And when there's a story about prostate cancer, this same 90% male audience will be joking around about that too. Get over yourself.
This thread contains plenty of posts regarding prostate cancer, and most of them are serious posts. Not jokes.
Ok, I must be missing something obvious, because I hit parent-parent-parent, followed this thread to all its leaves, and I didn't see a single post about prostate cancer -- much less a serious one -- until that first reply to yours saying we will joke about prostate cancer if there's a story about that.
Maybe you are using some strange definition of "thread" of which I wasn't previously aware?
Furthermore, you're posting anonymously. Have you even signed up yet? You could be part of the growing percentage of women here, instead of complaining about how there aren't any. Actually signing up will do infinitely more to make the atmosphere less mysogynistic than lecturing us about how bad it is to laugh at an old April 1st joke.
What they do on company time is mostly the company's responsibility. They rightly bear the blame, whether it's malice, lack of training, or stupidity.
Now, it is possible for corportaions to draw lines around what they will be responsible for. I wish they did that more -- for instance, a corporation should not be responsible for any damage an employee causes on the Internet, and thus should not have to set up facist firewalls. You can allow your employees to blog freely, even a company blog, so long as they put up disclaimers of "These are my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of <corporation>." Even Slashdot has such a disclaimer. But as soon as they are actually speeking for you, whatever they say is your responsibility.
As soon as the rep said "Vonage only works when your PC is on", it became a corporate lie, no matter whose idea it was.
On a related note, I propose a new word for unreasonably strict network policies: Berlin firewalls.
Well, let's just say my Powerbook is evil. Almost every private wireless network -- cheap Linksys and Dlink boxes -- get killed by my laptop. As in, I connect, and they crash.
That said, almost every time I've had an Internet outage here, it was the damned Linksys box. I don't know how it happens, but I do know that power-cycling the thing is all it takes to get online again.
Also, this kind of thing makes sense for me, at least. Let's say my phone went out -- I wouldn't even notice. I have a cell phone, but I don't even use that much. Now let's say my Internet goes down. Now I can't work -- I rely on online documentation and Google to keep myself sane while programming. In fact, if I need to dial 911, but the phones don't work, I can easily use the Internet instead -- run through my IM list asking people for help, to dial 911 for me.
This is actually pretty hypothetical/irrelevant now, because I'm on DSL -- chances are, if the phones go out, the Internet goes out. It's a bad thing to have all your eggs in one basket, but this can never work with DSL, only cable or fiber. And how many people even think of the Internet as a backup for 911? How many people buy a second phone line, in case one goes out? How many people actually have redundant Internet connections?
Put simply: real network outages simply aren't common enough, relative to phone outages, for it to be much of a nuscience. In case of emergency, yeah, it's bad, but you can always grab your cell phone, run to your neighbor's, etc etc.
And consider the flipside of putting all your eggs in one basket -- you can make a fucking TANK out of that basket. As it is, we have to maintain two separate networks and keep them running. If POTS dies, we simply have to keep Internet up in order to allow 911 dialing to work. We'll have a lot more resources to do that -- all the resources that would normally be keeping POTS up, in fact.
Yes, of course I know Home Depo and Dip-n-Dots aren't like that. My point is, even products so vastly different as those (or as Vista and Gmail) can be used for an example here. Basically saying, if Microsoft can't make Vista work -- if Home Depo can't keep their act together -- why is Dip-n-dots (Gmail) doing so amazingly good?
But we are too far into analogy-land. Simple fact: Vista may be getting close to what is generally regarded "beta" quality, but it's not a beta yet. Most games are released in beta quality, and become release quality through patches. Gmail is either RC quality or has gone through many releases.
I am not intending to bash Microsoft here, I'm really saying two things:
People have a twisted idea of what "beta" means, because they're used to "beta" meaning pre-alpha shit like the Vista betas. Microsoft is simply the most visible example of this common [mal]practice.
Google's "beta" products are actually far more complete and stable than even what most open source considers to be "beta". In fact, I've never noticed even moderate problems with Google software, so we shouldn't be bashing their software practices because of "betas" -- they work.
Neverthless, Google has called these applications Beta and shouldn't be surprised or offended if people assume that Google knows what the word means and used it appropriately.
I'm not Google, but I'm surprised and annoyed when people make comments like "They haven't gotten out of beta yet? That's HORRIBLE!" without actually using the products to see how "beta" they are.
Hey, if home depo regularly kills people due to poor shelving practices (falling knives), and dip-n-dots manages to synthesize amazing ice cream out of thin air and solar power, I think it's fair to start drawing comparisons.
Regardless, the point is that a functioning product that still calls itself "beta" shouldn't be used as an argument against the software development practices that spawned it. Google products being "beta", if anything, is a side effect of not letting your marketing/management swoop in and declare "We're releasing this, NOW!" I think it would be a good thing for most of them to let the "Beta" label come off, but again, it's not that the development process sucks at creating useful products, it's that the management process sucks at taking finished useful products and declaring them 1.0, even if they are still being improved.
That, by the way, is also not a failure. Consider the integrated gtalk support: Does this mean the software is still Alpha or Beta, that they can still add features like that? Or does it mean that Gmail should've hit 1.0 years ago, and the Gtalk addon would be 1.1 or 2.0.
