Really, this is liberal nonsense. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might want to steal IP and being nice to them is only going to eliminate a handful of them (eg. it might stop them stealing code just to spite you). Most obviously, someone might have found a new programming job somewhere else in the world that pays lots more money and having a convenient source of software they could steal from the old company will give them many advantages in the new place. If they act rationally and out of self-interest then no amount of being nice to this person at the old company is going to change the fact that it is advantageous for them to steal the code.
...and I've no idea what they plan to do with these lasers. I'm thinking that maybe they're small laser pointers and they're going to throw them at the planes in the hope that the noise they make will attract the attention of the pilot. Or maybe they'll render the words 'Wrong Way' using vector graphics on a convenient nearby cloud. Or maybe they'll stimulate the brain cells of the pilot and steer the plane by remote control. One possibility is shining the beam into the pilot's eyes to get his or her attention, but I'm embarassed to suggest that because it sounds a bit stupid.
There's a version of Firefox for USB drive that you can use under Windows. You launch it from the USB drive and it redirects all cache and temp files to the USB drive. So you can surf on any PC knowing that you're taking the evidence with you. I don't know the link but it's in Make magazine.
I've never made any particular comments about IE that would treat them differently from Opera of Firefox in this respect. If you're going to pick fights you need to pick them with people who actually disagree with you.
When every single major organisation and company in the business of implementing a standard fails I can't help wondering if the problem lies with the standard rather than the implementors. Just how hard is this?
...steal the money you need to afford this equipment. And the week after we'll be demonstrating a series of exercises you can use to relieve the pain from repeatedly craning your neck to view the far corners of your displays.
The information emerging from the CPU basicaly carries zero energy though it can carry away entropy and I'm guessing that this is what the original poster is talking about.
European and British tastes are quite different - which is why Benny Hill is rarely shown in the UK but still gets shown in Europe from time to time (or at least this was the case a few years ago).
I think American humor exports to Britain better than British humor exports to the US. What you say about Jerry Lewis may well be true but it's no surprise that H2G2 is being made for American tastes as that exports well to the rest of the world whereas the original didn't.
Spillproof keyboards are $20-$30 - you could pour Lysol over them without doing damage. And flexible silicone keyboards are the same - I don't know how washable they are but I'd guess 'very'.
I'm not saying this as flamebait, I'm saying it as an example of precisely what the studios would have been thinking as they tried to figure out what would bring them the largest possible return on their investment. British humor seems to be popular with geeks in the US, but it doesn't appeal to the population at large. And this isn't meant to be a value judgement about which type of humor is better. Americans do great slapstick and physical comedy and that isn't as well appreciated by the British. In fact, Britain has produced a few geniuses in the area of physical comedy who are appreciated everywhere in the world apart from in Britian (eg. Benny Hill).
Computing the forces required high-end equipment at the time, but should be very doable today
I wasn't doable on high end equipment then, it still isn't doable today. I spent 2 years working in computational chemistry and I've never seen such voodoo in my life. Yes - there are formulae for computing forces. But no, they don't bear much relation to reality Any simulation running anywhere near realtime is likely to be a purely classical simulation - balls and springs. This bears no relation to reality. Someone will run a simulation a few hundred times and after much tweaking of spring stiffnesses and so on they'll get results that vaguely approximate something measured in a lab. In the next simulation they'll need different parameters with no way of predicting what that change should be. Basically people in computational chemistry are doing post hoc fitting of models with close to zero predictive power. I've seen it happen over and over again and from time to time other people will also confess this is what they are doing. Occasionally someone will even run a quantum simulation - often a single electron model that is about as representative of a full quantum model as an elephant's dung is about its trunk.
Unfortunately, with the advent of fancy graphics workstations came the belief that these methods worked - after all, people could see pictures, on a computer at that. These new methods make things even worse, people will feel forces generated by a fictional simulation and be even more convinced that what they are experiencing really does reflect reality. If you care to check you'll find very few cases of a drug discovery, say, resulting from a theoretical prediction about receptor binding. And when you do, you'll find plenty of people questioning that interpretation. After all, drug discovery is largely about dumb luck, and every so often the next randomly suggested compound for testing comes from a computational chemistry lab, even if a bunch of fortune tellers using the I Ching to predict drug designs might score just as well.
Sometimes I worry if atmospheric sims used to predict global warming are just as bad - not not having worked in atmospheric science I've no evidence to back it up. The tricky thing is that anyone who works with sims is likely to have a vested interest in maintaining their use.
