What a ridiculous waste of money. Why employ a lethal robotic wireless sensor network instead of a wireless sensor network? The advantage of deploying wireless sensor networks is that you DON'T NEED THE FUCKING LANDMINES ANYMORE. Can these land mines discriminate bogeys from good guys? If a plain old WSN is deployed, it is first off safer, second-off cheaper, and thirdly, just as lethal, yet more accurately targeted when combined with a Hellfire-toting Predator drone or some other aerial bombardment.
Wow. The "Mensa Babe" can't even spell "naïveté" or "scenario." (I'll let "analyse" go under the charitable allowance that you might be using the English spelling). More alarming than the inept spelling, s/he can't figure out how to use a spell checker.
And I haven't even drilled down into the idiocy of the content of the post, for instance, confusing donating money to a CHARITY for donating money to a PERSON.
Buffet has a record of opposing tax cuts that help him stay richer, and of being a conscious and charitable person. So save your sour grapes.
Capitalism by definition doesn't have to have a completely unregulated marketplace. "That's capitalism" is an ampty platitude. What "that" is is a particular way of practicing capitalism that is unfair.
In the past, Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt tried to place check on corporations in order to protect our economy. Nowadays, we are seeking to tear down all these successful restrictions.
There a difference between free trade and fair trade. Exploiting economic imbalance to screw your own country's laborers is free trade, but it is not fair trade. If someone wants to outsource to the Third World, fine--but that decision should come with a tariff that makes it at least competitive to hiring workers in your own country. Otherwise, you wind up outsourcing your wealth and standard of living.
Some might say that that's a great thing to do, but I think it is each country's duty to protect its own workers. That's what we pay taxes for.
Actually, the aluminum cases develop little spots and eventually pitting where the acids from your sweat affect the metal. Mine has little tiny black dots, but I've seen cases of serious corrosion from people who are sweaty and acidic and compulsive computer users.
Regarding his quip about Galileo, I'd say SH is one of the funniest theoretical physicists (perhaps he doesn't have much competition!):
"This is the book of the film of the book. I don't know if they are planning a film of the book of the film of the book."
"I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was able to reason."
"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales."
"When asked, 'What did God do before he created the universe?' St. Augustine didnt reply, 'he was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.' "
"When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun."
(While looking at the Warp Core of the Star Trek Enterprise set) "I'm working on that."
And I'm sure someone remembers "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
If China wants to be heard in the international community, then they should participate in other global standards, or should have opened up the design and devlopment process of WAPI to either participation or scrutiny. They developed the standard knowing that their was an international effort (NOT American) to come up with the next generation of WLAN encryption, so I have no sympathy for the wasted effort at this stage. If China wants to effectively participate in the global standards game, they should, for instance, start a Common Criteria scheme and become a signatory country. It seems to this casual observer that China often likes to go it alone wrt standards, and when they suddenly start blustering about this international community not subscribing to their arbitrary standard is ridiculous. Why should the IEEE's efforts be thrown out? They lost the vote. They can complain about the vote being rigged or unfair, but a voting system is the closest approximation to a fair way of determining next-gen standards. I hear voting isn't so popular over in China though.
I agree that humanity is a transient state. Life is an ongoing process, and counter to all of our mythology, we are not the crowning achievement of that process, we are just a part of it. We are simply the first sentient species. It is possible that other species will become sentient and technological after we are gone, or that we will continue to evolve as the only, or perhaps the dominant, sentient life form on our planet.
1,000,000,000s of years from now, we had better be looking for a way to get to another solar system before our sun expands into a red giant and turns the earth into a cinder.
I like the Arthur C. Clarke's RAMA idea. Form a self-contained world for sublight speed interstellar travel.
Actually, there is a finite probability that one of those numbers could be five, but it just takes longer than the age of the universe for that possibility to emerge.
Sort of like the probability of me spontaneously teleporting to Paris.
(Especially if you believe in an infinite universe.)
All indications are that the conditions suitable for life in the universe aren't infinite, so from an anthropic perspective, we don't live in an infinite universe.
But in a quantum multiverse, everything possible happens!
I don't remember reading in the Bill of Rights that "no one shall know what phone numbers your phone numbers communicates with".
OK, so I guess you haven't read the Bill of Rights. They don't mention phones because they didn't exist yet, but this type of surveillance is the subject of Amendment IV. Moreover, the EXACT form of surveillance in question is itself explicitly outlawed by the Telecommunications Act. If this were legal, then the NSA would have taken Qwest's advice and procured the information through the FISA court. Even John Ashcroft balked at this program. For your edification:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The people leaking this information should be getting shot.
Yes, you really seem to have a grasp of the concept of freedom.
If Bush & Company find some reason for elections not to be held in a couple of years, I'll start worrying about the erosion of American freedoms.
We haven't had a legitimately elected president in eight years, but I guess that's OK with you.
Until that happens - which it won't - everything is fine, my life hasn't changed at all and neither has yours, and there are more important things to concern yourself with
On the contrary, there is nothing more important to concern oneself with than retaining freedom. Your wait-and-see attitude is nauseating and irrational. By the time you would start reacting, it would be too late.
