Perhaps insisting on metaphysical perspective diminishes the concept of what it means to be human, and denies an entire realm of fascination to the poetry of "mere" machines. Remember, George W. Bush has already failed the Turing test.
One, two or three more jobs. Then the two-year jump cycle in your C.V. gets noticeable, and the tag degrades from "talented" to "hobo." Eventually, you're hoping (if not actively encouraging) your particular O. K. Corral to go belly up before you burn out, so you'll have an excuse for one last jump. Convert cashflow to Euros or gold, and screw the IRA's (they're managed by "talented people," too), because your economy is tanking as fast as you are. Of course, if you already have the kind of cash that makes this consideration pointless, you already a pretty good notion of what to do with your time and talents, and you will grow an organization around yourself tout suite.
Well, consider dark phlogiston. Under the hypothetical inverse of the normal phlogistonic regime we're all familiar with, things should ACTUALLY GAIN WEIGHT as they burn!
The odds against THAT ever actually occurring in the real world must be ooodles bigger than the largest number imaginable by any random small child of a mathematician.
Actually, I used to think the puffs of "white smoke" and "black smoke" in the Challenger disaster films were early photoshops. A puff of zeroes. A puff of ones. Recently, though, NASA seems to have released extraordinarily detailed movies (from the classified cameras and undocumented camera angles, evidently) that do show beautifully complex puffs of thick black roil. Maybe they can do that with fractals these days, but if so, is it still Photoshop? GIMP can't do that (yet).
BFD. I installed Vista. UAC blew up in my face and hasn't been allowed to work since, even though this multi-user machine thinks everyone is an Administrator (but not THE Administrator, which is an obscure account no one discusses) whose desktops lose their user profiles at the drop of a farthing.
Odds Microsoft has fixed enough of anything, especially the stuff they can't imagine ever going wrong: Zero.
The only "Watergate" Japan has ever experienced, the only thing that's ever shaken confidence in their own government, is to lose War War II. I wonder sometimes if a couple of atom bombs was really enough, e.g., to defeat Tojo and the militarists, or if Truman's nuclear options were just the irritant that allowed the Japanese Navy to stage a quiet palace coup and bring the war to an end. Consider that in many Japanese RPG's, the ultimate weapons are identified, not just by, but as "crests," i.e., Infinity Crest, and so forth — seals of approval like 007's license to kill, taken by synedoche as the part pointing to the whole. So it makes perfect sense for Japanese to ID themselves, like counting the hairs on the Emperor's head. I suspect if they think about it at all, it represents baseline good standing in an extremely exclusive club. American libertarian consternation about universal registration is the true incomprehensible for Japan. Are Americans capable of self-governance?
Survival of the fittest. Frankly, creationists outbreed evolutionists 10 to 1. While, on the one hand, it may be a case of dinosaurs "versing" (as my kid sez) small insectivore mammals with the lowest profile on the planet, on the other there is no catastrophic asteroid of pure logic that will inject reason into arguments with these faith-based anachronomicons.
I can occasionally win the argument, at least temporarily, with educated ministers by suggesting that telling God how He MUST create is blasphemous, but for the most part my creationist acquaintances are obviously struggling with visions of kindling wood.
So, you pack a bit of C4 the size of a Pink Pearl eraser into a robot dragonfly the size of a pack of Marlboros and drop it off a rooftop, it flutters passively toward the mall walkers below and detonates at eye level, that your scenario? Or are we talking riderless Gundam mecha, here? iPhones on alternating tripod legs, climbing slyly into bowls of bistro minestrone? I can't do that. Can you do that? Can your oil rich rogue uncle Bob do that?
The first rule of cryptanalysis is that secure pipes leak at both ends, but if you build your pipes out of empty toilet paper tubes... Unh. It's sooo easy to be half-baked, as in been there, done that. BLNT.
You gotta give Microsoft credit for listening to customers' ideas before they ignore them. And I've never seen a Microsoft bug you couldn't eventually buy a fix for, all the way back to MS C V4. And not even Ubuntu supports my Compaq Presario notebook screen out of the box, although I'm given to understand that I can devote the better part of an evening making it work with tools in the distribution. Puh-leeze.
I wish I had a dime for every petty martinet who thinks they've had a good idea for solving imperceptible problems. Oh, wait... Iraq... WMDs, yellow cake... right! I wish I had that $50 trillion dollars back, too.
That's funny. I was immediately put in mind of a) parochial racist crap like Boss "King of the Jungle" Nass, b) patriarchal misogynist crap like piling 75 pounds of kabuki kit on Keisha Castle-Hughes without letting her speak, and c) in-your-face theater of the absurd Dadaist crap like Ubu Roi, sans brains, talent or insight.
