Yah, but I'm a practising Buddhist with some (amateur) scholarly interest in Buddhist texts, and I'll back you up on that.
I've met very few Buddhists who ever use the word 'suffering' when they mean 'dukkha.' The ones that do are usually folks whose experience with Buddhism has sadly been limited to semi-pop-culture books and syncretic New-Age Pseudobuddhism.
Hmm. Interesting idea. I've always wanted a MacIvory system, but don't really think it's worth putting all the effort into hunting down a MacIvory card and a Quadra.
I remember reading somewhere that Buddhism is the only major religion that has been positively correlated with happiness. Possibly it has something to do with Buddhism being the only major religion (that I can think of) whose sole stated purpose is to make people happier.
Methinks a lot of folks would argue that Python isn't a spiritual descendant so much as a wannabe. My understanding (I haven't programmed in Python much) is that it lacks a lot of the features that make lisp So. Damn. Cool., such as macros, and its closures are broken in the eyes of a lot of lispers. To me, the real kicker is that there is still a strong division between data and code in Python.
We aren't enslaved by our technology or our employers. We're enslaved by our own shallow, greedy, workaholic culture.
Our employers call us at home and have us bring our work home on company-provided laptops because we, as a society, let them do it.
Nay, we ask for it. Our obsessive need to have everything we buy cost less is what forces companies to start forcing us to do things like working unpaid overtime.
We're enslaving ourselves for valuing TVs that we don't have the time to watch and luxury cars that we will love for a week and then spend the rest of our lives associating with the two hours' worth of heavy traffic that we use them to experience every day. You're not a victim of the march of technology, you're not even a victim of your boss (remember, you agreed to take the job). You're just a victim of rampant materialism.
Think I'm just being some sort of hippie idealist? Well, chew on this: lately studies have been consitently showing that, once you get past the poverty line, personal satisfaction and happiness are negatively correlated with income.
The way science is taught in general in American public schools is unacceptable. They don't teach you science, they teach you to swallow and regurgitate. That doesn't prepare you for science, that prepares you for believing everything you read - meaning that it prepares you to believe evolution theory no better than it prepares you to believe 'creation science.'
I remember my high school biology class. Instead of learning biology, we spent large amounts of time doing completely useless stuff like memorizing every phylum and class in the animal kingdom. We spent maybe a day on the scientific method (that obligatory single day that is in every science class), but we never learned how to apply it or what it means.
I don't trust that number. For one, I can't find it on the company's website - whenever the topic of fuel efficiency or air pollution comes up, they throw up a smokescreen rather than giving some numbers.
For two, numbers in units of miles per gallon a rather unorthodox way of reporting an aircraft's fuel efficiency. This makes me think that this is the number they get for when it's operating on the ground.
For three, fixed-wing aircraft have fuel overall efficiencies that compete with cars, and VTOL aircraft ALWAYS consume a whole mess more fuel than CTOL aircraft. If they can really create an aircraft like this that sips fuel better than your average automobile (in the US at least), but haven't bothered to start pushing the technology behind their rotary engines to anybody in the auto industry - not even Mazda - I would be forced to conclude that the company is full of drooling morons.
Much easier for me to believe that that number is a result of either reporters screwing the facts up like they are wont to do when science or technology is involved, or a result of marketing people doing what marketing people get paid to do.
Huh, but the price of a first class ticket probably won't even cover a single Skycar ride. The fuel consumption on that thing must be completely off the wall - it looks like the aerodynamic equivalent of a gorgeous, curvy, futuristic-looking brick.
My dream scenario for this starts with the RIAA following through and yanking the rights to all of their music from Apple.
Should this happen, Apple will have to find something to do with iTMS - I think shutting it down would be their very last resort. Much more likely, Apple cashes in on what little "counterculture" street cred they might still have, and starts courting independent bands and labels.
Freed of the insatiable greed of the RIAA, they and the indie lables start turning the store into a much better service. The samples will get longer, and you will even be able to download full songs from many bands looking to market their new albums. The iTMS becomes a worthwhile service, and rapidly gains popularity. Pundits declare it the center of the independent music Universe, and hail Apple as the Greatest Company on Earth.
On top of that, Apple starts really capitalizing on the podcast thing. They start arranging agreements with various news and sports radio networks whereby people can subscribe to shows for a price. Apple breaks out of the young technophile music-head market and starts getting the attention of NPR addicts. (However, they will draw ridicule when their ad campaign featuring sillhouettes of people wearing headphones sitting at desks or driving home in traffic and being less bored than normal is launched.)
