If you're VBA (or vbscript) savvy, it's a fairly trivial exercise to write a macro to save off a copy of every incoming and outgoing email as a file on your hard drive. There are quite a few examples on the web, which I'm sure you can google.
Does this mean it will suck half as bad or twice as bad as Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle? Or will the degree of suckage be determined by a formula based on a sequence of primes that can only be fully understood by an improbably hot woman?
How long before the current economic situation (thanks, GW!) results in the majority of these technologies being needed in the good ole USofA? Is there going to come a day when the rich & affluent citizens of Zimbabwe are sending us cheap bicycle-powered corn shuckers?
One thing you might want to ask yourself is whether you want your kids to enjoy Sci-Fi or learn to love words. There is plenty of sci-fi that is fun to read. And then there are short stories and novels that can truly move you, deeply affect your life and remain with you forever. The difference is basically the difference between "a book" and "literature." Both have value. It's great to be able to sit on the porch with a good pulp sci-fi book on a summer's evening and immerse yourself in the struggles of the Lensmen against the evil agents of Boskone. It's even better to read Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" aloud as a family and find yourself moved to tears at the surprising conclusion. My recommendation: give them both, and make sure you talk about what they've read afterward. A simple "what did you like about it?" at the dinner table can spark a wonderful conversation.
One thing you absolutely have to do is make this a two-way operation. There's nothing that will kill an emerging reader's joy in words than to have his absolute favorite book pooh-pooh'd by an adult. So if your kid falls in love with with Eragon, by Christopher Paolini then you ought to get out a copy too- and read it carefully so that you can intelligently discuss character, setting, and plot.
Oh, and please read aloud when the material calls for it. Bradbury, Faulkner and many others wrote words that simply don't deserve to be stuck in ink on a page. If you need convincing, get a copy of The Hallowe'en Tree, by Ray Bradbury. Read a chapter to yourself, then read the next one aloud. You'll hear the difference. The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, is another example.
Hopefully I've embedded enough recommendations in there to keep this reply on-topic.
What I've always felt was lacking in most popular avatar-based systems (MMORPG's like WoW, social networks like SL, etc) was kinesthetic synchronization. The Wii is coming close to this, but I'm looking forward to the day when we can log on to a virtual world and have our physical actions approximated and reflected. The motion capture technology exists, as does the facial expression and lip-movement software. It just needs to be put together and hooked up to an MMORPG. Someday, maybe not now, maybe not in ten years, but someday I will be able to say "Read my lips: F**k You!" to that Lvl 30 Nightelf Hunter that just KS'd my mob in the Arathi Highlands, and he'll be able to.
I don't want to give the RIAA fuel for their fire, but I'm willing to bet that they have at least ONE smart person working for them so they'll probably figure this out anyway. Once you create the URL and the metadata (which blocks to d/l and how to xor them), doesn't that constitute a derivative work? The random data out on the cloud is sort of a red herring.
You: I'm working on an initiative to push the boundaries of neuromorphic computing (i.e. artificial intelligence.
ChatBot: Hello, Working.
You: The project is designed to advance ideas all fronts, including measuring and understanding biological brains, creating AI systems, and investigating the fundamental nature of intelligence.
ChatBot: Please tell me more, Working.
You: I'm conducting a wide search of these fields, but I wanted to know if any in this community know of neat projects along those lines that I might overlook.
ChatBot: Hello, Conducting.
You: Maybe you're working on a project like that and want to talk it up?
ChatBot: I don't know. How would you answer this question?
You: No promises (seriously), but interesting work will be brought to the attention of the project manager I'm working with.
ChatBot: How does that make you feel, Conducting?
You: If you want to start up a dialog, send me an email, and we'll see where it goes.
ChatBot: We'll see where it goes.
You: I'll also be reading the comments for the story.
ChatBot: I don't understand. Could you be a little more specific?
Yeah, and I'm gonna bring a phone book made of this stuff to the next carnival I go to. Then I'm gonna hand it to the "World's Strongest Man" and laugh uncontrollably as he tries to rip it in half.
(title is sarcastic, obviously).
There's nothing I hate more than one of those UML fetishists (thanks, blackcoot for that spot-on description) who insists on correcting you when you call it "UML." Yes, we know the authors intended it to be called "The UML," but frankly only about.05% of us give a shit. Unfortunately, it's the most annoying sanctimonious.05%. I don't care when they call it "The UML," so why should it be put their panties all in a wad when someone leaves off the article?
