Well, yeah... there are strong blemishes on McCain. One that concerns me a lot is his continued chummy relationship with lobbyists. Another is his weak but real support for torture. I don't understand that one at all.
However, to respond to your other specific points:
- His tax cuts for the rich actually would benefit me... guess I'm guilty of self-interest there - He dumped is injured wife to marry a 25-yr-old $100M heiress? Wow... that's pretty impressive! Not sure if it affects my vote. At least he had the decency to end a relationship that no longer was built on trust. - incompetence? He's many things, but after watching his voting record for years, I believe he's quite competent. Wrong sometimes, but who isn't? - McCain is on record saying he will close Guantanamo.
In comparison to other republican presidents who I feel did a good job, McCain comes with relatively few blemishes, though the spots he has are hard to overlook. There are valid points you make, but as a republican facing democrats in congress, I think we can count on bipartisan politics, and diminished far-right nonsense. All that said, I'm voting for Obama:-)
I'm having some trouble at work this week, which helps explain my acidic tone, but I have to apologize for it.
I do know reasonable and intelligent free-thinking people who voted for Bush Jr twice, who are able to vote for non-republicans and who aren't voting based on their religious beliefs. The ones I'm thinking of no longer support Bush.
I'm swayed by your gridlock argument. The best times of both Bush Sr and Bill Clintion, IMO, happened while they faced the opposite party in congress. I'm not sure I'd consider Hillary simply as a candidate to make us all want gridlock again... Bush already has most of us there, and I think McCain could handle gridlock nicely. Also, all the strong and intelligent women in my life, including my wife, mother and aunt, are strongly pro-Hillary. I don't understand why, but with that kind of endorsement, perhaps there's something she would bring as president I don't see. My daughter is against Hillary, because she wants to be the first woman president! She's eight. As I said, I'm interested in seeing if Obama can bring substantial change in Washington, but short of that, I'm voting for grid-lock. In reality, I see good reasons to consider any of the remaining candidates... I'm currently a happy camper with regards to the choices.
"Glass eaters" are people of any political party who would rather eat glass than say something negative of a sitting president from their party. Both parties have lots of them, true believers who sometimes are very smart, but believe in the politics they're fed religiously. The best programmer I work with is one... brilliant, but he'll never cast a non-republican vote, regardless of who the actual candidates are, except on occasions like primaries where he can use his vote to screw up the democrats.
The common use off neo-con is described well here. However, I meant the small group of self described neo-cons who exclude virtually everyone else. This small group includes Rumsfeld and Cheney, and a few other hyper-smart hyper-dangerous power brokers. It's this small group of zealots that represent most of the danger, while most common self-described neo-cons are just newly minted conservatives, many of them very reasonable republicans.
However, any reasonable person voting for Bush Jr is either a glass eater or likes to mix religion and politics. As a president, he's so bad, no free thinking person I know supports him.
Sorry about starting the name calling - my bad. If you have blood pressure issues, slashdot might be a dangerous place! Obviously, you're a free thinker, so sorry about my misdirected comments. It was a sin for Bill to lie to his family. It also was a sin for Congress to ask about his sex life. Someone should go to jail for outing a CIA operative, but probably not Libby. The real culprit should be outed, who likely as not is Dick Cheney.
The republican party you want back is the one I would switch to in a heartbeat. The current administration grew government by 60%, yet tries to characterize democrats as the "big government" party. They claim to want government off our backs, and then take away our rights to privacy, hide their actions in secrecy, commit torture, open up prisons for people without even Habeas Corpus... the list of hypocrisy is long and shameful. They play card tricks like, "Look at all that pork! There goes the money!" While we worried about $18B in pork (less than.2% of the budget), Bush increased our debt by 50%, and basically gave away our money to his rich constituents. If we could get back to a non-religiously based republican party that actually did what it said, without all the lies and hypocrisy, I'd finally find a political home.
