The same can be said that many people can't afford a car and that many don't have the skills to drive a car. What makes the net so different though is that many companies provide a "free-ride" (ie NetZero) and software is getting dumbed down.
I think there are a couple of things I can disagree with in this. For one, I think that you are underestimating the economic disparity that is keeping the poor off the net right now. Sure, Netzero can get some people online, but can it buy them a computer and a 56k modem? Current schemes for getting a free computer (unless you live in CA and managed to defraud Microsoft in the MSN deal) involve paying out decent sums of money over a very long term, something that the working poor don't need more of. There are computers available through civic centers and that sort of thing, but these are few, far between, and frequently in pretty poor shape unless you are really fortunate.
The Internet disparity is very real. A lot of people are touting the internet as the medium of the future for universal free expression, but at the moment it is restricted to the middle and upper classes. Another aspect of this is that the less money you have, the less opportunity you have to aquire the technical know-how to operate succesfully on the Internet. This situation is being helped by simpler software interfaces, but you still have to get that software in order to learn.
Do you really want everyone online.(sic) Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for...
I think it is a little rash to compare people who are too poor to own computers or pay for internet services as the electronic equivalent of blind people on the highway or child molesters. I agree that I would just as soon not be beset by script kiddies and kiddie porn on the net, but frankly I haven't had too much trouble with either of them. They might form some of the noise in the background, but it's no worse than the "undesirables" at the local shopping mall. I think the point is that if the internet is really going to be a medium for the real exchange of new ideas we have to have everyone online. The internet is about communication and the exchange of ideas, or at least that was the origonal idea (yes, it was designed to be a communication medium in the event of a nuclear war. But it was also designed to allow universities to exchange information about research in the meantime). If we are really going to give everyone in the country a voice, we have to get more people computer literate and online. This means especially the poor, who have just as big a stake in the world around them as anyone else. And while the Internet is more than just someone's idea of a nifty Jeffersonian politicol forum, it is also more than a platform for programmers to pat themselves on the back or to exchange cracked copies of Quake over FTP. The Internet is a huge information resource, something you understand very quickly once you've had a fast 24/7 connection for a while. Every person can contribute something to that body of knowledge if we let them, and certainly every person can benefit from it. If we lump the poor with other undesirables, we are depriving everyone of the benefit of their knowledge, and we're making the Internet one more old boy network for those in the know.
If you notice, the reason that she claims that all this legislation came about was because there was a high drop-out rate among freshman. If Arizona is anything like my home state, hell if it's anything like my old high school, than there is a very simple reason why kids are dropping out freshman year. They were pipelined into going to college by high schools and states desperate to look like they're doing well in the "war against ignorance" or what have you. My mother teaches in a public school in a small county in rural Kentucky, and watches as kids who would never have had any interest or business going to college get shoe horned into their local state university by schools chanting the mantra "every student can do college level work."
A number of my frinds from highschool have ended up dropping out and coming home to work or go to a local CC rather than a big state school, not because they are stupid but because they do not have the motivation necesary to go into a four year program at a major university. They were tired of it and ready to quit by junior or senior year in HS, and slapping "University" on the name of their school is not going to change that.
Realizing that education really is a pipeline to success, I do think that we should encourage people to go to college. I am not mandating testing to decide who becomes a Morlock and whoe becomes the Eloi, but I think schools need to ditch the idea that absolutely everyone needs to go to college. There are any number of perfectly good people who don't want or need to go to college, or who aren't capable of keeping up with the work and requirements. Yeah, some people do party too hard their freshman year and that is what knocks them out of school, but I know personally people that has happened to, and it is as much because they didn't want to be there as it was that they just couldn't help themselves and needed government attention.
This is possibly the single saddest example of legislative incompetance that I have ever seen. An elected official describing using the internet to learn about politics as an abuse of taxpayer dollars? What about all those silly direct mail surveys and bullitens that elected officials running for office send out to their constituants postage free because of the frankage privilage? I know that I learn a lot more about politics from the internet than I do from those. This person is fighting the single best, most legitimate use for the internet in the name of something silly about taxpayer dollars only going for what is on a syllibus. If all you learn in college is what is on that little white sheet they pass out in the first week of Psych 101, you will be a waste of taxpayer dollars for the rest of your life, not just while you're in school.
It could be that by bringing the beer to such a low temperature, you are inadvertantly creating a supersaturated solution. The ability of water to absorb solute (i.e salt, sugar, etc) decreases with temperature. So, if you make a sulution at a high temperature (brewing process) and then bring it down to a signifigantly lower temperature, there is actually more solute in the solution than can really be maintained. Once you add the lime juice, you bump the solute amount just a little too far and the semi-dissolved solids in the lime juice create a "seed" for crystals to form around, just like a bit of dirt or salt can create a "seed" for a raindrop. What you are seeing as freezing may be a process of solute's in the beer crystalizing out from around the lime juice "seed" that you added. Does anyone remember the specifics of this process better? It's been a long time since 12th grade chem, and even longer since I paid attention to the guy who taught it to me.
