I think while the parent post was a little excessive, the sentiment is sound. Novell is basically cozying up to the enemy at the expense of the open source community. SCO's move on GNU software faltered and failed in part because nobody took the bait.. well, I think a couple companies actually did buy indemnity from SCO but the majority reviewed what was being offered and threw the paper back in their face.
Novell is now separating itself a little from the rest of the community, at the expense of the community, by hopping into MSFT's lap for some perceived protection. It's a wedge in the ranks and introduces a new fear variable for anyone considering open source.
Typical myopic, facile response. 4.5 billion years ago you would have burned alive standing anywhere on this planet. And nevermind that the delicate global ecosystem we evolved in relied on fairly stable earth temperatures. We now have higher C02 levels than at any point before in recent history but you would prefer to turn a blind eye.
OpenLDAP (or Fedora Directory Server, if you will), is an excellent choice for things like back-ending OpenVPN installations. OpenVPN + customized OpenVPN-Win32-GUI + Fedora DS = no more commercial client VPN.
Questions for the slashdot crowd..
- How do you make multi-master replication useful for clients that only query one server? Like if you choose to use LDAP for linux authentication ("authconfig") how do you deal with having your primary server fail? I know the usual stuff like having a virtual IP, etc, but was wondering if someone had come up with any hacks to have the clients know to try a different LDAP repository.
- How do you approach UID conformity across a spread of organically grown servers? Take your typical startup, for instance, where people having been indiscriminately creating local users via "useradd" with little regard for varying UIDs. Are there any best practices for convergence when moving to LDAP outside of manually logging into a system, booting the user offline, changing the UID, then "find / " throughout the filesystem to chown the files?
I disagree. The reason I eschew iTunes and any other DRM site is because DRM protected media is just a royal PIA. If I could download standard MP3s (such that I could put them on a USB stick to take to parties) or DIVX files of my favorite shows (such that I could play them on my DIVX capable dvd player) I would be shoveling money at the industry. But instead I'm obliged to jump through the usual hoops of the/. crowd.
This move by MySpace is going to be significant in certain musical circles. There are hundreds if not thousands of electronica creators out there who have no good way of showing off their music. It takes an active community to lock on to and popularize a new group, something sites like mp3.com can't do. MySpace, however, will find the diamonds in the rough and hopefully upset the music industry while it's at it.
Greenpeace doesn't take corporate donations. So I'll think, for a second, that won't happen.
Where does Greenpeace get its funding from?
To maintain absolute independence Greenpeace does not accept money from companies, governments or political parties. We're serious about that, and we screen for and actually send checks back when they're drawn on a corporate account. We depend on the donations of our supporters to carry on our nonviolent campaigns to protect the environment.
One thing that has yet to be explained is why the engineers elected to suspend these massive concrete tiles from the cieling. Seriously, why did they need to be so thick and heavy? Or made of concrete for that matter? It just seems unnecessarily Damoclesian to have these slabs dangling from the roof of the tunnel.
In the meantime, all we can do as individuals is exactly what you said, try to conserve energy and try not to be part of the problem... however, do yourself a favour and travel just a little bit... even if it does cost a few barrels of oil... or wait for more energy efficient forms of travel.
I've been to a few spots in Europe, more in the US, Australia 3x, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Peru.. all when I was much younger and hadn't developed my current philosophy.
Your imagination may provide you with some satisfaction, but the real experience of visiting foregin countries is much, much better.:)
Most definitely. My point was that people who sacrifice great quantities of natural resources so that they can get worldly, or "rounded" or simply have a good time need to temper their pleasure with the knowledge that they're a big, big part of the problem. As a Westerner (I'm assuming you are) we consume something like 20x the resources or more than a third world villager. An actively traveling westerner probably pushes it up to 50x. I think travelled folk are on average more interesting and balanced people, but it's a luxury we have squandered and should generally deny ourselves.
You make a good point. Feeding a thousand starving kids while not doing anything to enhance their lives, the management of their land, etc, would be better intentioned than going into space but would not really help the planet to any great degree.
Cultural understanding however, while warm and fuzzy, doesn't do much to help the planet. I don't need to sympathize with the palestinians or the israelites to know that the whole ship is sinking.
