I knew that at some point the establishment would become sufficiently afraid of Ron Paul that they would have to resurrect some old smears. Paul is the only honest, intelligent man running. If you want to live in debt and tax slavery vote for any other candidate.
Many years back I worked on a vehicle routing system (we build maps from Navtech data).
Underneath, of course, it used Dijkstra's algorithm to find least cost routes between points.
The users were given a lot of control over how the cost was calculated. In particular, they
could independently assign costs to left and right turns. So if you didn't like left turns
you'd just give them a high cost. The route might be a little longer but it would have fewer
left turns. Drivers of big rigs (18 wheelers) would put the high costs
on the right turns.
As others have pointed out, the bill does not ban humans on Mars but simply forbids NASA from spending money on the hare brained scheme of sending men to Mars. Good. Only countries running huge budget surpluses year after year should even consider a stunt like that.
Of course this is a free country. All you sci fi fans with delusions of creating a Martian free state can spend your own money on it.
What other industry is there that abuses their customers like this? I feel like I'm being accused of criminal activity from the first second I install a MS product now.
How about airlines? I felt so much safer after they stole my toothpaste and shaving cream
and made me take off by belt while they went over me with a scanner. I love an industry that
treats every customer as a terrorist.
If this rule is enforced the virtual female/male ratio will approach the real one in these games.
That means maybe 20% of the avatars will be female. So the female population will be getting hit on even more than they are now. This will annoy enough of the women that many will quit, further reducing the fraction of females.
The US has massive power. Like it or not there is an ethical decision made when you choose not to exercise it.
Now there's the best possible argument for drastically downsizing the military industrial complex. If we no longer have "massive power", there there will no longer be any ethical obligation to meddle in everybody else's business.
Switzerland is a small European power, the US is the world superpower. This makes a difference.
I have no desire whatsoever to be a citizen of a "superpower".
I want to be a citizen of a free republic.
Let some other bunch of facists play the "superpower" game.
We are a bankrupt nation. We can't afford to play "superpower",
even if it were good for our souls, which it isn't.
You are part of this world, do you really want to leave the rest of the world to the political leadership of China and Russia?
You are far too paranoid. Do you really think Russia and China would take over if we
brought our troops home? If they try, they'll suffer from the same imperial overstretch
that we face now. They could then join us in bankruptcy.
Ron Paul is all in favor of free trade, he's just against the bureaucratic "managed" trade of
NAFTA and the WTO.
As for the UN, I'm indifferent as to whether we stay in or get out.
I'm not sure what we get out of it other than foreigners using their
diplomatic immunity to park illegally in Manhattan.
I think we should have gotten out of NATO long ago.
American leadership of NATO made some sense when Europe was shattered by WW II and there
were serious concerns that Stalin would extend his empire further west.
But Europe has long been capable of defending itself from any conceivable
military threat. NATO is now an expensive anachronism and it's time to
stop spending billions to defend people who don't need us defending them.
Also, NATO has nothing whatsoever to do with free trade. The Japanese manage
to trade with lots of countries without having to keep their troops in other
nations.
As for foreign aid, I would prefer that the government let me keep my money
and let me decide for myself which charities to contribute to. (And yes, I
give away thousands of dollars to charity each year, even with my current tax
load.)
The proper country to compare us to if you want to understand what Ron Paul seeks
is not North Korea but Switzerland. The Swiss don't keep troops in foreign countries and
don't try to rule the world, but do trade successfully with numerous other nations.
You may have noticed that a lot fewer people hate the Swiss than hate Americans.
What are you talking about? American politics is little but the same shade of gray in both parties.
Did you notice how the Democrats got elected because people are against the war in Iraq? Have you
noticed that we're still in Iraq, a year after the Democrats got voted in? Did you notice how
Republicans became popular in the 80s and 90s because people were sick of big spending Democrats?
Have you noticed how Republicans have proven to be the biggest spenders of all?
Re:I know why it's been 10 years
on
Programming Erlang
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There is nothing in the second example that isn't completely familiar to anyone who has ever programmed in LISP, one the world's oldest programming languages.
