See, what you're missing is we need to spend all of the budget on the robotic exploration of space. Once day, when robots are as intelligent as humans, or more so, they be able to improve themselves, making better, newer robots.
Humans will have indirectly made themselves obsolete. All of these robots will be out there exploring. Us goo- and bone- bags can rot away and die. Our legacy will populate the galaxy.
Those old 1950's cartoons were right about one thing: that's why all of the aliens that came out of the flying saucers were robots. Their biological progenitors were unable to cross the vastness of space and were doomed to wither trapped at the bottom of a gravitational well by their own conceitedness.
I'll let you into a secret. After graduating from University, my first real job was in Reactor Physics at a nuclear powerstation. I'd grown up on 8-bit micros and DOS pee cees, and was shocked at what I saw, even back then (1996).
Once a month, one of our routine jobs was to produce the NFER (Nuclear Fuel Element Register) for both reactors. It is the legal document detailing the "nuclear burn-up" (radiation dose) of all of the fuel in the reactors. This was done remotely on an IBM mainframe of some description (some dinosaur from the 1960s) using 3270 emulators on PS/2 386/16sx machines over a token ring network. We had a mysterious IBM printer connected to a wall socket with an incongruous piece of co-ax, sitting on a rickety desk. It used to almost shake the desk to pieces. It swayed violently from side to side. It was next to the door and how someone wasn't injured I'll never know. (A bit like having a dart board on a door).
Producing the input for the NFER was sheer Purgatory. There was JCL involved, but it looked completely unlike anything I'd ever seen. I didn't understand it and didn't have to. Luckily we only had to reformat columns of text data on the 3270 terminals using Satan's own editor.
After submitting the job, a couple of days later, the postman would bring the printouts. They weighed many pounds.
A few years later I was lucky enough to jump careers and into the wonderful world of unix...
With regard to drugs, doesn't the research and testing that goes into drugs cost major $$$$$ and time?
Not if you go to India and look at traditional herbal remedies, and then patent the ones that look like they might really work.
Thus you deprive the locals of thousands of years of medicine which they used to be able to afford, but not any more thanks to your stupid "intellectual property."
Languages and toolkits are so high-level nowadays, and computers are so fast, that you could write real-time shooters in the most inefficient, clumsy interpreted language and have it run on all unixes (including Apple) and the dreaded Windows.
The only obstacle is that it actually involves thinking about things.
We have the opposite problem. Our prisons are overcrowded, and it's getting worse. Proper criminals are being let out early because there's no room for them. Meanwhile, the "war on terror" gets top priority and funding, and "suspects" get locked up for as long as a short prison sentence. Guilty or not, your life is ruined.
This is allegedly a modern, liberal, enlightened, tolerant free country with democracy.
Funny that this ridicules story is on the front page, while the reclassification of cannabis probably wont make it, that's much more infringing on civil liberties than videos of you when your in a public place.
Cannabis, as Class C was as illegal as it will be as Class B again.
All they're saying is they consider it more harmful today than they did yesterday, and that the courts are encouraged to mete out harsher sentences for supply, cultivation or possession with intent to supply. On PM this afternoon, it was said that possession of small quantities for personal use would not be dealt with harshly. (That would be down to the discretion of the police and courts.
As for CCTV, it's ineffective in the UK for several reasons. The images are generally too poor (blurred, dark and grainy) to be useful, and secondly, the police can't be bothered to look at the footage. It's "hard work."
Cannabis should be legalised. End prohibition of drugs.
CCTV is creepy. I'm sure there is a case for it in certain places under certain circumstances, but what we have now is illiberal, wasteful and almost totally useless.
Every single PC that I've owned (apart from one someone gave me) I've built myself. It's not that I can't do stuff, it's that when it comes to analogue stuff, i.e. cutting things and drilling holes, I'm not very accurate. I can't cut wood straight, or drill holes straight. I once put up some shelves. It took all day, and I ruined two drill bits. The shelves were not quite level according to my spirit level, but luckily you couldn't tell by looking. I'm so slow.
I later found out the reason the drill bits were ruined is that I should have used a hammer drill.
I'd really like to build and fly model planes and rockets, but I'd probably chop off my fingers and set fire to myself.
Where I come from, sarcasm is the national sport, ahead of football hooliganism, and suicide by alcohol and deep-fried food. That doesn't look like sarcasm.
