But I think per-person cubicles create a lot of petty territorial issues, which was another thing avoided by the pits.
Physical territorial issues perhaps, but I can imagine a lot of social territorial issues will quickly arise. Who's the area top dog? Who's at the bottom? Which other teams do we like. Which are we not friendly with? Who does the boss like best? Their team got a coffee machine/air condition and we didn't. Their team is using our printer out in the hall. etc, etc, etc.
Just pack them into pidgeon holes and avoid the clique wars.
Gambling is a personal activity which, when not abused, harms no one else.
I believe that gambling, as well alcohol, nicotine, guns and organised religion, harms a lot of people. It destroys more than a few lives. Millions have been caught up in the backdraft from hardcore gamblers going critical.
On the other hand, I realise I really don't have the right to judge the opinions and decisions of grown adults. If someone wants to gamble, drink, smoke, go to church or whatever, why should I try and stop them. They are grown adults, capable of making their own decisions. What if someone came after me for playing too many video games or posting too much on Slashdot? But then again, people always seem to bring up things like heroin and cocaine and methamphetamine, stating that addiction is powerful enough to rob people of their sense and they need to be protected from themselves and those who would exploit them.
Personally, I'm dubious as to the power of addiction to rob people of their free will. I understand people do have powerful cravings and very real and physical withdrawal symptoms, but in the end as human beings we are supposed to have the will and sentience to change our behaviour. I understand people can be in a bad way, but I refuse to believe that those intoxicated by gambling, alcohol, drugs, or religious ceremonies, are somehow "possessed" by a chemical or by their behaviour. I don't believe in evil spirts and I don't believe in the ability of addiction to completely rob a person of free will.
In the end, I believe that people are not controlled by their addiction, but rather that they ultimately decide to act on it. Very often, this takes the form of actions harmful to our society. My position is; if you make legal any action know to cause addictions, what you are doing is accepting that a substantial amount of people will as a result take actions harmful to society. If you legalise alcohol, you are accepting a certain amount of violence in society. If you legalise nicotine, you are accepting a certain amount of death in society. Legalise gambling, accept poverty. Legalise religion, accept intolerance.
You're accepting these things on the basis that most people who partkae in this new activity are not going to harm society. You have to weight the freedoms of people to participate in an activity against the freedoms of others no to be harmed by that activity. The people you should be most concerned about are those that do not participate in the activity, but end up being harmed by it.
I'm a big believer in having the industries that provide such activities, make reparation to such innocent third party victims. Casinos, publicans, tabacco companies and dioceses should be make in some part accountable for the victims of people who participate in their activites. They after all, were the ones calling for us all to weigh their freedoms against the victims. If those that offer such activities are unprepared to accept the freedom of non participants not to be harmed by those activities, then the activity should not be made legal.
Fair enough. If my job requires me to be a part of a team, it's reasonable to ask that.
* Can they dress well?
Oh Gods. It depends on what you mean. If you mean my normal attaire is that uncomfortable garish dandy's outfit known as a three piece suit, I'll have to say no. The apparell oft proclaims the man, and I generally don't choose what clothes to wear based on what everyone else deems appropriate. If you need me to meet customers, I suppose, but for gods sakes why are you making me wear a shirt in my cubicle? Would anything else make you feel uncomfortable somehow?
* Do they shower?
This is reasonable. If you're going to ask me to do this every morning unconditionally, I'm gogint to ahve to say that if I choose the odd tuesday or so as a "wash the bits" morning and you take offense; you're standing to close inside my bubble.
* Are they sensitive to other people and their surroundings?
Of course I am! You'll never see me do or say anything inappropriate. Oh, wait. Do you mean by sensitive that I must take time away from my job to engage in vapid conversation to make insecure coworkers feel better? Must my meetings and greeting be peppered with trite reassurances and shallow smiles? Must I waste precious minutes of my life decoding and responding precisely to oh so many unfathomable and illogical social nuances, walking a tightrope of peril with each word I utter lest someone take grevious and irremediable offense and a misplaced clause or syllable. I'd rather just, you know, work.
