This is the only way to ensure you control it. Distributed hosting, where friends host their friends' status if they are offline. Everything crypted/signed with public/private keys to ensure no spoofing. Ability to create pseudonyms and enter as much personal data as I want, and possibility of anonimity.
I have used nokia navigation on my 5800 on several occasions, and it worked quite well. Of course I preloaded maps for the countries I was driving in- being hit by roaming charges for downloading maps on-demand abroad would have been atrocious. This is the main drawback of google maps- you cannot afford to use it in another country due to roaming charges. Nokia provides free maps for most of the world, and they are quite detailed and accurate.
Oh, and they should have doublechecked that assisted GPS works on all phones. GPS without assistance from the newtork is several times slower to get a lock.
Prepared statements or queries with parameters have been around since forever, and they are impervious to SQL injection attacks. Just go ahead and use them.
Hmm, I've heard that some parents start their daughters on birth control pills in early teens in fear that they'll screw someone and get pregnant. If that's true, I think that should mess up a lot of things with natural development. Not sure about the boys though. Bad food?
Actually, I agree that strong huge corporation capitalism is incompatible with democracy, but for different reasons.
First of all, corporations are hierarchical pyramids of power, de facto dictatorships. And in quite a lot of cases they don't represent the will of the people. They have huge influence on government decisions, by lobbying, contributions to parties, bribes, mass media. They have huge influence on culture and values via advertisement and PR. It is in their interest to have dumb consumer population and not educated skeptical citizen population necessary for a working democracy.
In short, I believe it is beneficial to large corporations to skew and twist democracy as much as possible. And that is why capitalism that allows huge corporations is incompatible with democracy. It concentrates the power in hands of corporate execs, not the people.
Do you really think that there can be a decision reached to sacrifice yourself in a democratic way?
First of all, countries are competitive, so for example Germany won't sacrifice itself so that China would get an advantage.
Second, any government that would impose hardship on the population will be booted out of the office, and another will be voted in. Functioning democracy implies rule of dumb and short sighted masses. Broken democracy means rule of big business with enough money for lobbying and mass media to get votes or to get whoever is in power to do what they want. In both of these cases there will not be a will to impose the long term goals that require short term sacrifice.
Thousands of tonnes could (theoretically) be launched by something like Project Orion. The estimated cost of the fallout would be ~20 people getting cancer across the world. I think more than that get killed in car crashes, wars and famines and other pointless ways each weekend, . So I think this is the price humankind is able to afford to do more space exploration.
Computer hardware was even more unreliable in the 70s-80s, and people managed to get by. You can always have some redundancy and hot-swappable modules, both with computer and with other hardware.
Assembly under the sea is just as dangerous, and we still manage to do it.
For the price of Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we would probably be in Mars already. It's just a matter of priorities and long term goals. We don't have any anymore. It's all about next quarter profit, getting rich and doing 2 chicks at the same time. There aren't any big plans or visions anymore.
Russians did. Stalin at the time of invasion by Germany probably did have more army than french did (counting men and probably equipment). Suffered the same fate, mostly due to poor leadership (good military leaders were "cleansed"). It took a harsh winter and fetching Zhukov from a gulag to stop them near Moscow.
Ok, I know cultures change. However, that doesn't mean that every change is good or desirable. I don't really like the trends I see in Europe currently. Others might have a different opinion.
Hell, I don't even like a lot of what I consider current European culture. Rampant selfishness and materialism and acceptance of corporate rule, risk-averse nanny-states, etc. I still don't think importing world-views from 3rd world countries would help at all.
I don't know or suggest any solutions. This is a difficult issue. Maybe we should restrict immigration from outside EU. Maybe we should restrict immigration from other EU countries as well. Maybe immigration doesn't really make much difference and we should allow more immigration. There are even some people who think culture should be ENGINEERED using scientific methods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Freedom_and_Dignity).
I just say that questioning immigration and dilution of local culture brought by immigration is a concern and a valid topic for discussion. And people bringing it up shouldn't be written off as Nazis or racists or whatever.
There are fairly well defined geographical boundaries. I don't think anyone would argue that Africa belongs to Europe.
However, I'm mostly talking about culture here. I am aware the subject matter is fuzzy and changing. However I don't think things like sharia law or non-secular society will ever be acceptable anywhere in Europe. There are certain values that must be preserved- like freedom of speech, secularism, democracy, free-thinking, individualism, value of life.
Your argument that borders are fuzzy and changing is something like arguing that a gradient image with black on top and white in the bottom is all the same colour. It isn't, it's white on the top, and black on the bottom and gray in the middle. There is no well defined border, but that doesn't mean that white and black are same colours.