/rant mode off.
//not a troll, just a person with a pet peeve
///hopefully there's a difference.
Seriously, yeah at one point it made sense to call it GNU/Linux or "GNU on top of Linux" or whatever, but at this point it's just friggin vanity. Get over it, people. It's Linux to 98% of the world, and the other 2% are self-absorbed twits who want everyone to know how clever they are for coming up with a "recursive" algorithm. I propose that we change the definition of GNU to mean "GNU's Nearly Useless" which is just as recursive and infinitely more descriptive.
Or better yet, just call it "Linux."
That way my Mom won't have to ask me "are you running regular Linux on your computer in the basement or that Agnew Linux?" every time she hears a Linux story on public radio.
/They're not "wipes" they're kleenexes. //We don't make photocopies, we zerox stuff. ///Unless we're British and applying a plaster, we get out a bandaid not an "adhesive bandage" when we cut ourselves.
Affected and hackish. Yes- you've described it exactly. Ditto for "Isn't he full of himself." I'd also add "able to relieve migraine headaches, in the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer can do" and "you'll keep reading in the sadly mistaken belief that 'Nothing can be this bad- it HAS to get better sometime'" and a more succinct "utter crap" to the list. Doesn't even qualify as escapist pulp. I've read better Harlequin Romance novels left behind on trains.
I love when a big company makes a huge fanfare about something that a little company has been doing for years. Borland Delphi used to come with the full source code for all its components. And it had a better IDE ten years ago than Visual Studio has today.
Time to trot this out... Odd how things we write as kids come back to us, isn't it?
Oh, my clone he has a first name It's O S C A R Oh, my clone he has a second name Barcoded on his jar
We're just a like in every way And if you ask me why I'll say 'Cause Oscar's makers had a way With recombining DNA/yes, it's original.//yes, I'm warped.
I agree- and I'm in IT, not medicine. I had a situation where I was working on a bug the very day I (and lots of other nice people) were laid off. When the bug finally manifested with three days of downtime and over 100K of lost revenue, I was asked to come back and fix it (for free, after having been laid off four days before Christmas). I should add that they did ask politely. When I refused, they told me they were going to have me arrested for "planting" the bug. To a jury of programmers, the bugzilla logs, emails, and SQL saved on my work PC would have made it overwhelmingly obvious that I did nothing wrong (aside from making a false assumption about an input parameter's validity). To a jury of 12 laypersons, the only relevant fact would have been that the CVS logs showed me as the one who first checked in a flawed copy. Being a stubborn idiot, I still refused (just slightly less politely than before). I still told them to fark off, but in retrospect I probably should have caved. The cost to defend myself would have bankrupted me and put my family on the street.
So... Not only do I have better graphics, better sound, better movies and better games (albeit fewer of the latter available), my free online experience I now also have better free online service.
And this is news how?
Personally, I'd rather we tackle the issue of "collaborations" with aging popular writers. Is there some sort of old-folks home where we let Lackeys prop up ex-best seller senile octogenarian authors whose "hair is gray but eyes are still green" so that younger talentless hacks without the ability to come up with an idea on their own get to "help" gramma write another book so that her grandkids can buy another Mercedes with the royalties?
I've even seen one edition that touted itself as being "FROM THE MIND OF [AUTHOR HERE]" which I can only interpret as "gramma could only drool and reminisce about the time she was six and her pet cat blouncy used to get in 'ever so much trouble' so we nodded, patted her head, and ran with that idea as inspiration for another Darkover book." Actually, it wasn't the Darkover series, but you get the idea.
Sadly, neither practice is likely to end soon. The vast majority of readers are either too stupid to see past the marketing gimmic or idiodic fanfic enthusiasts who are just waiting for that call from the author's agent telling them that the Harry-Potter-on-Darkover mashup they wrote is just the thing that could sell./Off to write a Harry-Potter-on-Darkover mashup...
I wrote a small app for a niche market and sold it with an activation key. To activate, you entered the order number, customer number, number of seats sold, and the key (which was a relatively simple hash of the first three). You could install as many copies as you wanted. The software broadcasted its licence over the local LAN as the payload of a custom layer-2 packet and listened on the LAN for that same packet type. If the number of distinct MAC addresses with the same licence exceeded the number of seats sold, you got a dunning message when you started and exited the program as well as when you tried to open or save file.
