From reading the Wikipedia article you linked I'd say it's because this is a stable combination of two allotropes of Boron. Their example of carbon existing in graphite and diamond form would mean - if this were the same thing - that diamond and graphite existed in a combined state of some sort.
I read an article about Information Theory a long, long time ago (which is probably why I can't Google it) wherein the authors demonstrated that the most efficient means of storing information would be by using an alphabet that had e (2.71828183) letters.
It was pretty interesting and has been stuck in my head. In any event, they surmised further that the closest we could get would be if we came up with some sort of trinary alphabet. They also opined that we were damned lucky to have binary as it's the next-most-efficient alphabet.
So can we expect ISPs to start incorporating in Texas the way that credit card companies like to incorporate in Delaware? Granted, the former would be for protection from industry harassment and the latter is for protection from usury laws, but if I were an ISP I'd certainly look on Texas as a nice place to call "home" for legal purposes.
What this book and the popularity of these alternative approaches to health and healing show is that people don't believe the science education they were given.
Most people are familiar - at least vaguely - with the Scientific Method. They were introduced to it in middle school or earlier.
While it's fun to laugh at the people that believe in this stuff and meet an early grave or a debilitating chronic condition because of their belief in this hocus-pocus, I believe we'd be better served (and more moral) if we were to focus on the big questions:
Why don't people believe in science? Why don't they know or keep the Scientific Method close to their hearts? What could we be doing better to make sure that quackery like this passes away naturally as it would in any system wherein most people subscribed to the SM?
We all know this stuff doesn't work (beyond the power of the placebo), but we're obviously in the minority. As Stephen Colbert might opine, this stuff is succeeding in the market, so it must be true.
If we want to save people from doom, we should look at improving either the quality or the retention of our science education.
There was also an article in Computer World Magazine, about Robert Lang's software that's being used to fold stuff from airbags to solar panels in spacecraft.
According to Aerospaceweb, the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/h. This train is approaching half that.
Dude. It'd be awesome to be standing at the train station and have it arrive about the time you heard the whistle it gave on the horizon, assuming it didn't Doppler up to a frequency you couldn't hear.
It's called NPSS and it stands for Numerical Propulsion System Simulation. The basic idea behind it is to be able to build a simulation of a jet engine by linking together different objects (fan, compressor, burner, turbine, nozzle, etc) whose properties you can change (fan area, burner temp, fuel flow), in order to theoretically model any engine you want.
I played with it some, and it's very cool. My BS is in Mechanical Engineering, and they didn't start letting engineering students take C/C++ until the year after I started, so I know the FORTRAN woes you suffer.
The thing is that for years engineers have had to use FORTRAN to do stuff it shouldn't really be doing, so they've gotten into habits of trying to think of problems as more complex than they really are, just because the programming language they have to use is unsuited to the problems.
Anyway, NASA has been at it for a few years, and they've done a great job (IMHO) at implementing OO for what they're doing. Using the software to build and simulate an engine is incredibly easy, and you can simulate all kinds of manuevers and engine configurations really fast.
What it really comes down to is what amount of the value one adds to the products one contributes to does one capture? I work 40 hours a week, straight up, and I am hacking code most of the time I'm not reading/.. I am underpaid, because I know what the products I'm working on are worth, how many people are working on them, their average salaries, etc., and it doesn't add up. So, I goof off sometimes.
Oh, and if you think that working hard, late nights, weekends, etc. is going to make you 'more valuable' than the guy who works 9-5 every day, you're fooling yourself. When it comes time to 'cut costs' you and he look just the same to the guy with the axe. Ask anyone who's been around a company when hard times are coming. The smartest people are those who are looking for other jobs while their 'loyal' cow-orkers are 'proving how valuable they are,' and when all of them get fired, the former has a job lined up, and the latter is out on his ass.
Also known as Everquest, it's an online RPG, which was the development in MUD's I'd been waiting for for a long time. The only thing that really drove me away from paper-and-dice RPG's was the dice and the time required to play. EQ has taken care of that.
I would also recommend the Age of Empires series, and Halflife.
Other than that, all the classics (Pong, Breakout) are my favs, and have ports, adaptations, etc. out already.
One thing briefly touched on, but not explored, in this article is "why people feel the need to create divisions in communities." Well, it's part of our "nature."