Instead of sneering in derision at Three Laws of Robotics, we can now subvert, pervert and ignore 117 pages of "ethics?"
Fie. War is about serious differences of opinion about what the law is, or should be, and whoever lays it down and keeps it down has ethics on her side.
In any case, our DOD is already run by "ethical robots". We have unilaterally decided not to use AK-47's, for example, because those things stink of ideologically improper provenance, even if they still fire when caked in mud or full of blowing sand or snow, and even if they never, ever, under any circumstances jam in action.
Not to mention various urban legends that we're perfectly happy to field armaments bearing electronics made in China. Go figure.
Personally, I'm rooting for Skynet.
Never had a Mac that lasted more than 2 years. Or rather, all my Macs still run, except for the ones with broken hinges, but State of the Art has made everything obsolete in two years. The worst Mac I ever owned, a Performa, still boots up fine (and would lock up once or twice a week, just like always, if I'd let it.) Other than that, Mach sucks. These machines blaze on native code.
Like it says in the Tao Te Ching, how'd you get in this mess in the first place? If you have to ask that question, management has hired you on because you're desperate and work cheap and may be qualified to solve their problem — IOW, they're outsourcing. If they weren't so cheap, the team that wrote the stuff would still be on board. Finally, if you have to grok it, do it inside out — look at the user interface (if there is one), then find the data, then find what calls what. I agree with previous remarks about ignoring comments, especially if the code is very old and has seen more than a few layers of maintenance. Two other observations: The elegant stuff is the oldest. The outrageously rewritten stuff is recent and extremely dangerous — change it at your peril. Well, three. Beware of academic styles. No one designing software tools actually has to use them, so usually any team of coders will have used 20% of the tools to do 80% of the work, all differently, except for the first guy, who used 95% of the tools to do what now amounts to 20% of the current specs.
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I just hope the tatikomas don't get too cozy with the Major's overdue laundry.
Perhaps insisting on metaphysical perspective diminishes the concept of what it means to be human, and denies an entire realm of fascination to the poetry of "mere" machines. Remember, George W. Bush has already failed the Turing test.
One, two or three more jobs. Then the two-year jump cycle in your C.V. gets noticeable, and the tag degrades from "talented" to "hobo." Eventually, you're hoping (if not actively encouraging) your particular O. K. Corral to go belly up before you burn out, so you'll have an excuse for one last jump. Convert cashflow to Euros or gold, and screw the IRA's (they're managed by "talented people," too), because your economy is tanking as fast as you are. Of course, if you already have the kind of cash that makes this consideration pointless, you already a pretty good notion of what to do with your time and talents, and you will grow an organization around yourself tout suite.
Honestly, you CAN cram that much theory into a fact smaller than a Pooh Meson. You're just not trying, dude!
Well, consider dark phlogiston. Under the hypothetical inverse of the normal phlogistonic regime we're all familiar with, things should ACTUALLY GAIN WEIGHT as they burn!
The odds against THAT ever actually occurring in the real world must be ooodles bigger than the largest number imaginable by any random small child of a mathematician.
Where are my mod points? Funny+Insightful+Informative+Flamebait
Actually, I used to think the puffs of "white smoke" and "black smoke" in the Challenger disaster films were early photoshops. A puff of zeroes. A puff of ones. Recently, though, NASA seems to have released extraordinarily detailed movies (from the classified cameras and undocumented camera angles, evidently) that do show beautifully complex puffs of thick black roil. Maybe they can do that with fractals these days, but if so, is it still Photoshop? GIMP can't do that (yet).
Does the "image" contain Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton or Sarah Michelle Gellar? It's photochopped.
BFD. I installed Vista. UAC blew up in my face and hasn't been allowed to work since, even though this multi-user machine thinks everyone is an Administrator (but not THE Administrator, which is an obscure account no one discusses) whose desktops lose their user profiles at the drop of a farthing. Odds Microsoft has fixed enough of anything, especially the stuff they can't imagine ever going wrong: Zero.
The only "Watergate" Japan has ever experienced, the only thing that's ever shaken confidence in their own government, is to lose War War II. I wonder sometimes if a couple of atom bombs was really enough, e.g., to defeat Tojo and the militarists, or if Truman's nuclear options were just the irritant that allowed the Japanese Navy to stage a quiet palace coup and bring the war to an end. Consider that in many Japanese RPG's, the ultimate weapons are identified, not just by, but as "crests," i.e., Infinity Crest, and so forth — seals of approval like 007's license to kill, taken by synedoche as the part pointing to the whole. So it makes perfect sense for Japanese to ID themselves, like counting the hairs on the Emperor's head. I suspect if they think about it at all, it represents baseline good standing in an extremely exclusive club. American libertarian consternation about universal registration is the true incomprehensible for Japan. Are Americans capable of self-governance?