Hear his prophecy of the marketing: 'You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages." "Faster, cheaper, more reliable."
Actually, this is exactly what was said -- back in the early 1980s when people were moving off time sharing and
onto PCs. "Software as a service" is just time sharing with a web interface.
Even worse: Knuth might write a book on compiler/interpreter construction.
Only if he lives to 130 or so. I'm a middle aged hacker and Knuth has been
working on volume 4 for my entire career (~28 years). And the compiler book
comes after volume 4.
If Linus really believes that it's okay to take Linux kernel code and lock it down with DRM so that recipients, even with source, are unable to install their bug fixes or enhancements, then he should have used the BSD license from the start. To release code under GPL v2, and then whine about GPL v3, which has the same intent but merely closes a couple of loopholes and makes a few technical improvements, is certainly hypocritical.
You misunderstood his point. This issue is not whether we have a wide field of vision, like a
horse, or a narrow field of binocular vision, like a cat. The issue is this: Our retina is wired backwards.
The photosensitive spots point backwards, into the brain. The connections to the neurons are in front.
The neurons have to be collected together and plunge through a hole in the retina to get to our brains.
These holes (one in each eye) are the reasons for the blind spots, which is very large and just a few
degrees away from the center of vision. The fact that we don't usually notice them is testimony to the
fact that we do not perceive the world, we perceive our brain's reconstruction of the world, and it doesn't
bother telling us about the parts where it has no input, like the blind spot or the back of our heads.
Needless to say, an animal that has its retina wired up sensibly, with the neurons in back and the photo receptors
in front, such as a squid, doesn't have a blind spot near the center of its vision.
Another consequence of our botched design is that our eyes are less sensitive to light than they could be,
because photons have to go through all that connection crap to get to the light sensitive part. Some mammals
partially compensate for this by having a reflective material that bounces back the photons for a second chance
at detection (that's why cats' eyes shine in the dark). But even this is not as good as just putting the photo
sensitive parts up front where they belong.
Finally, the weak attachment of the retina to the back of the eye that this design causes makes us more susceptible
to retinal detachment, which results in blindness.
So what are the advantages of a backwards wired retina? None. Absolutely none. But some time early in the
evolution of vertebrates we got developmentally locked into that suboptimal design, and the combination of mutations
that would be required to fix it are too complex to come about by natural selection. Either that or we were
created by an incompetent engineer. Take your pick.
Actually obey the Constitution. If the NSA wasn't doing illegal warrantless searches of
every American using the telephone or internet it would need about half as many computers
and half as much money.
I don't object to all patents. I do object to software patents, because I see no evidence that the bribe of a 17 or 20 year monopoly is in any way necessary to spur innovation in the software industry. Given that there are always dead weight losses associated with monopolies it is best not to create them unless there is strong positive evidence that the benefits outweight the costs.
In other industries, such as the chip industry where you have to blow billions of dollars on each new fab, patent monopolies on new processes and devices may be the only way to make the risks and expenses worthwhile.
I was under the impression that the GPL license is mostly meant for "hobby" developers that want to make sure no one abuses their code to earn money on time they donate for the good of mankind. Not industry developers that want to earn money from their code. I might just have gotten it all wrong though.
Yes, you did get it "all wrong". The GPL has nothing to do with preventing others from getting rich off the free labor of hobbyist developers.
In fact, anyone who objects to someone else making money off his work should use some other license.
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that any downstream recipient of the software gets the source code in a
form that actually enables him to make changes and distribute them. The restrictions on patents and DRM are
simply consequences of that.
Linux servers have become a favorite home for memory- resident rootkits because they're so reliable. Rebooting a computer resets its memory. When you don't have to reboot, you don't clear the memory out, so whatever is there stays there, undetected. "You've got 128 megs of RAM in network printers that are never shut off!" exclaims Michael Davis, CEO of incident response company Savid Technologies and a veteran security researcher who worked on the Honeynet Project. "It's an old technique, but a common one."
