and some proof that this civilization is not just a pack of marching morons
I always wanted to write Marilyn vos Savant and ask her if she felt this born-on-the-wrong-planet feeling, too. Maybe, more than special classes for the gifted, we should fund psychological studies of special neurosis that only affect the brainy. I tend to have more love for my fellow man, but it's tough. I know I would sleep easier at night if all weapons were gone from the world. Not because I'm a peacenik, but because guffawing dolts with their fingers on the triggers of deadly weapons BOTHER ME.
Re:And do we really want to?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or do you fear that bright kids will bring about the downfall of civilisation?
*Giggle* Do we really have to explain this one?
"After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists -- thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such 'abnormal' people until they are properly docile and stupid and 'well-socialized'." http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/weaknesses.ht ml
See, smart people don't go along with every war. They don't pacifically accept their cell-phone billing plan. They install Linux and hack it for free. They do their own mechanic work. Ever been hired and discovered quickly that you were the smartest person on your team? If so, you know your ass is grass at that point, because everybody from the janitor to the CEO will fear you, believing that you're going to take their job.
Smart people. are. intimidating. People recoil from you like you had the head of Cthulhu. "God, what if s/he gets mad at us?" Now look at the media stereotypes. Do you ever see a buff, handsome villian with a highschool-yearbook smile and a room-temp IQ up against a smart, quiet hero who works in a laboratory? Nope, always the maniacal genius whose plans for world conquest are foiled by the tough guy shooting his gun. No, I'm not laying the whole blame for smarty-stigma on Mad-Scientist stereotypes. The opposite is true.
I have a secret I'll share now: once during a string of odd jobs, I took a job that I knew would be temporary, and I tried an experiment: I acted almost medicatedly stupid. Think Forest Gump and post-lobotomy Jack Nicholson from "One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest". I was just real mellow, didn't talk much, carefully spoke only in words of six letters or less (and very slowly), and peacefully went to do whatever I was told, even if it was stupid. I even messed up things on purpose, and was instantly forgiven! I wish I'd never done that experiment, because I learned things about human nature I wish I'd never known. It was the only time in my life when I was just accepted as a regular person. Everybody I met, I felt just INSTANT LOVE! For the first time (except for the blessed few in my life who've understood me), I was not feared. For God's sake, I even had women hitting on me who ordinarily wouldn't have come near me!
or even Amish, but I've never owned a cell phone. I just couldn't see the point. They seem like useless toys to me. And even when I got curious enough to want to try one, I get scared away by the horror stories told by people like Slashdotters describing the contract as the financial equivalent of being shaved, tatooed, and collared to a Dominitrix who doesn't have the courtesy to give you a reach-around while she's pegging you. All that when there's a phone every ten feet in our society? Why do that when you can have a laptop or a Pilot? And when one internet account can be unlimited no matter *where* I send/recieve email to/from, all for one flat fee per month, and compatible for any operating system I chose to run, and can be used with multiple computers for the same price, and cancelable at any time without penalty, the whole cell phone business practice makes even *less* sense. How did you people allow yourselves to be screwed SO BADLY all these years?
It also helps that I'm never traveling by driving cross-country through long deserts with no call boxes and don't have to get help in such emergencies. It also helps that I strongly hate talking on telephones in the first place. The whole family has learned that even if I'm *leaning* on the phone and it rings, either somebody else gets it or the machine does. There is a name for this phobia/aversion, and some Slashdotter will doubtless post it's name in the followup.
Great concept, lousy name. "Where did you meet your wife?" "At Plenty-o'-Fish!" No, I just can't see it. And did anybody else read it as "plenty offish", as in the European slang "off" for "spoiled", as in "This fish smells a tad offish!"
Of course, there's the "Find the Fish" segment from the middle of "The Meaning of Life". I'd better stop right here.
Technically speaking, if you fail to procreate before you die because you wasted your whole fertile lifespan trying to date what are obviously pornobots online, you've excluded yourself from the gene pool through your own stupidity, right? I'm thinking of submitting this...
You might have answers to those questions, but my point is, it's not clear.
Now, I already explained this all any reasonable person needs to. The above statement is utter bullshit. It's perfectly clear to anybody but a lawyer. To anybody with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE, common sense is only common sense. It's somebody trying to worm out of it with what-ifs and maybe-that's that's going to obfuscate it. Go try your word tricks on the captive audience of a jury - I and Plato believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth.