Wrong, wrong, my good chum. Space tourism is a whole new industry that's completely separate from the tag-along flights that Mark Shuttleworth, et al, did. Have you heard of Virgin's space tourism program or have you been living in a cave for the last 3 years with your sunglasses on and your fingers in your ears? And the fuel wouldn't have "been burned anyway" as you so blithely put it. There's a very exact ratio of pounds of fuel needed to get 1lb into orbit.
As far as traveling abroad, yes, I'm a little disappointed that I can't bounce around the world to my heart's content. I can *afford* to but I can't in good conscience set fire to a few dozen barrels of fuel so that I can feel "travelled." I'll read a good book and let my imagination roam if need be.
I don't drive (or own a car), don't buy new clothes or other crap unless I need to. Hell, I even feel a bit guilty about my profession. Every time I rack a new machine for one of my clients for some generally worthless web site I think about the thousands of pounds of coal (or gas or whatever) that it took to create and ship this shitty little 1U and that it will cause to be burned in its lifetime.
Your comparison of human waste to animal exemplifies your misunderstanding of the situation. An environmental system can handle, and even needs, waste products to maintain balance. But when you have thousands of people in a certain area at the same time, year round, the system can no longer handle the excess and the result is -- pollution. Ditto for our rampant consumption of fossil fuels. A few forest fires here and there were easily absorbed by the global system but our current carbon output is way, way beyond the system's ability to maintain homeostasis.
I'm not saying we should all stay inside and refrain from any activity at all. But we do need to realize that our planet is at a crisis point right here. I'd love to go into space and be able to cup God's handiwork between my hands. But I have too much respect for what's here to indulge myself in such a trip.
I just ask that we try to be a little more thoughtful about our actions. The pursuit of happiness is important but it should not come at the expense of our home.
While I am all for man exploring the universe and getting off this lovely rock (we could use an off-site backup of our species), I find space tourism to be utterly repugnant. It's a gross example of environmental destruction in exchange for personal fulfillment. How many thousands of gallons of fuel will be ignited, leaving exhaust to circle the globe, so that some rich ponce can float about for a bit and subsequently be the toast of his next Manhattan cocktail party..
"Yes," he'll nod to his circle of gawkers, "when you're up there you come to appreciate what a marvelous planet we have, what an oasis of life in the sterile expanse of space." And everyone will murmur appreciatively, thinking themselves in the presence of a wiser man. Nevermind that this patrician ass has singularly done more to damage the world than 99.99% of the population.
I hold those who travel to the far corners of the world to a similar but lesser degree of contempt. "Oh, you climbed Kilimanjaro? How lovely! Good for you! That was only a few hundred gallons of fuel beween the flights, drives, campfires, etc. Plus as an added bonus you were able to dot the landscape with your feces! Now do give me a smug rundown of all your travels so I can be thoroughly impressed!"/rant
Yeah, exactly. Wasn't there a recently release about a 40GB flash module?
Obviously flash memory has issues with wearing out after thousands of RW operations but it seems like a more likely candidate for hard drive replacement (especially in laptops) in the near future than this magnetic memory.
I'm curious as to whether there are any reliable stats out there about the availability of IPv4 address space and how it has changed over time. The widespread adoption of hide-mode NAT has allowed companies, universities and the like to move thousands of computers out of the public address space, freeing up large blocks of public address goodness. Cripes when I think about what I got away with in university, hooking my desktop up to the local LAN, getting a public and........
Your attempt at tieing this article to some sort of anti-Western movement goes nicely with your otherwise misinformed position.
Suggesting that "antibodies" inherited from out mother is the same thing as developing our own immune response is well... just totally simplistic.
If I do get sick, at least I'll live. More people die in developing countries from things we can easily remedy than the other way around.
Hopelessly facile argument. The point of the article was that auto-immune disorders (which generally don't kill you outright) are a largely Western affliction because our immune systems have not been properly calibrated. Were you to get Crohn's disease (largely Western) you would live on, sure, but you'd have diarrhea for the rest of your life and some fun stomache pains. People with Crohn's disease have been successfully treated by deliberately giving them pig whipworm eggs.. once the immune system sees a *real* threat (real to the immune system, pig whipworms can't reproduce inside us) it eases up on inflaming the intestines. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that kids that grow up with pets, like a dog, have less of a chance of developing allergies then those that don't.
Please get a clue before you start posting drivel like the above. "anti-Western rhetoric" sheesh. paranoid?