When I first arrived in the US I bought some stamps from a vending machine at the post office. It gave me change in the form of dollar coins. I couldn't spend them. People repeatedly told me that they'd never seen them before and couldn't accept them. When I found someone who would accept them they said "you shouldn't spend those, they're worth something". They came out of a vending machine. They're worth exactly what it says on them. I couldn't believe that I, a mere foreigner, seemed to know more about the local currency than the locals.
...or you just trying to score points among your friends by bragging about how cool you are for not having paid for a Microsoft product? And is that second of coolness really worth the hassle?
The Simpsons is an invaluable guide...
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...to American culture for immigrants. For example one of the first tasks you have to carry out is getting a driver license. This explained it all:
[On working at the DMV.]
Patty: Somedays we don't let the line move at all.
Selma: Yeah, we call those WEEKdays.
That's an interesting point. Most aspects of the digestive system are under autonomic control so now you point it out it's quite surprising that we can control our farts. We can control our breathing, but that's probably a side effect of (4). Maybe it's just a side effect of being able to control when we shit (i.e. what Gould whould have called a spandrel).
You say "Stop anthropromorphizing evolution" but that's just a demand. You don't actually give reasons beyond hinting that it's "wrong" and I don't buy the "we ourselves begin to believe that evolution really is a deliberate mechanism". I'm perfectly capable of using this metaphor without being confused by it just as I talk quite happily talk about my optimisation code "discovering" an optimal solution without being confused about my computer's status as a person. I find these metaphors very powerful (because used with care they allow you to reason correctly) and efficient (in terms of reducing how many words you have to use in order to talk about evolution).
We have no idea how accurate the information will end up being
Google doesn't just serve up information like an oracle. It tells you the source where it obtained the information. They can serve up data by throwing round yarrow stalks and looking up the resulting patterns in ancient Chinese manuscripts for all I care. If they give their sources then why do we need to know what their algorithms are in order to judge their veracity?
I used to think nanotech meant things like microscopic sized self-reproducing robots. One might imagine an army of these reducing the world to goo - but that's so far off in the future there really is no need for regulation.
But when I peruse web sites of companies claiming to sell nanotech what I actually find are companies selling small amounts of powder that has been ground up really small. For example a medical application of nanotech is really small bits of ground up magnet with antibodies attached giving a nice way to detect antigens through a magnetic field. Or another application comes from the fact that really small particles have a high surface area to volume ratio making good reagents and catalysts for chemical processes. So nanotech is really just finely ground stuff. (It sounds a lot less sexy when you actually say the truth free of jargon.) And that, IMHO, is far more dangerous than imaginary robots because it can get in your lungs and lodge in other parts of your body. But this doesn't necessarily need specific regulation, we can just use existing regulation for particulate pollution more finely grained (no pun intended) to limit how much nanoparticle sized stuff may be released into the air.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, this is liberal nonsense. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might want to steal IP and being nice to them is only going to eliminate a handful of them (eg. it might stop them stealing code just to spite you). Most obviously, someone might have found a new programming job somewhere else in the world that pays lots more money and having a convenient source of software they could steal from the old company will give them many advantages in the new place. If they act rationally and out of self-interest then no amount of being nice to this person at the old company is going to change the fact that it is advantageous for them to steal the code.
...and I've no idea what they plan to do with these lasers. I'm thinking that maybe they're small laser pointers and they're going to throw them at the planes in the hope that the noise they make will attract the attention of the pilot. Or maybe they'll render the words 'Wrong Way' using vector graphics on a convenient nearby cloud. Or maybe they'll stimulate the brain cells of the pilot and steer the plane by remote control. One possibility is shining the beam into the pilot's eyes to get his or her attention, but I'm embarassed to suggest that because it sounds a bit stupid.
There's a version of Firefox for USB drive that you can use under Windows. You launch it from the USB drive and it redirects all cache and temp files to the USB drive. So you can surf on any PC knowing that you're taking the evidence with you. I don't know the link but it's in Make magazine.
I've never made any particular comments about IE that would treat them differently from Opera of Firefox in this respect. If you're going to pick fights you need to pick them with people who actually disagree with you.
When every single major organisation and company in the business of implementing a standard fails I can't help wondering if the problem lies with the standard rather than the implementors. Just how hard is this?
I guess you won't enjoy this paper then.