And don't browbeat me with your degree. Law libraries are open to the public, and I crawled one regularly when I lived near one - the same way I read anything else, curiosity. Tell me, if legalese is so clear, how come customers didn't detect the rootkit in Sony's EULA? How was Clinton worming out of the Monica Lewinsky scandal by questioning the definition of "is"? Why was a murderer able to make the ludicrous claim that eating too many Twinkies made him do it? If legalese has so much common sense left in it after it's been through the sausage grinder, what's with that fast-talking, breathless, low voice babbling at the end of radio commercials? Where do you get the expression "Read the fine print" - why isn't all the print the same size? In any of these cases, common people with common sense can spot the bullshit; only when it gets into a courtroom is it treated with any seriousness. Obfuscation is the chief weapon of the liar, and the way things are set up, a client needs a *skilled* liar working for them regardless of which side they're on! Sorry if you feel this cheapens your profession. I'm sure you'll get plenty of business, anyway.
If you show a nonprogrammer the code for a sorting algorithm, he might ask "Why do you need to write all that? Just tell it to put the items in order." After all, he can easily look at a list of numbers or words and put them in order.. it's just common sense.
The distinction being that computers, unlike people, *do* *not* inhernetly possess common sense; they only "understand" one and zero, on and off. So we take binary strings of ones and zeros millions of lines long and figure out how to express it in assembly that's hundreds of lines long, and then improve that to C code that's only tens of lines long, and then we even wrap that up into a single four-letter command with a one-letter switch: "sort -n my_number_list > sorted_numbers"
Now for a law: "Don't kill somebody." I know what it means. You know what it means. Any twelve random jurors know what it means. But some smart-ass is going to be on trial for murder, and sure enough he'll stand there going "I don't know what that means!", so we have to expand it all out to paragraphs. Then the punishment: Depends. How bad was this crime? You know what that means. I know what that means. But no matter what, nobody's going to open themselves up to litigation by arbitrarily interpretting how bad the crime was, so we have to categorize it into agravated assault and crime of passion and unmitigated impacted-paradighm-waddayacallit-manslaughter, and murder with intent to commit robbery, and yaddayadda... thus, due to the inherent dishonesty and untrustworthiness of those who would exploit loopholes, we must rigorously define the laws and define the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions of the definitions until it's all a big wad of words you gotta pay somebody $500 smacks an hour to read, because nothing else short of torture would coerce anybody to do so. And now *nobody* knows what it means!
You know what the ultimate destiny of all laws is? Binary. And that concludes our lecture. Join us next week for: "Revealed at last! What killed the dinosaurs! And you don't look so terrific yourself!"
I've long held the theory that programming mind and legal mind do not happily share the same head. It seems almost inevitable that the better one is at the one, the worse they will be at the other.
I think it is because programming and legalese have opposite aims. Programming takes the fantastically complicated task of explaining the world to a computer and renders it into the simplest possible form. Legal documents take the most basic common sense and render it into the most obfuscated and complicated possible form; the better to ensure that you will need to hire a lawyer to decode it and argue it in court for you.
And I just said a few days ago that this kind of product self-sabotage will forever be known as "pulling a Sony", and there's the reference in the post itself!
Only sad thing is, most any of us could have told them that this would be a fiasco, but before this happened there's no way any of us would have been believed or noticed. It took a disaster like this to wake everybody up. Lucky thing it wasn't nuclear bombs, huh?
But I'm happy, anyway. Slashdot has been fun to read this week; Sonygate brings the comedian out in the most taciturn geeks.
If the (extremely excellent, don't get me wrong) Patrick McGoohan Prisoner is so holy to you, go buy the goddamned DVDs. They'll still be there long after the remake has aired, no matter how good or bad the remake is.
The agony comes from the confusion that inevitably results. When we talk about the Prisoner from here on out, it'll be yet another show we have to carefully specify the *original* to the video store clerk, who likely won't even stock it because it'd compete too much with the straight-to-DVD remake that they're still trying to move...
Listen, one time grandma says she got my daughter "The Cat in the Hat" for Christmas. I looked forward to passing on a love of Dr. Seuss's rhymes to the next generation, only to see the box opened and it was the Mike Myers abomination of an attempt to do a movie version!!! If you've never seen this (lucky, lucky you!), trust me that it's grounds to murder all involved in it's production. (And the memory of Mike Myers making jokes about drinking piss and showing his bare ass will stick in your memory forever as a reason *not* to take liberties. Period.)
Yes, you can take a big ol' shit on the Mona Lisa and I'll still be able to get clean print copies from reproductions. The point is WHY SHIT ON THE MONA LISA IN THE FIRST PLAAAAAAACE?