I think one fundamental point to this debate that is consistently overlooked is the staging of your development. You simply can't bust your ass for 20 years, retire early, and then suddenly be a rounded, interesting, meaningful human. Becoming a worthwhile homo sapien is like growing a tree.. it's a life-long process that requires ongoing effort if the final result, the adult tree, is going to be an appreciable specimen.
If you sacrifice interest in music or learning a new language or falling in love to be able to retire by 50 then you're going to end up with a boring brain that's been neglected for 30 years and has no developed appreciation for the finer things in life. Quite simply, you'll suck. Yeah your money might let you buy bigger toys but you'll always have a quiet nagging knowledge that all all your flashy possessions are really just trinkets.
It's a sweeping generality, but our society is fixated on stop-gap measures that our aimed at making us feel okay with leading unbalanced and/or pointless lives. From prozac to the latest pulp spirituality (The Power of Now, for example) we're constantly seeking to glaze over a problem we refuse to define. It ain't easy being alive but if you blend in as much beauty as you can and indulge yourself in pursuits beyond what makes you some scratch you'll find the ride goes a lot easier.
I find more spooky though, trying to imagine the world I'll be failing to comprehend, when I make 86 (if I do)
There was an interesting article in Discover recently about the slowing pace of the implementation of new technologies and innovations. The basic premise is that as we come up with new widgets and consequently build enormous infrastructures around them (silicon chips, the internal combustion engine, for examples) it becomes harder and harder to introduce radically new technologies.
It's disheartening but true when you get down to it. Cell phones have been around for decades and, while incrementally more functional, still suffer the same problems they did way back when -- spotty coverage, poor battery life, and the like. Sure the BlackBerry is nice but it's really just a jumble of decade old technologies that they managed to squish into a slim box.
If you told someone in 1995 that more than a decade later we would still not have widespread voice recognition technology they would probably have dismissed you as a pessimist. But here we are, 2006, and voice recognition is still confined to automated systems that usually tell me "I'm sorry, I did not understand....".
Bring me a PDA that I can hold to my face and whisper "message wife I am running 10 mins late, record tonight's documentary on farting, and cancel next week's trip to Vegas." Will that be available in 2016? 2026? I'm sceptical.
And yes, there are lots of fun new technologies out there like EVDO but they're still just mincing improvements. Where's my blasted VR helmet already? And no, you don't get to hyperlink to some prototype page that promises to revolutionize human-computer interaction in just a couple years!
Actually I think that's the rub... people talking to one another across an aisle tend to be cognizant of their surroundings and moderate their voice accordingly. People on cell phones act like the other party won't hear them unless they put in an extra 10dB.
And the parent poster is not some lone malcontent.. Acela put specially designated "quiet cars" on every line due to people blabbing away.. and these quiet cars usually fill up early on in the route. You're telling me the following coming from the person sitting next to you on an airplane/trian/bus wouldn't be annoying?
"hey, bob, it's jim!.. JIM!.. i'm on a plane!.. I know, it's nuts!.. Yeah we just left a half hour ago.. we'll probably make it to Portland by 5.. but you never know with the airlines.. HAHA, EXACTLY!!.. so trisha says hi, she's all settled into her new job.. no, TRISHA!.. yeah.. yeah that's right... oh, no kidding!.. [clip 10 minutes] oh wait, bob, they're serving lunch, let me call you back in 15!"
Urbanhermes defines a communicative fashion framework that would ultimately consist
I have this idea of a robotic housemaid that can also tune my car and cure cancer. Can I get a post on slashdot?
It's pathetic how anything that MIT can conjecture automatically makes it news.
A teddy bear that's also a 100mbit switch? OMFG what innovation!
I know some of the older school media lab guys and even they are getting tired of the "news" they see in Tech Briefs etc. Please, give it a rest and treat the rest of us like we're not damned fanboys of anything MIT does. It's a good school that does some great science but it's not some flaming oracle.
I'm sure they do ban players that try to subvert the game but that would only be symptom treatment. The whole premise to the fantasy "World" is that your time investment results in a measurable achievement. You get the next sword, the bigger bag of gold, etc. This is especially true when you consider that many of these items are now considered to have real-world value. Can you imagine the uproar if it became evident that one guild that found a way to leap-frog ahead of everyone else? People's lives and sense of well being are tied to this world of make-believe. Any cracks in the framework of this false reality really would require immediate intervention. I'm not saying this is at all the case, but it is one possibility.
