Man, I cannot believe I'm living in a world where CmdrTaco isn't at the helm of Slashdot. While I haven't visited regularly in a while, I've (perhaps obviously from my UID) been around for a long time. I remember when Slashdot didn't have user accounts, when the moderation came in (and changed, and changed, and changed soem more), when Natalie Portman and her grits were topics of conversation. I submitted the story about the official reveal of the name of Star Wars Episode 1 (don't shoot the messenger!). Through all the years and newcomer sites every time I saw a link to Slashdot or visited my RSS feeds for Book Reviews and Ask Slashdot I felt a warm & fuzzy for the old site.
Thanks Taco! I certainly hope you find something to do that makes you happy in the next 14 years.
The helicopter you have to shoot with arrows in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden has stopped me from moving on in that game for months. It's the fault of my poor aim with the arrows but man, it's tough. Someday...
China will bring itself on board. The pollution going on there now is killing thousands of people a year and will only continue to grow unless the government puts strong controls in place. There are literally thousands of environmentally focussed protests going on in China every year and they cannot ignore the problem for their own reasons. Once we start controlling our own carbon output, the Chinese will have no choice. Their people will force the issue. We need to start getting our own house in order regardless of them and help them make the transition when the time comes.
I haven't watched the video but I did read the article and color me cynical but I have a hard believing any talk about a technology that is orders of magnitude better than an existing, established, technology and is cheaper. Plus this is based on 10 year old patents. Wouldn't somebody, somewhere within a hard drive company have seen these patents and worked on this technology if it were at all feasible in the market? There's any number of technology "breakthroughs" that look awesome in the lab but don't survive trying to mass-produce them. Making a few million of some complex piece of machinery is hard.
That said, good luck to him though. I hope to be buying their drives soon.
What does a legal 'Paid To Read' scheme consist of? Is this just a wishful thinking exersize? "Oh, nobody gets hurt and I get to make some money clicking on stuff so it's fine."
As a non-fan of B5 since the pilot episode, I found this guy's examination of the show pretty enlightening. He was a fan but now, after some time has gone by, he watched it again and decided "Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows."
Link found on The Mumpsimus (who also kindly, unknowingly, contributed the Subject of this post).
I don't have points to vote right now but I agree wholeheartedly with this. "Watch out! Here comes some learning!" is very offensive, especially for the audience of people interested in watching Mythbusters.
Are they really going to put a Dilbert cartoon on the cover? It's a funny one but the original book has kind of a classic, authoritative look to it. Putting a comic strip on the cover makes it look more like one of those jokey 'Unix in 3 hours!' books.
Part of the problem is that as much as Stallman would love everyone to use it, the GPL is a niche license. It's meant to let people with similar, laudable, mindsets exchange code and generally make the world better. It's not meant for everything under the sun. If people would just stop pushing GPL as the One True License and accept that not everybody has the same world-view, lots of open-source licenses would flourish. If you like the GPL, great. If you don't like it, don't re-use code that uses it. Write your own and put a different license on it. That's ok.
Wow, thanks FSF folks. You think the minor and stupid threat of legal action against Linux using corporations by SCO chilled use of Linux? Even talking about a change like this could do far more damage. It is incredible that they would even talk about something like this. If I'm a company like Google, why would I go forward using GPL software when the people in charge of the license talk about changing it to make me pay when I'm not redistributing my code? What's next? I run a website on Apache, I have to pay the FSF for the privilege? Sheesh.
1. you don't have a universal deluxe right to privacy, it's a myth.
The idea that you don't have a right because it's not in the Constitution is the exact opposite of how the framers intended things to work. The point of the Bill of Rights was to say 'You have all the rights that are not explicitly taken away, and here are some that can never be taken away'. There was a big fight amongst the founders because some of them thought people might come to interpret the Bill of Rights as a list of all the rights you have, rather than the rights that can't be taken away. The rest of the founders thought nobody would be that stupid but that's the way everyone has come to look at things now. It's a complete inversion of the idea of the Bill. I have a right to privacy because it's not taken away in the Constitution, not the other way around.
For me the most important thing to know about Monster is their recent spate of lawsuits against anyone who has 'monster' in their name. Check out this google search for more info. This is absolutely insane and has caused me to personally boycott Monster even though I used to like their cables.
This is a tad off topic but the last sentence of the 2nd story says
Gillespie said two phone tips naming the same hotel prompted his team to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which dispatched investigators to the alleged crime scene.
What the hell does the DHS have to do with child porn?
It's worth noting, by the way, that the Democrats have been waging a systematic campaign to get Ralph Nader off ballots, with no one seeming too upset about it...
Well since RNC funded organizations have been getting Nader on the ballet as a spoiler in places where he wouldn't normally be on, it's not as simple as you make it seem.
You can really tell the geek/civilian ratio has gone more and more to the civilian non-geek side by the number of 'What is this useful for?' posts on this story. A real geek knows that a hack is important in and of itself and no usefulness is implied or important.
