If you've ever watched the movie "Joyeux Noël", you would know that "fraternizing" is an extreme threat to the social order of warfare, and punished accordingly.
He is accurate, however, in depicting the aftermath: Officers and troops were punished for fraternizing with the enemy in wartime. A priest who celebrated mass in No Man's Land is savagely criticized by his bishop, who believes the patriotic task of the clergy is to urge the troops into battle and reconcile them to death.
Torture is a means of maintaining the required psychological boundaries which military duty entails.
Somewhere on the Michael Moore DVD, there is a scene of young American soldiers abusing an elderly Iraqi man, is tied up, has a black hood on his head, and appears to have some kind of injury. Would you let your own grandfather lie there in that condition? The troops resolve the cognitive dissonance by humiliating the man for his stress erection.
The men on both sides who failed to kill each other one Christmas night were dispatched on both sides to the bloodiest fronts in Europe. Who or what exactly was harmed by these men briefly failing to shoot at each other?
I suspect few of the men known to have fraternized survived the war. No army punishes its torturers as harshly. The actor who plays the drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket" was a real life drill sergeant. Under a psychological barrage of that intensity, not even the terminally obtuse fails to internalize the prevailing value system, and I'm not talking about the value system as portrayed in their recruiting pamphlets.
If patriotism was a rock band, torture would be one of the groupies.
However, when you attribute blame to a faultless party, regardless of whether you have a legitimate beef, you're just an uneducated whinging windbag.
I've never understood why false blame is regarded as an inalienable force of nature. I recall from my grade three classroom the glee that ensued whenever anybody cut a ripe one at the amazing ease of hanging the blame on any arbitrary person remotely in the upwind quadrant. You just had to be first at putting forward an arbitrary name. "Hey, Marvin, you didn't!" and Marvin would have to be very quick to deflect the hot potato.
We learn the social rules surrounding this game of arbitrary blamesmanship at the vulnerable age when children assimilate the religious beliefs of their parents. Along with everything else we learn at that age, it's rarely questioned again, apart from a Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut here or there with vinegar wit.
Clearly, now that the problem is known, Ubuntu should remediate it as best as possible, or they will deserve their share of the blame.
Still, I find it shocking how easily society accepts the notion that any person feeling abused and disempowered is entirely within their rights to arbitrarily point their finger at the nearest upwind party.
Unlike, say, derogating SVN, which really is for the i'm-too-dumb/lazy-to-explain/post-something-notable crowd.
Much better.
I just introduced an Eclipse/SVN/JIRA/wiki solution to a small embedded company which previously had none of the above. Tortoise and the Subversion plug-in made the transition relatively painless. I've mostly used distributed SCM in the past. For this project, svn was an easy place to start.
[Actually, I wrote this the other night, and got called away from the keyboard before I hit "submit".]
If you buy a recordable CD, it's assumed that you'll use a portion of it for copying music - some you pay something like $0.25 per cd to compensate the artists of that music.
The other way to look at this is that when you do copy someone's music, it's perfectly fine... you already paid for it through the CD levy. The psychology of this law is incredibly stupid.
Is there anyone (aside from crazies) who DOES want to die?
I have yet to meet a women who looks forward to the act of childbirth. Are there any crazies out there who believe that humanity should endure the agony of childbirth?
I'm not especially looking forward to my moment of death, but I don't fear *being* dead any more than I once feared being as yet unconceived. Around this neck of the woods, I was unconceived for 4 billion years, and I don't recall it being all that bad.
I think Kurzweil is desperate for Singularity to happen sooner because frankly he just doesn't want to die.
Yes, you could make a movie about the guy entitled "The Projectionist". He is also driven to anthropomorphize because he believes the foreverafterlife is a hybrid man/machine state of being.
I tend to view immortalists in much the same way as the drivers who cut in front of me on a crowded highway only to discover that my lane is going no faster than the lane they came from. Imagine we do succeed in this quest. Then the shit will really hit the fan. "The Future is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed". Think about the consequences of that statement. Do people think immortality will be available for purchase at the iTunes store?
It will be just like the markets. A lot of people will be lead to believe they're next in line, only to discover that the immortals have suspended distribution shortly before the time comes for the average prole to cash in his chips.
You seemed to have missed a page in your instruction manual about how this game is played. First of all, you need to predict what happens. Secondly, you need to not predict what doesn't happen. Posting evidence of one without the other makes the glorious sound of one hand patting.
I once read a study which claimed that many men tend to "freshen the troops" in the hours leading up to a fling after a brief (e.g. week long) separation from their girl friend. This is claimed to improve sperm fitness. It doesn't surprise me at all that there is a best before date. Biology tends not to leave major biological systems in parking orbits, lest they not be in good working order when the time comes, whatever the Calvinists might think.
I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here?
Slashdot, the game show: I'm smarter than you, and I can prove it in five disconnected, ungrammatical sentences.
Personally, I post here because it allows me to commune with the human truth that no matter whether you have a brain or a clue or both, it doesn't help much if you don't plug it in and turn it on.
The problem with being blinded by your own brilliance is tripping over the power cord.
No, more often than not, the game show here is "I'm smarter than you and I can prove without turning my brain on in the first place". We've all discovered that the engine roars loudest with your foot on the clutch.
I'm only about half way through, and this crop isn't as good as previous years, but I did like this one:
I know this might be a shocking proposal, but it is possible we might someday learn what the people who post here actually get out of it.
Rarely does it involve being taken seriously for substantive contribution. The dance is something entirely different.
I think some posters here have been trapped so long in the vacuous underbelly of IT support, they actually crave being told how stupid they've been, as if being hit over the head with a clue stick is better than no clue stick at all, by the same calculus that it's better to have a hot chick spit at you than fail to note your existence.
