As you can see, it's a damn near impossible feat, but scientists expect to take this from the lab to the mainstream within the next ten years. Everybody knows these maths don't exist yet and the equipment required to do this is vaporware.
But IANA-programm--- wait a second, I AM a programmer. The problem is that election officials and legislators ARE NOT, and they're the kind of people who think that the internet is actually made of tubes, and that email could possibly be taxed.
If the government has been hardening systems to survive the EMP of nuclear warfare since my parents were born, you'd think they could do a simple increment of an integer value. I bet the IRS doesn't make these kinds of mistakes.
The truth is, they can solve all of these problems easily; they're just too busy insisting the world's flat.
Why bother with a movie? With the official South Park episode now in the history books, I think it would be really lame of them to make an official movie.
Just play the game... who wants to watch a movie of it? I mean, I know we're slashdotters, but are any of us actually that pathetic?
I personally love my WS laptop because it's considerably smaller than a non-WS would have been. This is for both the screen area and the base containing the keyboard. It is more stable on my lap (ie less top-heavy) and is just super convenient to tote around -- smaller than a textbook.
If I want big, I have two screens on the wall in my studio. As a bonus, they're hooked up to a beefy workstation that would melt my legs if it were in a laptop.
Seems like everything's going widescreen, and I think the manufacturing process is probably one of the smallest influences. Media's heading in that direction, and computers (laptops especially) are becoming media centers more and more.
Widescreen seems more about bringing the movie theater into your living room/bedroom/pocket, than any cut and dry fiscal report line item.
I agree that the judges should be following the **AA actions around the country... but on the other hand, our founding fathers probably never envisioned all of this new-fangled technology that your typical old crotchety judge doesn't want anything to do with, nor has the appropriate time, exposure, and comprehension for totally "getting".
The telephone, radio, and television were not hard to be adopted and understood by all people of the world, but in this era, it's a different story.
I wouldn't be surprised if these judges are under the impression that this homeless person actually stole something material, just like booze or food.
The first wave of blocking files executed by the P2P world that I can remember was done by filename. If the filename contained "Metallica", the it was not allowed in the search results.
Sites sprang up that allowed users to digest the filenames or keywords into a hash value. Problem solved (for the users).
I say: It's pretty easy to tell which senators are participating in scenes of rape and molestation just by looking at the laws they try to pass.
This phrase doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore unfortunately. It's just a marketing slogan in this context.
It's a (false) euphemism, like "Greener Forests Act" or "No Child Left Behind" or "Patriot Act" or "Department of Defense". And in this case, it's coming from a corporation that we all already know has (or is in pursuit of) an evil monopoly.
Public school education taught me that I already had a lot of these rights protected by (or required for) our democratic free-market capitalist society's existence. The real world has so far only shown me otherwise.
There's only one reason to buy cables better than the cheapies at RadioShack:
Durability.
And in my experience, even the RadioShack jobbers will often outlive the "premium" cables the brand names peddle.
The only people buying Monster products are people who don't understand, or who think they're getting a deal at a box store because they can get the cables for half price with new electronics... ("wow, only $40 for 3' of coax?! well, it was $80... sure I'll take 4.")
When a product like this is sold, sales people usually later discuss it amongst themselves making spanking gestures.
I'm no expert on this subject, but this is what's most obvious to me.
Firing a gun is like getting pregnant. It's basically a boolean operation.
It'd be tough to foul that up, and it's very likely it has the simplest logic pathway on the little bugger. Then again, it's the US military.
Actuating the weapon with whatever stability and tracking/targeting/ranging system they have integrated is a inherently more complicated and more prone to mistakes.
As much as we likely all fear gun-shooting robots, I think the GP is right: they're inevitable. No army is going to rule out that option unless all other parties have as well (and we see how well that works with nuclear arms.) As nice as it would be to thwart our own side's human losses (replaced by likely much higher economic losses), what happens when both sides are in all-out-robot warfare? How do you end a war where nobody dies?
On Saturday I experienced about an hour-long outage in some internet sites. Particularly facebook, half of myspace's servers, and all the articles on en.wikipedia.org were not connecting (though they were resolving.)
I power-cycled my hardware several times to rule that out, and I began to suspect it could be related to this.
I tracerouted a few sites and saw packet loss occuring near the end of Comcast's line, as well as at the point where Comcast joined Level3.