Count me as one who loathes the idea of a Prisoner remake. That show had a frission about it which, I submit, would be *impossible* to reproduce today. As well you might say you were going to re-make the Mona Lisa using Paris Hilton as your model - what makes the picture special isn't the subject, but the presentation, dummy! *(Me imagining I was gripping a TV executive by the lapels and bashing his head on the desk.)
Meanwhile, there's tons of gold waiting to be mined, in the form of forgotten books. Larry Niven's "Ringworld" - God, what an epic it would make, if given the Peter Jackson treatment - a well-realized puppeteer would forever make Mr. Spock look like a person with pointy implants glued to his ears! Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" - Orwell's 1984 meets Kubric's interpretation of "A Clockwork Orange", with the action pace of a James Bond flick and the characteristic plot-twist-at-every-turn of all of Levin's work. Terry Pratchet's "Discworld" series - now, look at the traveling luggage and Rincewind and Twoflower and tell me they wouldn't be a hit with the Harry Potter crowd! Heinlein's "The Cat who Walks Through Walls" - picture Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" done in space, after Hitch had done a few espresso shots to quicken the tempo. There's decades of material crying to be brought to a larger audience, and all we seem to get is cannibalistic re-digestion of all that was made before.
Been there, done that. Of course, which of the zillion dialects? Hmph, anyway, when Firefox can interpret and render a page in Lisp, I'll switch. I'd be tickled pink: Lisp is that kind of groovy fun! (Chorus from the flame-pit: "Parenthesis! Parenthesis! Oooooh, the parenthesis!) *Ahem* Really, almost any single language will make do. I'm just talking about not needing five of them to make one simple web page...
Y'know, ELisp can do buffers and highlighting and such, and XEmacs can do graphics in versions 21+, if my facts are straight. It almost *could* work! But Python has much of what's attractive to the job, and (booooy, are we *ever* speculating here!) might be more adaptable to the web task.
See, I can tell just by looking at the capabilities of each web development language - it's not that they designed deliberately limited, but that each language brought the web up to match the technology at the time - while failing to anticipate any further development. Thus, they scale up poorly. Now project ten years into the future, as each year we bolt another clunky little special-purpose language onto the web, each one good at three more tasks and lousy at everything else! Had we to do it all over again, we'd make a web design language that's turing-complete and NOT FLASH, and there's your content, styling, interaction, and animation right there! Unfortunately, there's your damned viruses, too!
That is, I won't reply to such a repulsive and obvious rant. However, I will make clear that I made no indication of the United States as the *only* country affected by the Orwellianism of the new age. I would also like to point out that just because it doesn't happen on US soil doesn't mean the US isn't involved.
The totalitarian government described in Orwell's famous work is pretty much assumed to be world-wide - Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia all cooperating to wage perpetual war while switching allegiences every once in a while to keep the sides even. This allows each country to beseech it's citizens to sacrifice in the name of championing the state's cause (there's always a war on), an enemy to blame whenever things go wrong, and ally whose neediness may be used to appeal to the citizen's sense of charity...etc. By the way, if merely fleeing one country would have meant escape for the two protagonists of the story, they would have headed for the nearest border as soon as they consumated their first love. Now, you want the same kind of story *with* the extra ingredient of a place on the planet to escape to (oh ho ho ho ho! I won't spoil it!), check out Ira Levin's most under-appreciated novel, "This Perfect Day" (it's SCREAMING to be made into a movie!!! When will it be discovered? And when it becomes a movie, will they botch it up?)
PS to AC's: Don't cop literacy on me, Sonny. I've FORGOTTEN more books than you'll ever see in a lifetime!
Pay attention to the content. Measure *which* sites students spend the most time browsing and compare that to their grade average, you'll see much more meaningful data.
For my part, the internet has always been first one big reference library, and everything else second. I can guarantee one thing - the "A" students sure as HELL aren't the ones visiting drudgereport.com!
George Orwell was only 20 years too early - he got most of the rest right.
I've thought this so long, and have seen so many others say the same, that I'm supporting Orwell's canonization as an official prophet. God knows, he had a better batting average than most prophets.
but Sony does one thing and suddenly everyone is up in arms about them.
Granted, Sony hasn't established themselves as much of an evil overlord in the past. It's just that when they decided to do a boffo maneuver, they did it in such a big way all at once. To put a malicious binary program on an audio CD is a step too far. To have their first-offered fix hose things up even worse is beyond that. To say it infected hundreds of thousands of computers (including the Department of Defense!!!) puts it on a level with the greatest worms in history, albeit as a different kind of program, of course. The fact that numerous viruses have already been found that exploit the backdoor left open by the rootkit makes it scandalous. To think they did this to protect (amongst others) a Celine Dion album makes it hysterically funny.
