This is exactly why it's so difficult to have a rational discussion on global warming. Even perfectly ordinary phenomena like the gap in the ice at the North Pole is hysterically hyped as one more of it's effects.
Global warming alarmists ought to be especially careful to save the screaming for the real thing. They'll be taken a lot more seriously that way. The siren that goes off every day at noon gets ignored; the one that only sounds when bombs are falling is paid attention to by everybody.
There are some things with which mankind was not meant to tamper. Among the most sacred of these is the caffeine of the Holy Java Bean. Beware lest thou anger the gods with this blasphemy! They will strike you down whether you spell "caffeine" correctly or not!
This will probably cost me some karma, a painful thing for a karma whore, but what the hell. I've been a singularly unsuccessful karma whore lately anyway, but at least I don't leak karma anymore since I stopped moderating. (And as far as I'm concerned, any metamoderation system that can only sink your karma and not raise it is broken.)
WHAT THE FUCK was so FUCKING EVIL about this story last night when I submitted it? Yes, I understand that most stories are going to get rejected. That's just the nature of the beast, and I'm cool with it. But when around 75% of the stories I submit that are rejected turn up the next day submitted by someone else, I start to think something's going on.
It can't possibly be personal, of course. But I do generally submit stories around the same time of day, after about 10 PM Pacific time. Maybe it's that whoever's processing story submissions at that time is just an incompetent twit who can't be bothered to accept anything because it might mean that he's got to actually do some work to post it?
I liked it a whole lot better last year. Then, the.orgs were given a rectangular area in one corner of the floor and their individual booths were set up around the perimeter. Someone had donated the (free) use of a couple of pinball machines and a video game which were set up in the middel. It was kind of cozy. You got a real sense of community, and it was easy to socialize and meet people if you wanted to; but it was equally easy to just put your head down and hack away on your laptop if you were so inclined -- and many were.
This year they had a row to themselves at one end of the floor, and each.org got a little tiny cubicle all to itself. Not the same at all, and nowhere near as rewarding to hang around even that didn't mean you were standing in the aisle.
One more thing that sucks is that I missed seeing Nitrozac while I was there. You can't have everything, I suppose.
The "processor" was just 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shit register.
I know the UK was suffering greatly from wartime shortages just then, but couldn't they have found a more sanitary material to make the registers out of?
There are tons and tons of data on obsolete media that need to be preserved, or at least made accessible. I think that a technically savvy computer historian can make himself economically valuable as one of a very few people who are familiar enough with the old technology to do this.
I can't say how much of a demand there is for this sort of thing right now, but ask the Census Bureau for raw data from 1970. I bet they'd have a really tough time retrieving it. The same must be true for older companies as well.
You do generally have to recompile to get VAX code to run on an Alpha, but that generally was no big deal. The big issues were alignment problems, but that was fixable via the linker. And one weird thing: The VAX's Macro assembler turned into a compiler on the Alpha. It was nice being able to reuse all our old Macro code, but it's a little strange to deal with it now that it's no longer low-level code, even though it still looks like it.
For every valve out there, there has to be a dozen smaller shops that make bad games and turn out krap.
What "krap" (sic)? Looking Glass put out some of the most innovative, immersive games ever made. Neither the Thief nor the System Shock series can be compared to any other game and neither fits comfortably into any of the established genres. Believe it or not, there are more and better types of games than those that involve a heavily armored tank slaughtering anything that moves. The Thief series, especially, was a masterpiece.
From your statement, VMS basically runs things like machinery, etc, where upgrades are rare (being very expensive), and things don't change much.
Well, in my shop we're using VMS to support realtime telemetry processing, analysis, and anomaly resolution. We can't of course boast of uptimes in years because we're constantly upgrading our hardware and software and reconfiguring our networks. But the clustering is very robust.
And yes, you really can get code written in any lanugage linked together.
I would be shocked (shocked!) to discover that HTML was not copyrightable in the same manner as any other written document.
My wife is a writer, so I know a little something about copyrights. If the first company had a contract which specified that they retain all rights to the code they produced, except specific rights granted to the ad agency, then you have a problem. Otherwise, this falls under the rubric of "work made for hire" and the ad agency owns all rights to it. It all depends on the language of the contract.
