While technology may or may not progress, it is pretty certain that human nature will remain the same.
It's human nature that will make this a crisis, despite any amout of technological progress.
To fix the problem of procrastination causing crisis, you need to fix society not technology.
Currently fixing society is not considered doable, or ethical.
The proposal is infact disingenuous.
The honest proposal would be to say that leap-seconds are scrapped.
We will let clock time diverge from celestial time, and tackle the problem when it becomes a crisis, or some other junior poltician in 250 years time wants to make their mark on history.
Ok, so at some indeterminate time in the future*
the US goverment proposes bestwoing upon the world
an hours change in time.
Do they really expect people to plan for this event?
They will not, and will care even less than Y2K, as
your clock will only be out by an hour.
Most people will have to shift their computer
1 time zone back/forward.
I'm pretty certain that there's
This is passing the buck to future generations.
It is better to have a working system now, with the occasional bug, than
a spectacular IT crisis/fiasco in 500 year's time.
*I suspect we don't undersand the orbital mechanics
or our solar system enough to decide now exactly when the leap hour will be inserted
The indymedia guys do occasionally seem to give space to some
whacked-out lefites, but most of their stuff is
quite reasonable.
I've been espacially impressed with their coverage of Latin Ameircan issues.
If you don't want your news presented from a left wing angle, go elsewhere.
But dont' try to misrepresent indymedia's point of view. In the long run, you only do yourself a disservice.
Protons are the neucleus of a hydrogen atom.
It takes a lot of energy to get them moving anywhere near the speed of light.
A star, a particle accelerator, or a supernova would do.
No matter what you do, they will never reach the speed of light.
Thy have roughly the same mass as a hydrogen atom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton)
Java is not a language of clever tricks and obscure code, like C++ can be.
Java does have some extremely clever tricks, and I'm surprised that more beople don't use them.
The primary one I have used is reflection. You can use it to navigate class strcuctures in clever ways, search for methods by pattern matching etc.For instance, I have used this as a report generator to generate reports based upon C/C++ structures exposed to Java.
Another one is NIO byte buffers I have used this to import C++ structures into Java effieciently, without any communication with C++ code.
I hope this new language has provided some equally clever tricks for the scientific community to do their computing
Recently they have reverted to a more typical interpretation of re-distrbution,
but I wonder if Sleepycat (i.e. Mr Olson) would like to nudge the open source community back towards their old position?
I personally think Mr Olson's ideas are bad, and suspect many in the FSF do, and he's looking for outside support for this proposal.
Roughly conteporary with the Dada movement were the
Futurists.
Luigi Rossollo was a(the?) Futrist composer.
He costructed his own instruments, of which most were mechanical, but some were electric.
He also wrote a musical manifesto, which according to some, was quite infuential on later eletronic msicians. It was called "The art of noise". Sound familliar?;-)
More here:
http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/russolo.html
I hereby dub the comments on this article
"The Slashdot encylopedia of electronic music".
You've all created quite a good reference for the
electonic music enthusiat, or novice alike.
Many thanks to all the contributors.
Now, some politicians may indeed find it difficult to relate to or actively dislike geeks.
But I think most politicans understand power and influence. If you can show the politicans you can influence pubic opinion, have the ears of the poweful, or make a significant contribution to the economy then you will have their ear. What is essential is to differentiate the geek from the political kook, who bombards politicans with unpopular and irrelevant petitions.
What I'm interested in is the question: How can we put ourselves in a position that the politicans cannot afford to ignore us?
Yes, but by using DRM they increase the odds that they will make money from DRM copies in the first few weeks or months of a release.It also means they can control the release of promo copies that may be distributes a week ahead of official release. For a heavily hyped record, that must reach the top 10, this may be the only way to cover the outlay on marketing.
Of course if your hype consists of viral marketing, DRM may be a profoundly bad idea.
And.... after a month or so, the DRM copies will be on P2P, and in the second-hand record shops.
TutorialD could, with a few additions make a
good procedural language.
TutorialD could easily have a SQL backend.
Infact some SQL databases can have another SQL
database or CSV text files as a back end!
Or... Never attribute to conspiracy what can be attributed to a bad compromise.
I beleive from the little information I have seen, that Gatto has correctly identified the historical roots of the current state of affairs, but... Subrosas has identified why America puts up with what it's got now.
Now, given this, you can twist Gatto's pessimistic conclusion into something more interesting: To change America's education system, you must change the values of Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
While technology may or may not progress, it is pretty certain that human nature will remain the same.
It's human nature that will make this a crisis, despite any amout of technological progress.
To fix the problem of procrastination causing crisis, you need to fix society not technology.
Currently fixing society is not considered doable, or ethical.
The proposal is infact disingenuous.
The honest proposal would be to say that leap-seconds are scrapped.
We will let clock time diverge from celestial time, and tackle the problem when it becomes a crisis,
or some other junior poltician in 250 years time wants to make their mark on history.
