...You obviously haven't read the Kama Sutra, then. The awkward positions are only good in porn. Try the aquard, you'll like it and your partner will LOVE it!
"When own owns the property, one can legally do a great deal of things with it - including charging for something that was once free or controlling the supply."
So, hypothetically speaking, if the property is the nontangible Internet access, a municipality can gain more revenue by siezing said access (not necessarily the lines or equipment) and charging for use within city limits, by taking advantage of the New and Improved Eminent Domain laws!
Or, you could just connect an English keyboard and a Cyrillic keyboard to an inexpensive PS/2 switchbox. Yeah, it's messier on the work surface, but until the superkbd is actually released to market (No, we really, really mean it this time, it's almost just about ready to prototype...). Out of curiosity, has anyone actually seen working prototypes or just mockups?
I wonder just how much results reproduction is actually done today.
Let's face it, much of what individual research teams do is patented. The object of (most) research is to find something which can be patented and then sold by or licensed by the party that funds the research. Reproducing someone else's results is therefore a waste of research money. Even without the threat of patent infringement, duplicating someone else's work doesn't make money for anyone...
Please, keep in mind that I still believe in "pure" research and those who practice the same. Heck, I even appreciate anyone that works long hours and makes our world a better place. I just don't think that many labs that answer to a corporation can claim those attributes.
My '73-1/2 MG Miget had manual ignition. At some point along the years, the original ignition switch had failed, so a true handyperson retrofitted the center console with a separate switch for each circuit that the old steering-console switch used to close *automatically* when the key was turned. When I bought the vehicle, I had to learn a few things, such as which toggle switch was for ignition, which was for the starter, etc. Manual ignition!
Now, on to that "tap the pedal" stuff. I had a '78 Ford LTD with a 400ci V8 and a progressive two-barrel (post gas crisis). There was a stepped cam on the side that the "automatic" choke would ride on. You tapped the pedal not to release the choke, but to SET it before attempting to start the car! The bimetalic spring could not ride "up" the stepped ramp on the cam (i.e. when the car was cold), so that "tap" was even mentioned in the owner's manual. Of course, the tap came naturally since to start carburetted cars of that era, you had to pump the gas pedal a few times, forcing raw gas into the throats via the accelerator pump.
I agree completely! I mean, Slashdotters making automotive analogies to explain computer technology is like a mechanic telling his customer that when a car is in "overdrive" it is like having twice the RAM!
Serously, are you sure those numbers correct? The beauty of Dothan was that it consumed aprox 5W at rest, 20W in use and provided extremely usable performance.
It was going to be the answer to all of those super-long-pipelined, hyperthreaded chips that required a big power supply and equally large cooling system just to run the O/S and a few apps.
I truly believed Intel was back on track. First Itanium, then Itanium2, then the P4 wall-of-heat, now they've gone and screwed this up, the one shining star in their CPU lineup, the sleeper if ever they had one...what happened?
Don't forget Arachne! It FTP's, it emails, it even web browses on 4MB of ram and a 33Mhz CPU! Not to mention that TCP/IP for DOS is fairly developed. Still a Slack fan myself for these minimalist, low power and heat systems, but DSL and DOS can also go a long way in repurposing an old laptop into a really useful one trick pony. Think "almost embedded" and you might find yourself really getting into the type of systems that Scarletdown is describing.
I keep a copy of the DSL.iso and QEMU on my thumbdrive so I can IM using GAIM and browse from any borrowed system without having to worry about the host system. For that one use alone, I love Damn Small Linux. Even with the performance penalty of the QEMU emulator, I have yet to gouge my eyes out, but I might have pressed really hard just to see the pretty colors while I was waiting for it to boot up inside of a window on WinXP...
