Nope, sorry. Not buying the innovation argument. Or rather--it's not that I take issue with the idea that it's innovative (on second thought, see below), it's just that I see it as yet another unscrupulous tactic by some two-bit company to try to gank people out of their hard earned money. I'm kind of anti-corporation.
In addition, the concept of presenting a false or misleading user interface is not wholly new. There have been Trojan Horse programs that operate this way for many, many years. A popular choice used to be to immitate the logon screen. Nice way to grab passwords.
I'm not saying, exactly, that what this company's doing is the same as a Trojan, but if it isn't, then it's awfully damn close. Even when you know it's an add, you're forced to look at it for a second because it looks like it might be a real status window. (Until you read it of course.)
I hate this company and I say let 'em fry. What I want to know is, is there anyway I can get a cut of some of the profits if the class eventually wins the suit?
On relational operators...
I know what `!=' means. It means `does not equal' or `is not equal to'. Now I know it's a small hair, but it's my opinion that `is not equal to' is not the same as `is not the same as' (at least that's what they told me in geometry class). I realize that the subject line allowed is short. I'm sure that one reason people use `!=' is to make their subject fit, but if they really wanted to, they could use a different subject. I think a lot of people prefer flashy, sensationalist, or intentionally cliche subjects because they know it's more likely to get modded up. Hey, it's worked for me! I had this comment a long time ago, it wasn't worth much but it had a subject of "Life imitates art..." and bang, it got modded up. To me, when I read someone say, `those aren't the same', it's not *nearly* as forceful a statement as `Thing1 != Thing2'. The second form is absolute (so it's easy to oversimplify which is bad), while the first is just a statement. Perhaps it would be better if we had fuzzy relational operators instead. Then we could have fuzzy-equal and fuzzy-not-equal. How about prepending a question mark? Like this: `?=', `?!='.:-) Yeah, I know it looks stupid. Anyway, sensationalism is what slashdot is all about, so I'll probably use the `!=' construction myself sometime, if I feel all fired up about something.
On the chopped off portion of my comment: It's too bad it got cut off since now I'm not exactly sure what I was going to say myself. Nothing too extraordinary, I imagine. I think all I was going to do was point out the that unlawful search and seizure clause does not explicity refer to privacy. Of course, when you go to argue in favor of right to privacy that's exactly what you should point out--the unlawful search and seizure thing. That's really all I had to say about that. In my original post, I wasn't trying to come up with any actual conclusions.:-D That's *way* too hard. I was just hoping some people out there might read that comment and be forced to sit back and think for a bit, rather than just parrotting the party line (so to speak). You are obviously already thinking.
On the DRM thing: It's nice to know that some people that aren't huge corporations are also working on it. Here again, the only reason I even mentioned it is that, in the past I have noticed that, on the one hand a lot of people here are in favor of privacy and using encryption to further that end, but on the other hand, they seem to be automatically *against* *anything* named `DRM'. It's like a biohazard warning for them, I guess.
I realize where this mentality comes from--from the various attempts by large corporations to get evil/bad/nasty/icky DRM legislation passed. But a more productive alternative to simply automatically hating anything with the letters `DRM' attatched to it would be to re-define it into something that can help us. (Why not, salesman and lawyers play the game this way *all* the time.) So it's like: Sure, you bet I'm in favor of DRM--for the *citizens* of the U.S., *not* the corporations. Let them chew on that for a while.
To think people have no choice between, for example, SQL Server and Oracle
We want the desktop you insensitive, M$ clod! All that stuff you mention is aimed at backend, server type stuff. I know it's a hopeless pipedream, but the Linux zealots (includes me, marginally) want the desktop!
Choice! Ha! I laugh at your idea of "choice".
Seriously, are you going to get your opinion of any company from someone who quit after 3 weeks?
I don't base my opinion on that. My first inklinkgs of a negative opinion of M$ goes back to 1994. When I realized that DOS and the splashy GUI I was using (Win 3.11) were made by the same company, I was at a lose to explain why I couldn't close a DOS window by double clicking the little button on the upper left of the window. After all, it worked for all the Windows programs. But not for the DOS windows. But the programs are made by the same damn compnay.
Then I went away for the summer and heard about the new Win95. I saw it but was not greatly impressed. Then when I got back, some weirdo on campus showed me OS/2 Warp. Then I found that while I'd been gone, M$ had sent me an issue of a magazine that was essencially nothing but a big commercial for M$. I wondered why I'd never heard of OS/2 before. I felt like I'd been betrayed on some deep level by not being told that there was more than one OS in the world. I wonder how many non-computer-savvy people in the world still don't know this basic fact. It's like the people chained up in the cave. They've not seen the light.
Then I started to notice (over time) that not only was M$ a near monopoly, their products sucked, crashed a lot, and, M$ played the game dirty. That was what pissed me off the most. On second thought, no, it was the crappy software that pissed me off the most. The other thing was just a close second.
Now that M$ is all the way up to XP, the crappy software is mostly a thing of the past. M$ apps seem to run pretty solidly now (I'm not saying that XP is the first version to be able to make that claim, I'm just saying that it is that way now).
But I will never forgive them for playing the game dirty. It's not that I have a problem with them competing with other businesses and trying to win and drive other businesses out of business (although, despite what some people say, that's not always the best strategy for a business). It's the way they do it. Do you realize what company you're working for? Can you really look at yourself in the mirror each morning? Really?
If you see a person bleeding to death on the street, will you help them? Because I'm not so sure Ballmer or Gates would.
Yes, yes, I know. I'm a crazy lunatic. Don't worry about it, I'm just venting.:-P
*sigh* Why do people insist on using `!=' in such a way? It's a very strong, declarative thing. It makes it look like what you're saying is hugely important. I guess that's why. It seems to work well, posts like this frequently get modded up.
Anyway, thank you for your post. You make a good point. In my orignal post, I wasn't trying to say that we *don't* have right to privacy, I was just trying to point out that the argument for it is harder.
Yes, yes, yes you're right that just because something is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, that doesn't mean we don't have it. *But*, when it comes down to the actual legal wrangling, it really *does* make a difference. It will always be *easier* for people to make the copyright argument than the privacy one. (You point out the `unlawful search and seaz
Btw, how come all this DRM junk seems to be for corporations only? What about us? Do we get to have *our personal* digital rights managed by ourselves?
Anyway, thanks for taking an interest and replying.:-)
I apologize for not sticking to just one topic. sOMetimes I cHANeL Delerium.;-)
To the "It's ok to cheat!" group (Group One):
No it isn't. If it were, it wouldn't be called "cheating".
To the "cheating is bad" group (Group Two):
no shit. But someone will always cheat. This isn't the simple, clear cut right-and-wrong thing that some people make it out to be though. It would be if everyone was Dudly Do-Right, but they're not and they never will be.
If it were automatic for everyone to do-the-right-thing, banks would not need safes and locks and guards and all else. There is always, in human nature, the struggle between what society says you should do and what you actually want to do. Note that things get even more confused because certain elements in society will say that it's okay to do what you want to (i.e. Group One). For some people, some of the time, there is a temptation to cheat.
