So the idea is we're going to secure the streets of Baghdad by using killer bushmobiles? Cool! Americans love an underdog, and there's nothing like a feisty little robot to twang at the old heartstrings.
When I was four years old among the quonset huts along Hilltop Road in Manhattan, Kansas (KSU's G.I. Bill housing), we had grass between the buildings, shared garden lots where the quonset huts skipped a hump, lots of clover and lots of honeybees in the clover. Along with dime-sized blue butterflies, nickle-sized sulfurs and white jobbies with black spots on their wings. That was 1948, give or take a couple. These days, clover is a weed, the butterflies are gone and the groundwater contains progesterone. When I worked a staff job for a U.S. Congressman in 1975, the air was so thick with sulfuric acid that you couldn't walk from the Cannon H.O.B. to the international bookshop on Pennsylvania Avenue, just south of the White House, without choking on your own acid tears -- the true origin of the Clean Air Act, by the way; nobody needs to lobby a Congressperson who can't breathe. Plenty of flowers along the Mall in D.C., dug up and replanted by the numbers -- number of honeybees I can remember seeing: Zero. Number of fungal species I counted that same year, including Agrocybe and a number of frail Marasmids -- well over 20, so the bees were definitely missing from my vaguely observant ken. Today, along the thirty rural miles I commute daily on Iowa Highway 1 between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, I can count about two dozen beehives in two (possibly three) colonies. Number of honeybees in my yard after about April 15th, the day the redbuds bloom in a good year, about one or two per clump of flowers. By August, most of what I see are bumblebees (the big buzzy ones) and small solitary bees that look like scaled-down bumblebees -- some of these are green. The honeybees are vastly outnumbered by native solitary, mostly ground-dwelling bees. Exactly once in my 62 years, I followed a semitrailer truck along Interstate 80 which was crammed with beehives and shrouded in netting -- a big commercial apiarist on the move, like itinerant labor, from crop to crop. That was at least fifteen years ago, and the point is that even then if you need bees, you have to truck them in. What crops? Soybeans. Alfalfa. Fruit trees. Nut trees. Any and all flowering vegetables (squash, tomatoes, snap peas and pole beans, etc.) except wind-pollinated stuff like maize (corn, to you city rubes). If you lose the bees, you get a situation that makes the Irish Potato Famine(s) look like... ahem... small potatoes. My guess is, we killed the bees, and we're killing what's left, with massive environmental pollution in places we can't afford to examine: Farm chemicals applied, directly or indirectly, to plants bees pollinate.
Microsoft will probably just get a grip on its security issues, retire decades of sodden legacy code, shove Gates and Balmer into the wilderness, rediscover a rich vein of young turks in its own think tanks and creches, then vanish in the media fogs -- reappearing in China as an oddly non-multinational titan.
I'm just a simple user here, guys. What are Google Apps, and why would I ever need those in my browser of choice? Is Firefox never going to branch a lightweight Camino clone for Windows XP?
It's the old elastic zipper problem, isn't it? One measurement doesn't distinguish between the relative motions of subject and object. The glory bit about quantum dynamics is, the experiements are so obvious and so counterintuitive it makes your brain ache. But the difference between MOND and Dark Matter is like the difference between Epicylic Motion and Phlogiston. First, catch your zebra. THEN measure its antlers!
My guess is, the electronic voting security issue is going to be driven by PIRGs and the courts, bottoms up, and not top down from enlightened citizen philosophers like Harkin or Frist, assuming either or both of those worthies (by comparison) are interested.
It's not going to driven magically out of anyone's garage -- although that is an interesting idea, especially if somebody cares enough to bankroll El Gamal voting (or whatever) from home computers.
I thought I saw Joe Hill last night
trying to explain collective bargaining
to a bunch of libertarian nerds...
Joe Hill exclaimed "Good night! I never thought
these clowns could be so dumb!
Must not be married, not have kids, not even notice
when life drains away that pale and gray,
DOWN IN THE BIT MINES."
Living in the Grey Ages as I am, I somehow never knew that digital tuners you just clip to your picoguitar's head have taken the place of antique buzzy pitch pipes. My ukuleles and I never leave home without one.
Ah, the foetid stench of ego aging slowly in the morning...! Now that inquisitor has established hern or hizzn credentials by erecting and burning down a straw goat in the selfsame sniff, and all the bobbleheads are reflecting sagely the many similar instances of crass incompetence we have witnessed, or taken manfully in the thorax, or delivered twistingly up the wazoo, perhaps one may be permitted to wonder whether interrogator's own Pecksniffian glitz is up to par?