Hmmm...slightly OT, but how about BSD running on a Mac SE/30 from 1989? Forget those fancy double-digit clock speeds, I'm talking 16Mhz, and only _mostly_ 32-bit. Of course, the 128MB of ram might be cheating a bit. On the x86 side, somewhere around here I have a '486-33Mhz laptop printserver running Freesco off of a floppy on maybe 8, maybe 16Megs. It's headless, so I literally haven't touched it in years -if I remember right, the LCD was destroyed and I initially had it hooked up to a KVM for configuration. Somewhere on my network (I've long since forgotton the IP) it's little webserver is still waiting patiently to serve up the single admin page. The fantastic thing about OSS is that you can tailor the software to the hardware available and get the job done. Maybe you've heard how in the almost-prehistoric days of computing (think: Levy's book), folks would "bum" lines off of a fifty line program or function and get all giddy about it? Well, perl isn't the only place you can have that sort of fun nowadays. You have the luxury of doing that with entire operating systems! It's actually _fun_ to fit a usable if single purpose system into hardware that uses less power than a table lamp; you get the satisfaction of knowing that it really cannot get any more efficient and you've just saved some extra toxins from going into the landfill.
If you want the ultimate in Linux minimalism, try go to http://linuxhacker.org/ (and don't forget the Jailbait distro: 16MB of compact-flash/DOC goodness) or http://www.linuxdevices.com/ for info on running on hardware so tiny it'll make your head spin.
Not only that but if the patent mentioned in the story is accepted, you will have precedent to patent the method of setup and punchline used in your so-called joke. For instance, "knock-knock" or "There once was a man from Nantucket" jokes each follow a particular structure, which could then be patented. Of course, you are going to have to think up some new ones on your own...
Hey, don't get me wrong; I too think that the system no longer serves it's original purpose. And, I like the idea of patent trusts; I like the idea of public trusts even more.
However, what you are proposing is a direct attack on the operation and function of a government agency. In case you haven't noticed, "Peaceful protest" is no longer tolerated at a federal level. In fact, what you propose could be construed as terrorism (don't laugh, careers advance on this stuff), leading the USPTO to finally get put under the protective wing of the DHS.
My original point was just that large corporations like IBM already do exactly what you are proposing, and in numbers that dwarf what you could organize. Problem is, it hasn't fixed a thing and instead has contributed to the lack of scrutiny given current applications. You see, not only would you have to own these thousands of minutea patents, but you will also need to fund the lawyers to protect them. The patent office is willing to grant a patent to just about anything; they figure any problems will get resolved in the courts. Of course, that solution works just fine if you own an army of attorneys or happen to be an army of attorneys...or a politician that once part of an army of attorneys or who is owned by an army of attorneys or a corporation that owns an army of attorneys...
Yeeeaah. Almost every large corporation with an R&D group has already tried your Denial of Service approach...now, if only you could patent the idea of flooding a patent-granting office with frivolous patents, you could take down all of them in one move!
If the simplest methods of software, even those that mirror brick-and-mortar methods of business, can be patented, if the idea behind or attributes of a fictional story can be patented...why not a Bill and therefore, the Law it becomes? Eventually the legal system would find itself in the same bleak future that may befall software and now, fiction. I have a feeling that would finally reveal to those that control the US Patent Office budget just how broken the system has become. It would only take one politician to start the ball rolling and once it does, the Republicans and Democrats will jealously guard the laws that they each "own"...wait a second, I need to patent this as a story idea *before* it actually happens!
1.) I have no quarrel with your take on the gross number of lives taken in the name of organized religion. Nor that it is unfortunate. However, if you don't lighten up, just a little, you will be perceived as being every bit as extreme as the religious murdering bastards, and that certainly won't help your cause.
2.) See, there's that capitalization thing again. I really think that it is getting in the way of our friendship. "God" is the specific entity, "god" is the concept or abstraction. A perfect example of why you should support the use of "case sensitivity".
3.) Nice way to slip in a plug for your band, "BROKEN LADDER". I would never have gone to the website for BROKEN LADDER had you not posted a broken link to BROKEN LADDER. Fortunately, I was able to fix the link to BROKEN LADDER. I even sampled the music of BROKEN LADDER, but unfortunately it was not to my taste.