I was also somewhat disappointed to learn that my data took 12 hops internal to Comcast before ever getting out to the real internet.
Good thing they're not charging me something like $50/mo... oh crap, nevermind.
This is the frickin' pre-emptive war post-911 USA military.
I'm surprised to learn that we're essentially doing the old "HELO" to port 139 bitchslap on the enemy as a response when we could just as well resolve their physical location and drop some thermite down their "stovepipe".
I can just see it now... "These radical script kiddies hate our network neutrality and ascii pr0ns... and so we must take the herring to them and slap them with it before they slap us."
Seriously, why is the military even using "the internet" other than to snoop the traffic? For secure communications, they should be using something private, and only fall back on that in the event that the rest of their network fails (i.e. nuclear war, assuming the internet would still work, and that anybody would be around to use it.)
I would be deeply saddened if the military has, say... HTTP servers with sensitive information that are in any way accessible from the real world.
Buy M-Audio instead of Creative. Creative is entirely obsolete.
(No, I'm not on their payroll... I just have 2x Delta 1010s teamed up and working spectacularly in my home studio, and have heard nothing but good reviews from friends who have bought their lower end products. I too have previously owned other products from M-Audio to great satisfaction.)
That's only roughly 6000 citizens entered into each computer. Sounds like paper's more effective.
I wrote a handheld inventory and distribution control system for my company and it handles 6000 pallets every day. The handhelds cost $3000 each, can be run over by a forklift and dropped at least 5', have a barcode reader and wifi built in. My time, the hardware, and the infrastructure cost less than $50,000.
I'd say this census project was just horribly mismanaged. I could believe these figures if the census was to be conducted in a single day.
"Attention! You've got an assignment for tonight... go home and watch WARGAMES, HACKERS, and SWORDFISH. Tomorrow, we begin to convince the public that's how it really is. And for the commercial we're shooting tomorrow, we'll tell the public how many times we've been pinged, only say... they're 'attacks', and we'll blame them on the Chinese even if it's just a Google spider."
I'm more afraid of our own government's incompetence and its marketing campaigns than I am of foreign states.
It's a shame Creative bought E-mu. I sold my upgraded Proteus 2500 the day they sold out.
My experience with Creative (post-SoundBlaster 16) has been nothing but horrible. The Extigy was one of the worst abortions in computer hardware history. It was marketed as a pro-level 24-bit external sound card, but really was no better than the junk sound cards you can find sitting on a pile at a flea market. And while one version of the driver (also unofficial at the time) was capable of offering the 24-bit capabilitiy the box so boldly proclaimed... I believe the hardware secretly only ran at 16-bit. And it would have constant dropouts any time the host computer would do any disk or network activity... and it was a new computer. This was because there was basically no capabilties in the box -- it was all just host-based. There wasn't even a significant buffer onboard, so all it took was a tiny bit of lag on the USB bus and it was stutter-city.
A friend also had an Audigy back around this time, but didn't know where the driver disc was. Creative had only driver updates available online -- you had to purchase CD copies if you wanted at the original. I guess this makes sense considering their idea of a sound card driver is bloatware too big to download.
Don't get me wrong... they allowed me to hear speech for the first time on my 486 in Wing Commander III, but they haven't made a difference since then. I'm really glad they're getting all of this well-deserved negative publicity. They just plain suck. The only reason they're still around is because of brand recognition. Hopefully now they'll start to be recognized for what they really are... crap.
I guess if all you listen to is taco farts played through a kazoo, they're probably right for you.
Slashdot Mirror
"How hard can it be?"
// or //
C++:
candidate.votes++;
candidate->votes++;
C#:
candidate.votes++;
Java:
candidate.votes++;
JS:
candidate.votes++;
PHP:
$candidate->votes++;
Perl:
$candidate{'votes'}++;
VB:
candidate.votes++
SQL:
Update Votes = Votes + 1 Where CandidateID = @CandidateID
As you can see, it's a damn near impossible feat, but scientists expect to take this from the lab to the mainstream within the next ten years. Everybody knows these maths don't exist yet and the equipment required to do this is vaporware.
But IANA-programm--- wait a second, I AM a programmer. The problem is that election officials and legislators ARE NOT, and they're the kind of people who think that the internet is actually made of tubes, and that email could possibly be taxed.
