Fortunately, back then you couldn't patent a concept
Not true. In Richard Feynman's memoirs (either Surely You're Joking or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, I forget which one), he tells that after the Manhattan project, he and his colleagues were asked by managers to come up with ideas that they could patent. Feynman, half in jest, tossed up a few including "nuclear-powered aircraft" ("nuclear-powered ship" was already taken). The patents were applied for, and were awarded, and a few years later, Feynman was approached by an aircraft manufacturer, who assumed, given Feynman's name on a nuclear-aircraft patent, that Feynman was an aviation and nuclear energy expert.
Now this story is merely amusing, since even today, nuclear-powered airplanes are completely impractical, but still, I'm reminded of this anecdote whenever I hear people claiming that the phenomenon of stupid or obvious patents started only recently.
It was so depressing, I was down for days afterwards. I decided never to read anything by King again. (His Dark Tower series is also seriously depressing, but I wouldn't call that sci-fi.)
As for hard sci-fi, I'd say Frederick Pohl's Man Plus.
This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it from the record books, depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
I use MapDroyd for this on my Android phone (free), and CityMaps2Go on my iPhone ($2). Both are very basic -- no navigation -- but they have nice integrated UIs for selecting and downloading maps. You won't be able to load the whole world, but I loaded NYC, all of NJ, and all of the Netherlands, using county/province level maps (which have perfect detail; I feel no need to get the city-level maps at all), and all that fits in a gigabyte or two. If you plan ahead and download only the maps for the areas you want to visit, a 16 GB iPhone or an Android with a 32 GB SD card will take you a long way.
This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
I think it's a genuinely dangerous slippery slope.
This "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world? Certain people behave in ways that happen to be legal but which most of us find immoral (which, in fact, most of the perpetrators would find pretty nasty themselves, if it were to happen to them). So, we change the law and ban something. Libertarians immediately extrapolate the new legislation to a ridiculous extent (straw man argument) and thusly "prove" that even the non-exaggerated legislation is wrong. The rest of us ignore the screechy libertarians, and wait for any actual *evidence* that the new law is abused, and, lacking such evidence, sleep soundly at night. Many countries in Europe have limitations on public speech that would give a U.S. constitutional fanatic a brain embolism, and yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state. So, relax, and give some thought to the people that some of these "dangerous" laws are actually meant to protect.
Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the root cause of this kind of misery are people who'll believe whatever they read, without any due diligence? If we were to apply scientific publishing standards in the news -- that is, whenever you're writing based on someone else's words, name your source -- then any allegation could be tracked back to whomever made the initial comment, or it would dead-end at an anonymous post. A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Seriously. If you get an anonymous email accusing your next-door neighbor of being a child molester, are you going to go over there to beat him up? Anyone who has actual evidence of something like that should be talking to the police, not sending anonymous messages and forum posts around. Whenever I see anonymous accusations, I treat them with a lot of suspicion.
How did that cold-hearted garbage get modded "insightful"? Maybe I'm really, really unusual, but I do, in fact, care about all those 7 billion. Sure, I can't keep up to date with every facebook page on the planet, attend every wedding and every funeral, sit by every bedside, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I can make a substantial difference in only a handful of lives, and the rest of humanity is utterly beyond my ability to help. And yet, I care about them.
what happens when the extreme left jumps in the saddle is rarely discussed in any detail, perhaps because 90% of university professors in America label themselves as being "liberal or very liberal" in their political opinions, and are generally sympathetic to the iconic figures of communism (Che, Castro, Marx, etc.) if not to communism itself.
90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.
If there were fewer of us, as their were in our grandparents' day, we could probably go back to having fewer restrictions. Of course, to get there, we'd need to start licensing reproduction.
The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own. My personal theory is that it is actually possible for entire nations to come to their senses and start behaving responsibly, and those non-enforced low fertility rates could be evidence of that, but of course it remains to be seen whether the current demographic trends will hold long enough to really make a difference.