Through it all, Apple fares fairly well, and may even lose some of the "evil corporation" reputation it's been earning lately, although its profits may take a slight hit as the iTMS becomes more expensive to run. iPod sales will stay where they are, because iPod sales drive iTMS sales, not the other way around. Customers aren't hurt because there are plenty of other places to download MP3s on the internet.
The RIAA, though, ends up with egg on their face as their play at forcing Apple into a position where they can be accused of (and sued for) actively supporting piracy with iTunes and the iPod fails miserably. They also hurt their sales as they close down a small but noticeable source of revenue and it is promptly replaced by the biggest advertisement and point of sale that their competitors have ever had. Their reputation suffers further as a few more people are added to the ranks of those who think the RIAA is a pack of fucking morons with a greed problem.
Geez, if I had to all the details of how my computer, my cell phone, my car, my microwave oven, my mitochondria etc. worked, I don't think I would ever have made it through figuring all that stuff out in time to learn my multiplication tables before I died.
Hell, if I had to learn the particulars of every subsystem on my desktop computer, I don't think I would ever have gotten around to write a single useful program for it.
You keep your transistors, and I'll take my lexical scoping, and we'll all be happier for it.
You can lock down Windows well enough for business networks. But I would suggest that anyone who thinks that you can lock the unmanageable combinatorial explosion that is Windows down enough to make it suitable for anything on a Reagan-class aircraft carrier that might be considered "important" needs to read up on Windows a bit more.
Eight levels of TCSEC computer system security specifications, and nobody has succeeded in making a Windows-based system that met the minimum level except for Microsoft, who did it by making heavy modificatoins to NT4, and could still only make it by not having the thing networked, if I remember right.
I'm not saying that there isn't some crazy good security architecture, including separate networks for separate systems. And I do believe I mentioned keeping absolutely critical stuff cut off from the world in the first two clauses of the first sentence of the flipping grandparent post.
But a rootkit taking down even some piddly general-purpose office LAN but not being able to touch anything else is still a serious problem. Last I heard, there is very little that goes on on a battleship or carrier that you can readily dismiss as unimportant.
These guys need to be using a real secure envrionment for their computing - not Windows, not Linux, and I have my doubts about the likes of OpenBSD.
For the absolutely critical stuff, this may be an option, but I would be amazed if I were to learn that the military designs their large ships such that few to none of their computers are able to talk to each other electronically. And I'm simply not willing to believe that, in the year 2005, 36 years after the initial deployment of ARPANET, the US Navy still hasn't discovered how incredibly useful it can be to network computers together.
Nor have I ever heard of anything like "schlepping TCP packets stored on removable media back and forth across the boat detail."
Re:Really did innovate- not recently
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yah, but that's like saying that pine cones taste better than used tires.
Mobile computing in general has been stagnating. PalmOS completely failed to grow with the technology. Windows Mobile has never quite grasped that the hardware on which the OS is about the size of a stack of index cards and has a usage pattern that generally consists of pulling it out of a pocket, using it for 15 seconds, and putting it back in the pocket.
I killed my Tungsten|T2 last month. I'm making do with a dead tree notebook and my laptop until something worth spending money on comes out - not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
Simple. Moderation rule number 1: If you disagree, mod down. If you can't think of a good reason for the public, mod at random. If you can't think of a good reason but you don't want people to know, mod -1(Overrated).
I get modded down for speaking my mind all the time. It's really not surprising anymore.
Have you tried polishing the screen with some low abrasive? (I use toothpaste - but not toothpaste with baking soda or pumice, of course!) and it worked on my iPod.
Also, buy some clear plastic screen protectors for a handheld computer and trim 'em down. I did it on my iPod, too.
Maybe it's worse than it used to be, but it is true that iPods have always scratched when you look at them the wrong way. Precautions, precautions!
This should be possible. Why the hell isn't it already here?
I can tell you haven't spent much time working with the state of the art in devices that use voice recognition. (Your cell phone's voice dial doesn't count.)
In a word, because it would suck and be immensely frustrating. Only people who are clueful enough to realize they have to speak cleary and evenly and remember to turn off the TV and get everyone else in the room to shut up would be able to get the thing to recognize them with an acceptable level of accuracy.
Buy Konfabulator. It'll be cheaper, easier, and more useful.
1. Darwin 2. I'm pretty sure I had GNOME running on my OS X box years ago. 3. I'm pretty sure people have been running KDE on their OS X boxes years ago. 4. Oh wait, I know. KDE has been part of fink for a while now.
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Yah, but I'm a practising Buddhist with some (amateur) scholarly interest in Buddhist texts, and I'll back you up on that.
I've met very few Buddhists who ever use the word 'suffering' when they mean 'dukkha.' The ones that do are usually folks whose experience with Buddhism has sadly been limited to semi-pop-culture books and syncretic New-Age Pseudobuddhism.