One of the big benefits of Bloglines is that since it's all off of one site, they only hit each site's feed once for everyone to read it. A lot of people have their individual readers setup to hit sites every few minutes which can lead to a lot of bandwidth wasted when you multiply that times hundreds or thousands of RSS readers. With one site doing the hitting, everybody reads the feed and the site doesn't have to worry about RSS readers killing their bandwidth every 5 minutes.
The Massive Change project has a weekly interview show they put online every week. I've been listening to them and I'm amazed by what I've learned. There's very little more stimulating than smart people talking to each other and the host of MCR is one smart woman. She asks very intelligent questions and lets the interviewee talk, a rarity in interviews with professors and scientists. There's a large backlog of older interviews on there with luminaries such as Freeman Dyson, William McDonough, and Stewart Brand.
Oh yeah, I don't think anybody's willing to start cutting out the "junk" in our DNA or anything yet. It's an interesting finding though.
One of the theories about the junk DNA is that it's there to help reduce the chances that a mutation could cause catastrophic harm to the organism. If you've got 5 times as much stuff to hit with a cosmic ray, for example, you're more likely to hit the "padding" than the useful stuff. If that's correct, you would see exactly what they're seeing with this mouse, until an important bit of the DNA gets mutated.
New Scientist has an article about some scientists who removed pretty huge chunks of a mouse's "junk DNA" and the mouse was just fine in every way they could measure.
So the moral is, we have a lot to learn about DNA.
Pinky: Oh, I think so Brain, but SNOBOL for Windows?
SNOBOL is an early-60s era programming language. The only reason I caught that joke was one of my professors mentioned it offhand the day I saw that episode. I am forever impressed by the writers of P&tB because of this quote.
Whatever happened to Google splitting blogs off onto their own search? Sometimes I just want to search for what people have to say about certain products without having to wade through 5 pages of 'Buy XYZ Here!' links.
I know this is a joke but it's also a real concern. I'm all for OVC and electronic voting but what keeps a poll worker from coming in early before the vote and doing some creative editing on the poll software?
Is the paper ballot the only check against this type of thing? If so, it requires that all voters stop to listen and pay attention to the person reading back their vote. If you changed 10% of the votes and 50% of those people had their vote read back to them then you've just changed 5% of the vote and there's no guarantee that a 5% discrepency will be reported to anyone.
I love Banks's work. In fact I'm reading 'Look To Windward' right now. Can't say I care for Baxter based on Manifold: Time and I read the others so long ago I honestly can't remember them.
Have you read Banks's non-SF work? I liked The Bridge but haven't read his other stuff like The Wasp Factory.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I cannot believe I'm living in a world where CmdrTaco isn't at the helm of Slashdot. While I haven't visited regularly in a while, I've (perhaps obviously from my UID) been around for a long time. I remember when Slashdot didn't have user accounts, when the moderation came in (and changed, and changed, and changed soem more), when Natalie Portman and her grits were topics of conversation. I submitted the story about the official reveal of the name of Star Wars Episode 1 (don't shoot the messenger!). Through all the years and newcomer sites every time I saw a link to Slashdot or visited my RSS feeds for Book Reviews and Ask Slashdot I felt a warm & fuzzy for the old site.
Thanks Taco! I certainly hope you find something to do that makes you happy in the next 14 years.
What's the problem? He didn't start the fire.
The helicopter you have to shoot with arrows in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden has stopped me from moving on in that game for months. It's the fault of my poor aim with the arrows but man, it's tough. Someday...
China will bring itself on board. The pollution going on there now is killing thousands of people a year and will only continue to grow unless the government puts strong controls in place. There are literally thousands of environmentally focussed protests going on in China every year and they cannot ignore the problem for their own reasons. Once we start controlling our own carbon output, the Chinese will have no choice. Their people will force the issue. We need to start getting our own house in order regardless of them and help them make the transition when the time comes.
I haven't watched the video but I did read the article and color me cynical but I have a hard believing any talk about a technology that is orders of magnitude better than an existing, established, technology and is cheaper. Plus this is based on 10 year old patents. Wouldn't somebody, somewhere within a hard drive company have seen these patents and worked on this technology if it were at all feasible in the market? There's any number of technology "breakthroughs" that look awesome in the lab but don't survive trying to mass-produce them. Making a few million of some complex piece of machinery is hard. That said, good luck to him though. I hope to be buying their drives soon.
What does a legal 'Paid To Read' scheme consist of? Is this just a wishful thinking exersize? "Oh, nobody gets hurt and I get to make some money clicking on stuff so it's fine."
As a non-fan of B5 since the pilot episode, I found this guy's examination of the show pretty enlightening. He was a fan but now, after some time has gone by, he watched it again and decided "Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows."
Link found on The Mumpsimus (who also kindly, unknowingly, contributed the Subject of this post).
I don't have points to vote right now but I agree wholeheartedly with this. "Watch out! Here comes some learning!" is very offensive, especially for the audience of people interested in watching Mythbusters.
Are they really going to put a Dilbert cartoon on the cover? It's a funny one but the original book has kind of a classic, authoritative look to it. Putting a comic strip on the cover makes it look more like one of those jokey 'Unix in 3 hours!' books.
