Janet Horne, last witch to be burned in Scotland died in 1727.
Last witch execution in Europe was Anna Goeldi, hanged at Glaris in Switzerland on June 17, 1782
I believe one of the early English astronomical refractor telescopes (one of William Herschel's iirc, possibly the 20-foot one) had a lens made of two hemispherical pieces of glass filled with white wine.
...where you have to lure undead farmers to the mill, kill them,put them in the mill and turn them into ground meat, which you then hide in a barrel. In a subsequent quest in the same sequence, you are given a barrel of "URT Certified Meat" to feed to a bunch of redcaps. The meat turns out to be rather off, and you have to go destroy the witnesses to protect the reputation of URT...
Propulsion systems will likely be driven by some sort of nuclear energy
Every once in a while I drift back to Doc Smith on the bookshelf. Although his space suits were made of Bakelite, some of his thoughts were rather far-seeing (thinking for example of the replicated logic units of his Skylark electronic brain) considering he wrote in the 30's, where Einstein's mass-energy equation hadn't yet been popularised. Pre-atomic era. He thought that with enough energy you could turn energy directly into matter and use that for reaction mass. Sturgeon's Law holds with his ideas, for sure, but still it really makes me wonder...
Jack Thompson? I have utterly no clue who you are talking about. Is this some type of cultural isomorphism local to the US or to commercial television content? I am not current with either, I'm afraid.
But from the context of this thread, please don't enlighten me.
The plot of Forbidden Planet -- possibly the best SF movie to ever come out of the 50's -- had in the Planet of the Krell (first major Rotoscope production too iirc) the concept that the original inhabitants had destroyed themselves after they'd learned to control their planet's engines by their minds alone. "Monsters from the Id" complained Dr. Morbius; their innermost desires controlled the engines of destruction, bypassing the conscious censors.
Another point of view is the decadent society of Moorcock's "Dancers at the End of Time" where mind control of engines of construction and destruction led to a global ennui where all forward motion of society had ceased.
The very best of these in terms of simple imagery is I believe Alan Dean Foster's short story "With Friends Like These..." which still sends shivers down my back, and is possibly the only modern-era short story to match the best of the Golden Era SF for star quality.
So what will it all lead to, sports? Will we build something amazing, huge and new with these mind-driven machines, or will we simply amuse ourselves to death?
Also you can buy a second battery for your car (excluding Prius of course) and swap at home after your daily commute, run your house lights off 12V. Save a few kilowatts off the mains.
Good point. Mystical babbling is generally limited in sphere to the true believers, with whom one can either willingly participate or easily ignore; it's a good measure of someone's rationality to simply ask them about astrology (~Heinlein quote) for example.
Far more pernicious to the advancement of human knowledge is the premature press release. If you don't have your ducks well and truly in a row, and qualify your statements, any small step forward will be smacked down. If the idea is good, it's better to have it down solid before you say anything than to get it out first. First post fever in the Mists of Academia is attention-seeking behaviour, second effort is corroboration and counts as science.
Incidentally, a very good piece of mystical babbling from the Elizabethan era is Bacon's "Novum Organum", which I read because it looked precisely like that. Turned out to be a treatise on the scientific method, extolling experment under clean conditions, moving from theory to empirical experiment and requiring independent corroboration. Fancy that! Metaphysics turns into physics over time, if you have the patience and character strength to filter the grain of gold from the tons of dross out there.
CP/V? Hmmm.... Xerox Data Systems (ex Scientific Data Systems)? Sigma 5/7/9? Max Palevsky, first priority interrupts, head-per-track RAD virtual memory? Aviation Blvd in El Segundo?
Never heard of it, and it's a damn lie that I worked in the mail room for a few years.
Although It's amazing what you can pick up when you read other people's work-delivered magazines though, or have total access to all areas including watching large computers built from the ground up. Can give a punk kid big ideas, that.
In the absence of knowledge, you have to try things. One of the advantages of pursuing this through academic channels is that things are followed up, or have a better chance of it.
It is not difficult to justify parallel programming.
True, very true. As long as you have as many threads & processes as you do processors & a half-decent interrupt return on IO complete (listening, REI?) you'll use those cores. The techniques for ASMP, spinlocks etc. were all well refined 10 years ago. But if you're thinking of decomposing some very large data crunch (i.e. parallelising a large monolithic problem such as weather vectors) then yes, you do have to think a bit and use the specialised parallel languages such as Occam, Parallel Fortran and whatever else is out there by now.