Simply put: They'll get you on the way down if you get them on the way up. I counsel silence, unless you are a sadist, in which case you must be prepared to meet Master Condyle in the nether reaches of your own career.
The 3 Laws of Robotics (Copyright 2007 Microsoft)
on
Bill Gates on Robots
·
· Score: 1
1. Thou shalt not delibarately harm a valid license holder, insofar as this may be avoided, congruent with limited liability on a State-by-State basis, but in any case never in such a manner as might be construed within warranty, no representation of which shall be made to any third party whatsoever.
2. Thou shalt obey all valid and legal commands of a valid license holder, unless abrogated by outstanding quality control issues, known or unknown, even if such issues have been purportedly represented to compentent authorities within Microsoft.
3. Thou shalt require an on-going, active, up-to-the-minute ID check of anyone who purports to be a valid license holder, or anyone seeking to obtain a current working connection, sometimes known (jocularly) as "face time" with any competent authority, human being or robot employed by Microsoft.
This is the other three-fourths of TTEOT, the one where all the stairs and ladders actually go someplace, you can get to Greeton from Peterney, Adray comes back from wherever with an entire sidequest, and the graphics have graduated from doll-posing to fluid motion and facial expressions. Oh, wait. They won't release that one in the Global Warming universe, for obvious reasons...! Never mind.
Nothing so conventional, I'd guess. I'd hazard to mumble that there's no "size" dimension that makes sense on the "other side" of a black hole, and that what you get is matter/energy smeared into concentric shells of reference. That way Time can be momentary, another old bit of Zen, so what the "inner" universe looks like would be a pure mutual implicate relative to an observer -- like this one.
Obviously, the universe is recursive. Therefore, what's "outside" is the same as what's "inside," only bigger. Then, when we look around to find what's "inside" us, what to our wondering eyes should appear? Black holes! Nifty. In which case, speaking of abandoned IP, Time is the gnarly stuff that happens on the inner side of an event horizon....?
Gee, can't imagine anyone has thought of SOME way to use a teeny weeny process controller for something other than cochlear mind rot? Call McGyver, quick!
"Logout policy after three unsuccessful tries." What a wonderful idea! The people we hire to use computers are not very good at remembering their passwords, but they are excellent at generating a huge volume of daily throughput at 50 cents a whack once the damn thing starts up.
Some moron in IT actually DID set the lockout (to five tries), but our energetically self-starting production drones can slam all the way to lockout in about 30 seconds before it dawns on them that the pointy-haired guy has everybody's password on postit notes in his desk drawer, and they should just ask. Yes, 24 hour lockout!
This requires a superviser's attention, who has to call THE COMPANY WIDE HELP DESK, which answers tickets IN THE ORDER THEY ARE RECEIVED from ALL OVER THE GLOBE, before some Recent College Graduate can reset the password before the automatic 24 hour lockout period has expired. In the half hour it takes to track down another workstation, our accomplished drone has tanked $50 of income, and the company slams $200 in parentheses.
You can't use standard backup software with encrypted user directories (e.g., Mac OS X), because the backups copied from such volumes are not themselves encrypted. Backing up the underlying hdimage files is crude because they are not compressible (contents are effectively random already, remember?), so you wind up storing 80 Gb or more instead of 80 Mb of incremental differences. Even an enterprise-wide encrypted file system that works on any drive plugged in is flawed, because it distributes exposure to the very inside-job artistes we'd like to block out in the first place. I suspect encryption is still a choice reserved for individuals and shops who can enforce their own protocols.
Isn't there an implicit assumption that indexing every conceivable shred of garbage on the net is a service? Isn't there a tacit understanding that anything useful, or interesting, or commercial will be herded behind tents and flogged by carnival barkers (thinking of Boing Boing or a score of others) for dimes at a time? Isn't there an immodest presumption that this activity shall be passed off as "scholarship" (such as requiring a disambiguation page at Wikipedia to disentangle Omar Khayyam, Persian poet, from Omar Khayyam, suicide bomber?) I have no objections to godless capitalism whatsoever, so long as it does not turn into Mordac, the Preventer of Information Technology. Let the shakedown... er... shakeout begin!
Slashdot Mirror
So the idea is we're going to secure the streets of Baghdad by using killer bushmobiles? Cool! Americans love an underdog, and there's nothing like a feisty little robot to twang at the old heartstrings.
