Another thing that makes English difficult as a written language is that English has a very large number of vowel sounds, but all are represented by just five letters.
What I'd like to see is several of these teams going back to the drawing board to refine their plans. It seems that a couple of the X-prize teams made some sub-optimal design decisions purely because they wanted to get their product out the door as quickly as possible, and all of them would need improvements to work as safe commercial transportation. Even SpaceShipOne, while being leaps and bounds ahead of the other teams' vehicles, is clearly not ready for regular use.
I mean, have you ever tried to make a good duct tape wallet? A simple "fold up pocket" one isn't too hard, but as soon as you try doing slots for credit cards and your drivers license and all, it becomes a huge PITA. If you're after a duct tape wallet for fashion rather than because you lost your wallet and are too cheap/poor to buy another (which, admittedly, is why I have mine), it's definitely worth it to just buy one.
I used to do the same thing both with my Toyota Corolla and my Subaru Loyale.
Now I have a Honda Civic with those laser-cut keys where you have to get copies from the dealer at $bignum apiece, and I miss the security of knowing I had a nice, flat copy in my wallet.
Granted, with the keyless entry system, I shouldn't have to worry about that anymore since I can just lock the doors with it, but I'm not sure I trust them to not be easy to clone.
The big advantage to.NET/Mono is not platform-independent development. It's kind of asinine to even make that claim since Microsoft has not released the.NET framework on any platform but Widnows, and doesn't have any plans (that they're talking about) to do so.
The big advantage to.NET/Mono is the ability to easily use a common set of libraries from any (.NET/Mono compatible) language. This is why the GTK/GNOME people are so interested in Mono - they have always been interested in letting people work with whatever language they want with a minimum of effort.
As for the patent stuff, I'm not aware of what patents cover.NET. I realize they applied for some patents, but I was also under the impression that the patents they went for covering.NET are so broad they would never hold up in court. Assuming that is true, the only real worry for Mono is that Microsoft would change.NET enough to break what compatibility they have, but the Mono project has already explained why this doesn't worry them.
Your use of the word 'supply' reminds me that The Economist actually had a very insightful article on America's drug policy a few years ago. The entire article basically spent a long time explaining in minute detail how America's drug policy is a complete failure and can only be a complete failure because it creates an artificial perception of short supply without actually making much of a dent in the supply at all. Because of this, the street price of drugs has skyrocketed, but the cost to produce those drugs has increased very little, and the amount of drugs being sold has decreased very little.
What this provides is a situation where being a drug producer is so ludicrously profitable compared to anything else you could be doing with your time that nothing short of indisputable scientific proof that there is in fact a Hell could possibly convince people to stop producing drugs.
This also provides a situation where being a drug dealer is so ludicrously profitable compared to anything a person with no college (or even high school) education could be doing that nothing short of indisputable scientific proof that there is in fact a Hell could possibly get people to stop selling drugs.
It also points out that using the criminal justice system to try to cut off the supply by throwing dealers and trafficers in jail is akin to battling a hydra with tens or hundreds of thousands of heads. Just try and cut off enough to matter before they can grow back.
It was really a fascinating article. I don't really feel like it taught me all that much that I didn't already know from 1920s American hisotry, but it was easily the most well-thought-out discussion of the War on Drugs that I have ever seen, with some incredibly lucid and pertinent examples, and it completely steered clear of the "Sky is Falling" rhetoric that both sides of the drugs argument usually prefer to stick to.
You're right, Joe is buying a new computer in 2-3 years.
But that's the problem. All the Joes I know are buying a computer every few years, but the biggest workout these computers get is some of the more processor-intensive operations in TurboTax.
Meanwhile, in 2003 I was working on a stereoscopic computer vision system for a thesis. The development computer? Pentium 133 MMX laptop with 32MB of RAM. And it was definitely up to the task. No, it wouldn't run at a high enough framerate to, say, work on a platform moving at the pace of a walking human, but it didn't need to.
I'm pretty sure that people determine that a computer is 'underpowered' using the same logical system that they use to decide that a car is underpowered if it can only go 40mph over the speed limit.
Maybe I need to take the time to go to Infinium Labs's site, but otherwise this article doesn't really wow me. Those 20 developers could be a bunch of firms that don't have any hit games under their belts (or on the stove). Those 25+ games on the greatest games of all times list probably include such cutting-edge soon-to-be hits as DOOM, Commander Keen, Warcraft, and Pac-Man.
