Agreed, spam could really screw things up. Different ontologies aren't such a big problem, as there are already tools to translate between them -- that's part of the show, rather than being showstopper. However, when a search engine like this is open source, available to install on a lan (or any specific project server), and can be kickstarted with an ontology that says "we trust x, y, and z, and n hops of trust from them, with each trust hop reduced by a m", things may start to look up.
I never suggested that it was a contest, but he did sound like he had very modest requirements, by which he was judging everyone else's requirements. I don't think it was wrong to correct that assumption. I certainly never called anyone unprofessional.
Don't forget that digital media and e-commerce are all converging around PCs. Computers may be mainly educational tools now, but one day, those laptops will be required to make the poor good consumers.
Nope, you just have simpler needs than others. I have a laptop and desktop on a LAN, firewire external drives, usb printers, joypads, headsets, phone, camera, etc., and I'd still consider that a very modest setup. My plan for a rack-like setup is very much held back right now by cable planning. Not that it's insurmountable, of course.
It sounds like magnetic induction -- same thing they use to charge electric toothbrushes without exposing any wiring to water and toothpaste. It should work just fine with water.
My questions on this would be more focused on how practical it'll actually be, unless it's standardised so that different devices can charge off it, and on how wasteful it is, if it's throwing out energy even when nothing needs it.
Wait 'till you're 80, pensions have long since been abandoned, and you have to compete for food with twenty year-olds who have chips in their heads, and no sense of what it means to slow down and enjoy life. Longer lifespans aren't such a nice prospect, in a capitalist culture.
This is why Windows and Macintosh have had commercial success in the desktop market while Linux flails: the computer works out of the box.
Nope. Windows is the default; nothing more. It may work for a little while, but it screws itself up very quickly. The same isn't true (to the same extent) of Linux or OS X, and if working was the main criteria for sales, then Windows would NOT be in the lead. The fact is, Microsoft has wormed its way into a position of power and fear, and uses it to ensure that people sell its stuff when customers ask for "a computer".
The only reason I see for microsoft doing this is to leverage the FLOSS community, in order to get free ports to other platforms. If -- when -- Operating Systems become commodities (which Linux is really helping to make happen), then.NET will be Microsoft's cross-platform "OS". Anyone who helps them to port the CLR will be helping their future domination of education etc., for free.
No system protects against absolute stupidity, and if you try, you end up with broken systems that punish reasonably intelligent users with multitudinous dialog boxes and warnings that just waste their time.
There's some truth to that, but when, for instance, there is a workflow that is required to ensure correctness, it's generally a very good idea to build that workflow into the system. For instance, if an editor should see an article before it goes to press, the article shouldn't be publishable without an editor's approval. One could apply the same logic to credit card transactions, and many other issues that naïve computer users often don't understand, or simply don't understand the need to take seriously.
"Hi, I'm your local bank representative. Mr Jones has called from Burundi, claiming to be a prince in exile, and saying that you want to give him the entire contents of your bank account. I'm not convinced about the prince thing, but that's between you and him. So you want me to authorise this?"
"Oh, it's another card auth call? Sure, go ahead, I'm watching the game..."
I'm quite convinced that a lot of unexplained illnesses are probably due to nutrients we don't even know about yet.
Rather than taking supplements, the best thing you can do with the known vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. is use them to figure out what a balanced diet looks like. For instance, if you have to eat a certain amount from every food group to get certain nutrients, that's a good indication of what kind of a diet we're used to surviving on. It's arrogant to assume that we understand that diet, and can substitute it (or parts of it) with modern "equivalents".
Your joke points to a sad reality however, that it's only through patenting cures (ie having a monopoly over a cure) can pharmaceutical companies (free enterprises) get the investment capital to develop medicines. Cures are IP, traded and guarded.
I dunno, they do a fairly good job of charging a fortune for diagnostic equipment, consumables, etc. For example, diabetics' glucometers take tiny little sticks which seem to be mainly plastic and cotton wool, and are used and disposed of at a rate of four or five per day, per diabetic. These cost £0.50 per stick in the UK. Maybe there's some rare mineral in those sticks, but I doubt it.
I'm as happy as the next guy to see progress on the extrasolar planet front, but I don't think this is much more than a next step along the way... so far.
According to the stuff I was reading recently about Proxima Centauri, it's a lost hope as a place for earth-like life, mainly because it's a red dwarf, and hasn't been around long enough.
One could argue that windows is the non-standard UI, considering that there are many cross-platform toolkits out there. Don't confuse your own unwillingness to learn a suitable UI with the lack of a suitable UI.
I guess the simple reason is that people's imaginations have been constrained by TV budgets.
Nope. Other shows have tried weird looking aliens. Adults seem to treat them like kids' shows, and lose interest. The thing is... most sci-fi isn't about science or aliens at all; they're just re-tellings of old human stories; those alien stories are just modern versions of ghost/demon/knight stories from millenia ago, that humans find appealing.
The problem is just that most of us simply CAN'T imagine life from other worlds.
For the Win2K users, it got you the gaming APIs and other things formerly only good in the Win98 branch.
XP is Win2K with some modifications. The only thing it added over 2K was what Microsoft didn't care to give to 2K users. Vista, by comparison, has lots of new (well, new to the Windows world; mostly copied from Unix) things.
Apple also has more enemies, I'll bet. Remember what happened last time Microsoft decided they didn't like a certain government IT guy who was proposing a switch to OpenDocument?
Until someone at MS decides that they're "going to f'in kill China", and starts spreading crap about their weird isolationist document format that only commies like, so that everyone else shies away from it.