From another perspective, there are just enough people around here (but not on every thread) firing live ammunition to make crawling under the fence on your belly an interesting sport.
I used to know an usher back when Cats played in Toronto. I think it was the kind of theater where you pass the ticket boxes into the main lobby where a giant staircase sits in the middle, 5m wide at the base, covered in red carpet, with curved brass banisters. She never ceased to be amazed at how many people came up to her and asked, "do these stairs go up?" I've seen threads here with 200 posts that never got much above that level.
On a side note, I've often wondered if the people who persist in posting the deflated "in Soviet Russia" have the same brain activation pattern of a dog urinating on a fire hydrant. Really, that meme has all the appeal of a eunuch's scrotum.
It's pretty far fetched to claim the average poster here is engaged in a meaningful battle of wits, even from the safe refuge of mock sarcasm.
I've been working too many days in a row. Your post has spoiled my inflammatory rampage. Perspective, distinction, thesis, conclusion. Someone needs to mod you -1 for adult content.
You're completely right portraying the semantic web as the unhappy wishbone between the proactive and responsive camps, as you termed them.
What you didn't mention is the Achilles heal of the proactive camp: it's non-compositional. There's only room in the kitchen for a single proactive authority. Proactive systems don't layer well. It's extremely hard to compose subsystems which are neither predictable nor reproducible.
The reason Microsoft keeps returning to the proactive camp is that they believe there only *should* be one cook in the kitchen, and they know who it should be.
I don't believe it is impossible in principle to mash-up proactive components, just very difficult. I can see some progress being made with a constraint based subsystem, which brings up an interesting and persistent Microsoft design oversight.
If Clippy had offered me a way to tune him in to house rules, we might have got somewhere. The first thing I would need to explain to Clippy is that OOXML is *not* a viable standard of multi-party document interchange. Don't ever speak of it again.
Half of Microsoft wants to dabble in proactive software? Great. And I do think something will someday come of this. Historically the problem was insufficient context. Now we have the whole of human knowledge consuming 10% of our electrical grid. The world has changed.
One thing they need to get through their thick heads is that there is no good reason proactive software can't at least arrive house broken and not piss on my rugs.
Uh, that thing where you just popped up a window and stole focus while I was typing 90 wpm... don't ever do that again if you want to live to the ripe old age of 30 seconds. And hold still there, I've got a long list.
If I had a child, I'd be tempted to teach him or her to respond "my father taught me to be respectful toward people who believe in biblical horse shit".
I think we're right in the middle of a flood myth revival: the flood of data, genetic data. Unlike that blogging outfit, Adam and Eve made a *lot* of off-orchard backups. with some diligence, we might yet recover much of the original.
This time, however, the bible thumpers will paddle for 40 days and 40 nights, and the flood will not recede. This time the dove will land with a genetic scroll in its beak.
Curiously, one question I've never seen asked is this: how many genes present in the human population 7000 years ago (or 70ka or 700ka) have since gone extinct within modern humanity? How would one go about determining this?
It could be the case that we have an essential modern gene that converges on an introduction (fork) into the genome X years ago, but prior to X some other gene we no longer have must have been there, or the genotype would have been lethal.
Adam wasn't much of a poet, was he? Only woman in the known universe, and he doesn't even mention her eye color.
Oh, yes, I remember Micron. Back when memory was $40/megabyte, Micron would sell a PC pre-configured with enough memory to stun an elephant. Well, they weren't making so much money on the PC itself...
A quick dip of the fish net, brings up the following:
According to the complaint, Micron shares traded at inflated prices allowing the company to issue more than $632m worth of debt during 2003, sell more than $480m worth of warrants and complete numerous stock-for-stock acquisitions using inflated shares as acquisition currency.
Insiders also sold approximately $4.5m worth of their own personally held Micron stock at inflated prices during the class period, the complaint continued.
Turns out that extended plateau in the downward-trending DRAM price curve benefited from some white-collar terraforming.
Reminds me of the cleanest, best managed pig operation I ever saw. That working oil well on the back forty might have had something to do with it. I don't envy anyone aiming to make a respectable living in a commodity market.
Remember the good old days when excess babies were stacked like logs in the bed of the pickup? If you arrived with approximately as many as you left with, things were good.
There is a good chance the car of 2025 will have a working black ice detector, and a working white out detector. You'll have to press your thumb print against a display on the dashboard to unlock the ability to travel at more than 20 kph, if the car allows you to drive at all.
At 20 kph, when the infrared detects the moose, the car will lower the head-lights, sound the horn, and apply the brakes. Most likely it will be the moose that has the common sense to get out of the way in time. Moose are pretty good at evading lumbering objects moving slower than a wolf pack or a cranky bear.
It's only when your bumper sticker reads "God, guns, guts: let's keep all three" that a moose turns into an unavoidable pylon.
It's funny you write that with your cognitive capacity locked a rearward-facing neck brace.
By 2025, half the drivers on the road will have difficulty turning their heads far enough to see directly behind them. Plus the ocular depth-of-field adjustment will be slow as cold molasses.
Dude, turn your head and look at the future.
Or have you already volunteered to become a living chauffeur for all your living ancestors? Of course, with your mindset, you'll die at 50 from a heart attack trying to share the roads with the physically not-so-firm whom you totally fail to comprehend, so your penance will be relatively short lived.
I haven't seen a comment yet about small business fatigue.