I put that in quotes because i'm skeptical of "human nature," if only because it smacks of us having some inability to control ourselves. Still, I feel a need (as do all of us, at some times) to be a part of a group. For example, while I'm not the great technophile a lot of/.'rs are, I feel like a part of the Linux/Free Software/etc. movement, and I get a good rush of self-satisfaction when I'm explaining the evils of MS, Intel, patents, closed source, etc.
The rush comes from the feeling that because I know these things, and they are The Truth (TM), I am better than the people I am explaining to them. In all truth, I'm masterbating my ego, as is anyone that feels "superior" to a person simply because they have different ideas about things.
To some extent, this kind of schism in society is a good thing, because educated people try really hard to justify their views, and in the process they get or generate a lot of new information, and sometimes actually prove themselves right. It's even more entertaining when they prove themselves wrong though. So get to work, MS!
On the other hand, this strife can be (and has been) taken to unhealthy extremes, which is where a lot of war, institutionalized discrimination, and other Bad Stuff (TM) comes from.
By the time this gets on I'm sure someone will have done a much better job, but what the hey:
The article touched a little on the issue of who would produce/program these little machines, and mentioned the government as one of the groups to look out for. Ha! They don't have the mental fortitude to understand the implications this might have. Corporations are the ones we ought to be looking at (and we're doing a good job here).
Corp's have so much more to gain from controlling our thoughts: money, marketshare! Microsoft Mind Gnomes 2050, released in November 2051, will be the leading "mind expansion" software on the market. Hopefully, though, there will also be Red Hat Pins 6.1.3 available, with the source open to scrutiny and modification by those who want to get more out of their implants than the average individual.
So, better than looking out for Uncle Sam, we need to look out for Uncle Bill (who will probably be praising M$MG from inside one of their machines) and support open source Mind Expansion machines.
Ok, so it's tongue in cheek, but I'm sure people will take care of the "which one is the real me" question on their own, we just need to be sure they can determine that on their own with no corporate backdoors, suggestions, etc.
companies are simply grabbing what they can, often paying far undervalue,
What is even more disturbing is the lack of understanding of the "value added" people put into products their company sells. For instance, I'm a new engineer, working for a gov't contractor, making ~$40K, which is pretty good for the area I inhabit. However, the projects I'm working on represent a "final product" that will be sold to the government (or something -- tells you how much I know/care) for multiple millions of dollars.
The thing is that there are very few people working on this project, and most of them are around my wage level. Sure, there's stuff like "overhead" and "connected costs," but the bottom line is that, at some point, the stockholders are going to be walking away with a hell of a lot of money, most (if not all) of which will have been generated by me and my colleagues.
Now, soon I will have the opportunity to become a stockholder (employee stock purchase thing), and I will. In one way I will think of it as capturing more of the value I add to our "product."
The real solution, though, is unpalatable to my mostly conservative colleagues, though: unionize. "An engineer union!?!?"
A simple search on Google reveals that there are some engineering unions in the world, and following a link shows that they even do things.
I hate it when I lose my train of thought.
Ah yes. You see, the people that contribute their time, sweat, etc. to making automobiles, aircraft, hauling goods, teaching our children, etc. have all figured out that, in the end, corporations don't give a damn about the stakeholders. So, they've figured out that they can get their voices heard if they get together. Technology-savvy individuals, wooed by the "big bucks" they're offered, think that being in a union will only be a bad thing.
The funny thing is that this very opinion is propogated by the corporations. They own (almost) every media outlet, so is it a surprise that they can get the media to show pictures of the union exploiters sitting on their ass earning workman's comp for a papercut? Is it surprising that this is portrayed as some sort of a majority of union workers?
This is too long, it's gonna get auto-demoted.
You get the idea, though. It's more wicked than just controlling the media or the medium, it's controlling our lives and our livelihood. Particularly here, with the large numbers of techno-savvy people. Pay attention!
Remember, this whole internet thing has been around for just a short time. It took many years for societies to develop. This internet society needs to have its growing pains also. Things will get better, but given the vast number of people involved, it is going to take a few decades for things to settle out.
While it is true that this "society" is still young, as societies go, it is still a subset, or more likely a combination, of existing societies, each of which has similar rules about how one is to treat others.
