No, it means we should have just paid hookers right off the bat, rather than waste time taking girls out to dinners and movies in vain attempts to get laid.
This is just another story about perceived value vs. actual value... whoop-de-do. It's funny too, because the music industry would take the exact opposite position: people see "free" as being more "valuable".
Just FYI, the books you want to read are Inherit The Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giant's Star, all by Hogan. He later wrote some additional books in the series. Yes, they're pretty good reads, if you like reasonably hard sci-fi. I think you can get them on Amazon.
Because processing power is not what will keep us from developing a Holodeck... the ability to synthesize matter at will and manipulate it with such detail is a much more difficult task.
However, we may very well achieve some more along the lines of The Matrix or James P. Hogan's star-spanning Visar AI. I'd say it's almost a given that we'll eventually develop some kind of direct neural interface into a computer-generated virtual reality.
is either already knowledgeable enough to take care of themselves, or completely ignorant. There seems to be little middle ground, because those that consider their personal information valuable take steps to protect it, learn what they need to learn in order to accomplish that. They ask questions like, "I understand I need a firewall, can you recommend a good one?" or "I'm looking to get a wireless setup at home... how do I configure it so it's more secure?" I can deal with people like that. They're willing to learn.
Then there are the clueless ones, those who agree that privacy and security are important, but simply refuse to see their friendly personal computer as a potential threat in that regard. Just can't see it. Sure, I've set up security for people, done my best to keep them from screwing up too much, tried to educate them a little... but I always come back to find the firewall turned off because "Facebook stopped working and I thought it might be the firewall" or "this game I got off the Internet kept throwing up little windows saying 'this program is trying to access the Internet' and I got tired of clicking Allow." Gagh. That's not even counting the utter inability of these people to take even the slightest precautions when it comes to email. It's not like they haven't been told, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do to keep their data safe. They just refuse to do it... and when something bad happens to them I just shrug. An "I told you so" just isn't worth the effort.
It's very frustrating: you just want to smack them with a cluebat, you really do. I guess I'll just have to get used to willful ignorance. Might as well wish that SUV drivers would stop being four-wheeled sociopathic assholes. I don't see either situation improving any time soon.
Well, with any luck they'll get that massively-multicore quantum processor out in time for the release of Duke Nukem Forever. I hear the frame rate will be awesome.
but my point is that solutions should be final (wow, that kind of sounded bad)
Good thing you qualified that, or it would have cued up a whole slew of Hitler jokes (one has to wonder what the typical Slashdot Grammar Nazi's "final solution" would look like.)
Anyway, sometimes we have to settle for "good enough" or "it'll do until something better comes along." When you get right down to it, our entire energy infrastructure is exactly that. We're still waiting for that something better: none of the major power production technologies really qualifies as a long term solution, although some are longer term than others.
Still, even incremental improvements are better than none at all. You're right about one thing: if the solution creates more problems than it solves it's not a solution. I don't know enough about this crystal-CO2-sequestering to understand the ramifications either... it sounds darned interesting, but that's about it at this point.
Not really. They could be as chemically poisonous as plutonium, but still be useful. I mean, we're not talking about sequestering carbon dioxide with this stuff and then making Coke bottles out of it. It'll have to be put somewhere, of course, and that will pose problems. So which is worse? Global warming, or providing long-term storage of chemical residue?
One's opinion on that depends upon where one sits on the issue of global warming, I suppose.
The GP doesn't grasp the idea of "fault tolerance". It's pretty well understood in the mainframe/supermini world, but because it adds cost isn't something you see in your typical PC. Even there, as you say, the hardware guys have done their jobs pretty damn well... it's the software that usually fails in one way or another.
Well, I meant "capable of making this offer with the intent of screwing up Yahoo by not buying it", which is what the article was about anyways, not "are they actually capable of buying Yahoo" which is largely irrelevant in that context.
Like I said, it's hard to tell. Beats me what's really going on... from the outside looking in, Yahoo doesn't really seem like a good match for Microsoft. Personally I think Ballmer is flying higher than a kite, but we'll see.
The Net is by definition a peer-to-peer network, the whole concept of the data cloud. Packet goes in, packet comes out... anywhere. Anything else is just a artifice laid upon that, a convenience at best, an obstruction at worst.
No, they've been taught that being obnoxious is cool, because there are no consequences to bad behavior in a forum such as this. Now, if each of us could click a "jackass" button, and when a certain number of them get pressed the individual responsible receives a brief 30 kV electric shock... now that might do it.
And I'm not so sure that they're as young as you think: I'm pretty certain that some of them have had plenty of time to grow up but didn't.