Was the disgruntled employee a founding member? Was he a stake-holder on any other level? Had all back salaries been paid to cover any... uh... dry spells in the startup plan? Were they confident they would be cash flow positive entering a difficult business year? Do they really not have any back media stashed somewhere? Maybe they just looked at the recovery cost from their dated (and possibly tampered) spares, the cost to their business credibility, and decided the prudent business decision was to close the doors and move on.
Maybe the disgruntled party was throw out the door but the parties responsible for creating the dysfunctional environment hung around. They usually do. Does the closure unlock any business assets that one or more of the existing principals can roll forward into another opportunity? Is the "failed drive" story just a lot more sanitary for public consumption than the sordid story about disgruntlement and personality conflict?
There's a troll out there who is suggesting maybe the same thing about Madoff's too easy confession.
Not very good and puts far too much faith in "board level oversight" and never once mentions the Enron factor: even at the top (maybe especially at the top) people refuse to question black boxes if the profit stream appears reliable. How did Enron get away with not supplying detailed balance sheet? The usual refuge of "trade secret": if we tell you how we do it, the chicken recipe will cross the road.
Isn't that the bonus of being at the top? Everyone lets you into their secret tree forts? There are a lot of empty suits out there stalking the putting greens who aren't much motivated to puncture the veil of a secret handshake. They have other agendas.
The problem with the Madoff analysis is that it presumes his operation was legitimate for some (long) period of time, then he's wiped out by the big melt-down LTCM style, after which he concocts this bogus pyramid excuse. How then did he really achieve these implausibly consistent results over that long period of time? Does he really have a system that works as portrayed (until it blows up) LTCM style? Is there a secret he's still trying to keep?
I'd put my own bet on the square that the fund return levels were massaged since way back, and that the empty suit oversight boards were as gullible as you'd have to imagine, despite the glass and granite whitewash of financial controls and oversight.
As far as Journalspace is concerned, if it turns out that this "backup oversight" was the only bad seed at the core of this apple, it would be a case of truth stranger than fiction.
it really makes no sense to keep these restrictions, especially since they are getting it [anyway]
Are we talking about sending your teenage daughter to a convent, or the international trade in goods?
In the former case, I concede your logic.
An embargo has effects at every level of the supply chain *even if* the product arrives at the embargoed destination at the end of the day.
And here I was able to conclude that society should abandon moralizing to teenagers about abstinence, since they're going to get it anyway, but now I realize, after reading your post, how the syllogisms underlying this message often make a deep impression and carry over into other venues.
Doh! It's amazing really, our moral policy purports to be one thing, but accomplishes something else. Wow, just think if this gets out, how many people out there will lining up to return their copy of "Diplomacy for Dummies".
I had quite a bit of enthusiasm for Wikipedia a couple of years ago, but soured a bit over the deletionist thing.
I support the notability standard. I just happen to think that deletion is fatally flawed from a systems theory perspective. Deletion returns the system to the same state which caused someone to start the article in the first place. Why would you return the system to a state whose outcome, as you already know, was to incite the creation of a non-notable article you don't wish to include on present merit?
IMO the non-notable articles with the potential to become notable articles should be kept around, but delisted from major engines and the site search indexes, nor should they be linkable from main article space (links from talk space would be OK).
You don't want to pour janitorial energy into maintaining non-notable articles, so non-established editors would not be permitted to edit these. Maybe these semi-cloistered articles would have no written text, just a collection of annotated citations, until as some juncture the notability threshold is passed.
Just about any low-maintenance alternative to deletion would be better in my opinion. Of course, there would be a hue and cry about censorship, whatever editorial limits were imposed, by those who define freedom of speech as the right to drive a Blues Mobile down a crowded sandy beach.
That's the only virtue of deletion as I see it: it's a narrow battle front with a crowd who is going to find a reason to detract and complain regardless. Any of my cloistered non-deletion alternatives would certainly widen the battle front with this draining segment of society.
It's depressing sometimes how much energy can be squandered on the born quibblers of the world by expressing any well-meaning rule a word longer than "shoot on sight".
I've come to suspect this is the world order the quibblers wish to achieve. Whatever the surface agenda claims to be, the outcome that seems to result from the social skirmish is polarization and brinkmanship.
Whatever its defects, it is indeed hard to break a lance against "404 not found".
Why can't CEOs and such be satisfied with slow, even growth?
Well, you can't write off your Palm Beach golf membership unless you achieve you goal of investing several million dollars at a guaranteed 11% for life. Slow is for putzwads.
You're comparing an inception point against a saturation point. I'd like to think that all the crap around now will vanish as efficiently as you suggest, but I suspect not.
If you have an original PC, your best bet for interfacing with it today is good old RS232.
If it were up to the studios, you'd be a pirate for leaving the room to pee during the commercial break. One of the execs actually said something along these lines, unfortunately, I can't remember enough to track down the quote.
As for the rest of this discussion, I can't get excited about the purported quality difference between BluRay and DVD. Wake me up when the format improves the script, the plot, or the acting.
Maybe for some people, a sensory overload of thrilling sound and visuals shuts down the critical faculties, making it possible to enjoy crappy movies, the kind that make you want to gnaw your arm off the next morning when you return to your senses.
I guess then that BluRay occupies a similar cultural niche as an enthusiastic overdose of sticky piss-water domestic megabrew.
The only visual quality improvement I care about is the ability for the director to circle pan without turning the image into a strobe scope. Even if BluRay actually adds this feature, how many movies are filmed to exploit it?
In the long run, BluRay's only lasting accomplishment will be to add "best airbrushing" to the Oscars.
I just watched the movie 21 last night. It takes the main character, who is supposed to be exceptionally bright, the majority of the movie to figure out what is behind door number three.