A long, long time ago I joked I wanted a Cray-I on a chip. That was a very, very long time ago, and it's amazing how far my vision fell short of the reality. Geez today's machines are hot.
Oooo you've got a VT100 do ye? I ha'e a Heathkit clone of a ADM 3A VT52 clone I built and loooved it!! Built it myself and it only took a little while to get used to typing with the keyboard on the top (fools built the CRT upside down). AND I had to use real solder too, none of this poncy ROHS compliant stuff.
Scatter a million infected USB thumb drives across the landscape. There's bound to be someone who will pick one up, plug it in and click "readme.exe". You only need that fool in a million to do it.
People weren't all that good at connecting the dots in the 50's, mostly due to lack of good information -- for example, both of my parents smoked those Lucky Strikes because of the dancing cigarette packets on TV, and loved those fatty fried foods because they tasted good. Which eventually killed them both, but they had no clue what they were doing to their hearts. Remember this was pre-information age (barely into TV age). Earthquakes were not something you planned for, each one was pretty much a goldfish moment, nobody amongst us rabble talked about seismic trends. And during the post-WWII baby boom the drive to wrap houses around those new freeways was steered by economics -- how cheap could you build a thousand houses in Torrance? Bricks were basically dirt and labour (energy being seen as practically free) and were a cheaper alternative until the materials/labor equation tipped very early on in the boom. Drive from (say) Olivera street outward and you will still see brick buildings transitioning to frame construction as you approach the suburbs. Or at least was, I haven't been there in over 20 years.
Oh and I'm not anti-union per se, just anti-stupid. And stupidity is what you get only after the ignorance is gone.
A long time ago my father (a construction worker) told me why you didn't see many houses made out of brick in California. Seems the bricklayer's union became way, way too successful and powerful, demanding more and more pay up to the point where people couldn't afford brick construction any more and moved to frame and plasterboard houses with tar shingle roofs (this was back in the early 50's). Basically they priced themselves out of the market, but they couldn't roll back their demands due to the nature of the organisation, and their leaders chose economic death over political death as an organisation because people are funny that way.
As Hawkeye once said, the operation was a success but the patient died.
Funny thing though, the frame houses seemed to flex a bit but the brick houses tended to rubble during earthquakes, lovely Aesopian message there.
Off-topic? No, just a very extended metaphor. The RIAA will eventually have absolute control over a commodity that absolutely nobody will buy. And when they start annoying Congressmen more than their lobbyists are worth by stepping outside the bounds of their anointed playing field, they're going to get slapped down hard. Nobody has a right to make money, the market has to be there, and RIAA is killing the goose.
No, I invite you to look a little further at Google's commercial offerings, as they are to me the single greatest threat to the Microsoft hegemony since the introduction of Groklaw. See http://www.google.com/a/enterprise/. They offer a package at $50/user/year that allows you to control the sharable access to hosted documents with Google Apps in such a way that (a) you can control user logins (act as sysadmin) to that security domain, and (b) you can control access to these documents from the world at large. Effectively the same amount of file security (or perhaps better) than your average Windows server domain. Your users wouldn't need to know how to pronounce "LDAP". This is where you get your own hosted domain name, hosted on Google servers. And controlled logins. And a "good enough" business (dare I say "Office"?) suite of software. And your documents are your own business, and the collaboration (if not the overall UI) is done really well. The first real LAN-less office, and it's really hard to argue for a Microsoft-based solution in the face of it. If you ever wondered why Google was buying up all that data centre footprint around the world, this is it, ringside seat to the battle of the titans. Form Blazing Sword!!
Thing is, for commercial accounts Google lets you use your own domain name, e.g. Fred@FredEnterprises.com, not limited to Fred@FredEnterprises.gmail.com. That's got to be more of an attractor than keeping the domain name of an ISP you're familiar with.
Yes there's a strong reason to keep your old email account, but for a small business it would be far more compelling to have your own registered domain I would think. Of course you could talk another ISP into hosting your own choice of a registered MX / SOA, but Google makes this sooo easy for mom & pop...