Hmm. Interesting idea. I've always wanted a MacIvory system, but don't really think it's worth putting all the effort into hunting down a MacIvory card and a Quadra.
Exactly.
I remember reading somewhere that Buddhism is the only major religion that has been positively correlated with happiness. Possibly it has something to do with Buddhism being the only major religion (that I can think of) whose sole stated purpose is to make people happier.
Methinks a lot of folks would argue that Python isn't a spiritual descendant so much as a wannabe. My understanding (I haven't programmed in Python much) is that it lacks a lot of the features that make lisp So. Damn. Cool., such as macros, and its closures are broken in the eyes of a lot of lispers. To me, the real kicker is that there is still a strong division between data and code in Python.
Enslaved is a bit harsh of a term.
We aren't enslaved by our technology or our employers. We're enslaved by our own shallow, greedy, workaholic culture.
Our employers call us at home and have us bring our work home on company-provided laptops because we, as a society, let them do it.
Nay, we ask for it. Our obsessive need to have everything we buy cost less is what forces companies to start forcing us to do things like working unpaid overtime.
We're enslaving ourselves for valuing TVs that we don't have the time to watch and luxury cars that we will love for a week and then spend the rest of our lives associating with the two hours' worth of heavy traffic that we use them to experience every day. You're not a victim of the march of technology, you're not even a victim of your boss (remember, you agreed to take the job). You're just a victim of rampant materialism.
Think I'm just being some sort of hippie idealist? Well, chew on this: lately studies have been consitently showing that, once you get past the poverty line, personal satisfaction and happiness are negatively correlated with income.
Nuclear weapons. Anthrax. Acid rain. Constant surveillance. MDMA.
Technology just doesn't magically make life better. It turns out that it's a neutral thing. It's people that make life better or worse.
This is perl-land. Punctuation is always optional in perl-land.
The way science is taught in general in American public schools is unacceptable. They don't teach you science, they teach you to swallow and regurgitate. That doesn't prepare you for science, that prepares you for believing everything you read - meaning that it prepares you to believe evolution theory no better than it prepares you to believe 'creation science.'
I remember my high school biology class. Instead of learning biology, we spent large amounts of time doing completely useless stuff like memorizing every phylum and class in the animal kingdom. We spent maybe a day on the scientific method (that obligatory single day that is in every science class), but we never learned how to apply it or what it means.
Yeah, but all they want to talk about for this one is good old 92-octane unleaded.
I don't trust that number. For one, I can't find it on the company's website - whenever the topic of fuel efficiency or air pollution comes up, they throw up a smokescreen rather than giving some numbers.
For two, numbers in units of miles per gallon a rather unorthodox way of reporting an aircraft's fuel efficiency. This makes me think that this is the number they get for when it's operating on the ground.
For three, fixed-wing aircraft have fuel overall efficiencies that compete with cars, and VTOL aircraft ALWAYS consume a whole mess more fuel than CTOL aircraft. If they can really create an aircraft like this that sips fuel better than your average automobile (in the US at least), but haven't bothered to start pushing the technology behind their rotary engines to anybody in the auto industry - not even Mazda - I would be forced to conclude that the company is full of drooling morons.
Much easier for me to believe that that number is a result of either reporters screwing the facts up like they are wont to do when science or technology is involved, or a result of marketing people doing what marketing people get paid to do.
Huh, but the price of a first class ticket probably won't even cover a single Skycar ride. The fuel consumption on that thing must be completely off the wall - it looks like the aerodynamic equivalent of a gorgeous, curvy, futuristic-looking brick.
My dream scenario for this starts with the RIAA following through and yanking the rights to all of their music from Apple.
Should this happen, Apple will have to find something to do with iTMS - I think shutting it down would be their very last resort. Much more likely, Apple cashes in on what little "counterculture" street cred they might still have, and starts courting independent bands and labels.
Freed of the insatiable greed of the RIAA, they and the indie lables start turning the store into a much better service. The samples will get longer, and you will even be able to download full songs from many bands looking to market their new albums. The iTMS becomes a worthwhile service, and rapidly gains popularity. Pundits declare it the center of the independent music Universe, and hail Apple as the Greatest Company on Earth.
On top of that, Apple starts really capitalizing on the podcast thing. They start arranging agreements with various news and sports radio networks whereby people can subscribe to shows for a price. Apple breaks out of the young technophile music-head market and starts getting the attention of NPR addicts. (However, they will draw ridicule when their ad campaign featuring sillhouettes of people wearing headphones sitting at desks or driving home in traffic and being less bored than normal is launched.)