Suppose, for example, that you and I are playing a game of cards. Now suppose you've got to get up and leave the room for a bit. I stare at your hand lying face down on the table. Do I look at it and see what cards you've got? In my case, no I don't because I have a certain ethic about cheating in games (that have human opponents--when the opponent is a computer, whether I cheat depends on how much respect I have for the game and other factors) and I'm pedantic and I want to try to play by all the rules. So no, I don't look at the cards.
But another person might look at the other guy's cards and rationalize it as being a "more technically advanced style of play". Note that it becomes easier to rationalize cheating when you don't actually see the person that you're screwing over. It also becomes more tempting when there's money on the line. Don't people still pay big bucks on eBay for high-power EQ chars?
When you look at it that way, it's easy (for me anyway) to start to see the EQ "cheaters" as "power users", even though I know they're not. It becomes easier to lie to myself, because it becomes increasingly tempting to become on of them so I can set myself up a nice little business on eBay and make money (this is human nature in action, folks) out of little bits of data and other people's gulibility.:-) But making money off of people's gulibility always leaves a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak). That's why I'll never be a politician or a lawyer.
But the point, Group Two, is that there is no need to let Group One get away with so much in this situation. The server could, perhaps, be better written to give away less information. That would be a perfect example of doing the Right Thing. (But also note "deserves to lose". I suppose this is where some of the Group One people are coming from.) Yes, unfortunatetly, that might require some rewrites and it might increase the required bandwidth, but... Think of the Children!! (sorry, couldn't resist.;-) )
So how can we get to that point? What would get Sony to rewrite the code some more so that the client has less info to go on? Simple. Release WinSEQ. Then they won't have much choice.
This is not a new battle. It's just the age-old war of access to information being played out AGAIN. Other examples include: illegally copying mp3s, application programs, games programs, ALL programs. Where do YOU draw the line? What level of information access do you think is okay, and what do you think is wrong? Does your philosophy have any contradictions? Are you aware that arguing for illegalization of spam whilst also arguing for legalization of file trading implies that your right to privacy is greater than the right of copyright? But copyright is explictiy referred to and defined in the Constitution and, AFAIK, the right to privacy is not. Have you ever thought about the implications of that? How many more times will we have to go through this, I wonder? A hundred times? A million?
I think fifty years from now, people will look back on this age of poorly defined/handled information access rights and laugh. Heck, I live in this time and I already laugh at it!
Please mod up parent comment
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Immobile Robots
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· Score: 1
Thank you for writing your comment. If I had any moderator points left, I'd definitely mod you "+1 Informative". I see that between the time I downloaded the comments page and the time I downloaded the reply page, you've been modded up so now you're at four. Hopefully, you'll get to five soon.:-)
I've never heard of "control theory" before but since I have a CS degree, I probably should have. It sounds very interesting. It's nice to know there are systematic methods for attempting to keep control of complex systems other than just periodically asking the question, "is it still on?".:-)
Also, thanks for clearing up the "immobot" crude. I went to the "Check this column for details" link but it had been simplified to the point that there was no technical info in it. (Nothing left... Like if you take the derivative of a polynomial too many times: you always get f(x)=0.) So it was impossible to determine if they were actually telling me something or just saying, "Wow! Technology's cool, you bet!!" I hate when that happens.
It is a cliche to say "Orwell wasn't talking about the Soviet Union; he was talking about where Western society was headed".... In both 1984 and Animal Farm,
You're right about 1984 and Animal Farm, those two are definitely aimed at the Stalinist form of oppression. But have you read Brave New World or (the much less well known) This Perfect Day? Those two seem to be aimed at the Western way of doing things. In these worlds, people are kept in place not with "disappearings" and shock troops, but with condiitioning and drugs. People are kept helpless and happy by having all their needs fulfilled. Is this beginning to sound familiar?:-)
Note: BNW (Brave New World) has a main character who's suppsed to represent the reader (sort of). He's a person from outside the BNW society, so the normal BNW inhabitants call him "Savage". IMHO, he's sort of outdated now. When I read the book, he seemed like kind of a prude. I take this as evidence that society (the one I'm in) seems to have more in common now with the ordinary inhabitants of the BNW than with the society of the story's author, Aldus Huxley.
please try cygwin. Cygwin isn't the name of the shell, it's the name of the compatibily thingie that lets you use some GNU apps and other Free Unix apps on Windows. It mostly consists of some.dlls that act as a compatiability layer. You have your choice of shells to choose from on a Unix system. The one that's used on almost all Linux systems is bash, which is a feature-enhanced version of the classic Unix shell. That shell was called "The Bourne Shell" and was named "sh" (or should it be the other way round?). Therefore, it's only natural that the name bash stands for "The Bourne Again Shell".
The catch: In my experience, Cygwin runs much better on NT-based Windozes (NT 4.0, 2000, XP) than on DOS based Windozes (95, 98, Me). But, if you've got lots of processor power, Cygwin should still run quite nicely, even on crufty Win9x. The other catch: all of this sort of assumes that you're already somewhat familiar with the Unix Way. If you're not, it could be quite frustrating. But there are many, many help texts and HOWTos available (Google for HOWTO) and if you're adventurous and you want to know what a command line should be like, then it's out there waiting for you.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Another alternative is 4Dos or 4NT. It's available from these people. It's pretty good, except that's it's shareware and therefore commercial and I've had problems with certain versions crashing frequently. Also, there's a couple points where they could've gone for compatibility with Unix but chose to ignore it. (E.g. to not match the characters a,b, or c in a filename, they use [!abc] whereas the proper Unix Way is [^abc].)
Microsoft is the Evil Empire. Threfore, it's only natural that people hate them. You are right though--people shouldn't simply bash M$--at least they shouldn't all the time.:-) Instead, they should continually remind people of their past history of destroying all who stand in their way by buying them, or copying their stuff and running them out of business. Whenever Bill Gates talks of Microsoft's "freedom to innovate", what he really means is "freedom to steal". (or if you want to me to be more accurate and less dramatic: "freedom to use other peoples' ideas unconditionally without having to pay them or give them credit or be indebted to them in anyway". This would not be so bad except that MS doesn't want to extend that same, uh, courtesy to anyone who does the same to them. They want it all. All the time. They don't want to share.
Btw, did you actually read the article? It's not good at all. It tries to make the implicit assertion: "computer security problems" == "potential for cyberterrorism". Not a good thing for people to get in their heads. The article even makes reference to 9/11! This is the worst part:
During the week of Sept. 11-18, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Nimda virus changed the public's perspective on security, [Mundie] said.
Well if we, on the planet, constitute a group brain, then what about all the squirrels and iguanas and frogs and lions and wombats and single-celled organisms out there? Huh? Where do they fit in?
I don't think the group brain idea holds water--or spinal fluid. I think if we're a group brain, we've got an awfully bad case of... you name it: Multiple Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, (and the biggie) Schizophrenea (sp?).