Part of the problem is that as much as Stallman would love everyone to use it, the GPL is a niche license. It's meant to let people with similar, laudable, mindsets exchange code and generally make the world better. It's not meant for everything under the sun. If people would just stop pushing GPL as the One True License and accept that not everybody has the same world-view, lots of open-source licenses would flourish. If you like the GPL, great. If you don't like it, don't re-use code that uses it. Write your own and put a different license on it. That's ok.
The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson.
I believe that's supposed to be 'Marc Andresson', fact-checkers/reporters at MLAgazine. Sheesh.
Wow, thanks FSF folks. You think the minor and stupid threat of legal action against Linux using corporations by SCO chilled use of Linux? Even talking about a change like this could do far more damage. It is incredible that they would even talk about something like this. If I'm a company like Google, why would I go forward using GPL software when the people in charge of the license talk about changing it to make me pay when I'm not redistributing my code? What's next? I run a website on Apache, I have to pay the FSF for the privilege? Sheesh.
1. you don't have a universal deluxe right to privacy, it's a myth.
The idea that you don't have a right because it's not in the Constitution is the exact opposite of how the framers intended things to work. The point of the Bill of Rights was to say 'You have all the rights that are not explicitly taken away, and here are some that can never be taken away'. There was a big fight amongst the founders because some of them thought people might come to interpret the Bill of Rights as a list of all the rights you have, rather than the rights that can't be taken away. The rest of the founders thought nobody would be that stupid but that's the way everyone has come to look at things now. It's a complete inversion of the idea of the Bill. I have a right to privacy because it's not taken away in the Constitution, not the other way around.
For me the most important thing to know about Monster is their recent spate of lawsuits against anyone who has 'monster' in their name. Check out this google search for more info. This is absolutely insane and has caused me to personally boycott Monster even though I used to like their cables.
This is a tad off topic but the last sentence of the 2nd story says
Gillespie said two phone tips naming the same hotel prompted his team to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which dispatched investigators to the alleged crime scene.
What the hell does the DHS have to do with child porn?
It's worth noting, by the way, that the Democrats have been waging a systematic campaign to get Ralph Nader off ballots, with no one seeming too upset about it...
Well since RNC funded organizations have been getting Nader on the ballet as a spoiler in places where he wouldn't normally be on, it's not as simple as you make it seem.
You can really tell the geek/civilian ratio has gone more and more to the civilian non-geek side by the number of 'What is this useful for?' posts on this story. A real geek knows that a hack is important in and of itself and no usefulness is implied or important.
One of the big benefits of Bloglines is that since it's all off of one site, they only hit each site's feed once for everyone to read it. A lot of people have their individual readers setup to hit sites every few minutes which can lead to a lot of bandwidth wasted when you multiply that times hundreds or thousands of RSS readers. With one site doing the hitting, everybody reads the feed and the site doesn't have to worry about RSS readers killing their bandwidth every 5 minutes.
The Massive Change project has a weekly interview show they put online every week. I've been listening to them and I'm amazed by what I've learned. There's very little more stimulating than smart people talking to each other and the host of MCR is one smart woman. She asks very intelligent questions and lets the interviewee talk, a rarity in interviews with professors and scientists. There's a large backlog of older interviews on there with luminaries such as Freeman Dyson, William McDonough, and Stewart Brand.
Highly recommended.
Oh yeah, I don't think anybody's willing to start cutting out the "junk" in our DNA or anything yet. It's an interesting finding though.
One of the theories about the junk DNA is that it's there to help reduce the chances that a mutation could cause catastrophic harm to the organism. If you've got 5 times as much stuff to hit with a cosmic ray, for example, you're more likely to hit the "padding" than the useful stuff. If that's correct, you would see exactly what they're seeing with this mouse, until an important bit of the DNA gets mutated.
New Scientist has an article about some scientists who removed pretty huge chunks of a mouse's "junk DNA" and the mouse was just fine in every way they could measure.
So the moral is, we have a lot to learn about DNA.
From 'Pinky & The Brain'
Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: Oh, I think so Brain, but SNOBOL for Windows?
SNOBOL is an early-60s era programming language. The only reason I caught that joke was one of my professors mentioned it offhand the day I saw that episode. I am forever impressed by the writers of P&tB because of this quote.
Whatever happened to Google splitting blogs off onto their own search? Sometimes I just want to search for what people have to say about certain products without having to wade through 5 pages of 'Buy XYZ Here!' links.
I know this is a joke but it's also a real concern. I'm all for OVC and electronic voting but what keeps a poll worker from coming in early before the vote and doing some creative editing on the poll software?
Is the paper ballot the only check against this type of thing? If so, it requires that all voters stop to listen and pay attention to the person reading back their vote. If you changed 10% of the votes and 50% of those people had their vote read back to them then you've just changed 5% of the vote and there's no guarantee that a 5% discrepency will be reported to anyone.
I love Banks's work. In fact I'm reading 'Look To Windward' right now. Can't say I care for Baxter based on Manifold: Time and I read the others so long ago I honestly can't remember them.
Have you read Banks's non-SF work? I liked The Bridge but haven't read his other stuff like The Wasp Factory.