I find it more likely it was someone in Sony BMG being told to protect Sony's interests and they took it a step too far. That, or it was a rogue manager in Sony.
I've often thought the same thing. Perhaps even a lone rogue programmer thought he'd throw a BIG scoop of organic fertilizer into the ventilation system. It's hard to picture the decision to do this taking place on a top executive level without hearing a nearby lawyer clearing his throat and saying, "Uh, we need to talk..."
Man, whatever happened to recording songs off the radio to cassette? I *still* have that capacity on my stereo.
Look at how many web sites are just one big Flash application.
No, I wasn't talking about Flash at all. Flash is never the answer, no matter what the question is.
Did it ever occur to you that the parts look different because they do different things ?
See, I come to it from a programming background. In C, you would declare char *variable="my string"; , and that's the "what". Then you'd use ncurses for example: mvprintw(screen,10,12,variable); , and that's the "how". Annoying popups and visual effects can be done in their own library extensions to the language, which STILL have the same logic of syntax throughout, as with the SDL library for C. There is NO inherent reason why doing different functions requires a tag to be in nested angle brackets in one place and in lists seperated by colons and semicolons in another. And ActiveX can be dragged to the garbage can!
I, for one, like being able to tell these apart, even when someone insists on embedding them all into a single file.
Hey, thanks for your 2 cents, anyway! You mean in HTML, you can't tell the <b> from the <ul> just because they both use abreviations nested in angle brackets?
What gets me to wondering, is: Does Bill Gates' computer at home (because it should be running Windows) Blue-Screen-crash and get virus-infected and get rootkitted by Sony just like the rest of the Windows' boxen? God, I hope so. I hope he also gets frustrated enough to punch holes in the screen when it can't install the driver for his new piece of hardware and it won't stop asking to every time it boots. You should at least use your own product, just to see what you're putting everybody else through. But that would be too honest...
Bill Gates was never a hacker, I don't think. In fact, I don't think he's even touched a computer in 20 years. As soon as DOS 1.0 began selling in the little glad-wrapped floppies, everything he did after that was delegate.
Now to be a web developer its gotten to the point that its difficult to know fewer than 3-4 languages.
Now that goes right to the heart of why I hate web development. Each of the languages of web design are poky little scriptlets, weak beyond belief, so that to actually *do* something, you need three or four just to get you through it. It's really saying something when you needed four languages to design the page that your web browser displays, but you only needed one to write the web browser itself.
The web needs to be torn down and rewritten from scratch. Start with ONE language that does EVERYTHING, all with the SAME SYNTAX ON EVERY LINE. Not doing this part with a C-style curly brace here, and that part with an HTML-style angle-bracket there, and using twenty different commands in ten different dialects to do the same thing. Web source is starting to look like Perl on acid.
I thought the creationist mob were blockheaded... then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow.
Both of whom are rather eclipsed by what I've come to call the "devolutionists", that is, the anti-learning, book-burning, everything-bashing clods, a few of whom infest/. Devolutionists (wait, it'll catch on) insist that there should be NO learning, that everything is TOO hard (no, you can't make it easier: those breath strips that dissolve on your toungue are too hard.), and that I'm a bad person just because I LEARNED and believe that OTHERS CAN LEARN, TOO. Devolutionists resent all advancement of the human race since the Dark Ages, and can't wait to get back so they can curl up in their safe little manure pile. No kidding!
With apologies to Frank Zappa:
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Requiem for Usenet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Usenet isn't dead...but it is smelling funny!
I've left off most of my Usenet usage, basically because websites/forums/blogs give me most of what I was looking for information-wise, and Slashdot gives me all the geek twaddle I need. I have horded a few megs of more amusing Usenet archives (alt.sysadmin.recovery and the works of Kibo spring instantly to mind), just to save for reminiscence when I'm in the old geek's home. But Usenet has definitely waned in usefulness compared to other internet resources, and it *is* crawling with spam, anyway. (That virus business is bogus; Usenet's safer than IRC. And as for obscene sexual propositions...it's the net. What do expect, a cathedral?)
I will say this, I still turn to Usenet if I can't find information on a subject *anywhere* else: it'll be there.
ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
I always wondered about this one. I ask what's it good for, and get something like, "So we can rebel against our governement if it goes bad." Uh, yeah, I see. But not having a second amendment didn't stop the US Revolution against the British in the first place, did it? And the trouble over in France showed guns all over the place, but they're forbidden to have guns, too, aren't they? And you'd not be rebelling against a government unless you had a problem with it's laws in the first place, so what difference does it make?