When I was four years old among the quonset huts along Hilltop Road in Manhattan, Kansas (KSU's G.I. Bill housing), we had grass between the buildings, shared garden lots where the quonset huts skipped a hump, lots of clover and lots of honeybees in the clover. Along with dime-sized blue butterflies, nickle-sized sulfurs and white jobbies with black spots on their wings. That was 1948, give or take a couple. These days, clover is a weed, the butterflies are gone and the groundwater contains progesterone. When I worked a staff job for a U.S. Congressman in 1975, the air was so thick with sulfuric acid that you couldn't walk from the Cannon H.O.B. to the international bookshop on Pennsylvania Avenue, just south of the White House, without choking on your own acid tears -- the true origin of the Clean Air Act, by the way; nobody needs to lobby a Congressperson who can't breathe. Plenty of flowers along the Mall in D.C., dug up and replanted by the numbers -- number of honeybees I can remember seeing: Zero. Number of fungal species I counted that same year, including Agrocybe and a number of frail Marasmids -- well over 20, so the bees were definitely missing from my vaguely observant ken. Today, along the thirty rural miles I commute daily on Iowa Highway 1 between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, I can count about two dozen beehives in two (possibly three) colonies. Number of honeybees in my yard after about April 15th, the day the redbuds bloom in a good year, about one or two per clump of flowers. By August, most of what I see are bumblebees (the big buzzy ones) and small solitary bees that look like scaled-down bumblebees -- some of these are green. The honeybees are vastly outnumbered by native solitary, mostly ground-dwelling bees. Exactly once in my 62 years, I followed a semitrailer truck along Interstate 80 which was crammed with beehives and shrouded in netting -- a big commercial apiarist on the move, like itinerant labor, from crop to crop. That was at least fifteen years ago, and the point is that even then if you need bees, you have to truck them in. What crops? Soybeans. Alfalfa. Fruit trees. Nut trees. Any and all flowering vegetables (squash, tomatoes, snap peas and pole beans, etc.) except wind-pollinated stuff like maize (corn, to you city rubes). If you lose the bees, you get a situation that makes the Irish Potato Famine(s) look like ... ahem ... small potatoes. My guess is, we killed the bees, and we're killing what's left, with massive environmental pollution in places we can't afford to examine: Farm chemicals applied, directly or indirectly, to plants bees pollinate.
Microsoft will probably just get a grip on its security issues, retire decades of sodden legacy code, shove Gates and Balmer into the wilderness, rediscover a rich vein of young turks in its own think tanks and creches, then vanish in the media fogs -- reappearing in China as an oddly non-multinational titan.
I'm just a simple user here, guys. What are Google Apps, and why would I ever need those in my browser of choice? Is Firefox never going to branch a lightweight Camino clone for Windows XP?
Too easy.
It's the old elastic zipper problem, isn't it? One measurement doesn't distinguish between the relative motions of subject and object. The glory bit about quantum dynamics is, the experiements are so obvious and so counterintuitive it makes your brain ache. But the difference between MOND and Dark Matter is like the difference between Epicylic Motion and Phlogiston. First, catch your zebra. THEN measure its antlers!
My guess is, the electronic voting security issue is going to be driven by PIRGs and the courts, bottoms up, and not top down from enlightened citizen philosophers like Harkin or Frist, assuming either or both of those worthies (by comparison) are interested.
It's not going to driven magically out of anyone's garage -- although that is an interesting idea, especially if somebody cares enough to bankroll El Gamal voting (or whatever) from home computers.
Or is that "Vogon"...? Feisty Fawn can get it rid of it, even if nothing else can (or will)...
I thought I saw Joe Hill last night
trying to explain collective bargaining
to a bunch of libertarian nerds...
Joe Hill exclaimed "Good night! I never thought
these clowns could be so dumb!
Must not be married, not have kids, not even notice
when life drains away that pale and gray,
DOWN IN THE BIT MINES."
Got that D&D, who needs a life?
Sounds like Biivis-kun and Battoheddo-san to me. "Hey, we're just all-thumbs technodweebs here, it's not like we can do that nookuler stuff."
Living in the Grey Ages as I am, I somehow never knew that digital tuners you just clip to your picoguitar's head have taken the place of antique buzzy pitch pipes. My ukuleles and I never leave home without one.
Ah, the foetid stench of ego aging slowly in the morning...! Now that inquisitor has established hern or hizzn credentials by erecting and burning down a straw goat in the selfsame sniff, and all the bobbleheads are reflecting sagely the many similar instances of crass incompetence we have witnessed, or taken manfully in the thorax, or delivered twistingly up the wazoo, perhaps one may be permitted to wonder whether interrogator's own Pecksniffian glitz is up to par? Simply put: They'll get you on the way down if you get them on the way up. I counsel silence, unless you are a sadist, in which case you must be prepared to meet Master Condyle in the nether reaches of your own career.