If we are to take the "growing pains" argument to RL, however, we find that it loses some validity. When I join (or form) a group of people that meet to do similar things, such as a book club, if one or two of the members start berating or browbeating the other members, I'm not going to call that "growing pains." I'm going to point out that those people are being rude, and probably ask them to leave.
The real problem, as Katz points out (but does not expand on) is that there is no responsibility taken by flamers for their actions. Even in the case where the flamer is asked to leave, assuming they do, they can always come back under a different name, or email address, or even IP (assuming they know about those).
More than likely, though, since they percieve no threat or danger from their behavior, they'll just continue, probably even getting worse. We've all seen it.
So, the real trick is not only to point out when people flame, but to try to explain to them how useless and hurtful and counterproductive it is. I know that 14-yr-olds sometimes have problems understanding, but even if you can bring one flamer to the light side, you've succeeded, and we're all a little better off.
-ristoril
Oh how the tides have turned...
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AOL Nation
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It was only this past summer that AOL, along with Netscape and Sun, was whining to our judicial system that Microsoft was competing unfairly and should be punished.
I'm really not surprised at this latest move. It is common knowledge that no for-profit company is acting in the best interest of the consumer. They are acting in the best interest of their shareholders.
So, the judicial system and most of the internet "elite" were too busy watching the right hand of AOL/Netscape/Sun to notice that all three of them were interested in replacing MS, not displacing them. The real truth behind that lawsuit is that AOL (and Netscape and Sun) are jealous of MS's success at manipulating the market.
They all want our money, and they'll all use any tool they can to get it. That AOL and Netscape and Sun had to use the government to do it for them means only that they don't know how to tell people what they want to hear. Not as well as MS does, at least.
-ristoril
BTW, I believe that MS makes inferior products, and I'm using Netscape right now.
I know that if we all worked together it would be easy enough to solve, but I also realize that if we did it would decrease our chances individually of winning. So, who's feeling altruistic today? The guy that mentioned ISBN's was right, the first ten numbers on each line is the ISBN for one of the books on the right (one of them gets to go twice). I have no clue what the other numbers are for.....
In light of how fast this Internet thing makes technological innovation, maybe we're looking at a paradigm shift coming.
Perhaps, instead of trying to distribute the cracking of some cypher, or finding ET, people need to sign up for "distributed computing." What I mean is, people sign up to use some client software to do any project someone needs more than one or two computers to solve, even if they only need one CPU-year, if they provide the client-side software to do the number-crunching, it gets downloaded and executed.
Of course, the software would need to be small, and there would probably have to be some semi-centralized agent for everyone to get it from, and there would have to be a "validation" process to make sure someone wasn't just trying to find all the combinations of the letters in the alphabet that make cool names for their EverQuest character.
Thil promises to get big. I mean, they had a measurable backlog on their calculations at SETI, but it's dwindling quickly. This shouldn't make us upset, we should be glad that we have proven this can work. Not only that, but we've proven there are more people than they expected would be willing to participate.
What if they figured out a way to distribute the calcs on Pi or the solution to the human genome? We could probably find a cure for cancer in a month if they could figure out how to distribute the work. If it can be calculated, we could probably cut the calculation time down to virtually nothing. Not only that, but we've proven we can by laying the smack down on this whole ET-search.
So, what we need is an agency (/.@home?) to organize and distribute the plethora of projects out there that have one year project times or greater. Of course, one of the distributed projects could be the assignment and distribution of the projects. Maybe give that job to people who have proven dedicated to "the cause," a time-served promotion schedule, of sorts, like in a business.
Choices have to be presented to be made. As such, you can expect the group of people with less exposure to the fact they have the ability to use the internet, and "use it productively" to use computers and the internet less.
I am really getting tired of hearing from people that (for the most part) have had the choice to have a computer and/or the internet available to them from the get-go talk about how "obviously" the people that don't have those things don't want them. That isn't true. Those people can't get them as easily as you did, or they would have them.
As someone pointed out earlier, it is quite silly to read a bunch of technologically-minded people talking about others who aren't. I agree that the internet and home computing are still in their infancy, but that doesn't mean we should "let nature take its course" like it has before, with TV, electricity, and running water. In fact, it took heavy government intervention to get TV's to be everywhere. In the first part, they gave away airwaves to the Big Three networks, and on the second part, local governments got community antenna's and called it 'cable TV'.