No, I'm asking because I never got around to answering this question to my satisfaction.
Of course ITers dress sloppy. That's because people who actually get something *done* in the world don't care how they look.
And you know who's worried about that? Customers? Their peers? Nope, I'll tell you: Middle Managers. PHB's coming round with their sole annual productive output: the office dress calandar, with the intricacy of the I Ching combined with the logic of Jabberwocky. And a new "team spirit" shirt every fricking week! This is the kind of stuff they'd rather spend money on than pay you.
Every time in my life (in tech jobs) that I was confronted about workplace attire, my response pretty much amounted to "F--- off.", as I blew past them on my way to putting out the next fire/ rescuing the next luser from their own stupidity/ meeting the next deadline. Never heard about it again for another six months. I always stuck to button-down shirts tucked into casual slacks, anyway. It's not like I was dressed like a Nirvana fan.
This rant brought to you by "People who make BOFH's look warm 'n' friendly".
Of course, all Slashdotters were not infected because we all boycott music companies anyway. Right?? Or did I miss a memo?
Apparently:
To:all Slashdotters
From: The Big Penguin
Subject: Protective measures
We will be switching exclusively to the Linux operating system at 1200 hours effective Tuesday. This will ensure that we can run any music CD with impunity, be it ripped or legit.
Slashdot Mirror
I always wanted to write Marilyn vos Savant and ask her if she felt this born-on-the-wrong-planet feeling, too. Maybe, more than special classes for the gifted, we should fund psychological studies of special neurosis that only affect the brainy. I tend to have more love for my fellow man, but it's tough. I know I would sleep easier at night if all weapons were gone from the world. Not because I'm a peacenik, but because guffawing dolts with their fingers on the triggers of deadly weapons BOTHER ME.
*Giggle* Do we really have to explain this one?t ml
"After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists -- thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such 'abnormal' people until they are properly docile and stupid and 'well-socialized'."
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/weaknesses.h
See, smart people don't go along with every war. They don't pacifically accept their cell-phone billing plan. They install Linux and hack it for free. They do their own mechanic work. Ever been hired and discovered quickly that you were the smartest person on your team? If so, you know your ass is grass at that point, because everybody from the janitor to the CEO will fear you, believing that you're going to take their job.
Smart people. are. intimidating. People recoil from you like you had the head of Cthulhu. "God, what if s/he gets mad at us?" Now look at the media stereotypes. Do you ever see a buff, handsome villian with a highschool-yearbook smile and a room-temp IQ up against a smart, quiet hero who works in a laboratory? Nope, always the maniacal genius whose plans for world conquest are foiled by the tough guy shooting his gun. No, I'm not laying the whole blame for smarty-stigma on Mad-Scientist stereotypes. The opposite is true.
I have a secret I'll share now: once during a string of odd jobs, I took a job that I knew would be temporary, and I tried an experiment: I acted almost medicatedly stupid. Think Forest Gump and post-lobotomy Jack Nicholson from "One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest". I was just real mellow, didn't talk much, carefully spoke only in words of six letters or less (and very slowly), and peacefully went to do whatever I was told, even if it was stupid. I even messed up things on purpose, and was instantly forgiven! I wish I'd never done that experiment, because I learned things about human nature I wish I'd never known. It was the only time in my life when I was just accepted as a regular person. Everybody I met, I felt just INSTANT LOVE! For the first time (except for the blessed few in my life who've understood me), I was not feared. For God's sake, I even had women hitting on me who ordinarily wouldn't have come near me!
It also helps that I'm never traveling by driving cross-country through long deserts with no call boxes and don't have to get help in such emergencies. It also helps that I strongly hate talking on telephones in the first place. The whole family has learned that even if I'm *leaning* on the phone and it rings, either somebody else gets it or the machine does. There is a name for this phobia/aversion, and some Slashdotter will doubtless post it's name in the followup.
Great concept, lousy name. "Where did you meet your wife?" "At Plenty-o'-Fish!" No, I just can't see it. And did anybody else read it as "plenty offish", as in the European slang "off" for "spoiled", as in "This fish smells a tad offish!"
Of course, there's the "Find the Fish" segment from the middle of "The Meaning of Life". I'd better stop right here.
Technically speaking, if you fail to procreate before you die because you wasted your whole fertile lifespan trying to date what are obviously pornobots online, you've excluded yourself from the gene pool through your own stupidity, right? I'm thinking of submitting this...
