The Blight is the nemesis of galactic ciivilization in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". It spreads like a multi-level virus and once it infects a star system, all neighbors must turn their dishes away from it and destroy any vessel from there, lest they be contaminated too.
Whatever level on which you connect to an infected system, you'll receive information that is probing your systems, overflowing buffers, trying to subvert system security. For instance if you tuned into a video stream you might get charismatic people telling you how good life is over there, and how corrupt your own leaders are...
Our country is at the top position in the world today for a reason. We earned our way there, but can only stay as long as we can keep ourselves there. We must continue to evolve and compete to avoid being outdone by others, who have every right to try their best as well.
Your country is at the top position in a number of metrics because of hard work of course, but also because of a fair number of historical and geographic circumstances that were not earned. I think its important that if the US maintains its position, it does so not by continuing its habit of economic and military coercion of less priveleged nations. Having the right to try our best to outdo the US means nothing if we are not allowed to exercise it.
Because configs aren't generally speed critical, the XML parsing library should figure out the format type and use the appropriate parser. A program using it wouldn't care which XMLish format its config is in, unlike a user who might like to edit said config easily.
While I know the syntactic overloading of leading whitespace is a bit evil, it turns out to be not a problem as most Pythonistas will tell you. It encourages consistent formatting without including more syntactic squiggles, which improves readability of configs as much as code.
I have had the very occasional stuffup in copying python code straight off a browser window, its usually best to do it from source or saving as text.
Um, I think "bubble fusion" has also been proven to work. where deuterated acetone gas bubbles are formed and collapsed in an intense ultrasound environment.
Kin Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" spends a few pages on the 'fines' of Mars, as we might expect similar problems there. It doesn't get expanded on much as an implication to martian colonists however, it just gives them red eyes when exposed to it.
One might expect the problem to be lesser on a planet like Mars, with more atmosphere and significant dust storms. However there is no liquid surface water to bind tiny particles up into more manageable sizes. Also the wind probably plays an active role in making the dust fine, perhaps finer than that found on Luna.
Again and again people assume that Bill Gates is self made, that if he's worth a million times someone else financially that he worked something like a million times harder or smarter. Yet if IBM had seen the money in software in the early '80s, he'd be about as rich and powerful as steve jobs. Sure Bill has worked hard and some might even say smart, but it was a screwup on the part of IBM that made his company what it is.
Contrived hypotheticals do not impress me. If you can find a case where two identical patentable inventions were created at precisely the same time by two inventors working on opposite sides of the world, let's talk about it. As it is, you're basically asking me who would own the copyright if two authors sat down and, entirely by coincidence, wrote the exact same book, word for word, at precisely the same moment. Possible? Sure. But so utterly improbable that it's never happened and could never reasonably be expected to happen, ever. I don't think a discussion of that kind of hypothetical could ever go anywhere productive.
Leo, your hypothetical is much, much more contrived than that which you decry. It is astronomically more likely that two patentable inventions will overlap in a month than that two identical books are by chance written at the exact same time. Especially given the deeply flawed state of the USPTO which blows out the term 'patentable' to include anything with the right paperwork that a patent examiner isn't knowledgeable about. You are presenting ill-reasoned arguments passionately, which leads me to think that taking this kind of hypothetical anywhere productive is beyond you.
Grandparent post: For the record, most people who challenge our current implementations of copyright and/or patent have specific and legitimate arguments based upon real-world experience in various industry.
Parent post: Great. Let's hear one.
Fine. A few months back, I wrote a mail merge. No, I didn't use some MS Office function to do it. I wrote it myself, in Perl, having never seen the sourcecode of someone else's implementation of a mail merge in my life. Yet, now that the free trade agreement between Australia and the US has been signed off and we are obliged to 'harmonise' our IP law with the US, that mail merge is a liability to the company for which I work. In the late 90s Bill Gates' name was on an approved patent application for a mail merge algorithm. I haven't read the full text of this patent so I don't know if I infringe upon it, but the point is I shouldn't have to read it to make sure. If the two implementations are similar enough for a patent suit to carry weight, by law Mr Gates could shut this company down just with the legal defence and/or settlement fees. Yet I stole nothing, deprived nobody of anything, I didn't even get a copy of someone else's source and restructure it. That code is mine, he has no right to label the product of my mind as unlawful.
Yeah... people in Nazi Germany and in Stalinist Russia got used to the idea there are things, like the freedom to spread ideas, that are not accepted by society. Extreme cases to be sure, but the US is getting more extreme all the time.
Now that everything is implicitly copyright in the US - no need to label things as such - this means quoting or using anything improperly is now cause for the state to dissect your colon. Defending this kind of law is lame.