The code to do this was trivial on the Sun pizza-boxes it ran on. It was damn near impossible to implement on a Windows box due to the variances in the dozens of primitive IP stacks of the time, which is why I never ported the app to a Gatesian OS.
The license check was unobtrusive, used nearly no bandwidth, and didn't pose a risk to security or privacy since it neither phoned home (an idea that was really quite infeasable since widespread access to the internet wasn't in vogue at the time). It let the IT admins manage their licencing their own way, and if they wanted to invest the time to crack the hashing algorithm, well those were the sorts of folks who wouldn't pay anyway.
I just spent all weekend trying to install Kubuntu on my desktop. With an NVidea 8800-based video card, it's nearly impossible. The catch-22 there is that you can't NVidia's linux driver w/o a running system- but it's a GUI installation. It was very unclear that the alternate installation CD had a text-based mode. The description of the CD gave the impression that it was only for oddly-configured machines, like ones that ran on kerosene and used disk drives made of butter. I gave up- it was hopeless.
I finally switched to OpenSuSE. Granted, the distro took an overnight to download on my crappy connection, but it installed booted and let me stuff in the NVidia drivers like a champ. I'd really prefer to go with Kubuntu, but I think I'll wait. Maybe this will all be settled when they release some other silly version names like Horny Hippo, Idiotic Ibex, or Jumping Jehosephat. Hopefully I won't have to wait for Nerdy Nergleheimer...
I think length of time was factored in somehow, the gist of it being that comets have been around a lot longer than the Earth and therefore more likely to have had the incubating effect.
That stated, it'll take more than a few numbers in a formula to convince me. I'm not going to believe this until a cometary probe comes back contaminated with an alien microbe that destroys all life on the planet. And even then, I'll be a little bit skeptical.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're VBA (or vbscript) savvy, it's a fairly trivial exercise to write a macro to save off a copy of every incoming and outgoing email as a file on your hard drive. There are quite a few examples on the web, which I'm sure you can google.
Does this mean it will suck half as bad or twice as bad as Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle? Or will the degree of suckage be determined by a formula based on a sequence of primes that can only be fully understood by an improbably hot woman?
How long before the current economic situation (thanks, GW!) results in the majority of these technologies being needed in the good ole USofA? Is there going to come a day when the rich & affluent citizens of Zimbabwe are sending us cheap bicycle-powered corn shuckers?
One thing you might want to ask yourself is whether you want your kids to enjoy Sci-Fi or learn to love words. There is plenty of sci-fi that is fun to read. And then there are short stories and novels that can truly move you, deeply affect your life and remain with you forever. The difference is basically the difference between "a book" and "literature." Both have value. It's great to be able to sit on the porch with a good pulp sci-fi book on a summer's evening and immerse yourself in the struggles of the Lensmen against the evil agents of Boskone. It's even better to read Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" aloud as a family and find yourself moved to tears at the surprising conclusion. My recommendation: give them both, and make sure you talk about what they've read afterward. A simple "what did you like about it?" at the dinner table can spark a wonderful conversation.
One thing you absolutely have to do is make this a two-way operation. There's nothing that will kill an emerging reader's joy in words than to have his absolute favorite book pooh-pooh'd by an adult. So if your kid falls in love with with Eragon, by Christopher Paolini then you ought to get out a copy too- and read it carefully so that you can intelligently discuss character, setting, and plot.
Oh, and please read aloud when the material calls for it. Bradbury, Faulkner and many others wrote words that simply don't deserve to be stuck in ink on a page. If you need convincing, get a copy of The Hallowe'en Tree, by Ray Bradbury. Read a chapter to yourself, then read the next one aloud. You'll hear the difference. The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, is another example.
Hopefully I've embedded enough recommendations in there to keep this reply on-topic.
What I've always felt was lacking in most popular avatar-based systems (MMORPG's like WoW, social networks like SL, etc) was kinesthetic synchronization. The Wii is coming close to this, but I'm looking forward to the day when we can log on to a virtual world and have our physical actions approximated and reflected. The motion capture technology exists, as does the facial expression and lip-movement software. It just needs to be put together and hooked up to an MMORPG. Someday, maybe not now, maybe not in ten years, but someday I will be able to say "Read my lips: F**k You!" to that Lvl 30 Nightelf Hunter that just KS'd my mob in the Arathi Highlands, and he'll be able to.