* Are they capable of staying after normal work hours every now and then to see to something getting finished?
Oh, that kind of job. Sorry, despite what the above might lead one to imply, I do in fact have a life. Or at least, enough of a one not to waste it patching up someone elses mistakes.
The good news is that String theory makes the same predictions as GR and QM while still being only one theory.
True, but only an edited version of the truth.
String theory predicts over 10 to the power of 500 possible models for the universe. Amid all these, I'm sure you could find one that predicted bother GR and QM, but I doubt you could find one that does both and descirbes the universe we live in.
It would be a shame to turn over control of it to an organization (UN) even more beaurocratic, bloated and useless than the US Government, as they would likely regulate the internet into the ground.
And what is the US going to do to it? The country doesn't even abide by habeas corpus anymore. People can be dragged off in the middle of the night never to be seen again. It's becoming a theocracy and most Americans seem quite contented with this. And you want this nation to administer DNS for the entire globe? Lunacy!
It's only a matter of time before ICANN is order to edit the root DNS servers to combat child porn, terrorism, rouge states and/or anti-american sentiment. People who deny this are fooling only themselves. ICANN will go the way of every other agency in contemporary America. To the right. The US is no longer fit to lead the free world in anything anymore. This is not a troll. It really isn't.
There isn't a substantial amount of difference between US theocrats running DNS and Chinese autocrats running DNS. I'd rather have the UN in charge because at least then I could rely on inefficient beaucracy and discord to leave the system we know and love well enough alone.
The $500 billion dollar annual defense budget is being spent somewhere. I would hope some of it was put into spy satellites that are awful easy to overlook.
If you haven't read Wild Swans (ISBN: 0-00-717615-5), you should - it's excellent and quite revealing of the cultural revolution.
I did actually consider mentioning that book as I was writing the post. Paticularly of note in the book is the case of the Tings, a married couple who were basically the epitome of the the sort who rise to the top when people silently give up their rights.
On the other hand, as abuses of authority go, this is fairly mild.
But it's the pettiness of it that really stings though. The fact that jumped up little dictators in lowly positions abuse the current hysteria to basically enforce their views and opinions on others is really awful. It's like how factory foremen or the local priest used to dominate their communities, forcing people who were on paper free men, to essentially bow to their will.
Let's say you're a frequent flyer, for reasons of business. If your local TSA supervisor gropes you or someone you know at a bar or on the street, what are you going to do? What if they get in a property dispute with you? What if their child is tormenting your child at school? What if they don't like the clubs or places you want to frequent? What if you want to campaign for a political party they don't really like?
What will you do? Exercise your rights? Do something that might displease the officials? Perturb or them in some small way? You will on your fuck! You will drop everything and anything the moment you smell that this petty prick might make flying more difficult for you. Only fools and people with the right kind of friends will do otherwise.
As the TSA officials and persons like them grow in number and influence, expect such situations to arise. You think it won't happen? The people who set up the TSA, the people in the TSA, they all believe that such a state of affairs would be right and proper. They have a world view, and it does not involve tolerance for yours. If they can find a way to make life miserable for people who don't follow them, they will.
Capisci? Your freedom of speech, or press, or whatever, exist _only_ in your relation to congress. Noone else. Not an airline, not your neighbour, not Slashdot, not your employer, etc.
Nice tirade, but in all that you forgot one small detail. The TSA is a part of the government. A private airline has no power to detain anyone whatsoever, or to search anyone for that matter. This guy was detained, questioned, berated and denounced by government officials. Your country is still turning into a police state, despite your excuses.
I'm gonna wait until 2020 when they finally merge them all back into one fast core.
They'll call it a "Bose-Wintel condensate". Instructions will be sent to the single core, but there will be no way of distinguishing which of the merged cell cores the instructions was run on. This will play havoc with floating point precision, but as Intel commented, "most users don't need that kind of precision anyway".
