I hasten to point out that your historical analogy supports your contention poorly.
"Inflammable" is not the prom-queen-popular misspelling of "flammable". It is a legitimate word formed by "-able" suffix formation of "inflame". It has a legitimate and completely independent existence from "flammable", which is the corresponding "-able" suffix expansion of "flame".
If that had too many syllables, let me "tl;dr" for you: "inflammable" is a legitimate word. "Irregardless" is not. The fact that language "move on" simply demonstrates the power of a sufficient quantity of ignorance.
In the Slashdot tradition, I am going to comprehensively your assertion with my single unsupported anecdote. XD
Late December. A little dark-eyed_junco darts out of a leafless poplar tree across the street flies at full speed into our front window.
It was trying to get into our Christmas tree, a nice full (artificial, but very fluffy) tree with lots of potential cover, if only it weren't behind a plate of glass.
It lay there stunned until the thing it was fleeing caught up to it: a red-tailed hawk swooped down and snatched it out of the snow. Poor little birdie.
So, some birds ARE going for what's behind the glass.
Yeah, but "support" will be restricted to two major product line categories: "enterprise" hardware (i.e., "servers" and "workstations"); and "enthusiast" hardware.
Do you see another common factor in those two market segments? Let me give a hint: it's spelled with currency marks, not alphanumerics.
So, the beige-boxes sold to Mom, Pop, and the average kid going to school will be locked into Windows in ways that would make the ghost of Steve Jobs return from the Beyond seething with envy. Motherboards with "turn off the secure boot" capability will be the stuff of hackers, gamerz, and corporate big-hardware types. Period. At least, until some government decides it needs to regulate those devices and restrict them to properly licensed "tame" hackers and approved corporates. At which point, owning an unlicensed unlockable system will rank right up there with combat firearms and explosives.
BTW, this is the result of a single google search. I still trust it more than a wikipedia article, and I would trust that far more than I'd trust your unsupported anecdotal assertion.
Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.
DINGDINGDINGDING!
The marketing case for secure boot is that you'll never run those nasty, unapproved VIRUSES and TROJANS and OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWAREZ that those dirty communist unwashed anarchist hacker types are always trying to make you run. You just run those programs that our wonderful God-fearing right-thinking entirely trustworthy Microsoft-approved vendors are offering at a reasonable price.
That said, Steam would keep working, as long as they welcome our secure-booting overlords with sufficient enthusiasm. And toed the line. And never offered anything "offensive" to Microsoft's "sensibilities". (And by "offensive", I mean "competetive", and by "sensibilities", I mean "own software offerings.")
(Hint: If "open standards" is a buzzword in government to you, you're fucking doing it wrong -- it is EXACTLY what should be happening with our tax dollars.)
Protip: if a brainless parrot is saying "open standards", and you believe that actually means something, YOU are doing it wrong.
Minor, piddling detail: who decides which laws they want to follow?
Individuals do. Each consents to be ruled. If one individual refuses to obey a law they view as unjust, they may be punished. If a groundswell of individuals refuses to obey a law they view as unjust, the law changes or the rulership changes.
I believe the Apple response can be characterized thus:
Apple: "That doesn't count."
Court: "Why doesn't that count?"
Apple: "Because it makes us look bad."
This is where European and U.S. reality would diverge.
Euro Court: "Too bad. You lose. You get nothing! Good day Sir!"
U.S. Court: "Oooh, good point. Objection sustained. This 'prior art' is disregarded. Apple is awarded the patent and a lifetime supply of Everlasting Gobstoppers. Court is adjourned!"
I guess you meant "tanking", and for that I (the non-ninja huntard) thank you. A good tank makes being a hunter good. A bad tank makes a hunter bleed, and if the hunter is bleeding, something has gone horribly wrong.
Indeed. However, Europe lets Apple own "flat rectangle with rounded corners", so I am comforted that American stupidity has good company on the dexter side of the Atlantic pond.
Crap. The Peter Principle played out in international politics. This is a tragedy waiting for an excuse to happen. The Next Great War will probably be started by this.
You're right; any given irrational number may or may not be normal, which means the number's expansion in any given numerical base is predictably uniformly distributed (every digit in the decimal base occurs 1/10 of the time, for instance).
I'm presuming the nomality of pi in this little joke, but that's the keystone of the metaphor: you really do need an infinite number of truly random (i.e., evenly distributed) inputs to make the Shakespeare monkey thing to work.