Nah, really though, I mostly agree with the other people who repsonded to your post. Sorry. Collective Unconscious idea has worn out it's welcome. Why not try memes instead?
Thank you for writing your post. (there are several other good/similar posts below yours, but yours was earlier, I guess.)
No, of course slashdot isn't immune to this sort of thing, it never has been. However, since your post and others like yours made it all the way to Score: 5, we know there is still hope.
To anyone out there that thinks reality may be just a social construct, I challenge you to the following: 1. Try believing that while you burn your hand on a hot skillet or something similar. If your so sure reality is just a social construct, then make your own little society where no one believes in gravity. Then, one day, you and all the other believers can jump off a balcony and fly away (well, maybe not). 2. What, ultimately, does postmodernism do for us? What's the f'ing point? social construct or not, we still must live in this world. As another commentor below here mentions, I certainly would not want to live in a world where the postmodern doctors removed lungs that they felt weren't necessary.
Postmodernism sickens me. It's strikes me as something that could only develop in a coutry where many of the people have too much money, too much food and too much time on their hands. It's *very* arrogant (and stupid) to try to tell a person starving in a 3rd world country that he/she is just part of a social construct. (Perhaps, the real problem is that I don't understand postmodernism. But then, when you consider how postmodernists write, can you really blame me?)
Postmodernism isn't progress, or the next New Thing, it is its opposite--a high velocity ride right back into the dark ages. You won't get much real CS done that way. You won't even get very much programming done.
Postmodernism is like a desease or virus. It is a very bad meme. If we had a good vaccine, I'd administer it.
Well, actually, I guess we do. Reading of past known hoaxes like the one mentioned in the parent could be very instructive and act like a vaccine. That's why I wasn't lured in by the `Postmodern CS' junk.
It sounded tempting at first, but as I kept reading, I felt like I was being "taken for a ride" as the British say (at least they do on Doctor Who).
This piece of a slashdot comment sums it up well:
"I've tried my hand at reading Foucault/Derrida/Barthes/etc., and their secondary sources. It's exceptionally difficult, but not in the way that, say, a complex algorithm is difficult. It's difficult in the way religious texts, or David Lynch movies are difficult; i.e., the difficulty is a smokescreen to keep the reader from catching on that this is all a bunch of bullshit." (I apoligize for not giving credit, but I'm in a hurry.)
I don't mean to sound sexist, but I hope you definitely plan on having kids, even though it's exceedingly painful to give birth and exceedingly difficult to raise children. It's important for genes like yours to stay in circulation. Really we need them, badly! I mean, look at George W. Bush! Aaaagh!
Although, now that I think about it, it's also possible to help out your fellow humans in lots of other ways, and you've certainly done a lot of that.
Thank you for existing. Your presence has enriched all of our lives. I hope yours is going well.
You just hang around Debian long enough and get cool with it. Like superparent said, you fall into a Debian Zen and it all makes sense.... The only special knowledge you need is what chips your hardware is running...
I will bear that in mind and probably try again in a few months. Another thing I'll have if/when I try again: a second computer running Linux, right next to me, connected to the #debian IRC channel.
Also, I'll plan on it being a multi-day event, with "mini-goals"; like goal 1: get base system installed, goal 2: make network card go, etc.
Debian: not for newbies. Higher learning curve than others. Worth learning if you want more control over your system.
I do want more control over my system. But how the hell am I supposed to learn Debian if I can't install Debian?
I guess the only viable solution would be to to find a Debian expert and rip off their head and eat out their brain, there-by gaining their knowledge and experience. ...
Oh wait, that was the comic book solution. In the real one I have to substitute "ask them lots of questions" for "rip off...their brain". Much less exciting and much slower. Oh well.
Note to reader: this is not a flame! I'm just joking around. It's funny, laugh.
From the article:
A couple of months ago, it became clear that we could not do all of the above while at the same time fully realizing all of the new ideas we've developed about helping people manage information better. This gave rise to an important idea, which is that we see this project as needing to go through multiple major releases to grow up and become fully realized. We felt it was important to start with something which could over time gain wide adoption, because then there would be a larger potential base of interest for future developments. All of which is to say we're going to wind up deferring working on certain cool features in order to get an initial product out the door.
At this point, a small team has spent the better part of a year thinking through the problem space and developing the fundamental of our approach and has just begun writing the production code. We've made a number of fundamental decisions about the architecture and have arrived at a preliminary set of features. Andy Hertzfeld has built a terrific prototype which enabled us to explore lots of new ideas.
A couple of paragraphs ago, it became clear that I could not take all of Mitch Kapor's claims seriously while at the same time fully realizing my internal goals of being honest to myself and others. This gave rise to an important idea, which is that (maybe) Mitch has been in marketing far too long. I felt it was important to continue reading so that I could be fully informed. All of which is to say that I have to keep reading while Mitch drones on and on about "product" and "deferring work" and more "product".
At this point, a small team has spent the better part of a year thinking through the problem space and developing a theory to explain wtf Mitch's problem is. (Their answer? Five tons of flax! (see ddate(1) or your peneal gland for more info)) I've made a number of fundamental decisions about the quality of the weblog I've just read and have arrived at a (not preliminary) set of conclusions:
Mitch Kapor has been fatally infected by market droids and suits.
I have too much time on my hands.
You have too much time on your hands. (You (might have) read the article, then you read the blockquote of my post (so you read (part of) the article again), then you read all the way down to here.)
I use too many parentheticals. (But it's so much fun, dangit!)
The part that really got me was the first line of the second quoted paragraph. Yes, I understand what he means by "thinking through the problem space", but I can't ignore that he actually phrased it that way. Guys, the only time a programmer should talk of "problem space" is when she or he is writing code that handles one. E.g. an expert system that has to search its database to find the "best" answer to the user's querry or a (chess-like) games program that has to search the tree of valid moves to find a good one or a root finding program that has to search in the x-y plane (or the x-y-z space or n-dimensional space) for the set of points where f(x[1],x[2],...,x[n])=0.
Now go talk amongst yourselves while I "think through the problem space" of how to quit being a slashdot bum and go get a job.:-P (I know, I know. The answer is obvious...)
If it were really "just a hose" the software, Liquid, would look like this: | (pipe symbol)
Even if it's only a converter, studying its source would make it easier to learn the formats of the file types it converts from and to. Even if you could get specifications for those formats from somewhere else (I don't know if you could or not), it would still be easier with source. If someone were going to start their own project and they wanted to do stuff with Maya or Renderman files, Liquid would probably be the place to start.
At the same time, you're probably right that it's not such a big deal. But hey, that's slashdot for you.;-) We could be at WW III and all they'd care about is whether or not the soldiers' head-mounted cameras were running Linux.
One time I mounted a floppy disk that had some problems under Linux. I know it had problems because when mount mounted it, it said it was mounting it read-only because there were errors detected in the filesystem. I copied some data off it, then unmounted it. When I unmounted it, I got a message that said, "Attempting to write to a read-only filesystem. uhh..."