Survival of the fittest. Frankly, creationists outbreed evolutionists 10 to 1. While, on the one hand, it may be a case of dinosaurs "versing" (as my kid sez) small insectivore mammals with the lowest profile on the planet, on the other there is no catastrophic asteroid of pure logic that will inject reason into arguments with these faith-based anachronomicons. I can occasionally win the argument, at least temporarily, with educated ministers by suggesting that telling God how He MUST create is blasphemous, but for the most part my creationist acquaintances are obviously struggling with visions of kindling wood.
So, you pack a bit of C4 the size of a Pink Pearl eraser into a robot dragonfly the size of a pack of Marlboros and drop it off a rooftop, it flutters passively toward the mall walkers below and detonates at eye level, that your scenario? Or are we talking riderless Gundam mecha, here? iPhones on alternating tripod legs, climbing slyly into bowls of bistro minestrone? I can't do that. Can you do that? Can your oil rich rogue uncle Bob do that?
Somebody mod this guy up to 7+ please. Thanks for the info on a topic I've been wondering about!
As totally useless, since now you have to securely transmit a message AND a key you don't dare use twice. Ask Che Guevara.
The first rule of cryptanalysis is that secure pipes leak at both ends, but if you build your pipes out of empty toilet paper tubes... Unh. It's sooo easy to be half-baked, as in been there, done that. BLNT.
You gotta give Microsoft credit for listening to customers' ideas before they ignore them. And I've never seen a Microsoft bug you couldn't eventually buy a fix for, all the way back to MS C V4. And not even Ubuntu supports my Compaq Presario notebook screen out of the box, although I'm given to understand that I can devote the better part of an evening making it work with tools in the distribution. Puh-leeze.
I wish I had a dime for every petty martinet who thinks they've had a good idea for solving imperceptible problems. Oh, wait... Iraq... WMDs, yellow cake... right! I wish I had that $50 trillion dollars back, too.
SP 1 was available early to OEM's, IIRC. This does not bode well for ordinary "Home Premium" schmucks who'd rather be using Leopard.
That's funny. I was immediately put in mind of a) parochial racist crap like Boss "King of the Jungle" Nass, b) patriarchal misogynist crap like piling 75 pounds of kabuki kit on Keisha Castle-Hughes without letting her speak, and c) in-your-face theater of the absurd Dadaist crap like Ubu Roi, sans brains, talent or insight.
18-1/2 missing minutes? What 18-1/2 missing minutes? I love the private sector.
Hate Vista. Love the 10 billion tons of software noone has ported to Leopard yet. Awaiting SP1.
Instead of sneering in derision at Three Laws of Robotics, we can now subvert, pervert and ignore 117 pages of "ethics?" Fie. War is about serious differences of opinion about what the law is, or should be, and whoever lays it down and keeps it down has ethics on her side. In any case, our DOD is already run by "ethical robots". We have unilaterally decided not to use AK-47's, for example, because those things stink of ideologically improper provenance, even if they still fire when caked in mud or full of blowing sand or snow, and even if they never, ever, under any circumstances jam in action. Not to mention various urban legends that we're perfectly happy to field armaments bearing electronics made in China. Go figure. Personally, I'm rooting for Skynet.
Does a geisha painted on a Japanese fan know she's wrinkled? IOW, it's a frame problem, like biting your own forehead.
Never had a Mac that lasted more than 2 years. Or rather, all my Macs still run, except for the ones with broken hinges, but State of the Art has made everything obsolete in two years. The worst Mac I ever owned, a Performa, still boots up fine (and would lock up once or twice a week, just like always, if I'd let it.) Other than that, Mach sucks. These machines blaze on native code.
Like it says in the Tao Te Ching, how'd you get in this mess in the first place? If you have to ask that question, management has hired you on because you're desperate and work cheap and may be qualified to solve their problem — IOW, they're outsourcing. If they weren't so cheap, the team that wrote the stuff would still be on board. Finally, if you have to grok it, do it inside out — look at the user interface (if there is one), then find the data, then find what calls what. I agree with previous remarks about ignoring comments, especially if the code is very old and has seen more than a few layers of maintenance. Two other observations: The elegant stuff is the oldest. The outrageously rewritten stuff is recent and extremely dangerous — change it at your peril. Well, three. Beware of academic styles. No one designing software tools actually has to use them, so usually any team of coders will have used 20% of the tools to do 80% of the work, all differently, except for the first guy, who used 95% of the tools to do what now amounts to 20% of the current specs.