I like McCain, and Bush Sr is my favorite living president. Republicans who can see how rotten the Bush administration is are my kind of republicans. The others - glass eaters, neo-cons, and idiots who want to mix religion and government - those guys are ruining not just the party, but the whole planet. If the free-thinking republicans formed a party, what a great party it would be! McCain would be part of it, and so would Lieberman and Powell. Nuts like Cheney and Rumsfeld could stay with the religious zealots who they've duped into supporting them. Ah... that's a nice day-dream. Oh well, back to reality. Guess I'll just have to vote for Obama.
Yeah, that one scares me, too. It probably wont happen, but I'm pretty sure Dick Cheney has thought about it (Bush might, if he actually thought now and then). In the mind of a demented neo-con, is it worth nuking just one American town in order to defend Americans from terrorist-nukes forever? Cheney might possibly have the power to do that. I doubt he's that insane, but the possibility scares me.
I never voted for Clinton because I think a guy who's family can't trust him shouldn't be trusted to run the country. However, from now on, I think it only fair that any politician you personally vote for should be called to Congress, and asked if they masturbate. If they say no, they don't, they should go to jail, and if they say yes, they do, they should be required to describe explicit details on TV. You know... because it's just not right to commit perjury.
And obviously, you should be up in arms about Bush pardoning Libby. Let me guess... your not!
There are two kinds of people who still support Bush Jr. The religious right, who I strongly feel are harming the world through their politics, and glass eaters. Glass eaters (from either party) have drunk the Kool-Aid, and are incapable of even thinking badly of any sitting president from their party. From your ridiculous belief stated above, I'm putting you in the glass-eater category.
You're totally right, and with open-source trustworthy packages like openssl, I feel pretty comfortable that it'd be waaaaay cheaper for the feds to plant cameras and mics in my house than to decrypt my data links. Let the feds watch the ignorant masses... and of course me. I'd definitely watch me:-)
I probably should have stated the rough date... this would have been around 1995, and people were just discovering that the web could be used for things like medical condition support groups. I googled for familiar sites, but couldn't find one. I'm sure by now there are active support sites for both disorders.
In the end my ex-wife's condition partially led to our divorce, so I was unsuccessful in helping her find a way to live with her disorders. If you or a friend is dealing with one or both conditions, my heart goes out to you.
Agreed. At $20-40/barrel, it's not even as cheap as Canada's vast oil sands, and production directly from oil shale is profitable for anything near $100. We can also convert coal to fuel, through a liquefaction process. It seems that if we burn all our potential fossil fuels, we could probably slag the planet.
Fortunatetly, other cheaper alternatives exist, from "cheaper than coal" solar to nuclear.
Sometimes it is introverts. My ex-wife suffered from both panic disorder and social phobia. I found a great web site with hundreds to thousands of insightful posts about living with panic disorder. On the same host, I found a single post about social phobia:
I couldn't agree more! Much of the worst code I've ever had to deal with is C++ code written by smart guys who don't know what parts of C++ to use. How about mixing double inheritance from template classes, with smart pointers and garbage collection, when all you're writing is quicksort? Smart guys can take a 100 line problem and turn it into a 10,000 line C++ solution.
I focus instead on restricting programmers to the tools they need, so they focus their creativity on algorithms instead of coding methodology. I've even codified it all, as an extension to C, rather than C++. Works great for team programming. I had a guy last week write two IC placers: simulated annealing, and quadratic placement, in 5600 lines of hand written code, debugged and working. He did it in 6 days while supporting a difficult client, without working weekends or evenings. I'd estimate his productivity at 10X to 100X higher than average.
I agree with Huckabee. There are people I love who have unacceptable flaws. As a black man in Chicago, I suspect Obama has little choice but to love people in spite of their racist views. I live in NC. Try living in the South without having any racist friends.
As for TFA, wow... I was already an Obama supporter, but now I'm even more impressed. BTW, I see Obama banner adds often on slashdot. No on else running for president has shown up for me on any site. Obama runs his site on Linux, the other two run Windows. The tech savvyness of the president matters.