I think that posts like this advocating a central, unified configuration language are the way things need to go eventually. But, for the mean time, and in the case of extremely complex configs that won't mess readily with such a standard, maybe the solution is to create a number of pluggable GUI tools that will work with the existing configs. For common tasks that everyone needs to perform, there will be the option of editing the configs by hand, or using the GUI. For more complex tasks, let new users select from a few options that will handle basic things, but leave the text files in place, so that if they (or anyone else) needs to change the configs by hand, they can. Let people who know the most about a specific tool work on a GUI configurator for it, and then create central configuration util that can call on those other, device specific units. You keep the flexibility of hand configuring a device in its own origonal config language for advanced users and sysadmins, but you add the ability for newbies to get basic tasks up and running safely until they get a chance to learn more. It's a little stopgap; the real solution is still probably to go to a more standard format; while it would still leave some problems with GUI implementation, it would still allow hand-editing of configs. If a GUI is written responsably and so as to not break the hand configs, than there is no reason why slapping a different interface on a configuration should cripple anyonthe device's flexibility, or your ability to debug config problems.
I was kind of interested by the author including the focus of most gaming mags on warlike games as being part of what keeps women out of game magazines. There seem to be two big problems with this, one being that gaming mags tend to support more complicated games that they can write elaborate strategies and level-by-level write ups on. When I used to regularly read gaming mags, I never saw them shy away from writing on games that were primarily strategy, exploration, or puzzles, in fact some of them (i.e, Myst, which was all over the place for a long time after its release) aquire prominent places in mags. But, there is a limit to how much you can write about Tetris, or how much you can reveal about an exploration game without ruining the experience for a gamer. Most big write-ups in mags tend to be large RPG's, action games with a wide number of moves/tools/weapons, and combination action/strategy games. All of these do indeed involve conflict, and frequently battles and violence. But that is what is getting a lot of the market and hype right now (i.e Quake III), and game mags would be foolish to ignore that. Secondly, the author conforms to a very old stereotype by assuming that females won't play and are not interested in these violent games. The article makes it sound like all girls want to do is play nice, clean games like SimCity and Myst, which is extremely rooted in stereotypes and insults female gamers that are not locked inside that stereotype. I've come up against girls (or so they claimed; online isn't always what it seems) that could kick my ass many times over at Quake. Why does the author assume that girls need "safe" mags that don't cover violent content? I can agree with many of the points on the depiction of women and sexuality, but male gamers that prefer SimCity to Unreal Tournament are in no different situation than females. Claiming that a woman can't be interested in "manly" games just dives back into stereotype, and doesn't really help the situation.
One reason for Transmeta not to encourage writing native code for the Crusoe instruction set is that it very quickly creates the same trap as the current x86 instruction set: Backwords Compatiability. No one wants to buy a computer that cannot run the software that they have now, and this kind of attitude propigates down the line, until we have an instruction set that is being held back by the fact that we're still carrying the capability to use software that noone has been interested in for 10 years. If Cruose starts having native code programs written for it, than the next time they want to make a "next big thing" jump, they have the ball and chain of carrying all the old instructions with them. No one wants to rewrite their compilers and programs to work on a radically new instruction set, but maybe a radically new instruction set is what will be needed to face whatever computing challanges come up in the next 2/5/10/n years. Someone mentioned earlier the "vulerability" that Intel was facing, because they want to move away from the somewhat bloated by thoroughly entrenched x86 instruction set. x86 has so much momentum that Intel is going to have some very big growing pains once they try and move away from it. Leaving the code morphing in place as an "insulator" between programs and the instruction set permits them to tinker with the chip itself as much as they need, while keeping the support of users and developers, who will be happy to avoid a complete system overhall and rewrite every 2 years. Plus, if the Code Morphing is as fast and quality as the hype, than the ding in performance will be minor, and barely perceptable to most users.
I don't think that this trend is as disturbing as you think. I don't find that surfing the net or downloading warez eats all my time and keeps me away from my friends, but rather that it keeps me connected to the outside world and greatly expands the resources available to me. Thanks to the fast connection in my dorm, I get the news every morning and throughout the day, mail from family 1,000 miles away and friends farther than that, and access to school resources that I would usually be trudging through the snow or getting mugged late at night to get to. I look up books on the campus library index late at night, when I still have work to do but the library is closed. Rather than wait around for the 5 o'clock news, I read nytimes.com every morning after I get out of bed and check my email. If I am sick and miss a class, I can see it later on the web via video streaming. I order books and airline tickets over the web, usually saving a lot of money and work in the process. Sure, I've spent more than a few evenings hunting down a hard to find mp3 or jumping onto servers on Gamespy rather than spending an evening in front of the fire sipping cider with my roomates and friends, but frankly everyone has way too much to do to be doing that anyway. I still go into the city(I go to school in the Boston/Cambridge area) when I have time, but the fast, always on connection in my room has given me easily accesible information, academic resources, and news, and recreation, but hasn't eaten my life. So yeah, the speed of the ethernet wire in my living room has shaped my experience of college, but it has also given me a much better idea of the potential of the Internet or its replacement to be integrated into day to day life. I don't see anything disturbing about that.
What I meant was that the Khmer Rouge were not bad because they were Communist, they were bad because they killed many people and destroyed the country. If they were Communist and peaceable, I would have no problem with them. The writer of the earlier post seemed to imply that my problem with the Khmer Rouge was that they were Communist. But to me it is the action that is objectionable, and not the philosophy used to justify it. I do think that Marxism provided justification for the actions of the Khmer Rouge, but Marxism did not dictate it. So my point is just that even if the Khmer Rouge were motivated by some other ideology, I would find their actions just as objectionable, and place most of the blame with them for Cambodia's current state. Now, of course, the actions are greatly inseperable from their motivations, but that is an argument for a history class somewhere. ..