When I was 9 or 10 the family computer was a mechanical adding machine my dad dragged out at tax time. Sometime much later when I was a larval hacker I recall reading about IBM's new terabyte store. It was a multilevel system, of course, with drum drives for speed and (I think) disk drives at the middle level and some funky tape storage contraption at the slow, high capacity end. Mechanical pickers would pluck the relevant tape and wrap it around a reader to access it. The beast occupied a large room, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew that at some point the establishment would become sufficiently afraid of Ron Paul that they would have to resurrect some old smears. Paul is the only honest, intelligent man running. If you want to live in debt and tax slavery vote for any other candidate.
Why are people allowed to have performance enhancing genes but not performance enhancing drugs?
Many years back I worked on a vehicle routing system (we build maps from Navtech data). Underneath, of course, it used Dijkstra's algorithm to find least cost routes between points. The users were given a lot of control over how the cost was calculated. In particular, they could independently assign costs to left and right turns. So if you didn't like left turns you'd just give them a high cost. The route might be a little longer but it would have fewer left turns. Drivers of big rigs (18 wheelers) would put the high costs on the right turns.
As others have pointed out, the bill does not ban humans on Mars but simply forbids NASA from spending money on the hare brained scheme of sending men to Mars. Good. Only countries running huge budget surpluses year after year should even consider a stunt like that.
Of course this is a free country. All you sci fi fans with delusions of creating a Martian free state can spend your own money on it.
... that destroys car stereo systems.
What other industry is there that abuses their customers like this? I feel like I'm being accused of criminal activity from the first second I install a MS product now.
How about airlines? I felt so much safer after they stole my toothpaste and shaving cream and made me take off by belt while they went over me with a scanner. I love an industry that treats every customer as a terrorist.
If this rule is enforced the virtual female/male ratio will approach the real one in these games. That means maybe 20% of the avatars will be female. So the female population will be getting hit on even more than they are now. This will annoy enough of the women that many will quit, further reducing the fraction of females.
The US has massive power. Like it or not there is an ethical decision made when you choose not to exercise it.
Now there's the best possible argument for drastically downsizing the military industrial complex. If we no longer have "massive power", there there will no longer be any ethical obligation to meddle in everybody else's business.
Switzerland is a small European power, the US is the world superpower. This makes a difference.
I have no desire whatsoever to be a citizen of a "superpower".
I want to be a citizen of a free republic.
Let some other bunch of facists play the "superpower" game. We are a bankrupt nation. We can't afford to play "superpower", even if it were good for our souls, which it isn't.
You are part of this world, do you really want to leave the rest of the world to the political leadership of China and Russia?
You are far too paranoid. Do you really think Russia and China would take over if we brought our troops home? If they try, they'll suffer from the same imperial overstretch that we face now. They could then join us in bankruptcy.
Ron Paul is all in favor of free trade, he's just against the bureaucratic "managed" trade of NAFTA and the WTO.
As for the UN, I'm indifferent as to whether we stay in or get out. I'm not sure what we get out of it other than foreigners using their diplomatic immunity to park illegally in Manhattan.
I think we should have gotten out of NATO long ago. American leadership of NATO made some sense when Europe was shattered by WW II and there were serious concerns that Stalin would extend his empire further west.
But Europe has long been capable of defending itself from any conceivable military threat. NATO is now an expensive anachronism and it's time to stop spending billions to defend people who don't need us defending them. Also, NATO has nothing whatsoever to do with free trade. The Japanese manage to trade with lots of countries without having to keep their troops in other nations.
As for foreign aid, I would prefer that the government let me keep my money and let me decide for myself which charities to contribute to. (And yes, I give away thousands of dollars to charity each year, even with my current tax load.)
The proper country to compare us to if you want to understand what Ron Paul seeks is not North Korea but Switzerland. The Swiss don't keep troops in foreign countries and don't try to rule the world, but do trade successfully with numerous other nations. You may have noticed that a lot fewer people hate the Swiss than hate Americans.
What are you talking about? American politics is little but the same shade of gray in both parties. Did you notice how the Democrats got elected because people are against the war in Iraq? Have you noticed that we're still in Iraq, a year after the Democrats got voted in? Did you notice how Republicans became popular in the 80s and 90s because people were sick of big spending Democrats? Have you noticed how Republicans have proven to be the biggest spenders of all?
