The Chinese are going to stomp the west into the ground (And that's not a good thing). Not only will they have more scientists, but they censor their media to keep their kids from being mesmerized by sleaze, and teach the kids a work ethic both at home and at school. While our kids will be 30 year old virgins, working at Walmart, living in their parent's basements, drinking beer, smoking dope, and simulating sex on their Xboxes, the Chinese offspring will be starting the next generation of intels and oracles. Don't be surprised when the Microsoft software development offices move to Beijing in 2015. America is destined to take its place as a third-world debtor nation, and the republicans with their obsession with get rich quick schemes and huge deficits are leading the charge into economic collpase and a political oligarchy. Not that the democrats would fix anything with 60's era social programs. We need a new approach in the US, a true populist party with responsible economic growth as its mantra. And while I'm at it I'll wish for world peace and an end to tooth decay...
If you think this data loss would be unfortunate, you should check out the Earth Resource Observing Satellite (EROS) Data Center run by the US Geological Survey in Sioux Falls South Dakota. For years NASA has been dumping all manner of data tapes there. 9-track, 24-track, literally hundreds of Terabytes of data. And many of those tapes are literally growing mold, sitting in boxes and racks in the basement, for lack of funding to transfer them to more permanent media. Think about it, decades of climate data , going back to the 1970's, is being lost due to lethargy on the part of Clowngress. Or is it lethargy. Let's see, three and a half decades of climate change data, detailed and explicit. Hmmmm.... who *wouldn't* want that data placed online where researchers could access it? I wonder.....
As far as I am concerned, Disney has always been about seducing children to the dark side. After all, Mary Poppins was a witch who took her charges to a meeting of her coven. Then there are films like "bedknobs and broomsticks". Or clips like Mickey as the sorcerers apprentice. Can anyone think of a Disney film that has promoted faith in God... didn't think so. The trouble is that our whole culture has become so hedonistic and pagan, that the devil no longer *needs* Disney, he has video games teaching children to cast spells and make pacts with demons before most of them can read.
Linux growth is slowing because Linux has used up the available pool of UNIX cultists.
These are people who believe that it is morally wrong to make a computer easy to use, and are angry at Microsoft for making so many functions point-and-click.
The problem is, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once people get used to point-and-click interfaces, and software development that works like a powerpoint drawing, getting them to go back to a CLI and text code development is like talking people into giving up their car for a bicycle.
I'm an old-fashioned computer geek myself, I think that object oriented code is an abomination, and God wrote the Universe in "C" (with some assembler for the microscopic stuff). BUT - I have zero chance of getting my kids to see the world that way. SO FOR ALL YOU LinGeeks out there- make a choice. Either make Linux easier to use,(that means NO CLI) or resign yourselves to having Linux be the dysfunctional OS for the kind of social misfits who brew methane with their own poop to fuel their converted VW bugs.
Actually, there is serious research suggesting that so-called "fossil" fuels aren't fossils at all, but are pockets of natural carbon combined with water at high heat and pressure, that reforms continuously under the earth. Thereby giving us an inexhaustible supply. And it's a good thing too. Because without greenhouse gases we are overdue for the next ICE AGE. I'd rather have the ocean move in 100 ft or so along the coast, than have the ice cap extend down to Kansas. Face it, Gaia doesn't exist, the earth is just a ball of dirt, and the only thing special about it is that we live here. What matters is that technology make humans as comfortable as possible, nothing else.
For the great unwashed masses, using IPV6 will mean that: 1) Their ISP supports it 2) The Windoze protocol stack uses it. I know that Linux on my machine has an IPV6 stack available, but do any commercial ISPs deliver connectivity? It isn't exactly something they put in their TV ads.
There were two original purposes for NASA:
1) Test ICBM hardware for the cold war in the guise of civilian research
2) Create thrilling TV footage in the days before CGI
NASA is now dying because both purposes have been made obsolete, and space itself has become boring and mundane. Unfotunately, AT&T doesn't need NASA to buy satellites from hughes anymore.
The only things that can save NASA are:
a) The discovery of sentient extraterrestrial life, and the consequent rush to reach it.
b) A lifter technology so cheap, it makes space a viable tourist destination, creating a profitable industry
Let's face it, you don't get $10s of billions in funding with blurry pictures of frozen mud from Titan
I'm sorry , I mistook you for a sincere individual. You're just a trouble-making troll. You don't understand the subject under debate, or contribute to the dialogue, you just snipe at other posters using tidbits of repeated argument.