Now, I already explained this all any reasonable person needs to. The above statement is utter bullshit. It's perfectly clear to anybody but a lawyer. To anybody with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE, common sense is only common sense. It's somebody trying to worm out of it with what-ifs and maybe-that's that's going to obfuscate it. Go try your word tricks on the captive audience of a jury - I and Plato believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth.
And don't browbeat me with your degree. Law libraries are open to the public, and I crawled one regularly when I lived near one - the same way I read anything else, curiosity. Tell me, if legalese is so clear, how come customers didn't detect the rootkit in Sony's EULA? How was Clinton worming out of the Monica Lewinsky scandal by questioning the definition of "is"? Why was a murderer able to make the ludicrous claim that eating too many Twinkies made him do it? If legalese has so much common sense left in it after it's been through the sausage grinder, what's with that fast-talking, breathless, low voice babbling at the end of radio commercials? Where do you get the expression "Read the fine print" - why isn't all the print the same size? In any of these cases, common people with common sense can spot the bullshit; only when it gets into a courtroom is it treated with any seriousness. Obfuscation is the chief weapon of the liar, and the way things are set up, a client needs a *skilled* liar working for them regardless of which side they're on! Sorry if you feel this cheapens your profession. I'm sure you'll get plenty of business, anyway.
The distinction being that computers, unlike people, *do* *not* inhernetly possess common sense; they only "understand" one and zero, on and off. So we take binary strings of ones and zeros millions of lines long and figure out how to express it in assembly that's hundreds of lines long, and then improve that to C code that's only tens of lines long, and then we even wrap that up into a single four-letter command with a one-letter switch: "sort -n my_number_list > sorted_numbers"
Now for a law: "Don't kill somebody." I know what it means. You know what it means. Any twelve random jurors know what it means. But some smart-ass is going to be on trial for murder, and sure enough he'll stand there going "I don't know what that means!", so we have to expand it all out to paragraphs. Then the punishment: Depends. How bad was this crime? You know what that means. I know what that means. But no matter what, nobody's going to open themselves up to litigation by arbitrarily interpretting how bad the crime was, so we have to categorize it into agravated assault and crime of passion and unmitigated impacted-paradighm-waddayacallit-manslaughter, and murder with intent to commit robbery, and yaddayadda... thus, due to the inherent dishonesty and untrustworthiness of those who would exploit loopholes, we must rigorously define the laws and define the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions of the definitions until it's all a big wad of words you gotta pay somebody $500 smacks an hour to read, because nothing else short of torture would coerce anybody to do so. And now *nobody* knows what it means!
You know what the ultimate destiny of all laws is? Binary. And that concludes our lecture. Join us next week for: "Revealed at last! What killed the dinosaurs! And you don't look so terrific yourself!"
I think it is because programming and legalese have opposite aims. Programming takes the fantastically complicated task of explaining the world to a computer and renders it into the simplest possible form. Legal documents take the most basic common sense and render it into the most obfuscated and complicated possible form; the better to ensure that you will need to hire a lawyer to decode it and argue it in court for you.
Only sad thing is, most any of us could have told them that this would be a fiasco, but before this happened there's no way any of us would have been believed or noticed. It took a disaster like this to wake everybody up. Lucky thing it wasn't nuclear bombs, huh?
But I'm happy, anyway. Slashdot has been fun to read this week; Sonygate brings the comedian out in the most taciturn geeks.
Uh, if you'd actually gone to look at it, you'd know that it's not a reading blog, it's a picture blog. Nothing to read, beyond the titles.
The agony comes from the confusion that inevitably results. When we talk about the Prisoner from here on out, it'll be yet another show we have to carefully specify the *original* to the video store clerk, who likely won't even stock it because it'd compete too much with the straight-to-DVD remake that they're still trying to move...
Listen, one time grandma says she got my daughter "The Cat in the Hat" for Christmas. I looked forward to passing on a love of Dr. Seuss's rhymes to the next generation, only to see the box opened and it was the Mike Myers abomination of an attempt to do a movie version!!! If you've never seen this (lucky, lucky you!), trust me that it's grounds to murder all involved in it's production. (And the memory of Mike Myers making jokes about drinking piss and showing his bare ass will stick in your memory forever as a reason *not* to take liberties. Period.)
Yes, you can take a big ol' shit on the Mona Lisa and I'll still be able to get clean print copies from reproductions. The point is WHY SHIT ON THE MONA LISA IN THE FIRST PLAAAAAAACE?