Not a Google shill, not affiliated, no I haven't done it myself. The costs are way better than hosting it yourself. Figure 10-user company at $550/year perhaps? As opposed to the cost of a server, software licenses & sysadmin, etc. There's a point where it's no longer economical, but up to that point you're in good shape. Provided you can put up with Writely etc, of course, but for email I can't think of a compelling counter-argument.
For those of you with a taste for alternative alternatives, a word from an old Louisiana girl I knew some years ago on how to make the right pot of coffee:
You take a pound of coffee, a gallon of water then boil it 'till a horseshoe floats.
It's in the roast -- the method of roasting -- as much as the variety. Freshness counts, variety counts, but it's the roast that matters the most. I've experienced Jamaca Blue Mountain both in a mild roast and in a dark roast, and they could be two entirely different coffees. The mild roast made me want to compose a sonata, and the dark roast made me want to go scrape barnacles off an oil rig. I ended up doing neither, because I couldn't afford the next cup.
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Janet Horne, last witch to be burned in Scotland died in 1727. Last witch execution in Europe was Anna Goeldi, hanged at Glaris in Switzerland on June 17, 1782
I think he made his loot mostly by buying up a lot of Motown content.
I believe one of the early English astronomical refractor telescopes (one of William Herschel's iirc, possibly the 20-foot one) had a lens made of two hemispherical pieces of glass filled with white wine.
...where you have to lure undead farmers to the mill, kill them,put them in the mill and turn them into ground meat, which you then hide in a barrel. In a subsequent quest in the same sequence, you are given a barrel of "URT Certified Meat" to feed to a bunch of redcaps. The meat turns out to be rather off, and you have to go destroy the witnesses to protect the reputation of URT...
Every once in a while I drift back to Doc Smith on the bookshelf. Although his space suits were made of Bakelite, some of his thoughts were rather far-seeing (thinking for example of the replicated logic units of his Skylark electronic brain) considering he wrote in the 30's, where Einstein's mass-energy equation hadn't yet been popularised. Pre-atomic era. He thought that with enough energy you could turn energy directly into matter and use that for reaction mass. Sturgeon's Law holds with his ideas, for sure, but still it really makes me wonder...
But from the context of this thread, please don't enlighten me.
Another point of view is the decadent society of Moorcock's "Dancers at the End of Time" where mind control of engines of construction and destruction led to a global ennui where all forward motion of society had ceased.
The very best of these in terms of simple imagery is I believe Alan Dean Foster's short story "With Friends Like These..." which still sends shivers down my back, and is possibly the only modern-era short story to match the best of the Golden Era SF for star quality.
So what will it all lead to, sports? Will we build something amazing, huge and new with these mind-driven machines, or will we simply amuse ourselves to death?
Also you can buy a second battery for your car (excluding Prius of course) and swap at home after your daily commute, run your house lights off 12V. Save a few kilowatts off the mains.
Rehabilitation is a luxury. I just want the damned thug off my wires.
Far more pernicious to the advancement of human knowledge is the premature press release. If you don't have your ducks well and truly in a row, and qualify your statements, any small step forward will be smacked down. If the idea is good, it's better to have it down solid before you say anything than to get it out first. First post fever in the Mists of Academia is attention-seeking behaviour, second effort is corroboration and counts as science.
Incidentally, a very good piece of mystical babbling from the Elizabethan era is Bacon's "Novum Organum", which I read because it looked precisely like that. Turned out to be a treatise on the scientific method, extolling experment under clean conditions, moving from theory to empirical experiment and requiring independent corroboration. Fancy that! Metaphysics turns into physics over time, if you have the patience and character strength to filter the grain of gold from the tons of dross out there.
Never heard of it, and it's a damn lie that I worked in the mail room for a few years.
Although It's amazing what you can pick up when you read other people's work-delivered magazines though, or have total access to all areas including watching large computers built from the ground up. Can give a punk kid big ideas, that.
In the absence of knowledge, you have to try things. One of the advantages of pursuing this through academic channels is that things are followed up, or have a better chance of it.
Also by Edgar Cayce if I remember correctly -- he also mentioned the use of specific frequencies of light.
I would suggest a little script that replaces their simple system startup .WAV file with twenty minutes of drag racing.
