Shared music collections on the road are fine, but what this technology does is prepare the way for when your car talks the vehicle ahead of you about velocities, traffic obstructions, control inputs, lane changes, etc.
So, listen to the music in peace, and let the car do the driving.
I work at a medium sized university whose IT department has pretty well standardized on Microsoft everything. Not a week goes by that the network doesn't get taken down or seriously degraded by various worms, trojans, viri, or other dreck, predicated upon a single Microsoft product: Outlook Express. When I'm trying to order parts for a malfunctioning spectrometer, or just send an email to a friend at another university, and I can't do so because of problems related to a particular program, open source or not, it directly affects my life and my job.
Long before MSDOS days, the Icon programming language (public domain, Griswold) had both equality and equivalance operators. The equality operator compared the value of two objects. The equivalence operator compared the address of the two objects to see if they were the same object in memory. What I might like explained is just how this isn't prior art to Microsoft's patent application. Perhaps because Icon was placed in public domain, long ago?
If those of us who watch Microsoft have learned a single thing over the last fifteen years, it is that Microsoft never, ever throws out a single line of code. Passport may well move out of the limelight for a bit, but one can have absolute certainty that it will rise from the shadows as do all things undead, to live among us again.
Asking whether or not CSI is good for science is kind of missing the forest for the trees. With the onslaught of programs like "Crop Circles, the Real Story" and "UFO Cases" and "Bible Secrets" filling up nearly every available slot on dramatic TV, how can a program based on rationality possibly not be good for science? Giveth me a break. For all it's warts, and it has many, at least it's a program about deducing truth from objective evidence, and not about "How Can we Best Spin this Murder."
Not entirely true, we just don't have much. We can make antiprotons and antielectrons, which gives us antihydrogen. Now, if we can scale up our production by something like 20 orders of magnitude...
Mole problems? Call Avagadro, 602-1023
You've left out Litigation
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a technical consultant that spends a lot of time doing business in Mexico, I thought I'd mention another reason for the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs in the United States, to wit, litigation.
Self-serving lawyers are having a field day inventing class action suits against manufacturers, and it isn't just about the things that they manufacture. Distributors are on the list, also. Any company that makes or sells or promotes a product is in the line of fire for class action suits based upon the flimsiest of data. The litigators don't even have a need to make a good case; the majority of these cases are settled out of court because of the incredible costs of any possible defense.
In the absense of statutory protection, no manufacturer in their right mind would establish a new plant in the United States. Doing so is just posting a target at which überrich law firms can take aim. Most of my consulting work in the last decade has been with companies from Mexico and Brazil, because their principals - U.S. Citizens - told me they could not take a chance on building soda machines in the US, because they might well be involved in a class action suit claiming that their machines facilitated obesity among their many clients.
When I worked in telcom, I had a development job that among other things, ran my code on switching equipment so I was at least partly responsible for dial tone. I found the job to be very stressful.
My solution was to build a potter's wheel and kiln, and throw pots. It was demanding enough a task that I couldn't think about stuff at work, but took little enough that it wasn't stressful in it's own right. Between that, and playing DOOM (Take That, BOFH! BLAM!) I managed.
I've had DirecTV for years now, and I can state unequivocally that weather can effect satellite signals. Very large, heavy rainfall in thunderstorms can block signal completely. Normally this occurs for a few tens of seconds with storms just south of my location, but it does happen.
Having said that, let me also say that I've had far less dropouts and interruptions on my satellite signal than I previously had on my Time Warner digital cable. I recently had the privledge of telling a Time Warner door-to-door sales person that I would put up an old rusty coat hanger before I would ever spend another nickle with Time Warner.
LOTS OF OLDER COMPUTER LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS DIDN'T NEED OR USE LOWER CASE LETTERS, LET ALONE LATIN-1 OR UNICODE. DOS FILE NAMES ARE NOT CASE SENSITIVE NOR ARE THE FILE NAMES IN IBM'S OS/2. USING LOWER CASE IS SILLY. THOSE OF US WHO ARE ANCIENT PROGRAMMERS DON'T NEED NO STEENKING CASE SENSITIVITY.
I just wish the commentary had said "Windows Only" early in the article so I could have bypassed all the cheerful hyperbole about how great this thing would be if only I switched to Windoze.
There was no deck. Random cards were selected and turned face up. There's no discussion of FSB speeds, no commentary about memory cache, no controls, no nothing.
This is with no doubt at all one of the most useless, ridiculous, New-Wave-Science "benchmarks" I've ever even heard of. My only hope is that this writer doesn't work for the EPA or some other regulatory agency where such utter trash can be mistaken for science.
That's what makes google valuable, now isn't it? They consistantly do a good job (better than most) of separating the wheat from the chaff from the link farms.
My first "PC" was a PDP-11/20, with paper tape
reader and linc tape storage. Anyone who tries to
tell me that operating today's computers is much more complex needs to take some serious drugs.