I understand what NP-complete means... In this case it means we can use traditional computers to convert any NP-complete problem into a factoring problem in polynomial time, assuming we can prove that factoring is NP-complete (which it is almost certainly not). Then, since quantum computers can solve the factoring problem, we'd get the answer to any NP-complete problem we pose. There are problems harder than NP-complete, but many common ones, including large classes of automated theorem proving, are NP-complete. A quantum computer capable of solving MP-complete problems would be so powerful, it would seem more than intelligent. It would be able to find globally optimal solutions that humanity could never find otherwise, not with all our computers together, not for centuries. For example, consider chip design. We could pose chip design as an NP-complete optimization problem: what is the smallest chip we can build to implement a specific netlist. A quantum computer with enough qbits which is capable of solving any NP-complete problem could be used to answer this question optimally. It could literally cut tens of man-years off of some chip design projects, while yielding a far superior (in fact optimal) results. Such a computer would change the world. I consider this a contradiction... the existence of such a computer violates my sense of reality. It is far easier to believe that factoring is indeed not quite as hard as NP-complete problems.
Actually, quantum computers don't work quite like that. The result of a quantum computer computation is the superposition of all the possible results. At the end, you have to collapse the wave function, and you wind up with a specific result, randomly from all the possible results. To factor large integers, you have to rotate the cubits 90 degrees after doing the computation, and somehow that's similar to doing an FFT. If you run the computation many times, statistically you get results bunched into clumps, and the distance between clumps tells you what the factor is.
There's no evidence to date that a quantum computer can be used to solve NP complete problems, and most people seem to think factoring is in a class in between P and NP-complete.
I love that book. It's an absolutely great read, and just reading this one book, you get to join the elite club of people who aren't completely ignorant about cryptography (but you still don't get to actually be considered knowledgeable about it).
Quantum computers being able to factor big numbers is the best proof I've seen that factoring is not NP complete. If it were, we could just use these futuristic quantum computers (I'm talking far-future, many thousands or even millions of qbits) to solve just about anything. The darned things would be like oracles, just ask them any super hard question, like how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and they'd just spit out the answer. The things would be like talking directly to God. Is that even remotely possible? I don't think so. Factoring numbers is just not as hard as any NP complete problem.
AFAIK, DARPA just funds research projects. People who actually work for DARPA are mostly government administrators. You have to be careful, though. DARPA isn't suppose to fund projects that directly result in any actual products for the military. It's suppose to be far-future advanced research. I was once raked over the coals for pushing for actual commercialization of a DARPA funded project (cheap, reliable, rad-hard-by-design chips). Personally, I prefer to stay clear of DARPA, and instead work on projects funded to actually build something useful for today's military. It might sound fun on slashdot, but I've found DARPA work highly frustrating... but I like building real systems, so it's a matter of preference. With research, you can change the rules at the end and declare success... it's often very political. With real systems, the proof is in the product. There's no faking your way around it.
The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory, to the point that most of us just go ahead and refer to it as a fact. To say it's only a theory at this point requires an esoteric discussion of the definition of theory vs fact, and the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
However, exactly what happened in the past, and when, gets murkier as we go back in time. By the time we get to the actual origin of the self-replicating life form from which we all evolved, we have very little insight. Some scientists even suspect that Earth's initial life form may have come from an asteroid, and evolved initially outside the Solar System. Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory.
I think it's best to focus on more recent evolution in discussions with less educated parents, and those who purposely avoid learning about it. I find few people who believe God made the Earth in seven days have any clue how massive the body of evidence for evolution is. To respect their point of view, I generally concede that a "day" could have been a very long time back then, or perhaps God has reasons for trying to fool us. We don't even need to settle the "fact" vs "theory" dispute. Simply educating people about why we believe evolution is happening would be a great step forward. Arguing about what happened billions of years ago to create life in the first place just gives fud-slingers an opening to refute the entire body of evidence for evolution.
