There's another new article on this in the 'Globe and Mail'. It's a bit more indepth, and features a really, er, 'nice' picture of a seemingly shaven lady testing out the machine.
I hate my ISP's crappy transparent web caching.. it causes no end of problems.. including, last year, all of Google's logos being replaced with bizarre images.
While Amazon allows (mostly) free and open access to its API and data, Google, on the other hand, limits everyone to 1000 queries a day.
This means that coders who have tools that are based on Google results (say, some sort of link popularity checking tool) then have to either grab Google the regular way and try their darn best to pretend they're a regular visitor.. or get multiple API keys, which is against the T&Cs.
Of course, I can see why Google is doing this, simply because there's no benefit for them if people just leech their results, but....
Salary market is not really bloated. Living expenses are far more numerous here than in the UK and average pay, depending where you are isn't that great (non grads are lucky to get anything above $10 an hour).
My experience is solely with LA (spent several weeks there just a while ago). Compared to, say, London, LA seems rather cheap.
In London you not only have to pay your rent, but you have to pay about 10% again in 'Council Tax', whereas, as I understand it, the equivalent US tax 'property tax' is paid by the landlord and not the tenants.
I could rent a place in LA for about $800 a month which would probably be about £650 a month in the UK (approx $1000). Utilities are also cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Car insurance seems collossally higher in LA, although if you can scrape by on public transport or walking (which a surprising number of the people I know in LA do) this can be avoided.
Of course, this is woefully off topic, but I find it interesting to examine the cultural and economic differences of two countries bound only by language!;-)
Sales tax is not as fixed here in the US. We have 50 different States, each charging their own tax.
Oh, I did realize that. However, isn't sales tax based on the location of the retailer rather than the buyer? For example, if I wanted to buy one of those cheap Linux PCs for $200 on the Web, and they were based in Wisconsin.. then I'd pay $210?
Add to that the fact that some counties (which there can be 100's of in a state) also charge sales tax.. and its virtually impossible to list prices with sales tax.
And I didn't know that.
I guess I am just pissed because I spent 5 weeks in LA, and everywhere you go you get bumped up 8% because the tax isn't included in the display price. If I go to buy a burger and it says $4.99, I expect to pay $4.99.. not have to get out a five and rattle around for change.:-)
I'm in the UK. Computer components cost more here, yet I could build a perfectly fine PC for under $200. I actually keep tabs on how much it'd cost me to get a basic rig up and running for, incase my machine explodes, whatever, and I need something to tide me over.
You can build a regular Duron 1.3Ghz box including case, keyboard, mouse, 30GB HD, 128MB RAM, and using onboard video, sound and LAN for about £140 including the 17.5% sales tax.
Generally US retailers bizarrely don't include the tax (even though you're gunna pay it anyway), so deduct 17.5% from my figure, that's £119.15.. which is just over $190.
These guys are in the US, and they're trade.. so they're getting their parts at well below $200, and probably have a margin of 50%, excluding labor, which, admittedly, could be the deal breaker in the bloated US salary market.
Microtransactions have failed up to now because of the extreme costs involved in processing them. The credit card companies like to take a small flat rate fee and then a percentage on top. On amounts of a few dollars and up, the retailer can swallow this.. but on a buck? Regular deals with the credit card companies could end up with them getting about 40 cents out of the dollar.
Clearly Apple and chums have made some sort of special deal with the credit card companies, but there's no doubt there's a percentage coming out for the credit card companies.. and their chart just doesn't address it.
You could argue that it's the 'middlemen' section, but this is listed as going to subsidaries such as AOL and Amazon (in the case of certain retailers).. and I seriously doubt as if they'd fork over their whole share to VISA!
Someone with some real knowledge of merchant accounts in this capacity.. please fill us in:-)
Let's face it. Most of the suggestions above are useless. Since when is a company going to officially distribute stuff via Kazaa or BitTorrent? Sorry, but when Microsoft says 'To download our latest Service Pack, use Kazaa' then pigs will be flying. It's so unprofessional.
The easiest solution is not to host it yourself, but to use specialized file hosting ISPs. There are lots of these around, and it's a trivial task on Google to find one at the price you want. These are ISPs that entirely focus on hosting large files for download, with servers optimized for that job.
There's no point in lagging out your regular servers which are probably optimized for something else.. and a dedicated file host can scale as you go.. which would usually cost you a packet.
