Well, it's mostly a matter of perspective. Certainly the money in WoW isn't backed by anything and is continually created without external restriction -- but so are all the things you can buy with that money, so it's not directly analogous to a the real-world situation of more dollars chasing the same amount of goods -- both the overall wealth level and the money supply are controllable in WoW.
As others have pointed out here, launch costs are a problem, but even barring that, you need 10 square kilometers for the receiver, and the other economic factors make it uncompetitive.
It's a shame that only "sexier" energy schemes like this get attention.
There's more involved in a university environment than just the final degree. A lot of the value is in being surrounded by other intelligent folks and interacting with professors who know their stuff.
Man, you obviously went to a different college than me. Pretty much all the students were just there to collect the degree and get a job; practically no interest in the subjects being studied beyond what it took to get a passing grade.
Why wouldn't Intel be doing stuff like putting SSE-2 optimisation code into gcc so that all us hacker-types would have a _reason_ to pick the P4 over the Athlon? I know they have their own compiler but to the best of my knowledge it's not free (or at least it's not in Debian...;-)
Just seems odd that they'd pass up the opportunity for something like that. *shrug*
> My proposal, thus, is to transfer the handling of digital certificates to a governemnt
> (ideally international, thus UN) sponsored body which achieves thrustworthiness trough legal > backing.
> This anihilates the market and the situation of near-monopoly we presently face.
Only by going to a total monopoly system. And why do you make the assumption that governments are trustworthy? *I* certainly dont trust them.
> I mean, your passport is issued by the state and I'd venture to guess nobody even among the > most extreme libertarians would challenge that...
Sure I will. What gives governments the right to control my movements?
The situation may be bad now, but the solution you propose will only make it worse; who says SSL and the CA system is the final word in authorization/authentication? Why not let the market decide?
i'm rather picky about the keyboards i'll use; i can't stand normal "membrane" keyboards, and that's just abut all you'll find in a wireless model. Lately i've become quite enamored of the IBM PS/1 keyboard: it has the excellent clicky feel, but it doesn't weigh 5 pounds. the old IBM Desktop Dominatior keyboards are good too, especially if you get the 10-foot cable like mine.:) Logitech wireless mice are pretty good in my experience though; just wish XF86 3.3.6 supported that 4th button... (no, i don't want to use 4.0.1.)
"When you think about how many interesting things Cheney & co. could be talking about - like ending the Drug War - you'll wind up holding your nose and voting for Gore. "
Not bloody likely. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to vote for a man who finds lying easier than breathing. Bush may be bad, but Gore is much, much worse. I *do* hope you aren't serious.
On another note, how did this Nader guy get so much press? He's little more than a publicity-seeker; no clear grasp of economics, no real understanding of the important issues. There IS a real alternative: the Libertarian party. If you don't like Bush (and i'm not especially thrilled by him), vote Harry Browne next month.
or does a "Yopy" sound like it should be a small harmless alien in some adventure game? or maybe a one-eyed yellow smiley face? i dunno. where do they get this things, anyway?:-/
As one of the most prominent "elder generation" hackers, and as one who has worked extensively with *non*-Unix systems such as ITS and the Lisp Machine, what do you see as an important focus for free software programmers in the near future? My (limited) personal experience with, for example, Lisp vs. C has led me to believe that more productive and useful systems can be designed on high-level languages than C-based ones such as Unix, Windows, BeOS, etc. Is the Unix platform worth keeping on technological merits? I understand the social reasons for adopting Unix as the base for a free-software system; now that we have one, what next?
Unlike many of the alternatives to UNIX mentioned by other posters, Vapour is an OS design that totally breaks with the UNIX concept - it has no kernel, no processes, no filesystem. Memory protection is implemented at the language level rather than the OS level. Persistent virtual memory (similar in some respects to EROS' design) replaces the traditional filesystem. All parts of the system may be modified at runtime. It's still very early in development, but the design is fairly comprehensive at this stage.