This loose comparison is not the Monty Hall paradox, which never was a paradox in the first place. I always thought of it more as a Vegas paradox. Isn't the whole purpose of a shell game that the car is *always* behind the door you didn't pick?
Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information. You already know what is behind the door he opens (a goat), so you gain no information there. But you don't know which of the two doors he needs to open to accomplish this, so you learn something there, but this amounts to an implementation artifact. Uncertainty about what was behind the door he is about to open *would* change your original probability of 1/3. Uncertainty about which door he chooses to open to accomplish this does not. 2/3rds of the time Monty faces restricted choice, but of course his patter doesn't reveal this.
I just went to my favorite Wikipedia page, but on a quick scan I didn't spot a GM-style name-plate astroturfing bias as I expected I would.
The one I was looking for was where humans given a meaningless choice are often quite content to lose control over a meaningful choice. For a good example of this, consult two-party democracy (excepting the last U.S. election, which was atypically black and white).
Another bias is that once we become emotionally occupied by Coke/Pepsi, we forget that there are other soft drinks, or worse, that tap water is good for hydration. Or am I now the last person alive who still drinks tap water?
I don't see how Monty has much to do with the human capacity to become distracted from real decisions by proliferation of meaningless choice.
To the extent it worked, what GM managed to accomplish with this marketing strategy was insulate themselves from whether their customers actually preferred their vehicles to their competitor's. Ouch. Payback's a bitch.
Google doesn't know how to do desktop apps as conventionally defined, and I suspect they don't wish to learn. In Google's world view, everything is a cloud. Patches flow like water, mostly invisible. From Google, what did you expect?
I give you the last point. If you uninstall software, it should *completely* uninstall itself. I recall a poster that was for some reason quite popular in my residence: If you hate something send it away, if it comes back, kill it. Can be applied to more than one monopolist in training.
Here's a timely update for all concerned: Every time an abortion debate breaks out, God exterminates a species.
I think abortion is "off topic" on more than one level here. Don't we just use abortion as an excuse not to debate the more difficult matter of responsible parenthood?
Do we really want a lot of stressed out teenagers, who had no intention to start a family, with poor job prospects, raising a child without the benefit of universal health care, scraping along in an "at will" employment environment, where even the crappy job they can manage to hold disappears whenever fat bankers torch the economy? It has long puzzled me that anti-abortion views are so strongly held in the richest country that provides the least support.
I'm also surprised by the fatalistic instinct most of us possess toward conception. If a stranger walked up to your toddler and denting his/her skull with a hammer most parents would be angry. Yet if a conception involves a genetic liability of equal concern as the hammer blow, well, luck of the draw. We'll get through this together. God's will. Love conquers all. Yada, yada, buy me a Lada.
I think the underlying fear of abortion is that we'll start choosing our offspring the same way we (wish we could) choose our mates; or that if conception is not the first taste of adult responsibility, for many of us the line will never be crossed.
In this attitude of parental brinkmanship that makes us feel good about ourselves as a society of adult who suffers? The children. How we hate to admit that.
My first experience with C++ dates back to an early release of Zortech C++, by Walter Bright, and it was quite usable.
This was circa 1988, only three years after Cfront 1.0. That's hardly what I would call a long gestation for a language working its way *up* the abstraction stack when the average PC was struggling to lace its shoes.
I don't understand your suggestion to teach C first. C is (very nearly) a proper subset of C++. If you teach C++, you are also teaching C. What you can do with C++ is teach C (mostly) without the CPP. Is that your issue? You love the CPP?
Nearly every feature in C++, used judiciously within in the right problem domain, is an improvement over the bend-over-backward solution in C. Most of the ugliness of C++ results from the attempt to offer conceptually better facilities *without* depriving the user of the ability to fall back on a pure C solution.
Stroustrup has confessed in his past writings that he spent too long futzing with multiple inheritance when he could have been working on templates instead, which proved vastly more fruitful.
I've had few complaints about the conceptual evolution of C++, many complaints about the near-sighted standardization committee.
How did the "auto" declaration get left out of the standard for so long, when the overhead of supplying all those iterator types by hand is absolutely brutal, to no real benefit. Acres of typedefs with no conceptual utility. Of course, standards work is the ultimate grind with no reward, with industry poised to piss on the results.
I also think the original decision of the standards committee not to define minimal diagnostic standards blew up in their face as templates became more prominent. This will be *partly* addressed by the new work on template concepts.
If you study the history, the C++ language has a lot less to apologize over than its standardization. That is a political reality, not an intellectual reality.
If the C language had chosen a better declaration syntax, C++ would only be half so ugly. But C has no aspirations to provide abstraction when abstraction is worth having, so it rarely gets blamed for this.
I happen to love C (for the right problem) and have done more work in C than C++. But I'm also honest in admitting that C is one of the best dead-end languages ever devised. C has a spectacularly strong sense of self identity. It can't be anything other than what it is. All the same, C is the language whose deficiencies made Perl and Python necessary. And then we praise it for the virtue of narrow mindedness.
The crippling problem with C++ is that it is very hard to teach that less is more. For the amount of effort it takes to fully learn multiple inheritance, you want to use it a lot. Bad call. To significantly reduce the learning curve, one would have to pitch out the C language subset. Bad call.
I'm sympathetic to the view that C++ fills a niche that would have been better left empty. I'm not so sympathetic to blanket statements that C++ is a bad language within the constraints that shaped it.
I'm especially annoyed by the number of people generating flack about C++ whose aesthetic sentiments align "better" with "less useful".
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever watched the movie "Joyeux Noël", you would know that "fraternizing" is an extreme threat to the social order of warfare, and punished accordingly.
