I think now is the time to ask, if I had the money, how would I go about bribing a senator? Do I just stuff the money in an envelope with a note saying how to vote, or do I have to wine and dine him? Should I call first? Do I use his home or work number? Should I expect a thank-you note, or would that be pretentious? There must be a protocol, and I wish someone would clue me in.
Although I'm not familiar with Name-it!, here's a technical defense based on speculation as to how it works. Lets face it, programmers are often lazy, and back in the DOS days, it was very common to allocate fixed-size buffers from the stack for pathnames - you knew that each path component would be 12 characters long, and there was a limit to directory nesting. For these programs, if the operating system returns a longer name, it will clobber the stack and cause a crash, or possibly a vulnerability (though "local root" doesn't mean much in the context of Win95). Possibly Name-it! still limited the length of the overall path length, but this would still break the probably numerous programs that assume 12-character path components.
I guess in that case, I'd actually fault MS with being too backward compatible. That's a disadvantage of closed source and commercial software - no matter how mind-numbingly stupid an interface is, you can't ever tear it out and tell people to recompile or modify their software. So we still have backslashes, we still have drive letters, every third Windows function has Ex on the end of its name, and don't even get me started about using friggin CR/LF as a line terminator...
Re:I had a better suggestion
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Do the next best thing, and learn Dvorak while using a regular keyboard.
Well, you can press Alt-SysRq-some letter to use some kernel debugging functions, for example S to sync disks, U to do an emergency unmount of everything, K to kill all programs running on the current console, and B to summarily reboot. Certainly not the only or the first use, but it's the only one I know of for which the title SysRq makes sense.
Looking up quotes and citations is exactly the kind of thing people go to the library for, as nobody would pay tens or hundreds of dollars for a book they'll only use once. People only do that for books they'll use regularly, and I don't think Google will change that.
Maybe if the US fixed it's broken and steadily worsening IP policies, it wouldn't be about to be overtaken by so many countries in the IT sector, and this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
Therin lies the difference in the philosophies. You are ascribing to the word "I" something other than the physical processes in your brain. As soon as you make the copy, the word "I" doesn't make sense, because there are two of you. One I dies, the other I lives.
Would you be worried if someone made a copy of you, and then killed the copy, leaving you alive? I think if that bothers you, then you simply have an ethical concern about conciousnesses equal to yours being ended. But if that wouldn't bother you, then you are disagreeing with the premise that the perfect physical copy is indeed a perfect copy, the same in every way, and in doing so positing that there's something more to conciousness than physical processes, which I disagree with.
I think it's fun to imagine a bunch of SNES ROMs having this discussion, while being halted, saved, restored, copied, and destroyed throughout by nerds like us.
Apple understanding the need to zealously protect intellectual property? On the contrary - I think that Apple's rather lax restrictions (refering for example to the ability to burn iTunes-purchased music to CD) are big part of the reason iTunes is as popular as it is. I view this as a good thing. I'd really hate to see Apple start trying to "protect IP" more than they are; frankly, I'd kinda hoped they'd convince the labels that protection other than copyright law itself isn't necessary.
Even if it's entirely as simple as you say it is, it's still pretty amazing. First, it shows that an individual neuron can be conciously controlled and used to do useful things. And it's developying technology for interfacing with that neuron. And if it can be done with one neuron, surely it can be done with several, and eventually enough to haev very natural control of a robotic limb.
Or, personally more interesting to me, it could be used as a very high-bandwidth connection between a computer and me. (Which could be general enough to allow me to control a robotic limb, or even robotic body, just as I control a video-game character, only better (as I could give more fine-grained input faster and more naturally.)
Even in the cases where Microsoft is better, is it really more educational? Which is more educational, clicking next a few times or trying to get the game to run in Wine? And why would you be running games anyway? I think that because open source software is often a bit less polished, it's actually better for education.
Microsoft doesn't make any educational software anyway - why waste money that should go to specialized software for the younger kids on mundane things like operating systems?
I think his point was that it's easier to make one image that supports a very diverse collection of computers, as opposed to Windows, where hardware support and drivers are largely a black box and you usually have to tailor the drivers specifically to each system.
As to the Megaraid drivers, the proper protocol would be to do some testing with different versions of the kernel to determine when it stopped working, then post something about it on the linux kernel mailing list. A quick Google showed that nobody seems to have done this. How can the kernel developers fix a problem if they aren't made aware?
I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch, but how could eating meat reduce the number of rodents killed when growing vegetables? What do you think the cows ate? Chances are, more than their weight in grain.
Honest question - if the data is digital, why does it matter at all? Surely it either works perfectly or doesn't work at all, so if copper works, why fiber?
I couldn't agree more. I think of it in terms of understanding - intelligent beings are constrained in what they create by a desire to understand it. Evolution does not understand it's creations in any way, shape, or form. When we look at things that evolve, we see that they are a mess of spaghetti logic, defying complete understanding by any human-like mind.
Also, the very fact that you can't disprove the existance of the tooth fairy means that the tooth fairy's existance isn't a scientific theory. It'd be pretty easy to disprove the theory that your parents give you the money, (lock them up and see if you still get tooth money) so it's a good theory. And the fact that nobody has disproven it makes it a well-accepted one.