...steal the money you need to afford this equipment. And the week after we'll be demonstrating a series of exercises you can use to relieve the pain from repeatedly craning your neck to view the far corners of your displays.
The information emerging from the CPU basicaly carries zero energy though it can carry away entropy and I'm guessing that this is what the original poster is talking about.
I think American humor exports to Britain better than British humor exports to the US. What you say about Jerry Lewis may well be true but it's no surprise that H2G2 is being made for American tastes as that exports well to the rest of the world whereas the original didn't.
Is Baywatch comedy?
Spillproof keyboards are $20-$30 - you could pour Lysol over them without doing damage. And flexible silicone keyboards are the same - I don't know how washable they are but I'd guess 'very'.
I'm not saying this as flamebait, I'm saying it as an example of precisely what the studios would have been thinking as they tried to figure out what would bring them the largest possible return on their investment. British humor seems to be popular with geeks in the US, but it doesn't appeal to the population at large. And this isn't meant to be a value judgement about which type of humor is better. Americans do great slapstick and physical comedy and that isn't as well appreciated by the British. In fact, Britain has produced a few geniuses in the area of physical comedy who are appreciated everywhere in the world apart from in Britian (eg. Benny Hill).
Unfortunately, with the advent of fancy graphics workstations came the belief that these methods worked - after all, people could see pictures, on a computer at that. These new methods make things even worse, people will feel forces generated by a fictional simulation and be even more convinced that what they are experiencing really does reflect reality. If you care to check you'll find very few cases of a drug discovery, say, resulting from a theoretical prediction about receptor binding. And when you do, you'll find plenty of people questioning that interpretation. After all, drug discovery is largely about dumb luck, and every so often the next randomly suggested compound for testing comes from a computational chemistry lab, even if a bunch of fortune tellers using the I Ching to predict drug designs might score just as well.
Sometimes I worry if atmospheric sims used to predict global warming are just as bad - not not having worked in atmospheric science I've no evidence to back it up. The tricky thing is that anyone who works with sims is likely to have a vested interest in maintaining their use.
I have to admit, as I mentioned earlier, I did have a little training before arriving.
When I first arrived in the US I bought some stamps from a vending machine at the post office. It gave me change in the form of dollar coins. I couldn't spend them. People repeatedly told me that they'd never seen them before and couldn't accept them. When I found someone who would accept them they said "you shouldn't spend those, they're worth something". They came out of a vending machine. They're worth exactly what it says on them. I couldn't believe that I, a mere foreigner, seemed to know more about the local currency than the locals.
...or you just trying to score points among your friends by bragging about how cool you are for not having paid for a Microsoft product? And is that second of coolness really worth the hassle?
That's an interesting point. Most aspects of the digestive system are under autonomic control so now you point it out it's quite surprising that we can control our farts. We can control our breathing, but that's probably a side effect of (4). Maybe it's just a side effect of being able to control when we shit (i.e. what Gould whould have called a spandrel).
You say "Stop anthropromorphizing evolution" but that's just a demand. You don't actually give reasons beyond hinting that it's "wrong" and I don't buy the "we ourselves begin to believe that evolution really is a deliberate mechanism". I'm perfectly capable of using this metaphor without being confused by it just as I talk quite happily talk about my optimisation code "discovering" an optimal solution without being confused about my computer's status as a person. I find these metaphors very powerful (because used with care they allow you to reason correctly) and efficient (in terms of reducing how many words you have to use in order to talk about evolution).
But when I peruse web sites of companies claiming to sell nanotech what I actually find are companies selling small amounts of powder that has been ground up really small. For example a medical application of nanotech is really small bits of ground up magnet with antibodies attached giving a nice way to detect antigens through a magnetic field. Or another application comes from the fact that really small particles have a high surface area to volume ratio making good reagents and catalysts for chemical processes. So nanotech is really just finely ground stuff. (It sounds a lot less sexy when you actually say the truth free of jargon.) And that, IMHO, is far more dangerous than imaginary robots because it can get in your lungs and lodge in other parts of your body. But this doesn't necessarily need specific regulation, we can just use existing regulation for particulate pollution more finely grained (no pun intended) to limit how much nanoparticle sized stuff may be released into the air.
Give me a PC and I'll confirm my code has a bug in it. Give me a cluster of several hundred and I'll figure out why there's a bug.
...the tester gets a skewed view because he uses equipment worth 3/4 million whereas real users have to use a crappy phone that costs a few hundred.
Is 'conceed' the past tense of 'concee'?