If the government has been hardening systems to survive the EMP of nuclear warfare since my parents were born, you'd think they could do a simple increment of an integer value. I bet the IRS doesn't make these kinds of mistakes.
The truth is, they can solve all of these problems easily; they're just too busy insisting the world's flat.
I've been researching them for some time now...!
Haha... that's a great story.
I've read that the one thing duct tape sucks for is taping ducts. It makes a great fender though.
Now I'm off to find some ducks...
Why bother with a movie? With the official South Park episode now in the history books, I think it would be really lame of them to make an official movie.
Just play the game... who wants to watch a movie of it? I mean, I know we're slashdotters, but are any of us actually that pathetic?
(That made me crack up so bad as I noshed down my McRibb.)
Hm, then perhaps we could inject the cows with a soul substitute... like money or fame?
I personally love my WS laptop because it's considerably smaller than a non-WS would have been. This is for both the screen area and the base containing the keyboard. It is more stable on my lap (ie less top-heavy) and is just super convenient to tote around -- smaller than a textbook.
If I want big, I have two screens on the wall in my studio. As a bonus, they're hooked up to a beefy workstation that would melt my legs if it were in a laptop.
Seems like everything's going widescreen, and I think the manufacturing process is probably one of the smallest influences. Media's heading in that direction, and computers (laptops especially) are becoming media centers more and more.
Widescreen seems more about bringing the movie theater into your living room/bedroom/pocket, than any cut and dry fiscal report line item.
If we're willing to make "meat in a test tube", wouldn't it just be easier to genetically engineer cows without souls?
Don't forget the Discovery channel.
Adding to that... in years past, judges were elders with vast wisdom about virtually all facets of life. Now they're just referees.
I agree that the judges should be following the **AA actions around the country... but on the other hand, our founding fathers probably never envisioned all of this new-fangled technology that your typical old crotchety judge doesn't want anything to do with, nor has the appropriate time, exposure, and comprehension for totally "getting".
The telephone, radio, and television were not hard to be adopted and understood by all people of the world, but in this era, it's a different story.
I wouldn't be surprised if these judges are under the impression that this homeless person actually stole something material, just like booze or food.
I was blown away by the Bear Sterns buyout also.
They basically were given a TON of people's REAL ESTATE for less than (for example) YouTube cost Google... and YouTube is barely tangible.
Real estate is turning into the new airline industry.
Where do I sign up to be on their team?
The first wave of blocking files executed by the P2P world that I can remember was done by filename. If the filename contained "Metallica", the it was not allowed in the search results.
Sites sprang up that allowed users to digest the filenames or keywords into a hash value. Problem solved (for the users).
I say: It's pretty easy to tell which senators are participating in scenes of rape and molestation just by looking at the laws they try to pass.
"Bill of Rights"???
This phrase doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore unfortunately. It's just a marketing slogan in this context.
It's a (false) euphemism, like "Greener Forests Act" or "No Child Left Behind" or "Patriot Act" or "Department of Defense". And in this case, it's coming from a corporation that we all already know has (or is in pursuit of) an evil monopoly.
Public school education taught me that I already had a lot of these rights protected by (or required for) our democratic free-market capitalist society's existence. The real world has so far only shown me otherwise.
"let loose a powerful flare"...
"26,000 Hz tone"...
Sounds like the Brown Note...
(Caution: Opinions follow...)
There's only one reason to buy cables better than the cheapies at RadioShack:
Durability.
And in my experience, even the RadioShack jobbers will often outlive the "premium" cables the brand names peddle.
The only people buying Monster products are people who don't understand, or who think they're getting a deal at a box store because they can get the cables for half price with new electronics... ("wow, only $40 for 3' of coax?! well, it was $80... sure I'll take 4.")
When a product like this is sold, sales people usually later discuss it amongst themselves making spanking gestures.
I'm no expert on this subject, but this is what's most obvious to me.
Firing a gun is like getting pregnant. It's basically a boolean operation.
It'd be tough to foul that up, and it's very likely it has the simplest logic pathway on the little bugger. Then again, it's the US military.
Actuating the weapon with whatever stability and tracking/targeting/ranging system they have integrated is a inherently more complicated and more prone to mistakes.
As much as we likely all fear gun-shooting robots, I think the GP is right: they're inevitable. No army is going to rule out that option unless all other parties have as well (and we see how well that works with nuclear arms.) As nice as it would be to thwart our own side's human losses (replaced by likely much higher economic losses), what happens when both sides are in all-out-robot warfare? How do you end a war where nobody dies?