I'll get excited when they can drop names like Sega and Valve and mention games like DOOM 3 and Warcraft 3.
Maybe the nature of e-mail has changed in the past couple of days. But if it hasn't, then it seems to me that requiring an e-mail address would only be like requiring people to have license plates if there were no laws saying that license plates had to be unique to the vehicle, or even government-issued.
The idea is that if take one act and turn it into several crimes by breaking the act into little pieces and making each of those illegal (in addition to the primary act), you will be able to lock someobody up for a very long time if they are caught committing even a very minor offense. This is supposed to act as a deterrent.
I'm sure even a kindergartener could find several logical flaws and unfounded assumptions inherent in this line of thinking, and anyone old enough to have research skills could also find a huge stack of numbers that also show that this is silly. Still, it is the basis for a large percentage of the USA's legal opus, including some laws that most people seem to really like (hate crimes, for example).
(completely unrelated, I swear)Fun Fact: Did you know the USA has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other democracy (and most other authorotarian states) in the world?
Security is a lot more complicated than what OS you run and whether or not you have AV software installed.
From the business perspective, that Linux server could be way more insecure because it's allowing Telnet and non-anonymous FTP connections. With those you're shouting username/password pairs across the aether for anyone to pick up and use, and someone can log in and start stealing corporate data.
If I were running a company, I'd be far more worried about that than I would be about most Windows viruses.
&& you're acting like IT people have the ability to just redefine the world w/r/t security. If I blocked attatchments and replaced Windows NT with Linux, I'd get hanged for basically shutting down the company. (With very good reason, too - I would have basically shut down the company.)
Hey, don't blame them for 4-pin FW ports. Me, I blame all the cheap-ass PC users who push manufacturers to cut costs by any means necessary, including emasculating an otherwise far superior bus technology.
The amount power you can send over a 6-pin FireWire bus is one of its greatest assets. I've had four external FireWire hard drives daisy-chained off of one FW port without having to resort to an external power source. Granted, God Save You if you try to transfer data from two of those drives at once, but with USB I've never even seen one drive work without an external power source.
I imagine the next great innovations we'll get from Dell and company will include mice that speak to the computer using BlueTooth but get their power from 110V A/C, optical drives where you spin the media with a hand crank, and MP3 players that have no internal storage but can grab music from SMB shares using the convenient ethernet port.
The EULA that came with my copy of OS X Server says you aren't allowed to install the OS on non-Apple hardware. You'll have to call them and work out a special agreement.
Political reporting may run more smoothly, but as far as the stability of a country's political climate, a two party system is much more susceptible to violent
swinging right
and left as the country switches between one party having the most seats (and winning any vote that goes along partisan lines) and then the other party having the most seats and trying to get all their digs in before they lose the majority again.
Well, to me trying to implement is as important as actually implementing in determining how much I think a politician agrees with me.
And I guess it also depends on what your threshold for signifigance is. To me, it is very significant that under Bush's watch mercury compounds have suddenly been downgraded from toxic chemical status to "volatile organic compounds" and that manufacturers have been given the right to violate clean air acts.
I also think it is very significant that the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law with little protest by Clinton.
And on government spending and small vs. big government, I think the real truth is that the two parties have flip-flopped. Or rather, that the Republicans have made such a rapid shift to big government politics over the past 20 years that the Democrats, by not making many changes to their platform during that period of time, suddenly became the small government party.
So I don't think it's really that there is no difference between the two parties. (Hell, look at how many votes fall on partisan lines and try to tell me again that it doesn't matter which side is in power) Instead, I think it's that the disconnect between what each party claims to stand for and what it really does stand for has grown so large that it's getting darn near impossible to remember which party believes in what.
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as would the latter, I think. At least, not without adding accents or more glyphs to the English alphabet.
Gotta love a party whose campaign platform is largely unconstitutional.
It couldn't be some third party that is opposed to Bush, but isn't the Democratic Party.
Another thing that makes English difficult as a written language is that English has a very large number of vowel sounds, but all are represented by just five letters.