I was using the term Communist descriptively and not perjoratively, in my own mind, at least. I don't think that the KR were bad because they were Communist. They were bad, and they were communist. I was sticking Communist in there because I didn't want to type Khmer Rouge that many times. I don't think that I ever imply that the most important thing about the Khmer Rouge was that they were communist; the post mentions Communism only twice, I think, once in place of "Khmer Rouge", and once as an adjective. I'm not sure how you are reading a focus on Communism into what I wrote. What to you seems to say that I think the most important attritute of the Khmer Rouge was that they were communist?
The description of the current state of genetic engineering reminds me of the state of computing technology around the start of WWII. We're taking a look at building the first steps in what will probably become the "next big thing" technology in the 21st century. Maybe in another 4 years all we can build is a simple, single celled organism that sits in a jar and feeds itself, maybe producing something useful as a waste product. But I think that very quickly we're going to build on that development, the same way that we built on the very first and most primitive designs of computers and adding machines. There are bound to be advances, and there are bound to be mistakes. I think this is why it is clear that this is the proper time to start discussing the implications of this sort of technology. I don't so much see the ethical problems involved, unless we're talking about large scale genetic testing and screening that could be used in a descriminatory fashion. Frankly, to my presonal and religious beliefs, a genetically created/cloned/vat grown organism is not any different or more spectacular than any other sort of organism. But the impact on the ecosystem is a very real concern; we are talking about organisms that will be interacting with the world in a completely novel way. I think that great advances will be possible, even safe advances, if scientists exert proper caution and care.
Well, for years the soviet government has been bussing workers into the reactor to work and then out again at the end of the day. The area around Chernobyl has been evacuated since the meltdown, and is now inhabited only by a group of scientists that have basically cashed in their health for the possibility of studying the effects of widespread radiation exposure in an ecosystem. I would imagine that they are continuing the same type of deal. There was a very good documentary on TV some years back, probably on TLC on Chernobyl, concerning the scientists that work in the area observing the ecosystem and checking the failed reactor for safety hazards. I wish I could remember the name- wonder if anyone else does. Also, at the time there was a lo of worry because the sarcophagus over reactor 4 was starting to weather poorly, it had been thrown up pretty fast and the concrete was poor quality. Has there been any overhaul or repair performed on it? It seems like it would constitute a serious problem and danger by now.
It is not at all uncommon to find things similar to the one described at the beginning of Buddhist scriptures and suttas. It was considered a meritotious act to distribute copies of the scriptures; in China and Japan, the rich would donate to the temples and monestaries to have a copy of a particular sutta(e.g the diamond) or a set of suttas (e.g the Digha Nikaya, or Long Discourse) published. It was even considered the duty of monks to expound the teachings to anyone who asked(notice that this includes "anyone who asks", not prostelytizing to the uninterested or followers of other religions). So there is really nothing all that odd about the inscription on the inside of this particular book. Anyone familiar with this tradition could probably tell you about it and probably better than I. I really fail to see what it has to do with the GPL; to be honest, if I didn't know better I would call this a crosspost from segfault. If you wanna know a bit more about the suttas, check out Access to Insight, or Dharmanet.
PS- yes, I do know how to spell "sutra". It's Sanskrit, I use Pali. These things happen.
There was a very interesting essay by Richard Feynman on just this topic in a book on Superstring Theory that I read recently. His view was that a lot of these theories were getting off into speculation and concerns of mathematical elegence while failing to stay rooted in experimental data. Some of the predictions made by some of the early superstring theories were predicting particles with energies so high that they would be impossible to test, but people just continued building on top of them, piling speculation on speculation. I think maybe some of the hype around superstrings is dieing down(they weren't mentioned in every other sentence the way they used to be in articles about the Unified Theory), but some of the more solid ideas that they provoked inquiry into(perturbative theories, gauge symmatries, and ultimately M-Theory) are being built into possible future models. Strings could be the "aether" of the 20th century; not really there, but used to give rise to some damn useful physics and mathematics(Maxwell's equations, the foundations of classical electrodynamics were written based on the assumption of the existence of an aether; but hey, they work well anyway).
PS- the book with Feynman's essay, as well as a lot of insightful views on superstring theory, is called Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?, and I believe it was put out from an imprint called Echo, but I may be on crack.
I have to disagree with the statement that this sort of tailored program is a universal "Good Thing". Yeah, if you are just starting to use a program of a certain type, it is helpful to keep the bels an whistles and power tools out of your way until you know how to use them. However, for more advanced users, I would just as soon not have any "suggestions" piped my way; I am content to use my own judgement. Do you leave the "tip of the day" running on every program you own? I would much rather have a well documented tool that gives me the freedom to do what I will without suggestions or restraint and learn what I want than something that claims that it is going to lead me by the hand until I am up to speed, or offer "helpful hints" when I do something in a less than optimal fashion(thinking of the MS Word assitant here).
This issue I have with this is that this device is doing more than record what websight I visited publicly; it is recording what files I access in the privacy of my own home. The article said that it recorded the title, format, quality, and genre of all of the music that you play or record. This is not at all like what happens when you mail-order a CD or visit a store. If I walk down to Tower Records and buy a CD, they don't get to search my house in exchange to see what else I might be interested in. The monitoring on this device is well beyond keeping a track of public actons; it is recording private habits.