I wonder why the lawyers find it necessary to grill you. But IANAL, and I do know that lawyers like to cover every possible angle on a case. Good luck.
Would Andover have any standing, I wonder, to represent the Open Source community, specifically the users of Kerberos? Would not a lawsuit against Microsoft alleging consumer fraud be called for here since they have a product they represent as being fully compatable with Kerberos but contains proprietary extensions? Or is it contrary to the license under which the Kerberos protocol is specified to attach proprietary extensions, and a lawsuit possible on those grounds? Would not the wise thing for MS to do under the circumstances of such a lawsuit be to drop any further procedings against/. and open up their extensions, in exchange for the lawsuits against them being dropped?
Do I have any idea what I'm talking about? Are these meaningful questions?
The more Bill Gates open his mouth, the more obvious it becomes even to his boosters that he's more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. Even Rush Limbaugh, who thinks that someone with as much money as Gates can do no wrong, isn't buying this one.
Limbaugh, it seems, is a Mac user and was utterly untroubled by the TH. Even he could see that if the only systems affected by it are running Windows, then Microsoft is the problem, not the solution.
Indeed, the one complaint I have against this production from what I have seen so far is the miscasting of Stilgar, Chani, and probably the other Fremen. A German and a Russian, for crying out loud! Couldn't they have at least tried to find someone who looked vaguely Semitic? Good actors from the Middle East aren't that hard to find. Just ask my wife - she's a huge Oded Fehr fan.
Other than that I'm very impressed with the stills they've made available so far. It's going to be yards better than that awful DeLaurentis piece of garbage.
Raymond calls the regulation Lessig endorses "one-size-fits-all pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns."
Yeah! If there's going to be any pseudo-cooperation around here, ESR is going to enforce it with his own guns! Who needs the government for firepower anyway, when we have the Enforcer of Open Source around!
I always wanted a wave motion gun on my old Chevy (just to clear a path through heavy traffic) and I am deeply disappointed that they have yet to be invented. Dammit, what's it going to take? An alien invader poisoning the surface of the planet with radiation or something?
To enlarge on this issue: It appears that many aspects of human intelligence are dependent on physiology. We are "wired" to process information as we receive it via our senses. An artificial intelligence is going to experience a spectrum of sensory impressions that are entirely alien to us. It does not therefore seem reasonable to me that an AI will necessarily exhibit any behaviors we ordinarily associate with intelligence. I wouldn't think, for example, that we could know for sure that an AI would regard an I/O channel as a means of communication, but that it may rather experience it as some other kind of stimulus entirely.
With that in mind, what other kind of measurements can we take besides such communication as we might expect that would lead us to conclude that an AI had been achieved?
Slashdot Mirror
Global warming alarmists ought to be especially careful to save the screaming for the real thing. They'll be taken a lot more seriously that way. The siren that goes off every day at noon gets ignored; the one that only sounds when bombs are falling is paid attention to by everybody.
There are some things with which mankind was not meant to tamper. Among the most sacred of these is the caffeine of the Holy Java Bean. Beware lest thou anger the gods with this blasphemy! They will strike you down whether you spell "caffeine" correctly or not!
WHAT THE FUCK was so FUCKING EVIL about this story last night when I submitted it? Yes, I understand that most stories are going to get rejected. That's just the nature of the beast, and I'm cool with it. But when around 75% of the stories I submit that are rejected turn up the next day submitted by someone else, I start to think something's going on.
It can't possibly be personal, of course. But I do generally submit stories around the same time of day, after about 10 PM Pacific time. Maybe it's that whoever's processing story submissions at that time is just an incompetent twit who can't be bothered to accept anything because it might mean that he's got to actually do some work to post it?
2000-08-29 00:27:22 NVIDIA Sues 3dfx (articles,patents) (rejected)
Go piss up a rope.
This year they had a row to themselves at one end of the floor, and each .org got a little tiny cubicle all to itself. Not the same at all, and nowhere near as rewarding to hang around even that didn't mean you were standing in the aisle.