Now, I believe that anything we (the technologically savvy) can do to help others to realize the power available to them through the use of the internet and/or home computing is warranted and even mandatory, should we want to call ourselves Good People (TM). To that end, free local computer labs with good (T1 or better) connections to the internet should be provided, with better technology in the schools, and this should be done in the urban areas first because they are, statistically, more in need than suburbs, and have higher population densities than rural areas.
Also, a good media campaign (a la Drug Council ads) targetted at those who are least likely to spontaneously start using computers needs to take place. The main reason people that I know who don't use computers/internet don't use them is that they can't percieve the use of them. This is most likely the case for our less connected countrymen, as well.
Although I've proposed some solutions here, the main purpose of this post is to impress upon the readers here that it is a great fallacy to believe that others have had the same opportunities, background, motivations, etc. as you. In fact, most people (prepare to be shocked) have had lives entirely different from yours. As such, in order to appreciate the things you take for granted as being 'good,' they must sometimes have it explained to them why, in fact, it is good. If you grew up in downtown Chicago or Detroit (or any other decaying urban area), and had to walk through gang-controlled playgrounds to get to school every day, and had to eat government food, sleep on soiled, beat-up mattresses, and wear ratty, third-generation clothes, do you believe, seriously, that you would have had the 'motivation' to pull yourself to where you are now? If you do, you are either the single most motivated person in the world, or a self-important idiot.
It is completely unfair to ask two runners of otherwise equal ability to compete when one has to start from one mile back, carrying 150 pounds of dead weight, and hop on one foot to finish, but for some reason the other racer always favors this situation. Strangely enough, he never goes back to help his fellow, though he would want that help were their situations reversed.
William Hughes ristoril AT iname DOT com
Re:Geek Union != solution
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GEEK Unions?
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Unions help only when a workforce is in a position to be exploited by management
What do you consider 'exploitation'? I consider it to be any time when the worker does not recieve a fair portion of the value she adds to a product. I don't care if there's a 6-fig salary, if your work brings the company 7-fig, then you're not getting paid enough.
All you married people out there with working spouses: do you enjoy 2x the standard of living your parents had? You have 2x as many people working.
I will also hold that the primary focus of unions today is off the mark. The government takes care of fair wages (minimum wage and EEOC) and worker protection (OSHA). What is left is workers becoming *shareholders* instead of *stakeholders*, because the companies listen to the former more than the latter (if at all). One way to start this is to become a board member.
What any ponential geek union would need to go after, in light of the fact that most geek laborers are fairly well paid, would be seats on corporate boards and/or getting a Geek in some elected office. We could form our own party!
Seriously, though, if all this potential union went after was more money for geeks, we wouldn't be any better off for it. What we need is to get someone up in the board room who knows more about computers than 'point, click.' Then the progress can really start happening.
With that out of the way, I do have an observation that I believe is worth consideration.
When Mindcraft came out with their benchmarking tests, this place (as well as their mail server) was flooded with 'what a bogus test!' 'you MS whores!' and the venerable 'go f*ck yourselves!'
However, when these benchmarks come out, and say that Linux beat NT, they are automatically heralded as The Truth. Now, I really do like the fact that Linux has been 'vindicated', but what guarantees do we have that these tests were any less biased than the ones that said NT won?
I know a lot of you will think I'm a heretic, but we need to present an image of being clear-headed observers. The way not to do this is to automatically discount every benchmark that says NT is better while automatically accepting benchmarks that say Linux is better as God's Own Truth.
Just so I can be sure you guys understand, I'll reiterate:
Linux rules
Microsoft sucks
A benchmark is not trustworthy merely because it agrees with your beliefs
Anyway, the article was a totally transparent: "Don't be afraid of poor abused little ol' innocent Microsoft, be afraid of this horrible three-headed monster we are depicting!"
If you are referring to the picture at the top of the article, you might notice that the three people at the bottom (with swords?) have the symbols of the Trio on their backs. That would make MS the 3-headed monster. I made the same mistake on immediate examination.
However, the fact that they were making plans, and had ideas on how to implement them, gives weight to the idea that the market isn't as closed as they would have us believe. That article makes me think that all these companies really want is to replace MS, not make the environment better for users.