What is more complex is what today's
computers do, and increasing their reliability or
making them goal oriented are both laudable goals.
What will not be accomplished is making the things
that these computers actually do less complex.
During my time at telco, development costs were always a fraction of maintenance costs. Producing write-only code may be cute, and may cut back on other people using it, but it also cuts back on your own people being able to maintain it.
We have, in the United States, an interesting twist on democracy. Here, voters are not required to vote. Everyone (with a few exceptions) can vote if they desire, but there are no real incentives to get people to the polls. Because of this, there is a constant outcry about how much better the system would work if only everyone would vote.
Personally, I think this is Male Bovine Fecal Material, at its worst.
What we have is a plurocracy. Those who vote do so because they want to, and my contention is that voters who want to vote are, as a group, better informed than the overall population of eligible voters. Those voters who plan on voting are certainly more motivated to serve a political purpose; said voters are likely to be better enlightened about the issues being voted upon.
I believe that our system works as well as it does because most voters stay home, not despite the lack of response at the polls.
What makes anyone think that the internet isn't going to be the unstoppable "virus of freedom" in the world? Did people expect a tsunami of change to happen overnight?
Political changes are generational things. In the United States, the civil rights act was passed in the mid-60's, and real change in the South is just happening now, as this comment is being read. In this particular case, it had to wait for the diehard bigots in congress and in the electorate to die off. Freedom in the Soviet Union took a similar change of leadership, over a similar length of time.
There are two general cases that need to be considered, those being "rich" countries and "poor" countries. In those countries where sizeable chunks of the population are starving, changes of politics are quite secondary to the average citizen (though perhaps they should not be, in the long run). Adlai Stevenson expressed it well when he said, "A Hungry Man is not a Free Man." These people have no time to be interested in the internet, though even here, the internet will make changes over the long haul.
In countries where hunger is not the primary motivating force, changes will come faster. One can see the ripples even now -- spend some time in Hong Kong and look around. In some of the most repressive theocracies on the planet, voices for change are being raised, and one of the primary ways we know about them is through the internet.
Have patience; revolutions that happen overnight tend to be accompanied by copious quantities of blood. With any luck, things in many of these places may happen as they did in the Soviet Union. One day, we may wake up and notice that tyrants are becoming yet another endangered species.
I can't help wondering what the University will think when somebody realizes that a wireless access point is cheap and readily available, and (the drumroll...) not part of the "University" network.
Well, the new age Industrial Feudalism has arrived. We have Lawyers instead of Warriors in Armor, but with the same unerring desire to take their cut from the peasants whenever money or goods change hands.
Is that what it has come to, when the Patrician Knights stand by for their tribute, even for free software? What kind of world is this when giant corporations decide that assets are too costly, and that it's better to just take their rake on other people's business? Is the future a day when corporate legions own all the politicians and 'due process' is something about which we read in old moldy paper history books?
This is not for me.
Click through licenses on free software? Screw that. Vigorously
Slashdot Mirror
Shared music collections on the road are fine, but what this technology does is prepare the way for when your car talks the vehicle ahead of you about velocities, traffic obstructions, control inputs, lane changes, etc.
So, listen to the music in peace, and let the car do the driving.
I work at a medium sized university whose IT department has pretty well standardized on Microsoft everything. Not a week goes by that the network doesn't get taken down or seriously degraded by various worms, trojans, viri, or other dreck, predicated upon a single Microsoft product: Outlook Express. When I'm trying to order parts for a malfunctioning spectrometer, or just send an email to a friend at another university, and I can't do so because of problems related to a particular program, open source or not, it directly affects my life and my job.
So, I care.
Long before MSDOS days, the Icon programming language (public domain, Griswold) had both equality and equivalance operators. The equality operator compared the value of two objects. The equivalence operator compared the address of the two objects to see if they were the same object in memory. What I might like explained is just how this isn't prior art to Microsoft's patent application. Perhaps because Icon was placed in public domain, long ago?
If those of us who watch Microsoft have learned a single thing over the last fifteen years, it is that Microsoft never, ever throws out a single line of code. Passport may well move out of the limelight for a bit, but one can have absolute certainty that it will rise from the shadows as do all things undead, to live among us again.
Of course it's good for science.
Mole problems? Call Avagadro, 602-1023
Self-serving lawyers are having a field day inventing class action suits against manufacturers, and it isn't just about the things that they manufacture. Distributors are on the list, also. Any company that makes or sells or promotes a product is in the line of fire for class action suits based upon the flimsiest of data. The litigators don't even have a need to make a good case; the majority of these cases are settled out of court because of the incredible costs of any possible defense.
In the absense of statutory protection, no manufacturer in their right mind would establish a new plant in the United States. Doing so is just posting a target at which überrich law firms can take aim. Most of my consulting work in the last decade has been with companies from Mexico and Brazil, because their principals - U.S. Citizens - told me they could not take a chance on building soda machines in the US, because they might well be involved in a class action suit claiming that their machines facilitated obesity among their many clients.