If database compaction and the like are the reason for these sudden outtages then Blizzard is being extremely careless. Build in a "night time" phase or some other fantasy explanation for the outtages.
I'm not a WoW player but if it's true that these systems regularly go dark for 8 hours at a time I have to wonder if they're not racing through some software patch. In other words, I don't know an architecture out there that can't be rebooted in 8 hours so a straight-up crash seems unlikely. I would assume they've taken care of scalability problems by now so system load / tablespace, etc, ought to not be an issue.
Could it be that WoW suffers constant attempts at subverting the framework of play... and some succeed, requiring a quick patch to the code base? I wouldn't doubt that they have monitoring mechanisms in play which detect unreasonable changes in a character's level / gold, etc.
Categorically condemning porn is like declaring anyone who consumes alcohol to be an alcoholic, regardless of quantity imbibed. Yes, some porn is worrisome, but what always strikes me as illogical about our western value system is how we celebrate violence but consider the viewing of people mating to be abnormal.
A Vietnam vet once said, "war is the most vulgar thing man can do to man." That word choice, "vulgar," always struck me. It's considered perfectly healthy and even Christian to go to the movies and bear witness to people slaughtering eachother in all sorts of inventive ways. We cheer when the good buy sends a round through the brains of the "bad" guy, delight in big-budget scenes of bombers blowing troops to shreds, etc, etc. Hell, collecting war movies is considered no more deviant than collecting video games.
But should you amuse yourself, at your discretion, by watching people get a little kinky then you're a social misfit. It's almost a pity that we did not descend a bit more from the bonobo monkey -- a completely peaceful ape whose days consist of eating fruit and mating. H.sapiens come closer to the rhesus -- tribal, quarrelsome, and unafraid to resort to violence.
At any rate, if you spend all your free time wanking in front of the computer, particularly if you have a sexual partner, you're a little sleazy and ought to get a life. But I rather doubt you'll be the downfall of civilization.
I'm going to be heretical here and suggest that encrypting Internet communication mitigates a very small risk of compromise -- as far interception. Authentication is a different story as far as trusted certificates, etc, but that was not in the scope of the parent post (e.g., who cares about the key fingerprint). Not that I would want my ETrade sessions to go in the clear, but, if they were to go in the clear, what would happen... traffic leaves my computer, goes straight into the backbone of my major ISP (where interception and analysis would require quite a lot of behind-the-scenes treachery), bounces around amongst other backbone routers (similar situation), and then plonks off into the ETrade server where, hopefully, they're fastidious about security.
Using a net cafe would be a totally different situation as I'm relying on some $7/hr admin to not sniff traffic and install keystroke loggers.. but I would never online bank from such a spot anyways.
Flame away, but I worry less about my VOIP traffic being encrypted than I do about the material on my USB keychain, my laptop, my system being encrypted. Most of you probably have $20 door locks protecting your home machines and files.
Fine the subject doesn't make complete sense.. BUT... doesn't compiling code with Intel's cc result in significantly better binaries than any flag you can throw at gcc?? From http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/ 219902.htm, MySQL claims 20 percent performance improvement over gcc.
I'm not saying we all have access to icc, but if someone wants to make a binary available, I'm more liable to use that than compiling from source. Call me crazy. And I know someone will.
It's not always an option to "not answer the phone"! And even if I can selectively ignore calls, I still have something on my tesk that goes BEEP and pulls me out of my buddha-like concentration. And if you can turn your phone off, well, gimme your job.
That's also great that you can not IM but in my company not using IM is akin to announcing that you'll be working from home from now on.
I hear you, but don't *fully* agree.. Certains works have proven timeless (Mozart) whereas much of what we create today gets swallowed whole in a generation or two. I doubt a little bit that my grandchildren will listen to The Dead but they will still know Mozart's name and practice his music.
I stand by my original point -- fewer and fewer people have the peace and quiet, and general isolation necessary to create something magnificent. All our children are now taught from day one how to multi-task like a hooker with a dozen sailors. We force them to become computer-like generalists who process info from multiple sources simultaneously. Back in the day it was plausible that you could start learning the piano at 12 and do little else for 20 years (not saying this is good for the individual). Nearly impossible now.