I know that Nazism did horrible things in the past and that (in theory) people of all races and nations are equal, but being always politically correct and not even trying to discuss issues like that makes them even worse.
I don't care about other people's nation or the colour of their skin. I do care about the culture they bring with them. And I do think that culture in Europe should remain predominantly European. This means either assimilating other cultures (people representing them living in Europe), or limiting amount of other cultures (people representing them) we import, or both.
I don't condone 1984-ish measures like described in this story, but I do think there should be limits to immigration, and I think toleration can go too far.
Well said. I agree that "architecture astronauts" are around phase 2 only, but that doesn't mean they don't get a job where they can force their ideas onto others. It's not too hard to impress whoever is interviewing your by knowing too many buzzwords and ideas of grand designs.
However, I agree with Joel that overengineering is evil and is probably a more serious issue than underengineering. And by "Duct tape programmers" he doesn't mean programmers that wrote CRAP code. He means programmers that add code that works and doesn't introduce more complexity than is absolutely necessary. And I agree that this is a good thing. With current development tools if you have relatively clean code (preferably unit tested), you can refactor it and add abstraction layers, interfaces, flexibility etc. at a later date when that is needed.
"Duct tape development" is actually promoted by Agile development model. You are supposed to write only the code that is needed NOW to solve THIS problem and refactor later. Unit tests are supposed to make refactoring safe.
I guess as with all things in life there must be a balance. But I believe everyone who has ever done design can say that they have at some point designed their systems for future requirements. And then these requirements never arrived, system evolved in a different direction, and all the complexity and flexibility introduced was bloat and a waste of time and effort. OTOH developing systems without and design is also stupid.
Try some 2 panel GUI/curses apps like Midnight Commander. Best of both worlds- you have a visible list of files, and you have 1 line of CLI, and you can drop file names and directory names into CLI. I found it to be vastly superior than pure CLI and drag&drop/multiple window/mouse based GUIs. OTOH I have been using norton commander derivatives for >15 years, so I might be biased...
RTFA. It says that Word has been primarily designed about creating documents that have to be printed on paper. Nowadays, we need less and less documents to be printed on paper, and more and more documents that must be made available on-line or emailed or shared etc. Word is NOT designed for those tasks, and using it for those tasks (as it is done in multitude of organizations) is hard, non-intuitive and counterproductive. It is the wrong tool for the job.
The gist of the article is that with new tools like wikis, content management systems, revision management systems, something like Google Wave, etc. Word will become used less and less. They attach a doc file, when you can format email itself? Why write a doc file and stash it on a shared drive, when you can edit a wiki page? And so on and so forth.
Of course Word will have its uses and it will not go anywhere anytime soon. But the world around is changing, and Word Processing itself is slowly becoming niche/obsolete.
I've looked at BeagleBoard and some other TI OMAP3 board specs. They all have PowerVR video/3D accelerator, which does not have any open-source drivers. And I'm not even sure about closed source ones. These boards lose 90% of their cool without them.
Reading these specs felt like kissing a girlfriend and then getting kicked in the groin... Especially at a time when it is becoming possible to have a 100% open-source supported hardware in desktop machines (ATI drivers started supporting new cards, lots of opensource wifi drivers are mature, etc).
Ok, apparently your argument is that priority of USA should be building air superiority fighter planes that will probably never be used. In this case don't bring in argument that USA is doing it because it employs people. There are other/better ways to employ people. The question here is if USA needs more air superiority fighters. I don't think it does. I think military contractors are already getting too fat from the 2 wars you are fighting, and there are no nations that could contest air superiority of US air force anyway.
My point is that USA's resources could be spent on other things. I do agree that capabilities to defend yourself are necessary, but what USA is doing is a major overkill. And spending money on F-22 means less money on rifles, bulletproof vests, training, etc. for the infantry/special forces, that are actually needed in Afghanistan & Iraq.
And I do think that "education, science, getting us in space, open source software" are things more worth pursuing than strengthening military where it's already strongest by far. For example, education will bring prosperity in the future. Extra F-22s won't. And even keeping money "in the mattress" is not a waste, as it is kept in a bank that reinvests it.
And the thing is, it's up to the shopkeeper to decide what he does with his money, not some goons with stones.