This would seem a fair argument if I didn't actually find modern music more enjoyable to that of the past. Most of my daily listening is stuff that's come out within the last few years. Of course, there's plenty of ELO, Huey Lewis and The News, and greats from the 70's and 80's, but I love modern stuff. It's just that mass media removes a lot of the anticipation.
Perhaps it's that I've heard almost every style there is about, and so music, on the whole, doesn't excite me anymore in terms of its newness.. whereas I am now more interested in albums and songs after I've 'got into them'.
As you say, this might just be a part of growing up, as I am sure there are kids who scream at their parents nowadays until they buy the latest kid favorite.
That inner page of his is like 660KB all in, so I can see this guy's server taking a crunch real soon. His JPEGs were uber-unoptimized, so I've optimized them and put up a temporary mirror so you can all see the joy that is the rotissery scanner:-) It will disappear in a few hours or so.
Thanks for the very insightful reply. It is rare I get such interesting responses;-) I can comment on one area though:
Consider: why is it OK to hang out in a book store, sit and drink coffee and read all day, but record stores think this is so bad?
Because of the different demographic. Not many ghoulishly dressed 18 year old skater-bois will casually go to the book store and sup coffee, whereas they'd be likely to hang around a record store (see 'Empire Records').
When Richard Branson started the music retail arm of his empire (of course, back then his empire was only a youth advice center anyway!) he capitalised on a big gap in the market.
In the UK at the time (the early 70's), all record stores were really boring places, no music playing, and the people in the store didn't care about music.. it was just another thing they sold, along with pins and ribbons.
Richard Branson figured he'd create somewhere where music was playing, where the staff were all hippies who 'digged' music, and where customers could lounge around on beanbags smoking pot and checking out the latest tunes. What's more, he'd sell the records cheaper than anyplace else.
His store (in Oxford Street, and on which he actually paid no rent to start with!!) was flooded with customers for quite some time. He noticed after a while, however, that while sales were brisk, a lot of people were just turning up and smoking pot all day without buying anything. He cleared these people out, and made it so that people would still want to come to the store, but not that they could stay there all day.
And so was developed the current model of 'specialty record store' retail. This is a model that hasn't changed since the 70's! Virgin Megastores tries new things like having listening booths, and computerised searches of their CD database.. but it's too little too late, in my opinion.
The next model of retail kicked off in the late 90's with the discounted 'pile it high, sell it cheap' WAL*Mart model of selling records.
The big problem, however, is that this is not much different to how records were sold in the UK in the 60's! The staff at Wal*Mart don't know music, and they could care less about what you're buying So.. it seems we've come FULL CIRCLE.
And let's face it, the whole music industry has lost its vibe anyway. I remember back in the 'good old days' that it was fun to go buy records, and it was a real thrill to get them home and put them on. Nowadays? Sure, there are a lot of good gigs going on, but few people exhibit the same excitement over CDs these days, since you probably heard half of the tracks on MTV/the radio already anyway.
I think commercially music has lost its way, and while there's still a LOT of great music out there.. music just isn't as fun anymore. These stores are feeling the pinch. Why go and hang out at a record store when it's not fun anymore?
Squarepusher is typically known as a techno/drum'n'bass demi-God, but he released one album a few years ago which was actually pure jazz. He played all of the instruments himself and did the recording, and it came out amazingly. It has often been compared to the best of Miles Davis, which is high praise indeed.
What's so interesting about it is you can clearly tell that there's a big modern influence, even a drum'n'bass influence if you will. Where the influence really occured the other way around, his jazz album makes it sound like D&B came first, and then jazz was a progression on from THAT. This leads to some extremely interesting tunes.
The album is called 'Music is Rotted One Note'. I suggest you look at the reviews of it at Amazon (not an affiliate link) and even listen to a few clips. The best track by far, in my opinion, is 'Don't Go Plastic' which has a real Miles feel.
With the recent thread on the decline in white-collar jobs.. I'm not surprised, when they post nonsense like this to some of the world's biggest sites.
I think it's time some of the editors were given the finger and let some nice Indian people give us quality links for $5 an hour. Slashdot would live on, have more money, be of a higher quality, and so on. (CmdrTaco could stay on as general manager though.)
It's funny you say this, but I'm potentially about to go through the H-1B process myself, as a Brit who has accepted a job offer from the US.