Slashdot Mirror
I think while the parent post was a little excessive, the sentiment is sound. Novell is basically cozying up to the enemy at the expense of the open source community. SCO's move on GNU software faltered and failed in part because nobody took the bait.. well, I think a couple companies actually did buy indemnity from SCO but the majority reviewed what was being offered and threw the paper back in their face.
Novell is now separating itself a little from the rest of the community, at the expense of the community, by hopping into MSFT's lap for some perceived protection. It's a wedge in the ranks and introduces a new fear variable for anyone considering open source.
So yeah, I sympathize with the parent post.
Typical myopic, facile response. 4.5 billion years ago you would have burned alive standing anywhere on this planet. And nevermind that the delicate global ecosystem we evolved in relied on fairly stable earth temperatures. We now have higher C02 levels than at any point before in recent history but you would prefer to turn a blind eye.
You, sir, do not deserve this planet.
OpenLDAP (or Fedora Directory Server, if you will), is an excellent choice for things like back-ending OpenVPN installations. OpenVPN + customized OpenVPN-Win32-GUI + Fedora DS = no more commercial client VPN.
Questions for the slashdot crowd..
- How do you make multi-master replication useful for clients that only query one server? Like if you choose to use LDAP for linux authentication ("authconfig") how do you deal with having your primary server fail? I know the usual stuff like having a virtual IP, etc, but was wondering if someone had come up with any hacks to have the clients know to try a different LDAP repository.
- How do you approach UID conformity across a spread of organically grown servers? Take your typical startup, for instance, where people having been indiscriminately creating local users via "useradd" with little regard for varying UIDs. Are there any best practices for convergence when moving to LDAP outside of manually logging into a system, booting the user offline, changing the UID, then "find / " throughout the filesystem to chown the files?
I disagree. The reason I eschew iTunes and any other DRM site is because DRM protected media is just a royal PIA. If I could download standard MP3s (such that I could put them on a USB stick to take to parties) or DIVX files of my favorite shows (such that I could play them on my DIVX capable dvd player) I would be shoveling money at the industry. But instead I'm obliged to jump through the usual hoops of the /. crowd.
This move by MySpace is going to be significant in certain musical circles. There are hundreds if not thousands of electronica creators out there who have no good way of showing off their music. It takes an active community to lock on to and popularize a new group, something sites like mp3.com can't do. MySpace, however, will find the diamonds in the rough and hopefully upset the music industry while it's at it.
Greenpeace doesn't take corporate donations. So I'll think, for a second, that won't happen.
Where does Greenpeace get its funding from? To maintain absolute independence Greenpeace does not accept money from companies, governments or political parties. We're serious about that, and we screen for and actually send checks back when they're drawn on a corporate account. We depend on the donations of our supporters to carry on our nonviolent campaigns to protect the environment.
One thing that has yet to be explained is why the engineers elected to suspend these massive concrete tiles from the cieling. Seriously, why did they need to be so thick and heavy? Or made of concrete for that matter? It just seems unnecessarily Damoclesian to have these slabs dangling from the roof of the tunnel.
In the meantime, all we can do as individuals is exactly what you said, try to conserve energy and try not to be part of the problem... however, do yourself a favour and travel just a little bit... even if it does cost a few barrels of oil... or wait for more energy efficient forms of travel.
:)
I've been to a few spots in Europe, more in the US, Australia 3x, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Peru.. all when I was much younger and hadn't developed my current philosophy.
Your imagination may provide you with some satisfaction, but the real experience of visiting foregin countries is much, much better.
Most definitely. My point was that people who sacrifice great quantities of natural resources so that they can get worldly, or "rounded" or simply have a good time need to temper their pleasure with the knowledge that they're a big, big part of the problem. As a Westerner (I'm assuming you are) we consume something like 20x the resources or more than a third world villager. An actively traveling westerner probably pushes it up to 50x. I think travelled folk are on average more interesting and balanced people, but it's a luxury we have squandered and should generally deny ourselves.
You make a good point. Feeding a thousand starving kids while not doing anything to enhance their lives, the management of their land, etc, would be better intentioned than going into space but would not really help the planet to any great degree.
Cultural understanding however, while warm and fuzzy, doesn't do much to help the planet. I don't need to sympathize with the palestinians or the israelites to know that the whole ship is sinking.
Wrong, wrong, my good chum.