What I'd like to see is several of these teams going back to the drawing board to refine their plans. It seems that a couple of the X-prize teams made some sub-optimal design decisions purely because they wanted to get their product out the door as quickly as possible, and all of them would need improvements to work as safe commercial transportation. Even SpaceShipOne, while being leaps and bounds ahead of the other teams' vehicles, is clearly not ready for regular use.
Eh, it's what OS X uses for configurations.
Personally, I like it. Throwing everything together in a huge registry is a can of worms just asking for trouble.
I mean, have you ever tried to make a good duct tape wallet? A simple "fold up pocket" one isn't too hard, but as soon as you try doing slots for credit cards and your drivers license and all, it becomes a huge PITA. If you're after a duct tape wallet for fashion rather than because you lost your wallet and are too cheap/poor to buy another (which, admittedly, is why I have mine), it's definitely worth it to just buy one.
I used to do the same thing both with my Toyota Corolla and my Subaru Loyale.
Now I have a Honda Civic with those laser-cut keys where you have to get copies from the dealer at $bignum apiece, and I miss the security of knowing I had a nice, flat copy in my wallet.
Granted, with the keyless entry system, I shouldn't have to worry about that anymore since I can just lock the doors with it, but I'm not sure I trust them to not be easy to clone.
As a Lisp geek who has to use Java at work, let me suggest the following improvement to your list:
The big advantage to .NET/Mono is not platform-independent development. It's kind of asinine to even make that claim since Microsoft has not released the .NET framework on any platform but Widnows, and doesn't have any plans (that they're talking about) to do so.
.NET/Mono is the ability to easily use a common set of libraries from any (.NET/Mono compatible) language. This is why the GTK/GNOME people are so interested in Mono - they have always been interested in letting people work with whatever language they want with a minimum of effort.
.NET. I realize they applied for some patents, but I was also under the impression that the patents they went for covering .NET are so broad they would never hold up in court. Assuming that is true, the only real worry for Mono is that Microsoft would change .NET enough to break what compatibility they have, but the Mono project has already explained why this doesn't worry them.
The big advantage to
As for the patent stuff, I'm not aware of what patents cover
Your use of the word 'supply' reminds me that The Economist actually had a very insightful article on America's drug policy a few years ago. The entire article basically spent a long time explaining in minute detail how America's drug policy is a complete failure and can only be a complete failure because it creates an artificial perception of short supply without actually making much of a dent in the supply at all. Because of this, the street price of drugs has skyrocketed, but the cost to produce those drugs has increased very little, and the amount of drugs being sold has decreased very little.
What this provides is a situation where being a drug producer is so ludicrously profitable compared to anything else you could be doing with your time that nothing short of indisputable scientific proof that there is in fact a Hell could possibly convince people to stop producing drugs.
This also provides a situation where being a drug dealer is so ludicrously profitable compared to anything a person with no college (or even high school) education could be doing that nothing short of indisputable scientific proof that there is in fact a Hell could possibly get people to stop selling drugs.
It also points out that using the criminal justice system to try to cut off the supply by throwing dealers and trafficers in jail is akin to battling a hydra with tens or hundreds of thousands of heads. Just try and cut off enough to matter before they can grow back.
It was really a fascinating article. I don't really feel like it taught me all that much that I didn't already know from 1920s American hisotry, but it was easily the most well-thought-out discussion of the War on Drugs that I have ever seen, with some incredibly lucid and pertinent examples, and it completely steered clear of the "Sky is Falling" rhetoric that both sides of the drugs argument usually prefer to stick to.
Yes.
In the same way that non-negative means >0.
It doesn't matter if you're doing something useful, or even something that's noncounterproductive, as long as you're doing something.
You're right, Joe is buying a new computer in 2-3 years.
But that's the problem. All the Joes I know are buying a computer every few years, but the biggest workout these computers get is some of the more processor-intensive operations in TurboTax.
Meanwhile, in 2003 I was working on a stereoscopic computer vision system for a thesis. The development computer? Pentium 133 MMX laptop with 32MB of RAM. And it was definitely up to the task. No, it wouldn't run at a high enough framerate to, say, work on a platform moving at the pace of a walking human, but it didn't need to.
I'm pretty sure that people determine that a computer is 'underpowered' using the same logical system that they use to decide that a car is underpowered if it can only go 40mph over the speed limit.