Operating systems are a mature technology, and there is no money to be made there, unless you have a huge monopoly or a well liked brand. If there were value left in operating system, Vista would be better than XP. I've heard the latest Microsoft Office is great, and worth some money, so kudos to Microsoft for earning a few bucks. Explorer hasn't ever made Microsoft money, and I wonder why they didn't just ship Netscape. Adobe, on the other hand, gets thousands every year from my wife's company, simply because there's nothing out there anywhere near as good for publishing. There's money to be made through innovation, and that's where we geeks should focus. Making money through branding and monopolistic practices... let's leave that to the big boys.
FOSS may threaten monopolies, simply because they offer a choice that can't be buried in a competitive market place the old fashioned way - with tons of money. However, FOSS doesn't often threaten innovative companies.
Stealing software is similar to stealing a film. Both hurt their respective industries, and have nothing to do with a discussion of FOSS.
FOSS rarely hurts commercial software companies who still sell valuable software. That's because we geeks generally prefer to get rich rather than give away our work for free. Once a software niche has matured, and when there's no remaining opportunities to make money, you generally see the rise of FOSS. Tetris is a good example of a game so simple that any good hacker could crank out a clone. It was worth a bit in it's time, but not now.
You know, there's another good reason IT guys support open source projects. When things go wrong, you just enter the error message into Google, and 80% of the time, the solution is right there! It's faster to fix open-source goobers than it is to call a support company. Google and open-source make you smarter than a paid closed-source consultant. Why do IT guys support open-source themselves? Because they can. Because it's actually easier. And... it's more fun:-)
I'll try to answer... The iPhone has nothing going for it technology wise... it's old news, except for the great touch-screen. However, the stupid cell industry has had a buzz-word mentality for decades now. "3G, MMS, vidoe recoding"... the existing players just add a bunch of features and check the boxes. Without a great OS, and great programming, they all suck big time. How about adding 8 gig of music to a phone? The stupid cell industry added less than 1 gig. How about a giant display so you can do real pictures and video, rather than some postage stamp? How about adding a simple zoom feature to that big display, and real wi-fi so you get an actual functional browser? I had several phones with limited browsers that only were able to view the stupid cell phone company's sites. And the interface? The typical phone has a stupid wheel that is actually just 4 direction buttons. The devices with real keyboards have some value, but the rest are just worthless. What really pissed me off is that my last two stupid cell carriers wouldn't even let me download pictures I took with my camera... they held them hostage, and wanted me to pay to get them off my phone. Fuckers.
When I had an iPhone, I used the music player, camera, ssh shell, wi-fi, photo-album (great for sales), e-mail, contacts, man... they gave me very few programs, but I hammered them all. Very unlike the crap I've gotten for years from the rest.
I also hammered the 3rd party hacker-apps. I particularly loved ssh-ing into servers at work to check on things. I'd also do some slashdotting, and check on the latest news from sites I like (rather than the ones my cell company prefers). Frankly, the rest of the field sucks big-time compared to the current generation of iPhone. Again, the big threat I see to Apple is Google Android, and even then only if Android opens up a bit more, and only if Steve remains mostly closed.
I fully agree. The cell industry has had it's ass so far up there for so long, it took Steve Jobs to show them how screwed up they are. The only threat IMO to Apple dominating smart cell phones the way they dominated music players is Google's Android, which currently is far far behind, and Steve Jobs keeping his head in his own ass to boot. Steve can make an advanced and desirable product, but he can't compete against open platforms any better than he competes against Windows/IBM PCs. If Google offers a native devkit (which they currently do not), and Jobs continues to be hostile to native app developers, eventually the iPhone line will be nothing but pretty, high-end low-feature stuff, just like his Macs. It'll be Mac vs Wintel all over again.
The reason Jobs kicks butt in music players is that it's low-end stuff, where we can't build open platforms to compete against him.
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Well, yeah... there are strong blemishes on McCain. One that concerns me a lot is his continued chummy relationship with lobbyists. Another is his weak but real support for torture. I don't understand that one at all.