The condensated core will also be subject to the laws of quantum mechanics in that, before a program has finished running, there will be no way to know if it will crash or not. Microsoft plans to leverage this to further stablise their latest version of Windows. Security experts worried about the onboard "Quantum-Threading" technology redirecting portions of thread output randomly to other threads, were dismissed as not being "forward looking".
Meanwhile, AMDs new 1W, 128 core, 4098bit chip with 1GB L2 cache retails for almost 50% higher than Intel's Bose-Wintel chips, and has seen sluggish sales since the arrival of the new technology, despite its lower running cost that the 5MW Intel chip. When asked for comment, AMD's spokesman added; "Ch@#&t!! What the f**k is wrong with you people!??! Our chips save you money!! F@#*&^g cheapskates!!!"
Upon hearing the news, Linux founder and lead developer Linus Torvalds(51) said: "We're not rewriting the kernel for that monstrosity." Intel representative declared that the company was "dissapointed" in Torvald's remarks. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs(65), when asked whether Apple intended to release a the new Mac based on the chipset, declined to comment as he went about his daily 5km morning run. Apple pundits widely believe that the new Mac will run on a quad core Bose-Wintel Condensate, and to complement this will sport a blazing white, ultra smooth case made out of Bose-Einstien condensate, the fifth phase of matter.
In a related story, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates(65), assaulted a technology reporter at a company press conference disccusing the new chip. Details are sketchy, but reports mention that one of Mr Gates older quotes about appropriate amounts of computer memory was brought up. Remond police have declined to comment on the case.
What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good.
Woah, woah, woah! Have you actually used an average onboard video card lately? I can testify that mplayer has issues at high resolutions, and google earth gets about 0.5fps. A simple X terminal will consume large portions of CPU if the app spits out a lot to stdout.
More data equals more confidence. If you dredge up thousands and thousands of ice cores, mud cores or what have you, take all the data and plot a histogram of it, you usually get a nice bell shaped curve. If you've got lots and lots and lots and lots of data, which these guys do, you can safely say that the middle of the bell curve is the mean of your data.
Of course, as you mention, there is a margin of error. However, by a happy chance of mathematics, the more data you get, the more confident you become that the temperature was within so many standard deviations of the mean. The bell curve won't change shape, in fact you want it to stay the same. And if it does, that means, on average, the temperature or whatever was in and around the mean value.
Basically if you get enough data, i.e. do enough experiments, you can tell the doubters to stick their unsubstanciated opinion where the maths don't shine.
Two situations. First, one can have the ability to see and modify source code, but not run the program. Case in point, hardware that will only run signed binaries. Sure, you can look at the source code for your CCTV system, TiVo, etc, but you will never be able to upgrade your own devices code without the hardware keys from the vendor.
Second, ability to run the program, but not see the source code. Case in point, Google. It is beyond question that Google are using all kinds of GPL applications, from the kernel to webservers to highly modified filesystem drivers. All of it GPLed and none of the code available for you to see, despite the fact that Google allow you to use all these services online, you'll never see a line of the modified code.
Both these cases violate not the letter of the GPLv2 licence, but the spirit of it. That spirit being the ability to run the program, modify the source, and run the changed program. This is happening on small scales today. It could soon be happening on a huge scale, and that would undermine the whole FOSS community. GPLv3 will be needed in the future.
On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter.
Personally, I would consider this a sackable offense. The occasional dupe will slip through, paticularly when a lot of time has passed since the original story. The odd one may slip in if two different submitters submit substantially different summaries. But this isn't the case.
ScuttleMonkey has just posted a dupe, of the exact same story that was posted only four hours earlier, and which is still on the main page. The summary is near identical, the submitter is the same, and what's worse the different titles are immediately noticeable and recognisable. It's a total farce with no excuses. To make some would be to further make a farce of the situation.