As it stands, the normality of pi is unproven. Some mathematicians believe it's unprovable. Others are working on alternate approaches that may get there.
You can't say it's proof, but pi appears to be quite normal in decimal expansions of thousands, millions, or billions of digits. It would have to go terribly sideways after, say, the trillionth digit for it not to be apparently normal. It's just not provably normal that way.
This year's hungry little rodent becomes next century's dinosaur trying to stamp out next century's hungry little rodents. This Circle of Life is more interesting than anything Elton John ever wrote of.
1: We'll colonize and even explore space (because if we don't get off this rock, we're as good as dead).
Tens of millions of dead smokers proves that the rationale is not valid, but tens of millions of dead natives in colonized areas proves your basic prediction is sound, if only for other reasons.
2: We'll have something much closer to true virtual reality devices and use them willingly (a bit obvious I suppose)
I'd debate this more extensively, but my guild just issued its mass invite for our weekly Firelands raid, so I have to go.
3: Not everyone will go the cyborg route. In fact, only a few may, because of the 'ick' format that many people will detest. Star Trek agrees here (and no, Geordi La Forge doesn't count).
Frankly, most people want to "look normal". Hence, even the most innocuous "prosthetics"--eyeglasses--have a zero-cosmetic-impact alternative (contact lenses). No bet there.
4: At some point, we'll have sky cars. We'll need better batteries, and good AI for stability and non-crashability, but we'll get there (eventually, we'll even be able to drive them for fun (with the safety mechanisms kicking in if we make a wrong move).
There are other implications, too. Does privacy extend to the airspace above your house? Otherwise your neighbors could just hover over your house to watch your comings and goings. And yeah, if the technology becomes cheap enough and sufficiently different than conventional aviation (i.e., not needing specialty training and licensing), then it'll have some ugly public safety impacts. But when cars were new a century ago, they'd have been surprised and horrified at the quarter million casualties a year car accidents cause.
5: (Hot) fusion will become viable at some stage too (we could really do with the energy to feed our sky cars etc. with.)
It's happening now. Too bad we're not so good at collecting and distributing that energy, considering it already travels 99.99993% of the way here by itself.
6: And the big one; fewer and fewer people will have traditional jobs, letting the robots/computers do the admin / manual work for them. Instead, we'll be exploring, learning, creating, having fun, or socializing (eventually mankind will realize that higher unemployment is a good thing, and not a bad)
Alas, having the machines do all the work liberates the working man to abject poverty and crime or starvation. Economies function on scarcity, and if you don't have natural scarcity, you invent artificial scarcity. The wealth of the "haves" tends to increase towards 100% of total value of the economy, and the wealth of the "have-nots" decreases towards 0. The costs of production are already a non-factor in a lot of the economy, but that hasn't made the important things zero-cost for the consumer.
7: There will be a universal currency, universal language, and universal OS (don't worry, not necessarily Windows, MacOS, or Linux) at some point which most (>99%) can and will use. It'll take a while, and will probably happen after most people stop working, but at some point, we will all agree to get along (traveling to outer space, and to the stars may add some confusion to this point however).
In many ways, we're almost already there. What percentage of the world's nations and economies has a working understanding of English and access to some basically-interoperable computer networking system? If you believe in the curse of the Tower of Babel, you might be inclined to argue that humanity is overcoming the confounding of languages and is again a viable candidate to ascend to the heavens.
Naah. He's commenting that with an appropriate mapping between digits and characters, you can find a stretch of digits of pi which maps perfectly to the works of Shakespeare. Since the digits of pi are infinite and non-repeating, it's just an alternate expression of the "infinite monkeys" premise.
Slashdot Mirror
I hasten to point out that your historical analogy supports your contention poorly.
"Inflammable" is not the prom-queen-popular misspelling of "flammable". It is a legitimate word formed by "-able" suffix formation of "inflame". It has a legitimate and completely independent existence from "flammable", which is the corresponding "-able" suffix expansion of "flame".
If that had too many syllables, let me "tl;dr" for you: "inflammable" is a legitimate word. "Irregardless" is not. The fact that language "move on" simply demonstrates the power of a sufficient quantity of ignorance.
I am going to comprehensively your assertion
The red-tail hawk also swooped down and snatched up the word missing in the first line. Poor little wordie.
"comprehensively demolish." I wanted to put that in so the sentence has some ultimate hope of making sense.
In the Slashdot tradition, I am going to comprehensively your assertion with my single unsupported anecdote. XD
Late December. A little dark-eyed_junco darts out of a leafless poplar tree across the street flies at full speed into our front window.