Your opinion of the denizens of upper-IQ land borders on making them infallible, almost (dare I say it) "Godlike". I'm afraid you just can't count on them to save the world for you. Check out your local Mensa group, or go to a RG. What you will find in that upper 2% of human IQ is the ability to learn certain types of information quickly (if the topic agrees with them), a strong aptitude for doing well on certain testing and a strange lack of basic social skills (also known as manners). Don't even get me started on how few in that upper %2 have a good foundation in scientific knowledge. You see, the distribution of IQ is semi-random and a person's beliefs and education -and therefore areas of interest or study- are shaped much more by environment than by biology. It's our culture, not our intelligence that is the root cause of American Antiscientism.
Actually, I think you might be fighting the tranqs the nice nurse gave you, not God.
I believe the statement was meant to be taken in a somewhat humorous light. You see, Athiests don't fight "God" because they don't believe this "God" exists. The quotes are the somewhat subtle giveaway.
That said, I'd vote for you for Dictator. I like your lack of Capitalism. Oh, wait, that should be Capitalization. Whatever.
Actually, you CAN prove the nonexistence of something. If the existence of that something is mutually exclusive with something else, and you can prove that the something else exists, the original something cannot exist.
Now, consider that *any* alternate cause for our existence, if proven to exist, would thereby disprove the existence of this "God" of which you speak and you understand why the Fundies are so full of anger and hatred toward Science...
Sounds more like the card(s) they were using used the ROOM NUMBER ITSELF as the "key" or as the seed for the key algorithm. My guess is that they use the simplest possible process, which is to put your room number on the card, unencrypted. The door card reader simply reads the key and says "yup, that keycard is for door number 567 and I am door number 567". Click. Some more advanced (!) systems might even include an expiration date, but that would require a realtime clock on the door card reader for comparison...which could complicate the battery change procedure, etc. Still more complex ones put your name and CC info on the card, but I would venture to say that the "key" is still just the room number itself. If this is the case, it would be trivial to change a legitimate card to work on any given room simply by changing the encoded room number, and hey, "999" or "FFF" just might be the universal key that housekeeping uses...you would think something that insecure would make the hotel liable, but then there's that clause about "not being responsible for items lost or stolen"...
Now that's pretty slick, Slick. I can actually envision some of my more bitter coworkers deciding that from this day on, since no one looks at their precious code anyway, they will write everything in "jlarocco notation"!
The funny thing is, you don't need to say it out loud to get the effect: as you read, your own mind starts to substitute a symbolic "+" for "plus" and vice-versa and you really lose track of the variables quickly -try it with a larger example! It's even better if you can often put the variable GreaterThan right before a less-than operator, a PlusPlus variable right before a minus operator, etc...what a great April Fool's day prank for a code review.
Funny thing is how few people, then or now, recognize that the author is intentionally crafting the misinformation and new-CS-student attitude. Thanks to the person in this present-day thread for pointing me to Egg Troll's writings!
Can anonymous coward have an ego?
Slashdot Mirror
...You obviously haven't read the Kama Sutra, then. The awkward positions are only good in porn. Try the aquard, you'll like it and your partner will LOVE it!
So, hypothetically speaking, if the property is the nontangible Internet access, a municipality can gain more revenue by siezing said access (not necessarily the lines or equipment) and charging for use within city limits, by taking advantage of the New and Improved Eminent Domain laws!
Or, you could just connect an English keyboard and a Cyrillic keyboard to an inexpensive PS/2 switchbox. Yeah, it's messier on the work surface, but until the superkbd is actually released to market (No, we really, really mean it this time, it's almost just about ready to prototype...). Out of curiosity, has anyone actually seen working prototypes or just mockups?
Mr. President, we weren't talking about Iraq...