I don't know why something was attempting to write to the disk on umount.
I think one of my favorite messages was the message that, that old Apple ][e printing program (what the hell was it called? Printshop? I can't remember) would display when it was calculating what commands to send to the printer next. It would flash the word `THINKING' on the screen in a huge font and alternate the "colors". (It wasn't actually a color monitor--it was monochrome but it had the capacity for bright text as well.)
And let's not forget the error message Haikus (sp?) that people were playing with before. I really liked some of those. I think that some real programs (for programmers, not regular users) should try error messages delivered as Haiku. It would be neat. The point would be to have more than one Haiku for the same thing; then always follow that with the no-nonsense error message down below the Haiku. The Haiku would be like a little treat to offset all the compiler errors. Sort of like a quote of the day.
Now back to Linux. Quite a long time ago, I foolishly tried to run X Windows on a 486 with only 16MB. It didn't exactly crash, it just kept the hard drive going non-stop. Even when I didn't move the mouse for over a minute. When I would go to shutdown X Windows, over in the console where I had typed startx&, there'd be a status message like this: Sending server the TERM signal,
waiting for server to shutdown...
Sometimes, that's all there'd be. But because this machine had only 16MB and the hard drive was thrasing so much from running X, everything was drastically slowed down. Sometimes, after about 30 sec-1 min, I'd see: Server too slow to shutdown
Sending server the KILL signal,
waiting for server to die...
In plain vanilla MS-DOS, if DOS fails to read from a floppy disk in a certain special way, what can happen is this: C:\>dir a:
[the disk churns and time passes...]
[some more time passes]
Volume in drive A is unlabled
[again time passes]
[still more time passes]
Fail on INT 24
C:\>
If you're stupid or unlucky enough to be in a situation where you have to make a batch file for COMMAND.COM, then all the error messages are cryptic. Because, as the script executes, there's no indication of what line caused the error message (unless you do an echo on and there are certain situations where that won't help. All you see is stuff like: Bad command or filename
Syntax error
File not found
all the way down the screen.
Oh yeah, and then there's INTERCAL, where the compiler error messages are actually intended to be not understandable.
Actually, the message ?Syntax error was really cryptic the first time I saw it, since I had no idea what the hell `s-Y-n-tax' was. (I was 12.) In general, every (status or error) message a computer gives you is cryptic without context. Ironic since computers can't really understand context, eh?
Many other people will likely post a comment like mine, if they haven't already. But hey, karma was made to burn!
According to my computer clock and the timestamp on the article posting, it's only been about 33 minutes (since the article was posted). Even so, it took me over a minute to finally receive the "Hardware Analysis" main page. The top of that page has:
Please register or login. There are 2 registered and 995 anonymous users currently online. Current bandwidth usage: 214.98 kbit/s
sheesh. We got some crazy people here. Seems like everyone's messing around with liquid nitrogen and microwaves and such.
The stuff I remember is a lot simpler: bending water stream
1. air up a baloon and rub it against some cloth to get a nice clump of static electricity.
2. go turn on the tap water and hold the balloon really close to the stream *without* touching it.
You will see the water bend towards the balloon. Fwee.
crushing can
you need tongs, a heat source (like a stove), a pot of cold/room temperature water, and an empty metal pop can
1. using the tongs, hold the pop can right-side up over the heat source until the can is really hot.
2. now quickly, still using the tongs, place the can upside-down into the water (part of the point is to make sure the mouth of the can is completely covered.)
The can should now be quickly and dramatically crushed. The reason is difference in air pressure coupled with rapid temperature change.
Also, of course, the levitating magnet thing is cool (superconductivity).
Another source for science demos is magic books. Go to some bookstore and pick out an interesting magic book. Just skim until you find one that exploits more science or math than misdirection. Some do, some don't. It's also possible to use magic tricks to get kids' attention and make a dramatic impression, as this post by DaveNay (532546) humorously demonstrates.
The moderation totals for the parent comment are (at the time of my posting): Moderation Totals: Troll=1, Total=1.
Uhh... I'm not entirely sure how to read that, but I choose to believe that it means that this comment started out at 2 and got knocked down to 1 Troll.
Why? What's the point of modding down? It should be obvious the poster is playing out the ancient vi vs. \non_vi_editor/(1) *for fun*.
I bet the moderater doesn't even know what the heck the poster's talking about when he says, "Quirk's Exception to Godwin's Law applies here." Of course, I don't either! But I'm not gonna go modding down things I don't understand.(2)
Footnote 1: It's supposed to be "vi vs EMACS", but since vi is so weird, I think a person could argue vi vs. just about any other editor. (For the record, I don't really care for vi or EMACS too much. Although, I suppose I may one day familiarize myself with vim.) Footnote 2: It's sort of like what Tegan said to the Master: "This'll teach you not to meddle in things you don't understand!" And, of course, that is just one example of the more general sci-fi principle summed up so eloquently by Joel Robinson when he says of some random mad scientist: "He tampered in God's domain." And, of course, all this goes back to the Tower of Babel and/or the Tower Struck By Lightning tarrot card.
(oh btw, one last thing--today I found out that the commercial for Millyways ("If *you've* done six impossible things this morning...") is very similar to something the white queen says in "Alice In Wonderland" (warning, quote may not be exact): "I've found that, with practice, I can believe at least six impossible things before breakfast." It's a happy day.:-) )
Re:Microbes would be ... depressing.
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Life on Pluto?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Last sememster, during biology class, I had lots of time to philosophize to myself about evolution in general and us humans in particular. Eventually, I came to just such a conclusion--that, although life in the Universe may be common, it may also be that life-that-we-can-talk-to may be nonexistent.
To me, the reason for this, seems to be that life apparently doesn't need to be intelligent to be successful. i.e. on our planet, there are ludicrously huge numbers of types of lifeforms. According to my Biology text, only a very small fraction of those are multicellular. But there's no shortage of single celled life out there. There's gobs and gobs of it. And it is, of course, easier, in many ways, for single celled life to grow and evolve.
After lots of long thought, it seemed, to me at least, that from an evolutionary standpoint, all of multicellular life was nothing more than a luxury--something that happened only in a very rich environment where there are lots and los of nutrients and much energy. Think of it from the standpoint of energy and the law of entropy--as we move up the food chain, converting energy from one form to another, a lot of it is lost each time we move up from one creature to another. In a sense, a tiger, leopard, meat-eating human, or any other predator is less efficient than a cow or grasshopper because the former all feed on the latter, whereas the latter all eat vegatation. (I do not personally eat grasshoppers but some humans do, and anyway, we all know about the concept of indirect consumption.)
Now, finally, I'm to the part where you wrote:
The final hitch though might be that intelligence seems to be only weakly selected for.
And I agree. (So this post has really just been a long "mee too" and therefore a glorious waste of everyone's time, including mine.;-P ) Sadly, it seems intelligence, the way we think of it at least, may only happen to be an accidental solution that just happened to work. Granted, all of evolution acts this way, but there does not seem to be any substantial reason why intelligence would necessarially evolve again. It would be nice if someone could give some convincing arguments to the contrary...