People working on F-22 are NOT working on education, science, getting us in space, open source software, ending world hunger, etc. Resources spent on F-22 are SPENT, and they could have been put to better use elsewhere. Economy as measured by GNP only is a useless characteristic. Making a choice and spending time/money on something you don't need does NOT improve prosperity. go read about something called Opportunity Cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Well, that is the theory. In practice, you get big corporations dominating/skewing the market, bribing/lobbying/controlling government, and using marketing/mass media to brainwash people into doing things that suit them. And corporations are run by SMALL number of people. And they have hierarchical control structures (ala dictatorships). And most of the time they are above the law.
Not to mention that in many cases, hordes of selfish people (voters/consumers) as a whole fail to make optimal decisions. See market failures, tragedy of the commons and prisoner's dilemma.
"Democracy", like "The Market" only works in perfect conditions. Real world conditions are not perfect, so markets fail to regulate, and democracies often fail to make correct decisions.
I wish I could suggest something better though. Dictatorships always degenerate, much faster than democracies. Until we get some kind of shared consciousness, best we can do is to improve conditions for our markets and democracies so that they function adequately. That means having educated/involved/not ignorant population and real responsability for the actions of politicians. And as much information/transparency and competition in the market as we can get.
Um, They will censor wikipedia and are IWF shills. I'm on Be now, but I will switch away from them when I get a chance. Search for previous articles on Slashdot.
I have heard AAISP is quite good, but they are more expensive and have traffic caps.
There are too many humans for that to work. There will be a percentage of population that is resistant. Even the worst pandemics didn't kill >30% of population. This would be enough to disrupt civilized way of live for a while, but not the "end of world".
If we go into biotechnology, I'm more scared of completely synthetic viruses/bacterias/nanobots. Our current tech is still way off, but one day it will be possible to create things for which humans have no resistance whatsoever. Something like polyethylene membrane coated bacterias. I know this specific example wouldn't work, but if something as exotic was created, our immune system would be completely helpless.
And chemical weapons are not even that scary. You need quite a lot of chemicals to cover a relatively small area. And most dangerous ones are organic and get broken down/degraded in nature. I don't think you would be able to kill >1% of world population even if you tried with chemical weapons. And to destroy entire biosphere- impossible.
Unless we get nuclear winter, and plants cannot grow anymore- no more food. Or radiation levels become so high that people die before reaching adulthood or cannot reproduce.
The conventional bombs we have to detonate to kill a couple of people are peanuts compared to MIRV missiles with 10 warheads each having 0.5 MT yield. And we have thousands of these.
I know there are lots of humans all over the place, but global thermonuclear war could have enough effect on the biosphere to render it unlivable.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the only way to ensure you control it. Distributed hosting, where friends host their friends' status if they are offline. Everything crypted/signed with public/private keys to ensure no spoofing. Ability to create pseudonyms and enter as much personal data as I want, and possibility of anonimity.
Something like that I'd actually sign up for.
--Coder
I have used nokia navigation on my 5800 on several occasions, and it worked quite well. Of course I preloaded maps for the countries I was driving in- being hit by roaming charges for downloading maps on-demand abroad would have been atrocious. This is the main drawback of google maps- you cannot afford to use it in another country due to roaming charges. Nokia provides free maps for most of the world, and they are quite detailed and accurate.
Oh, and they should have doublechecked that assisted GPS works on all phones. GPS without assistance from the newtork is several times slower to get a lock.
--Coder
Prepared statements or queries with parameters have been around since forever, and they are impervious to SQL injection attacks. Just go ahead and use them.
--Coder
Hmm, I've heard that some parents start their daughters on birth control pills in early teens in fear that they'll screw someone and get pregnant. If that's true, I think that should mess up a lot of things with natural development. Not sure about the boys though. Bad food?
--Coder
Now imagine same process with punch cards. Entire forests would have to be cut down to make enough of these...
--Coder
Actually, I agree that strong huge corporation capitalism is incompatible with democracy, but for different reasons.
First of all, corporations are hierarchical pyramids of power, de facto dictatorships. And in quite a lot of cases they don't represent the will of the people. They have huge influence on government decisions, by lobbying, contributions to parties, bribes, mass media. They have huge influence on culture and values via advertisement and PR. It is in their interest to have dumb consumer population and not educated skeptical citizen population necessary for a working democracy.
In short, I believe it is beneficial to large corporations to skew and twist democracy as much as possible. And that is why capitalism that allows huge corporations is incompatible with democracy. It concentrates the power in hands of corporate execs, not the people.
--Coder
Do you really think that there can be a decision reached to sacrifice yourself in a democratic way?
First of all, countries are competitive, so for example Germany won't sacrifice itself so that China would get an advantage.