Plenty of personal freedoms are under direct attack. Did you know, for example, that there are a bunch of people being held in violation of Amendments VI and VIII?
When the executive starts willfully breaking the law and is not held accountable, that is a direct attack on separation of powers. Separation of powers is the prime mechanism checking against restrictive practices by the government. Ergo, the Bush administration is dismantling the very framework which protects our freedom.
The message of current US policy is that freedom is weak. Freedom cannot withstand a single terrrorist attack.
Do you think that the fear we're living under now is anything compared to the fear of the founders as the much larger, better equipped and trained Royal armies attacked?
Yet they believed freedom was more important than life itself. That belief is the foundation of our way of life, and this foundation is under attack. Once we lose these freedoms, they will be almost impossible to recoup without force.
What unmitigated cowards are the people who are willing to cede freedoms to terrorism. And furthermore, there is no proof that ceding these freedoms enables us to better fight terror.
To the founding fathers, we would look like a bunch of cowards and ingrates. They would be horrified to see the legacy they struggled and died to create collapsing under the comparatively tame threat of terrorism.
Well, the fact that it measures the ability to think and that well fail there is even more disturbing, though not surprising (see Presidential elections, MTV, and pop music).
Fortunately my school hasn't (yet) been affected by this, and I'm graduating in a few days, so it looks like I'll miss that. The reason I say "I'll miss that" is because I think this will be a growing problem as academic and scientific funding continues to dry up over the next few years, and as demand for CS professionals goes up.
My thinking on it is that departments will have to continue to become more self-sufficient, and thus will have to get professors based purely upon the criterion of research, meaning what research dollars can s/he bring to our program? And as demand for CS professionals goes up, those professors who are great instructors, but who don't care about research, may be lured into the work force.
This is clearly a bad thing, but there could be some benefits if education adapts by offering more project-oriented curricula, allowing undergrads to become involved in some of the research projects.
Computer Engineering on the other hand allows people to gain the skills needed to participate in industry, leading teams of developers and (hopefully) using methodologies taught in school.
I think you're confused. Computer engineering is physical engineering discipline. It's the confluence of CS and EE. The only programming involved (I think) is typically microcontroller assembly and embedded C. Computer engineers make systems like, say, the innards of a vending machine. It's got nothing to do with "leading teams of developers."
I suspect what you are thinking of is "Software Engineering."
I didn't read TFA, but does a poor showing in a programming competition really mean we're not producing good programmers? In terms of numbers, I can understand a shortfall, but I don't think you can extrapolate to the quality of programmer. I know that at my school at least, programmers are too busy working on real-world applications, either for funded research or deployment, to worry about some meaningless competition. To my mind, that's a good thing.
Allow me to use the Baseball World Cup as a metaphor. In that event, either the US or the Dominican Republic should have won if you strictly base it on the talent of the players. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. There are other factors involved, such as nationalism and the existence of MLB in the US, which become factors influencing the amount of preparation put in by each of the teams (Cuba being an example of a year-long affair). You can see the same thing with the US's basketball team, though some of that failure is attributable to the differences between NBA and international style basketball.
In this competition, I think international teams simply care more. They probably spend a lot of time preparing for it and the teams become highly specialized at winning programming competitions. I'm not saying those skills don't translate into useful skills in RL, but I think we should take these results with a grain of salt. I would put our best programmers against those of any country in the world, but they're too busy doing relevant stuff.
You should've known that this is what you want to do with your life -- computer programming -- even before you've gotten your high school diploma.
That's a bit extreme. Plenty of people change their minds about what they want to do in college if not after, and a lot of times are rewarded by changing paths.
I was talking about the post itself. If it's a Republican-controlled committee, then the Republicans are more responsible for the outcome. That's the basis of democratic majority.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you've been in a coma or something, but most Mac hardware IS x86 hardware now.
This is more military-industrial pork.
And I haven't even drilled down into the idiocy of the content of the post, for instance, confusing donating money to a CHARITY for donating money to a PERSON.
Buffet has a record of opposing tax cuts that help him stay richer, and of being a conscious and charitable person. So save your sour grapes.
Mensa, my ass.
I don't know a lot about van Ecking, but could a device like this be hacked to spy on people?
In the past, Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt tried to place check on corporations in order to protect our economy. Nowadays, we are seeking to tear down all these successful restrictions.
There a difference between free trade and fair trade. Exploiting economic imbalance to screw your own country's laborers is free trade, but it is not fair trade. If someone wants to outsource to the Third World, fine--but that decision should come with a tariff that makes it at least competitive to hiring workers in your own country. Otherwise, you wind up outsourcing your wealth and standard of living.
Some might say that that's a great thing to do, but I think it is each country's duty to protect its own workers. That's what we pay taxes for.
Actually, the aluminum cases develop little spots and eventually pitting where the acids from your sweat affect the metal. Mine has little tiny black dots, but I've seen cases of serious corrosion from people who are sweaty and acidic and compulsive computer users.