There is nothing in the second example that isn't completely familiar to anyone who has ever programmed in LISP, one the world's oldest programming languages.
Newbies, feh!
Hear his prophecy of the marketing: 'You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages." "Faster, cheaper, more reliable."
Actually, this is exactly what was said -- back in the early 1980s when people were moving off time sharing and onto PCs. "Software as a service" is just time sharing with a web interface.
That is by far our most perpetually renewable resource.
Only if he lives to 130 or so. I'm a middle aged hacker and Knuth has been working on volume 4 for my entire career (~28 years). And the compiler book comes after volume 4.
If Linus really believes that it's okay to take Linux kernel code and lock it down with DRM so that recipients, even with source, are unable to install their bug fixes or enhancements, then he should have used the BSD license from the start. To release code under GPL v2, and then whine about GPL v3, which has the same intent but merely closes a couple of loopholes and makes a few technical improvements, is certainly hypocritical.
It looks like Microsoft has found another way to not hire Americans.
You misunderstood his point. This issue is not whether we have a wide field of vision, like a horse, or a narrow field of binocular vision, like a cat. The issue is this: Our retina is wired backwards. The photosensitive spots point backwards, into the brain. The connections to the neurons are in front. The neurons have to be collected together and plunge through a hole in the retina to get to our brains. These holes (one in each eye) are the reasons for the blind spots, which is very large and just a few degrees away from the center of vision. The fact that we don't usually notice them is testimony to the fact that we do not perceive the world, we perceive our brain's reconstruction of the world, and it doesn't bother telling us about the parts where it has no input, like the blind spot or the back of our heads.
Needless to say, an animal that has its retina wired up sensibly, with the neurons in back and the photo receptors in front, such as a squid, doesn't have a blind spot near the center of its vision.
Another consequence of our botched design is that our eyes are less sensitive to light than they could be, because photons have to go through all that connection crap to get to the light sensitive part. Some mammals partially compensate for this by having a reflective material that bounces back the photons for a second chance at detection (that's why cats' eyes shine in the dark). But even this is not as good as just putting the photo sensitive parts up front where they belong.
Finally, the weak attachment of the retina to the back of the eye that this design causes makes us more susceptible to retinal detachment, which results in blindness.
So what are the advantages of a backwards wired retina? None. Absolutely none. But some time early in the evolution of vertebrates we got developmentally locked into that suboptimal design, and the combination of mutations that would be required to fix it are too complex to come about by natural selection. Either that or we were created by an incompetent engineer. Take your pick.
Actually obey the Constitution. If the NSA wasn't doing illegal warrantless searches of every American using the telephone or internet it would need about half as many computers and half as much money.
I don't object to all patents. I do object to software patents, because I see no evidence that the bribe of a 17 or 20 year monopoly is in any way necessary to spur innovation in the software industry. Given that there are always dead weight losses associated with monopolies it is best not to create them unless there is strong positive evidence that the benefits outweight the costs.
In other industries, such as the chip industry where you have to blow billions of dollars on each new fab, patent monopolies on new processes and devices may be the only way to make the risks and expenses worthwhile.
Yes, you did get it "all wrong". The GPL has nothing to do with preventing others from getting rich off the free labor of hobbyist developers. In fact, anyone who objects to someone else making money off his work should use some other license. The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that any downstream recipient of the software gets the source code in a form that actually enables him to make changes and distribute them. The restrictions on patents and DRM are simply consequences of that.
2. Surely within the next couple decades electronic book reading technology will get parity on heft, size of screen, resolution, and outdoor viewing.
Yes, but it will all be DRMed.
Nobody ever wrote a kernel in Cobol. C will be dead when Linux and BSD are dead.
When I was 9 or 10 the family computer was a mechanical adding machine my dad dragged out at tax time. Sometime much later when I was a larval hacker I recall reading about IBM's new terabyte store. It was a multilevel system, of course, with drum drives for speed and (I think) disk drives at the middle level and some funky tape storage contraption at the slow, high capacity end. Mechanical pickers would pluck the relevant tape and wrap it around a reader to access it. The beast occupied a large room, of course.