It's only in the last couple of years that I've had any disposable income to speak of. I'm not very practical, in fact my did used to discourage me from helping because I was so bad.
Needless to say at the ripe old age of 33 I'm beginning to wish I could do those sorts of things. However, I live in a tiny rented house with nowhere to keep lots of tools. I have an electric drill and a small soldering iron and a socket set.
I once changed the brake pads on my car successfully.
You'd be surprised at how resourceful Cuban people are...I am amazed at how they make some of those old cars still work with no parts available...
I'm Scottish. My grandfather had a lathe, a welding set, a bandsaw, a circular saw, various soldering irons, dies and taps etc. Parts for engines were made now and then, weights for fishing etc.
My father has it all now.
I dare say it'll be mine one day too, but I haven't a clue how to use any of it.
I have been reading through the comments and it appears as if most "nerds" have been pussy wiped by other distros and don't understand the point of actually knowing your OS.
Most have given up and left/. because their interesting and informative posts keep getting modded Troll or Flamebait whereas the ignorant rantings and astroturfers get modded up.
Maybe I'm getting old. I just come here to read the headlines now and go to other sites to find the actual news. Having said that, many things that make the front page are troll articles, vacuous speculation or just plain wrong
They get a corporate tax discount for having layoffs. It's how they mitigate the cost of purchasing companies. (Cobalt, StorageTek, MySQL, whoever comes next).
I've been running Slackware since 1995 (initially on a 486). Last year I got an Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) and later upgraded it to a Athlon 64 X2 5200+.
I decided to give SLAMD64 a try. It's straight Slackware compiled for AMD64/Intel EM64T. Although I haven't done any serious benchmarks, my SETI@Home floating-point measured performance went up 55% when I installed the 64-bit client. The system is using memory more efficiently too (read up on the problems 32-bit OSes have with RAM of 1GB and above).
Making a distro is quite an involved software integration exercise.
It's not just about selecting a bunch of packages. It's about selecting the right versions of the source, configuring, compiling, testing, debugging, patching, testing, packaging, installing, testing, testing and more testing.
A lot of bugs in core utilities get found in this way, and obviously they have to be fixed. Whether that's the disto maintainer, the developers or random community members depends on the individual circumstances.
Bugs pertaining to architecture (big- vs. little-endiam, 32- vs. 64-bit etc.) get found. Bugs in shiny new cutting-edge versions of applications, obscure kernel bugs caused by very particular combinations of configuration parameters, you name it.
As the complexity of GNU/Linux and unix systems increases, it's an ever-increasingly difficult job. That's why large, diverse communities of testers and developers are important.
As for Slackware, it's simple, conservative, very high quality and very useful/usable.
It's a shape Pat hasn't done an official AMD64 version. I've moved to SLAMD64 for my newest machine now. I should really make a donation to Fred.
Friedman and Skolnick are technically superb musicians, and unfortunately I've never seen a Cacophony CD in a record shop or I'd have bought one 15 years ago.
Both were on the "wuss-music" end of metal. Friedman wanted Megadeth to sound like cheesey AOR and Skolnick wanted Testament to sound like Def Leppard and Metallica's Black album.
As far as both bands go, I'm glad that Mustaine and Peterson retained artistic control.
I never got into Prong. Primus were cool. I really like Pink Floyd. Gilmore is probably the best electric guitar musician in the world. Pantera were a bit too kitchy for my liking. Anslemo(?) (vocals) was a moron but Dimebag ruled.
Mustaine's music is technically interesting if not quite as out-there as some others. I've always preferred Megadeth to Metallica. There's an extra depth there that Metallica just don't have.
If you want to hear something really different, and if you can stomach synthesisers, get some Bohlen-Pierce music. Get Splat by Charles Carpenter.
That reminds me, Gandhi had a contemporary who advocated India joining up with Nazi Germany in WWII to defeat the British. He had quite a sizable following.
Goodness only knows what would have happened had Gandhi not been successful.
Slashdot Mirror
See, what you're missing is we need to spend all of the budget on the robotic exploration of space. Once day, when robots are as intelligent as humans, or more so, they be able to improve themselves, making better, newer robots.
Humans will have indirectly made themselves obsolete. All of these robots will be out there exploring. Us goo- and bone- bags can rot away and die. Our legacy will populate the galaxy.
Those old 1950's cartoons were right about one thing: that's why all of the aliens that came out of the flying saucers were robots. Their biological progenitors were unable to cross the vastness of space and were doomed to wither trapped at the bottom of a gravitational well by their own conceitedness.