I'm quite shocked by the US where they catch a drunken bozo for the 5th time in a month and he still is allowed to drive to work and back.
It depends on which state you're in. Here in New Jersey, a first DUI conviction will cause your driving privileges to be revoked for 6 to 12 months; a second conviction is 12 to 24 months; a third conviction means you lose your license for life. The law does not provide for exceptions for people who need to drive because of their jobs or because of disability.
At least, that's how it was when I took my NJ driving test back in 1998. IANAL, etc.
I'm personally pretty pleased with Firefox and found every new release to be an improvement so far. The fact that sometimes a configuration setting disappears from Preferences and then has to be set through about:config, it's not ideal, but not exactly a big deal either since I only have to do it once.
Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.
I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.
I can think of half a dozen articles that disseminate actual information - yet are incomplete, misleading/slanted, out-of-context copy pasta from other sources
I guess your idea of "actual information" is not the same as mine. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a hard time even imagining edit wars over things like the carbon cycle, the climate of Buenos Aires, Winston Churchill's alma mater, or the progression of the U.S. GDP or unemployment levels.
If you can provide some actual examples -- as opposed to saying "I can think of half a dozen articles" and then not citing a single one -- I would be interested to hear about them. If I'm really so seriously misguided, I'd like to know.
Criticism of famous / historical figures has no place in an encyclopedia in the first place; they are supposed to be repositories of information, not opinion. I spent countless hours with major encyclopedias when I was a kid, and whenever I see criticism or praise of people in Wikipedia, it feels jarring and out of place. I don't consider it a problem, though, I just skip over those sections.
What keeps me coming back to Wikipedia is because it is actually truly excellent as an encyclopedia. Whenever I'm looking for something about physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geography, history, etc. etc. etc., I find what I'm looking for and I find it quickly. The edit wars that so many people seem to have such huge stakes in tend not to affect articles that disseminate actual information, and those are the only ones I'm interested in; those are the only ones that belong there. The fact that lots of other people use Wikipedia as their personal political soapbox or Geocities page is a very minor annoyance, and maybe the way Wikipedia deals with those annoyances is heavy-handed and/or misguided sometimes, but it takes little to nothing away from its true utility. Certainly not enough to stop me from donating $100 a year.
Am I just getting old and crotchety, or is this a new trend?
It is just you getting old and crotchety. I speak as someone to whom this is also happening, FWIW.
People are always complaining about the youth of today, mostly because they reach a point where they no longer remember what it was like when they were young themselves, when it was them annoying their elders with their questions. At my job, I am regarded as a guru now, but in the past I did my share of asking questions, too, some of them perceptive, some of them lazy or stupid. At some point you transition to being a person who answers them, and at that point it behooves a good citizen to be patient with the youngsters and return the favor to society.
In other words, relax. Civilization is not collapsing just yet.
Right now, I am sending and receiving my email via public SMTP and IMAP servers that my mail client connects to over SSL. There are several major email providers that offer this option, and it's not difficult to set that up on a server of your own, either, if you so choose.
This takes my ISP out of the equation: SSL was specifically designed to be secure against eavesdroppers *and* to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way around this would be to ban SSL altogether, or cripple it with a government-mandated back door. This is going to be fun.
Sun did not sue Microsoft for making their own JVM; they sued Microsoft for making an incompatible JVM, while using the Java trademark -- in direct and deliberate violation of the Java licensing terms.
In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the "Strategic Objective" described as to "Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
What's with the fixation on spending cuts? How about we leave government the way it is, and make up for the budget shortfalls by raising taxes on the rich? Seriously, if there's one segment of the population that's been making out like bandits over the last 30 years (while the rest of us went nowhere), it's them. How about we end the neocon nonsense and start redistributing some wealth already? It's not like the rich are spending it on anything that benefits the common good. Trickle-down economics, don't make me laugh.