ScuttleMonkey should resign. No one could honestly consider themselves fit for an editorial position after such a slip up. I cannot for the life of me see how he can go on working for Slashdot after this. He should resign, or be sacked.
How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?
The early 22 century saw the fall of the Washington principality and its vassal state of Neo-Patriota. When the outsourced nations of new Canada and Greenland launched their massive offensive, the Redmondites placed all their hope in their new integrated Office 2109 communications software, running on Server 2104 with Microsoft SQL Server Warfare edition as a backend. This mighty system would integrate and focus the now awesome firepower of the mighty MS battle fleets into one precise and deadly, continent spanning living engine of death.
But fate was against the principality. And the plans of Emporor William Gates, the fifth of that name were all foiled. For it is said, the outsourced attack came at the very cusp of the next hardware upgrade cycle, and moreover, due to a great ion storm knocking out 802.11zzid coverage over half of eastern EU, the desperately needed hardware upgrades from CzechaMichDellia were delayed by over an entire release cycle.
And so, while the battle fleet was equipped with the latest interoperability software, it ran too slowly on the previous cycle's hardware, and by the time the first stirke was tallied and the volleys made ready, the war was already three weeks over.
And so the principality was defeated, but not destroyed. For instead of destroying Microsoft, the victors instead only broke the kingdom into seperate divisions, each responsible for a different part of their foul business. And, while there was much confusion and compatability issues for many a long year after, still the Windows OS ran deep and black withing the viens of the world; and the kernel source the victors did not take, for it was now completely written in x86 assembly, and had become terrible to behold.
Slashdot Mirror
Just pack them into pidgeon holes and avoid the clique wars.
On the other hand, I realise I really don't have the right to judge the opinions and decisions of grown adults. If someone wants to gamble, drink, smoke, go to church or whatever, why should I try and stop them. They are grown adults, capable of making their own decisions. What if someone came after me for playing too many video games or posting too much on Slashdot? But then again, people always seem to bring up things like heroin and cocaine and methamphetamine, stating that addiction is powerful enough to rob people of their sense and they need to be protected from themselves and those who would exploit them.
Personally, I'm dubious as to the power of addiction to rob people of their free will. I understand people do have powerful cravings and very real and physical withdrawal symptoms, but in the end as human beings we are supposed to have the will and sentience to change our behaviour. I understand people can be in a bad way, but I refuse to believe that those intoxicated by gambling, alcohol, drugs, or religious ceremonies, are somehow "possessed" by a chemical or by their behaviour. I don't believe in evil spirts and I don't believe in the ability of addiction to completely rob a person of free will.
In the end, I believe that people are not controlled by their addiction, but rather that they ultimately decide to act on it. Very often, this takes the form of actions harmful to our society. My position is; if you make legal any action know to cause addictions, what you are doing is accepting that a substantial amount of people will as a result take actions harmful to society. If you legalise alcohol, you are accepting a certain amount of violence in society. If you legalise nicotine, you are accepting a certain amount of death in society. Legalise gambling, accept poverty. Legalise religion, accept intolerance.
You're accepting these things on the basis that most people who partkae in this new activity are not going to harm society. You have to weight the freedoms of people to participate in an activity against the freedoms of others no to be harmed by that activity. The people you should be most concerned about are those that do not participate in the activity, but end up being harmed by it.
I'm a big believer in having the industries that provide such activities, make reparation to such innocent third party victims. Casinos, publicans, tabacco companies and dioceses should be make in some part accountable for the victims of people who participate in their activites. They after all, were the ones calling for us all to weigh their freedoms against the victims. If those that offer such activities are unprepared to accept the freedom of non participants not to be harmed by those activities, then the activity should not be made legal.
Oh Gods. It depends on what you mean. If you mean my normal attaire is that uncomfortable garish dandy's outfit known as a three piece suit, I'll have to say no. The apparell oft proclaims the man, and I generally don't choose what clothes to wear based on what everyone else deems appropriate. If you need me to meet customers, I suppose, but for gods sakes why are you making me wear a shirt in my cubicle? Would anything else make you feel uncomfortable somehow?