Space tourism is a whole new industry that's completely separate from the tag-along flights that Mark Shuttleworth, et al, did. Have you heard of Virgin's space tourism program or have you been living in a cave for the last 3 years with your sunglasses on and your fingers in your ears?
And the fuel wouldn't have "been burned anyway" as you so blithely put it. There's a very exact ratio of pounds of fuel needed to get 1lb into orbit.
As far as traveling abroad, yes, I'm a little disappointed that I can't bounce around the world to my heart's content. I can *afford* to but I can't in good conscience set fire to a few dozen barrels of fuel so that I can feel "travelled." I'll read a good book and let my imagination roam if need be.
I don't drive (or own a car), don't buy new clothes or other crap unless I need to. Hell, I even feel a bit guilty about my profession. Every time I rack a new machine for one of my clients for some generally worthless web site I think about the thousands of pounds of coal (or gas or whatever) that it took to create and ship this shitty little 1U and that it will cause to be burned in its lifetime.
Your comparison of human waste to animal exemplifies your misunderstanding of the situation. An environmental system can handle, and even needs, waste products to maintain balance. But when you have thousands of people in a certain area at the same time, year round, the system can no longer handle the excess and the result is -- pollution. Ditto for our rampant consumption of fossil fuels. A few forest fires here and there were easily absorbed by the global system but our current carbon output is way, way beyond the system's ability to maintain homeostasis.
I'm not saying we should all stay inside and refrain from any activity at all. But we do need to realize that our planet is at a crisis point right here. I'd love to go into space and be able to cup God's handiwork between my hands. But I have too much respect for what's here to indulge myself in such a trip.
I just ask that we try to be a little more thoughtful about our actions. The pursuit of happiness is important but it should not come at the expense of our home.
While I am all for man exploring the universe and getting off this lovely rock (we could use an off-site backup of our species), I find space tourism to be utterly repugnant. It's a gross example of environmental destruction in exchange for personal fulfillment. How many thousands of gallons of fuel will be ignited, leaving exhaust to circle the globe, so that some rich ponce can float about for a bit and subsequently be the toast of his next Manhattan cocktail party..
/rant
"Yes," he'll nod to his circle of gawkers, "when you're up there you come to appreciate what a marvelous planet we have, what an oasis of life in the sterile expanse of space." And everyone will murmur appreciatively, thinking themselves in the presence of a wiser man. Nevermind that this patrician ass has singularly done more to damage the world than 99.99% of the population.
I hold those who travel to the far corners of the world to a similar but lesser degree of contempt. "Oh, you climbed Kilimanjaro? How lovely! Good for you! That was only a few hundred gallons of fuel beween the flights, drives, campfires, etc. Plus as an added bonus you were able to dot the landscape with your feces! Now do give me a smug rundown of all your travels so I can be thoroughly impressed!"
Yeah, exactly. Wasn't there a recently release about a 40GB flash module? Obviously flash memory has issues with wearing out after thousands of RW operations but it seems like a more likely candidate for hard drive replacement (especially in laptops) in the near future than this magnetic memory.
I'm curious as to whether there are any reliable stats out there about the availability of IPv4 address space and how it has changed over time. The widespread adoption of hide-mode NAT has allowed companies, universities and the like to move thousands of computers out of the public address space, freeing up large blocks of public address goodness. Cripes when I think about what I got away with in university, hooking my desktop up to the local LAN, getting a public and ........
Your attempt at tieing this article to some sort of anti-Western movement goes nicely with your otherwise misinformed position.
Suggesting that "antibodies" inherited from out mother is the same thing as developing our own immune response is well... just totally simplistic.
If I do get sick, at least I'll live. More people die in developing countries from things we can easily remedy than the other way around.
Hopelessly facile argument. The point of the article was that auto-immune disorders (which generally don't kill you outright) are a largely Western affliction because our immune systems have not been properly calibrated. Were you to get Crohn's disease (largely Western) you would live on, sure, but you'd have diarrhea for the rest of your life and some fun stomache pains. People with Crohn's disease have been successfully treated by deliberately giving them pig whipworm eggs.. once the immune system sees a *real* threat (real to the immune system, pig whipworms can't reproduce inside us) it eases up on inflaming the intestines.
Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that kids that grow up with pets, like a dog, have less of a chance of developing allergies then those that don't.
Please get a clue before you start posting drivel like the above. "anti-Western rhetoric" sheesh. paranoid?