The point is to have gear cool enough that the chicks come to you. Also likely to make every other guy in the area green with jealousy -- if they can't see you through the cloud of chicks, but they keep hearing "Can I touch it?" in sweet, feminine voices...
This would be pretty pathetic/depraved, pretty typical of Slashdot, except that I discovered it by accident in high school, when I went to fetch my laptop and found a girl... stroking it.
I don't know much about Java except that I hate the language, so you may be entirely right. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either viewpoint, I just want to bring us back on topic.
I like Perl a lot now, mostly because of CPAN. It's just awesome to sit there and think "I need to write a CSV file", and within minutes have Class::CSV installed on my system and be cranking out CSV files, with all oddities like quotation and punctuation handled.
For the love of all that is holy, RTFA! The claim was not that Java EE should use Ajax, or that Java developers should use Ajax at all. Google Web Toolkit is completely irrelevant!
What was meant by this is that Ajax is a loose collection of cooperating technologies, without a standard, that develops very rapidly, and allows a lot of choices to the developer -- as opposed to Java EE as a rigid platform. Kind of like Linux vs BSD.
Even TFA understood this in the response.
The Slashdot response, so far, is roughly equivalent to if I said I wish Java had something like CPAN, and people jumped all over me with comments like "You want Java to use:: as the class separator? You want all variables to have dollar signs on them? You want no type checking, and all kinds of random C code?" Completely missing the point, of course. CPAN is a centralized collection of community modules, most of which play nice with each other, which make it possible to develop most Perl programs by splicing together 4-5 modules with <100 lines of glue code containing your actual program logic.
It's like a Wikipedia of code -- NO! Not in that anyone can edit any module. It's like Wikipedia in that it's a central repository of the collective programming skill of mankind. It's sort of the library to end all libraries.
Anyway. -1 Offtopic to the entire comment section this time. RTFA!
x86 is an engineer's nightmare. It's horrible, it's ugly, it's loaded with legacy crap.
But the true engineer doesn't care, because he's likely working in a high-level language, like, say, Java.
Now, if you want to engineer a web app (and you're sure that's not an oxy-moron), you can do it in the low-level -- you can write the code manually, deal with browser issues, hack around. It'd be kind of like writing x86 assembly. Or you could do true engineering, just as easily. Hell, if you think Java==Engineering, you can do Ajax entirely in Java with the Google Web Toolkit -- it will take anything needed for the frontend and compile it to JavaScript.
But you're damn right it has to kick ass from the user's point of view. I could write a beautifully normalized, speed-optimized, complete, perfect relational database, but if the only frontend is a SQL commandline, I've failed as an engineer and a hacker.
I'm not saying that Yahoo should've provided IMAP/SMTP in the first place, though it would be nice for any email provider to do that. I'm suggesting that someone should write an IMAP/SMTP proxy for Yahoo mail.
I would be interested in using that -- maybe. As it is, I use my own IMAP server anyway. Which is a nice thing when it comes to services that require a unique email address to set up an account -- I have as many email addresses as I want.
Multi-angles doesn't really seem to have ever been a particularly good thing, except for porn. MGS3 had a feature where the first-person-mode button could be pressed sometimes during cinematics. Aside from allowing the player to stare at Eva, I didn't really see the point. Most of the time, it was a question of looking at Snake's face as he stares through binoculars, or actually looking through the binoculars.
I think this becomes even worse for movies. Why would we want to select angles, rather than just have the best angles already selected for us? This really only becomes a nice feature in games, and then only when you're allowed free movement of the camera, or even your character.
But, I do think that if I'm buying a movie, especially if it's going to be at next-gen prices, I deserve a little replay value. Commentary helps here.
Tricky, because you'd have to implement it as a standard, and it's probably too late for either Blu-ray or HD-DVD. Also tricky, because it now means that you now can't refuse to sell, say, X-rated material, because most DVDs will include unrated or X-rated material for those who want it. And there's probably a whole other can of worms I haven't even touched on.
But I like it. I like it becaues it means I'll just allow all content, but they'll be less afraid of putting "strong" content in films that really deserve it.
I don't like the rating system, though. There will be people who like sex and not violence, and vice versa, and ours is not the only rating system. There's no reason not to have incredibly fine-grained control here -- down to the curse word, body part, and sexual or violent act. For instance, most consider Star Wars to be a family movie, even though they can get extremely violent -- but there's no blood. So, someone with a "no blood" setting could watch all of Star Wars, but someone with a "no kissing" setting could only watch most of it, and "no violence" could watch almost none of it.
I suspect that consumers would love such a system, but writers, directors, filmmakers in general would hate it. For instance, Zatoichi is a movie with brutally realistic swordfights -- but the blood was added in digitally. (I'm not sure about Kill Bill and other, similar movies.) It could easily have a PG or PG-13 rating, because while there are geishas, there isn't so much as a nipple shown -- so, remove all the blood, maybe some of the worse sound effects (all of which can be done), and it's a family movie. And Takeshi Kitano would absolutely hate it -- it wouldn't be the same movie at all.
Men in Black: Almost certainly a separate title. I don't believe DVDs currently do any compositing at all, except possibly the menus. I suppose it's possible they could've made the whole movie a "menu", but even if they did, it would've been incredibly clumsy.
X-Men 1: I wish I'd seen this kind of feature more often. In fact, I've never seen it at all, except by offering the director's cut as a separate DVD.
