It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
That must be a pretty common thing to do at college dorms. My college dorm had many letters and catalogs being addressed to "Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness". I can only imagine what the data entry folks are thinking when they type this stuff in - maybe "thanks for the laugh":-)
I also read too quickly to make it worthwhile to buy a lot of individual books (not because of speed reading training, just because I read a _lot_ when I was a kid), so I've ended up adopting a couple of tactics:
1. Look for trilogies (to make the pleasant experience last longer).
2. Read while standing next to the book shelf at the bookstore:-) As long as I don't sit down, and aren't bending the spine of the book, I generally don't get bothered.
(This used to be "visit the library", but I read everything in the science fiction/fantasy section in my local library, and they don't update it often enough to be worthwhile...)
People, before you reply stating how utterly evil the Microsofts, Nintendos, and other large corporations are, ask yourself this: "What happened to making an honest living?"
Yeah, I keep wondering about that too. I wonder why people think they deserve to make money indefinitely off something that was written down somewhere and has left their control.
Unlike, for instance, people who _really_ make an honest living by receiving compensation for providing goods & services.
Whereas the actuality would be that by changing the behavior of the firmware, you've made it possible for the machine to do things it wasn't allowed to before:-)
I always wondered if it might be a good idea for laws to have constitutionally-required expirations, so that they have to be renewed by the legislature or they become no longer valid. That would take care of a lot of this leftover cruft, and might keep the legislature busy enough maintaining the existing laws to slow them down at coming up with new ways to screw over the general populace.
Inidentally, this is one of the advantages of the microkernel approach: by severely limiting the code that must be run in kernel space, you can minimize context switches between kernel and user mode and save a lot of time.
That's odd - I heard that many of the early, naive implementations of microkernels caused performance degradation because of the massive context switching that was required between all the various user-space processes created to handle all of the functionality which was normally handled in the monolithic kernel.
Re:Beware of overusing patterns.
on
Design Patterns
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· Score: 2
Are you a coder or a planner?
In the "real world" (tm) there is no clean separation between the "design" and the "planning" phase - because things change.
Actually, it's this whole viewpoint why I think Design Patterns & Refactoring go together like PB&J...
One of the reasons why I like working with other people who also understand design patterns is because it simplifies a LOT of communication - instead of having to repeatedly describe an entire architecture, you can just say "I used the Abstract Factory pattern, and these are the names of the relevant objects", and then everyone knows what you're talking about (and can sanity check your code in a review to tell you if you violated the pattern somehow).
Screw that, have the starship accelerate/decelerate at 2Gs for the trip. By the time the ship gets there, all the colonists will have evolved into immensely strong dwarves:)
Actually, I would say that it is more important to make sure that your recursive algorithm is provably bounded, i.e., each level of recursion can be shown to work on a smaller piece of data until all of the data has been consumed.
Tail recursion is just an efficiency optimization for a certain kind of recursion. It wouldn't stop a compiler from an infinite recursion though.
In the US, I believe it's against the law for telemarketers to call you on your cell phone (because of paying for the incoming calls thing). The telemarketing firms can get fined pretty heavily for breaking this rule. I am guessing that the various cell phone companies register the ranges of phone numbers that they use for cell phones with someone so that the telemarketers can avoid calling them.
I get about 6 telemarketing calls a night on my land line (which I refuse to answer anymore - I just keep it for my security system & DirecTV system). I've gotten 1 on my cell phone in the last 3 months, and as soon as I stated that this was my cell phone, they apologized & hung up.
Let's say you're some lowly patent clerk, underpaid and generally unappreciated.
Your job performance is rated by how many patent applications you grant. There is no negative feedback (other than pride in your job) to discourage you from granting stupid patents.
Your buddies laugh about any ethical concerns and keep telling you, "Don't worry, the court system will fix anything we screw up."
What are the odds that a person in such a situation won't just rubberstamp everything that comes across his/her desk?
According to the rules (as I understand them), the only higher authority in the PTO is the Patent Office Appeal board - and the appeal board has a 6 month waiting list before they'll even tell us whether they'll take the case. (If anyone knowledgeable about difficulties with the Patent Office has any suggestions, I'll love to pass them on to my boss!)
Not only that, but we are technically winning each re-exam so we do not have the standing to take our case to the Appeals board, but then the examiner's supervisor keeps letting the big company submit "a little more" prior art (BS stuff which is easy to refute) to force a new re-exam, which lets them delay the court case for 4-8 months (the judge doesn't want to do anything until he gets a firm "patent is valid/not valid" indication from the Patent Office).