In the end, that is (should be) the goal of anti-trust legislation: guarantee competition. If MS acted to prevent these companies from replacing their OS as dominant, that's one thing. If, on the other hand, these companies were just too wary of the development and advertising costs associated with entering the fray, why are we spending money on them? I don't remember seeing AOL or Sun or Netscape releasing an OS, MS drastically cutting the price of Winblows, and raising it back after the other died.
Basically, this trial is about the other companies being upset that MS is better at pulling the wool over the consumers' eyes than thay are. I think Netscape is a greatly superior browser (my employers, unfortunately, don't), but MS has greatly superior advertising (in that it exists), and the great majority of our fellow countrypeople are more swayed by advertising than quality.
Slashdot Mirror
From reading the Wikipedia article you linked I'd say it's because this is a stable combination of two allotropes of Boron. Their example of carbon existing in graphite and diamond form would mean - if this were the same thing - that diamond and graphite existed in a combined state of some sort.
I read an article about Information Theory a long, long time ago (which is probably why I can't Google it) wherein the authors demonstrated that the most efficient means of storing information would be by using an alphabet that had e (2.71828183) letters.
It was pretty interesting and has been stuck in my head. In any event, they surmised further that the closest we could get would be if we came up with some sort of trinary alphabet. They also opined that we were damned lucky to have binary as it's the next-most-efficient alphabet.
So can we expect ISPs to start incorporating in Texas the way that credit card companies like to incorporate in Delaware? Granted, the former would be for protection from industry harassment and the latter is for protection from usury laws, but if I were an ISP I'd certainly look on Texas as a nice place to call "home" for legal purposes.
The Internet isn't very useful if the delivery guy can't bring your ThinkGeek toys to you because the roads are broken.
What this book and the popularity of these alternative approaches to health and healing show is that people don't believe the science education they were given.
Most people are familiar - at least vaguely - with the Scientific Method. They were introduced to it in middle school or earlier.
While it's fun to laugh at the people that believe in this stuff and meet an early grave or a debilitating chronic condition because of their belief in this hocus-pocus, I believe we'd be better served (and more moral) if we were to focus on the big questions:
Why don't people believe in science? Why don't they know or keep the Scientific Method close to their hearts? What could we be doing better to make sure that quackery like this passes away naturally as it would in any system wherein most people subscribed to the SM?
We all know this stuff doesn't work (beyond the power of the placebo), but we're obviously in the minority. As Stephen Colbert might opine, this stuff is succeeding in the market, so it must be true.
If we want to save people from doom, we should look at improving either the quality or the retention of our science education.
There was also an article in Computer World Magazine, about Robert Lang's software that's being used to fold stuff from airbags to solar panels in spacecraft.
According to Aerospaceweb, the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/h. This train is approaching half that.
Dude. It'd be awesome to be standing at the train station and have it arrive about the time you heard the whistle it gave on the horizon, assuming it didn't Doppler up to a frequency you couldn't hear.
Neato.
If only we could harness the true power of the Internet, and somehow embed distributed computing clients into pr0n. Cure for cancer in 10 minutes.
About the woman using her mouse as a foot pedal.
It's called NPSS and it stands for Numerical Propulsion System Simulation. The basic idea behind it is to be able to build a simulation of a jet engine by linking together different objects (fan, compressor, burner, turbine, nozzle, etc) whose properties you can change (fan area, burner temp, fuel flow), in order to theoretically model any engine you want.
I played with it some, and it's very cool. My BS is in Mechanical Engineering, and they didn't start letting engineering students take C/C++ until the year after I started, so I know the FORTRAN woes you suffer.
The thing is that for years engineers have had to use FORTRAN to do stuff it shouldn't really be doing, so they've gotten into habits of trying to think of problems as more complex than they really are, just because the programming language they have to use is unsuited to the problems.
Anyway, NASA has been at it for a few years, and they've done a great job (IMHO) at implementing OO for what they're doing. Using the software to build and simulate an engine is incredibly easy, and you can simulate all kinds of manuevers and engine configurations really fast.
-ristoril
"the partnership of they and Amazon is going to be a pivotal one," In the 'circle jerk' sense, maybe.
