how?
that's it; if this is the best our scientists can come up with; i am starting to dig my hole and buying canned soup.
FYI...
moore's law says size of transistor shrink by 50% every 18 monthes (same size double # of transistors). not the double of speed.
last i checked it was pretty on track. (if it's a good thing is up to debate, though.)
maybe. but when you are ALREADY a billioniare, it writing million-dollar checks certainly does not hurt as much. or, at all.
sony had SALES of ~64 billion last year. they have 6.2 billion of *cash* hanging around. this is not mentioning their assets (don't even want to quote), and their brand image value (~30 billion last i checked). so, you tell me... 30 million check is worth _what_ to them exactly?
putting it into perspective: if Sony was a person, who made 64k yearly income (reasonable example), he would have 6200 dollars in the bank, and the 30 million? that's a 30 dollar steak dinner.
don't tell me that ain't chump change.
the most beautiful experiment is, has been, and always will be the practical aspects of
* photons gets converted to electric impulses;
* these electric impulsese are stored, usually by dielectric tunneling, into a floating gate (Flash memory)
* the information is then read back, sent through 7 (read it, it's SEVEN) layers of network stack, to a physical link
* the data is digitized into more packets of light, and sent across the atlantic from RUSSIA to the US.
* after more routing (some in light-packets, some in electrical), it climbs back up the 7-layers.
* mozilla interprets them, and through some seriously complex transistor networks, the signals cause some polymers to twist just the right amount
* and i see some pr0n.
wait a sec; that would probabbly be "the most beautiful engineering feat"... ahh fsck it.
Like tele-commuting.
Boss: you workin'?
You: YEAH... working on that driver bug as we speak (NASCAR TV noise gets muted); will have that to you in a day.
but seriously though -- i know a lot of people who would be more productive at home, and then it relieves you of the commuting time that would be otherwise wasted.
And if you can get the project defined not in "hours" but in, say, "features," you may well be finishing the "15 hours" of work within a couple long-hauls M,T,W and have yourself a 4-day weekend.
and from my experience, ppl can pull 15 hours much more easily when in their underwear at home, rather than in cubes.
just a suggesting.
come on guys, get it straight. Gates already switched...
it all balmer now.
p.s. here is a google cache in case the main one does not work