I've spent some time in the US, and the jobs are there. The problem is, they're either at a rate which is below the dot com era (say, $50k for a programmer.. which you can EASILY live on, but a lot of people are greedy), or they require you have skills beyond those that an education can give you. For example, extreme UNIX admin stuff, people skills, the ability to sell yourself, etc. In my time in the US I met many friendly and extremely 'people confident' programmers and techies. These were the guys who had the jobs.
If you're the type of super-techie who's great at their job, but can't deal with the marketing people, it's not really surprising you haven't got a job. A self employed life is more for you, and quite rightly so.. besides, you might earn more.
I think people skills are what separate the employed from the unemployed these days, rather than skills. A lot of companies are now hiring on personality and 'can do' attitude rather than pure skill-set.. This is why I've got my job offer. My technical competence may be lower than others they could employ in the same area of the country (a major metropolitan center), but they like me, and they're willing to take on the hassle of getting me out there just to have me.
The problem with technologies like these are that they're simply form factor adjustments of existing technologies.
Currently you can very easily put temperature sensors (or even seismic detectors) in a building, but this project wants to put these items into a brick with a wireless connection. Is this really a story? Sure, such a brick might exist in every new building in the future, but you could have this in your home right now, in a small box containing the same gadgets. Putting it in a brick just doesn't seem that exiting, y'know?
This is like the 'building a PC without a case' stories we see from time to time, but without the humor value of seeing someone mount a motherboard in a cardboard box.
Oh? I thought it was just morally upright and/or hard working people who thought this way -- wouldn't lazyboneses actually prefer a system of forced equal sharing?
A good point, but isn't that the difference between knowing what you need, and stating what you want? Most procrastinating lazy people know that they should work hard and get rewarded for that, but don't.
In my perfect world I'd do no work and be a trillionairre, but alas.. I know I've got to work instead. 99% of the world is moral. Most people don't believe murder or rape are right, most people believe you should reap what you sow.. but just because we don't all live up to morals doesn't mean we don't have them.
Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed.
That's because when you have free will, you choose not to live under an unfair system of sharing everything between everyone, no matter what their merit. When most people have free will, they believe they should receive similar to what they give. If you work hard, you get more. If you don't work hard, you get less.
my boss tells me: We need a program that does foo. So i write the program that does foo, and if i decide that it could potentially be useful to someone else except me, i release it as open-source.
Generally, you cannot do that. If you're working for someone and you produce something, then the rights for that work belong to them, and not you. Therefore, they need to control how that product is licenced.
Of course, if your boss is some schmuck who doesn't know anything about coding, business, or the law, then sure.. release it. But, technically, they own your work unless you signed a contract stating otherwise.
(similar to that of "clean needle" campaign in the War on Drugs)
Sounds great. If I were a hacker does this mean I get a support group, help weaning off of my addiction to hacking, and generous government grants and welfare? Somehow I think not.
Ever seen a recording of a computer monitor?
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 5, Informative
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
If you get a camcorder and record a regular CRT and play it back, you'll see all sorts of crazy flickering on the recording. That's because the screen only updates X times per second, and that doesn't always correlate up with how often the camcorder takes a shot.
Generally, people can use a CRT without seeing this flickering. Although if you use a lower refresh rate, most people get headaches, and some will notice flickering or just sense something is 'wrong'.
At the right refresh rate, you could recreate this effect while annoying only perhaps 0.5% of your audience, and if it's just for a few preview screenings, it might be a good idea for them.
and it is doubtful that Perl will ever be re-implemented ever again.
It's obvious you don't read Slashdot, or even keep up with the latest programming news. Perl is under heavy reimplementation right now. Indeed, Larry Wall publishes a new tome of information about the rearchitecture every few months. The Parrot team are working on a VM for the language, upon which other languages like Ruby are even planned to be re-implemented.
Get with the times:-)
If this were true, why is it the case that science developed greatly in the Christian world (that has now been become secular) and not in the Buddhistic world?
That's an excellent point. I think you may have answered your own question though. Science has only become revered and far reaching in secular societies.
The other reason is that while Buddhism accepts science and, in some cases, follows it, it is ultimately a faith whose believers are trying to break away from the 'human realm'.
Why do we spend so much time on science and discovery? Even if we made contact with aliens, managed to grow crops on the moon, and all had cellphones, what good is that? When you're dealing with faith, issues of science and technology are almost irrelevant. Buddhists are trying to reach Nirvana, not NYC on their cellphones.