Meanwhile, there's tons of gold waiting to be mined, in the form of forgotten books. Larry Niven's "Ringworld" - God, what an epic it would make, if given the Peter Jackson treatment - a well-realized puppeteer would forever make Mr. Spock look like a person with pointy implants glued to his ears! Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" - Orwell's 1984 meets Kubric's interpretation of "A Clockwork Orange", with the action pace of a James Bond flick and the characteristic plot-twist-at-every-turn of all of Levin's work. Terry Pratchet's "Discworld" series - now, look at the traveling luggage and Rincewind and Twoflower and tell me they wouldn't be a hit with the Harry Potter crowd! Heinlein's "The Cat who Walks Through Walls" - picture Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" done in space, after Hitch had done a few espresso shots to quicken the tempo. There's decades of material crying to be brought to a larger audience, and all we seem to get is cannibalistic re-digestion of all that was made before.
Been there, done that. Of course, which of the zillion dialects? Hmph, anyway, when Firefox can interpret and render a page in Lisp, I'll switch. I'd be tickled pink: Lisp is that kind of groovy fun! (Chorus from the flame-pit: "Parenthesis! Parenthesis! Oooooh, the parenthesis!) *Ahem* Really, almost any single language will make do. I'm just talking about not needing five of them to make one simple web page...
Y'know, ELisp can do buffers and highlighting and such, and XEmacs can do graphics in versions 21+, if my facts are straight. It almost *could* work! But Python has much of what's attractive to the job, and (booooy, are we *ever* speculating here!) might be more adaptable to the web task.
See, I can tell just by looking at the capabilities of each web development language - it's not that they designed deliberately limited, but that each language brought the web up to match the technology at the time - while failing to anticipate any further development. Thus, they scale up poorly. Now project ten years into the future, as each year we bolt another clunky little special-purpose language onto the web, each one good at three more tasks and lousy at everything else! Had we to do it all over again, we'd make a web design language that's turing-complete and NOT FLASH, and there's your content, styling, interaction, and animation right there! Unfortunately, there's your damned viruses, too!
The totalitarian government described in Orwell's famous work is pretty much assumed to be world-wide - Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia all cooperating to wage perpetual war while switching allegiences every once in a while to keep the sides even. This allows each country to beseech it's citizens to sacrifice in the name of championing the state's cause (there's always a war on), an enemy to blame whenever things go wrong, and ally whose neediness may be used to appeal to the citizen's sense of charity...etc. By the way, if merely fleeing one country would have meant escape for the two protagonists of the story, they would have headed for the nearest border as soon as they consumated their first love. Now, you want the same kind of story *with* the extra ingredient of a place on the planet to escape to (oh ho ho ho ho! I won't spoil it!), check out Ira Levin's most under-appreciated novel, "This Perfect Day" (it's SCREAMING to be made into a movie!!! When will it be discovered? And when it becomes a movie, will they botch it up?)
PS to AC's: Don't cop literacy on me, Sonny. I've FORGOTTEN more books than you'll ever see in a lifetime!
For my part, the internet has always been first one big reference library, and everything else second. I can guarantee one thing - the "A" students sure as HELL aren't the ones visiting drudgereport.com!
I've thought this so long, and have seen so many others say the same, that I'm supporting Orwell's canonization as an official prophet. God knows, he had a better batting average than most prophets.
Granted, Sony hasn't established themselves as much of an evil overlord in the past. It's just that when they decided to do a boffo maneuver, they did it in such a big way all at once. To put a malicious binary program on an audio CD is a step too far. To have their first-offered fix hose things up even worse is beyond that. To say it infected hundreds of thousands of computers (including the Department of Defense!!!) puts it on a level with the greatest worms in history, albeit as a different kind of program, of course. The fact that numerous viruses have already been found that exploit the backdoor left open by the rootkit makes it scandalous. To think they did this to protect (amongst others) a Celine Dion album makes it hysterically funny.
I find it more likely it was someone in Sony BMG being told to protect Sony's interests and they took it a step too far. That, or it was a rogue manager in Sony.
I've often thought the same thing. Perhaps even a lone rogue programmer thought he'd throw a BIG scoop of organic fertilizer into the ventilation system. It's hard to picture the decision to do this taking place on a top executive level without hearing a nearby lawyer clearing his throat and saying, "Uh, we need to talk..."
Man, whatever happened to recording songs off the radio to cassette? I *still* have that capacity on my stereo.
No, I wasn't talking about Flash at all. Flash is never the answer, no matter what the question is.
Did it ever occur to you that the parts look different because they do different things ?