If I remember my U.S civics class correctly, the US supreme court held in the decision of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward that contracts are still valid of themselves, even if the authrity by which they were issued isn't. This is a bit of a stretch of analogy(okay, a lot of a stretch), but it seems that similar principles would apply on our side at least. It is something of a dicey issue as to how this applies to the fromer members of the USSR; it is obsiously fair to argue that they individually were not signatories of the treaty, and are free to ignore or renegotiate its terms. The other half of it is that the bulk if not all of the former soviet republics are in such poor shape economically that there is little worry that they are going to be whipping out a fusion powered orbital rail gun any time soon. As for the US, I'd just as soon that they held up their end of the old bargain. Semi-effective orbital space weapons kind of give me the creeps.
I think your definition of violence is a bit broad. It is nexesary in some lines of work(i.e, demolitions) to cause destruction, but this is seperate from violence. Likewise, I really can't see how having EMT's, firemen and surgeons with violent tendancies is a good idea. Violence implies intent to harm in most schemes, not just causing structural damage. Certain aggresive tendancies do have a role in society, and it is important that people exhibiting those tendancies are not descriminated against. If we didn't have a certain number of people with them, society wouldn't work. But when those tendancies cross the line to desire to actually cause harm, that is an indication that something needs to be done to "defuse" the person exhibiting them.
I see nothing wrong with patenting software per se. As several people have pointed out, the patent process originated not in the desire to keep large bags of cash in the hands of corporations, but to allow inovators the freedom to create and distribute their ideas while still putting food on the table, which tends to be a concern for most people. The problem seems to me to be not that patenting is wrong, but that the process that we have is not prepared to address the issues of software patenting. The patent process was origonally designed for steam engines, zippers, and light bulbs, not operating system code. The devices being registered have gotten more complex, and so has the patenting process. The process that the patent office has is not prepared to deal with the issues that software patenting raises. We can't just blaim the patent service for bowing to the will of large companies; the patent service is following the rules it has always had, but the situation has changed so as to make it only accesable to companies with serious resources($). The answer would be for Someone(what body is responsible for administering the patent office? Anyone know?) to start a very serious inquiry into patent law as it relates to software. In some cases, old precidents may be useful, but as with any growing field of the law, some times new precidents will need to be written. Law as related to computers, software, and the internet is still in its infancy; this issue is just one of many that are going to be addressed in the coming years.
I think one of the most intriguing issues raised by this dealt with the way licensing agreements are distributed. I suppose that I have never really thought about it before, but it is bizarre that they can try and argue that opening a box to look at an agreement you never before read can comprise agreeing to the terms. Based on that and the fact that at least one company in the article had had success suing past the agreement, it sounds like the current method of distributing licensing agreements could constitute an unconscionable contract, making them basically illegal and void. It would seem that it shouldn't be too hard(if you remove the obsticle of the software industries hoardes of lawyers) to argue that it is unreasonable to expect that if anyone knew that just opening a box to read an agreement constituted agreeing not to sue of the product was responsible for hosing their data they would go ahead and do it. Of course, if you actually want to collect damages, the problem becomes proving that a single product did the damage, instead of you symantic driver conflicting with a packard bell dll and all of them getting raised to a low boil by your buggy M$ operating system. But the licensing contracts themselves seem to be impeachable.
Actually, I think it was 2061(the date is around there... 2060?), in which Various People go to Europa, which now orbits around Lucifer, the star that Jupiter became when the thousands of monoliths increased its mass and density. One of the scientists on the trip is hoping to find a big hunk of the Jovian core on the surface of Europa. Actually, I remember Clarke giving credit to some other guy as having actually published the theory in question several years before, but I don't know who it was.
Very much so. But the slide strips with Prof. Lipscomb making a cup of tea were a riot. There's just something about pictures of a seemingly doddering old man with an acetyline torch...
I love the line in the article about the government "begging" the media industries to exercise self restrant. Maybe if parents in America want to keep their kids away from violent or sexual content, it's THEM and not the government or the media that should be exercising restraint. This is the sort of hands-off approach to parenting that is rampant in the country right now. God forbid a parent should actually decide what they want their children exposed to and enforce that decision through regulating what they buy for their kids, their own consumption, and the example and priviliges they grant their children. Apperantly, it is much better to just let the government step in and tell the kids what to do, or try and pressure the movie industry into making less profitable films. It's time people started taking responsability for their own actions and for how they raise their kids, rather than trying to get the government to legislate "restraint".
All I know is that my university seems to work pretty hard at lowering the number of people who end up in the hard sciences. Seems like a lot of first year science courses are geared to "weed out" undesirables, undesirables in this case often being people who would be perfectly capable of pursuing the degree, just not at the pace and depth at which the first class is taught, often in huge lectures with little access to useful assistance. A number of people that I have talked to have seen this to be the case, especially at large schools. People who, if attending a different college, could go on to become, if not nobel prize winners, at least useful members of industry, are shuttled into social sciences or the liberal arts. The impression that at least one person who I know got was that professors are interested in the top precentage of students, those who can assist them in their research and who will require the least attention. Sure, you produce more outstanding research assistants and super scientists that way, but odds are you're going to loose some very good people too. Combine this mentality with the fabled high pay and recent publicity of the computer field, and it's no wonder universities are hurting for geophysicists and mechanical engineers.