Unless a special purpose language has really good reasons putting it head and shoulders above a general purpose language for a given task, I'll go the general purpose route. I have yet to see the reasons for using PHP stack up to more than 'it handles sessions etc for you' and 'its what every web host offers'. That may be reason enough for some for sure.
I've set up the odd PHP command-line app to do things other than munge web pages, and found that for anything longrunning, you have to edit or override a setting in php.ini that specifies the HTTP timeout, so it won't timeout your PHP system daemon/batch job processor. Aside from the rest, somehow that tells me everying other than 'web monkeywrench' was an afterthought.
That was one of the first things my Dr wrote down in her notebook about me. Then again, were I extremely into books she wouldn't have written anything except maybe 'needs more exercise'. Oh and um, she thinks I'm posessed by a demon - but she won't write that down cause it wouldn't look good at a medical tribunal:P
Each molecule can only kill off one fat cell, correct?
Um, no. The peptides may not be consumed in performing their signaling/binding function. Nevertheless it might take millions of them to kill a single cell, the article isn't specific. There would be a constant of proportionality or other relation parameterised by species, bodily location of the tissue, etc.
Couldn't they just hook you up to a dialysis machine while your fat cells die?
Some of the blood vessels to the fat tissue die, as a result the fat cells dump their load. Would be interesting to find out why. I think fat cell numbers would be almost conserved in the process, just like fat people have about the same number of fat cells as slender people.
I do think this may be one of the first non-mind altering drug to become a controlled substance if it gets approved because of the danger involved
If you're implying that substances which are controlled are dangerous, I think the question is 'dangerous to who?'.
Check out projectudi.org. I think its a little VM just for platform independent device drivers, that should also improve system stability when running a less than perfectly written driver. Goes some of the way you're heading. I at least wish the linux/bsd kernels were written in C++ (a sane subset thereof), or nowadays D. Of course, microsoft wants to kill UDI since it implies leveling the playing field windoze is on - imagine universal compatibility with commodity devices... 'Right to innovate' my arse!
In fact only a year or so previous to the Hindenberg disaster, a similar event took place in California though fewer lives were lost. That blimp was full of helium and it still went up in a great ball of flames - because like the Hindenberg it was coated with cellulose acetate (I think to keep water off it). Not sure if it had the aluminium paint as well though.
So yeah, I think the gas used for bouyancy makes little difference to the hazard.
Now if we could produce some kinda field that stabilises positive muons by an order of, say, many trillions, we could have muonium lofted blimps that make do with 10% the volume. But. Alas...
Just put a stipulation in the contracts that they cannot be outsourced and you can have all the money going back to the US economy.
You forget that money spent overseas has a way of making it back to the US. Money spent in the US also has a way of going overseas. Even without globalisation, economies are far from closed.
Most critics of the plan want us to give the money to poor countries, who will then most likely end up spending it on weapons. And later they will just spit in our face.
You think money in the US doesn't get spent on weapons that end up getting spat back in your face? The US economy is very involved with military expenditure and arms production. Much of which gets sold to people who end up being enemies of the US. An obvious example is Saddam Hussein. Read some Noam Chomsky.
We are not the worlds welfare system!
Considering how the US and other rish countries treat the world's poor, a little more welfare could go a long way to reducing the tendency for people to attack US interests.
Re:"set -e" will go a long way to helping you
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 1
Untrue. You have the return code of the script which can indicate quite a number of conditions, or you can capture the standard output/error of the script if you don't need it for other things.
I've often thought it would be nice to have the option of allowing environment changes or some more structured information get back to the parent. XMLBash anyone?
As companies are dropping support, but not property rights to our old favorites, many are in danger of vanishing forever. Itellectual property law is on the one hand there to encourage creators by giving them protection, on the other hand to benefit society directly by codifying the passage of that work to the public domain. Sitting on intellectual property indefinately is anathema to the intent of the law. It seems to me that if support and publication (availability) of a work is dropped, that should mean the owner of the rights is relinquishing them, after a short period that should be no longer than a few years - enough for a business cycle or two. Of course, what with the crazy copyright laws today, I wouldn't expect this sort of sane position from today's corrupt and out of touch judiciary and legislature. But its something to campaign for...
Slashdot Mirror
Parsec
Munchman
Elite
Frontier
System Shock
Quake
Starsiege Tribes
Half Life (and HL2)
Warcraft 2
Dark Reign
Total Annihilation
Perl is a fable, about a monastery
The Blight is the nemesis of galactic ciivilization in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". It spreads like a multi-level virus and once it infects a star system, all neighbors must turn their dishes away from it and destroy any vessel from there, lest they be contaminated too.
Whatever level on which you connect to an infected system, you'll receive information that is probing your systems, overflowing buffers, trying to subvert system security. For instance if you tuned into a video stream you might get charismatic people telling you how good life is over there, and how corrupt your own leaders are...