Second, any government that would impose hardship on the population will be booted out of the office, and another will be voted in. Functioning democracy implies rule of dumb and short sighted masses. Broken democracy means rule of big business with enough money for lobbying and mass media to get votes or to get whoever is in power to do what they want. In both of these cases there will not be a will to impose the long term goals that require short term sacrifice.
--Coder
Thousands of tonnes could (theoretically) be launched by something like Project Orion. The estimated cost of the fallout would be ~20 people getting cancer across the world. I think more than that get killed in car crashes, wars and famines and other pointless ways each weekend, . So I think this is the price humankind is able to afford to do more space exploration.
Computer hardware was even more unreliable in the 70s-80s, and people managed to get by. You can always have some redundancy and hot-swappable modules, both with computer and with other hardware.
Assembly under the sea is just as dangerous, and we still manage to do it.
For the price of Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we would probably be in Mars already. It's just a matter of priorities and long term goals. We don't have any anymore. It's all about next quarter profit, getting rich and doing 2 chicks at the same time. There aren't any big plans or visions anymore.
--Coder
Russians did. Stalin at the time of invasion by Germany probably did have more army than french did (counting men and probably equipment). Suffered the same fate, mostly due to poor leadership (good military leaders were "cleansed"). It took a harsh winter and fetching Zhukov from a gulag to stop them near Moscow.
--Coder
Ok, I know cultures change. However, that doesn't mean that every change is good or desirable. I don't really like the trends I see in Europe currently. Others might have a different opinion.
Hell, I don't even like a lot of what I consider current European culture. Rampant selfishness and materialism and acceptance of corporate rule, risk-averse nanny-states, etc. I still don't think importing world-views from 3rd world countries would help at all.
I don't know or suggest any solutions. This is a difficult issue. Maybe we should restrict immigration from outside EU. Maybe we should restrict immigration from other EU countries as well. Maybe immigration doesn't really make much difference and we should allow more immigration. There are even some people who think culture should be ENGINEERED using scientific methods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Freedom_and_Dignity).
I just say that questioning immigration and dilution of local culture brought by immigration is a concern and a valid topic for discussion. And people bringing it up shouldn't be written off as Nazis or racists or whatever.
--Coder
There are fairly well defined geographical boundaries. I don't think anyone would argue that Africa belongs to Europe.
However, I'm mostly talking about culture here. I am aware the subject matter is fuzzy and changing. However I don't think things like sharia law or non-secular society will ever be acceptable anywhere in Europe. There are certain values that must be preserved- like freedom of speech, secularism, democracy, free-thinking, individualism, value of life.
Your argument that borders are fuzzy and changing is something like arguing that a gradient image with black on top and white in the bottom is all the same colour. It isn't, it's white on the top, and black on the bottom and gray in the middle. There is no well defined border, but that doesn't mean that white and black are same colours.
--Coder
I know that Nazism did horrible things in the past and that (in theory) people of all races and nations are equal, but being always politically correct and not even trying to discuss issues like that makes them even worse.
I don't care about other people's nation or the colour of their skin. I do care about the culture they bring with them. And I do think that culture in Europe should remain predominantly European. This means either assimilating other cultures (people representing them living in Europe), or limiting amount of other cultures (people representing them) we import, or both.
I don't condone 1984-ish measures like described in this story, but I do think there should be limits to immigration, and I think toleration can go too far.
--Coder
Well said. I agree that "architecture astronauts" are around phase 2 only, but that doesn't mean they don't get a job where they can force their ideas onto others. It's not too hard to impress whoever is interviewing your by knowing too many buzzwords and ideas of grand designs.
However, I agree with Joel that overengineering is evil and is probably a more serious issue than underengineering. And by "Duct tape programmers" he doesn't mean programmers that wrote CRAP code. He means programmers that add code that works and doesn't introduce more complexity than is absolutely necessary. And I agree that this is a good thing. With current development tools if you have relatively clean code (preferably unit tested), you can refactor it and add abstraction layers, interfaces, flexibility etc. at a later date when that is needed.
"Duct tape development" is actually promoted by Agile development model. You are supposed to write only the code that is needed NOW to solve THIS problem and refactor later. Unit tests are supposed to make refactoring safe.
I guess as with all things in life there must be a balance. But I believe everyone who has ever done design can say that they have at some point designed their systems for future requirements. And then these requirements never arrived, system evolved in a different direction, and all the complexity and flexibility introduced was bloat and a waste of time and effort. OTOH developing systems without and design is also stupid.