Re:50k ways to say 'lets bump uglies'
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Date Pagers
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> <i>I fail to see how asking for a filesystem check is a good pickup line.</i>
you're new here, aren't you?:)
Re:Value of pi is three according to Bible (no)
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Happy Pi Day!
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· Score: 2
If you're referring to the basin described as "ten cubits across and thirty cubits in circumference" keep in mind that cubits aren't exact measures as feet/inches/meters are today. if you assume a cubit is about 18 inches, the difference between 30 cubits and 31.4 cubits is about 9 inches or so. this is about 5% error, which isn't extremely unreasonable.
Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and websites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, i believe that Emacs has the best user interface of any text editor i've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people:), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?
uh..... i know this is a flame and there's probably no thought whatsoever in it, but *do* try to notice that Jesus was one of the most out-of-the-box thinkers ever. There's more to life than thought and there's more to thought than logic, but they're both necessary; I doubt you'll find any Bible scholars who'll tell you that skepticism is bad. In fact, check out Acts 17:10-11. There's an example of Christians who knew better than to accept blindly what they were taught. For more modern perspectives, read _The Case For Christ_ by Lee Strobel, a former investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun; as an atheist, he approached Christianity as he would a newspaper story, interviewing scholars to determine the historical validity of the Bible and Christianity. Another good read is _Can Man Live Without God_, by Ravi Zacharias - it examines atheism from a philosophical standpoint and finds it wanting.
In short -- Some Christians are mindless drones. Some atheists are mindless drones. This says nothing about the validity of either belief system.
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Well, it's mostly a matter of perspective. Certainly the money in WoW isn't backed by anything and is continually created without external restriction -- but so are all the things you can buy with that money, so it's not directly analogous to a the real-world situation of more dollars chasing the same amount of goods -- both the overall wealth level and the money supply are controllable in WoW.
I can't help but think the people after this stuff are more interested in grant money than in solving the world's energy problems.
Comments from someone who's worked on these problems:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=240#1536
As others have pointed out here, launch costs are a problem, but even barring that, you need 10 square kilometers for the receiver, and the other economic factors make it uncompetitive.
It's a shame that only "sexier" energy schemes like this get attention.
Diamond is both unstable (it spontaneously decays to graphite) and flammable.
Man, you obviously went to a different college than me. Pretty much all the students were just there to collect the degree and get a job; practically no interest in the subjects being studied beyond what it took to get a passing grade.
Finally! The koinonia of the Eucharist is only a click away!
Frank Herbert had a similar idea in Dune: he referred to a pair of binoculars having "oil lenses" that were shaped electrically.
Just another instance of science fiction authors' jobs getting harder, I guess.
Why wouldn't Intel be doing stuff like putting SSE-2 optimisation code into gcc so that all us hacker-types would have a _reason_ to pick the P4 over the Athlon? I know they have their own compiler but to the best of my knowledge it's not free (or at least it's not in Debian... ;-)
Just seems odd that they'd pass up the opportunity for something like that. *shrug*
> My proposal, thus, is to transfer the handling of digital certificates to a governemnt
> (ideally international, thus UN) sponsored body which achieves thrustworthiness trough legal > backing.
> This anihilates the market and the situation of near-monopoly we presently face.
Only by going to a total monopoly system. And why do you make the assumption that governments are trustworthy? *I* certainly dont trust them.
> I mean, your passport is issued by the state and I'd venture to guess nobody even among the > most extreme libertarians would challenge that...
Sure I will. What gives governments the right to control my movements?
The situation may be bad now, but the solution you propose will only make it worse; who says SSL and the CA system is the final word in authorization/authentication? Why not let the market decide?
Given the choice between Evil and Stupid, i'll take Stupid just about any day.
;)
I voted for Browne, btw.
i'm rather picky about the keyboards i'll use; i can't stand normal "membrane" keyboards, and that's just abut all you'll find in a wireless model. Lately i've become quite enamored of the IBM PS/1 keyboard: it has the excellent clicky feel, but it doesn't weigh 5 pounds. the old IBM Desktop Dominatior keyboards are good too, especially if you get the 10-foot cable like mine. :) Logitech wireless mice are pretty good in my experience though; just wish XF86 3.3.6 supported that 4th button... (no, i don't want to use 4.0.1.)