Absolutely. IT is one of the most wasteful industries we have, at a time when natural resources and the energy to get them are in short supply.
Our country is at the top position in the world today for a reason. We earned our way there, but can only stay as long as we can keep ourselves there. We must continue to evolve and compete to avoid being outdone by others, who have every right to try their best as well.
Your country is at the top position in a number of metrics because of hard work of course, but also because of a fair number of historical and geographic circumstances that were not earned. I think its important that if the US maintains its position, it does so not by continuing its habit of economic and military coercion of less priveleged nations. Having the right to try our best to outdo the US means nothing if we are not allowed to exercise it.
If not YAML, there is no shortage of alternatives to address any issues you might have with it.t ml
http://www.pault.com/pault/pxml/xmlalternatives.h
Because configs aren't generally speed critical, the XML parsing library should figure out the format type and use the appropriate parser. A program using it wouldn't care which XMLish format its config is in, unlike a user who might like to edit said config easily.
One of my favourites is Sorta Like Python:
http://www.scottsweeney.com/projects/slip
While I know the syntactic overloading of leading whitespace is a bit evil, it turns out to be not a problem as most Pythonistas will tell you. It encourages consistent formatting without including more syntactic squiggles, which improves readability of configs as much as code.
I have had the very occasional stuffup in copying python code straight off a browser window, its usually best to do it from source or saving as text.
Um, I think "bubble fusion" has also been proven to work. where deuterated acetone gas bubbles are formed and collapsed in an intense ultrasound environment.
Kin Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" spends a few pages on the 'fines' of Mars, as we might expect similar problems there. It doesn't get expanded on much as an implication to martian colonists however, it just gives them red eyes when exposed to it.
One might expect the problem to be lesser on a planet like Mars, with more atmosphere and significant dust storms. However there is no liquid surface water to bind tiny particles up into more manageable sizes. Also the wind probably plays an active role in making the dust fine, perhaps finer than that found on Luna.
Again and again people assume that Bill Gates is self made, that if he's worth a million times someone else financially that he worked something like a million times harder or smarter.
Yet if IBM had seen the money in software in the early '80s, he'd be about as rich and powerful as steve jobs. Sure Bill has worked hard and some might even say smart, but it was a screwup on the part of IBM that made his company what it is.
Contrived hypotheticals do not impress me. If you can find a case where two identical patentable inventions were created at precisely the same time by two inventors working on opposite sides of the world, let's talk about it. As it is, you're basically asking me who would own the copyright if two authors sat down and, entirely by coincidence, wrote the exact same book, word for word, at precisely the same moment. Possible? Sure. But so utterly improbable that it's never happened and could never reasonably be expected to happen, ever. I don't think a discussion of that kind of hypothetical could ever go anywhere productive.
Leo, your hypothetical is much, much more contrived than that which you decry. It is astronomically more likely that two patentable inventions will overlap in a month than that two identical books are by chance written at the exact same time. Especially given the deeply flawed state of the USPTO which blows out the term 'patentable' to include anything with the right paperwork that a patent examiner isn't knowledgeable about. You are presenting ill-reasoned arguments passionately, which leads me to think that taking this kind of hypothetical anywhere productive is beyond you.
Grandparent post:
For the record, most people who challenge our current implementations of copyright and/or patent have specific and legitimate arguments based upon real-world experience in various industry.
Parent post:
Great. Let's hear one.
Fine. A few months back, I wrote a mail merge. No, I didn't use some MS Office function to do it. I wrote it myself, in Perl, having never seen the sourcecode of someone else's implementation of a mail merge in my life. Yet, now that the free trade agreement between Australia and the US has been signed off and we are obliged to 'harmonise' our IP law with the US, that mail merge is a liability to the company for which I work. In the late 90s Bill Gates' name was on an approved patent application for a mail merge algorithm. I haven't read the full text of this patent so I don't know if I infringe upon it, but the point is I shouldn't have to read it to make sure. If the two implementations are similar enough for a patent suit to carry weight, by law Mr Gates could shut this company down just with the legal defence and/or settlement fees. Yet I stole nothing, deprived nobody of anything, I didn't even get a copy of someone else's source and restructure it. That code is mine, he has no right to label the product of my mind as unlawful.
Leo, I'm trying to follow but you're losing me. How does the deprivation argument break down with respect to real estate?
If I take your land, you are deprived of it. Ask any indigenous community.
Yeah... people in Nazi Germany and in Stalinist Russia got used to the idea there are things, like the freedom to spread ideas, that are not accepted by society. Extreme cases to be sure, but the US is getting more extreme all the time.
Now that everything is implicitly copyright in the US - no need to label things as such - this means quoting or using anything improperly is now cause for the state to dissect your colon. Defending this kind of law is lame.