Next time you post an article like this, you needs must have a clarification of the word "image". At first I was thinkin', `Okay, so it can burn.iso images to the media side of a CD... So? Isn't this what CD burner software generally does? Isn't this the whole point? Perhaps this is some strange usage of the word "media".'
But it turned out to be an ambiguous usage of "image" as I have indicated. This isn't the first time we've had this problem here.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, sorry. Not buying the innovation argument. Or rather--it's not that I take issue with the idea that it's innovative (on second thought, see below), it's just that I see it as yet another unscrupulous tactic by some two-bit company to try to gank people out of their hard earned money. I'm kind of anti-corporation.
In addition, the concept of presenting a false or misleading user interface is not wholly new. There have been Trojan Horse programs that operate this way for many, many years. A popular choice used to be to immitate the logon screen. Nice way to grab passwords.
I'm not saying, exactly, that what this company's doing is the same as a Trojan, but if it isn't, then it's awfully damn close. Even when you know it's an add, you're forced to look at it for a second because it looks like it might be a real status window. (Until you read it of course.)
I hate this company and I say let 'em fry. What I want to know is, is there anyway I can get a cut of some of the profits if the class eventually wins the suit?
It has better rhythmn and sounds more catchy if you say, "Correlation does not prove causation." instead. :-)
On relational operators... :-) Yeah, I know it looks stupid. Anyway, sensationalism is what slashdot is all about, so I'll probably use the `!=' construction myself sometime, if I feel all fired up about something.
:-D That's *way* too hard. I was just hoping some people out there might read that comment and be forced to sit back and think for a bit, rather than just parrotting the party line (so to speak). You are obviously already thinking.
I know what `!=' means. It means `does not equal' or `is not equal to'. Now I know it's a small hair, but it's my opinion that `is not equal to' is not the same as `is not the same as' (at least that's what they told me in geometry class). I realize that the subject line allowed is short. I'm sure that one reason people use `!=' is to make their subject fit, but if they really wanted to, they could use a different subject. I think a lot of people prefer flashy, sensationalist, or intentionally cliche subjects because they know it's more likely to get modded up. Hey, it's worked for me! I had this comment a long time ago, it wasn't worth much but it had a subject of "Life imitates art..." and bang, it got modded up. To me, when I read someone say, `those aren't the same', it's not *nearly* as forceful a statement as `Thing1 != Thing2'. The second form is absolute (so it's easy to oversimplify which is bad), while the first is just a statement. Perhaps it would be better if we had fuzzy relational operators instead. Then we could have fuzzy-equal and fuzzy-not-equal. How about prepending a question mark? Like this: `?=', `?!='.
On the chopped off portion of my comment:
It's too bad it got cut off since now I'm not exactly sure what I was going to say myself. Nothing too extraordinary, I imagine. I think all I was going to do was point out the that unlawful search and seizure clause does not explicity refer to privacy. Of course, when you go to argue in favor of right to privacy that's exactly what you should point out--the unlawful search and seizure thing. That's really all I had to say about that. In my original post, I wasn't trying to come up with any actual conclusions.
On the DRM thing:
It's nice to know that some people that aren't huge corporations are also working on it. Here again, the only reason I even mentioned it is that, in the past I have noticed that, on the one hand a lot of people here are in favor of privacy and using encryption to further that end, but on the other hand, they seem to be automatically *against* *anything* named `DRM'. It's like a biohazard warning for them, I guess.
I realize where this mentality comes from--from the various attempts by large corporations to get evil/bad/nasty/icky DRM legislation passed. But a more productive alternative to simply automatically hating anything with the letters `DRM' attatched to it would be to re-define it into something that can help us. (Why not, salesman and lawyers play the game this way *all* the time.) So it's like: Sure, you bet I'm in favor of DRM--for the *citizens* of the U.S., *not* the corporations. Let them chew on that for a while.
To think people have no choice between, for example, SQL Server and Oracle
We want the desktop you insensitive, M$ clod! All that stuff you mention is aimed at backend, server type stuff. I know it's a hopeless pipedream, but the Linux zealots (includes me, marginally) want the desktop!
Choice! Ha! I laugh at your idea of "choice".
Seriously, are you going to get your opinion of any company from someone who quit after 3 weeks?
I don't base my opinion on that. My first inklinkgs of a negative opinion of M$ goes back to 1994. When I realized that DOS and the splashy GUI I was using (Win 3.11) were made by the same company, I was at a lose to explain why I couldn't close a DOS window by double clicking the little button on the upper left of the window. After all, it worked for all the Windows programs. But not for the DOS windows. But the programs are made by the same damn compnay.
Then I went away for the summer and heard about the new Win95. I saw it but was not greatly impressed. Then when I got back, some weirdo on campus showed me OS/2 Warp. Then I found that while I'd been gone, M$ had sent me an issue of a magazine that was essencially nothing but a big commercial for M$. I wondered why I'd never heard of OS/2 before. I felt like I'd been betrayed on some deep level by not being told that there was more than one OS in the world. I wonder how many non-computer-savvy people in the world still don't know this basic fact. It's like the people chained up in the cave. They've not seen the light.
Then I started to notice (over time) that not only was M$ a near monopoly, their products sucked, crashed a lot, and, M$ played the game dirty. That was what pissed me off the most. On second thought, no, it was the crappy software that pissed me off the most. The other thing was just a close second.
Now that M$ is all the way up to XP, the crappy software is mostly a thing of the past. M$ apps seem to run pretty solidly now (I'm not saying that XP is the first version to be able to make that claim, I'm just saying that it is that way now).
But I will never forgive them for playing the game dirty. It's not that I have a problem with them competing with other businesses and trying to win and drive other businesses out of business (although, despite what some people say, that's not always the best strategy for a business). It's the way they do it. Do you realize what company you're working for? Can you really look at yourself in the mirror each morning? Really?
If you see a person bleeding to death on the street, will you help them? Because I'm not so sure Ballmer or Gates would.
Yes, yes, I know. I'm a crazy lunatic. Don't worry about it, I'm just venting. :-P
*sigh* Why do people insist on using `!=' in such a way? It's a very strong, declarative thing. It makes it look like what you're saying is hugely important. I guess that's why. It seems to work well, posts like this frequently get modded up.
:-)
;-)
Anyway, thank you for your post. You make a good point. In my orignal post, I wasn't trying to say that we *don't* have right to privacy, I was just trying to point out that the argument for it is harder.
Yes, yes, yes you're right that just because something is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, that doesn't mean we don't have it. *But*, when it comes down to the actual legal wrangling, it really *does* make a difference. It will always be *easier* for people to make the copyright argument than the privacy one. (You point out the `unlawful search and seaz
Btw, how come all this DRM junk seems to be for corporations only? What about us? Do we get to have *our personal* digital rights managed by ourselves?
