Friends of mine have spoken with authors of software likely to be challenged by the Powers That Be, and suggested that C files that might
be troubles some be converted to.eng files,
and that the makefile convert them back to C.
No takers so far, but we'll see. I'm hoping the
upcoming litigation will render such a tactic unnecessary (to use it, people would have to distribute Perl 5.6 and higher, and Parse::RecDescent in every tarball).
If it does become necessary, however, I will
compile the grammars I wrote to ease the distribution.
When I moved to America I was astonished to notice
that it takes a tornado to cut the power in this country. Recently, the US of A changed to being a
little bit underwhelming, but this turns things around.
You guys actually warn people about the chance of rolling blackouts? In Tel Aviv, no warnings unless it was known that there was going to be a rolling blackout. And even then, not much notice, and only in the form of a few notices pasted on light poles.
Not to mention the rolling blackouts that happened without any warning at all...
"If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that's just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life."
Helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky
However, the helicopter did come to be
used for other purposes.
Party pooping away,
--Apuleius
Mir is important, even if it's worse off than an A
on
Mir Lives
·
· Score: 3
You guys remember the Mir-is-filling-up-with-fungus story?
Wouldn't it have sucked for the first Mars mission people to find this out, oh, halfway across?
NASA's philosophy is to be as certain as possible that everything must be perfectly planned before the first countdown. Baikonur's philosophy is "we'll jump off that bridge when we get to it." Guess what: the Mars mission will need a mix of both philosophies.
Every new Mir disaster is another data point, another caveat, for the Mars mission. Let's
give some praise for the Russians for putting up with these disasters (and the American haughtiness they inevitably provoke). We need it.
(Next Mir story: Mir held hostage by mutant fungus. Neo-organism demands net connection and account on/.)
We note with great interest that you
have revived your program to divert waters
from the Brahmaputra River. We note with similar
interest that your Three Gorges Dam is nearing completion. You may care to note our recent
success in joining the nuclear club. Allow me
to explain how these are related:
Assuming your diversion project even works without a hitch, we have grave reasons to be displeased with it. Although Assam and Bangladesh usually do not lack for water, they will suffer several adverse consequences: you plan to retain these waters during dry spells and let them spill in their original course during we spells. This lets you stabilize your water supply. But it gravely destabilize ours, and we have enough trouble with flooding in the region as it is.
Furthermore, your foolish idea will cause Bangladeshis to be increasingly reliant on their
artesian waters, which are contaminated with arsenic. I'm sure that your PR flaks will bombard the Western media with promises that China would never, ever, use her dams in a way that would adversely affect India or Bangladesh. However, we note that your dams on the Mekong River have been quite the curse for Vietnam.
We don't need this. We're an emerging economic power, and after a long struggle for this we just this year became a net exporter of cereals. Now, the world is a little upset that
we just developed a nuclear capacity. But the world will forgive us, especially the West, because we just had an orderly transfer of power from the Congress Party to the BJP, and the BJP has just made fools of many Chicken Littles who described India's new rulers as being to the right of Atilla the Hun. The world will note that an orderly transfer of power has not happened in your country's entire history.
Back to nukes. Wouldn't it suck if one of those things fell near the Three Gorges Dam? We think it would.
Call me up, Zhang, and we'll discuss better ways we can cooperate over water issues. We know how bad the water situation is in northwestern China, we know that people there have such salty water that they don't bother with table salt. We sympathise, we are not heartless. But don't be a fool.
Seriously, if I were an undergrad again, (Lord have mercy), I would not like being required to obtain two grand's worth of easily stolen gear when there are other, better ways to use comptuer technology in education.
Not every topic requires computing, let alone mobile computing, shakedowns like this open the path for time limited textbooks, and desk top computers are not as easily stolen.
What you need is an MPI implementation that
Does The Right Thing in handling communication
between interhost MPI processes and intrahost
MPI processes.
Take John Doe, a wealthy manager who has stock in
AT&T. He pays the corporate income tax on the dividents and the income tax on his large salary.
Take Jane Doe, a little old lady who has stock in AT&T. She pays the corporate income tax on her dividents, and uses the rest to buy knitting supplies.
Why do they pay the same rate? Because demagoguish
politicians have fooled Americans to thinking that corporations pay taxes. That is a fiction. Corporations don't pay taxes, shareholders do.
And not all shareholders are rich.
The corporate income tax should not exist.
A progressive individual income tax is far more suited.
Instead of expanding the program, Clinton could start offering HB-1 veterans residency visas. That way the market gets more programmers (nobody gets sent back), but since they have more bargaining power, they'll use and thus not push down the pay scales for the rest of us.