Every now and then I get a (7 month?) itch to have a closer look at PHP, usually something turns me right off it, like the following:
PHP in contrast to Perl
Python vs PHP
Unless a special purpose language has really good reasons putting it head and shoulders above a general purpose language for a given task, I'll go the general purpose route. I have yet to see the reasons for using PHP stack up to more than 'it handles sessions etc for you' and 'its what every web host offers'. That may be reason enough for some for sure.
I've set up the odd PHP command-line app to do things other than munge web pages, and found that for anything longrunning, you have to edit or override a setting in php.ini that specifies the HTTP timeout, so it won't timeout your PHP system daemon/batch job processor. Aside from the rest, somehow that tells me everying other than 'web monkeywrench' was an afterthought.
That was one of the first things my Dr wrote down in her notebook about me. Then again, were I extremely into books she wouldn't have written anything except maybe 'needs more exercise'. :P
Oh and um, she thinks I'm posessed by a demon - but she won't write that down cause it wouldn't look good at a medical tribunal
Um, no. The peptides may not be consumed in performing their signaling/binding function. Nevertheless it might take millions of them to kill a single cell, the article isn't specific. There would be a constant of proportionality or other relation parameterised by species, bodily location of the tissue, etc.
Couldn't they just hook you up to a dialysis machine while your fat cells die?
Some of the blood vessels to the fat tissue die, as a result the fat cells dump their load. Would be interesting to find out why. I think fat cell numbers would be almost conserved in the process, just like fat people have about the same number of fat cells as slender people.
I do think this may be one of the first non-mind altering drug to become a controlled substance if it gets approved because of the danger involved
If you're implying that substances which are controlled are dangerous, I think the question is 'dangerous to who?'.
Um I think 'function delegation' is really present in C++:
o in ters/
http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/memberp
However not as graceful as the D syntax.
We should admit the failure of the imperitive approach and go back to Common LISP.
Check out projectudi.org. I think its a little VM just for platform independent device drivers, that should also improve system stability when running a less than perfectly written driver. Goes some of the way you're heading. I at least wish the linux/bsd kernels were written in C++ (a sane subset thereof), or nowadays D.
Of course, microsoft wants to kill UDI since it implies leveling the playing field windoze is on - imagine universal compatibility with commodity devices...
'Right to innovate' my arse!
In fact only a year or so previous to the Hindenberg disaster, a similar event took place in California though fewer lives were lost. That blimp was full of helium and it still went up in a great ball of flames - because like the Hindenberg it was coated with cellulose acetate (I think to keep water off it). Not sure if it had the aluminium paint as well though.
So yeah, I think the gas used for bouyancy makes little difference to the hazard.
Now if we could produce some kinda field that stabilises positive muons by an order of, say, many trillions, we could have muonium lofted blimps that make do with 10% the volume. But. Alas...
Just put a stipulation in the contracts that they cannot be outsourced and you can have all the money going back to the US economy.
You forget that money spent overseas has a way of making it back to the US. Money spent in the US also has a way of going overseas. Even without globalisation, economies are far from closed.
Most critics of the plan want us to give the money to poor countries, who will then most likely end up spending it on weapons. And later they will just spit in our face.
You think money in the US doesn't get spent on weapons that end up getting spat back in your face? The US economy is very involved with military expenditure and arms production. Much of which gets sold to people who end up being enemies of the US. An obvious example is Saddam Hussein. Read some Noam Chomsky.
We are not the worlds welfare system!
Considering how the US and other rish countries treat the world's poor, a little more welfare could go a long way to reducing the tendency for people to attack US interests.
Untrue. You have the return code of the script which can indicate quite a number of conditions, or you can capture the standard output/error of the script if you don't need it for other things.
I've often thought it would be nice to have the option of allowing environment changes or some more structured information get back to the parent. XMLBash anyone?
Cute .sig, though I spell it differently.
Teehee you said 'anal'
I think, they are talking about greenhouse gases the concentration of which we can influence (directly).
How about nuclear reactors that can't melt down?h tm
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1997/ion.
Its old news, yet not old enough to be news it seems.
Neither do people with no freedom to - fascism is totalitarian after all. Great solution, yeah.
As companies are dropping support, but not property rights to our old favorites, many are in danger of vanishing forever.
Itellectual property law is on the one hand there to encourage creators by giving them protection, on the other hand to benefit society directly by codifying the passage of that work to the public domain.
Sitting on intellectual property indefinately is anathema to the intent of the law. It seems to me that if support and publication (availability) of a work is dropped, that should mean the owner of the rights is relinquishing them, after a short period that should be no longer than a few years - enough for a business cycle or two.
Of course, what with the crazy copyright laws today, I wouldn't expect this sort of sane position from today's corrupt and out of touch judiciary and legislature. But its something to campaign for...