Anyway, thanks for taking an interest and replying.
I apologize for not sticking to just one topic. sOMetimes I cHANeL Delerium.
bitch, bitch, bitch.
Geez!
To the "It's ok to cheat!" group (Group One):
No it isn't. If it were, it wouldn't be called "cheating".
To the "cheating is bad" group (Group Two):
no shit. But someone will always cheat. This isn't the simple, clear cut right-and-wrong thing that some people make it out to be though. It would be if everyone was Dudly Do-Right, but they're not and they never will be.
If it were automatic for everyone to do-the-right-thing, banks would not need safes and locks and guards and all else. There is always, in human nature, the struggle between what society says you should do and what you actually want to do. Note that things get even more confused because certain elements in society will say that it's okay to do what you want to (i.e. Group One). For some people, some of the time, there is a temptation to cheat.
Suppose, for example, that you and I are playing a game of cards. Now suppose you've got to get up and leave the room for a bit. I stare at your hand lying face down on the table. Do I look at it and see what cards you've got? In my case, no I don't because I have a certain ethic about cheating in games (that have human opponents--when the opponent is a computer, whether I cheat depends on how much respect I have for the game and other factors) and I'm pedantic and I want to try to play by all the rules. So no, I don't look at the cards.
But another person might look at the other guy's cards and rationalize it as being a "more technically advanced style of play". Note that it becomes easier to rationalize cheating when you don't actually see the person that you're screwing over. It also becomes more tempting when there's money on the line. Don't people still pay big bucks on eBay for high-power EQ chars?
When you look at it that way, it's easy (for me anyway) to start to see the EQ "cheaters" as "power users", even though I know they're not. It becomes easier to lie to myself, because it becomes increasingly tempting to become on of them so I can set myself up a nice little business on eBay and make money (this is human nature in action, folks) out of little bits of data and other people's gulibility. :-) But making money off of people's gulibility always leaves a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak). That's why I'll never be a politician or a lawyer.
But the point, Group Two, is that there is no need to let Group One get away with so much in this situation. The server could, perhaps, be better written to give away less information. That would be a perfect example of doing the Right Thing. (But also note "deserves to lose". I suppose this is where some of the Group One people are coming from.) Yes, unfortunatetly, that might require some rewrites and it might increase the required bandwidth, but... Think of the Children!! (sorry, couldn't resist. ;-) )
So how can we get to that point? What would get Sony to rewrite the code some more so that the client has less info to go on? Simple. Release WinSEQ. Then they won't have much choice.
This is not a new battle. It's just the age-old war of access to information being played out AGAIN . Other examples include: illegally copying mp3s, application programs, games programs, ALL programs. Where do YOU draw the line? What level of information access do you think is okay, and what do you think is wrong? Does your philosophy have any contradictions? Are you aware that arguing for illegalization of spam whilst also arguing for legalization of file trading implies that your right to privacy is greater than the right of copyright? But copyright is explictiy referred to and defined in the Constitution and, AFAIK, the right to privacy is not. Have you ever thought about the implications of that? How many more times will we have to go through this, I wonder? A hundred times? A million?
I think fifty years from now, people will look back on this age of poorly defined/handled information access rights and laugh. Heck, I live in this time and I already laugh at it!
Thank you for writing your comment. If I had any moderator points left, I'd definitely mod you "+1 Informative". I see that between the time I downloaded the comments page and the time I downloaded the reply page, you've been modded up so now you're at four. Hopefully, you'll get to five soon. :-)
:-)
I've never heard of "control theory" before but since I have a CS degree, I probably should have. It sounds very interesting. It's nice to know there are systematic methods for attempting to keep control of complex systems other than just periodically asking the question, "is it still on?".
Also, thanks for clearing up the "immobot" crude. I went to the "Check this column for details" link but it had been simplified to the point that there was no technical info in it. (Nothing left... Like if you take the derivative of a polynomial too many times: you always get f(x)=0.) So it was impossible to determine if they were actually telling me something or just saying, "Wow! Technology's cool, you bet!!" I hate when that happens.
You're right about 1984 and Animal Farm, those two are definitely aimed at the Stalinist form of oppression. But have you read Brave New World or (the much less well known) This Perfect Day? Those two seem to be aimed at the Western way of doing things. In these worlds, people are kept in place not with "disappearings" and shock troops, but with condiitioning and drugs. People are kept helpless and happy by having all their needs fulfilled. Is this beginning to sound familiar? :-)
Note: BNW (Brave New World) has a main character who's suppsed to represent the reader (sort of). He's a person from outside the BNW society, so the normal BNW inhabitants call him "Savage". IMHO, he's sort of outdated now. When I read the book, he seemed like kind of a prude. I take this as evidence that society (the one I'm in) seems to have more in common now with the ordinary inhabitants of the BNW than with the society of the story's author, Aldus Huxley.
please try cygwin. Cygwin isn't the name of the shell, it's the name of the compatibily thingie that lets you use some GNU apps and other Free Unix apps on Windows. It mostly consists of some .dlls that act as a compatiability layer. You have your choice of shells to choose from on a Unix system. The one that's used on almost all Linux systems is bash, which is a feature-enhanced version of the classic Unix shell. That shell was called "The Bourne Shell" and was named "sh" (or should it be the other way round?). Therefore, it's only natural that the name bash stands for "The Bourne Again Shell".
The catch: In my experience, Cygwin runs much better on NT-based Windozes (NT 4.0, 2000, XP) than on DOS based Windozes (95, 98, Me). But, if you've got lots of processor power, Cygwin should still run quite nicely, even on crufty Win9x. The other catch: all of this sort of assumes that you're already somewhat familiar with the Unix Way. If you're not, it could be quite frustrating. But there are many, many help texts and HOWTos available (Google for HOWTO) and if you're adventurous and you want to know what a command line should be like, then it's out there waiting for you.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Another alternative is 4Dos or 4NT. It's available from these people. It's pretty good, except that's it's shareware and therefore commercial and I've had problems with certain versions crashing frequently. Also, there's a couple points where they could've gone for compatibility with Unix but chose to ignore it. (E.g. to not match the characters a,b, or c in a filename, they use [!abc] whereas the proper Unix Way is [^abc].)
Microsoft is the Evil Empire. Threfore, it's only natural that people hate them. You are right though--people shouldn't simply bash M$--at least they shouldn't all the time. :-) Instead, they should continually remind people of their past history of destroying all who stand in their way by buying them, or copying their stuff and running them out of business. Whenever Bill Gates talks of Microsoft's "freedom to innovate", what he really means is "freedom to steal". (or if you want to me to be more accurate and less dramatic: "freedom to use other peoples' ideas unconditionally without having to pay them or give them credit or be indebted to them in anyway". This would not be so bad except that MS doesn't want to extend that same, uh, courtesy to anyone who does the same to them. They want it all. All the time. They don't want to share.
Btw, did you actually read the article? It's not good at all. It tries to make the implicit assertion: "computer security problems" == "potential for cyberterrorism". Not a good thing for people to get in their heads. The article even makes reference to 9/11! This is the worst part:
Not good for us geeks, not good at all.