Oh, and if you think that working hard, late nights, weekends, etc. is going to make you 'more valuable' than the guy who works 9-5 every day, you're fooling yourself. When it comes time to 'cut costs' you and he look just the same to the guy with the axe. Ask anyone who's been around a company when hard times are coming. The smartest people are those who are looking for other jobs while their 'loyal' cow-orkers are 'proving how valuable they are,' and when all of them get fired, the former has a job lined up, and the latter is out on his ass.
I would also recommend the Age of Empires series, and Halflife.
Other than that, all the classics (Pong, Breakout) are my favs, and have ports, adaptations, etc. out already.
-ristoril
I put that in quotes because i'm skeptical of "human nature," if only because it smacks of us having some inability to control ourselves. Still, I feel a need (as do all of us, at some times) to be a part of a group. For example, while I'm not the great technophile a lot of /.'rs are, I feel like a part of the Linux/Free Software/etc. movement, and I get a good rush of self-satisfaction when I'm explaining the evils of MS, Intel, patents, closed source, etc.
The rush comes from the feeling that because I know these things, and they are The Truth (TM), I am better than the people I am explaining to them. In all truth, I'm masterbating my ego, as is anyone that feels "superior" to a person simply because they have different ideas about things.
To some extent, this kind of schism in society is a good thing, because educated people try really hard to justify their views, and in the process they get or generate a lot of new information, and sometimes actually prove themselves right. It's even more entertaining when they prove themselves wrong though. So get to work, MS!
On the other hand, this strife can be (and has been) taken to unhealthy extremes, which is where a lot of war, institutionalized discrimination, and other Bad Stuff (TM) comes from.
The trick, I suppose, is in finding the balance.
-Ristoril
The article touched a little on the issue of who would produce/program these little machines, and mentioned the government as one of the groups to look out for. Ha! They don't have the mental fortitude to understand the implications this might have. Corporations are the ones we ought to be looking at (and we're doing a good job here).
Corp's have so much more to gain from controlling our thoughts: money, marketshare! Microsoft Mind Gnomes 2050, released in November 2051, will be the leading "mind expansion" software on the market. Hopefully, though, there will also be Red Hat Pins 6.1.3 available, with the source open to scrutiny and modification by those who want to get more out of their implants than the average individual.
So, better than looking out for Uncle Sam, we need to look out for Uncle Bill (who will probably be praising M$MG from inside one of their machines) and support open source Mind Expansion machines.
Ok, so it's tongue in cheek, but I'm sure people will take care of the "which one is the real me" question on their own, we just need to be sure they can determine that on their own with no corporate backdoors, suggestions, etc.
Mind Expansion wants to be free!!
-ristoril
What is even more disturbing is the lack of understanding of the "value added" people put into products their company sells. For instance, I'm a new engineer, working for a gov't contractor, making ~$40K, which is pretty good for the area I inhabit. However, the projects I'm working on represent a "final product" that will be sold to the government (or something -- tells you how much I know/care) for multiple millions of dollars.
The thing is that there are very few people working on this project, and most of them are around my wage level. Sure, there's stuff like "overhead" and "connected costs," but the bottom line is that, at some point, the stockholders are going to be walking away with a hell of a lot of money, most (if not all) of which will have been generated by me and my colleagues.
Now, soon I will have the opportunity to become a stockholder (employee stock purchase thing), and I will. In one way I will think of it as capturing more of the value I add to our "product."
The real solution, though, is unpalatable to my mostly conservative colleagues, though: unionize. "An engineer union!?!?"
A simple search on Google reveals that there are some engineering unions in the world, and following a link shows that they even do things.
I hate it when I lose my train of thought.
Ah yes. You see, the people that contribute their time, sweat, etc. to making automobiles, aircraft, hauling goods, teaching our children, etc. have all figured out that, in the end, corporations don't give a damn about the stakeholders . So, they've figured out that they can get their voices heard if they get together. Technology-savvy individuals, wooed by the "big bucks" they're offered, think that being in a union will only be a bad thing.
The funny thing is that this very opinion is propogated by the corporations. They own (almost) every media outlet, so is it a surprise that they can get the media to show pictures of the union exploiters sitting on their ass earning workman's comp for a papercut? Is it surprising that this is portrayed as some sort of a majority of union workers?
This is too long, it's gonna get auto-demoted.