I'll let you into a secret. After graduating from University, my first real job was in Reactor Physics at a nuclear powerstation. I'd grown up on 8-bit micros and DOS pee cees, and was shocked at what I saw, even back then (1996).
Once a month, one of our routine jobs was to produce the NFER (Nuclear Fuel Element Register) for both reactors. It is the legal document detailing the "nuclear burn-up" (radiation dose) of all of the fuel in the reactors. This was done remotely on an IBM mainframe of some description (some dinosaur from the 1960s) using 3270 emulators on PS/2 386/16sx machines over a token ring network. We had a mysterious IBM printer connected to a wall socket with an incongruous piece of co-ax, sitting on a rickety desk. It used to almost shake the desk to pieces. It swayed violently from side to side. It was next to the door and how someone wasn't injured I'll never know. (A bit like having a dart board on a door).
Producing the input for the NFER was sheer Purgatory. There was JCL involved, but it looked completely unlike anything I'd ever seen. I didn't understand it and didn't have to. Luckily we only had to reformat columns of text data on the 3270 terminals using Satan's own editor.
After submitting the job, a couple of days later, the postman would bring the printouts. They weighed many pounds.
A few years later I was lucky enough to jump careers and into the wonderful world of unix...
*cough* Are you serous? Is JCL really that bad? Or is this a whooooosh joke?
With regard to drugs, doesn't the research and testing that goes into drugs cost major $$$$$ and time?
Not if you go to India and look at traditional herbal remedies, and then patent the ones that look like they might really work.
Thus you deprive the locals of thousands of years of medicine which they used to be able to afford, but not any more thanks to your stupid "intellectual property."
Have you seen the advert for Purina dog food with the dogs in 0-g in that space station? Could you imagine the poop? Yeuch.
But then how else do you get free games?
Write your own?
Languages and toolkits are so high-level nowadays, and computers are so fast, that you could write real-time shooters in the most inefficient, clumsy interpreted language and have it run on all unixes (including Apple) and the dreaded Windows.
The only obstacle is that it actually involves thinking about things.
Yeah, we can trust them to do the right thing, can't we ?
Well, quite.
We have the opposite problem. Our prisons are overcrowded, and it's getting worse. Proper criminals are being let out early because there's no room for them. Meanwhile, the "war on terror" gets top priority and funding, and "suspects" get locked up for as long as a short prison sentence. Guilty or not, your life is ruined.
This is allegedly a modern, liberal, enlightened, tolerant free country with democracy.
Now look here, young man, that just isn't cricket!
Funny that this ridicules story is on the front page, while the reclassification of cannabis probably wont make it, that's much more infringing on civil liberties than videos of you when your in a public place.
Cannabis, as Class C was as illegal as it will be as Class B again.
All they're saying is they consider it more harmful today than they did yesterday, and that the courts are encouraged to mete out harsher sentences for supply, cultivation or possession with intent to supply. On PM this afternoon, it was said that possession of small quantities for personal use would not be dealt with harshly. (That would be down to the discretion of the police and courts.
As for CCTV, it's ineffective in the UK for several reasons. The images are generally too poor (blurred, dark and grainy) to be useful, and secondly, the police can't be bothered to look at the footage. It's "hard work."
Cannabis should be legalised. End prohibition of drugs.
CCTV is creepy. I'm sure there is a case for it in certain places under certain circumstances, but what we have now is illiberal, wasteful and almost totally useless.
Thanks. All the Windows astroturfers around here like to go on about Windows backwards compatibility: you can run W2k binaries on XP.
There is nothing stopping you learning how to do these things except your idea that you can't.
I keep thinking that's the great problem with British society. You're right. It's time I built something. I want to make a boat and a submarine too.
Thanks for the positive advice.
Every single PC that I've owned (apart from one someone gave me) I've built myself. It's not that I can't do stuff, it's that when it comes to analogue stuff, i.e. cutting things and drilling holes, I'm not very accurate. I can't cut wood straight, or drill holes straight. I once put up some shelves. It took all day, and I ruined two drill bits. The shelves were not quite level according to my spirit level, but luckily you couldn't tell by looking. I'm so slow.
I later found out the reason the drill bits were ruined is that I should have used a hammer drill.
I'd really like to build and fly model planes and rockets, but I'd probably chop off my fingers and set fire to myself.