This is reasonable. If you're going to ask me to do this every morning unconditionally, I'm gogint to ahve to say that if I choose the odd tuesday or so as a "wash the bits" morning and you take offense; you're standing to close inside my bubble.
Of course I am! You'll never see me do or say anything inappropriate. Oh, wait. Do you mean by sensitive that I must take time away from my job to engage in vapid conversation to make insecure coworkers feel better? Must my meetings and greeting be peppered with trite reassurances and shallow smiles? Must I waste precious minutes of my life decoding and responding precisely to oh so many unfathomable and illogical social nuances, walking a tightrope of peril with each word I utter lest someone take grevious and irremediable offense and a misplaced clause or syllable. I'd rather just, you know, work.
Oh, that kind of job. Sorry, despite what the above might lead one to imply, I do in fact have a life. Or at least, enough of a one not to waste it patching up someone elses mistakes.
He sounded more like a capitalist to me.
RIAA: Those danm Pirates are attacking our economy with their Voodoo Economics!!
Pirate: Arrr!! But 'tis naught to the voodoo that you do so well!! Ye scurvy dogs!
String theory predicts over 10 to the power of 500 possible models for the universe. Amid all these, I'm sure you could find one that predicted bother GR and QM, but I doubt you could find one that does both and descirbes the universe we live in.
It's only a matter of time before ICANN is order to edit the root DNS servers to combat child porn, terrorism, rouge states and/or anti-american sentiment. People who deny this are fooling only themselves. ICANN will go the way of every other agency in contemporary America. To the right. The US is no longer fit to lead the free world in anything anymore. This is not a troll. It really isn't.
There isn't a substantial amount of difference between US theocrats running DNS and Chinese autocrats running DNS. I'd rather have the UN in charge because at least then I could rely on inefficient beaucracy and discord to leave the system we know and love well enough alone.
Let's say you're a frequent flyer, for reasons of business. If your local TSA supervisor gropes you or someone you know at a bar or on the street, what are you going to do? What if they get in a property dispute with you? What if their child is tormenting your child at school? What if they don't like the clubs or places you want to frequent? What if you want to campaign for a political party they don't really like?
What will you do? Exercise your rights? Do something that might displease the officials? Perturb or them in some small way? You will on your fuck! You will drop everything and anything the moment you smell that this petty prick might make flying more difficult for you. Only fools and people with the right kind of friends will do otherwise.
As the TSA officials and persons like them grow in number and influence, expect such situations to arise. You think it won't happen? The people who set up the TSA, the people in the TSA, they all believe that such a state of affairs would be right and proper. They have a world view, and it does not involve tolerance for yours. If they can find a way to make life miserable for people who don't follow them, they will.
It's unlikely it will show up at all. By now wind has likely dispersed the pieces and dust buried most of it.
The condensated core will also be subject to the laws of quantum mechanics in that, before a program has finished running, there will be no way to know if it will crash or not. Microsoft plans to leverage this to further stablise their latest version of Windows. Security experts worried about the onboard "Quantum-Threading" technology redirecting portions of thread output randomly to other threads, were dismissed as not being "forward looking".
Meanwhile, AMDs new 1W, 128 core, 4098bit chip with 1GB L2 cache retails for almost 50% higher than Intel's Bose-Wintel chips, and has seen sluggish sales since the arrival of the new technology, despite its lower running cost that the 5MW Intel chip. When asked for comment, AMD's spokesman added; "Ch@#&t!! What the f**k is wrong with you people!??! Our chips save you money!! F@#*&^g cheapskates!!!"
Upon hearing the news, Linux founder and lead developer Linus Torvalds(51) said: "We're not rewriting the kernel for that monstrosity." Intel representative declared that the company was "dissapointed" in Torvald's remarks. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs(65), when asked whether Apple intended to release a the new Mac based on the chipset, declined to comment as he went about his daily 5km morning run. Apple pundits widely believe that the new Mac will run on a quad core Bose-Wintel Condensate, and to complement this will sport a blazing white, ultra smooth case made out of Bose-Einstien condensate, the fifth phase of matter.