So while Buddhism may comfortably live alongside science, compared with other religions, it does not actively participate in developing it.
I'm no university graduate, so I can't argue on the lingo so much, but I know there is a law or theorem out there that states you cannot define any one system using the variables of that one system.
For example, you cannot totally define the rules of arithmetic without using concepts OUTSIDE of the branch of arithmetic.. can anyone remember what this concept is called? I think this also applies to probabilities. There are axioms related to probability theory that are based on principles from other areas.
You're right about the brain hurting though. You can go round and round with logic.
The impossible cannot exist. Therefore nothing is impossible. I am a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I am perfect.
Buddhism is the only 'old' religion (although some argue it's a philosophy as it has no god) which correlates and whose beliefs correspond with science all the way across the board.
The Buddhist concept of the universe's energy and rebirth of life actually tie in pretty well with science. The belief is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be converted between types.
That's why Buddhists don't believe you diw and.. that's it, game over. They believe the energy ('lifeforce' for want of a better term) merely transposes into another form of energy, which then may be mix with other energy and turn into other life or matter later on. While scientists would not particularly go for the whole reincarnation game, there is a lot of logic in it, and obviously a lot of anecdotal evidence (how do the child prodigies know stuff they shouldn't know? etc.. how comes some people remember fragments of what happened in the past and then verify it to be true? and so on)
Buddhism also presents the theory of the 'middle way'. That is, it is not good to be swung to one side or another on issues, but to steer a middle path only. Our universe shows that nothing exists in a place that is too cold, or a place that is too hot. Psychology shows major issues with people who are too egotistical and people who have no sense of self esteem. The middle way works in all disciplines. You should not be too lazy, but you should not be a workaholic either. And so on.
Another concept is experimentation, which was prevalent in Buddhism way before modern science. Buddhists do not generally believe anything blindly, the Buddha said that it is unwise to believe what someone says without knowing it is true yourself. Therefore you must experiment and prove your own truths. Yet again, another bond with the modern scientific process. Even the Dalai Lama (as a spiritual head of a branch of the religion) has changed many of his views upon being exposed to the West and our different way of life.
Religions and science may never walk hand in hand, but if you pay attention you can find a lot of close bonds and even areas where religion has helped science, rather than hindered it.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another new article on this in the 'Globe and Mail'. It's a bit more indepth, and features a really, er, 'nice' picture of a seemingly shaven lady testing out the machine.
I hate my ISP's crappy transparent web caching.. it causes no end of problems.. including, last year, all of Google's logos being replaced with bizarre images.
While Amazon allows (mostly) free and open access to its API and data, Google, on the other hand, limits everyone to 1000 queries a day.
This means that coders who have tools that are based on Google results (say, some sort of link popularity checking tool) then have to either grab Google the regular way and try their darn best to pretend they're a regular visitor.. or get multiple API keys, which is against the T&Cs.
Of course, I can see why Google is doing this, simply because there's no benefit for them if people just leech their results, but....
Salary market is not really bloated. Living expenses are far more numerous here than in the UK and average pay, depending where you are isn't that great (non grads are lucky to get anything above $10 an hour).
;-)
My experience is solely with LA (spent several weeks there just a while ago). Compared to, say, London, LA seems rather cheap.
In London you not only have to pay your rent, but you have to pay about 10% again in 'Council Tax', whereas, as I understand it, the equivalent US tax 'property tax' is paid by the landlord and not the tenants.
I could rent a place in LA for about $800 a month which would probably be about £650 a month in the UK (approx $1000). Utilities are also cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Car insurance seems collossally higher in LA, although if you can scrape by on public transport or walking (which a surprising number of the people I know in LA do) this can be avoided.
Of course, this is woefully off topic, but I find it interesting to examine the cultural and economic differences of two countries bound only by language!
Sales tax is not as fixed here in the US. We have 50 different States, each charging their own tax.
:-)
Oh, I did realize that. However, isn't sales tax based on the location of the retailer rather than the buyer? For example, if I wanted to buy one of those cheap Linux PCs for $200 on the Web, and they were based in Wisconsin.. then I'd pay $210?
Add to that the fact that some counties (which there can be 100's of in a state) also charge sales tax.. and its virtually impossible to list prices with sales tax.
And I didn't know that.
I guess I am just pissed because I spent 5 weeks in LA, and everywhere you go you get bumped up 8% because the tax isn't included in the display price. If I go to buy a burger and it says $4.99, I expect to pay $4.99.. not have to get out a five and rattle around for change.