I went to their web site, but apparently all the stars have already been adopted by Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Madonna.
I don't want to give the RIAA fuel for their fire, but I'm willing to bet that they have at least ONE smart person working for them so they'll probably figure this out anyway. Once you create the URL and the metadata (which blocks to d/l and how to xor them), doesn't that constitute a derivative work? The random data out on the cloud is sort of a red herring.
You: I'm a consultant with DARPA.
ChatBot: How does that make you feel?
You: I'm working on an initiative to push the boundaries of neuromorphic computing (i.e. artificial intelligence.
ChatBot: Hello, Working.
You: The project is designed to advance ideas all fronts, including measuring and understanding biological brains, creating AI systems, and investigating the fundamental nature of intelligence.
ChatBot: Please tell me more, Working.
You: I'm conducting a wide search of these fields, but I wanted to know if any in this community know of neat projects along those lines that I might overlook.
ChatBot: Hello, Conducting.
You: Maybe you're working on a project like that and want to talk it up?
ChatBot: I don't know. How would you answer this question?
You: No promises (seriously), but interesting work will be brought to the attention of the project manager I'm working with.
ChatBot: How does that make you feel, Conducting?
You: If you want to start up a dialog, send me an email, and we'll see where it goes.
ChatBot: We'll see where it goes.
You: I'll also be reading the comments for the story.
ChatBot: I don't understand. Could you be a little more specific?
Yeah, and I'm gonna bring a phone book made of this stuff to the next carnival I go to. Then I'm gonna hand it to the "World's Strongest Man" and laugh uncontrollably as he tries to rip it in half.
It's the little things that make us happy.
(title is sarcastic, obviously). There's nothing I hate more than one of those UML fetishists (thanks, blackcoot for that spot-on description) who insists on correcting you when you call it "UML." Yes, we know the authors intended it to be called "The UML," but frankly only about .05% of us give a shit. Unfortunately, it's the most annoying sanctimonious .05%. I don't care when they call it "The UML," so why should it be put their panties all in a wad when someone leaves off the article?
/rant mode off.
//not a troll, just a person with a pet peeve
///hopefully there's a difference.
Seriously, yeah at one point it made sense to call it GNU/Linux or "GNU on top of Linux" or whatever, but at this point it's just friggin vanity. Get over it, people. It's Linux to 98% of the world, and the other 2% are self-absorbed twits who want everyone to know how clever they are for coming up with a "recursive" algorithm. I propose that we change the definition of GNU to mean "GNU's Nearly Useless" which is just as recursive and infinitely more descriptive.
Or better yet, just call it "Linux."
That way my Mom won't have to ask me "are you running regular Linux on your computer in the basement or that Agnew Linux?" every time she hears a Linux story on public radio.
/They're not "wipes" they're kleenexes.
//We don't make photocopies, we zerox stuff.
///Unless we're British and applying a plaster, we get out a bandaid not an "adhesive bandage" when we cut ourselves.
Affected and hackish. Yes- you've described it exactly. Ditto for "Isn't he full of himself." I'd also add "able to relieve migraine headaches, in the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer can do" and "you'll keep reading in the sadly mistaken belief that 'Nothing can be this bad- it HAS to get better sometime'" and a more succinct "utter crap" to the list. Doesn't even qualify as escapist pulp. I've read better Harlequin Romance novels left behind on trains.
Apparently, he did not have the right ant ticks
I love when a big company makes a huge fanfare about something that a little company has been doing for years. Borland Delphi used to come with the full source code for all its components. And it had a better IDE ten years ago than Visual Studio has today.
Chi-chi-chi-chia! Chi-chi-chi-chia meat!
crap - the slashies should go on another line. I guess my slash-fu is weak.
Time to trot this out... Odd how things we write as kids come back to us, isn't it?
/yes, it's original. //yes, I'm warped.