You get the idea, though. It's more wicked than just controlling the media or the medium, it's controlling our lives and our livelihood. Particularly here, with the large numbers of techno-savvy people. Pay attention!
-Ristoril
While it is true that this "society" is still young, as societies go, it is still a subset, or more likely a combination, of existing societies, each of which has similar rules about how one is to treat others.
If we are to take the "growing pains" argument to RL, however, we find that it loses some validity. When I join (or form) a group of people that meet to do similar things, such as a book club, if one or two of the members start berating or browbeating the other members, I'm not going to call that "growing pains." I'm going to point out that those people are being rude, and probably ask them to leave.
The real problem, as Katz points out (but does not expand on) is that there is no responsibility taken by flamers for their actions. Even in the case where the flamer is asked to leave, assuming they do, they can always come back under a different name, or email address, or even IP (assuming they know about those).
More than likely, though, since they percieve no threat or danger from their behavior, they'll just continue, probably even getting worse. We've all seen it.
So, the real trick is not only to point out when people flame, but to try to explain to them how useless and hurtful and counterproductive it is. I know that 14-yr-olds sometimes have problems understanding, but even if you can bring one flamer to the light side, you've succeeded, and we're all a little better off.
-ristoril
I'm really not surprised at this latest move. It is common knowledge that no for-profit company is acting in the best interest of the consumer. They are acting in the best interest of their shareholders.
So, the judicial system and most of the internet "elite" were too busy watching the right hand of AOL/Netscape/Sun to notice that all three of them were interested in replacing MS, not displacing them. The real truth behind that lawsuit is that AOL (and Netscape and Sun) are jealous of MS's success at manipulating the market.
They all want our money, and they'll all use any tool they can to get it. That AOL and Netscape and Sun had to use the government to do it for them means only that they don't know how to tell people what they want to hear. Not as well as MS does, at least.
-ristoril
BTW, I believe that MS makes inferior products, and I'm using Netscape right now.
-Ristoril
Perhaps, instead of trying to distribute the cracking of some cypher, or finding ET, people need to sign up for "distributed computing." What I mean is, people sign up to use some client software to do any project someone needs more than one or two computers to solve, even if they only need one CPU-year, if they provide the client-side software to do the number-crunching, it gets downloaded and executed.
Of course, the software would need to be small, and there would probably have to be some semi-centralized agent for everyone to get it from, and there would have to be a "validation" process to make sure someone wasn't just trying to find all the combinations of the letters in the alphabet that make cool names for their EverQuest character.
Thil promises to get big. I mean, they had a measurable backlog on their calculations at SETI, but it's dwindling quickly. This shouldn't make us upset, we should be glad that we have proven this can work. Not only that, but we've proven there are more people than they expected would be willing to participate.
What if they figured out a way to distribute the calcs on Pi or the solution to the human genome? We could probably find a cure for cancer in a month if they could figure out how to distribute the work. If it can be calculated, we could probably cut the calculation time down to virtually nothing. Not only that, but we've proven we can by laying the smack down on this whole ET-search.
So, what we need is an agency (/.@home?) to organize and distribute the plethora of projects out there that have one year project times or greater. Of course, one of the distributed projects could be the assignment and distribution of the projects. Maybe give that job to people who have proven dedicated to "the cause," a time-served promotion schedule, of sorts, like in a business.
Or something.
-Ristoril
I am really getting tired of hearing from people that (for the most part) have had the choice to have a computer and/or the internet available to them from the get-go talk about how "obviously" the people that don't have those things don't want them. That isn't true. Those people can't get them as easily as you did, or they would have them.
As someone pointed out earlier, it is quite silly to read a bunch of technologically-minded people talking about others who aren't. I agree that the internet and home computing are still in their infancy, but that doesn't mean we should "let nature take its course" like it has before, with TV, electricity, and running water. In fact, it took heavy government intervention to get TV's to be everywhere. In the first part, they gave away airwaves to the Big Three networks, and on the second part, local governments got community antenna's and called it 'cable TV'.
Now, I believe that anything we (the technologically savvy) can do to help others to realize the power available to them through the use of the internet and/or home computing is warranted and even mandatory, should we want to call ourselves Good People (TM). To that end, free local computer labs with good (T1 or better) connections to the internet should be provided, with better technology in the schools, and this should be done in the urban areas first because they are, statistically, more in need than suburbs, and have higher population densities than rural areas.