From Ebert
He is accurate, however, in depicting the aftermath: Officers and troops were punished for fraternizing with the enemy in wartime. A priest who celebrated mass in No Man's Land is savagely criticized by his bishop, who believes the patriotic task of the clergy is to urge the troops into battle and reconcile them to death.
Torture is a means of maintaining the required psychological boundaries which military duty entails.
Somewhere on the Michael Moore DVD, there is a scene of young American soldiers abusing an elderly Iraqi man, is tied up, has a black hood on his head, and appears to have some kind of injury. Would you let your own grandfather lie there in that condition? The troops resolve the cognitive dissonance by humiliating the man for his stress erection.
The men on both sides who failed to kill each other one Christmas night were dispatched on both sides to the bloodiest fronts in Europe. Who or what exactly was harmed by these men briefly failing to shoot at each other?
I suspect few of the men known to have fraternized survived the war. No army punishes its torturers as harshly. The actor who plays the drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket" was a real life drill sergeant. Under a psychological barrage of that intensity, not even the terminally obtuse fails to internalize the prevailing value system, and I'm not talking about the value system as portrayed in their recruiting pamphlets.
If patriotism was a rock band, torture would be one of the groupies.
Here's another way to phrase that:
However, when you attribute blame to a faultless party, regardless of whether you have a legitimate beef, you're just an uneducated whinging windbag.
I've never understood why false blame is regarded as an inalienable force of nature. I recall from my grade three classroom the glee that ensued whenever anybody cut a ripe one at the amazing ease of hanging the blame on any arbitrary person remotely in the upwind quadrant. You just had to be first at putting forward an arbitrary name. "Hey, Marvin, you didn't!" and Marvin would have to be very quick to deflect the hot potato.
We learn the social rules surrounding this game of arbitrary blamesmanship at the vulnerable age when children assimilate the religious beliefs of their parents. Along with everything else we learn at that age, it's rarely questioned again, apart from a Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut here or there with vinegar wit.
Clearly, now that the problem is known, Ubuntu should remediate it as best as possible, or they will deserve their share of the blame.
Still, I find it shocking how easily society accepts the notion that any person feeling abused and disempowered is entirely within their rights to arbitrarily point their finger at the nearest upwind party.
Unlike, say, derogating SVN, which really is for the i'm-too-dumb/lazy-to-explain/post-something-notable crowd.
Much better.
I just introduced an Eclipse/SVN/JIRA/wiki solution to a small embedded company which previously had none of the above. Tortoise and the Subversion plug-in made the transition relatively painless. I've mostly used distributed SCM in the past. For this project, svn was an easy place to start.
[Actually, I wrote this the other night, and got called away from the keyboard before I hit "submit".]
If you buy a recordable CD, it's assumed that you'll use a portion of it for copying music - some you pay something like $0.25 per cd to compensate the artists of that music.
The other way to look at this is that when you do copy someone's music, it's perfectly fine ... you already paid for it through the CD levy. The psychology of this law is incredibly stupid.
Dequote all but the first line. I can't even slash properly.
Is there anyone (aside from crazies) who DOES want to die?
I have yet to meet a women who looks forward to the act of childbirth. Are there any crazies out there who believe that humanity should endure the agony of childbirth?
I'm not especially looking forward to my moment of death, but I don't fear *being* dead any more than I once feared being as yet unconceived. Around this neck of the woods, I was unconceived for 4 billion years, and I don't recall it being all that bad.
I think Kurzweil is desperate for Singularity to happen sooner because frankly he just doesn't want to die.
Yes, you could make a movie about the guy entitled "The Projectionist". He is also driven to anthropomorphize because he believes the foreverafterlife is a hybrid man/machine state of being.
I tend to view immortalists in much the same way as the drivers who cut in front of me on a crowded highway only to discover that my lane is going no faster than the lane they came from. Imagine we do succeed in this quest. Then the shit will really hit the fan. "The Future is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed". Think about the consequences of that statement. Do people think immortality will be available for purchase at the iTunes store?
It will be just like the markets. A lot of people will be lead to believe they're next in line, only to discover that the immortals have suspended distribution shortly before the time comes for the average prole to cash in his chips.
You seemed to have missed a page in your instruction manual about how this game is played. First of all, you need to predict what happens. Secondly, you need to not predict what doesn't happen. Posting evidence of one without the other makes the glorious sound of one hand patting.
I once read a study which claimed that many men tend to "freshen the troops" in the hours leading up to a fling after a brief (e.g. week long) separation from their girl friend. This is claimed to improve sperm fitness. It doesn't surprise me at all that there is a best before date. Biology tends not to leave major biological systems in parking orbits, lest they not be in good working order when the time comes, whatever the Calvinists might think.
I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here?
Slashdot, the game show: I'm smarter than you, and I can prove it in five disconnected, ungrammatical sentences.
Personally, I post here because it allows me to commune with the human truth that no matter whether you have a brain or a clue or both, it doesn't help much if you don't plug it in and turn it on.
The problem with being blinded by your own brilliance is tripping over the power cord.
No, more often than not, the game show here is "I'm smarter than you and I can prove without turning my brain on in the first place". We've all discovered that the engine roars loudest with your foot on the clutch.
I'm only about half way through, and this crop isn't as good as previous years, but I did like this one:
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_7.html#fisher
I know this might be a shocking proposal, but it is possible we might someday learn what the people who post here actually get out of it.
Rarely does it involve being taken seriously for substantive contribution. The dance is something entirely different.
I think some posters here have been trapped so long in the vacuous underbelly of IT support, they actually crave being told how stupid they've been, as if being hit over the head with a clue stick is better than no clue stick at all, by the same calculus that it's better to have a hot chick spit at you than fail to note your existence.