Dumbest thing I've heard all day. Might as well say, "the roads would be perfectly safe if it weren't for that 5% of people who are bad drivers." Sure, it's true... but reality is what it is and railing against it doesn't help. Furthermore, it's not the communications provider's job to determine what is, or is not, considered legitimate traffic, just like it's not the traffic cop's job to determine if my visiting my mother-in-law is appropriate. In neither case do we want them to operate in that capacity, because the reason I'm using the particular resource (public street or Information Superhighway) is none of his goddamned business. Cops know that... do you really want the likes of Brian Robertson or Edward J. "These are my pipes!" Whitacre making those decisions? No? I thought not.
Now, if it came down to the ISPs simply being physically incapable of providing the services their paying customers are demanding, it might be different. But it's not, there's more than adequate capacity (the supposed scarcity of bandwidth is entirely artificial) and they're basically jacking us around to (as another poster put it) "extract value" from us. Extract value from that last mile, that is.
When it comes to problems like this, they need to be dealt with in a way that has the least long term negative consequences. Breaking laws and damaging Internet functionality is not such a solution. Matter of fact, that's the problem with both the ISPs and the content industry: they're both thinking short-term and don't seem to care about what happens to them (or us) down the road.
Maybe it's just the stockholders applying pressure, maybe it's just management with a decided lack of vision... whatever. Blaming "pirates" (and you obviously don't understand what that term means, under U.S. law anyway) is not the answer.
Not necessarily. A given Torrent search engine may or may not run a tracker itself, and many just link to trackers hosted by other people. Anyone can host a torrent, and there are a lot of them with more popping up all the time... I think it might be a bit more difficult than you think to keep tabs on any significant number of them.
Yes, but the GP's point is well-taken... the pattern of connections and data flow for a Torrent tracker/client is very different from that of a browser making a secure connection to a bank. If the goal is simply to reduce or eliminate swarming protocols, you don't need to know what's in the packet stream: just analyze the traffic and shut down specific patterns of connections. Sure, that may mean that the occasional (ahem!) "legitimate" connection gets knocked off, but they may feel that's a price we have to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
No, our legal code is almost entirely like an entire operating system written in undocumented Perl.
... Perl is positively self-documenting when compared to Teco!
Hell no
Offtopic, my foot.
Is that why free love didn't catch on?
No, it means we should have just paid hookers right off the bat, rather than waste time taking girls out to dinners and movies in vain attempts to get laid.
This is just another story about perceived value vs. actual value ... whoop-de-do. It's funny too, because the music industry would take the exact opposite position: people see "free" as being more "valuable".
Gagh. The human psyche is fundamentally twisted.
Just FYI, the books you want to read are Inherit The Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giant's Star, all by Hogan. He later wrote some additional books in the series. Yes, they're pretty good reads, if you like reasonably hard sci-fi. I think you can get them on Amazon.
We may never achieve something like the holodeck
... the ability to synthesize matter at will and manipulate it with such detail is a much more difficult task.
Because processing power is not what will keep us from developing a Holodeck
However, we may very well achieve some more along the lines of The Matrix or James P. Hogan's star-spanning Visar AI. I'd say it's almost a given that we'll eventually develop some kind of direct neural interface into a computer-generated virtual reality.
is either already knowledgeable enough to take care of themselves, or completely ignorant. There seems to be little middle ground, because those that consider their personal information valuable take steps to protect it, learn what they need to learn in order to accomplish that. They ask questions like, "I understand I need a firewall, can you recommend a good one?" or "I'm looking to get a wireless setup at home ... how do I configure it so it's more secure?" I can deal with people like that. They're willing to learn.
... but I always come back to find the firewall turned off because "Facebook stopped working and I thought it might be the firewall" or "this game I got off the Internet kept throwing up little windows saying 'this program is trying to access the Internet' and I got tired of clicking Allow." Gagh. That's not even counting the utter inability of these people to take even the slightest precautions when it comes to email. It's not like they haven't been told, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do to keep their data safe. They just refuse to do it ... and when something bad happens to them I just shrug. An "I told you so" just isn't worth the effort.
Then there are the clueless ones, those who agree that privacy and security are important, but simply refuse to see their friendly personal computer as a potential threat in that regard. Just can't see it. Sure, I've set up security for people, done my best to keep them from screwing up too much, tried to educate them a little
It's very frustrating: you just want to smack them with a cluebat, you really do. I guess I'll just have to get used to willful ignorance. Might as well wish that SUV drivers would stop being four-wheeled sociopathic assholes. I don't see either situation improving any time soon.
Dude, watch the movie. It's a moral imperative.
Well, with any luck they'll get that massively-multicore quantum processor out in time for the release of Duke Nukem Forever. I hear the frame rate will be awesome.
but my point is that solutions should be final (wow, that kind of sounded bad)
... it sounds darned interesting, but that's about it at this point.