Through it all, Apple fares fairly well, and may even lose some of the "evil corporation" reputation it's been earning lately, although its profits may take a slight hit as the iTMS becomes more expensive to run. iPod sales will stay where they are, because iPod sales drive iTMS sales, not the other way around. Customers aren't hurt because there are plenty of other places to download MP3s on the internet.
The RIAA, though, ends up with egg on their face as their play at forcing Apple into a position where they can be accused of (and sued for) actively supporting piracy with iTunes and the iPod fails miserably. They also hurt their sales as they close down a small but noticeable source of revenue and it is promptly replaced by the biggest advertisement and point of sale that their competitors have ever had. Their reputation suffers further as a few more people are added to the ranks of those who think the RIAA is a pack of fucking morons with a greed problem.
My Voodoo3 card has no fan, either. I got it five years ago.
Geez, if I had to all the details of how my computer, my cell phone, my car, my microwave oven, my mitochondria etc. worked, I don't think I would ever have made it through figuring all that stuff out in time to learn my multiplication tables before I died.
Hell, if I had to learn the particulars of every subsystem on my desktop computer, I don't think I would ever have gotten around to write a single useful program for it.
You keep your transistors, and I'll take my lexical scoping, and we'll all be happier for it.
You can lock down Windows well enough for business networks. But I would suggest that anyone who thinks that you can lock the unmanageable combinatorial explosion that is Windows down enough to make it suitable for anything on a Reagan-class aircraft carrier that might be considered "important" needs to read up on Windows a bit more.
Eight levels of TCSEC computer system security specifications, and nobody has succeeded in making a Windows-based system that met the minimum level except for Microsoft, who did it by making heavy modificatoins to NT4, and could still only make it by not having the thing networked, if I remember right.
I'm not saying that there isn't some crazy good security architecture, including separate networks for separate systems. And I do believe I mentioned keeping absolutely critical stuff cut off from the world in the first two clauses of the first sentence of the flipping grandparent post.
But a rootkit taking down even some piddly general-purpose office LAN but not being able to touch anything else is still a serious problem. Last I heard, there is very little that goes on on a battleship or carrier that you can readily dismiss as unimportant.
These guys need to be using a real secure envrionment for their computing - not Windows, not Linux, and I have my doubts about the likes of OpenBSD.
For the absolutely critical stuff, this may be an option, but I would be amazed if I were to learn that the military designs their large ships such that few to none of their computers are able to talk to each other electronically. And I'm simply not willing to believe that, in the year 2005, 36 years after the initial deployment of ARPANET, the US Navy still hasn't discovered how incredibly useful it can be to network computers together.
Nor have I ever heard of anything like "schlepping TCP packets stored on removable media back and forth across the boat detail."
Yah, but that's like saying that pine cones taste better than used tires.
Mobile computing in general has been stagnating. PalmOS completely failed to grow with the technology. Windows Mobile has never quite grasped that the hardware on which the OS is about the size of a stack of index cards and has a usage pattern that generally consists of pulling it out of a pocket, using it for 15 seconds, and putting it back in the pocket.
I killed my Tungsten|T2 last month. I'm making do with a dead tree notebook and my laptop until something worth spending money on comes out - not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
This should help you find something better than a keyboard.
Simple. Moderation rule number 1: If you disagree, mod down. If you can't think of a good reason for the public, mod at random. If you can't think of a good reason but you don't want people to know, mod -1(Overrated).
I get modded down for speaking my mind all the time. It's really not surprising anymore.
Have you tried polishing the screen with some low abrasive? (I use toothpaste - but not toothpaste with baking soda or pumice, of course!) and it worked on my iPod.
Also, buy some clear plastic screen protectors for a handheld computer and trim 'em down. I did it on my iPod, too.
Maybe it's worse than it used to be, but it is true that iPods have always scratched when you look at them the wrong way. Precautions, precautions!
The U.S. Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels.
Ahem. . . isn't a key part of the definition of the term "terrorist" that they attack civilian targets?
Or have we officially redefined the term to include anyone who attacks an American anything under any circumstances, ever?
This should be possible. Why the hell isn't it already here?
I can tell you haven't spent much time working with the state of the art in devices that use voice recognition. (Your cell phone's voice dial doesn't count.)
In a word, because it would suck and be immensely frustrating. Only people who are clueful enough to realize they have to speak cleary and evenly and remember to turn off the TV and get everyone else in the room to shut up would be able to get the thing to recognize them with an acceptable level of accuracy.
Buy Konfabulator. It'll be cheaper, easier, and more useful.
1. Darwin
2. I'm pretty sure I had GNOME running on my OS X box years ago.
3. I'm pretty sure people have been running KDE on their OS X boxes years ago.
4. Oh wait, I know. KDE has been part of fink for a while now.