Final Destination 3: This is the extent of how I believe DVDs work. All this is inference by observation, but it really seems like the best you can do is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure with the menus. It's like static web pages -- no javascript and certainly no server-side tricks, but with real video.
Back to the Future: Possibly an alternate angle. The only DVD I've bothered to dissect this on was The Matrix, in which "Follow the White Rabbit" was a completely separate title, and it switched completely away from the action for the little behind-the-scenes shorts.
Momento: I use this kind of crap as an example of why we should boycott next-gen formats until they give up on DRM. Right now, I can fastforward through that all I want, because the best screen I have is hooked up to my computer, which runs Linux and has four or five media players all capable of cracking DVD encryption and completely ignoring "You can't use that button now" instructions.
In general, almost every DVD I've played has some combination of deleted scenes, audio commentary, or a behind-the-scenes documentary. And of course, I always focus more on the movie itself -- Zatoichi is awesome, by the way. But regarding the features you mentioned, I suggest you try turning the features on and off, and see if the title changes. If a movie fits into less than half the disc, they might put it on there twice, as they did in The Matrix. Certainly, audio is pretty much always going to be one or the other -- especially considering that any time you're blending two audio streams, you need those two streams in the first place, so there's not much point to allowing realtime mixing -- at least, not for the features we've done so far.
However, everything you mention is, as far as I know, entirely possible with current DVD tech, but in many cases it wastes disc space (bumping up against that 9 gig limit), even as they compress the shit out of the documentaries. Most DVDs, I'd rather they use something like Superbit, where they simply compress the actual movie less, and remove any special features that take a significant amount of space.
What excites me is just how much I imagine Blu-ray is going to kick HD-DVD's ass in this area, if they have the imagination to. Blu-ray players make a small JVM available to the discs, which means you can do your special features in Java. As much as I hate Java, it is a real programming language, and we're likely to see some cool stuff come out of it. Regarding your bodycount: It would be entirely possible for you to attempt to count every kill by pushing the button, and have it tell you at the end how far you were off, or replay the deaths you missed.
I still stand by the "boycott" comment, though. I will not buy music, movies, or books in any format that uses uncracked DRM. I make an exception for games, because there are almost no games I want to play that don't use DRM, but I'd hate to see the same thing happen to the movie or music industries.
an election is FAR more important than a personal signature, it matters a lot more whether it is fraudulent or not because the scale of damage is far greater.
The scale isn't relevant here, because, as you admit, an RSA signature is more secure than a handwritten one.
and, just as significantly, moving from written signatures to electronic signatures isn't a significant reduction in the security of the system because written signatures aren't very secure to start with. by contrast, moving from a many-eyes manual count to an electronic count is a massive reduction in the security of the system.
I was simply making the point that moving to an electronic system can, under the right circumstances, improve security.
the miniscule benefits of electronic counting are greatly outweighed by the risks.
Unless there actually are fewer risks.
non-compulsory voting means that voting is done by those most sucked in by the hype.
Agreed, but it's better than the alternative.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, you've got an AMD zealot, raving about how AMD will always smoke Intel. And you've got the Intel person, who's looked at some benchmarks. Or maybe they've both looked at biased benchmarks and been wooed by marketspeak.
I'd much prefer those people making a decision, irrational as it may be, than the grandmother who just walks into a store and buys a Dell, for no particular reason.
there's certainly potential for problems here, but it's far better than candidates simply ignoring what the majority of people in their electorate want, to concentrate exclusively on what the nutters and corporate interests want (i.e. appease the nutters to get their vote, and do what their corporate masters tell them to do).
Better still would be trying to actually get the majority to care.
very few politicians are likable, whether on a personal level or what they stand for. in most elections, it's a choice between two evils - and the sensible voter votes for the *lesser* of two evils, the one they think will do the least damage, cause the least harm, make the fewest unwanted changes, offers the most in benefits for the local community.
Or maybe... I'm a hopeless idealist, but maybe we should try to vote for the one that actually isn't evil?
overall, compulsory voting has a moderating influence on politics, it tends to encourage policies towards a middle-ground that the majority of voters can accept or perhaps even be comfortable with, which is as good as compromise as any (and better than most).
It also seems like it would tend to encourage stagnation. The middle ground isn't always the best choice. And in any case, I'd think it would tend towards the candidate who will do the least, period.
Again, it's this sort of voting by default that annoys me to no end. Windows is that kind of choice. Voting for the incumbant, even when they are Bush, is that kind of choice.
I had a teacher who had a slogan, not sure where else it's from: If you don't know, don't vote.
think of it as a backup plan. they know that people are beginning to realise that the diebold machines are untrustworthy and not just potentially easy to rig, but have been rigged on a massive scale in the last few elections. so, instead of fixing the problem with a verifiable paper trail ballot, they'll do whatever they can to keep the idea of (easily rigged) electronic voting machines alive...and that involves dangling the next carrot, of a magical technology that will be secure. they promise. you can trust them, they're from the government.
Except they're not, unless this is astroturf. And also, I don't see why my believing such a thing might exist would keep me from protesting the Diebold machines, or closely scrutiniz
Ruby and Python have the same problem Perl5 does. Not that they will be replaced, but that after their one, big innovation, they aren't really going anywhere.