I'm in the UK. Computer components cost more here, yet I could build a perfectly fine PC for under $200. I actually keep tabs on how much it'd cost me to get a basic rig up and running for, incase my machine explodes, whatever, and I need something to tide me over.
You can build a regular Duron 1.3Ghz box including case, keyboard, mouse, 30GB HD, 128MB RAM, and using onboard video, sound and LAN for about £140 including the 17.5% sales tax.
Generally US retailers bizarrely don't include the tax (even though you're gunna pay it anyway), so deduct 17.5% from my figure, that's £119.15.. which is just over $190.
These guys are in the US, and they're trade.. so they're getting their parts at well below $200, and probably have a margin of 50%, excluding labor, which, admittedly, could be the deal breaker in the bloated US salary market.
Microtransactions have failed up to now because of the extreme costs involved in processing them. The credit card companies like to take a small flat rate fee and then a percentage on top. On amounts of a few dollars and up, the retailer can swallow this.. but on a buck? Regular deals with the credit card companies could end up with them getting about 40 cents out of the dollar.
:-)
Clearly Apple and chums have made some sort of special deal with the credit card companies, but there's no doubt there's a percentage coming out for the credit card companies.. and their chart just doesn't address it.
You could argue that it's the 'middlemen' section, but this is listed as going to subsidaries such as AOL and Amazon (in the case of certain retailers).. and I seriously doubt as if they'd fork over their whole share to VISA!
Someone with some real knowledge of merchant accounts in this capacity.. please fill us in
Let's face it. Most of the suggestions above are useless. Since when is a company going to officially distribute stuff via Kazaa or BitTorrent? Sorry, but when Microsoft says 'To download our latest Service Pack, use Kazaa' then pigs will be flying. It's so unprofessional.
The easiest solution is not to host it yourself, but to use specialized file hosting ISPs. There are lots of these around, and it's a trivial task on Google to find one at the price you want. These are ISPs that entirely focus on hosting large files for download, with servers optimized for that job.
There's no point in lagging out your regular servers which are probably optimized for something else.. and a dedicated file host can scale as you go.. which would usually cost you a packet.
This would seem a fair argument if I didn't actually find modern music more enjoyable to that of the past. Most of my daily listening is stuff that's come out within the last few years. Of course, there's plenty of ELO, Huey Lewis and The News, and greats from the 70's and 80's, but I love modern stuff. It's just that mass media removes a lot of the anticipation.
Perhaps it's that I've heard almost every style there is about, and so music, on the whole, doesn't excite me anymore in terms of its newness.. whereas I am now more interested in albums and songs after I've 'got into them'.
As you say, this might just be a part of growing up, as I am sure there are kids who scream at their parents nowadays until they buy the latest kid favorite.
That inner page of his is like 660KB all in, so I can see this guy's server taking a crunch real soon. His JPEGs were uber-unoptimized, so I've optimized them and put up a temporary mirror so you can all see the joy that is the rotissery scanner :-) It will disappear in a few hours or so.
Rotissery Scanner Mirror
Thanks for the very insightful reply. It is rare I get such interesting responses ;-) I can comment on one area though:
Consider: why is it OK to hang out in a book store, sit and drink coffee and read all day, but record stores think this is so bad?
Because of the different demographic. Not many ghoulishly dressed 18 year old skater-bois will casually go to the book store and sup coffee, whereas they'd be likely to hang around a record store (see 'Empire Records').