The term anonymous coward is quite apropos.
Oh, exsqueeze me. You caught me in a semantic error. Yes technically speaking the Xrays don't literally "scatter" because they are neither reflected or refracted but merely absorbed by the target. They are subject to Compton scattering, but that isn't germain.
However your point is completely orthogonal to my premise, which was that CAT scans are computationally more complex than the images in the original post. But I'm sure that everyone is impressed by you knowing what a Fourier transform is, even though it transforms the data into FREQUENCY space, not Fourier space.
Or, an alternate theory. I used to work for a company that made MRI and CAT scanning hardware, and I used to write software to process imagery om those devices. Knowing the math involved, I can reassure you that this imaging technique is analogous to finger-painting mathematically. This article IS about a simple parlor trick. If I have a point light source and a photo diode, I can make an image in one of two ways. I can hold the light still and move the diode (this is how satellites like GOES and Landsat make images), OR I can hold the diode still and move the point of light, which is what they did for the article. BFD. If you're impressed by this, you'll probably go ga-ga for the "pinhole lens" effect. On a sunny day, go into a dark room with opague window shades, pull the shades down, then put a pinhole in one of the shades. Hold a clean piece of paper a foot or so from the pinhole, and the hole will act as a lens and create an image of the outdoor scene on the paper - OOOooooo, magic!
Gosh, how fascinating. Now compare this to a *really cool* imaging technique, like using an x-ray beam and an array of photodiodes to detect the scatter patterns as the beam passes through a human body, then calculate an image of the actual bones and organs inside. It's called Computed Axial Tomography or a CAT scan. And if you want something *realy really* cool, check out the technique that uses a magnetic field gradient to delay the re-emission of photons from an RF pulse, and then calculates the position of molecules in a body from their RF scinillations. Its called Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI. Somwhow I think the images they produce are slightly more profound that scanning the back of a playing card. Consider yourselves offcially Harumphed.
Al right, enough already. This SCO suit has become so absurd that no one is buying it anymore. It's time to drop the act, and admit the truth. The whole SCO fiasco was just an attempt to cover up the true origins of Linux. If we could create the rumor that Linux was a pirated version of AT&T UNIX, then we wouldn't have to admit that it was really reverse engineered from the computers aboard alien spacecraft under study by project BlueBook in Area 51 of the Nellis Airforce base in Groome Lake, NV. So there, now the secret is out! Wait, who are those men in black suits on my front lawn? Wait, stop, what does that thing do? ****FLASH*****... so as I was saying, Linux is clearly a pirated version of SCO UNIX....
You miss the point, my young apprentice. The Turing test was devised in the days of WWII. Remember Eugenics? Saving the gene pool? If we can devise automatons that can emulate humans in functions like retail clerks and floor sweeps, we can *finally* euthanize/sterilize the half of the population with IQs below 100. Just think, a world without country music, free from rap too. We could balance the federal budget once welfare was eliminated....sigh... where have all the facists gone anyway?
Here's a cynical view of a system lifecycle 1) A company has a business process that isn't working well because it is understaffed by poorly trained and unmotivated personnel 2) The company decides to automate the business process to make it "more efficient". In the project charter, they justify the project by promising further staff cuts. 3) A project team is formed, and the IT department interviews the poorly trained unmotivated users to gather "system requirements". Which end up covering only a small fraction of the actual business process because the users don't care. 4) The IT department realizes the project is hopeless, and uses lack of resources as an excuse to bring in "consultants". 5) The consultants poor concrete on the system requiremnts to avoid "scope creep", ensuring that the resulting system will be functionally useless. 6) The consultants carefully build a system that meets a minimal interpretation of the sparse requirements. 7) In testing it becomes obvious that the system meets the paper requirements, but is functionally useless to the actual users. 8) The IT department offers the consultants follow on work in return for helping IT blame the users. The users get a staff cut. 9) The system is declared a victory, and bonuses go to the executives who weren't involved. 10) The consultant is hired to fix the system, now called "Phase Two"
My experience, limited as it may be, is that former Soviet-block programmers come from an environement where a 33Mhz 486 machine with 8MB of RAM costs the effective equivalent of $20K. So they ignore Windoze and write their own drivers in assembler, and use the box as a mainframe to support 12 green-screen terminals in old-fashoned text mode. Yeah they can tweak the max out of each CPU cycle. But they are experts out of necessity. Kind of like the Guatemalans who weld an extended bed and bolt 20 seats to a 10-year old chevy pickup and use it as a public bus.