Let's face it, much of what individual research teams do is patented. The object of (most) research is to find something which can be patented and then sold by or licensed by the party that funds the research. Reproducing someone else's results is therefore a waste of research money. Even without the threat of patent infringement, duplicating someone else's work doesn't make money for anyone...
Please, keep in mind that I still believe in "pure" research and those who practice the same. Heck, I even appreciate anyone that works long hours and makes our world a better place. I just don't think that many labs that answer to a corporation can claim those attributes.
Now, on to that "tap the pedal" stuff. I had a '78 Ford LTD with a 400ci V8 and a progressive two-barrel (post gas crisis). There was a stepped cam on the side that the "automatic" choke would ride on. You tapped the pedal not to release the choke, but to SET it before attempting to start the car! The bimetalic spring could not ride "up" the stepped ramp on the cam (i.e. when the car was cold), so that "tap" was even mentioned in the owner's manual. Of course, the tap came naturally since to start carburetted cars of that era, you had to pump the gas pedal a few times, forcing raw gas into the throats via the accelerator pump.
I agree completely! I mean, Slashdotters making automotive analogies to explain computer technology is like a mechanic telling his customer that when a car is in "overdrive" it is like having twice the RAM!
"This analysis was based on data breaches at four separate companies, covering approximately half a million identities."
So, using your 100 thieves, that means 250,000 of the 500,000 identities were stolen. 50-50 chance? Not bad!
It was going to be the answer to all of those super-long-pipelined, hyperthreaded chips that required a big power supply and equally large cooling system just to run the O/S and a few apps.
I truly believed Intel was back on track. First Itanium, then Itanium2, then the P4 wall-of-heat, now they've gone and screwed this up, the one shining star in their CPU lineup, the sleeper if ever they had one...what happened?
You know, I've heard there's a logo of a little red devil that someone discarded...
Don't forget Arachne! It FTP's, it emails, it even web browses on 4MB of ram and a 33Mhz CPU! Not to mention that TCP/IP for DOS is fairly developed. Still a Slack fan myself for these minimalist, low power and heat systems, but DSL and DOS can also go a long way in repurposing an old laptop into a really useful one trick pony. Think "almost embedded" and you might find yourself really getting into the type of systems that Scarletdown is describing.
I keep a copy of the DSL.iso and QEMU on my thumbdrive so I can IM using GAIM and browse from any borrowed system without having to worry about the host system. For that one use alone, I love Damn Small Linux. Even with the performance penalty of the QEMU emulator, I have yet to gouge my eyes out, but I might have pressed really hard just to see the pretty colors while I was waiting for it to boot up inside of a window on WinXP...
If you want the ultimate in Linux minimalism, try go to http://linuxhacker.org/ (and don't forget the Jailbait distro: 16MB of compact-flash/DOC goodness) or http://www.linuxdevices.com/ for info on running on hardware so tiny it'll make your head spin.
Not only that but if the patent mentioned in the story is accepted, you will have precedent to patent the method of setup and punchline used in your so-called joke. For instance, "knock-knock" or "There once was a man from Nantucket" jokes each follow a particular structure, which could then be patented. Of course, you are going to have to think up some new ones on your own...
However, what you are proposing is a direct attack on the operation and function of a government agency. In case you haven't noticed, "Peaceful protest" is no longer tolerated at a federal level. In fact, what you propose could be construed as terrorism (don't laugh, careers advance on this stuff), leading the USPTO to finally get put under the protective wing of the DHS.
My original point was just that large corporations like IBM already do exactly what you are proposing, and in numbers that dwarf what you could organize. Problem is, it hasn't fixed a thing and instead has contributed to the lack of scrutiny given current applications. You see, not only would you have to own these thousands of minutea patents, but you will also need to fund the lawyers to protect them. The patent office is willing to grant a patent to just about anything; they figure any problems will get resolved in the courts. Of course, that solution works just fine if you own an army of attorneys or happen to be an army of attorneys...or a politician that once part of an army of attorneys or who is owned by an army of attorneys or a corporation that owns an army of attorneys...