Can you possibly put this in terms we're more likely to understand... like Libraries of Congress per fortnight?
/hides back under the bridge
"Free as in beer" will not be understood by future generations.
So for all intents and purposes, we're basically renting or leasing the music.
How does sales tax work on rentals/leases?
On Saturday I experienced about an hour-long outage in some internet sites. Particularly facebook, half of myspace's servers, and all the articles on en.wikipedia.org were not connecting (though they were resolving.)
I power-cycled my hardware several times to rule that out, and I began to suspect it could be related to this.
I tracerouted a few sites and saw packet loss occuring near the end of Comcast's line, as well as at the point where Comcast joined Level3.
I was also somewhat disappointed to learn that my data took 12 hops internal to Comcast before ever getting out to the real internet.
Good thing they're not charging me something like $50/mo... oh crap, nevermind.
This is the frickin' pre-emptive war post-911 USA military.
I'm surprised to learn that we're essentially doing the old "HELO" to port 139 bitchslap on the enemy as a response when we could just as well resolve their physical location and drop some thermite down their "stovepipe".
I can just see it now... "These radical script kiddies hate our network neutrality and ascii pr0ns... and so we must take the herring to them and slap them with it before they slap us."
Seriously, why is the military even using "the internet" other than to snoop the traffic? For secure communications, they should be using something private, and only fall back on that in the event that the rest of their network fails (i.e. nuclear war, assuming the internet would still work, and that anybody would be around to use it.)
I would be deeply saddened if the military has, say... HTTP servers with sensitive information that are in any way accessible from the real world.
This geek's opinion:
Buy M-Audio instead of Creative. Creative is entirely obsolete.
(No, I'm not on their payroll... I just have 2x Delta 1010s teamed up and working spectacularly in my home studio, and have heard nothing but good reviews from friends who have bought their lower end products. I too have previously owned other products from M-Audio to great satisfaction.)
Half a billion dollars??? 525,000 computers?
That's only roughly 6000 citizens entered into each computer. Sounds like paper's more effective.
I wrote a handheld inventory and distribution control system for my company and it handles 6000 pallets every day. The handhelds cost $3000 each, can be run over by a forklift and dropped at least 5', have a barcode reader and wifi built in. My time, the hardware, and the infrastructure cost less than $50,000.
I'd say this census project was just horribly mismanaged. I could believe these figures if the census was to be conducted in a single day.
Somewhere at the Pentagon...
"Attention! You've got an assignment for tonight... go home and watch WARGAMES, HACKERS, and SWORDFISH. Tomorrow, we begin to convince the public that's how it really is. And for the commercial we're shooting tomorrow, we'll tell the public how many times we've been pinged, only say... they're 'attacks', and we'll blame them on the Chinese even if it's just a Google spider."
I'm more afraid of our own government's incompetence and its marketing campaigns than I am of foreign states.
It's a shame Creative bought E-mu. I sold my upgraded Proteus 2500 the day they sold out.
My experience with Creative (post-SoundBlaster 16) has been nothing but horrible. The Extigy was one of the worst abortions in computer hardware history. It was marketed as a pro-level 24-bit external sound card, but really was no better than the junk sound cards you can find sitting on a pile at a flea market. And while one version of the driver (also unofficial at the time) was capable of offering the 24-bit capabilitiy the box so boldly proclaimed... I believe the hardware secretly only ran at 16-bit. And it would have constant dropouts any time the host computer would do any disk or network activity... and it was a new computer. This was because there was basically no capabilties in the box -- it was all just host-based. There wasn't even a significant buffer onboard, so all it took was a tiny bit of lag on the USB bus and it was stutter-city.
A friend also had an Audigy back around this time, but didn't know where the driver disc was. Creative had only driver updates available online -- you had to purchase CD copies if you wanted at the original. I guess this makes sense considering their idea of a sound card driver is bloatware too big to download.
Don't get me wrong... they allowed me to hear speech for the first time on my 486 in Wing Commander III, but they haven't made a difference since then. I'm really glad they're getting all of this well-deserved negative publicity. They just plain suck. The only reason they're still around is because of brand recognition. Hopefully now they'll start to be recognized for what they really are... crap.
I guess if all you listen to is taco farts played through a kazoo, they're probably right for you.