Make a large pile of the things that you're not likely to reread or sleep hugging them to your chest. Go to the used book store. Trade them in. You'll come out with fewer books than before (a ratio of 3 to 1, most likely). They'll be books you'll be more likely to use. And you'll lose fewer friends on moving day.
Say I run Ed's Diner in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And say it becomes necessary for me to set up a site with my menu and hours and the such. And I want a domain name.
But eds-diner.com is taken.
And I don't want to drive people nuts with
ed-s-diner.com.
I could settle for eds-diner.cambridge.ma.us.
Because for me, the Web is geographic, at
least in this context.
So let's hope the.us digraph becomes more
accessible. It does have a niche it can fill.
Mojonation
seems to address this problem.
From their site:
Micropayments and Scalability
Mojo Nation compensates users who provide the resources, content, and indexing services.
Effectively preventing cheating, denial of service, and freeloading, Mojo Nation fosters an
information market for all types of content. This is accomplished through a micropayment system
which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the
services: disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. In time you will be able to buy and sell these
tokens, turning Mojo your earn into real dollars.
Of course, I've yet to use Napster or Gnutella,
so who knows. But this thing gives you incentive to give as well as take.
Solar cell technology still has a long way to go because it still has one nasty catch:
a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
Solarhost is a good step forward to establishing a market value for the use of green-er power, but considering that the energy demand spurred by the 'net needs to demonstrate a much larger energy payoff, I'd be more game for hosting businesses that promise the state of the art in energy efficienct servers. (And for chip manufacturers that pay more attention to their wattage requirements and not worry so much about hertzage.)
Re:Making a point of law with computer code.
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 2
You should also write an "English compiler" that translates the resulting English back to C, or better yet straight to machine code.
That comes next.
Making a point of law with computer code.
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
·
· Score: 3
I'm writing a script in Perl (using RecDescent) that translates C code to English sentences that correctly describe what the original C code does.
Here is an early version, which at the moment I am abandoning since it became unwieldy by my neophyte knowledge of Perl. Run it against whatever code you feel like. Set STDERR to/dev/null.
Here is my currently worked on version. (Not even close to running just yet).
Slashdot Mirror
be troubles some be converted to
and that the makefile convert them back to C.
No takers so far, but we'll see. I'm hoping the
upcoming litigation will render such a tactic unnecessary (to use it, people would have to distribute Perl 5.6 and higher, and Parse::RecDescent in every tarball).
If it does become necessary, however, I will
compile the grammars I wrote to ease the distribution.
True, but wasn't it Draper who
figured out that it could be done with
cheap whistles?
You guys actually warn people about the chance of rolling blackouts? In Tel Aviv, no warnings unless it was known that there was going to be a rolling blackout. And even then, not much notice, and only in the form of a few notices pasted on light poles.
Not to mention the rolling blackouts that happened without any warning at all...
Helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky
However, the helicopter did come to be
used for other purposes.
Party pooping away,
--Apuleius
You guys remember the Mir-is-filling-up-with-fungus story?
/.)
Wouldn't it have sucked for the first Mars mission people to find this out, oh, halfway across?
NASA's philosophy is to be as certain as possible that everything must be perfectly planned before the first countdown. Baikonur's philosophy is "we'll jump off that bridge when we get to it." Guess what: the Mars mission will need a mix of both philosophies.
Every new Mir disaster is another data point, another caveat, for the Mars mission. Let's
give some praise for the Russians for putting up with these disasters (and the American haughtiness they inevitably provoke). We need it.
(Next Mir story: Mir held hostage by mutant fungus. Neo-organism demands net connection and account on
We note with great interest that you have revived your program to divert waters from the Brahmaputra River. We note with similar interest that your Three Gorges Dam is nearing completion. You may care to note our recent success in joining the nuclear club. Allow me to explain how these are related:
Assuming your diversion project even works without a hitch, we have grave reasons to be displeased with it. Although Assam and Bangladesh usually do not lack for water, they will suffer several adverse consequences: you plan to retain these waters during dry spells and let them spill in their original course during we spells. This lets you stabilize your water supply. But it gravely destabilize ours, and we have enough trouble with flooding in the region as it is. Furthermore, your foolish idea will cause Bangladeshis to be increasingly reliant on their artesian waters, which are contaminated with arsenic. I'm sure that your PR flaks will bombard the Western media with promises that China would never, ever, use her dams in a way that would adversely affect India or Bangladesh. However, we note that your dams on the Mekong River have been quite the curse for Vietnam.