When Richard Branson started the music retail arm of his empire (of course, back then his empire was only a youth advice center anyway!) he capitalised on a big gap in the market. In the UK at the time (the early 70's), all record stores were really boring places, no music playing, and the people in the store didn't care about music.. it was just another thing they sold, along with pins and ribbons. Richard Branson figured he'd create somewhere where music was playing, where the staff were all hippies who 'digged' music, and where customers could lounge around on beanbags smoking pot and checking out the latest tunes. What's more, he'd sell the records cheaper than anyplace else. His store (in Oxford Street, and on which he actually paid no rent to start with!!) was flooded with customers for quite some time. He noticed after a while, however, that while sales were brisk, a lot of people were just turning up and smoking pot all day without buying anything. He cleared these people out, and made it so that people would still want to come to the store, but not that they could stay there all day. And so was developed the current model of 'specialty record store' retail. This is a model that hasn't changed since the 70's! Virgin Megastores tries new things like having listening booths, and computerised searches of their CD database.. but it's too little too late, in my opinion. The next model of retail kicked off in the late 90's with the discounted 'pile it high, sell it cheap' WAL*Mart model of selling records. The big problem, however, is that this is not much different to how records were sold in the UK in the 60's! The staff at Wal*Mart don't know music, and they could care less about what you're buying So.. it seems we've come FULL CIRCLE. And let's face it, the whole music industry has lost its vibe anyway. I remember back in the 'good old days' that it was fun to go buy records, and it was a real thrill to get them home and put them on. Nowadays? Sure, there are a lot of good gigs going on, but few people exhibit the same excitement over CDs these days, since you probably heard half of the tracks on MTV/the radio already anyway. I think commercially music has lost its way, and while there's still a LOT of great music out there.. music just isn't as fun anymore. These stores are feeling the pinch. Why go and hang out at a record store when it's not fun anymore?
Squarepusher is typically known as a techno/drum'n'bass demi-God, but he released one album a few years ago which was actually pure jazz. He played all of the instruments himself and did the recording, and it came out amazingly. It has often been compared to the best of Miles Davis, which is high praise indeed.
What's so interesting about it is you can clearly tell that there's a big modern influence, even a drum'n'bass influence if you will. Where the influence really occured the other way around, his jazz album makes it sound like D&B came first, and then jazz was a progression on from THAT. This leads to some extremely interesting tunes.
The album is called 'Music is Rotted One Note'. I suggest you look at the reviews of it at Amazon (not an affiliate link) and even listen to a few clips. The best track by far, in my opinion, is 'Don't Go Plastic' which has a real Miles feel.
With the recent thread on the decline in white-collar jobs.. I'm not surprised, when they post nonsense like this to some of the world's biggest sites.
I think it's time some of the editors were given the finger and let some nice Indian people give us quality links for $5 an hour. Slashdot would live on, have more money, be of a higher quality, and so on. (CmdrTaco could stay on as general manager though.)
It's funny you say this, but I'm potentially about to go through the H-1B process myself, as a Brit who has accepted a job offer from the US.
I've spent some time in the US, and the jobs are there. The problem is, they're either at a rate which is below the dot com era (say, $50k for a programmer.. which you can EASILY live on, but a lot of people are greedy), or they require you have skills beyond those that an education can give you. For example, extreme UNIX admin stuff, people skills, the ability to sell yourself, etc. In my time in the US I met many friendly and extremely 'people confident' programmers and techies. These were the guys who had the jobs.
If you're the type of super-techie who's great at their job, but can't deal with the marketing people, it's not really surprising you haven't got a job. A self employed life is more for you, and quite rightly so.. besides, you might earn more.
I think people skills are what separate the employed from the unemployed these days, rather than skills. A lot of companies are now hiring on personality and 'can do' attitude rather than pure skill-set.. This is why I've got my job offer. My technical competence may be lower than others they could employ in the same area of the country (a major metropolitan center), but they like me, and they're willing to take on the hassle of getting me out there just to have me.
The problem with technologies like these are that they're simply form factor adjustments of existing technologies.
Currently you can very easily put temperature sensors (or even seismic detectors) in a building, but this project wants to put these items into a brick with a wireless connection. Is this really a story? Sure, such a brick might exist in every new building in the future, but you could have this in your home right now, in a small box containing the same gadgets. Putting it in a brick just doesn't seem that exiting, y'know?
This is like the 'building a PC without a case' stories we see from time to time, but without the humor value of seeing someone mount a motherboard in a cardboard box.
Oh? I thought it was just morally upright and/or hard working people who thought this way -- wouldn't lazyboneses actually prefer a system of forced equal sharing?
A good point, but isn't that the difference between knowing what you need, and stating what you want? Most procrastinating lazy people know that they should work hard and get rewarded for that, but don't.
In my perfect world I'd do no work and be a trillionairre, but alas.. I know I've got to work instead. 99% of the world is moral. Most people don't believe murder or rape are right, most people believe you should reap what you sow.. but just because we don't all live up to morals doesn't mean we don't have them.
Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed.
That's because when you have free will, you choose not to live under an unfair system of sharing everything between everyone, no matter what their merit. When most people have free will, they believe they should receive similar to what they give. If you work hard, you get more. If you don't work hard, you get less.
my boss tells me: We need a program that does foo. So i write the program that does foo, and if i decide that it could potentially be useful to someone else except me, i release it as open-source.