Nope, full install version booting from the CD. Using the disk I got from the computer manufacturer, who ought to be on the up and up considering its a nationwide name brand. The damn thing screwed up so bad a couple of times that it tried to tell me the CD itself was damaged, which turned out not to be the case. The boot disk was, however, defectice, which is why I ended up booting from the CD.
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I think there are a couple of things I can disagree with in this. For one, I think that you are underestimating the economic disparity that is keeping the poor off the net right now. Sure, Netzero can get some people online, but can it buy them a computer and a 56k modem? Current schemes for getting a free computer (unless you live in CA and managed to defraud Microsoft in the MSN deal) involve paying out decent sums of money over a very long term, something that the working poor don't need more of. There are computers available through civic centers and that sort of thing, but these are few, far between, and frequently in pretty poor shape unless you are really fortunate.
The Internet disparity is very real. A lot of people are touting the internet as the medium of the future for universal free expression, but at the moment it is restricted to the middle and upper classes. Another aspect of this is that the less money you have, the less opportunity you have to aquire the technical know-how to operate succesfully on the Internet. This situation is being helped by simpler software interfaces, but you still have to get that software in order to learn.
I think it is a little rash to compare people who are too poor to own computers or pay for internet services as the electronic equivalent of blind people on the highway or child molesters. I agree that I would just as soon not be beset by script kiddies and kiddie porn on the net, but frankly I haven't had too much trouble with either of them. They might form some of the noise in the background, but it's no worse than the "undesirables" at the local shopping mall. I think the point is that if the internet is really going to be a medium for the real exchange of new ideas we have to have everyone online. The internet is about communication and the exchange of ideas, or at least that was the origonal idea (yes, it was designed to be a communication medium in the event of a nuclear war. But it was also designed to allow universities to exchange information about research in the meantime). If we are really going to give everyone in the country a voice, we have to get more people computer literate and online. This means especially the poor, who have just as big a stake in the world around them as anyone else. And while the Internet is more than just someone's idea of a nifty Jeffersonian politicol forum, it is also more than a platform for programmers to pat themselves on the back or to exchange cracked copies of Quake over FTP. The Internet is a huge information resource, something you understand very quickly once you've had a fast 24/7 connection for a while. Every person can contribute something to that body of knowledge if we let them, and certainly every person can benefit from it. If we lump the poor with other undesirables, we are depriving everyone of the benefit of their knowledge, and we're making the Internet one more old boy network for those in the know.
A number of my frinds from highschool have ended up dropping out and coming home to work or go to a local CC rather than a big state school, not because they are stupid but because they do not have the motivation necesary to go into a four year program at a major university. They were tired of it and ready to quit by junior or senior year in HS, and slapping "University" on the name of their school is not going to change that.
Realizing that education really is a pipeline to success, I do think that we should encourage people to go to college. I am not mandating testing to decide who becomes a Morlock and whoe becomes the Eloi, but I think schools need to ditch the idea that absolutely everyone needs to go to college. There are any number of perfectly good people who don't want or need to go to college, or who aren't capable of keeping up with the work and requirements. Yeah, some people do party too hard their freshman year and that is what knocks them out of school, but I know personally people that has happened to, and it is as much because they didn't want to be there as it was that they just couldn't help themselves and needed government attention.
This is possibly the single saddest example of legislative incompetance that I have ever seen. An elected official describing using the internet to learn about politics as an abuse of taxpayer dollars? What about all those silly direct mail surveys and bullitens that elected officials running for office send out to their constituants postage free because of the frankage privilage? I know that I learn a lot more about politics from the internet than I do from those. This person is fighting the single best, most legitimate use for the internet in the name of something silly about taxpayer dollars only going for what is on a syllibus. If all you learn in college is what is on that little white sheet they pass out in the first week of Psych 101, you will be a waste of taxpayer dollars for the rest of your life, not just while you're in school.
It could be that by bringing the beer to such a low temperature, you are inadvertantly creating a supersaturated solution. The ability of water to absorb solute (i.e salt, sugar, etc) decreases with temperature. So, if you make a sulution at a high temperature (brewing process) and then bring it down to a signifigantly lower temperature, there is actually more solute in the solution than can really be maintained. Once you add the lime juice, you bump the solute amount just a little too far and the semi-dissolved solids in the lime juice create a "seed" for crystals to form around, just like a bit of dirt or salt can create a "seed" for a raindrop. What you are seeing as freezing may be a process of solute's in the beer crystalizing out from around the lime juice "seed" that you added.
Does anyone remember the specifics of this process better? It's been a long time since 12th grade chem, and even longer since I paid attention to the guy who taught it to me.
I think that posts like this advocating a central, unified configuration language are the way things need to go eventually. But, for the mean time, and in the case of extremely complex configs that won't mess readily with such a standard, maybe the solution is to create a number of pluggable GUI tools that will work with the existing configs. For common tasks that everyone needs to perform, there will be the option of editing the configs by hand, or using the GUI. For more complex tasks, let new users select from a few options that will handle basic things, but leave the text files in place, so that if they (or anyone else) needs to change the configs by hand, they can. Let people who know the most about a specific tool work on a GUI configurator for it, and then create central configuration util that can call on those other, device specific units. You keep the flexibility of hand configuring a device in its own origonal config language for advanced users and sysadmins, but you add the ability for newbies to get basic tasks up and running safely until they get a chance to learn more. It's a little stopgap; the real solution is still probably to go to a more standard format; while it would still leave some problems with GUI implementation, it would still allow hand-editing of configs. If a GUI is written responsably and so as to not break the hand configs, than there is no reason why slapping a different interface on a configuration should cripple anyonthe device's flexibility, or your ability to debug config problems.