From another perspective, there are just enough people around here (but not on every thread) firing live ammunition to make crawling under the fence on your belly an interesting sport.
I used to know an usher back when Cats played in Toronto. I think it was the kind of theater where you pass the ticket boxes into the main lobby where a giant staircase sits in the middle, 5m wide at the base, covered in red carpet, with curved brass banisters. She never ceased to be amazed at how many people came up to her and asked, "do these stairs go up?" I've seen threads here with 200 posts that never got much above that level.
On a side note, I've often wondered if the people who persist in posting the deflated "in Soviet Russia" have the same brain activation pattern of a dog urinating on a fire hydrant. Really, that meme has all the appeal of a eunuch's scrotum.
It's pretty far fetched to claim the average poster here is engaged in a meaningful battle of wits, even from the safe refuge of mock sarcasm.
I've been working too many days in a row. Your post has spoiled my inflammatory rampage. Perspective, distinction, thesis, conclusion. Someone needs to mod you -1 for adult content.
You're completely right portraying the semantic web as the unhappy wishbone between the proactive and responsive camps, as you termed them.
What you didn't mention is the Achilles heal of the proactive camp: it's non-compositional. There's only room in the kitchen for a single proactive authority. Proactive systems don't layer well. It's extremely hard to compose subsystems which are neither predictable nor reproducible.
The reason Microsoft keeps returning to the proactive camp is that they believe there only *should* be one cook in the kitchen, and they know who it should be.
I don't believe it is impossible in principle to mash-up proactive components, just very difficult. I can see some progress being made with a constraint based subsystem, which brings up an interesting and persistent Microsoft design oversight.
If Clippy had offered me a way to tune him in to house rules, we might have got somewhere. The first thing I would need to explain to Clippy is that OOXML is *not* a viable standard of multi-party document interchange. Don't ever speak of it again.
Half of Microsoft wants to dabble in proactive software? Great. And I do think something will someday come of this. Historically the problem was insufficient context. Now we have the whole of human knowledge consuming 10% of our electrical grid. The world has changed.
One thing they need to get through their thick heads is that there is no good reason proactive software can't at least arrive house broken and not piss on my rugs.
Uh, that thing where you just popped up a window and stole focus while I was typing 90 wpm ... don't ever do that again if you want to live to the ripe old age of 30 seconds. And hold still there, I've got a long list.
If I had a child, I'd be tempted to teach him or her to respond "my father taught me to be respectful toward people who believe in biblical horse shit".
I think we're right in the middle of a flood myth revival: the flood of data, genetic data. Unlike that blogging outfit, Adam and Eve made a *lot* of off-orchard backups. with some diligence, we might yet recover much of the original.
This time, however, the bible thumpers will paddle for 40 days and 40 nights, and the flood will not recede. This time the dove will land with a genetic scroll in its beak.
Curiously, one question I've never seen asked is this: how many genes present in the human population 7000 years ago (or 70ka or 700ka) have since gone extinct within modern humanity? How would one go about determining this?
It could be the case that we have an essential modern gene that converges on an introduction (fork) into the genome X years ago, but prior to X some other gene we no longer have must have been there, or the genotype would have been lethal.
Adam wasn't much of a poet, was he? Only woman in the known universe, and he doesn't even mention her eye color.
No, wait, he did, but some zealot wiped it out.
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_8.html#zeilinger
Oh, yes, I remember Micron. Back when memory was $40/megabyte, Micron would sell a PC pre-configured with enough memory to stun an elephant. Well, they weren't making so much money on the PC itself ...
A quick dip of the fish net, brings up the following:
http://law.taragana.net/archive/micron-faces-two-class-action-lawsuits/
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2006/02/28/37828/more-dram-price-fixing-charges-for-micron.htm
According to the complaint, Micron shares traded at inflated prices allowing the company to issue more than $632m worth of debt during 2003, sell more than $480m worth of warrants and complete numerous stock-for-stock acquisitions using inflated shares as acquisition currency.
Insiders also sold approximately $4.5m worth of their own personally held Micron stock at inflated prices during the class period, the complaint continued.
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/187202238
Turns out that extended plateau in the downward-trending DRAM price curve benefited from some white-collar terraforming.
Reminds me of the cleanest, best managed pig operation I ever saw. That working oil well on the back forty might have had something to do with it. I don't envy anyone aiming to make a respectable living in a commodity market.
Remember the good old days when excess babies were stacked like logs in the bed of the pickup? If you arrived with approximately as many as you left with, things were good.
There is a good chance the car of 2025 will have a working black ice detector, and a working white out detector. You'll have to press your thumb print against a display on the dashboard to unlock the ability to travel at more than 20 kph, if the car allows you to drive at all.
At 20 kph, when the infrared detects the moose, the car will lower the head-lights, sound the horn, and apply the brakes. Most likely it will be the moose that has the common sense to get out of the way in time. Moose are pretty good at evading lumbering objects moving slower than a wolf pack or a cranky bear.
It's only when your bumper sticker reads "God, guns, guts: let's keep all three" that a moose turns into an unavoidable pylon.
Turn your head and look behind you.
It's funny you write that with your cognitive capacity locked a rearward-facing neck brace.
By 2025, half the drivers on the road will have difficulty turning their heads far enough to see directly behind them. Plus the ocular depth-of-field adjustment will be slow as cold molasses.
Dude, turn your head and look at the future.
Or have you already volunteered to become a living chauffeur for all your living ancestors? Of course, with your mindset, you'll die at 50 from a heart attack trying to share the roads with the physically not-so-firm whom you totally fail to comprehend, so your penance will be relatively short lived.
I haven't seen a comment yet about small business fatigue.