Good thing you qualified that, or it would have cued up a whole slew of Hitler jokes (one has to wonder what the typical Slashdot Grammar Nazi's "final solution" would look like.)
Anyway, sometimes we have to settle for "good enough" or "it'll do until something better comes along." When you get right down to it, our entire energy infrastructure is exactly that. We're still waiting for that something better: none of the major power production technologies really qualifies as a long term solution, although some are longer term than others.
Still, even incremental improvements are better than none at all. You're right about one thing: if the solution creates more problems than it solves it's not a solution. I don't know enough about this crystal-CO2-sequestering to understand the ramifications either
no, it's annoying and comment sections should be removed from news websites.
This is a news site. Why don't you remove yourself, as an example to the rest of us?
Not really. They could be as chemically poisonous as plutonium, but still be useful. I mean, we're not talking about sequestering carbon dioxide with this stuff and then making Coke bottles out of it. It'll have to be put somewhere, of course, and that will pose problems. So which is worse? Global warming, or providing long-term storage of chemical residue?
One's opinion on that depends upon where one sits on the issue of global warming, I suppose.
The GP doesn't grasp the idea of "fault tolerance". It's pretty well understood in the mainframe/supermini world, but because it adds cost isn't something you see in your typical PC. Even there, as you say, the hardware guys have done their jobs pretty damn well ... it's the software that usually fails in one way or another.
Yes, I believe the Inuit make accounting software, or something like that.
Well, I meant "capable of making this offer with the intent of screwing up Yahoo by not buying it", which is what the article was about anyways, not "are they actually capable of buying Yahoo" which is largely irrelevant in that context.
Like I said, it's hard to tell. Beats me what's really going on ... from the outside looking in, Yahoo doesn't really seem like a good match for Microsoft. Personally I think Ballmer is flying higher than a kite, but we'll see.
Yeah ... but it would be cool!
The Net is by definition a peer-to-peer network, the whole concept of the data cloud. Packet goes in, packet comes out ... anywhere. Anything else is just a artifice laid upon that, a convenience at best, an obstruction at worst.
but is Microsoft capable of this? I'd say that's a given.
No, they've been taught that being obnoxious is cool, because there are no consequences to bad behavior in a forum such as this. Now, if each of us could click a "jackass" button, and when a certain number of them get pressed the individual responsible receives a brief 30 kV electric shock ... now that might do it.
And I'm not so sure that they're as young as you think: I'm pretty certain that some of them have had plenty of time to grow up but didn't.
A sub-par small plane?
Well, I'd say there's a pretty good chance it was a sub-par model, all things considered.
Dumbest thing I've heard all day. Might as well say, "the roads would be perfectly safe if it weren't for that 5% of people who are bad drivers." Sure, it's true ... but reality is what it is and railing against it doesn't help. Furthermore, it's not the communications provider's job to determine what is, or is not, considered legitimate traffic, just like it's not the traffic cop's job to determine if my visiting my mother-in-law is appropriate. In neither case do we want them to operate in that capacity, because the reason I'm using the particular resource (public street or Information Superhighway) is none of his goddamned business. Cops know that ... do you really want the likes of Brian Robertson or Edward J. "These are my pipes!" Whitacre making those decisions? No? I thought not.
... whatever. Blaming "pirates" (and you obviously don't understand what that term means, under U.S. law anyway) is not the answer.
Now, if it came down to the ISPs simply being physically incapable of providing the services their paying customers are demanding, it might be different. But it's not, there's more than adequate capacity (the supposed scarcity of bandwidth is entirely artificial) and they're basically jacking us around to (as another poster put it) "extract value" from us. Extract value from that last mile, that is.
When it comes to problems like this, they need to be dealt with in a way that has the least long term negative consequences. Breaking laws and damaging Internet functionality is not such a solution. Matter of fact, that's the problem with both the ISPs and the content industry: they're both thinking short-term and don't seem to care about what happens to them (or us) down the road.
Maybe it's just the stockholders applying pressure, maybe it's just management with a decided lack of vision
Or is there some intelligent design behind it? ;-)
Yes. It's just not supernatural.
Not necessarily. A given Torrent search engine may or may not run a tracker itself, and many just link to trackers hosted by other people. Anyone can host a torrent, and there are a lot of them with more popping up all the time ... I think it might be a bit more difficult than you think to keep tabs on any significant number of them.
Yes, but the GP's point is well-taken ... the pattern of connections and data flow for a Torrent tracker/client is very different from that of a browser making a secure connection to a bank. If the goal is simply to reduce or eliminate swarming protocols, you don't need to know what's in the packet stream: just analyze the traffic and shut down specific patterns of connections. Sure, that may mean that the occasional (ahem!) "legitimate" connection gets knocked off, but they may feel that's a price we have to pay.