Recently I posted a reply to an article about the Linux CLI vs GUI, the gist being that ease of use was all that matters. I was lambasted by the true believers of the cult of UNIX, who assert that it is immoral to make a computer easy to use. Further they argued that anyone who balks at memorizing 150 CLI commands, each with subtly different option flags, is somehow mentally difficent. Well here's the proof of the pudding, clowns. Windows is winning over Linux because it is easier to use. Period. If you care, and you want Linux to ascend to pre-eminence, then DROP THE CLI. Furthermore, your GUI needs to go WELL BEYOND the MS GUI. The Linux user interface needs to STOP being a video game designed to trick the user into doing things wrong, and instead start using a rules-based AI engine to HELP the user figure out what THEY WANT do and do it correctly. I hereby establish prior art for any patent of this idea. It should be refered to as DWIM, the DO WHAT I MEANT user interface.
Well, we certainly didn't mean to offend any *robosexuals* in the audience, seeing as how their behavior was presciently genetically predetermined before robots existed...or so they claim...
How dare they outsource to *foreign* criminals, when they could have outrsourced to US criminals like most credit card companies do...http://www.unicor.gov/services/
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer the title "Psynic" - I see the future, with a jaundiced eye
The Chinese are going to stomp the west into the ground (And that's not a good thing). Not only will they have more scientists, but they censor their media to keep their kids from being mesmerized by sleaze, and teach the kids a work ethic both at home and at school. While our kids will be 30 year old virgins, working at Walmart, living in their parent's basements, drinking beer, smoking dope, and simulating sex on their Xboxes, the Chinese offspring will be starting the next generation of intels and oracles. Don't be surprised when the Microsoft software development offices move to Beijing in 2015. America is destined to take its place as a third-world debtor nation, and the republicans with their obsession with get rich quick schemes and huge deficits are leading the charge into economic collpase and a political oligarchy. Not that the democrats would fix anything with 60's era social programs. We need a new approach in the US, a true populist party with responsible economic growth as its mantra. And while I'm at it I'll wish for world peace and an end to tooth decay...
I had a friend who had a lobotomy once, but I'm all better now....
If you think this data loss would be unfortunate, you should check out the Earth Resource Observing Satellite (EROS) Data Center run by the US Geological Survey in Sioux Falls South Dakota. For years NASA has been dumping all manner of data tapes there. 9-track, 24-track, literally hundreds of Terabytes of data. And many of those tapes are literally growing mold, sitting in boxes and racks in the basement, for lack of funding to transfer them to more permanent media.
Think about it, decades of climate data , going back to the 1970's, is being lost due to lethargy on the part of Clowngress. Or is it lethargy.
Let's see, three and a half decades of climate change data, detailed and explicit. Hmmmm.... who *wouldn't* want that data placed online where researchers could access it? I wonder.....
Did anyone else notice the little village of resort condos just south and east of the lake on titan?
I'm guessing the skiing is phenomenal with snow made from hydrocarbons (think frozen motor oil).
Can I make reservations through expedia?
As far as I am concerned, Disney has always been about seducing children to the dark side. After all, Mary Poppins was a witch who took her charges to a meeting of her coven. Then there are films like "bedknobs and broomsticks". Or clips like Mickey as the sorcerers apprentice. Can anyone think of a Disney film that has promoted faith in God... didn't think so. The trouble is that our whole culture has become so hedonistic and pagan, that the devil no longer *needs* Disney, he has video games teaching children to cast spells and make pacts with demons before most of them can read.