I'm not happy with iOS 4.0 on my iPod touch (second generation), either. General UI sluggishness, sometimes to the point of making Mail react so slowly to the keyboard that it becomes unusable, and at that point the only way to get things back to normal is a reboot. There is some new functionality in Mail 4.0 but I don't use it. It appears that it is possible to downgrade back to 3.1.3; I'm going to try that next...
I have fond memories of my Compaq Armada 7790. Among its many virtues was a built-in power supply. If it had used the standard power cable used on desktop PCs (and just about everything else with a detachable power cable) it would have been perfect, although theirs wasn't too hard to get either (it was not some completely nonstandard Compaq-only plug). Not having the brick to deal with makes a big difference in terms of convenience.
Apparently, even financial geniuses can miss bubbles -- see here, for example.
Not to say anything against the financial geniuses of the world, but if even objectively successful investors can miss something as huge as the U.S. housing bubble, it just reinforces my suspicion that those financial types are merely experts on the small scale, and ignorant of the big picture.
The big picture being: population grows. Places where you can find gainful employment are growing at a lesser pace because of limited natural resources. Population density grows disproportionally in areas with lots of Big Business and concomitant employment opportunities. Housing in said areas becomes scarcer and therefore more expensive. People get antsy about having to spend more and more on housing, but demographic inertia prevents the decline in population growth that would bring things back into balance quickly; instead, people start focusing on how rising real estate prices could actually work to their benefit, and buy things that are really kinda out of reach. This leads to real estate prices rising even more rapidly, making the expectation of rising real estate prices a self-fulfilling prophecy. People buy outrageously expensive houses yet feel that they've gotten themselves a great deal, will be able to retire 10 years sooner than they used to expect, a win-win all around. Some sane people realize that this cannot continue because it's just another pyramid scheme that will implode once the market runs out of suckers. Those sane people are a tiny minority that everyone else just laughs at -- financial geniuses included. Then the inevitable happens and the bubble bursts. Bankers get blamed because they made the juiciest profits; people who bought ridiculously overpriced homes consider themselves innocent victims. People who stayed in rented apartments while the world around them went nuts end up just scratching their heads and laughing at the stupidity of it all.
Protip: when someone doesn't get that you were joking, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're "humour-impaired". Maybe, just maybe, it means that it actually wasn't obvious that you were joking.
Besides, the difference between strong beer and whisky is no joking matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. In Richard Feynman's memoirs (either Surely You're Joking or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, I forget which one), he tells that after the Manhattan project, he and his colleagues were asked by managers to come up with ideas that they could patent. Feynman, half in jest, tossed up a few including "nuclear-powered aircraft" ("nuclear-powered ship" was already taken). The patents were applied for, and were awarded, and a few years later, Feynman was approached by an aircraft manufacturer, who assumed, given Feynman's name on a nuclear-aircraft patent, that Feynman was an aviation and nuclear energy expert.
Now this story is merely amusing, since even today, nuclear-powered airplanes are completely impractical, but still, I'm reminded of this anecdote whenever I hear people claiming that the phenomenon of stupid or obvious patents started only recently.
It was so depressing, I was down for days afterwards. I decided never to read anything by King again. (His Dark Tower series is also seriously depressing, but I wouldn't call that sci-fi.) As for hard sci-fi, I'd say Frederick Pohl's Man Plus.
This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it from the record books, depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
I use MapDroyd for this on my Android phone (free), and CityMaps2Go on my iPhone ($2). Both are very basic -- no navigation -- but they have nice integrated UIs for selecting and downloading maps. You won't be able to load the whole world, but I loaded NYC, all of NJ, and all of the Netherlands, using county/province level maps (which have perfect detail; I feel no need to get the city-level maps at all), and all that fits in a gigabyte or two. If you plan ahead and download only the maps for the areas you want to visit, a 16 GB iPhone or an Android with a 32 GB SD card will take you a long way.
This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
I think it's a genuinely dangerous slippery slope.