I think one fundamental point to this debate that is consistently overlooked is the staging of your development. You simply can't bust your ass for 20 years, retire early, and then suddenly be a rounded, interesting, meaningful human. Becoming a worthwhile homo sapien is like growing a tree.. it's a life-long process that requires ongoing effort if the final result, the adult tree, is going to be an appreciable specimen.
If you sacrifice interest in music or learning a new language or falling in love to be able to retire by 50 then you're going to end up with a boring brain that's been neglected for 30 years and has no developed appreciation for the finer things in life. Quite simply, you'll suck. Yeah your money might let you buy bigger toys but you'll always have a quiet nagging knowledge that all all your flashy possessions are really just trinkets.
It's a sweeping generality, but our society is fixated on stop-gap measures that our aimed at making us feel okay with leading unbalanced and/or pointless lives. From prozac to the latest pulp spirituality (The Power of Now, for example) we're constantly seeking to glaze over a problem we refuse to define. It ain't easy being alive but if you blend in as much beauty as you can and indulge yourself in pursuits beyond what makes you some scratch you'll find the ride goes a lot easier.
I find more spooky though, trying to imagine the world I'll be failing to comprehend, when I make 86 (if I do)
There was an interesting article in Discover recently about the slowing pace of the implementation of new technologies and innovations. The basic premise is that as we come up with new widgets and consequently build enormous infrastructures around them (silicon chips, the internal combustion engine, for examples) it becomes harder and harder to introduce radically new technologies.
It's disheartening but true when you get down to it. Cell phones have been around for decades and, while incrementally more functional, still suffer the same problems they did way back when -- spotty coverage, poor battery life, and the like. Sure the BlackBerry is nice but it's really just a jumble of decade old technologies that they managed to squish into a slim box.
If you told someone in 1995 that more than a decade later we would still not have widespread voice recognition technology they would probably have dismissed you as a pessimist. But here we are, 2006, and voice recognition is still confined to automated systems that usually tell me "I'm sorry, I did not understand....".
Bring me a PDA that I can hold to my face and whisper "message wife I am running 10 mins late, record tonight's documentary on farting, and cancel next week's trip to Vegas." Will that be available in 2016? 2026? I'm sceptical.
And yes, there are lots of fun new technologies out there like EVDO but they're still just mincing improvements. Where's my blasted VR helmet already? And no, you don't get to hyperlink to some prototype page that promises to revolutionize human-computer interaction in just a couple years!
Actually I think that's the rub... people talking to one another across an aisle tend to be cognizant of their surroundings and moderate their voice accordingly. People on cell phones act like the other party won't hear them unless they put in an extra 10dB. And the parent poster is not some lone malcontent.. Acela put specially designated "quiet cars" on every line due to people blabbing away.. and these quiet cars usually fill up early on in the route. You're telling me the following coming from the person sitting next to you on an airplane/trian/bus wouldn't be annoying? "hey, bob, it's jim!.. JIM! .. i'm on a plane! .. I know, it's nuts! .. Yeah we just left a half hour ago .. we'll probably make it to Portland by 5 .. but you never know with the airlines .. HAHA, EXACTLY!! .. so trisha says hi, she's all settled into her new job .. no, TRISHA! .. yeah .. yeah that's right... oh, no kidding! .. [clip 10 minutes] oh wait, bob, they're serving lunch, let me call you back in 15!"
Urbanhermes defines a communicative fashion framework that would ultimately consist
I have this idea of a robotic housemaid that can also tune my car and cure cancer. Can I get a post on slashdot?
It's pathetic how anything that MIT can conjecture automatically makes it news.
A teddy bear that's also a 100mbit switch? OMFG what innovation!
I know some of the older school media lab guys and even they are getting tired of the "news" they see in Tech Briefs etc.
Please, give it a rest and treat the rest of us like we're not damned fanboys of anything MIT does. It's a good school that does some great science but it's not some flaming oracle.
I'm sure they do ban players that try to subvert the game but that would only be symptom treatment. The whole premise to the fantasy "World" is that your time investment results in a measurable achievement. You get the next sword, the bigger bag of gold, etc. This is especially true when you consider that many of these items are now considered to have real-world value. Can you imagine the uproar if it became evident that one guild that found a way to leap-frog ahead of everyone else? People's lives and sense of well being are tied to this world of make-believe. Any cracks in the framework of this false reality really would require immediate intervention. I'm not saying this is at all the case, but it is one possibility.