We are hoping that because this is the 5th re-exam (and four were in our favor), that the judge will decide that "enough is enough" and let the case go forward (in which case we're expecting to kick butt), but in the meantime we're just a small company with our IP in an uncertain status trying to stay afloat in a bad economy.
The way the British laws are written, if you cannot hand over the keys necessary for decryption, then they can put you in jail - even if you've honestly lost or "forgotten" the keys, or if somebody passed you the encrypted message w/o giving you the key to decrypt it.
Basically, it's up to the Bobbies to decide whether they want to throw you in jail or not.
If this technique turns out to be applicable to human sperm, it seems like it would be used for creating designer babies (with all the ethical issues that might cause).
If you know that the parents have a genetic defect which will be passed to their children, it seems only logical to try and fix that genetic defect at the earliest possible stage of development.
Of course, if the technology becomes "reliable", I could see vain & shallow parents asking for specific hair/skin/eye colors, "make sure they're athletic gods", etc.
And how about the possibility of extending the telemorase cap of the fertilized cell? At some increased risk of cancer, you might be able to extend the kid's lifetime to some obscene length of time (if the telemorase length is the only cell division "counter").
His boss is involved in all sorts of payoffs and dirt - I literally couldn't believe the stories he was telling.
I wouldn't be surprised - our (very small) company has been fighting a huge company over the violation of one of our patents, and they're using the strategy of delaying the reviews of our patent so that we can't go to court (and they are hoping that our little company will eventually die).
We've fought off their challenges to our patent FOUR times (now going on a fifth reexamination), taking over 4 years now. Each time, the primary examiner has revalidated our patent - and then his boss overrides his conclusion & throws our patent out (the same boss each time), usually without a reason.
Needless to say, we've got some questions about the motivations of the patent examiner's supervisor - but there isn't anything we can prove, and due to the rules of the Patent Office, we can't get anyone else to look at the case.
Some of the more brain-dead members of my undergraduate house would stuff our chimney full of newspaper & start it burning. The resultant chimney draft caused our entire house to vibrate like a 1Hz organ pipe (you could feel your internal organs shifting to that beat).
I kept expecting the vibration to shake the chimney (and part of the house) apart, but it was still intact by the time I graduated...
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That must be a pretty common thing to do at college dorms. My college dorm had many letters and catalogs being addressed to "Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness". I can only imagine what the data entry folks are thinking when they type this stuff in - maybe "thanks for the laugh" :-)
I also read too quickly to make it worthwhile to buy a lot of individual books (not because of speed reading training, just because I read a _lot_ when I was a kid), so I've ended up adopting a couple of tactics:
:-) As long as I don't sit down, and aren't bending the spine of the book, I generally don't get bothered.
1. Look for trilogies (to make the pleasant experience last longer).
2. Read while standing next to the book shelf at the bookstore
(This used to be "visit the library", but I read everything in the science fiction/fantasy section in my local library, and they don't update it often enough to be worthwhile...)
Sorry, we're not capable of developing anything with the required level of magnification.
Actually, I believe this is an joke adapting the kind of argument creationists use about evolution to the "fake moon landing" crowd.
Yeah, I keep wondering about that too. I wonder why people think they deserve to make money indefinitely off something that was written down somewhere and has left their control.
Unlike, for instance, people who _really_ make an honest living by receiving compensation for providing goods & services.
We'd lose all of our politicians & lawyers! uh...never mind!
Whereas the actuality would be that by changing the behavior of the firmware, you've made it possible for the machine to do things it wasn't allowed to before :-)
Maybe the satellites could also be pulling & pushing on each other, in order to maintain their relative positioning.
I always wondered if it might be a good idea for laws to have constitutionally-required expirations, so that they have to be renewed by the legislature or they become no longer valid. That would take care of a lot of this leftover cruft, and might keep the legislature busy enough maintaining the existing laws to slow them down at coming up with new ways to screw over the general populace.
How do you know the Athlon is having signal propagation problems? Do you have access to a description of its internal architecture?
I do _not_ want to know how you trained your dog to do that...
Owwww...THAT reference dredged up a really old memory.
In retrospect, you know that boys his age would've tried to use the thing to peek into girls' dressing rooms...
That's odd - I heard that many of the early, naive implementations of microkernels caused performance degradation because of the massive context switching that was required between all the various user-space processes created to handle all of the functionality which was normally handled in the monolithic kernel.