Where I come from, sarcasm is the national sport, ahead of football hooliganism, and suicide by alcohol and deep-fried food. That doesn't look like sarcasm.
It's only in the last couple of years that I've had any disposable income to speak of. I'm not very practical, in fact my did used to discourage me from helping because I was so bad.
Needless to say at the ripe old age of 33 I'm beginning to wish I could do those sorts of things. However, I live in a tiny rented house with nowhere to keep lots of tools. I have an electric drill and a small soldering iron and a socket set.
I once changed the brake pads on my car successfully.
You'd be surprised at how resourceful Cuban people are...I am amazed at how they make some of those old cars still work with no parts available...
I'm Scottish. My grandfather had a lathe, a welding set, a bandsaw, a circular saw, various soldering irons, dies and taps etc. Parts for engines were made now and then, weights for fishing etc.
My father has it all now.
I dare say it'll be mine one day too, but I haven't a clue how to use any of it.
How did you manage to wean her off of Windows?
Yes, because in a gravity deficient environment, we need a robot that can lift 200lbs. comfortably.
Ever heard of inertia and momentum?
I have been reading through the comments and it appears as if most "nerds" have been pussy wiped by other distros and don't understand the point of actually knowing your OS.
Most have given up and left /. because their interesting and informative posts keep getting modded Troll or Flamebait whereas the ignorant rantings and astroturfers get modded up.
Maybe I'm getting old. I just come here to read the headlines now and go to other sites to find the actual news. Having said that, many things that make the front page are troll articles, vacuous speculation or just plain wrong
They get a corporate tax discount for having layoffs. It's how they mitigate the cost of purchasing companies. (Cobalt, StorageTek, MySQL, whoever comes next).
I've been running Slackware since 1995 (initially on a 486). Last year I got an Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) and later upgraded it to a Athlon 64 X2 5200+.
I decided to give SLAMD64 a try. It's straight Slackware compiled for AMD64/Intel EM64T. Although I haven't done any serious benchmarks, my SETI@Home floating-point measured performance went up 55% when I installed the 64-bit client. The system is using memory more efficiently too (read up on the problems 32-bit OSes have with RAM of 1GB and above).
Making a distro is quite an involved software integration exercise.
It's not just about selecting a bunch of packages. It's about selecting the right versions of the source, configuring, compiling, testing, debugging, patching, testing, packaging, installing, testing, testing and more testing.
A lot of bugs in core utilities get found in this way, and obviously they have to be fixed. Whether that's the disto maintainer, the developers or random community members depends on the individual circumstances.
Bugs pertaining to architecture (big- vs. little-endiam, 32- vs. 64-bit etc.) get found. Bugs in shiny new cutting-edge versions of applications, obscure kernel bugs caused by very particular combinations of configuration parameters, you name it.
As the complexity of GNU/Linux and unix systems increases, it's an ever-increasingly difficult job. That's why large, diverse communities of testers and developers are important.
As for Slackware, it's simple, conservative, very high quality and very useful/usable.
It's a shape Pat hasn't done an official AMD64 version. I've moved to SLAMD64 for my newest machine now. I should really make a donation to Fred.
Friedman and Skolnick are technically superb musicians, and unfortunately I've never seen a Cacophony CD in a record shop or I'd have bought one 15 years ago.
Both were on the "wuss-music" end of metal. Friedman wanted Megadeth to sound like cheesey AOR and Skolnick wanted Testament to sound like Def Leppard and Metallica's Black album.
As far as both bands go, I'm glad that Mustaine and Peterson retained artistic control.
I never got into Prong. Primus were cool. I really like Pink Floyd. Gilmore is probably the best electric guitar musician in the world. Pantera were a bit too kitchy for my liking. Anslemo(?) (vocals) was a moron but Dimebag ruled.
Mustaine's music is technically interesting if not quite as out-there as some others. I've always preferred Megadeth to Metallica. There's an extra depth there that Metallica just don't have.
If you want to hear something really different, and if you can stomach synthesisers, get some Bohlen-Pierce music. Get Splat by Charles Carpenter.
Megadeth always was Dave Mustaine. He has a huge ego, but he's a real rock star, so I can forgive him. He rules.
That reminds me, Gandhi had a contemporary who advocated India joining up with Nazi Germany in WWII to defeat the British. He had quite a sizable following.
Goodness only knows what would have happened had Gandhi not been successful.