Was the disgruntled employee a founding member? Was he a stake-holder on any other level? Had all back salaries been paid to cover any ... uh ... dry spells in the startup plan? Were they confident they would be cash flow positive entering a difficult business year? Do they really not have any back media stashed somewhere? Maybe they just looked at the recovery cost from their dated (and possibly tampered) spares, the cost to their business credibility, and decided the prudent business decision was to close the doors and move on.
Maybe the disgruntled party was throw out the door but the parties responsible for creating the dysfunctional environment hung around. They usually do. Does the closure unlock any business assets that one or more of the existing principals can roll forward into another opportunity? Is the "failed drive" story just a lot more sanitary for public consumption than the sordid story about disgruntlement and personality conflict?
There's a troll out there who is suggesting maybe the same thing about Madoff's too easy confession.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11488
Not very good and puts far too much faith in "board level oversight" and never once mentions the Enron factor: even at the top (maybe especially at the top) people refuse to question black boxes if the profit stream appears reliable. How did Enron get away with not supplying detailed balance sheet? The usual refuge of "trade secret": if we tell you how we do it, the chicken recipe will cross the road.
Isn't that the bonus of being at the top? Everyone lets you into their secret tree forts? There are a lot of empty suits out there stalking the putting greens who aren't much motivated to puncture the veil of a secret handshake. They have other agendas.
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_10.html#taleb
The problem with the Madoff analysis is that it presumes his operation was legitimate for some (long) period of time, then he's wiped out by the big melt-down LTCM style, after which he concocts this bogus pyramid excuse. How then did he really achieve these implausibly consistent results over that long period of time? Does he really have a system that works as portrayed (until it blows up) LTCM style? Is there a secret he's still trying to keep?
I'd put my own bet on the square that the fund return levels were massaged since way back, and that the empty suit oversight boards were as gullible as you'd have to imagine, despite the glass and granite whitewash of financial controls and oversight.
As far as Journalspace is concerned, if it turns out that this "backup oversight" was the only bad seed at the core of this apple, it would be a case of truth stranger than fiction.
it really makes no sense to keep these restrictions, especially since they are getting it [anyway]
Are we talking about sending your teenage daughter to a convent, or the international trade in goods?
In the former case, I concede your logic.
An embargo has effects at every level of the supply chain *even if* the product arrives at the embargoed destination at the end of the day.
And here I was able to conclude that society should abandon moralizing to teenagers about abstinence, since they're going to get it anyway, but now I realize, after reading your post, how the syllogisms underlying this message often make a deep impression and carry over into other venues.
Doh! It's amazing really, our moral policy purports to be one thing, but accomplishes something else. Wow, just think if this gets out, how many people out there will lining up to return their copy of "Diplomacy for Dummies".
I had quite a bit of enthusiasm for Wikipedia a couple of years ago, but soured a bit over the deletionist thing.
I support the notability standard. I just happen to think that deletion is fatally flawed from a systems theory perspective. Deletion returns the system to the same state which caused someone to start the article in the first place. Why would you return the system to a state whose outcome, as you already know, was to incite the creation of a non-notable article you don't wish to include on present merit?
IMO the non-notable articles with the potential to become notable articles should be kept around, but delisted from major engines and the site search indexes, nor should they be linkable from main article space (links from talk space would be OK).
You don't want to pour janitorial energy into maintaining non-notable articles, so non-established editors would not be permitted to edit these. Maybe these semi-cloistered articles would have no written text, just a collection of annotated citations, until as some juncture the notability threshold is passed.
Just about any low-maintenance alternative to deletion would be better in my opinion. Of course, there would be a hue and cry about censorship, whatever editorial limits were imposed, by those who define freedom of speech as the right to drive a Blues Mobile down a crowded sandy beach.
That's the only virtue of deletion as I see it: it's a narrow battle front with a crowd who is going to find a reason to detract and complain regardless. Any of my cloistered non-deletion alternatives would certainly widen the battle front with this draining segment of society.
It's depressing sometimes how much energy can be squandered on the born quibblers of the world by expressing any well-meaning rule a word longer than "shoot on sight".
I've come to suspect this is the world order the quibblers wish to achieve. Whatever the surface agenda claims to be, the outcome that seems to result from the social skirmish is polarization and brinkmanship.
Whatever its defects, it is indeed hard to break a lance against "404 not found".
Why can't CEOs and such be satisfied with slow, even growth?
Well, you can't write off your Palm Beach golf membership unless you achieve you goal of investing several million dollars at a guaranteed 11% for life. Slow is for putzwads.
You're comparing an inception point against a saturation point. I'd like to think that all the crap around now will vanish as efficiently as you suggest, but I suspect not.
If you have an original PC, your best bet for interfacing with it today is good old RS232.
If it were up to the studios, you'd be a pirate for leaving the room to pee during the commercial break. One of the execs actually said something along these lines, unfortunately, I can't remember enough to track down the quote.
As for the rest of this discussion, I can't get excited about the purported quality difference between BluRay and DVD. Wake me up when the format improves the script, the plot, or the acting.
Maybe for some people, a sensory overload of thrilling sound and visuals shuts down the critical faculties, making it possible to enjoy crappy movies, the kind that make you want to gnaw your arm off the next morning when you return to your senses.
I guess then that BluRay occupies a similar cultural niche as an enthusiastic overdose of sticky piss-water domestic megabrew.
The only visual quality improvement I care about is the ability for the director to circle pan without turning the image into a strobe scope. Even if BluRay actually adds this feature, how many movies are filmed to exploit it?
In the long run, BluRay's only lasting accomplishment will be to add "best airbrushing" to the Oscars.