Yes, in a heartbeat.
My solution was to build a potter's wheel and kiln, and throw pots. It was demanding enough a task that I couldn't think about stuff at work, but took little enough that it wasn't stressful in it's own right. Between that, and playing DOOM (Take That, BOFH! BLAM!) I managed.
Having said that, let me also say that I've had far less dropouts and interruptions on my satellite signal than I previously had on my Time Warner digital cable. I recently had the privledge of telling a Time Warner door-to-door sales person that I would put up an old rusty coat hanger before I would ever spend another nickle with Time Warner.
LOTS OF OLDER COMPUTER LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS DIDN'T NEED OR USE LOWER CASE LETTERS, LET ALONE LATIN-1 OR UNICODE. DOS FILE NAMES ARE NOT CASE SENSITIVE NOR ARE THE FILE NAMES IN IBM'S OS/2. USING LOWER CASE IS SILLY. THOSE OF US WHO ARE ANCIENT PROGRAMMERS DON'T NEED NO STEENKING CASE SENSITIVITY.
-- Norm Reitzel
It's simple enough. If you can't stand the adverts, don't use the web site.
This is with no doubt at all one of the most useless, ridiculous, New-Wave-Science "benchmarks" I've ever even heard of. My only hope is that this writer doesn't work for the EPA or some other regulatory agency where such utter trash can be mistaken for science.
Litigate, of course.
It's the American Way.
Why spend money on geeky developers and lengthy software testing when you can support swank lawyers with their stylish cars?
That's what makes google valuable, now isn't it? They consistantly do a good job (better than most) of separating the wheat from the chaff from the link farms.
My first "PC" was a PDP-11/20, with paper tape reader and linc tape storage. Anyone who tries to tell me that operating today's computers is much more complex needs to take some serious drugs.
What is more complex is what today's computers do, and increasing their reliability or making them goal oriented are both laudable goals. What will not be accomplished is making the things that these computers actually do less complex.
During my time at telco, development costs were always a fraction of maintenance costs. Producing write-only code may be cute, and may cut back on other people using it, but it also cuts back on your own people being able to maintain it.
Oh, do I agree, in boldface.
We have, in the United States, an interesting twist on democracy. Here, voters are not required to vote. Everyone (with a few exceptions) can vote if they desire, but there are no real incentives to get people to the polls. Because of this, there is a constant outcry about how much better the system would work if only everyone would vote.
Personally, I think this is Male Bovine Fecal Material, at its worst.
What we have is a plurocracy. Those who vote do so because they want to, and my contention is that voters who want to vote are, as a group, better informed than the overall population of eligible voters. Those voters who plan on voting are certainly more motivated to serve a political purpose; said voters are likely to be better enlightened about the issues being voted upon.
I believe that our system works as well as it does because most voters stay home, not despite the lack of response at the polls.
Windoze media.... I'm sure I've heard of it somewhere...
Political changes are generational things. In the United States, the civil rights act was passed in the mid-60's, and real change in the South is just happening now, as this comment is being read. In this particular case, it had to wait for the diehard bigots in congress and in the electorate to die off. Freedom in the Soviet Union took a similar change of leadership, over a similar length of time.
There are two general cases that need to be considered, those being "rich" countries and "poor" countries. In those countries where sizeable chunks of the population are starving, changes of politics are quite secondary to the average citizen (though perhaps they should not be, in the long run). Adlai Stevenson expressed it well when he said, "A Hungry Man is not a Free Man." These people have no time to be interested in the internet, though even here, the internet will make changes over the long haul.
In countries where hunger is not the primary motivating force, changes will come faster. One can see the ripples even now -- spend some time in Hong Kong and look around. In some of the most repressive theocracies on the planet, voices for change are being raised, and one of the primary ways we know about them is through the internet.
Have patience; revolutions that happen overnight tend to be accompanied by copious quantities of blood. With any luck, things in many of these places may happen as they did in the Soviet Union. One day, we may wake up and notice that tyrants are becoming yet another endangered species.
Code was like that when we were writing it for Datapoint back in 1973.
I can't help wondering what the University will think when somebody realizes that a wireless access point is cheap and readily available, and (the drumroll...) not part of the "University" network.
Well, the new age Industrial Feudalism has arrived. We have Lawyers instead of Warriors in Armor, but with the same unerring desire to take their cut from the peasants whenever money or goods change hands.
Is that what it has come to, when the Patrician Knights stand by for their tribute, even for free software? What kind of world is this when giant corporations decide that assets are too costly, and that it's better to just take their rake on other people's business? Is the future a day when corporate legions own all the politicians and 'due process' is something about which we read in old moldy paper history books?
This is not for me.
Click through licenses on free software? Screw that. Vigorously