When the greedy are playing dirty politics, and decent people still care about their reputations, there's no such thing as game over. Well, not for the good, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, spam could really screw things up. Different ontologies aren't such a big problem, as there are already tools to translate between them -- that's part of the show, rather than being showstopper. However, when a search engine like this is open source, available to install on a lan (or any specific project server), and can be kickstarted with an ontology that says "we trust x, y, and z, and n hops of trust from them, with each trust hop reduced by a m", things may start to look up.
I never suggested that it was a contest, but he did sound like he had very modest requirements, by which he was judging everyone else's requirements. I don't think it was wrong to correct that assumption. I certainly never called anyone unprofessional.
You might think so, but if everyone thinks that way, then there's competition for that beach, and you'll no longer be able to afford it ;)
Don't forget that digital media and e-commerce are all converging around PCs. Computers may be mainly educational tools now, but one day, those laptops will be required to make the poor good consumers.
Nope, you just have simpler needs than others. I have a laptop and desktop on a LAN, firewire external drives, usb printers, joypads, headsets, phone, camera, etc., and I'd still consider that a very modest setup. My plan for a rack-like setup is very much held back right now by cable planning. Not that it's insurmountable, of course.
It sounds like magnetic induction -- same thing they use to charge electric toothbrushes without exposing any wiring to water and toothpaste. It should work just fine with water.
My questions on this would be more focused on how practical it'll actually be, unless it's standardised so that different devices can charge off it, and on how wasteful it is, if it's throwing out energy even when nothing needs it.
$ python
$ iruby
Wait 'till you're 80, pensions have long since been abandoned, and you have to compete for food with twenty year-olds who have chips in their heads, and no sense of what it means to slow down and enjoy life. Longer lifespans aren't such a nice prospect, in a capitalist culture.
Nope. Windows is the default; nothing more. It may work for a little while, but it screws itself up very quickly. The same isn't true (to the same extent) of Linux or OS X, and if working was the main criteria for sales, then Windows would NOT be in the lead. The fact is, Microsoft has wormed its way into a position of power and fear, and uses it to ensure that people sell its stuff when customers ask for "a computer".
The only reason I see for microsoft doing this is to leverage the FLOSS community, in order to get free ports to other platforms. If -- when -- Operating Systems become commodities (which Linux is really helping to make happen), then .NET will be Microsoft's cross-platform "OS". Anyone who helps them to port the CLR will be helping their future domination of education etc., for free.
There's some truth to that, but when, for instance, there is a workflow that is required to ensure correctness, it's generally a very good idea to build that workflow into the system. For instance, if an editor should see an article before it goes to press, the article shouldn't be publishable without an editor's approval. One could apply the same logic to credit card transactions, and many other issues that naïve computer users often don't understand, or simply don't understand the need to take seriously.
"Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS."
No, Linux is a Kernel. Debian is an OS, and has plenty of System Design.
"Hi, I'm your local bank representative. Mr Jones has called from Burundi, claiming to be a prince in exile, and saying that you want to give him the entire contents of your bank account. I'm not convinced about the prince thing, but that's between you and him. So you want me to authorise this?"
"Oh, it's another card auth call? Sure, go ahead, I'm watching the game..."
I'm quite convinced that a lot of unexplained illnesses are probably due to nutrients we don't even know about yet.
Rather than taking supplements, the best thing you can do with the known vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. is use them to figure out what a balanced diet looks like. For instance, if you have to eat a certain amount from every food group to get certain nutrients, that's a good indication of what kind of a diet we're used to surviving on. It's arrogant to assume that we understand that diet, and can substitute it (or parts of it) with modern "equivalents".
This thread is about other lifeforms existing on other planets, not our lifeform spreading to other planets.
On age: evolution took a while here. On type: different types of stars have different lifetimes.
I dunno, they do a fairly good job of charging a fortune for diagnostic equipment, consumables, etc. For example, diabetics' glucometers take tiny little sticks which seem to be mainly plastic and cotton wool, and are used and disposed of at a rate of four or five per day, per diabetic. These cost £0.50 per stick in the UK. Maybe there's some rare mineral in those sticks, but I doubt it.
I'm as happy as the next guy to see progress on the extrasolar planet front, but I don't think this is much more than a next step along the way... so far.
According to the stuff I was reading recently about Proxima Centauri, it's a lost hope as a place for earth-like life, mainly because it's a red dwarf, and hasn't been around long enough.
One could argue that windows is the non-standard UI, considering that there are many cross-platform toolkits out there. Don't confuse your own unwillingness to learn a suitable UI with the lack of a suitable UI.
Agreed. It sounded good, until his use of the phrase "necessary for life", at which point the whole thing fell apart.
Nope. Other shows have tried weird looking aliens. Adults seem to treat them like kids' shows, and lose interest. The thing is... most sci-fi isn't about science or aliens at all; they're just re-tellings of old human stories; those alien stories are just modern versions of ghost/demon/knight stories from millenia ago, that humans find appealing.
The problem is just that most of us simply CAN'T imagine life from other worlds.
XP is Win2K with some modifications. The only thing it added over 2K was what Microsoft didn't care to give to 2K users. Vista, by comparison, has lots of new (well, new to the Windows world; mostly copied from Unix) things.
It also bears a striking resemblance to the Nemesis Star theory, which solves a problem that already has simpler solutions.
Apple also has more enemies, I'll bet. Remember what happened last time Microsoft decided they didn't like a certain government IT guy who was proposing a switch to OpenDocument?
Until someone at MS decides that they're "going to f'in kill China", and starts spreading crap about their weird isolationist document format that only commies like, so that everyone else shies away from it.
When the greedy are playing dirty politics, and decent people still care about their reputations, there's no such thing as game over. Well, not for the good, anyway.