:-)
However, to respond to your other specific points:
- His tax cuts for the rich actually would benefit me... guess I'm guilty of self-interest there
- He dumped is injured wife to marry a 25-yr-old $100M heiress? Wow... that's pretty impressive! Not sure if it affects my vote. At least he had the decency to end a relationship that no longer was built on trust.
- incompetence? He's many things, but after watching his voting record for years, I believe he's quite competent. Wrong sometimes, but who isn't?
- McCain is on record saying he will close Guantanamo.
In comparison to other republican presidents who I feel did a good job, McCain comes with relatively few blemishes, though the spots he has are hard to overlook. There are valid points you make, but as a republican facing democrats in congress, I think we can count on bipartisan politics, and diminished far-right nonsense. All that said, I'm voting for Obama
I'm having some trouble at work this week, which helps explain my acidic tone, but I have to apologize for it.
I do know reasonable and intelligent free-thinking people who voted for Bush Jr twice, who are able to vote for non-republicans and who aren't voting based on their religious beliefs. The ones I'm thinking of no longer support Bush.
I'm swayed by your gridlock argument. The best times of both Bush Sr and Bill Clintion, IMO, happened while they faced the opposite party in congress. I'm not sure I'd consider Hillary simply as a candidate to make us all want gridlock again... Bush already has most of us there, and I think McCain could handle gridlock nicely. Also, all the strong and intelligent women in my life, including my wife, mother and aunt, are strongly pro-Hillary. I don't understand why, but with that kind of endorsement, perhaps there's something she would bring as president I don't see. My daughter is against Hillary, because she wants to be the first woman president! She's eight. As I said, I'm interested in seeing if Obama can bring substantial change in Washington, but short of that, I'm voting for grid-lock. In reality, I see good reasons to consider any of the remaining candidates... I'm currently a happy camper with regards to the choices.
"Glass eaters" are people of any political party who would rather eat glass than say something negative of a sitting president from their party. Both parties have lots of them, true believers who sometimes are very smart, but believe in the politics they're fed religiously. The best programmer I work with is one... brilliant, but he'll never cast a non-republican vote, regardless of who the actual candidates are, except on occasions like primaries where he can use his vote to screw up the democrats.
The common use off neo-con is described well here. However, I meant the small group of self described neo-cons who exclude virtually everyone else. This small group includes Rumsfeld and Cheney, and a few other hyper-smart hyper-dangerous power brokers. It's this small group of zealots that represent most of the danger, while most common self-described neo-cons are just newly minted conservatives, many of them very reasonable republicans.
However, any reasonable person voting for Bush Jr is either a glass eater or likes to mix religion and politics. As a president, he's so bad, no free thinking person I know supports him.
Sorry about starting the name calling - my bad. If you have blood pressure issues, slashdot might be a dangerous place! Obviously, you're a free thinker, so sorry about my misdirected comments. It was a sin for Bill to lie to his family. It also was a sin for Congress to ask about his sex life. Someone should go to jail for outing a CIA operative, but probably not Libby. The real culprit should be outed, who likely as not is Dick Cheney.
.2% of the budget), Bush increased our debt by 50%, and basically gave away our money to his rich constituents. If we could get back to a non-religiously based republican party that actually did what it said, without all the lies and hypocrisy, I'd finally find a political home.
The republican party you want back is the one I would switch to in a heartbeat. The current administration grew government by 60%, yet tries to characterize democrats as the "big government" party. They claim to want government off our backs, and then take away our rights to privacy, hide their actions in secrecy, commit torture, open up prisons for people without even Habeas Corpus... the list of hypocrisy is long and shameful. They play card tricks like, "Look at all that pork! There goes the money!" While we worried about $18B in pork (less than
I like McCain, and Bush Sr is my favorite living president. Republicans who can see how rotten the Bush administration is are my kind of republicans. The others - glass eaters, neo-cons, and idiots who want to mix religion and government - those guys are ruining not just the party, but the whole planet. If the free-thinking republicans formed a party, what a great party it would be! McCain would be part of it, and so would Lieberman and Powell. Nuts like Cheney and Rumsfeld could stay with the religious zealots who they've duped into supporting them. Ah... that's a nice day-dream. Oh well, back to reality. Guess I'll just have to vote for Obama.