See, I come to it from a programming background. In C, you would declare char *variable="my string"; , and that's the "what". Then you'd use ncurses for example: mvprintw(screen,10,12,variable); , and that's the "how". Annoying popups and visual effects can be done in their own library extensions to the language, which STILL have the same logic of syntax throughout, as with the SDL library for C. There is NO inherent reason why doing different functions requires a tag to be in nested angle brackets in one place and in lists seperated by colons and semicolons in another. And ActiveX can be dragged to the garbage can!
I, for one, like being able to tell these apart, even when someone insists on embedding them all into a single file.
Hey, thanks for your 2 cents, anyway! You mean in HTML, you can't tell the <b> from the <ul> just because they both use abreviations nested in angle brackets?
What gets me to wondering, is: Does Bill Gates' computer at home (because it should be running Windows) Blue-Screen-crash and get virus-infected and get rootkitted by Sony just like the rest of the Windows' boxen? God, I hope so. I hope he also gets frustrated enough to punch holes in the screen when it can't install the driver for his new piece of hardware and it won't stop asking to every time it boots. You should at least use your own product, just to see what you're putting everybody else through. But that would be too honest...
Bill Gates was never a hacker, I don't think. In fact, I don't think he's even touched a computer in 20 years. As soon as DOS 1.0 began selling in the little glad-wrapped floppies, everything he did after that was delegate.
Now that goes right to the heart of why I hate web development. Each of the languages of web design are poky little scriptlets, weak beyond belief, so that to actually *do* something, you need three or four just to get you through it. It's really saying something when you needed four languages to design the page that your web browser displays, but you only needed one to write the web browser itself.
The web needs to be torn down and rewritten from scratch. Start with ONE language that does EVERYTHING, all with the SAME SYNTAX ON EVERY LINE. Not doing this part with a C-style curly brace here, and that part with an HTML-style angle-bracket there, and using twenty different commands in ten different dialects to do the same thing. Web source is starting to look like Perl on acid.
Both of whom are rather eclipsed by what I've come to call the "devolutionists", that is, the anti-learning, book-burning, everything-bashing clods, a few of whom infest /. Devolutionists (wait, it'll catch on) insist that there should be NO learning, that everything is TOO hard (no, you can't make it easier: those breath strips that dissolve on your toungue are too hard.), and that I'm a bad person just because I LEARNED and believe that OTHERS CAN LEARN, TOO. Devolutionists resent all advancement of the human race since the Dark Ages, and can't wait to get back so they can curl up in their safe little manure pile. No kidding!
I've left off most of my Usenet usage, basically because websites/forums/blogs give me most of what I was looking for information-wise, and Slashdot gives me all the geek twaddle I need. I have horded a few megs of more amusing Usenet archives (alt.sysadmin.recovery and the works of Kibo spring instantly to mind), just to save for reminiscence when I'm in the old geek's home. But Usenet has definitely waned in usefulness compared to other internet resources, and it *is* crawling with spam, anyway. (That virus business is bogus; Usenet's safer than IRC. And as for obscene sexual propositions...it's the net. What do expect, a cathedral?)
I will say this, I still turn to Usenet if I can't find information on a subject *anywhere* else: it'll be there.
I always wondered about this one. I ask what's it good for, and get something like, "So we can rebel against our governement if it goes bad." Uh, yeah, I see. But not having a second amendment didn't stop the US Revolution against the British in the first place, did it? And the trouble over in France showed guns all over the place, but they're forbidden to have guns, too, aren't they? And you'd not be rebelling against a government unless you had a problem with it's laws in the first place, so what difference does it make?
No, I'm asking because I never got around to answering this question to my satisfaction.
And you know who's worried about that? Customers? Their peers? Nope, I'll tell you: Middle Managers. PHB's coming round with their sole annual productive output: the office dress calandar, with the intricacy of the I Ching combined with the logic of Jabberwocky. And a new "team spirit" shirt every fricking week! This is the kind of stuff they'd rather spend money on than pay you.
Every time in my life (in tech jobs) that I was confronted about workplace attire, my response pretty much amounted to "F--- off.", as I blew past them on my way to putting out the next fire/ rescuing the next luser from their own stupidity/ meeting the next deadline. Never heard about it again for another six months. I always stuck to button-down shirts tucked into casual slacks, anyway. It's not like I was dressed like a Nirvana fan.
This rant brought to you by "People who make BOFH's look warm 'n' friendly".
Apparently:
To:all Slashdotters
From: The Big Penguin
Subject: Protective measures
We will be switching exclusively to the Linux operating system at 1200 hours effective Tuesday. This will ensure that we can run any music CD with impunity, be it ripped or legit.
Sincerly,
T.B.P.