Also, a good media campaign (a la Drug Council ads) targetted at those who are least likely to spontaneously start using computers needs to take place. The main reason people that I know who don't use computers/internet don't use them is that they can't percieve the use of them. This is most likely the case for our less connected countrymen, as well.
Although I've proposed some solutions here, the main purpose of this post is to impress upon the readers here that it is a great fallacy to believe that others have had the same opportunities, background, motivations, etc. as you. In fact, most people (prepare to be shocked) have had lives entirely different from yours. As such, in order to appreciate the things you take for granted as being 'good,' they must sometimes have it explained to them why, in fact, it is good. If you grew up in downtown Chicago or Detroit (or any other decaying urban area), and had to walk through gang-controlled playgrounds to get to school every day, and had to eat government food, sleep on soiled, beat-up mattresses, and wear ratty, third-generation clothes, do you believe, seriously, that you would have had the 'motivation' to pull yourself to where you are now? If you do, you are either the single most motivated person in the world, or a self-important idiot.
It is completely unfair to ask two runners of otherwise equal ability to compete when one has to start from one mile back, carrying 150 pounds of dead weight, and hop on one foot to finish, but for some reason the other racer always favors this situation. Strangely enough, he never goes back to help his fellow, though he would want that help were their situations reversed.
William Hughes
ristoril AT iname DOT com
What do you consider 'exploitation'? I consider it to be any time when the worker does not recieve a fair portion of the value she adds to a product. I don't care if there's a 6-fig salary, if your work brings the company 7-fig, then you're not getting paid enough.
All you married people out there with working spouses: do you enjoy 2x the standard of living your parents had? You have 2x as many people working.
I will also hold that the primary focus of unions today is off the mark. The government takes care of fair wages (minimum wage and EEOC) and worker protection (OSHA). What is left is workers becoming *shareholders* instead of *stakeholders*, because the companies listen to the former more than the latter (if at all). One way to start this is to become a board member.
Seriously, though, if all this potential union went after was more money for geeks, we wouldn't be any better off for it. What we need is to get someone up in the board room who knows more about computers than 'point, click.' Then the progress can really start happening.
Viva Revolution!
With that out of the way, I do have an observation that I believe is worth consideration.
When Mindcraft came out with their benchmarking tests, this place (as well as their mail server) was flooded with 'what a bogus test!' 'you MS whores!' and the venerable 'go f*ck yourselves!'
However, when these benchmarks come out, and say that Linux beat NT, they are automatically heralded as The Truth. Now, I really do like the fact that Linux has been 'vindicated', but what guarantees do we have that these tests were any less biased than the ones that said NT won?
I know a lot of you will think I'm a heretic, but we need to present an image of being clear-headed observers. The way not to do this is to automatically discount every benchmark that says NT is better while automatically accepting benchmarks that say Linux is better as God's Own Truth.
Just so I can be sure you guys understand, I'll reiterate:
- Linux rules
- Microsoft sucks
- A benchmark is not trustworthy merely because it agrees with your beliefs
RistorilIf you are referring to the picture at the top of the article, you might notice that the three people at the bottom (with swords?) have the symbols of the Trio on their backs. That would make MS the 3-headed monster. I made the same mistake on immediate examination.
However, the fact that they were making plans, and had ideas on how to implement them, gives weight to the idea that the market isn't as closed as they would have us believe. That article makes me think that all these companies really want is to replace MS, not make the environment better for users.
In the end, that is (should be) the goal of anti-trust legislation: guarantee competition. If MS acted to prevent these companies from replacing their OS as dominant, that's one thing. If, on the other hand, these companies were just too wary of the development and advertising costs associated with entering the fray, why are we spending money on them? I don't remember seeing AOL or Sun or Netscape releasing an OS, MS drastically cutting the price of Winblows, and raising it back after the other died.
Basically, this trial is about the other companies being upset that MS is better at pulling the wool over the consumers' eyes than thay are. I think Netscape is a greatly superior browser (my employers, unfortunately, don't), but MS has greatly superior advertising (in that it exists), and the great majority of our fellow countrypeople are more swayed by advertising than quality.
ohhhh.... bad post.... long.....