Actually, it's this whole viewpoint why I think Design Patterns & Refactoring go together like PB&J...
One of the reasons why I like working with other people who also understand design patterns is because it simplifies a LOT of communication - instead of having to repeatedly describe an entire architecture, you can just say "I used the Abstract Factory pattern, and these are the names of the relevant objects", and then everyone knows what you're talking about (and can sanity check your code in a review to tell you if you violated the pattern somehow).
Screw that, have the starship accelerate/decelerate at 2Gs for the trip. By the time the ship gets there, all the colonists will have evolved into immensely strong dwarves :)
Do you really need that extra speed to keep up with Lara Croft's ever-increasing polygon count?
In the US, I believe it's against the law for telemarketers to call you on your cell phone (because of paying for the incoming calls thing). The telemarketing firms can get fined pretty heavily for breaking this rule. I am guessing that the various cell phone companies register the ranges of phone numbers that they use for cell phones with someone so that the telemarketers can avoid calling them.
I get about 6 telemarketing calls a night on my land line (which I refuse to answer anymore - I just keep it for my security system & DirecTV system). I've gotten 1 on my cell phone in the last 3 months, and as soon as I stated that this was my cell phone, they apologized & hung up.
Actually, think of it more this way:
Let's say you're some lowly patent clerk, underpaid and generally unappreciated.
Your job performance is rated by how many patent applications you grant. There is no negative feedback (other than pride in your job) to discourage you from granting stupid patents.
Your buddies laugh about any ethical concerns and keep telling you, "Don't worry, the court system will fix anything we screw up."
What are the odds that a person in such a situation won't just rubberstamp everything that comes across his/her desk?
According to the rules (as I understand them), the only higher authority in the PTO is the Patent Office Appeal board - and the appeal board has a 6 month waiting list before they'll even tell us whether they'll take the case. (If anyone knowledgeable about difficulties with the Patent Office has any suggestions, I'll love to pass them on to my boss!)
Not only that, but we are technically winning each re-exam so we do not have the standing to take our case to the Appeals board, but then the examiner's supervisor keeps letting the big company submit "a little more" prior art (BS stuff which is easy to refute) to force a new re-exam, which lets them delay the court case for 4-8 months (the judge doesn't want to do anything until he gets a firm "patent is valid/not valid" indication from the Patent Office).
We are hoping that because this is the 5th re-exam (and four were in our favor), that the judge will decide that "enough is enough" and let the case go forward (in which case we're expecting to kick butt), but in the meantime we're just a small company with our IP in an uncertain status trying to stay afloat in a bad economy.
The way the British laws are written, if you cannot hand over the keys necessary for decryption, then they can put you in jail - even if you've honestly lost or "forgotten" the keys, or if somebody passed you the encrypted message w/o giving you the key to decrypt it.
Basically, it's up to the Bobbies to decide whether they want to throw you in jail or not.
If this technique turns out to be applicable to human sperm, it seems like it would be used for creating designer babies (with all the ethical issues that might cause).
If you know that the parents have a genetic defect which will be passed to their children, it seems only logical to try and fix that genetic defect at the earliest possible stage of development.
Of course, if the technology becomes "reliable", I could see vain & shallow parents asking for specific hair/skin/eye colors, "make sure they're athletic gods", etc.
And how about the possibility of extending the telemorase cap of the fertilized cell? At some increased risk of cancer, you might be able to extend the kid's lifetime to some obscene length of time (if the telemorase length is the only cell division "counter").
I wouldn't be surprised - our (very small) company has been fighting a huge company over the violation of one of our patents, and they're using the strategy of delaying the reviews of our patent so that we can't go to court (and they are hoping that our little company will eventually die).
We've fought off their challenges to our patent FOUR times (now going on a fifth reexamination), taking over 4 years now. Each time, the primary examiner has revalidated our patent - and then his boss overrides his conclusion & throws our patent out (the same boss each time), usually without a reason.
Needless to say, we've got some questions about the motivations of the patent examiner's supervisor - but there isn't anything we can prove, and due to the rules of the Patent Office, we can't get anyone else to look at the case.
You can never have enough disk space for editing video.
Some of the more brain-dead members of my undergraduate house would stuff our chimney full of newspaper & start it burning. The resultant chimney draft caused our entire house to vibrate like a 1Hz organ pipe (you could feel your internal organs shifting to that beat).
I kept expecting the vibration to shake the chimney (and part of the house) apart, but it was still intact by the time I graduated...