Maybe I need to take the time to go to Infinium Labs's site, but otherwise this article doesn't really wow me. Those 20 developers could be a bunch of firms that don't have any hit games under their belts (or on the stove). Those 25+ games on the greatest games of all times list probably include such cutting-edge soon-to-be hits as DOOM, Commander Keen, Warcraft, and Pac-Man.
I'll get excited when they can drop names like Sega and Valve and mention games like DOOM 3 and Warcraft 3.
. . . or does anyone else get the feeling that the synopsis for this article was written by Mojo Jojo?
In the form of an e-mail address?
Maybe the nature of e-mail has changed in the past couple of days. But if it hasn't, then it seems to me that requiring an e-mail address would only be like requiring people to have license plates if there were no laws saying that license plates had to be unique to the vehicle, or even government-issued.
The idea is that if take one act and turn it into several crimes by breaking the act into little pieces and making each of those illegal (in addition to the primary act), you will be able to lock someobody up for a very long time if they are caught committing even a very minor offense. This is supposed to act as a deterrent.
I'm sure even a kindergartener could find several logical flaws and unfounded assumptions inherent in this line of thinking, and anyone old enough to have research skills could also find a huge stack of numbers that also show that this is silly. Still, it is the basis for a large percentage of the USA's legal opus, including some laws that most people seem to really like (hate crimes, for example).
(completely unrelated, I swear)Fun Fact: Did you know the USA has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other democracy (and most other authorotarian states) in the world?
Security is a lot more complicated than what OS you run and whether or not you have AV software installed.
From the business perspective, that Linux server could be way more insecure because it's allowing Telnet and non-anonymous FTP connections. With those you're shouting username/password pairs across the aether for anyone to pick up and use, and someone can log in and start stealing corporate data.
If I were running a company, I'd be far more worried about that than I would be about most Windows viruses.
&& you're acting like IT people have the ability to just redefine the world w/r/t security. If I blocked attatchments and replaced Windows NT with Linux, I'd get hanged for basically shutting down the company. (With very good reason, too - I would have basically shut down the company.)
Hey, don't blame them for 4-pin FW ports. Me, I blame all the cheap-ass PC users who push manufacturers to cut costs by any means necessary, including emasculating an otherwise far superior bus technology.
The amount power you can send over a 6-pin FireWire bus is one of its greatest assets. I've had four external FireWire hard drives daisy-chained off of one FW port without having to resort to an external power source. Granted, God Save You if you try to transfer data from two of those drives at once, but with USB I've never even seen one drive work without an external power source.
I imagine the next great innovations we'll get from Dell and company will include mice that speak to the computer using BlueTooth but get their power from 110V A/C, optical drives where you spin the media with a hand crank, and MP3 players that have no internal storage but can grab music from SMB shares using the convenient ethernet port.
I would imagine the traffic of porn and usenet far outweigh spam and is also increasing at an exponential rate.
Last I checked, the majority of all Usenet traffic is spam.
The EULA that came with my copy of OS X Server says you aren't allowed to install the OS on non-Apple hardware. You'll have to call them and work out a special agreement.
Political reporting may run more smoothly, but as far as the stability of a country's political climate, a two party system is much more susceptible to
violent
swinging
right
and
left
as the country switches between one party having the most seats (and winning any vote that goes along partisan lines) and then the other party having the most seats and trying to get all their digs in before they lose the majority again.
Well, to me trying to implement is as important as actually implementing in determining how much I think a politician agrees with me.
And I guess it also depends on what your threshold for signifigance is. To me, it is very significant that under Bush's watch mercury compounds have suddenly been downgraded from toxic chemical status to "volatile organic compounds" and that manufacturers have been given the right to violate clean air acts.
I also think it is very significant that the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law with little protest by Clinton.
And on government spending and small vs. big government, I think the real truth is that the two parties have flip-flopped. Or rather, that the Republicans have made such a rapid shift to big government politics over the past 20 years that the Democrats, by not making many changes to their platform during that period of time, suddenly became the small government party.
So I don't think it's really that there is no difference between the two parties. (Hell, look at how many votes fall on partisan lines and try to tell me again that it doesn't matter which side is in power) Instead, I think it's that the disconnect between what each party claims to stand for and what it really does stand for has grown so large that it's getting darn near impossible to remember which party believes in what.
I may not be able to keep someone from cutting a hole in the side of my house, but that doesn't keep me from locking my doors when I'm out.