In a related story, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates(65), assaulted a technology reporter at a company press conference disccusing the new chip. Details are sketchy, but reports mention that one of Mr Gates older quotes about appropriate amounts of computer memory was brought up. Remond police have declined to comment on the case.
It's 2006. You need a video card.
More data equals more confidence. If you dredge up thousands and thousands of ice cores, mud cores or what have you, take all the data and plot a histogram of it, you usually get a nice bell shaped curve. If you've got lots and lots and lots and lots of data, which these guys do, you can safely say that the middle of the bell curve is the mean of your data.
Of course, as you mention, there is a margin of error. However, by a happy chance of mathematics, the more data you get, the more confident you become that the temperature was within so many standard deviations of the mean. The bell curve won't change shape, in fact you want it to stay the same. And if it does, that means, on average, the temperature or whatever was in and around the mean value.
Basically if you get enough data, i.e. do enough experiments, you can tell the doubters to stick their unsubstanciated opinion where the maths don't shine.
Second, ability to run the program, but not see the source code. Case in point, Google. It is beyond question that Google are using all kinds of GPL applications, from the kernel to webservers to highly modified filesystem drivers. All of it GPLed and none of the code available for you to see, despite the fact that Google allow you to use all these services online, you'll never see a line of the modified code.
Both these cases violate not the letter of the GPLv2 licence, but the spirit of it. That spirit being the ability to run the program, modify the source, and run the changed program. This is happening on small scales today. It could soon be happening on a huge scale, and that would undermine the whole FOSS community. GPLv3 will be needed in the future.
ScuttleMonkey has just posted a dupe, of the exact same story that was posted only four hours earlier, and which is still on the main page. The summary is near identical, the submitter is the same, and what's worse the different titles are immediately noticeable and recognisable. It's a total farce with no excuses. To make some would be to further make a farce of the situation.
ScuttleMonkey should resign. No one could honestly consider themselves fit for an editorial position after such a slip up. I cannot for the life of me see how he can go on working for Slashdot after this. He should resign, or be sacked.
How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?
s/soma/[one or more of the following]/g
Alcohol, marijuana, caffine, sugar, nicotine, TV, MySpace, video games, soccer, golf, blackberries, pornography, religion, sudoku, gossip or pokemon.
We all have our vices.
The early 22 century saw the fall of the Washington principality and its vassal state of Neo-Patriota. When the outsourced nations of new Canada and Greenland launched their massive offensive, the Redmondites placed all their hope in their new integrated Office 2109 communications software, running on Server 2104 with Microsoft SQL Server Warfare edition as a backend. This mighty system would integrate and focus the now awesome firepower of the mighty MS battle fleets into one precise and deadly, continent spanning living engine of death.
But fate was against the principality. And the plans of Emporor William Gates, the fifth of that name were all foiled. For it is said, the outsourced attack came at the very cusp of the next hardware upgrade cycle, and moreover, due to a great ion storm knocking out 802.11zzid coverage over half of eastern EU, the desperately needed hardware upgrades from CzechaMichDellia were delayed by over an entire release cycle.
And so, while the battle fleet was equipped with the latest interoperability software, it ran too slowly on the previous cycle's hardware, and by the time the first stirke was tallied and the volleys made ready, the war was already three weeks over.
And so the principality was defeated, but not destroyed. For instead of destroying Microsoft, the victors instead only broke the kingdom into seperate divisions, each responsible for a different part of their foul business. And, while there was much confusion and compatability issues for many a long year after, still the Windows OS ran deep and black withing the viens of the world; and the kernel source the victors did not take, for it was now completely written in x86 assembly, and had become terrible to behold.
Finally!! The perfect weapon to stop mass zombification getting out of control.