Well if we, on the planet, constitute a group brain, then what about all the squirrels and iguanas and frogs and lions and wombats and single-celled organisms out there? Huh? Where do they fit in?
I don't think the group brain idea holds water--or spinal fluid. I think if we're a group brain, we've got an awfully bad case of... you name it: Multiple Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, (and the biggie) Schizophrenea (sp?).
Nah, really though, I mostly agree with the other people who repsonded to your post. Sorry. Collective Unconscious idea has worn out it's welcome. Why not try memes instead?
Thank you for writing your post. (there are several other good/similar posts below yours, but yours was earlier, I guess.)
No, of course slashdot isn't immune to this sort of thing, it never has been. However, since your post and others like yours made it all the way to Score: 5, we know there is still hope.
To anyone out there that thinks reality may be just a social construct, I challenge you to the following:
1. Try believing that while you burn your hand on a hot skillet or something similar. If your so sure reality is just a social construct, then make your own little society where no one believes in gravity. Then, one day, you and all the other believers can jump off a balcony and fly away (well, maybe not).
2. What, ultimately, does postmodernism do for us? What's the f'ing point? social construct or not, we still must live in this world. As another commentor below here mentions, I certainly would not want to live in a world where the postmodern doctors removed lungs that they felt weren't necessary.
Postmodernism sickens me. It's strikes me as something that could only develop in a coutry where many of the people have too much money, too much food and too much time on their hands. It's *very* arrogant (and stupid) to try to tell a person starving in a 3rd world country that he/she is just part of a social construct. (Perhaps, the real problem is that I don't understand postmodernism. But then, when you consider how postmodernists write, can you really blame me?)
Postmodernism isn't progress, or the next New Thing, it is its opposite--a high velocity ride right back into the dark ages. You won't get much real CS done that way. You won't even get very much programming done.
Postmodernism is like a desease or virus. It is a very bad meme. If we had a good vaccine, I'd administer it.
Well, actually, I guess we do. Reading of past known hoaxes like the one mentioned in the parent could be very instructive and act like a vaccine. That's why I wasn't lured in by the `Postmodern CS' junk.
It sounded tempting at first, but as I kept reading, I felt like I was being "taken for a ride" as the British say (at least they do on Doctor Who).
This piece of a slashdot comment sums it up well:
"I've tried my hand at reading Foucault/Derrida/Barthes/etc., and their secondary sources. It's exceptionally difficult, but not in the way that, say, a complex algorithm is difficult. It's difficult in the way religious texts, or David Lynch movies are difficult; i.e., the difficulty is a smokescreen to keep the reader from catching on that this is all a bunch of bullshit."
(I apoligize for not giving credit, but I'm in a hurry.)
During the episode of Scrapheap Challenge where the N.E.R.D.S. built Frobette (see also frob) they handed you and Robert a copy of The New Hacker's Dictionary. Did you keep it?
How did you get to be so insanely cool?
I don't mean to sound sexist, but I hope you definitely plan on having kids, even though it's exceedingly painful to give birth and exceedingly difficult to raise children. It's important for genes like yours to stay in circulation. Really we need them, badly! I mean, look at George W. Bush! Aaaagh!
Although, now that I think about it, it's also possible to help out your fellow humans in lots of other ways, and you've certainly done a lot of that.
Thank you for existing. Your presence has enriched all of our lives. I hope yours is going well.
I will bear that in mind and probably try again in a few months. Another thing I'll have if/when I try again: a second computer running Linux, right next to me, connected to the #debian IRC channel.
Also, I'll plan on it being a multi-day event, with "mini-goals"; like goal 1: get base system installed, goal 2: make network card go, etc.
I do want more control over my system. But how the hell am I supposed to learn Debian if I can't install Debian?
I guess the only viable solution would be to to find a Debian expert and rip off their head and eat out their brain, there-by gaining their knowledge and experience.
...
Oh wait, that was the comic book solution. In the real one I have to substitute "ask them lots of questions" for "rip off...their brain". Much less exciting and much slower. Oh well.
Note to reader: this is not a flame! I'm just joking around. It's funny, laugh.
From the article:
A couple of paragraphs ago, it became clear that I could not take all of Mitch Kapor's claims seriously while at the same time fully realizing my internal goals of being honest to myself and others. This gave rise to an important idea, which is that (maybe) Mitch has been in marketing far too long. I felt it was important to continue reading so that I could be fully informed. All of which is to say that I have to keep reading while Mitch drones on and on about "product" and "deferring work" and more "product".
At this point, a small team has spent the better part of a year thinking through the problem space and developing a theory to explain wtf Mitch's problem is. (Their answer? Five tons of flax! (see ddate(1) or your peneal gland for more info)) I've made a number of fundamental decisions about the quality of the weblog I've just read and have arrived at a (not preliminary) set of conclusions:
The part that really got me was the first line of the second quoted paragraph. Yes, I understand what he means by "thinking through the problem space", but I can't ignore that he actually phrased it that way. Guys, the only time a programmer should talk of "problem space" is when she or he is writing code that handles one. E.g. an expert system that has to search its database to find the "best" answer to the user's querry or a (chess-like) games program that has to search the tree of valid moves to find a good one or a root finding program that has to search in the x-y plane (or the x-y-z space or n-dimensional space) for the set of points where f(x[1],x[2],...,x[n])=0.
Now go talk amongst yourselves while I "think through the problem space" of how to quit being a slashdot bum and go get a job. :-P (I know, I know. The answer is obvious...)
If it were really "just a hose" the software, Liquid, would look like this: | (pipe symbol)
;-) We could be at WW III and all they'd care about is whether or not the soldiers' head-mounted cameras were running Linux.
Even if it's only a converter, studying its source would make it easier to learn the formats of the file types it converts from and to. Even if you could get specifications for those formats from somewhere else (I don't know if you could or not), it would still be easier with source. If someone were going to start their own project and they wanted to do stuff with Maya or Renderman files, Liquid would probably be the place to start.
At the same time, you're probably right that it's not such a big deal. But hey, that's slashdot for you.
One time I mounted a floppy disk that had some problems under Linux. I know it had problems because when mount mounted it, it said it was mounting it read-only because there were errors detected in the filesystem. I copied some data off it, then unmounted it. When I unmounted it, I got a message that said, "Attempting to write to a read-only filesystem. uhh..."
I don't know why something was attempting to write to the disk on umount.
I think one of my favorite messages was the message that, that old Apple ][e printing program (what the hell was it called? Printshop? I can't remember) would display when it was calculating what commands to send to the printer next. It would flash the word `THINKING' on the screen in a huge font and alternate the "colors". (It wasn't actually a color monitor--it was monochrome but it had the capacity for bright text as well.)