Linux growth is slowing because Linux has used up the available pool of UNIX cultists. These are people who believe that it is morally wrong to make a computer easy to use, and are angry at Microsoft for making so many functions point-and-click. The problem is, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once people get used to point-and-click interfaces, and software development that works like a powerpoint drawing, getting them to go back to a CLI and text code development is like talking people into giving up their car for a bicycle. I'm an old-fashioned computer geek myself, I think that object oriented code is an abomination, and God wrote the Universe in "C" (with some assembler for the microscopic stuff). BUT - I have zero chance of getting my kids to see the world that way. SO FOR ALL YOU LinGeeks out there- make a choice. Either make Linux easier to use,(that means NO CLI) or resign yourselves to having Linux be the dysfunctional OS for the kind of social misfits who brew methane with their own poop to fuel their converted VW bugs.
...for doing business with citibank.
I worked for a major bank once, and know people who have worked for citibank in particular.
THe contempt in which banks hold their customers is mind boggling.
Use a credit union. Thye seem to be the only financial institutions with a conscience - probably because they can't make a profit.
Actually, there is serious research suggesting that so-called "fossil" fuels aren't fossils at all, but are pockets of natural carbon combined with water at high heat and pressure, that reforms continuously under the earth. Thereby giving us an inexhaustible supply. And it's a good thing too. Because without greenhouse gases we are overdue for the next ICE AGE. I'd rather have the ocean move in 100 ft or so along the coast, than have the ice cap extend down to Kansas.
Face it, Gaia doesn't exist, the earth is just a ball of dirt, and the only thing special about it is that we live here. What matters is that technology make humans as comfortable as possible, nothing else.
For the great unwashed masses, using IPV6 will mean that:
1) Their ISP supports it
2) The Windoze protocol stack uses it.
I know that Linux on my machine has an IPV6 stack available, but do any commercial ISPs deliver connectivity? It isn't exactly something they put in their TV ads.
There were two original purposes for NASA: 1) Test ICBM hardware for the cold war in the guise of civilian research 2) Create thrilling TV footage in the days before CGI NASA is now dying because both purposes have been made obsolete, and space itself has become boring and mundane. Unfotunately, AT&T doesn't need NASA to buy satellites from hughes anymore. The only things that can save NASA are: a) The discovery of sentient extraterrestrial life, and the consequent rush to reach it. b) A lifter technology so cheap, it makes space a viable tourist destination, creating a profitable industry Let's face it, you don't get $10s of billions in funding with blurry pictures of frozen mud from Titan
For you, I defer to your logic. Perhaps my remarks were too acidic. It is a cool trick, after all.
I'm sorry , I mistook you for a sincere individual. You're just a trouble-making troll. You don't understand the subject under debate, or contribute to the dialogue, you just snipe at other posters using tidbits of repeated argument. The term anonymous coward is quite apropos.
The @sshole persona is a deliberate choice. /. wouldn't be half as much fun.
Admit it, if it wasn't for the excitement of taking @ssholes to task,
But rest assured that there are few things in the universe that are less important to me than your opinion (grin)
Oh, exsqueeze me. You caught me in a semantic error. Yes technically speaking the Xrays don't literally "scatter" because they are neither reflected or refracted but merely absorbed by the target. They are subject to Compton scattering, but that isn't germain. However your point is completely orthogonal to my premise, which was that CAT scans are computationally more complex than the images in the original post. But I'm sure that everyone is impressed by you knowing what a Fourier transform is, even though it transforms the data into FREQUENCY space, not Fourier space.
Or, an alternate theory. I used to work for a company that made MRI and CAT scanning hardware, and I used to write software to process imagery om those devices. Knowing the math involved, I can reassure you that this imaging technique is analogous to finger-painting mathematically. This article IS about a simple parlor trick. If I have a point light source and a photo diode, I can make an image in one of two ways. I can hold the light still and move the diode (this is how satellites like GOES and Landsat make images), OR I can hold the diode still and move the point of light, which is what they did for the article. BFD. If you're impressed by this, you'll probably go ga-ga for the "pinhole lens" effect. On a sunny day, go into a dark room with opague window shades, pull the shades down, then put a pinhole in one of the shades. Hold a clean piece of paper a foot or so from the pinhole, and the hole will act as a lens and create an image of the outdoor scene on the paper - OOOooooo, magic!