Yeah, that one scares me, too. It probably wont happen, but I'm pretty sure Dick Cheney has thought about it (Bush might, if he actually thought now and then). In the mind of a demented neo-con, is it worth nuking just one American town in order to defend Americans from terrorist-nukes forever? Cheney might possibly have the power to do that. I doubt he's that insane, but the possibility scares me.
I never voted for Clinton because I think a guy who's family can't trust him shouldn't be trusted to run the country. However, from now on, I think it only fair that any politician you personally vote for should be called to Congress, and asked if they masturbate. If they say no, they don't, they should go to jail, and if they say yes, they do, they should be required to describe explicit details on TV. You know... because it's just not right to commit perjury.
And obviously, you should be up in arms about Bush pardoning Libby. Let me guess... your not!
There are two kinds of people who still support Bush Jr. The religious right, who I strongly feel are harming the world through their politics, and glass eaters. Glass eaters (from either party) have drunk the Kool-Aid, and are incapable of even thinking badly of any sitting president from their party. From your ridiculous belief stated above, I'm putting you in the glass-eater category.
You're totally right, and with open-source trustworthy packages like openssl, I feel pretty comfortable that it'd be waaaaay cheaper for the feds to plant cameras and mics in my house than to decrypt my data links. Let the feds watch the ignorant masses... and of course me. I'd definitely watch me :-)
I probably should have stated the rough date... this would have been around 1995, and people were just discovering that the web could be used for things like medical condition support groups. I googled for familiar sites, but couldn't find one. I'm sure by now there are active support sites for both disorders.
In the end my ex-wife's condition partially led to our divorce, so I was unsuccessful in helping her find a way to live with her disorders. If you or a friend is dealing with one or both conditions, my heart goes out to you.
Agreed. At $20-40/barrel, it's not even as cheap as Canada's vast oil sands, and production directly from oil shale is profitable for anything near $100. We can also convert coal to fuel, through a liquefaction process. It seems that if we burn all our potential fossil fuels, we could probably slag the planet.
Fortunatetly, other cheaper alternatives exist, from "cheaper than coal" solar to nuclear.
Sometimes it is introverts. My ex-wife suffered from both panic disorder and social phobia. I found a great web site with hundreds to thousands of insightful posts about living with panic disorder. On the same host, I found a single post about social phobia:
"Is anyone out there?"
How about doing a Google Android app? Cheap GPS enabled phones should soon be available, and there's still time to enter the developer challenge
I couldn't agree more! Much of the worst code I've ever had to deal with is C++ code written by smart guys who don't know what parts of C++ to use. How about mixing double inheritance from template classes, with smart pointers and garbage collection, when all you're writing is quicksort? Smart guys can take a 100 line problem and turn it into a 10,000 line C++ solution.
I focus instead on restricting programmers to the tools they need, so they focus their creativity on algorithms instead of coding methodology. I've even codified it all, as an extension to C, rather than C++. Works great for team programming. I had a guy last week write two IC placers: simulated annealing, and quadratic placement, in 5600 lines of hand written code, debugged and working. He did it in 6 days while supporting a difficult client, without working weekends or evenings. I'd estimate his productivity at 10X to 100X higher than average.
I agree with Huckabee. There are people I love who have unacceptable flaws. As a black man in Chicago, I suspect Obama has little choice but to love people in spite of their racist views. I live in NC. Try living in the South without having any racist friends.
As for TFA, wow... I was already an Obama supporter, but now I'm even more impressed. BTW, I see Obama banner adds often on slashdot. No on else running for president has shown up for me on any site. Obama runs his site on Linux, the other two run Windows. The tech savvyness of the president matters.