We don't need this. We're an emerging economic power, and after a long struggle for this we just this year became a net exporter of cereals. Now, the world is a little upset that we just developed a nuclear capacity. But the world will forgive us, especially the West, because we just had an orderly transfer of power from the Congress Party to the BJP, and the BJP has just made fools of many Chicken Littles who described India's new rulers as being to the right of Atilla the Hun. The world will note that an orderly transfer of power has not happened in your country's entire history.
Back to nukes. Wouldn't it suck if one of those things fell near the Three Gorges Dam? We think it would.
Call me up, Zhang, and we'll discuss better ways we can cooperate over water issues. We know how bad the water situation is in northwestern China, we know that people there have such salty water that they don't bother with table salt. We sympathise, we are not heartless. But don't be a fool.
Regards,
Vajpayee.
Recall the time limited textbook issue?
Seriously, if I were an undergrad again, (Lord have mercy), I would not like being required to obtain two grand's worth of easily stolen gear when there are other, better ways to use comptuer technology in education.
Not every topic requires computing, let alone mobile computing, shakedowns like this open the path for time limited textbooks, and desk top computers are not as easily stolen.
Blind technophilia is not leading edge.
What you need is an MPI implementation that
Does The Right Thing in handling communication
between interhost MPI processes and intrahost
MPI processes.
Such a beast is not that far off into
the future.
Have you ever paid taxes on dividends before?
Ahem.
The payment you calculate in Schedule B
is the second time you pay taxes on
your dividents.
Take John Doe, a wealthy manager who has stock in
AT&T. He pays the corporate income tax on the dividents and the income tax on his large salary.
Take Jane Doe, a little old lady who has stock in AT&T. She pays the corporate income tax on her dividents, and uses the rest to buy knitting supplies.
Why do they pay the same rate? Because demagoguish
politicians have fooled Americans to thinking that corporations pay taxes. That is a fiction.
Corporations don't pay taxes, shareholders do.
And not all shareholders are rich.
The corporate income tax should not exist.
A progressive individual income tax is far more suited.
Jeff Schiller of MIT
has declined to review Carnivore,
saying that "what they want is a rubber stamp."
Obviously, you will say you intend to do a genuine
review.
Why should anyone take your word over Schiller's?
If it's non voting stock that MS is buying,
then the title says it all.
Extropians: Randists, only
more so.
Singularity: Explained here.
Read all of that and digest. It's fun.
Instead of expanding the program, Clinton could start offering HB-1 veterans residency visas. That way the market gets more programmers (nobody gets sent back), but since they have more bargaining power, they'll use and thus not push down the pay scales for the rest of us.
Fox says "Perdue". They mean "Purdue".
Fox says "University of San Diego".
They mean University of California, San Diego".
Fox says "Dartmouth University".
Dartmouth is still a college.
Fox needs to improve their vetting.
"Rocky, watch me pull Douglas Adams out of a hat."
"But that trick never works, Bullwinkle."
"This time for sure!"
Adams has stood up these engagements
many, many times. So keep your fingers
crossed and eyes peeled.
Friends help friends move.
Good friends help friends move bodies.
Really good friends help friends move books.
Make a large pile of the things that you're not likely to reread or sleep hugging them to your chest. Go to the used book store. Trade them in. You'll come out with fewer books than before (a ratio of 3 to 1, most likely). They'll be books you'll be more likely to use. And you'll lose fewer friends on moving day.
Say I run Ed's Diner in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
.us digraph becomes more
And say it becomes necessary for me to set up a site with my menu and hours and the such. And I want a domain name.
But eds-diner.com is taken.
And I don't want to drive people nuts with
ed-s-diner.com.
I could settle for eds-diner.cambridge.ma.us.
Because for me, the Web is geographic, at
least in this context.
So let's hope the
accessible. It does have a niche it can fill.
Their stuff (Like most software) gets written "from dusk till dawn" anyway.
That's really the main serious use
for these devices.
Solarhost specifically says they're using solar cells, hence my comment.
As for mirror farms, they indeed rock.
Solar cell technology still has a long way to go because it still has one nasty catch:
a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
Solarhost is a good step forward to establishing a market value for the use of green-er power, but considering that the energy demand spurred by the 'net needs to demonstrate a much larger energy payoff, I'd be more game for hosting businesses that promise the state of the art in energy efficienct servers. (And for chip manufacturers that pay more attention to their wattage requirements and not worry so much about hertzage.)
You should also write an "English compiler" that translates the resulting English back to C, or better yet straight to machine code.
That comes next.
I'm writing a script in Perl (using RecDescent)
/dev/null.
that translates C code to English sentences that correctly describe what the original C code does.
Here is an early version, which at the moment I am abandoning since it became unwieldy by my neophyte knowledge of Perl. Run it against whatever code you feel like. Set STDERR to
Here is my currently worked on version. (Not even close to running just yet).