A theory that can't be disproven is a dead end, because if by it's nature you can't find flaws, how can you improve it?
Science never proves things! Math, geometry, logic, and maybe even religion prove things. But science just comes up with theories. True, you can't prove evolution without a control planet and another billion years. Neither can you prove gravity - how can you prove it won't stop tomorrow? How do you know there isn't some mass to which gravity doesn't apply? You can't prove anything in science, because you can't prove a negative, such as "There are no exceptions to this theory."
I'd be hard pressed to define science better than you just did: "You've got evidence, and you can come up with theories to fit the evidence."
Note that I'm using prove in the sense of "determine to be true," not in the sense of "test." Science does test things. But no matter how much it proves (tests) theories, it can never prove them true.
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There should probably also be a punctuation mark for it. Suggestions?
I think now is the time to ask, if I had the money, how would I go about bribing a senator? Do I just stuff the money in an envelope with a note saying how to vote, or do I have to wine and dine him? Should I call first? Do I use his home or work number? Should I expect a thank-you note, or would that be pretentious? There must be a protocol, and I wish someone would clue me in.
That, if true, is an interesting statistic, but I'd like to know where it came from.
I guess in that case, I'd actually fault MS with being too backward compatible. That's a disadvantage of closed source and commercial software - no matter how mind-numbingly stupid an interface is, you can't ever tear it out and tell people to recompile or modify their software. So we still have backslashes, we still have drive letters, every third Windows function has Ex on the end of its name, and don't even get me started about using friggin CR/LF as a line terminator...
Do the next best thing, and learn Dvorak while using a regular keyboard.
Well, you can press Alt-SysRq-some letter to use some kernel debugging functions, for example S to sync disks, U to do an emergency unmount of everything, K to kill all programs running on the current console, and B to summarily reboot. Certainly not the only or the first use, but it's the only one I know of for which the title SysRq makes sense.
Looking up quotes and citations is exactly the kind of thing people go to the library for, as nobody would pay tens or hundreds of dollars for a book they'll only use once. People only do that for books they'll use regularly, and I don't think Google will change that.
Maybe if the US fixed it's broken and steadily worsening IP policies, it wouldn't be about to be overtaken by so many countries in the IT sector, and this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
How could you possibly know that?
Would you be worried if someone made a copy of you, and then killed the copy, leaving you alive? I think if that bothers you, then you simply have an ethical concern about conciousnesses equal to yours being ended. But if that wouldn't bother you, then you are disagreeing with the premise that the perfect physical copy is indeed a perfect copy, the same in every way, and in doing so positing that there's something more to conciousness than physical processes, which I disagree with.
I think it's fun to imagine a bunch of SNES ROMs having this discussion, while being halted, saved, restored, copied, and destroyed throughout by nerds like us.
Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.
Apple understanding the need to zealously protect intellectual property? On the contrary - I think that Apple's rather lax restrictions (refering for example to the ability to burn iTunes-purchased music to CD) are big part of the reason iTunes is as popular as it is. I view this as a good thing. I'd really hate to see Apple start trying to "protect IP" more than they are; frankly, I'd kinda hoped they'd convince the labels that protection other than copyright law itself isn't necessary.
- Modchips currently exist for all major gaming platforms.
- Games on those platforms still make money.
Discuss.Or, personally more interesting to me, it could be used as a very high-bandwidth connection between a computer and me. (Which could be general enough to allow me to control a robotic limb, or even robotic body, just as I control a video-game character, only better (as I could give more fine-grained input faster and more naturally.)
Uh, couldn't you at least read the summary? "Becta does not name Microsoft in its analysis."
Microsoft doesn't make any educational software anyway - why waste money that should go to specialized software for the younger kids on mundane things like operating systems?
As to the Megaraid drivers, the proper protocol would be to do some testing with different versions of the kernel to determine when it stopped working, then post something about it on the linux kernel mailing list. A quick Google showed that nobody seems to have done this. How can the kernel developers fix a problem if they aren't made aware?
I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch, but how could eating meat reduce the number of rodents killed when growing vegetables? What do you think the cows ate? Chances are, more than their weight in grain.
Honest question - if the data is digital, why does it matter at all? Surely it either works perfectly or doesn't work at all, so if copper works, why fiber?
Click "Bookmarks," "Add Bookmark Here," and check "Bookmark all tabs in a folder."
Those of us with AMD CPUs don't have to worry about our motherboard melting or evaporating, thank you very much. :)
I couldn't agree more. I think of it in terms of understanding - intelligent beings are constrained in what they create by a desire to understand it. Evolution does not understand it's creations in any way, shape, or form. When we look at things that evolve, we see that they are a mess of spaghetti logic, defying complete understanding by any human-like mind.
A theory that can't be disproven is a dead end, because if by it's nature you can't find flaws, how can you improve it?
I'd be hard pressed to define science better than you just did: "You've got evidence, and you can come up with theories to fit the evidence."
Note that I'm using prove in the sense of "determine to be true," not in the sense of "test." Science does test things. But no matter how much it proves (tests) theories, it can never prove them true.
Uh, that's because doing both would be impossible.