I understand what NP-complete means... In this case it means we can use traditional computers to convert any NP-complete problem into a factoring problem in polynomial time, assuming we can prove that factoring is NP-complete (which it is almost certainly not). Then, since quantum computers can solve the factoring problem, we'd get the answer to any NP-complete problem we pose. There are problems harder than NP-complete, but many common ones, including large classes of automated theorem proving, are NP-complete. A quantum computer capable of solving MP-complete problems would be so powerful, it would seem more than intelligent. It would be able to find globally optimal solutions that humanity could never find otherwise, not with all our computers together, not for centuries. For example, consider chip design. We could pose chip design as an NP-complete optimization problem: what is the smallest chip we can build to implement a specific netlist. A quantum computer with enough qbits which is capable of solving any NP-complete problem could be used to answer this question optimally. It could literally cut tens of man-years off of some chip design projects, while yielding a far superior (in fact optimal) results. Such a computer would change the world. I consider this a contradiction... the existence of such a computer violates my sense of reality. It is far easier to believe that factoring is indeed not quite as hard as NP-complete problems.
Actually, quantum computers don't work quite like that. The result of a quantum computer computation is the superposition of all the possible results. At the end, you have to collapse the wave function, and you wind up with a specific result, randomly from all the possible results. To factor large integers, you have to rotate the cubits 90 degrees after doing the computation, and somehow that's similar to doing an FFT. If you run the computation many times, statistically you get results bunched into clumps, and the distance between clumps tells you what the factor is.
There's no evidence to date that a quantum computer can be used to solve NP complete problems, and most people seem to think factoring is in a class in between P and NP-complete.
I love that book. It's an absolutely great read, and just reading this one book, you get to join the elite club of people who aren't completely ignorant about cryptography (but you still don't get to actually be considered knowledgeable about it).
Quantum computers being able to factor big numbers is the best proof I've seen that factoring is not NP complete. If it were, we could just use these futuristic quantum computers (I'm talking far-future, many thousands or even millions of qbits) to solve just about anything. The darned things would be like oracles, just ask them any super hard question, like how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and they'd just spit out the answer. The things would be like talking directly to God. Is that even remotely possible? I don't think so. Factoring numbers is just not as hard as any NP complete problem.
AFAIK, DARPA just funds research projects. People who actually work for DARPA are mostly government administrators. You have to be careful, though. DARPA isn't suppose to fund projects that directly result in any actual products for the military. It's suppose to be far-future advanced research. I was once raked over the coals for pushing for actual commercialization of a DARPA funded project (cheap, reliable, rad-hard-by-design chips). Personally, I prefer to stay clear of DARPA, and instead work on projects funded to actually build something useful for today's military. It might sound fun on slashdot, but I've found DARPA work highly frustrating... but I like building real systems, so it's a matter of preference. With research, you can change the rules at the end and declare success... it's often very political. With real systems, the proof is in the product. There's no faking your way around it.
The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory, to the point that most of us just go ahead and refer to it as a fact. To say it's only a theory at this point requires an esoteric discussion of the definition of theory vs fact, and the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
However, exactly what happened in the past, and when, gets murkier as we go back in time. By the time we get to the actual origin of the self-replicating life form from which we all evolved, we have very little insight. Some scientists even suspect that Earth's initial life form may have come from an asteroid, and evolved initially outside the Solar System. Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory.
I think it's best to focus on more recent evolution in discussions with less educated parents, and those who purposely avoid learning about it. I find few people who believe God made the Earth in seven days have any clue how massive the body of evidence for evolution is. To respect their point of view, I generally concede that a "day" could have been a very long time back then, or perhaps God has reasons for trying to fool us. We don't even need to settle the "fact" vs "theory" dispute. Simply educating people about why we believe evolution is happening would be a great step forward. Arguing about what happened billions of years ago to create life in the first place just gives fud-slingers an opening to refute the entire body of evidence for evolution.