Generally, you cannot do that. If you're working for someone and you produce something, then the rights for that work belong to them, and not you. Therefore, they need to control how that product is licenced.
Of course, if your boss is some schmuck who doesn't know anything about coding, business, or the law, then sure.. release it. But, technically, they own your work unless you signed a contract stating otherwise.
(similar to that of "clean needle" campaign in the War on Drugs)
Sounds great. If I were a hacker does this mean I get a support group, help weaning off of my addiction to hacking, and generous government grants and welfare? Somehow I think not.
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
If you get a camcorder and record a regular CRT and play it back, you'll see all sorts of crazy flickering on the recording. That's because the screen only updates X times per second, and that doesn't always correlate up with how often the camcorder takes a shot.
Generally, people can use a CRT without seeing this flickering. Although if you use a lower refresh rate, most people get headaches, and some will notice flickering or just sense something is 'wrong'.
At the right refresh rate, you could recreate this effect while annoying only perhaps 0.5% of your audience, and if it's just for a few preview screenings, it might be a good idea for them.
and it is doubtful that Perl will ever be re-implemented ever again. It's obvious you don't read Slashdot, or even keep up with the latest programming news. Perl is under heavy reimplementation right now. Indeed, Larry Wall publishes a new tome of information about the rearchitecture every few months. The Parrot team are working on a VM for the language, upon which other languages like Ruby are even planned to be re-implemented. Get with the times :-)
If this were true, why is it the case that science developed greatly in the Christian world (that has now been become secular) and not in the Buddhistic world?
That's an excellent point. I think you may have answered your own question though. Science has only become revered and far reaching in secular societies.
The other reason is that while Buddhism accepts science and, in some cases, follows it, it is ultimately a faith whose believers are trying to break away from the 'human realm'.
Why do we spend so much time on science and discovery? Even if we made contact with aliens, managed to grow crops on the moon, and all had cellphones, what good is that? When you're dealing with faith, issues of science and technology are almost irrelevant. Buddhists are trying to reach Nirvana, not NYC on their cellphones.
So while Buddhism may comfortably live alongside science, compared with other religions, it does not actively participate in developing it.
Smart thinking, that man :-)
I'm no university graduate, so I can't argue on the lingo so much, but I know there is a law or theorem out there that states you cannot define any one system using the variables of that one system.
For example, you cannot totally define the rules of arithmetic without using concepts OUTSIDE of the branch of arithmetic.. can anyone remember what this concept is called? I think this also applies to probabilities. There are axioms related to probability theory that are based on principles from other areas.
You're right about the brain hurting though. You can go round and round with logic.
The impossible cannot exist. Therefore nothing is impossible. I am a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I am perfect.
Buddhism is the only 'old' religion (although some argue it's a philosophy as it has no god) which correlates and whose beliefs correspond with science all the way across the board.
The Buddhist concept of the universe's energy and rebirth of life actually tie in pretty well with science. The belief is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be converted between types.
That's why Buddhists don't believe you diw and.. that's it, game over. They believe the energy ('lifeforce' for want of a better term) merely transposes into another form of energy, which then may be mix with other energy and turn into other life or matter later on. While scientists would not particularly go for the whole reincarnation game, there is a lot of logic in it, and obviously a lot of anecdotal evidence (how do the child prodigies know stuff they shouldn't know? etc.. how comes some people remember fragments of what happened in the past and then verify it to be true? and so on)
Buddhism also presents the theory of the 'middle way'. That is, it is not good to be swung to one side or another on issues, but to steer a middle path only. Our universe shows that nothing exists in a place that is too cold, or a place that is too hot. Psychology shows major issues with people who are too egotistical and people who have no sense of self esteem. The middle way works in all disciplines. You should not be too lazy, but you should not be a workaholic either. And so on.
Another concept is experimentation, which was prevalent in Buddhism way before modern science. Buddhists do not generally believe anything blindly, the Buddha said that it is unwise to believe what someone says without knowing it is true yourself. Therefore you must experiment and prove your own truths. Yet again, another bond with the modern scientific process. Even the Dalai Lama (as a spiritual head of a branch of the religion) has changed many of his views upon being exposed to the West and our different way of life.
Religions and science may never walk hand in hand, but if you pay attention you can find a lot of close bonds and even areas where religion has helped science, rather than hindered it.