Ruby, for instance, still doesn't have a bytecode engine, much less real compilation. I thought it was beautiful, but the beauty is skin-deep -- it's a bastardization of lisp in perl's clothing. I haven't looked at Python in awhile, but I'm guessing, in terms of power and readability: perl5 < python < ruby < perl6.
Parrot will be much faster than Perl5 is now, and you will be able to run all your old Perl5 code with Ponie.
Parrot may also become the standard VM for "dynamic" languages, like Python and Ruby, and there are already many implementations of many languages running on Parrot.
This means that you can learn Perl6 slowly, and only use it for new code, and delay rewriting your old code for as long as possible. But there are many other reasons Perl6 will be not just good, but amazing, if I'm to believe what arodland is saying.
The basic premise of freedom of speech is that you are fundamentally wrong. It's rooted in another assumption, something Chinese children say in school every day: "Man is essentially good."
Ignoring that this is from China, do you believe that? Do you believe that most people mostly have good intent, most of the time? That given the choice between killing or not killing someone they don't know, who they can't possibly know is innocent, most people will choose not to kill?
The basic premise of freedom of speech is that good ideas, both morally good and practically good, will survive. It's a kind of memetic natural selection. We cannot survive as a species if we are all psychopathic killers, thus any meme of psychopathic killing cannot survive. And it is inherent in our nature to reject such a meme.
On the other hand, the true psychopaths don't need all this wonderful, free exchange of ideas. In the most facist, locked-down, censored society imaginable, a psychopath could still find something to set them off. Son of Sam was set off by a dog.
The basic premise of freedom of speech is, given free exchange of both good and bad information, the good will outweigh the bad. That there will be many more people who would be neutral/apathetic or evil, who are influenced by a book or a movie like 1984, Uncle Tom's CAbin, etc, and end up being a good person -- that even good people will become better people, or live better lives, or even simply be happier because of the availability of such material... That the positive impact of such things is much more than the negative impact of, say, the Turner Diaries.
In fact, even more fundamental is the assumption that we simply cannot afford anything less than a totally free flow of information, and that we must have a damn good reason for even the slightest limitation ("Fire!" in a crowded theater).
If these assumptions are not true, than we must admit that we, as a species, are so immature that we cannot tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one. If we are so easily manipulated, then we really have no hope, and we should just give up now. There's no point in trying to limit the flow of information in such a case, since all you would have to do to control the population is send a letter to the censors -- who, upon reading the letter, would be emotionally swayed by it into censoring exactly what you wish them to censor, thus giving you world domination.
Also, I think I've read your post somewhere before. No offense, but is it a cut'n'paste troll?
It worked for IM, after all. They just had to change the name to Text Messaging, and they can actually charge 10c per IM, because people think it's something new.
So they just have to convince everyone that it's not MySpace, and they can sell the same shit to us all over again.
Yes, Em is a much deeper thinker than we give him credit for. Of course, you have to wade through a lot more shit than in, say, Rage Against the Machine, but it's there. Back to the Real Slimshady for these classic anti-censorship lyrics:
And that's the message that we deliver to little kids And expect them not to know what a woman's clitoris is Of course they gonna know what intercourse is By the time they hit fourth grade They got the Discovery Channel don't they?
they can NOT verify that other people's votes haven't been tampered with
Except that, given a sufficient number of people willing to volunteer for a hand-count, you likely have at least as many people willing to verify their own vote. Should someone's vote not be counted, there would be a recount.
or that thousands of fraudulent votes haven't been inserted into the count, or that the system hasn't been rigged to keep two sets of records - one for the count, and one for whenever a voter attempts to verify their vote.
I don't know about the first, but I'm certain that the second is covered. You'd verify your vote against some sort of massive signature (or something), with which it would also be possible to verify the count.
Also, if you can verify the count, you've effectively got verification that there aren't fraudulent votes, because that would mean displacing legitimate votes, meaning someone's vote wouldn't be counted.
As I recall, the system isn't completely accurate, but it's accurate enough that any significant fraud will likely be detected by at least one person verifying their vote, where "likely" is similar to "If you verify my PGP signature, it's likely that I sent the message."
electronic data is too malleable, too easy to manipulate without any trace to trust with something this important.
Again, a Luddite statement. We're debating in a void without actually knowing what this system was, but consider signatures. Surely you'll admit that a signature is important, right? You don't want someone to be able to sign checks in your name. Now, they know what your signature is by comparing it to the copy they have on file, so it would be just as easy to give them a public RSA key as a signature in that case. And a PGP signature is much harder to forge.
It is possible to build computer systems that are at least as reliable and trustworthy as more traditional ones. I know of very few business owners who keep a paper ledger, for instance. So, I'm suggesting that it is possible for an electronic voting system to exist which is more reliable than hand-counts.
I admit, it may not be possible or practical, but that would be because of the cryptography/math involved, not the mere fact that it's a computer.
because they have to (pay at least lip-service) to representing ALL the people in their electorate, not just the extremists and fanatics...because if they dont, they run the risk of pissing off enough voters that they lose the next election.
I don't get why this is important. If the apathetic masses don't want to vote, haven't done any research at all on the candidates, then their votes would be much more harmful than the votes of the extremists. At least the extremists know what they're voting for. The apathetic masses, at least in America, would end up voting much the same way they choose Coke or Pepsi -- which candidate has the coolest campaign ads? Not in terms of what was said, but in terms of production values?