"When you think about how many interesting things Cheney & co. could be talking about - like ending the Drug War - you'll wind up holding your nose and voting for Gore. "
Not bloody likely. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to vote for a man who finds lying easier than breathing. Bush may be bad, but Gore is much, much worse. I *do* hope you aren't serious.
On another note, how did this Nader guy get so much press? He's little more than a publicity-seeker; no clear grasp of economics, no real understanding of the important issues. There IS a real alternative: the Libertarian party. If you don't like Bush (and i'm not especially thrilled by him), vote Harry Browne next month.
Guess this means i have to go write "Visual Rep" now
or does a "Yopy" sound like it should be a small harmless alien in some adventure game? or maybe a one-eyed yellow smiley face? i dunno. where do they get this things, anyway? :-/
huh? IIRC positive curvature is synclastic, while negative curvature is anticlastic. You've got it backwards.
True; but it's nice for those of us who got suckered into buying NVidia hardware when they seemed the most "open source friendly" gfx card maker. :-/
thanks for nothing nvidia, i'm buying 3dfx or matrox next time
As one of the most prominent "elder generation" hackers, and as one who has worked extensively with *non*-Unix systems such as ITS and the Lisp Machine, what do you see as an important focus for free software programmers in the near future? My (limited) personal experience with, for example, Lisp vs. C has led me to believe that more productive and useful systems can be designed on high-level languages than C-based ones such as Unix, Windows, BeOS, etc. Is the Unix platform worth keeping on technological merits? I understand the social reasons for adopting Unix as the base for a free-software system; now that we have one, what next?
Unlike many of the alternatives to UNIX mentioned by other posters, Vapour is an OS design that totally breaks with the UNIX concept - it has no kernel, no processes, no filesystem. Memory protection is implemented at the language level rather than the OS level. Persistent virtual memory (similar in some respects to EROS' design) replaces the traditional filesystem. All parts of the system may be modified at runtime. It's still very early in development, but the design is fairly comprehensive at this stage.
> <i>I fail to see how asking for a filesystem check is a good pickup line.</i>
you're new here, aren't you?
If you're referring to the basin described as "ten cubits across and thirty cubits in circumference" keep in mind that cubits aren't exact measures as feet/inches/meters are today. if you assume a cubit is about 18 inches, the difference between 30 cubits and 31.4 cubits is about 9 inches or so. this is about 5% error, which isn't extremely unreasonable.
This is a true troll in the grand Kiboesque tradition! Keep it up, this is much better quality than the idiots we see on here at other times.
Sounds like a good idea to me! let me know when you've got it running.
hmm, really? i was not aware of that. seemed nice the few times i used it. *shrug* i prefer emacs anyway :)
Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and websites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, i believe that Emacs has the best user interface of any text editor i've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?
uh..... i know this is a flame and there's probably no thought whatsoever in it, but *do* try to notice that Jesus was one of the most out-of-the-box thinkers ever. There's more to life than thought and there's more to thought than logic, but they're both necessary; I doubt you'll find any Bible scholars who'll tell you that skepticism is bad. In fact, check out Acts 17:10-11. There's an example of Christians who knew better than to accept blindly what they were taught. For more modern perspectives, read _The Case For Christ_ by Lee Strobel, a former investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun; as an atheist, he approached Christianity as he would a newspaper story, interviewing scholars to determine the historical validity of the Bible and Christianity. Another good read is _Can Man Live Without God_, by Ravi Zacharias - it examines atheism from a philosophical standpoint and finds it wanting.
In short -- Some Christians are mindless drones. Some atheists are mindless drones. This says nothing about the validity of either belief system.
I've been waiting a long time for something like this!
Thanks, oznoid &co. - now i'm off to start a language model for Lojban!