Oh, my clone he has a first name
It's O S C A R
Oh, my clone he has a second name
Barcoded on his jar
We're just a like in every way
And if you ask me why I'll say
'Cause Oscar's makers had a way
With recombining DNA
I agree- and I'm in IT, not medicine. I had a situation where I was working on a bug the very day I (and lots of other nice people) were laid off. When the bug finally manifested with three days of downtime and over 100K of lost revenue, I was asked to come back and fix it (for free, after having been laid off four days before Christmas). I should add that they did ask politely. When I refused, they told me they were going to have me arrested for "planting" the bug. To a jury of programmers, the bugzilla logs, emails, and SQL saved on my work PC would have made it overwhelmingly obvious that I did nothing wrong (aside from making a false assumption about an input parameter's validity). To a jury of 12 laypersons, the only relevant fact would have been that the CVS logs showed me as the one who first checked in a flawed copy. Being a stubborn idiot, I still refused (just slightly less politely than before). I still told them to fark off, but in retrospect I probably should have caved. The cost to defend myself would have bankrupted me and put my family on the street.
So... Not only do I have better graphics, better sound, better movies and better games (albeit fewer of the latter available), my free online experience I now also have better free online service. And this is news how?
Personally, I'd rather we tackle the issue of "collaborations" with aging popular writers. Is there some sort of old-folks home where we let Lackeys prop up ex-best seller senile octogenarian authors whose "hair is gray but eyes are still green" so that younger talentless hacks without the ability to come up with an idea on their own get to "help" gramma write another book so that her grandkids can buy another Mercedes with the royalties?
/Off to write a Harry-Potter-on-Darkover mashup...
I've even seen one edition that touted itself as being "FROM THE MIND OF [AUTHOR HERE]" which I can only interpret as "gramma could only drool and reminisce about the time she was six and her pet cat blouncy used to get in 'ever so much trouble' so we nodded, patted her head, and ran with that idea as inspiration for another Darkover book." Actually, it wasn't the Darkover series, but you get the idea.
Sadly, neither practice is likely to end soon. The vast majority of readers are either too stupid to see past the marketing gimmic or idiodic fanfic enthusiasts who are just waiting for that call from the author's agent telling them that the Harry-Potter-on-Darkover mashup they wrote is just the thing that could sell.
I wrote a small app for a niche market and sold it with an activation key. To activate, you entered the order number, customer number, number of seats sold, and the key (which was a relatively simple hash of the first three). You could install as many copies as you wanted. The software broadcasted its licence over the local LAN as the payload of a custom layer-2 packet and listened on the LAN for that same packet type. If the number of distinct MAC addresses with the same licence exceeded the number of seats sold, you got a dunning message when you started and exited the program as well as when you tried to open or save file.
The code to do this was trivial on the Sun pizza-boxes it ran on. It was damn near impossible to implement on a Windows box due to the variances in the dozens of primitive IP stacks of the time, which is why I never ported the app to a Gatesian OS.
The license check was unobtrusive, used nearly no bandwidth, and didn't pose a risk to security or privacy since it neither phoned home (an idea that was really quite infeasable since widespread access to the internet wasn't in vogue at the time). It let the IT admins manage their licencing their own way, and if they wanted to invest the time to crack the hashing algorithm, well those were the sorts of folks who wouldn't pay anyway.
I just spent all weekend trying to install Kubuntu on my desktop. With an NVidea 8800-based video card, it's nearly impossible. The catch-22 there is that you can't NVidia's linux driver w/o a running system- but it's a GUI installation. It was very unclear that the alternate installation CD had a text-based mode. The description of the CD gave the impression that it was only for oddly-configured machines, like ones that ran on kerosene and used disk drives made of butter. I gave up- it was hopeless.
I finally switched to OpenSuSE. Granted, the distro took an overnight to download on my crappy connection, but it installed booted and let me stuff in the NVidia drivers like a champ. I'd really prefer to go with Kubuntu, but I think I'll wait. Maybe this will all be settled when they release some other silly version names like Horny Hippo, Idiotic Ibex, or Jumping Jehosephat. Hopefully I won't have to wait for Nerdy Nergleheimer...
Still can't run Vanguard SOH
Hmm. Could this be the inspiration for the similar scene in Heinlein's Glory Road?
I think length of time was factored in somehow, the gist of it being that comets have been around a lot longer than the Earth and therefore more likely to have had the incubating effect.
That stated, it'll take more than a few numbers in a formula to convince me. I'm not going to believe this until a cometary probe comes back contaminated with an alien microbe that destroys all life on the planet. And even then, I'll be a little bit skeptical.