I was kind of interested by the author including the focus of most gaming mags on warlike games as being part of what keeps women out of game magazines. There seem to be two big problems with this, one being that gaming mags tend to support more complicated games that they can write elaborate strategies and level-by-level write ups on. When I used to regularly read gaming mags, I never saw them shy away from writing on games that were primarily strategy, exploration, or puzzles, in fact some of them (i.e, Myst, which was all over the place for a long time after its release) aquire prominent places in mags. But, there is a limit to how much you can write about Tetris, or how much you can reveal about an exploration game without ruining the experience for a gamer. Most big write-ups in mags tend to be large RPG's, action games with a wide number of moves/tools/weapons, and combination action/strategy games. All of these do indeed involve conflict, and frequently battles and violence. But that is what is getting a lot of the market and hype right now (i.e Quake III), and game mags would be foolish to ignore that.
Secondly, the author conforms to a very old stereotype by assuming that females won't play and are not interested in these violent games. The article makes it sound like all girls want to do is play nice, clean games like SimCity and Myst, which is extremely rooted in stereotypes and insults female gamers that are not locked inside that stereotype. I've come up against girls (or so they claimed; online isn't always what it seems) that could kick my ass many times over at Quake. Why does the author assume that girls need "safe" mags that don't cover violent content? I can agree with many of the points on the depiction of women and sexuality, but male gamers that prefer SimCity to Unreal Tournament are in no different situation than females. Claiming that a woman can't be interested in "manly" games just dives back into stereotype, and doesn't really help the situation.
One reason for Transmeta not to encourage writing native code for the Crusoe instruction set is that it very quickly creates the same trap as the current x86 instruction set: Backwords Compatiability. No one wants to buy a computer that cannot run the software that they have now, and this kind of attitude propigates down the line, until we have an instruction set that is being held back by the fact that we're still carrying the capability to use software that noone has been interested in for 10 years. If Cruose starts having native code programs written for it, than the next time they want to make a "next big thing" jump, they have the ball and chain of carrying all the old instructions with them. No one wants to rewrite their compilers and programs to work on a radically new instruction set, but maybe a radically new instruction set is what will be needed to face whatever computing challanges come up in the next 2/5/10/n years. Someone mentioned earlier the "vulerability" that Intel was facing, because they want to move away from the somewhat bloated by thoroughly entrenched x86 instruction set. x86 has so much momentum that Intel is going to have some very big growing pains once they try and move away from it. Leaving the code morphing in place as an "insulator" between programs and the instruction set permits them to tinker with the chip itself as much as they need, while keeping the support of users and developers, who will be happy to avoid a complete system overhall and rewrite every 2 years. Plus, if the Code Morphing is as fast and quality as the hype, than the ding in performance will be minor, and barely perceptable to most users.
I don't think that this trend is as disturbing as you think. I don't find that surfing the net or downloading warez eats all my time and keeps me away from my friends, but rather that it keeps me connected to the outside world and greatly expands the resources available to me. Thanks to the fast connection in my dorm, I get the news every morning and throughout the day, mail from family 1,000 miles away and friends farther than that, and access to school resources that I would usually be trudging through the snow or getting mugged late at night to get to. I look up books on the campus library index late at night, when I still have work to do but the library is closed. Rather than wait around for the 5 o'clock news, I read nytimes.com every morning after I get out of bed and check my email. If I am sick and miss a class, I can see it later on the web via video streaming. I order books and airline tickets over the web, usually saving a lot of money and work in the process. Sure, I've spent more than a few evenings hunting down a hard to find mp3 or jumping onto servers on Gamespy rather than spending an evening in front of the fire sipping cider with my roomates and friends, but frankly everyone has way too much to do to be doing that anyway. I still go into the city(I go to school in the Boston/Cambridge area) when I have time, but the fast, always on connection in my room has given me easily accesible information, academic resources, and news, and recreation, but hasn't eaten my life. So yeah, the speed of the ethernet wire in my living room has shaped my experience of college, but it has also given me a much better idea of the potential of the Internet or its replacement to be integrated into day to day life. I don't see anything disturbing about that.