And let's not forget the error message Haikus (sp?) that people were playing with before. I really liked some of those. I think that some real programs (for programmers, not regular users) should try error messages delivered as Haiku. It would be neat. The point would be to have more than one Haiku for the same thing; then always follow that with the no-nonsense error message down below the Haiku. The Haiku would be like a little treat to offset all the compiler errors. Sort of like a quote of the day.
Now back to Linux. Quite a long time ago, I foolishly tried to run X Windows on a 486 with only 16MB. It didn't exactly crash, it just kept the hard drive going non-stop. Even when I didn't move the mouse for over a minute. When I would go to shutdown X Windows, over in the console where I had typed startx&, there'd be a status message like this:
Sending server the TERM signal,
waiting for server to shutdown...
Sometimes, that's all there'd be. But because this machine had only 16MB and the hard drive was thrasing so much from running X, everything was drastically slowed down. Sometimes, after about 30 sec-1 min, I'd see:
Server too slow to shutdown
Sending server the KILL signal,
waiting for server to die...
In plain vanilla MS-DOS, if DOS fails to read from a floppy disk in a certain special way, what can happen is this:
C:\>dir a:
[the disk churns and time passes...]
[some more time passes]
Volume in drive A is unlabled
[again time passes]
[still more time passes]
Fail on INT 24
C:\>
If you're stupid or unlucky enough to be in a situation where you have to make a batch file for COMMAND.COM, then all the error messages are cryptic. Because, as the script executes, there's no indication of what line caused the error message (unless you do an echo on and there are certain situations where that won't help. All you see is stuff like:
Bad command or filename
Syntax error
File not found
all the way down the screen.
Oh yeah, and then there's INTERCAL, where the compiler error messages are actually intended to be not understandable.
Actually, the message ?Syntax error was really cryptic the first time I saw it, since I had no idea what the hell `s-Y-n-tax' was. (I was 12.) In general, every (status or error) message a computer gives you is cryptic without context. Ironic since computers can't really understand context, eh?
Many other people will likely post a comment like mine, if they haven't already. But hey, karma was made to burn!
According to my computer clock and the timestamp on the article posting, it's only been about 33 minutes (since the article was posted). Even so, it took me over a minute to finally receive the "Hardware Analysis" main page. The top of that page has:
Draw your own conclusions.
sheesh. We got some crazy people here. Seems like everyone's messing around with liquid nitrogen and microwaves and such.
The stuff I remember is a lot simpler:
bending water stream
1. air up a baloon and rub it against some cloth to get a nice clump of static electricity.
2. go turn on the tap water and hold the balloon really close to the stream *without* touching it. You will see the water bend towards the balloon. Fwee.
crushing can
you need tongs, a heat source (like a stove), a pot of cold/room temperature water, and an empty metal pop can
1. using the tongs, hold the pop can right-side up over the heat source until the can is really hot.
2. now quickly, still using the tongs, place the can upside-down into the water (part of the point is to make sure the mouth of the can is completely covered.)
The can should now be quickly and dramatically crushed. The reason is difference in air pressure coupled with rapid temperature change.
Also, of course, the levitating magnet thing is cool (superconductivity).
Another source for science demos is magic books. Go to some bookstore and pick out an interesting magic book. Just skim until you find one that exploits more science or math than misdirection. Some do, some don't. It's also possible to use magic tricks to get kids' attention and make a dramatic impression, as this post by DaveNay (532546) humorously demonstrates.
"Speex Joins Xiph To Bring Free VOIP To The Masses"
--is a little hard to read. It looks like a line from Jabberwocky.
"a helix of pure energy which spirals and radiates in ways no one understands." -- the fourth Doctor.
Yep. Gotta love that Mandragora Helix. ;-P
The moderation totals for the parent comment are (at the time of my posting): Moderation Totals: Troll=1, Total=1.
:-) )
Uhh... I'm not entirely sure how to read that, but I choose to believe that it means that this comment started out at 2 and got knocked down to 1 Troll.
Why? What's the point of modding down? It should be obvious the poster is playing out the ancient vi vs. \non_vi_editor/(1) *for fun*.
I bet the moderater doesn't even know what the heck the poster's talking about when he says, "Quirk's Exception to Godwin's Law applies here." Of course, I don't either! But I'm not gonna go modding down things I don't understand.(2)
Footnote 1: It's supposed to be "vi vs EMACS", but since vi is so weird, I think a person could argue vi vs. just about any other editor. (For the record, I don't really care for vi or EMACS too much. Although, I suppose I may one day familiarize myself with vim.)
Footnote 2: It's sort of like what Tegan said to the Master: "This'll teach you not to meddle in things you don't understand!" And, of course, that is just one example of the more general sci-fi principle summed up so eloquently by Joel Robinson when he says of some random mad scientist: "He tampered in God's domain." And, of course, all this goes back to the Tower of Babel and/or the Tower Struck By Lightning tarrot card.
(oh btw, one last thing--today I found out that the commercial for Millyways ("If *you've* done six impossible things this morning...") is very similar to something the white queen says in "Alice In Wonderland" (warning, quote may not be exact): "I've found that, with practice, I can believe at least six impossible things before breakfast." It's a happy day.
Last sememster, during biology class, I had lots of time to philosophize to myself about evolution in general and us humans in particular. Eventually, I came to just such a conclusion--that, although life in the Universe may be common, it may also be that life-that-we-can-talk-to may be nonexistent.
To me, the reason for this, seems to be that life apparently doesn't need to be intelligent to be successful. i.e. on our planet, there are ludicrously huge numbers of types of lifeforms. According to my Biology text, only a very small fraction of those are multicellular. But there's no shortage of single celled life out there. There's gobs and gobs of it. And it is, of course, easier, in many ways, for single celled life to grow and evolve.
After lots of long thought, it seemed, to me at least, that from an evolutionary standpoint, all of multicellular life was nothing more than a luxury--something that happened only in a very rich environment where there are lots and los of nutrients and much energy. Think of it from the standpoint of energy and the law of entropy--as we move up the food chain, converting energy from one form to another, a lot of it is lost each time we move up from one creature to another. In a sense, a tiger, leopard, meat-eating human, or any other predator is less efficient than a cow or grasshopper because the former all feed on the latter, whereas the latter all eat vegatation. (I do not personally eat grasshoppers but some humans do, and anyway, we all know about the concept of indirect consumption.)
Now, finally, I'm to the part where you wrote:
And I agree. (So this post has really just been a long "mee too" and therefore a glorious waste of everyone's time, including mine. ;-P ) Sadly, it seems intelligence, the way we think of it at least, may only happen to be an accidental solution that just happened to work. Granted, all of evolution acts this way, but there does not seem to be any substantial reason why intelligence would necessarially evolve again. It would be nice if someone could give some convincing arguments to the contrary...
Next time you post an article like this, you needs must have a clarification of the word "image". At first I was thinkin', `Okay, so it can burn .iso images to the media side of a CD... So? Isn't this what CD burner software generally does? Isn't this the whole point? Perhaps this is some strange usage of the word "media".'
But it turned out to be an ambiguous usage of "image" as I have indicated. This isn't the first time we've had this problem here.