If all of America was forced to vote, we might end up with, say, a rapper or a movie star elected. Not that this is inherently bad (it's happened before), but we shouldn't be electing people because we like their music/movies, we should be electing people because we like what they stand for.
also, compulsory voting gives people a direct involvement in the process - i'm sure that a big part of the reason why the public in america don't care that their last two elections were completely compromised and stolen is because they think "i didn't vote, so i have no reason to care/no right to complain".
Possible, but I think roughly half of us voted, and I think if roughly half of us were pissed about how the election was stolen, that would be enough.
the process is entirely open. any citizen can volunteer. who watches the watchers? the other w
no, it's true of ALL machine counts. you can't trust them because there is inherently insufficient scrutiny of them in operation - otherwise, there's no point in having the machine count it rather than humans.
Giving any voter the capability to verify their own vote isn't sufficient scrutiny?
yes, humans can be bribed, manipulated, blackmailed, and threatened....but to succeed, you have to compromise ALL of the humans involved in a count
No, only a majority. Also, depending on the structure, you can likely simply buy humans in strategic positions, who can affect the result of tens or hundreds of humans working under them.
compulsory voting is a good thing because it forces the candidates to actually give a damn about the majority of mostly apathetic, disinterested and distracted-by-sport-and-entertainment voters, rather than just the extremists on either side.
And why's that a good thing? (Not rhetorical; I'm curious)
with the counting done by thousands of volunteers
Which is also thousands of opportunities to make mistakes, intentional or not.
and thousands of eyes to see those mistakes, intentional or not.
Again, depends on the organization. I'd want to see it -- just how open is the process? How much scrutiny is there -- and who watches the watchers?
Frankly, I'd feel better trying to win the jackpot from a slot machine than simply trying to have my vote counted by a Diebold machine.
and you still think machine-counted voting is a good thing? that it can be trusted more than a manual count? amazing.
I suppose that you mistrust all computers because of Windows? There are other OSes than Windows, and other voting machines than Diebold, including the system I was describing. And yes, I think my ability to verify my own vote, in addition to massive scrutiny from volunteers and everyone else who cared to verify their vote, is more trustworty than just the massive scrutiny from volunteers.
Of course, this all becomes academic and I agree with you fully if the system I described is actually impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I must be missing something obvious, because I hit parent-parent-parent, followed this thread to all its leaves, and I didn't see a single post about prostate cancer -- much less a serious one -- until that first reply to yours saying we will joke about prostate cancer if there's a story about that.
Maybe you are using some strange definition of "thread" of which I wasn't previously aware?
Furthermore, you're posting anonymously. Have you even signed up yet? You could be part of the growing percentage of women here, instead of complaining about how there aren't any. Actually signing up will do infinitely more to make the atmosphere less mysogynistic than lecturing us about how bad it is to laugh at an old April 1st joke.
What they do on company time is mostly the company's responsibility. They rightly bear the blame, whether it's malice, lack of training, or stupidity.
Now, it is possible for corportaions to draw lines around what they will be responsible for. I wish they did that more -- for instance, a corporation should not be responsible for any damage an employee causes on the Internet, and thus should not have to set up facist firewalls. You can allow your employees to blog freely, even a company blog, so long as they put up disclaimers of "These are my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of <corporation>." Even Slashdot has such a disclaimer. But as soon as they are actually speeking for you, whatever they say is your responsibility.
As soon as the rep said "Vonage only works when your PC is on", it became a corporate lie, no matter whose idea it was.
On a related note, I propose a new word for unreasonably strict network policies: Berlin firewalls.
Well, let's just say my Powerbook is evil. Almost every private wireless network -- cheap Linksys and Dlink boxes -- get killed by my laptop. As in, I connect, and they crash.
That said, almost every time I've had an Internet outage here, it was the damned Linksys box. I don't know how it happens, but I do know that power-cycling the thing is all it takes to get online again.
Also, this kind of thing makes sense for me, at least. Let's say my phone went out -- I wouldn't even notice. I have a cell phone, but I don't even use that much. Now let's say my Internet goes down. Now I can't work -- I rely on online documentation and Google to keep myself sane while programming. In fact, if I need to dial 911, but the phones don't work, I can easily use the Internet instead -- run through my IM list asking people for help, to dial 911 for me.
This is actually pretty hypothetical/irrelevant now, because I'm on DSL -- chances are, if the phones go out, the Internet goes out. It's a bad thing to have all your eggs in one basket, but this can never work with DSL, only cable or fiber. And how many people even think of the Internet as a backup for 911? How many people buy a second phone line, in case one goes out? How many people actually have redundant Internet connections?
Put simply: real network outages simply aren't common enough, relative to phone outages, for it to be much of a nuscience. In case of emergency, yeah, it's bad, but you can always grab your cell phone, run to your neighbor's, etc etc.
And consider the flipside of putting all your eggs in one basket -- you can make a fucking TANK out of that basket. As it is, we have to maintain two separate networks and keep them running. If POTS dies, we simply have to keep Internet up in order to allow 911 dialing to work. We'll have a lot more resources to do that -- all the resources that would normally be keeping POTS up, in fact.