This "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world? Certain people behave in ways that happen to be legal but which most of us find immoral (which, in fact, most of the perpetrators would find pretty nasty themselves, if it were to happen to them). So, we change the law and ban something. Libertarians immediately extrapolate the new legislation to a ridiculous extent (straw man argument) and thusly "prove" that even the non-exaggerated legislation is wrong. The rest of us ignore the screechy libertarians, and wait for any actual *evidence* that the new law is abused, and, lacking such evidence, sleep soundly at night. Many countries in Europe have limitations on public speech that would give a U.S. constitutional fanatic a brain embolism, and yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state. So, relax, and give some thought to the people that some of these "dangerous" laws are actually meant to protect.
http://www.viruscomix.com/page329.html
Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the root cause of this kind of misery are people who'll believe whatever they read, without any due diligence? If we were to apply scientific publishing standards in the news -- that is, whenever you're writing based on someone else's words, name your source -- then any allegation could be tracked back to whomever made the initial comment, or it would dead-end at an anonymous post. A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Seriously. If you get an anonymous email accusing your next-door neighbor of being a child molester, are you going to go over there to beat him up? Anyone who has actual evidence of something like that should be talking to the police, not sending anonymous messages and forum posts around. Whenever I see anonymous accusations, I treat them with a lot of suspicion.
Technically, you didn't -- the crew compartment survived the fuel tank explosion; the crew were still alive until they hit the water.
How did that cold-hearted garbage get modded "insightful"? Maybe I'm really, really unusual, but I do, in fact, care about all those 7 billion. Sure, I can't keep up to date with every facebook page on the planet, attend every wedding and every funeral, sit by every bedside, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I can make a substantial difference in only a handful of lives, and the rest of humanity is utterly beyond my ability to help. And yet, I care about them.
what happens when the extreme left jumps in the saddle is rarely discussed in any detail, perhaps because 90% of university professors in America label themselves as being "liberal or very liberal" in their political opinions, and are generally sympathetic to the iconic figures of communism (Che, Castro, Marx, etc.) if not to communism itself.
90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.
If there were fewer of us, as their were in our grandparents' day, we could probably go back to having fewer restrictions. Of course, to get there, we'd need to start licensing reproduction.
The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own. My personal theory is that it is actually possible for entire nations to come to their senses and start behaving responsibly, and those non-enforced low fertility rates could be evidence of that, but of course it remains to be seen whether the current demographic trends will hold long enough to really make a difference.
It depends on which state you're in. Here in New Jersey, a first DUI conviction will cause your driving privileges to be revoked for 6 to 12 months; a second conviction is 12 to 24 months; a third conviction means you lose your license for life. The law does not provide for exceptions for people who need to drive because of their jobs or because of disability.
At least, that's how it was when I took my NJ driving test back in 1998. IANAL, etc.
Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.
I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.
I can think of half a dozen articles that disseminate actual information - yet are incomplete, misleading/slanted, out-of-context copy pasta from other sources
I guess your idea of "actual information" is not the same as mine. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a hard time even imagining edit wars over things like the carbon cycle, the climate of Buenos Aires, Winston Churchill's alma mater, or the progression of the U.S. GDP or unemployment levels.
If you can provide some actual examples -- as opposed to saying "I can think of half a dozen articles" and then not citing a single one -- I would be interested to hear about them. If I'm really so seriously misguided, I'd like to know.
What keeps me coming back to Wikipedia is because it is actually truly excellent as an encyclopedia. Whenever I'm looking for something about physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geography, history, etc. etc. etc., I find what I'm looking for and I find it quickly. The edit wars that so many people seem to have such huge stakes in tend not to affect articles that disseminate actual information, and those are the only ones I'm interested in; those are the only ones that belong there. The fact that lots of other people use Wikipedia as their personal political soapbox or Geocities page is a very minor annoyance, and maybe the way Wikipedia deals with those annoyances is heavy-handed and/or misguided sometimes, but it takes little to nothing away from its true utility. Certainly not enough to stop me from donating $100 a year.