- one (1) EMC Symmetrix DMX Storage array of at least 1 petabyte (1 x 10^15 bytes) (recommend the 15k RPM drives)
- one (1) (Beowulf) Cluster of 1000 overclocked Athlon 64 FX-powered blades in a liquid nitrogen cooling element, 2.5 GB RAM ea.
- one (1) OC-48 Pipe for downloading updates
- one (1) array of Trusted Computing Crippleware to make sure you can't play any media or games
- one (1) array of 1000 SLI GeForce 7950 graphics cards
There you go. Should be able to run Office with that baseline configuration, but it's gonna lag. Don't even try to fire up Solitaire.And I'm sure someone remembers "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
Are you suggesting that RMS is planning a military attack on Paris? He's turning into quite the zealot these days...
BA-ZING!
If China wants to be heard in the international community, then they should participate in other global standards, or should have opened up the design and devlopment process of WAPI to either participation or scrutiny. They developed the standard knowing that their was an international effort (NOT American) to come up with the next generation of WLAN encryption, so I have no sympathy for the wasted effort at this stage. If China wants to effectively participate in the global standards game, they should, for instance, start a Common Criteria scheme and become a signatory country. It seems to this casual observer that China often likes to go it alone wrt standards, and when they suddenly start blustering about this international community not subscribing to their arbitrary standard is ridiculous. Why should the IEEE's efforts be thrown out? They lost the vote. They can complain about the vote being rigged or unfair, but a voting system is the closest approximation to a fair way of determining next-gen standards. I hear voting isn't so popular over in China though.
I agree that humanity is a transient state. Life is an ongoing process, and counter to all of our mythology, we are not the crowning achievement of that process, we are just a part of it. We are simply the first sentient species. It is possible that other species will become sentient and technological after we are gone, or that we will continue to evolve as the only, or perhaps the dominant, sentient life form on our planet.
I like the Arthur C. Clarke's RAMA idea. Form a self-contained world for sublight speed interstellar travel.
Sort of like the probability of me spontaneously teleporting to Paris.
But in a quantum multiverse, everything possible happens!
Yes, you really seem to have a grasp of the concept of freedom. We haven't had a legitimately elected president in eight years, but I guess that's OK with you. On the contrary, there is nothing more important to concern oneself with than retaining freedom. Your wait-and-see attitude is nauseating and irrational. By the time you would start reacting, it would be too late.
Plenty of personal freedoms are under direct attack. Did you know, for example, that there are a bunch of people being held in violation of Amendments VI and VIII?
When the executive starts willfully breaking the law and is not held accountable, that is a direct attack on separation of powers. Separation of powers is the prime mechanism checking against restrictive practices by the government. Ergo, the Bush administration is dismantling the very framework which protects our freedom.
Do you think that the fear we're living under now is anything compared to the fear of the founders as the much larger, better equipped and trained Royal armies attacked?
Yet they believed freedom was more important than life itself. That belief is the foundation of our way of life, and this foundation is under attack. Once we lose these freedoms, they will be almost impossible to recoup without force.
What unmitigated cowards are the people who are willing to cede freedoms to terrorism. And furthermore, there is no proof that ceding these freedoms enables us to better fight terror.
To the founding fathers, we would look like a bunch of cowards and ingrates. They would be horrified to see the legacy they struggled and died to create collapsing under the comparatively tame threat of terrorism.
Place your bets!
Well, the fact that it measures the ability to think and that well fail there is even more disturbing, though not surprising (see Presidential elections, MTV, and pop music).
My thinking on it is that departments will have to continue to become more self-sufficient, and thus will have to get professors based purely upon the criterion of research, meaning what research dollars can s/he bring to our program? And as demand for CS professionals goes up, those professors who are great instructors, but who don't care about research, may be lured into the work force.
This is clearly a bad thing, but there could be some benefits if education adapts by offering more project-oriented curricula, allowing undergrads to become involved in some of the research projects.
We'll see.
I suspect what you are thinking of is "Software Engineering."
Allow me to use the Baseball World Cup as a metaphor. In that event, either the US or the Dominican Republic should have won if you strictly base it on the talent of the players. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. There are other factors involved, such as nationalism and the existence of MLB in the US, which become factors influencing the amount of preparation put in by each of the teams (Cuba being an example of a year-long affair). You can see the same thing with the US's basketball team, though some of that failure is attributable to the differences between NBA and international style basketball.
In this competition, I think international teams simply care more. They probably spend a lot of time preparing for it and the teams become highly specialized at winning programming competitions. I'm not saying those skills don't translate into useful skills in RL, but I think we should take these results with a grain of salt. I would put our best programmers against those of any country in the world, but they're too busy doing relevant stuff.
I was talking about the post itself. If it's a Republican-controlled committee, then the Republicans are more responsible for the outcome. That's the basis of democratic majority.
The post is neutral. It mentions the people responsible, who happen to be the currently more criminal Repugnantans.