One more thing that sucks is that I missed seeing Nitrozac while I was there. You can't have everything, I suppose.
I know the UK was suffering greatly from wartime shortages just then, but couldn't they have found a more sanitary material to make the registers out of?
I can't say how much of a demand there is for this sort of thing right now, but ask the Census Bureau for raw data from 1970. I bet they'd have a really tough time retrieving it. The same must be true for older companies as well.
You do generally have to recompile to get VAX code to run on an Alpha, but that generally was no big deal. The big issues were alignment problems, but that was fixable via the linker. And one weird thing: The VAX's Macro assembler turned into a compiler on the Alpha. It was nice being able to reuse all our old Macro code, but it's a little strange to deal with it now that it's no longer low-level code, even though it still looks like it.
I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.
/* Standard I/O library we must include, hm? */
/* Do, or do not. There is no try. */
/* Mmmm, yes, finished now we are! */
#<h.stdio> include
/* Now begin we shall. */
(argc int, argv** char) main
{
("World, Hello!")fprint;
}
Major Tom's Capsule?
If only every warez d00d who ever ripped off a Looking Glass game was so honest...
What "krap" (sic)? Looking Glass put out some of the most innovative, immersive games ever made. Neither the Thief nor the System Shock series can be compared to any other game and neither fits comfortably into any of the established genres. Believe it or not, there are more and better types of games than those that involve a heavily armored tank slaughtering anything that moves. The Thief series, especially, was a masterpiece.
Well, in my shop we're using VMS to support realtime telemetry processing, analysis, and anomaly resolution. We can't of course boast of uptimes in years because we're constantly upgrading our hardware and software and reconfiguring our networks. But the clustering is very robust.
And yes, you really can get code written in any lanugage linked together.
My wife is a writer, so I know a little something about copyrights. If the first company had a contract which specified that they retain all rights to the code they produced, except specific rights granted to the ad agency, then you have a problem. Otherwise, this falls under the rubric of "work made for hire" and the ad agency owns all rights to it. It all depends on the language of the contract.
I wonder why the lawyers find it necessary to grill you. But IANAL, and I do know that lawyers like to cover every possible angle on a case. Good luck.
Would Andover have any standing, I wonder, to represent the Open Source community, specifically the users of Kerberos? Would not a lawsuit against Microsoft alleging consumer fraud be called for here since they have a product they represent as being fully compatable with Kerberos but contains proprietary extensions? Or is it contrary to the license under which the Kerberos protocol is specified to attach proprietary extensions, and a lawsuit possible on those grounds? Would not the wise thing for MS to do under the circumstances of such a lawsuit be to drop any further procedings against /. and open up their extensions, in exchange for the lawsuits against them being dropped?
Do I have any idea what I'm talking about? Are these meaningful questions?
The change looked smooth from this end, and the new hardware is speedy as all-get-out. Pages load in a blink. Great job, guys!
Limbaugh, it seems, is a Mac user and was utterly untroubled by the TH. Even he could see that if the only systems affected by it are running Windows, then Microsoft is the problem, not the solution.
Other than that I'm very impressed with the stills they've made available so far. It's going to be yards better than that awful DeLaurentis piece of garbage.
Yeah! If there's going to be any pseudo-cooperation around here, ESR is going to enforce it with his own guns! Who needs the government for firepower anyway, when we have the Enforcer of Open Source around!
That bastard! I think my eyeballs fell out of my head!
I always wanted a wave motion gun on my old Chevy (just to clear a path through heavy traffic) and I am deeply disappointed that they have yet to be invented. Dammit, what's it going to take? An alien invader poisoning the surface of the planet with radiation or something?
That would have more to do with the dictionary it uses than the spell checker itself, I would think.
With that in mind, what other kind of measurements can we take besides such communication as we might expect that would lead us to conclude that an AI had been achieved?
Um... I think the usual method is sex. I know many geeks have attenuated social lives, but sheesh!
Then it seems the elusive goals of AI are as far away as ever it was. So far, the slashbot experiment is a complete and total failure.