Anyone who lies in an advert should have their tongue cut off.
I don't know whether it would solve the problem, but it would be damned satisfying.
Yes, of course I know Home Depo and Dip-n-Dots aren't like that. My point is, even products so vastly different as those (or as Vista and Gmail) can be used for an example here. Basically saying, if Microsoft can't make Vista work -- if Home Depo can't keep their act together -- why is Dip-n-dots (Gmail) doing so amazingly good?
But we are too far into analogy-land. Simple fact: Vista may be getting close to what is generally regarded "beta" quality, but it's not a beta yet. Most games are released in beta quality, and become release quality through patches. Gmail is either RC quality or has gone through many releases.
I am not intending to bash Microsoft here, I'm really saying two things:
I'm not Google, but I'm surprised and annoyed when people make comments like "They haven't gotten out of beta yet? That's HORRIBLE!" without actually using the products to see how "beta" they are.
Hey, if home depo regularly kills people due to poor shelving practices (falling knives), and dip-n-dots manages to synthesize amazing ice cream out of thin air and solar power, I think it's fair to start drawing comparisons.
Regardless, the point is that a functioning product that still calls itself "beta" shouldn't be used as an argument against the software development practices that spawned it. Google products being "beta", if anything, is a side effect of not letting your marketing/management swoop in and declare "We're releasing this, NOW!" I think it would be a good thing for most of them to let the "Beta" label come off, but again, it's not that the development process sucks at creating useful products, it's that the management process sucks at taking finished useful products and declaring them 1.0, even if they are still being improved.
That, by the way, is also not a failure. Consider the integrated gtalk support: Does this mean the software is still Alpha or Beta, that they can still add features like that? Or does it mean that Gmail should've hit 1.0 years ago, and the Gtalk addon would be 1.1 or 2.0.
...the sex appeal of "cute" electronics...
The point is to have gear cool enough that the chicks come to you. Also likely to make every other guy in the area green with jealousy -- if they can't see you through the cloud of chicks, but they keep hearing "Can I touch it?" in sweet, feminine voices...
This would be pretty pathetic/depraved, pretty typical of Slashdot, except that I discovered it by accident in high school, when I went to fetch my laptop and found a girl... stroking it.
I don't know much about Java except that I hate the language, so you may be entirely right. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either viewpoint, I just want to bring us back on topic.
I like Perl a lot now, mostly because of CPAN. It's just awesome to sit there and think "I need to write a CSV file", and within minutes have Class::CSV installed on my system and be cranking out CSV files, with all oddities like quotation and punctuation handled.
For the love of all that is holy, RTFA! The claim was not that Java EE should use Ajax, or that Java developers should use Ajax at all. Google Web Toolkit is completely irrelevant!
:: as the class separator? You want all variables to have dollar signs on them? You want no type checking, and all kinds of random C code?" Completely missing the point, of course. CPAN is a centralized collection of community modules, most of which play nice with each other, which make it possible to develop most Perl programs by splicing together 4-5 modules with <100 lines of glue code containing your actual program logic.
What was meant by this is that Ajax is a loose collection of cooperating technologies, without a standard, that develops very rapidly, and allows a lot of choices to the developer -- as opposed to Java EE as a rigid platform. Kind of like Linux vs BSD.
Even TFA understood this in the response.
The Slashdot response, so far, is roughly equivalent to if I said I wish Java had something like CPAN, and people jumped all over me with comments like "You want Java to use
It's like a Wikipedia of code -- NO! Not in that anyone can edit any module. It's like Wikipedia in that it's a central repository of the collective programming skill of mankind. It's sort of the library to end all libraries.
Anyway. -1 Offtopic to the entire comment section this time. RTFA!
Ah, so that's where they got the Terminator 3 plot. Of course, Skynet couldn't possibl.... ...... ....
NO CARRIER
You do use x86, right? Like most of the world?
x86 is an engineer's nightmare. It's horrible, it's ugly, it's loaded with legacy crap.
But the true engineer doesn't care, because he's likely working in a high-level language, like, say, Java.
Now, if you want to engineer a web app (and you're sure that's not an oxy-moron), you can do it in the low-level -- you can write the code manually, deal with browser issues, hack around. It'd be kind of like writing x86 assembly. Or you could do true engineering, just as easily. Hell, if you think Java==Engineering, you can do Ajax entirely in Java with the Google Web Toolkit -- it will take anything needed for the frontend and compile it to JavaScript.
But you're damn right it has to kick ass from the user's point of view. I could write a beautifully normalized, speed-optimized, complete, perfect relational database, but if the only frontend is a SQL commandline, I've failed as an engineer and a hacker.
I fail to see what this has to do with Java or AJAX, and I don't have the mod points to mod you offtopic.
Are you a cut'n'paste troll, or are you simply in the wrong article? Or maybe you intended to reply to a specific comment?
I'm not saying that Yahoo should've provided IMAP/SMTP in the first place, though it would be nice for any email provider to do that. I'm suggesting that someone should write an IMAP/SMTP proxy for Yahoo mail.
I would be interested in using that -- maybe. As it is, I use my own IMAP server anyway. Which is a nice thing when it comes to services that require a unique email address to set up an account -- I have as many email addresses as I want.
14Tbps of inane Slashdot comments.