Am I just getting old and crotchety, or is this a new trend?
It is just you getting old and crotchety. I speak as someone to whom this is also happening, FWIW.
People are always complaining about the youth of today, mostly because they reach a point where they no longer remember what it was like when they were young themselves, when it was them annoying their elders with their questions. At my job, I am regarded as a guru now, but in the past I did my share of asking questions, too, some of them perceptive, some of them lazy or stupid. At some point you transition to being a person who answers them, and at that point it behooves a good citizen to be patient with the youngsters and return the favor to society.
In other words, relax. Civilization is not collapsing just yet.
Right now, I am sending and receiving my email via public SMTP and IMAP servers that my mail client connects to over SSL. There are several major email providers that offer this option, and it's not difficult to set that up on a server of your own, either, if you so choose.
This takes my ISP out of the equation: SSL was specifically designed to be secure against eavesdroppers *and* to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. The only way around this would be to ban SSL altogether, or cripple it with a government-mandated back door. This is going to be fun.
In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the "Strategic Objective" described as to "Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
More...
What's with the fixation on spending cuts? How about we leave government the way it is, and make up for the budget shortfalls by raising taxes on the rich? Seriously, if there's one segment of the population that's been making out like bandits over the last 30 years (while the rest of us went nowhere), it's them. How about we end the neocon nonsense and start redistributing some wealth already? It's not like the rich are spending it on anything that benefits the common good. Trickle-down economics, don't make me laugh.
I'm not happy with iOS 4.0 on my iPod touch (second generation), either. General UI sluggishness, sometimes to the point of making Mail react so slowly to the keyboard that it becomes unusable, and at that point the only way to get things back to normal is a reboot. There is some new functionality in Mail 4.0 but I don't use it. It appears that it is possible to downgrade back to 3.1.3; I'm going to try that next...
the first three SW movies were ripped nearly line for line out of Norse myth
Er, no. I think you fell for a joke article where the reverse was done (retelling Star Wars in the style of an Icelandic Saga): http://tattuinardoelasaga.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/tattuinardoela-saga-if-star-wars-were-an-icelandic-saga/
I have fond memories of my Compaq Armada 7790. Among its many virtues was a built-in power supply. If it had used the standard power cable used on desktop PCs (and just about everything else with a detachable power cable) it would have been perfect, although theirs wasn't too hard to get either (it was not some completely nonstandard Compaq-only plug). Not having the brick to deal with makes a big difference in terms of convenience.
Not to say anything against the financial geniuses of the world, but if even objectively successful investors can miss something as huge as the U.S. housing bubble, it just reinforces my suspicion that those financial types are merely experts on the small scale, and ignorant of the big picture.
The big picture being: population grows. Places where you can find gainful employment are growing at a lesser pace because of limited natural resources. Population density grows disproportionally in areas with lots of Big Business and concomitant employment opportunities. Housing in said areas becomes scarcer and therefore more expensive. People get antsy about having to spend more and more on housing, but demographic inertia prevents the decline in population growth that would bring things back into balance quickly; instead, people start focusing on how rising real estate prices could actually work to their benefit, and buy things that are really kinda out of reach. This leads to real estate prices rising even more rapidly, making the expectation of rising real estate prices a self-fulfilling prophecy. People buy outrageously expensive houses yet feel that they've gotten themselves a great deal, will be able to retire 10 years sooner than they used to expect, a win-win all around. Some sane people realize that this cannot continue because it's just another pyramid scheme that will implode once the market runs out of suckers. Those sane people are a tiny minority that everyone else just laughs at -- financial geniuses included. Then the inevitable happens and the bubble bursts. Bankers get blamed because they made the juiciest profits; people who bought ridiculously overpriced homes consider themselves innocent victims. People who stayed in rented apartments while the world around them went nuts end up just scratching their heads and laughing at the stupidity of it all.
Besides, the difference between strong beer and whisky is no joking matter.