What I meant was that the Khmer Rouge were not bad because they were Communist, they were bad because they killed many people and destroyed the country. If they were Communist and peaceable, I would have no problem with them. The writer of the earlier post seemed to imply that my problem with the Khmer Rouge was that they were Communist. But to me it is the action that is objectionable, and not the philosophy used to justify it. I do think that Marxism provided justification for the actions of the Khmer Rouge, but Marxism did not dictate it. So my point is just that even if the Khmer Rouge were motivated by some other ideology, I would find their actions just as objectionable, and place most of the blame with them for Cambodia's current state. Now, of course, the actions are greatly inseperable from their motivations, but that is an argument for a history class somewhere. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I was using the term Communist descriptively and not perjoratively, in my own mind, at least. I don't think that the KR were bad because they were Communist. They were bad, and they were communist. I was sticking Communist in there because I didn't want to type Khmer Rouge that many times. I don't think that I ever imply that the most important thing about the Khmer Rouge was that they were communist; the post mentions Communism only twice, I think, once in place of "Khmer Rouge", and once as an adjective. I'm not sure how you are reading a focus on Communism into what I wrote. What to you seems to say that I think the most important attritute of the Khmer Rouge was that they were communist?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The description of the current state of genetic engineering reminds me of the state of computing technology around the start of WWII. We're taking a look at building the first steps in what will probably become the "next big thing" technology in the 21st century. Maybe in another 4 years all we can build is a simple, single celled organism that sits in a jar and feeds itself, maybe producing something useful as a waste product. But I think that very quickly we're going to build on that development, the same way that we built on the very first and most primitive designs of computers and adding machines. There are bound to be advances, and there are bound to be mistakes. I think this is why it is clear that this is the proper time to start discussing the implications of this sort of technology. I don't so much see the ethical problems involved, unless we're talking about large scale genetic testing and screening that could be used in a descriminatory fashion. Frankly, to my presonal and religious beliefs, a genetically created/cloned/vat grown organism is not any different or more spectacular than any other sort of organism. But the impact on the ecosystem is a very real concern; we are talking about organisms that will be interacting with the world in a completely novel way. I think that great advances will be possible, even safe advances, if scientists exert proper caution and care.
Well, for years the soviet government has been bussing workers into the reactor to work and then out again at the end of the day. The area around Chernobyl has been evacuated since the meltdown, and is now inhabited only by a group of scientists that have basically cashed in their health for the possibility of studying the effects of widespread radiation exposure in an ecosystem. I would imagine that they are continuing the same type of deal. There was a very good documentary on TV some years back, probably on TLC on Chernobyl, concerning the scientists that work in the area observing the ecosystem and checking the failed reactor for safety hazards. I wish I could remember the name- wonder if anyone else does. Also, at the time there was a lo of worry because the sarcophagus over reactor 4 was starting to weather poorly, it had been thrown up pretty fast and the concrete was poor quality. Has there been any overhaul or repair performed on it? It seems like it would constitute a serious problem and danger by now.
It is not at all uncommon to find things similar to the one described at the beginning of Buddhist scriptures and suttas. It was considered a meritotious act to distribute copies of the scriptures; in China and Japan, the rich would donate to the temples and monestaries to have a copy of a particular sutta(e.g the diamond) or a set of suttas (e.g the Digha Nikaya, or Long Discourse) published. It was even considered the duty of monks to expound the teachings to anyone who asked(notice that this includes "anyone who asks", not prostelytizing to the uninterested or followers of other religions). So there is really nothing all that odd about the inscription on the inside of this particular book. Anyone familiar with this tradition could probably tell you about it and probably better than I. I really fail to see what it has to do with the GPL; to be honest, if I didn't know better I would call this a crosspost from segfault. If you wanna know a bit more about the suttas, check out Access to Insight, or Dharmanet.
PS- yes, I do know how to spell "sutra". It's Sanskrit, I use Pali. These things happen.
There was a very interesting essay by Richard Feynman on just this topic in a book on Superstring Theory that I read recently. His view was that a lot of these theories were getting off into speculation and concerns of mathematical elegence while failing to stay rooted in experimental data. Some of the predictions made by some of the early superstring theories were predicting particles with energies so high that they would be impossible to test, but people just continued building on top of them, piling speculation on speculation. I think maybe some of the hype around superstrings is dieing down(they weren't mentioned in every other sentence the way they used to be in articles about the Unified Theory), but some of the more solid ideas that they provoked inquiry into(perturbative theories, gauge symmatries, and ultimately M-Theory) are being built into possible future models. Strings could be the "aether" of the 20th century; not really there, but used to give rise to some damn useful physics and mathematics(Maxwell's equations, the foundations of classical electrodynamics were written based on the assumption of the existence of an aether; but hey, they work well anyway).
PS- the book with Feynman's essay, as well as a lot of insightful views on superstring theory, is called Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?, and I believe it was put out from an imprint called Echo, but I may be on crack.
I have to disagree with the statement that this sort of tailored program is a universal "Good Thing". Yeah, if you are just starting to use a program of a certain type, it is helpful to keep the bels an whistles and power tools out of your way until you know how to use them. However, for more advanced users, I would just as soon not have any "suggestions" piped my way; I am content to use my own judgement. Do you leave the "tip of the day" running on every program you own? I would much rather have a well documented tool that gives me the freedom to do what I will without suggestions or restraint and learn what I want than something that claims that it is going to lead me by the hand until I am up to speed, or offer "helpful hints" when I do something in a less than optimal fashion(thinking of the MS Word assitant here).
This issue I have with this is that this device is doing more than record what websight I visited publicly; it is recording what files I access in the privacy of my own home. The article said that it recorded the title, format, quality, and genre of all of the music that you play or record. This is not at all like what happens when you mail-order a CD or visit a store. If I walk down to Tower Records and buy a CD, they don't get to search my house in exchange to see what else I might be interested in. The monitoring on this device is well beyond keeping a track of public actons; it is recording private habits.