Multi-angles doesn't really seem to have ever been a particularly good thing, except for porn. MGS3 had a feature where the first-person-mode button could be pressed sometimes during cinematics. Aside from allowing the player to stare at Eva, I didn't really see the point. Most of the time, it was a question of looking at Snake's face as he stares through binoculars, or actually looking through the binoculars.
I think this becomes even worse for movies. Why would we want to select angles, rather than just have the best angles already selected for us? This really only becomes a nice feature in games, and then only when you're allowed free movement of the camera, or even your character.
But, I do think that if I'm buying a movie, especially if it's going to be at next-gen prices, I deserve a little replay value. Commentary helps here.
Tricky, because you'd have to implement it as a standard, and it's probably too late for either Blu-ray or HD-DVD. Also tricky, because it now means that you now can't refuse to sell, say, X-rated material, because most DVDs will include unrated or X-rated material for those who want it. And there's probably a whole other can of worms I haven't even touched on.
But I like it. I like it becaues it means I'll just allow all content, but they'll be less afraid of putting "strong" content in films that really deserve it.
I don't like the rating system, though. There will be people who like sex and not violence, and vice versa, and ours is not the only rating system. There's no reason not to have incredibly fine-grained control here -- down to the curse word, body part, and sexual or violent act. For instance, most consider Star Wars to be a family movie, even though they can get extremely violent -- but there's no blood. So, someone with a "no blood" setting could watch all of Star Wars, but someone with a "no kissing" setting could only watch most of it, and "no violence" could watch almost none of it.
I suspect that consumers would love such a system, but writers, directors, filmmakers in general would hate it. For instance, Zatoichi is a movie with brutally realistic swordfights -- but the blood was added in digitally. (I'm not sure about Kill Bill and other, similar movies.) It could easily have a PG or PG-13 rating, because while there are geishas, there isn't so much as a nipple shown -- so, remove all the blood, maybe some of the worse sound effects (all of which can be done), and it's a family movie. And Takeshi Kitano would absolutely hate it -- it wouldn't be the same movie at all.
From what I've observed:
In general, almost every DVD I've played has some combination of deleted scenes, audio commentary, or a behind-the-scenes documentary. And of course, I always focus more on the movie itself -- Zatoichi is awesome, by the way. But regarding the features you mentioned, I suggest you try turning the features on and off, and see if the title changes. If a movie fits into less than half the disc, they might put it on there twice, as they did in The Matrix. Certainly, audio is pretty much always going to be one or the other -- especially considering that any time you're blending two audio streams, you need those two streams in the first place, so there's not much point to allowing realtime mixing -- at least, not for the features we've done so far.
However, everything you mention is, as far as I know, entirely possible with current DVD tech, but in many cases it wastes disc space (bumping up against that 9 gig limit), even as they compress the shit out of the documentaries. Most DVDs, I'd rather they use something like Superbit, where they simply compress the actual movie less, and remove any special features that take a significant amount of space.
What excites me is just how much I imagine Blu-ray is going to kick HD-DVD's ass in this area, if they have the imagination to. Blu-ray players make a small JVM available to the discs, which means you can do your special features in Java. As much as I hate Java, it is a real programming language, and we're likely to see some cool stuff come out of it. Regarding your bodycount: It would be entirely possible for you to attempt to count every kill by pushing the button, and have it tell you at the end how far you were off, or replay the deaths you missed.
I still stand by the "boycott" comment, though. I will not buy music, movies, or books in any format that uses uncracked DRM. I make an exception for games, because there are almost no games I want to play that don't use DRM, but I'd hate to see the same thing happen to the movie or music industries.
The scale isn't relevant here, because, as you admit, an RSA signature is more secure than a handwritten one.
I was simply making the point that moving to an electronic system can, under the right circumstances, improve security.
Unless there actually are fewer risks.
Agreed, but it's better than the alternative.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, you've got an AMD zealot, raving about how AMD will always smoke Intel. And you've got the Intel person, who's looked at some benchmarks. Or maybe they've both looked at biased benchmarks and been wooed by marketspeak.
I'd much prefer those people making a decision, irrational as it may be, than the grandmother who just walks into a store and buys a Dell, for no particular reason.
Better still would be trying to actually get the majority to care.
Or maybe... I'm a hopeless idealist, but maybe we should try to vote for the one that actually isn't evil?
It also seems like it would tend to encourage stagnation. The middle ground isn't always the best choice. And in any case, I'd think it would tend towards the candidate who will do the least, period.
Again, it's this sort of voting by default that annoys me to no end. Windows is that kind of choice. Voting for the incumbant, even when they are Bush, is that kind of choice.
I had a teacher who had a slogan, not sure where else it's from: If you don't know, don't vote.
Except they're not, unless this is astroturf. And also, I don't see why my believing such a thing might exist would keep me from protesting the Diebold machines, or closely scrutiniz
Ruby and Python have the same problem Perl5 does. Not that they will be replaced, but that after their one, big innovation, they aren't really going anywhere.
Ruby, for instance, still doesn't have a bytecode engine, much less real compilation. I thought it was beautiful, but the beauty is skin-deep -- it's a bastardization of lisp in perl's clothing. I haven't looked at Python in awhile, but I'm guessing, in terms of power and readability: perl5 < python < ruby < perl6.
Parrot will be much faster than Perl5 is now, and you will be able to run all your old Perl5 code with Ponie.