If the simplest methods of software, even those that mirror brick-and-mortar methods of business, can be patented, if the idea behind or attributes of a fictional story can be patented...why not a Bill and therefore, the Law it becomes? Eventually the legal system would find itself in the same bleak future that may befall software and now, fiction. I have a feeling that would finally reveal to those that control the US Patent Office budget just how broken the system has become. It would only take one politician to start the ball rolling and once it does, the Republicans and Democrats will jealously guard the laws that they each "own"...wait a second, I need to patent this as a story idea *before* it actually happens!
2.) See, there's that capitalization thing again. I really think that it is getting in the way of our friendship. "God" is the specific entity, "god" is the concept or abstraction. A perfect example of why you should support the use of "case sensitivity".
3.) Nice way to slip in a plug for your band, "BROKEN LADDER". I would never have gone to the website for BROKEN LADDER had you not posted a broken link to BROKEN LADDER. Fortunately, I was able to fix the link to BROKEN LADDER. I even sampled the music of BROKEN LADDER, but unfortunately it was not to my taste.
Your opinion of the denizens of upper-IQ land borders on making them infallible, almost (dare I say it) "Godlike". I'm afraid you just can't count on them to save the world for you. Check out your local Mensa group, or go to a RG. What you will find in that upper 2% of human IQ is the ability to learn certain types of information quickly (if the topic agrees with them), a strong aptitude for doing well on certain testing and a strange lack of basic social skills (also known as manners). Don't even get me started on how few in that upper %2 have a good foundation in scientific knowledge. You see, the distribution of IQ is semi-random and a person's beliefs and education -and therefore areas of interest or study- are shaped much more by environment than by biology. It's our culture, not our intelligence that is the root cause of American Antiscientism.
I believe the statement was meant to be taken in a somewhat humorous light. You see, Athiests don't fight "God" because they don't believe this "God" exists. The quotes are the somewhat subtle giveaway.
That said, I'd vote for you for Dictator. I like your lack of Capitalism. Oh, wait, that should be Capitalization. Whatever.
Now, consider that *any* alternate cause for our existence, if proven to exist, would thereby disprove the existence of this "God" of which you speak and you understand why the Fundies are so full of anger and hatred toward Science...
Sounds more like the card(s) they were using used the ROOM NUMBER ITSELF as the "key" or as the seed for the key algorithm. My guess is that they use the simplest possible process, which is to put your room number on the card, unencrypted. The door card reader simply reads the key and says "yup, that keycard is for door number 567 and I am door number 567". Click. Some more advanced (!) systems might even include an expiration date, but that would require a realtime clock on the door card reader for comparison...which could complicate the battery change procedure, etc. Still more complex ones put your name and CC info on the card, but I would venture to say that the "key" is still just the room number itself. If this is the case, it would be trivial to change a legitimate card to work on any given room simply by changing the encoded room number, and hey, "999" or "FFF" just might be the universal key that housekeeping uses...you would think something that insecure would make the hotel liable, but then there's that clause about "not being responsible for items lost or stolen"...
"Journalism": it's all about advertising.
The funny thing is, you don't need to say it out loud to get the effect: as you read, your own mind starts to substitute a symbolic "+" for "plus" and vice-versa and you really lose track of the variables quickly -try it with a larger example! It's even better if you can often put the variable GreaterThan right before a less-than operator, a PlusPlus variable right before a minus operator, etc...what a great April Fool's day prank for a code review.
Thank you, jlarocco, for the chuckle.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/brows e_thread/thread/4d7d5feddc66f7a/e88f4c2a88cddc0c?q =%22time+to+retire+C%2B%2B%22&
Funny thing is how few people, then or now, recognize that the author is intentionally crafting the misinformation and new-CS-student attitude. Thanks to the person in this present-day thread for pointing me to Egg Troll's writings! Can anonymous coward have an ego?