Ok, so at some indeterminate time in the future* the US goverment proposes bestwoing upon the world an hours change in time.
Do they really expect people to plan for this event?
They will not, and will care even less than Y2K, as your clock will only be out by an hour.
Most people will have to shift their computer 1 time zone back/forward.
I'm pretty certain that there's
This is passing the buck to future generations.
It is better to have a working system now, with the occasional bug, than a spectacular IT crisis/fiasco in 500 year's time.
*I suspect we don't undersand the orbital mechanics or our solar system enough to decide now exactly when the leap hour will be inserted
The sample given is highly unrepresentative.
l l l
The indymedia guys do occasionally seem to give space to some whacked-out lefites, but most of their stuff is quite reasonable.
I've been espacially impressed with their coverage of Latin Ameircan issues.
If you don't want your news presented from a left wing angle, go elsewhere.
But dont' try to misrepresent indymedia's point of view. In the long run, you only do yourself a disservice.
And finally....
Here are some more representitive articles, taken from UK indymedia page today:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314908.htm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314733.htm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314391.htm
Lots of readers seem to be confusing Protons and Photons.
Photons are light.
They have zero rest mass, and always travel at the speed of light.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon)
Protons are the neucleus of a hydrogen atom.
It takes a lot of energy to get them moving anywhere near the speed of light.
A star, a particle accelerator, or a supernova would do.
No matter what you do, they will never reach the speed of light.
Thy have roughly the same mass as a hydrogen atom
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton)
In the UK we have a concept of design-right.
This concept is similar to copyright, but protects a design.
Therefore, I presume a design patent is eqivalent to design right.
If you know otherwise, please speak up.
Also it would be of interest to know if the design patents carry similar penalties for abuse "classic" patents, or are more like copyright.
Java is not a language of clever tricks and obscure code, like C++ can be.
Java does have some extremely clever tricks, and I'm surprised that more beople don't use them.
The primary one I have used is reflection. You can use it to navigate class strcuctures in clever ways, search for methods by pattern matching etc.For instance, I have used this as a report generator to generate reports based upon C/C++ structures exposed to Java.
Another one is NIO byte buffers I have used this to import C++ structures into Java effieciently, without any communication with C++ code.
I hope this new language has provided some equally clever tricks for the scientific community to do their computing
In this case, the messenger is Mike Olson CEO of Sleepycat Software.
/ www.sleepycat.com/download/licensinginfo.shtml)
For a long time Sleepycat software has an odd license.
It appered to be BSD, but...
They considered re-distribution to mean among other things...
"your application is distributed to more than a single physical location".
Source from wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/20030115155248/http:/
Recently they have reverted to a more typical interpretation of re-distrbution, but I wonder if Sleepycat (i.e. Mr Olson) would like to nudge the open source community back towards their old position?
I personally think Mr Olson's ideas are bad, and suspect many in the FSF do, and he's looking for outside support for this proposal.
Roughly conteporary with the Dada movement were the Futurists.
;-)
Luigi Rossollo was a(the?) Futrist composer. He costructed his own instruments, of which most were mechanical, but some were electric.
He also wrote a musical manifesto, which according to some, was quite infuential on later eletronic msicians. It was called "The art of noise".
Sound familliar?
More here: http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/russolo.html
I hereby dub the comments on this article "The Slashdot encylopedia of electronic music". You've all created quite a good reference for the electonic music enthusiat, or novice alike. Many thanks to all the contributors.
Now, some politicians may indeed find it difficult to relate to or actively dislike geeks.
But I think most politicans understand power and influence. If you can show the politicans you can influence pubic opinion, have the ears of the poweful, or make a significant contribution to the economy then you will have their ear.
What is essential is to differentiate the geek from the political kook, who bombards politicans with unpopular and irrelevant petitions.
What I'm interested in is the question: How can we put ourselves in a position that the politicans cannot afford to ignore us?
Yes, but by using DRM they increase the odds that they will make money from DRM copies in the first few weeks or months of a release.It also means they can control the release of promo copies that may be distributes a week ahead of official release. For a heavily hyped record, that must reach the top 10, this may be the only way to cover the outlay on marketing.
Of course if your hype consists of viral marketing, DRM may be a profoundly bad idea.
And.... after a month or so, the DRM copies will be on P2P, and in the second-hand record shops.
TutorialD could, with a few additions make a good procedural language. TutorialD could easily have a SQL backend. Infact some SQL databases can have another SQL database or CSV text files as a back end!
Or...
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be attributed to a bad compromise.
I beleive from the little information I have seen, that Gatto has correctly identified the historical roots of the current state of affairs, but...
Subrosas has identified why America puts up with what it's got now.
Now, given this, you can twist Gatto's pessimistic conclusion into something more interesting:
To change America's education system, you must change the values of Americans.