If database compaction and the like are the reason for these sudden outtages then Blizzard is being extremely careless. Build in a "night time" phase or some other fantasy explanation for the outtages.
I'm not a WoW player but if it's true that these systems regularly go dark for 8 hours at a time I have to wonder if they're not racing through some software patch. In other words, I don't know an architecture out there that can't be rebooted in 8 hours so a straight-up crash seems unlikely. I would assume they've taken care of scalability problems by now so system load / tablespace, etc, ought to not be an issue.
... and some succeed, requiring a quick patch to the code base? I wouldn't doubt that they have monitoring mechanisms in play which detect unreasonable changes in a character's level / gold, etc.
Could it be that WoW suffers constant attempts at subverting the framework of play
Categorically condemning porn is like declaring anyone who consumes alcohol to be an alcoholic, regardless of quantity imbibed. Yes, some porn is worrisome, but what always strikes me as illogical about our western value system is how we celebrate violence but consider the viewing of people mating to be abnormal.
A Vietnam vet once said, "war is the most vulgar thing man can do to man." That word choice, "vulgar," always struck me. It's considered perfectly healthy and even Christian to go to the movies and bear witness to people slaughtering eachother in all sorts of inventive ways. We cheer when the good buy sends a round through the brains of the "bad" guy, delight in big-budget scenes of bombers blowing troops to shreds, etc, etc. Hell, collecting war movies is considered no more deviant than collecting video games.
But should you amuse yourself, at your discretion, by watching people get a little kinky then you're a social misfit. It's almost a pity that we did not descend a bit more from the bonobo monkey -- a completely peaceful ape whose days consist of eating fruit and mating. H.sapiens come closer to the rhesus -- tribal, quarrelsome, and unafraid to resort to violence.
At any rate, if you spend all your free time wanking in front of the computer, particularly if you have a sexual partner, you're a little sleazy and ought to get a life. But I rather doubt you'll be the downfall of civilization.
I'm going to be heretical here and suggest that encrypting Internet communication mitigates a very small risk of compromise -- as far interception. Authentication is a different story as far as trusted certificates, etc, but that was not in the scope of the parent post (e.g., who cares about the key fingerprint). Not that I would want my ETrade sessions to go in the clear, but, if they were to go in the clear, what would happen... traffic leaves my computer, goes straight into the backbone of my major ISP (where interception and analysis would require quite a lot of behind-the-scenes treachery), bounces around amongst other backbone routers (similar situation), and then plonks off into the ETrade server where, hopefully, they're fastidious about security.
Using a net cafe would be a totally different situation as I'm relying on some $7/hr admin to not sniff traffic and install keystroke loggers.. but I would never online bank from such a spot anyways.
Flame away, but I worry less about my VOIP traffic being encrypted than I do about the material on my USB keychain, my laptop, my system being encrypted. Most of you probably have $20 door locks protecting your home machines and files.
Fine the subject doesn't make complete sense.. BUT... doesn't compiling code with Intel's cc result in significantly better binaries than any flag you can throw at gcc?? From http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/ 219902.htm, MySQL claims 20 percent performance improvement over gcc.
I'm not saying we all have access to icc, but if someone wants to make a binary available, I'm more liable to use that than compiling from source. Call me crazy. And I know someone will.
It's not always an option to "not answer the phone"! And even if I can selectively ignore calls, I still have something on my tesk that goes BEEP and pulls me out of my buddha-like concentration. And if you can turn your phone off, well, gimme your job. That's also great that you can not IM but in my company not using IM is akin to announcing that you'll be working from home from now on.
I hear you, but don't *fully* agree.. Certains works have proven timeless (Mozart) whereas much of what we create today gets swallowed whole in a generation or two. I doubt a little bit that my grandchildren will listen to The Dead but they will still know Mozart's name and practice his music. I stand by my original point -- fewer and fewer people have the peace and quiet, and general isolation necessary to create something magnificent. All our children are now taught from day one how to multi-task like a hooker with a dozen sailors. We force them to become computer-like generalists who process info from multiple sources simultaneously. Back in the day it was plausible that you could start learning the piano at 12 and do little else for 20 years (not saying this is good for the individual). Nearly impossible now.
True, but I don't think Ralph was getting SMS'd, faxed, emailed, called, IM'd, while off writing. :)