Operating systems are a mature technology, and there is no money to be made there, unless you have a huge monopoly or a well liked brand. If there were value left in operating system, Vista would be better than XP. I've heard the latest Microsoft Office is great, and worth some money, so kudos to Microsoft for earning a few bucks. Explorer hasn't ever made Microsoft money, and I wonder why they didn't just ship Netscape. Adobe, on the other hand, gets thousands every year from my wife's company, simply because there's nothing out there anywhere near as good for publishing. There's money to be made through innovation, and that's where we geeks should focus. Making money through branding and monopolistic practices... let's leave that to the big boys.
FOSS may threaten monopolies, simply because they offer a choice that can't be buried in a competitive market place the old fashioned way - with tons of money. However, FOSS doesn't often threaten innovative companies.
Stealing software is similar to stealing a film. Both hurt their respective industries, and have nothing to do with a discussion of FOSS.
FOSS rarely hurts commercial software companies who still sell valuable software. That's because we geeks generally prefer to get rich rather than give away our work for free. Once a software niche has matured, and when there's no remaining opportunities to make money, you generally see the rise of FOSS. Tetris is a good example of a game so simple that any good hacker could crank out a clone. It was worth a bit in it's time, but not now.
I'd like to have that app just to describe the area where I live. I wish I'd been able to work on it... the other geeks always get all the fun :-)
You mean https? You can host as many as you like, with real certificates. I host starterpbx.org with a cert on billrocks.org. No problem.
I have to agree the article is a bit of fud. Except for geeks like us and corporations, who needs a real IP? A billion sounds like plenty.
You know, there's another good reason IT guys support open source projects. When things go wrong, you just enter the error message into Google, and 80% of the time, the solution is right there! It's faster to fix open-source goobers than it is to call a support company. Google and open-source make you smarter than a paid closed-source consultant. Why do IT guys support open-source themselves? Because they can. Because it's actually easier. And... it's more fun :-)
I'll try to answer... The iPhone has nothing going for it technology wise... it's old news, except for the great touch-screen. However, the stupid cell industry has had a buzz-word mentality for decades now. "3G, MMS, vidoe recoding"... the existing players just add a bunch of features and check the boxes. Without a great OS, and great programming, they all suck big time. How about adding 8 gig of music to a phone? The stupid cell industry added less than 1 gig. How about a giant display so you can do real pictures and video, rather than some postage stamp? How about adding a simple zoom feature to that big display, and real wi-fi so you get an actual functional browser? I had several phones with limited browsers that only were able to view the stupid cell phone company's sites. And the interface? The typical phone has a stupid wheel that is actually just 4 direction buttons. The devices with real keyboards have some value, but the rest are just worthless. What really pissed me off is that my last two stupid cell carriers wouldn't even let me download pictures I took with my camera... they held them hostage, and wanted me to pay to get them off my phone. Fuckers.
When I had an iPhone, I used the music player, camera, ssh shell, wi-fi, photo-album (great for sales), e-mail, contacts, man... they gave me very few programs, but I hammered them all. Very unlike the crap I've gotten for years from the rest.
I also hammered the 3rd party hacker-apps. I particularly loved ssh-ing into servers at work to check on things. I'd also do some slashdotting, and check on the latest news from sites I like (rather than the ones my cell company prefers). Frankly, the rest of the field sucks big-time compared to the current generation of iPhone. Again, the big threat I see to Apple is Google Android, and even then only if Android opens up a bit more, and only if Steve remains mostly closed.
I fully agree. The cell industry has had it's ass so far up there for so long, it took Steve Jobs to show them how screwed up they are. The only threat IMO to Apple dominating smart cell phones the way they dominated music players is Google's Android, which currently is far far behind, and Steve Jobs keeping his head in his own ass to boot. Steve can make an advanced and desirable product, but he can't compete against open platforms any better than he competes against Windows/IBM PCs. If Google offers a native devkit (which they currently do not), and Jobs continues to be hostile to native app developers, eventually the iPhone line will be nothing but pretty, high-end low-feature stuff, just like his Macs. It'll be Mac vs Wintel all over again.
The reason Jobs kicks butt in music players is that it's low-end stuff, where we can't build open platforms to compete against him.