It was trying to get into our Christmas tree, a nice full (artificial, but very fluffy) tree with lots of potential cover, if only it weren't behind a plate of glass.
It lay there stunned until the thing it was fleeing caught up to it: a red-tailed hawk swooped down and snatched it out of the snow. Poor little birdie.
So, some birds ARE going for what's behind the glass.
Yeah, but "support" will be restricted to two major product line categories: "enterprise" hardware (i.e., "servers" and "workstations"); and "enthusiast" hardware.
Do you see another common factor in those two market segments? Let me give a hint: it's spelled with currency marks, not alphanumerics.
So, the beige-boxes sold to Mom, Pop, and the average kid going to school will be locked into Windows in ways that would make the ghost of Steve Jobs return from the Beyond seething with envy. Motherboards with "turn off the secure boot" capability will be the stuff of hackers, gamerz, and corporate big-hardware types. Period. At least, until some government decides it needs to regulate those devices and restrict them to properly licensed "tame" hackers and approved corporates. At which point, owning an unlicensed unlockable system will rank right up there with combat firearms and explosives.
Unless by "countered" you mean "feebly opposed by inferior number and singular anecdotes", I think you're mistaken.
Random purported fact off teh Intarwebs: 7% of all iPhones are jailbroken. The rest are still in their bright plastic chains.
BTW, this is the result of a single google search. I still trust it more than a wikipedia article, and I would trust that far more than I'd trust your unsupported anecdotal assertion.
I'm just sayin'.
Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.
DINGDINGDINGDING!
The marketing case for secure boot is that you'll never run those nasty, unapproved VIRUSES and TROJANS and OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWAREZ that those dirty communist unwashed anarchist hacker types are always trying to make you run. You just run those programs that our wonderful God-fearing right-thinking entirely trustworthy Microsoft-approved vendors are offering at a reasonable price.
That said, Steam would keep working, as long as they welcome our secure-booting overlords with sufficient enthusiasm. And toed the line. And never offered anything "offensive" to Microsoft's "sensibilities". (And by "offensive", I mean "competetive", and by "sensibilities", I mean "own software offerings.")
Welcome, my son... welcome to the machine.
Well, the odds this "technology demonstration" will work out is only 1 in ten million less than the odds of hitting the Powerball.
(Hint: If "open standards" is a buzzword in government to you, you're fucking doing it wrong -- it is EXACTLY what should be happening with our tax dollars.)
Protip: if a brainless parrot is saying "open standards", and you believe that actually means something, YOU are doing it wrong.
Acta, non verba.
Minor, piddling detail: who decides which laws they want to follow?
Individuals do. Each consents to be ruled. If one individual refuses to obey a law they view as unjust, they may be punished. If a groundswell of individuals refuses to obey a law they view as unjust, the law changes or the rulership changes.
I believe the Apple response can be characterized thus:
Apple: "That doesn't count."
Court: "Why doesn't that count?"
Apple: "Because it makes us look bad."
This is where European and U.S. reality would diverge.
Euro Court: "Too bad. You lose. You get nothing! Good day Sir!"
U.S. Court: "Oooh, good point. Objection sustained. This 'prior art' is disregarded. Apple is awarded the patent and a lifetime supply of Everlasting Gobstoppers. Court is adjourned!"
It's not April.... not even in the Southern Hemisphere. So it's completely out of season.
So, no, it doesn't appear to be an intentional joke.
I got my taking cap on,
"Taking" cap? TAKING?
You're a ninja huntard, aren't you?
(I keed, I keeed. A little.)
I guess you meant "tanking", and for that I (the non-ninja huntard) thank you. A good tank makes being a hunter good. A bad tank makes a hunter bleed, and if the hunter is bleeding, something has gone horribly wrong.
Indeed. However, Europe lets Apple own "flat rectangle with rounded corners", so I am comforted that American stupidity has good company on the dexter side of the Atlantic pond.
Crap. The Peter Principle played out in international politics. This is a tragedy waiting for an excuse to happen. The Next Great War will probably be started by this.
or it didn't happen.
Why is it that people keep lumping science fiction with fantasy?
-- Arthur C. Clarke
I don't think he does, he says stupid things fairly often. His mouth is like a font, with stupidity gushing forth.
And, given Microsoft's history, the font is almost certainly Comic Sans.
So, Ballmer speaks with authority from ignorance?