I just watched the movie 21 last night. It takes the main character, who is supposed to be exceptionally bright, the majority of the movie to figure out what is behind door number three.
This loose comparison is not the Monty Hall paradox, which never was a paradox in the first place. I always thought of it more as a Vegas paradox. Isn't the whole purpose of a shell game that the car is *always* behind the door you didn't pick?
Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information. You already know what is behind the door he opens (a goat), so you gain no information there. But you don't know which of the two doors he needs to open to accomplish this, so you learn something there, but this amounts to an implementation artifact. Uncertainty about what was behind the door he is about to open *would* change your original probability of 1/3. Uncertainty about which door he chooses to open to accomplish this does not. 2/3rds of the time Monty faces restricted choice, but of course his patter doesn't reveal this.
I just went to my favorite Wikipedia page, but on a quick scan I didn't spot a GM-style name-plate astroturfing bias as I expected I would.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
The one I was looking for was where humans given a meaningless choice are often quite content to lose control over a meaningful choice. For a good example of this, consult two-party democracy (excepting the last U.S. election, which was atypically black and white).
Another bias is that once we become emotionally occupied by Coke/Pepsi, we forget that there are other soft drinks, or worse, that tap water is good for hydration. Or am I now the last person alive who still drinks tap water?
I don't see how Monty has much to do with the human capacity to become distracted from real decisions by proliferation of meaningless choice.
To the extent it worked, what GM managed to accomplish with this marketing strategy was insulate themselves from whether their customers actually preferred their vehicles to their competitor's. Ouch. Payback's a bitch.
Google doesn't know how to do desktop apps as conventionally defined, and I suspect they don't wish to learn. In Google's world view, everything is a cloud. Patches flow like water, mostly invisible. From Google, what did you expect?
I give you the last point. If you uninstall software, it should *completely* uninstall itself. I recall a poster that was for some reason quite popular in my residence: If you hate something send it away, if it comes back, kill it. Can be applied to more than one monopolist in training.
Here's a timely update for all concerned: Every time an abortion debate breaks out, God exterminates a species.
I think abortion is "off topic" on more than one level here. Don't we just use abortion as an excuse not to debate the more difficult matter of responsible parenthood?
Do we really want a lot of stressed out teenagers, who had no intention to start a family, with poor job prospects, raising a child without the benefit of universal health care, scraping along in an "at will" employment environment, where even the crappy job they can manage to hold disappears whenever fat bankers torch the economy? It has long puzzled me that anti-abortion views are so strongly held in the richest country that provides the least support.
I'm also surprised by the fatalistic instinct most of us possess toward conception. If a stranger walked up to your toddler and denting his/her skull with a hammer most parents would be angry. Yet if a conception involves a genetic liability of equal concern as the hammer blow, well, luck of the draw. We'll get through this together. God's will. Love conquers all. Yada, yada, buy me a Lada.
I think the underlying fear of abortion is that we'll start choosing our offspring the same way we (wish we could) choose our mates; or that if conception is not the first taste of adult responsibility, for many of us the line will never be crossed.
In this attitude of parental brinkmanship that makes us feel good about ourselves as a society of adult who suffers? The children. How we hate to admit that.
My first experience with C++ dates back to an early release of Zortech C++, by Walter Bright, and it was quite usable.
This was circa 1988, only three years after Cfront 1.0. That's hardly what I would call a long gestation for a language working its way *up* the abstraction stack when the average PC was struggling to lace its shoes.
I don't understand your suggestion to teach C first. C is (very nearly) a proper subset of C++. If you teach C++, you are also teaching C. What you can do with C++ is teach C (mostly) without the CPP. Is that your issue? You love the CPP?
Nearly every feature in C++, used judiciously within in the right problem domain, is an improvement over the bend-over-backward solution in C. Most of the ugliness of C++ results from the attempt to offer conceptually better facilities *without* depriving the user of the ability to fall back on a pure C solution.
Stroustrup has confessed in his past writings that he spent too long futzing with multiple inheritance when he could have been working on templates instead, which proved vastly more fruitful.
I've had few complaints about the conceptual evolution of C++, many complaints about the near-sighted standardization committee.
How did the "auto" declaration get left out of the standard for so long, when the overhead of supplying all those iterator types by hand is absolutely brutal, to no real benefit. Acres of typedefs with no conceptual utility. Of course, standards work is the ultimate grind with no reward, with industry poised to piss on the results.
I also think the original decision of the standards committee not to define minimal diagnostic standards blew up in their face as templates became more prominent. This will be *partly* addressed by the new work on template concepts.
If you study the history, the C++ language has a lot less to apologize over than its standardization. That is a political reality, not an intellectual reality.
If the C language had chosen a better declaration syntax, C++ would only be half so ugly. But C has no aspirations to provide abstraction when abstraction is worth having, so it rarely gets blamed for this.
I happen to love C (for the right problem) and have done more work in C than C++. But I'm also honest in admitting that C is one of the best dead-end languages ever devised. C has a spectacularly strong sense of self identity. It can't be anything other than what it is. All the same, C is the language whose deficiencies made Perl and Python necessary. And then we praise it for the virtue of narrow mindedness.
The crippling problem with C++ is that it is very hard to teach that less is more. For the amount of effort it takes to fully learn multiple inheritance, you want to use it a lot. Bad call. To significantly reduce the learning curve, one would have to pitch out the C language subset. Bad call.
I'm sympathetic to the view that C++ fills a niche that would have been better left empty. I'm not so sympathetic to blanket statements that C++ is a bad language within the constraints that shaped it.
I'm especially annoyed by the number of people generating flack about C++ whose aesthetic sentiments align "better" with "less useful".