True, very true. As long as you have as many threads & processes as you do processors & a half-decent interrupt return on IO complete (listening, REI?) you'll use those cores. The techniques for ASMP, spinlocks etc. were all well refined 10 years ago. But if you're thinking of decomposing some very large data crunch (i.e. parallelising a large monolithic problem such as weather vectors) then yes, you do have to think a bit and use the specialised parallel languages such as Occam, Parallel Fortran and whatever else is out there by now.
A long, long time ago I joked I wanted a Cray-I on a chip. That was a very, very long time ago, and it's amazing how far my vision fell short of the reality. Geez today's machines are hot.
Oooo you've got a VT100 do ye? I ha'e a Heathkit clone of a ADM 3A VT52 clone I built and loooved it!! Built it myself and it only took a little while to get used to typing with the keyboard on the top (fools built the CRT upside down). AND I had to use real solder too, none of this poncy ROHS compliant stuff.
Scatter a million infected USB thumb drives across the landscape. There's bound to be someone who will pick one up, plug it in and click "readme.exe". You only need that fool in a million to do it.
Man, I just found out my KEYBOARD is made out of ATOMS!! OMFG I'm going to die from keyboard radiation because it has ATOMS in it!
Oh and I'm not anti-union per se, just anti-stupid. And stupidity is what you get only after the ignorance is gone.
A long time ago my father (a construction worker) told me why you didn't see many houses made out of brick in California. Seems the bricklayer's union became way, way too successful and powerful, demanding more and more pay up to the point where people couldn't afford brick construction any more and moved to frame and plasterboard houses with tar shingle roofs (this was back in the early 50's). Basically they priced themselves out of the market, but they couldn't roll back their demands due to the nature of the organisation, and their leaders chose economic death over political death as an organisation because people are funny that way.
As Hawkeye once said, the operation was a success but the patient died.
Funny thing though, the frame houses seemed to flex a bit but the brick houses tended to rubble during earthquakes, lovely Aesopian message there.
Off-topic? No, just a very extended metaphor. The RIAA will eventually have absolute control over a commodity that absolutely nobody will buy. And when they start annoying Congressmen more than their lobbyists are worth by stepping outside the bounds of their anointed playing field, they're going to get slapped down hard. Nobody has a right to make money, the market has to be there, and RIAA is killing the goose.
No, I invite you to look a little further at Google's commercial offerings, as they are to me the single greatest threat to the Microsoft hegemony since the introduction of Groklaw. See http://www.google.com/a/enterprise/. They offer a package at $50/user/year that allows you to control the sharable access to hosted documents with Google Apps in such a way that (a) you can control user logins (act as sysadmin) to that security domain, and (b) you can control access to these documents from the world at large. Effectively the same amount of file security (or perhaps better) than your average Windows server domain. Your users wouldn't need to know how to pronounce "LDAP". This is where you get your own hosted domain name, hosted on Google servers. And controlled logins. And a "good enough" business (dare I say "Office"?) suite of software. And your documents are your own business, and the collaboration (if not the overall UI) is done really well. The first real LAN-less office, and it's really hard to argue for a Microsoft-based solution in the face of it. If you ever wondered why Google was buying up all that data centre footprint around the world, this is it, ringside seat to the battle of the titans. Form Blazing Sword!!
Yes there's a strong reason to keep your old email account, but for a small business it would be far more compelling to have your own registered domain I would think. Of course you could talk another ISP into hosting your own choice of a registered MX / SOA, but Google makes this sooo easy for mom & pop...
Not a Google shill, not affiliated, no I haven't done it myself. The costs are way better than hosting it yourself. Figure 10-user company at $550/year perhaps? As opposed to the cost of a server, software licenses & sysadmin, etc. There's a point where it's no longer economical, but up to that point you're in good shape. Provided you can put up with Writely etc, of course, but for email I can't think of a compelling counter-argument.
You take a pound of coffee, a gallon of water then boil it 'till a horseshoe floats.
It's in the roast -- the method of roasting -- as much as the variety. Freshness counts, variety counts, but it's the roast that matters the most. I've experienced Jamaca Blue Mountain both in a mild roast and in a dark roast, and they could be two entirely different coffees. The mild roast made me want to compose a sonata, and the dark roast made me want to go scrape barnacles off an oil rig. I ended up doing neither, because I couldn't afford the next cup.
The problem was coming up with a palindromic EULA that didn't require pentagrams on the floor.