If I remember my U.S civics class correctly, the US supreme court held in the decision of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward that contracts are still valid of themselves, even if the authrity by which they were issued isn't. This is a bit of a stretch of analogy(okay, a lot of a stretch), but it seems that similar principles would apply on our side at least. It is something of a dicey issue as to how this applies to the fromer members of the USSR; it is obsiously fair to argue that they individually were not signatories of the treaty, and are free to ignore or renegotiate its terms. The other half of it is that the bulk if not all of the former soviet republics are in such poor shape economically that there is little worry that they are going to be whipping out a fusion powered orbital rail gun any time soon. As for the US, I'd just as soon that they held up their end of the old bargain. Semi-effective orbital space weapons kind of give me the creeps.
I think your definition of violence is a bit broad. It is nexesary in some lines of work(i.e, demolitions) to cause destruction, but this is seperate from violence. Likewise, I really can't see how having EMT's, firemen and surgeons with violent tendancies is a good idea. Violence implies intent to harm in most schemes, not just causing structural damage. Certain aggresive tendancies do have a role in society, and it is important that people exhibiting those tendancies are not descriminated against. If we didn't have a certain number of people with them, society wouldn't work. But when those tendancies cross the line to desire to actually cause harm, that is an indication that something needs to be done to "defuse" the person exhibiting them.
I see nothing wrong with patenting software per se. As several people have pointed out, the patent process originated not in the desire to keep large bags of cash in the hands of corporations, but to allow inovators the freedom to create and distribute their ideas while still putting food on the table, which tends to be a concern for most people. The problem seems to me to be not that patenting is wrong, but that the process that we have is not prepared to address the issues of software patenting. The patent process was origonally designed for steam engines, zippers, and light bulbs, not operating system code. The devices being registered have gotten more complex, and so has the patenting process. The process that the patent office has is not prepared to deal with the issues that software patenting raises. We can't just blaim the patent service for bowing to the will of large companies; the patent service is following the rules it has always had, but the situation has changed so as to make it only accesable to companies with serious resources($). The answer would be for Someone(what body is responsible for administering the patent office? Anyone know?) to start a very serious inquiry into patent law as it relates to software. In some cases, old precidents may be useful, but as with any growing field of the law, some times new precidents will need to be written. Law as related to computers, software, and the internet is still in its infancy; this issue is just one of many that are going to be addressed in the coming years.
I think one of the most intriguing issues raised by this dealt with the way licensing agreements are distributed. I suppose that I have never really thought about it before, but it is bizarre that they can try and argue that opening a box to look at an agreement you never before read can comprise agreeing to the terms. Based on that and the fact that at least one company in the article had had success suing past the agreement, it sounds like the current method of distributing licensing agreements could constitute an unconscionable contract, making them basically illegal and void. It would seem that it shouldn't be too hard(if you remove the obsticle of the software industries hoardes of lawyers) to argue that it is unreasonable to expect that if anyone knew that just opening a box to read an agreement constituted agreeing not to sue of the product was responsible for hosing their data they would go ahead and do it. Of course, if you actually want to collect damages, the problem becomes proving that a single product did the damage, instead of you symantic driver conflicting with a packard bell dll and all of them getting raised to a low boil by your buggy M$ operating system. But the licensing contracts themselves seem to be impeachable.
Actually, I think it was 2061(the date is around there... 2060?), in which Various People go to Europa, which now orbits around Lucifer, the star that Jupiter became when the thousands of monoliths increased its mass and density. One of the scientists on the trip is hoping to find a big hunk of the Jovian core on the surface of Europa. Actually, I remember Clarke giving credit to some other guy as having actually published the theory in question several years before, but I don't know who it was.
Very much so. But the slide strips with Prof. Lipscomb making a cup of tea were a riot. There's just something about pictures of a seemingly doddering old man with an acetyline torch...
I love the line in the article about the government "begging" the media industries to exercise self restrant. Maybe if parents in America want to keep their kids away from violent or sexual content, it's THEM and not the government or the media that should be exercising restraint. This is the sort of hands-off approach to parenting that is rampant in the country right now. God forbid a parent should actually decide what they want their children exposed to and enforce that decision through regulating what they buy for their kids, their own consumption, and the example and priviliges they grant their children. Apperantly, it is much better to just let the government step in and tell the kids what to do, or try and pressure the movie industry into making less profitable films. It's time people started taking responsability for their own actions and for how they raise their kids, rather than trying to get the government to legislate "restraint".
All I know is that my university seems to work pretty hard at lowering the number of people who end up in the hard sciences. Seems like a lot of first year science courses are geared to "weed out" undesirables, undesirables in this case often being people who would be perfectly capable of pursuing the degree, just not at the pace and depth at which the first class is taught, often in huge lectures with little access to useful assistance. A number of people that I have talked to have seen this to be the case, especially at large schools. People who, if attending a different college, could go on to become, if not nobel prize winners, at least useful members of industry, are shuttled into social sciences or the liberal arts. The impression that at least one person who I know got was that professors are interested in the top precentage of students, those who can assist them in their research and who will require the least attention. Sure, you produce more outstanding research assistants and super scientists that way, but odds are you're going to loose some very good people too. Combine this mentality with the fabled high pay and recent publicity of the computer field, and it's no wonder universities are hurting for geophysicists and mechanical engineers.
Nope, full install version booting from the CD. Using the disk I got from the computer manufacturer, who ought to be on the up and up considering its a nationwide name brand. The damn thing screwed up so bad a couple of times that it tried to tell me the CD itself was damaged, which turned out not to be the case. The boot disk was, however, defectice, which is why I ended up booting from the CD.