Who knew?
Apparently, Scott Adams concurs.
You're right; any given irrational number may or may not be normal, which means the number's expansion in any given numerical base is predictably uniformly distributed (every digit in the decimal base occurs 1/10 of the time, for instance).
I'm presuming the nomality of pi in this little joke, but that's the keystone of the metaphor: you really do need an infinite number of truly random (i.e., evenly distributed) inputs to make the Shakespeare monkey thing to work.
As it stands, the normality of pi is unproven. Some mathematicians believe it's unprovable. Others are working on alternate approaches that may get there.
You can't say it's proof, but pi appears to be quite normal in decimal expansions of thousands, millions, or billions of digits. It would have to go terribly sideways after, say, the trillionth digit for it not to be apparently normal. It's just not provably normal that way.
This year's hungry little rodent becomes next century's dinosaur trying to stamp out next century's hungry little rodents. This Circle of Life is more interesting than anything Elton John ever wrote of.
Penguin can rage at the dying of the light....but that will only make it run out of breath sooner.
I prefer the poetic image of star systems slipping through Penguin's fingers the more they tighten their grip, but I don't know why.
1: We'll colonize and even explore space (because if we don't get off this rock, we're as good as dead).
Tens of millions of dead smokers proves that the rationale is not valid, but tens of millions of dead natives in colonized areas proves your basic prediction is sound, if only for other reasons.
2: We'll have something much closer to true virtual reality devices and use them willingly (a bit obvious I suppose)
I'd debate this more extensively, but my guild just issued its mass invite for our weekly Firelands raid, so I have to go.
3: Not everyone will go the cyborg route. In fact, only a few may, because of the 'ick' format that many people will detest. Star Trek agrees here (and no, Geordi La Forge doesn't count).
Frankly, most people want to "look normal". Hence, even the most innocuous "prosthetics"--eyeglasses--have a zero-cosmetic-impact alternative (contact lenses). No bet there.
4: At some point, we'll have sky cars. We'll need better batteries, and good AI for stability and non-crashability, but we'll get there (eventually, we'll even be able to drive them for fun (with the safety mechanisms kicking in if we make a wrong move).
There are other implications, too. Does privacy extend to the airspace above your house? Otherwise your neighbors could just hover over your house to watch your comings and goings. And yeah, if the technology becomes cheap enough and sufficiently different than conventional aviation (i.e., not needing specialty training and licensing), then it'll have some ugly public safety impacts. But when cars were new a century ago, they'd have been surprised and horrified at the quarter million casualties a year car accidents cause.
5: (Hot) fusion will become viable at some stage too (we could really do with the energy to feed our sky cars etc. with.)
It's happening now. Too bad we're not so good at collecting and distributing that energy, considering it already travels 99.99993% of the way here by itself.
6: And the big one; fewer and fewer people will have traditional jobs, letting the robots/computers do the admin / manual work for them. Instead, we'll be exploring, learning, creating, having fun, or socializing (eventually mankind will realize that higher unemployment is a good thing, and not a bad)
Alas, having the machines do all the work liberates the working man to abject poverty and crime or starvation. Economies function on scarcity, and if you don't have natural scarcity, you invent artificial scarcity. The wealth of the "haves" tends to increase towards 100% of total value of the economy, and the wealth of the "have-nots" decreases towards 0. The costs of production are already a non-factor in a lot of the economy, but that hasn't made the important things zero-cost for the consumer.
7: There will be a universal currency, universal language, and universal OS (don't worry, not necessarily Windows, MacOS, or Linux) at some point which most (>99%) can and will use. It'll take a while, and will probably happen after most people stop working, but at some point, we will all agree to get along (traveling to outer space, and to the stars may add some confusion to this point however).
In many ways, we're almost already there. What percentage of the world's nations and economies has a working understanding of English and access to some basically-interoperable computer networking system? If you believe in the curse of the Tower of Babel, you might be inclined to argue that humanity is overcoming the confounding of languages and is again a viable candidate to ascend to the heavens.
Naah. He's commenting that with an appropriate mapping between digits and characters, you can find a stretch of digits of pi which maps perfectly to the works of Shakespeare. Since the digits of pi are infinite and non-repeating, it's just an alternate expression of the "infinite monkeys" premise.
if you use the platters to cook your shredded potatoes for breakfast while computing and storing cryptographic trapdoor values, you'll discover...
<sunglasses>
your hashes are already salted.
YEEEEAAAAAAAHHH