Parrot may also become the standard VM for "dynamic" languages, like Python and Ruby, and there are already many implementations of many languages running on Parrot.
This means that you can learn Perl6 slowly, and only use it for new code, and delay rewriting your old code for as long as possible. But there are many other reasons Perl6 will be not just good, but amazing, if I'm to believe what arodland is saying.
The basic premise of freedom of speech is that you are fundamentally wrong. It's rooted in another assumption, something Chinese children say in school every day: "Man is essentially good."
Ignoring that this is from China, do you believe that? Do you believe that most people mostly have good intent, most of the time? That given the choice between killing or not killing someone they don't know, who they can't possibly know is innocent, most people will choose not to kill?
The basic premise of freedom of speech is that good ideas, both morally good and practically good, will survive. It's a kind of memetic natural selection. We cannot survive as a species if we are all psychopathic killers, thus any meme of psychopathic killing cannot survive. And it is inherent in our nature to reject such a meme.
On the other hand, the true psychopaths don't need all this wonderful, free exchange of ideas. In the most facist, locked-down, censored society imaginable, a psychopath could still find something to set them off. Son of Sam was set off by a dog.
The basic premise of freedom of speech is, given free exchange of both good and bad information, the good will outweigh the bad. That there will be many more people who would be neutral/apathetic or evil, who are influenced by a book or a movie like 1984, Uncle Tom's CAbin, etc, and end up being a good person -- that even good people will become better people, or live better lives, or even simply be happier because of the availability of such material... That the positive impact of such things is much more than the negative impact of, say, the Turner Diaries.
In fact, even more fundamental is the assumption that we simply cannot afford anything less than a totally free flow of information, and that we must have a damn good reason for even the slightest limitation ("Fire!" in a crowded theater).
If these assumptions are not true, than we must admit that we, as a species, are so immature that we cannot tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one. If we are so easily manipulated, then we really have no hope, and we should just give up now. There's no point in trying to limit the flow of information in such a case, since all you would have to do to control the population is send a letter to the censors -- who, upon reading the letter, would be emotionally swayed by it into censoring exactly what you wish them to censor, thus giving you world domination.
Also, I think I've read your post somewhere before. No offense, but is it a cut'n'paste troll?
It worked for IM, after all. They just had to change the name to Text Messaging, and they can actually charge 10c per IM, because people think it's something new.
So they just have to convince everyone that it's not MySpace, and they can sell the same shit to us all over again.
Except that, given a sufficient number of people willing to volunteer for a hand-count, you likely have at least as many people willing to verify their own vote. Should someone's vote not be counted, there would be a recount.
I don't know about the first, but I'm certain that the second is covered. You'd verify your vote against some sort of massive signature (or something), with which it would also be possible to verify the count.
Also, if you can verify the count, you've effectively got verification that there aren't fraudulent votes, because that would mean displacing legitimate votes, meaning someone's vote wouldn't be counted.
As I recall, the system isn't completely accurate, but it's accurate enough that any significant fraud will likely be detected by at least one person verifying their vote, where "likely" is similar to "If you verify my PGP signature, it's likely that I sent the message."
Again, a Luddite statement. We're debating in a void without actually knowing what this system was, but consider signatures. Surely you'll admit that a signature is important, right? You don't want someone to be able to sign checks in your name. Now, they know what your signature is by comparing it to the copy they have on file, so it would be just as easy to give them a public RSA key as a signature in that case. And a PGP signature is much harder to forge.
It is possible to build computer systems that are at least as reliable and trustworthy as more traditional ones. I know of very few business owners who keep a paper ledger, for instance. So, I'm suggesting that it is possible for an electronic voting system to exist which is more reliable than hand-counts.
I admit, it may not be possible or practical, but that would be because of the cryptography/math involved, not the mere fact that it's a computer.
I don't get why this is important. If the apathetic masses don't want to vote, haven't done any research at all on the candidates, then their votes would be much more harmful than the votes of the extremists. At least the extremists know what they're voting for. The apathetic masses, at least in America, would end up voting much the same way they choose Coke or Pepsi -- which candidate has the coolest campaign ads? Not in terms of what was said, but in terms of production values?
If all of America was forced to vote, we might end up with, say, a rapper or a movie star elected. Not that this is inherently bad (it's happened before), but we shouldn't be electing people because we like their music/movies, we should be electing people because we like what they stand for.
Possible, but I think roughly half of us voted, and I think if roughly half of us were pissed about how the election was stolen, that would be enough.
Giving any voter the capability to verify their own vote isn't sufficient scrutiny?
No, only a majority. Also, depending on the structure, you can likely simply buy humans in strategic positions, who can affect the result of tens or hundreds of humans working under them.
And why's that a good thing? (Not rhetorical; I'm curious)
Again, depends on the organization. I'd want to see it -- just how open is the process? How much scrutiny is there -- and who watches the watchers?
I suppose that you mistrust all computers because of Windows? There are other OSes than Windows, and other voting machines than Diebold, including the system I was describing. And yes, I think my ability to verify my own vote, in addition to massive scrutiny from volunteers and everyone else who cared to verify their vote, is more trustworty than just the massive scrutiny from volunteers.
Of course, this all becomes academic and I agree with you fully if the system I described is actually impossible.