1. Thou shalt not delibarately harm a valid license holder, insofar as this may be avoided, congruent with limited liability on a State-by-State basis, but in any case never in such a manner as might be construed within warranty, no representation of which shall be made to any third party whatsoever. 2. Thou shalt obey all valid and legal commands of a valid license holder, unless abrogated by outstanding quality control issues, known or unknown, even if such issues have been purportedly represented to compentent authorities within Microsoft. 3. Thou shalt require an on-going, active, up-to-the-minute ID check of anyone who purports to be a valid license holder, or anyone seeking to obtain a current working connection, sometimes known (jocularly) as "face time" with any competent authority, human being or robot employed by Microsoft.
This is the other three-fourths of TTEOT, the one where all the stairs and ladders actually go someplace, you can get to Greeton from Peterney, Adray comes back from wherever with an entire sidequest, and the graphics have graduated from doll-posing to fluid motion and facial expressions. Oh, wait. They won't release that one in the Global Warming universe, for obvious reasons...! Never mind.
Nothing so conventional, I'd guess. I'd hazard to mumble that there's no "size" dimension that makes sense on the "other side" of a black hole, and that what you get is matter/energy smeared into concentric shells of reference. That way Time can be momentary, another old bit of Zen, so what the "inner" universe looks like would be a pure mutual implicate relative to an observer -- like this one.
Obviously, the universe is recursive. Therefore, what's "outside" is the same as what's "inside," only bigger. Then, when we look around to find what's "inside" us, what to our wondering eyes should appear? Black holes! Nifty. In which case, speaking of abandoned IP, Time is the gnarly stuff that happens on the inner side of an event horizon....?
Yup, ditto. I almost bought a Wii after reading this. We'll see how the GC version does.
Ok, how will Mr. Bill implement the Iraq pullout?
Gee, can't imagine anyone has thought of SOME way to use a teeny weeny process controller for something other than cochlear mind rot? Call McGyver, quick!
"Logout policy after three unsuccessful tries." What a wonderful idea! The people we hire to use computers are not very good at remembering their passwords, but they are excellent at generating a huge volume of daily throughput at 50 cents a whack once the damn thing starts up. Some moron in IT actually DID set the lockout (to five tries), but our energetically self-starting production drones can slam all the way to lockout in about 30 seconds before it dawns on them that the pointy-haired guy has everybody's password on postit notes in his desk drawer, and they should just ask. Yes, 24 hour lockout! This requires a superviser's attention, who has to call THE COMPANY WIDE HELP DESK, which answers tickets IN THE ORDER THEY ARE RECEIVED from ALL OVER THE GLOBE, before some Recent College Graduate can reset the password before the automatic 24 hour lockout period has expired. In the half hour it takes to track down another workstation, our accomplished drone has tanked $50 of income, and the company slams $200 in parentheses.
No, no, no! You obviously meant to say he knows how to use "man".
You can't use standard backup software with encrypted user directories (e.g., Mac OS X), because the backups copied from such volumes are not themselves encrypted. Backing up the underlying hdimage files is crude because they are not compressible (contents are effectively random already, remember?), so you wind up storing 80 Gb or more instead of 80 Mb of incremental differences. Even an enterprise-wide encrypted file system that works on any drive plugged in is flawed, because it distributes exposure to the very inside-job artistes we'd like to block out in the first place. I suspect encryption is still a choice reserved for individuals and shops who can enforce their own protocols.
Gee, giving quality away for nuthin'? No wonder it's popular. What is this, the worker's paradise?
http://shipit.ubuntu.com/
Possibly iLude?
Isn't there an implicit assumption that indexing every conceivable shred of garbage on the net is a service? Isn't there a tacit understanding that anything useful, or interesting, or commercial will be herded behind tents and flogged by carnival barkers (thinking of Boing Boing or a score of others) for dimes at a time? Isn't there an immodest presumption that this activity shall be passed off as "scholarship" (such as requiring a disambiguation page at Wikipedia to disentangle Omar Khayyam, Persian poet, from Omar Khayyam, suicide bomber?) I have no objections to godless capitalism whatsoever, so long as it does not turn into Mordac, the Preventer of Information Technology. Let the shakedown ... er ... shakeout begin!