Gosh, how fascinating. Now compare this to a *really cool* imaging technique, like using an x-ray beam and an array of photodiodes to detect the scatter patterns as the beam passes through a human body, then calculate an image of the actual bones and organs inside. It's called Computed Axial Tomography or a CAT scan. And if you want something *realy really* cool, check out the technique that uses a magnetic field gradient to delay the re-emission of photons from an RF pulse, and then calculates the position of molecules in a body from their RF scinillations. Its called Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI. Somwhow I think the images they produce are slightly more profound that scanning the back of a playing card. Consider yourselves offcially Harumphed.
Al right, enough already. This SCO suit has become so absurd that no one is buying it anymore. It's time to drop the act, and admit the truth. ... so as I was saying, Linux is clearly a pirated version of SCO UNIX....
The whole SCO fiasco was just an attempt to cover up the true origins of Linux. If we could create the rumor that Linux was a pirated version of AT&T UNIX, then we wouldn't have to admit that it was really reverse engineered from the computers aboard alien spacecraft under study by project BlueBook in Area 51 of the Nellis Airforce base in Groome Lake, NV.
So there, now the secret is out!
Wait, who are those men in black suits on my front lawn? Wait, stop, what does that thing do?
****FLASH*****
You miss the point, my young apprentice.
The Turing test was devised in the days of WWII. Remember Eugenics? Saving the gene pool?
If we can devise automatons that can emulate humans in functions like retail clerks and floor sweeps, we can *finally* euthanize/sterilize the half of the population with IQs below 100. Just think, a world without country music, free from rap too. We could balance the federal budget once welfare was eliminated....sigh... where have all the facists gone anyway?
Here's a cynical view of a system lifecycle
1) A company has a business process that isn't working well because it is understaffed by poorly trained and unmotivated personnel
2) The company decides to automate the business process to make it "more efficient". In the project charter, they justify the project by promising further staff cuts.
3) A project team is formed, and the IT department interviews the poorly trained unmotivated users to gather "system requirements". Which end up covering only a small fraction of the actual business process because the users don't care.
4) The IT department realizes the project is hopeless, and uses lack of resources as an excuse to bring in "consultants".
5) The consultants poor concrete on the system requiremnts to avoid "scope creep", ensuring that the resulting system will be functionally useless.
6) The consultants carefully build a system that meets a minimal interpretation of the sparse requirements.
7) In testing it becomes obvious that the system meets the paper requirements, but is functionally useless to the actual users.
8) The IT department offers the consultants follow on work in return for helping IT blame the users. The users get a staff cut.
9) The system is declared a victory, and bonuses go to the executives who weren't involved.
10) The consultant is hired to fix the system, now called "Phase Two"
My experience, limited as it may be, is that former Soviet-block programmers come from an environement where a 33Mhz 486 machine with 8MB of RAM costs the effective equivalent of $20K. So they ignore Windoze and write their own drivers in assembler, and use the box as a mainframe to support 12 green-screen terminals in old-fashoned text mode. Yeah they can tweak the max out of each CPU cycle. But they are experts out of necessity. Kind of like the Guatemalans who weld an extended bed and bolt 20 seats to a 10-year old chevy pickup and use it as a public bus.
Recently I posted a reply to an article about the Linux CLI vs GUI, the gist being that ease of use was all that matters. I was lambasted by the true believers of the cult of UNIX, who assert that it is immoral to make a computer easy to use. Further they argued that anyone who balks at memorizing 150 CLI commands, each with subtly different option flags, is somehow mentally difficent. Well here's the proof of the pudding, clowns. Windows is winning over Linux because it is easier to use. Period. If you care, and you want Linux to ascend to pre-eminence, then DROP THE CLI. Furthermore, your GUI needs to go WELL BEYOND the MS GUI. The Linux user interface needs to STOP being a video game designed to trick the user into doing things wrong, and instead start using a rules-based AI engine to HELP the user figure out what THEY WANT do and do it correctly. I hereby establish prior art for any patent of this idea. It should be refered to as DWIM, the DO WHAT I MEANT user interface.
Dost thou forget the line - "I don't want anyone thinking we're robosexuals, so if anyone asks, you're my debugger..."
Well, we certainly didn't mean to offend any *robosexuals* in the audience, seeing as how their behavior was presciently genetically predetermined before robots existed...or so they claim...
How dare they outsource to *foreign* criminals, when they could have outrsourced to US criminals like most credit card companies do ...http://www.unicor.gov/services/