--Coder
Try some 2 panel GUI/curses apps like Midnight Commander. Best of both worlds- you have a visible list of files, and you have 1 line of CLI, and you can drop file names and directory names into CLI. I found it to be vastly superior than pure CLI and drag&drop/multiple window/mouse based GUIs. OTOH I have been using norton commander derivatives for >15 years, so I might be biased...
--Coder
RTFA. It says that Word has been primarily designed about creating documents that have to be printed on paper. Nowadays, we need less and less documents to be printed on paper, and more and more documents that must be made available on-line or emailed or shared etc. Word is NOT designed for those tasks, and using it for those tasks (as it is done in multitude of organizations) is hard, non-intuitive and counterproductive. It is the wrong tool for the job.
The gist of the article is that with new tools like wikis, content management systems, revision management systems, something like Google Wave, etc. Word will become used less and less. They attach a doc file, when you can format email itself? Why write a doc file and stash it on a shared drive, when you can edit a wiki page? And so on and so forth.
Of course Word will have its uses and it will not go anywhere anytime soon. But the world around is changing, and Word Processing itself is slowly becoming niche/obsolete.
--Coder
I've looked at BeagleBoard and some other TI OMAP3 board specs. They all have PowerVR video/3D accelerator, which does not have any open-source drivers. And I'm not even sure about closed source ones. These boards lose 90% of their cool without them.
Reading these specs felt like kissing a girlfriend and then getting kicked in the groin... Especially at a time when it is becoming possible to have a 100% open-source supported hardware in desktop machines (ATI drivers started supporting new cards, lots of opensource wifi drivers are mature, etc).
--Coder
Enough said in the subject.
I wonder what engines were used in Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault games. They seem to be missing from the list.
--Coder
Ok, apparently your argument is that priority of USA should be building air superiority fighter planes that will probably never be used. In this case don't bring in argument that USA is doing it because it employs people. There are other/better ways to employ people. The question here is if USA needs more air superiority fighters. I don't think it does. I think military contractors are already getting too fat from the 2 wars you are fighting, and there are no nations that could contest air superiority of US air force anyway.
My point is that USA's resources could be spent on other things. I do agree that capabilities to defend yourself are necessary, but what USA is doing is a major overkill. And spending money on F-22 means less money on rifles, bulletproof vests, training, etc. for the infantry/special forces, that are actually needed in Afghanistan & Iraq.
And I do think that "education, science, getting us in space, open source software" are things more worth pursuing than strengthening military where it's already strongest by far. For example, education will bring prosperity in the future. Extra F-22s won't. And even keeping money "in the mattress" is not a waste, as it is kept in a bank that reinvests it.
And the thing is, it's up to the shopkeeper to decide what he does with his money, not some goons with stones.
--Coder
I have probably been trolled, but I'll write anyway. Go and actually READ about broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
People working on F-22 are NOT working on education, science, getting us in space, open source software, ending world hunger, etc. Resources spent on F-22 are SPENT, and they could have been put to better use elsewhere. Economy as measured by GNP only is a useless characteristic. Making a choice and spending time/money on something you don't need does NOT improve prosperity. go read about something called Opportunity Cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
--Coder
RTFA the New Scientist article. It generates enough juice to power the fly paper strap and a small clock
--Coder
Well, that is the theory. In practice, you get big corporations dominating/skewing the market, bribing/lobbying/controlling government, and using marketing/mass media to brainwash people into doing things that suit them. And corporations are run by SMALL number of people. And they have hierarchical control structures (ala dictatorships). And most of the time they are above the law.
Not to mention that in many cases, hordes of selfish people (voters/consumers) as a whole fail to make optimal decisions. See market failures, tragedy of the commons and prisoner's dilemma.
"Democracy", like "The Market" only works in perfect conditions. Real world conditions are not perfect, so markets fail to regulate, and democracies often fail to make correct decisions.
I wish I could suggest something better though. Dictatorships always degenerate, much faster than democracies. Until we get some kind of shared consciousness, best we can do is to improve conditions for our markets and democracies so that they function adequately. That means having educated/involved/not ignorant population and real responsability for the actions of politicians. And as much information/transparency and competition in the market as we can get.
--Coder
Um, They will censor wikipedia and are IWF shills. I'm on Be now, but I will switch away from them when I get a chance. Search for previous articles on Slashdot.
I have heard AAISP is quite good, but they are more expensive and have traffic caps.
--Coder
This will never stand because of this: http://www.progressquest.com/
--Coder
There are too many humans for that to work. There will be a percentage of population that is resistant. Even the worst pandemics didn't kill >30% of population. This would be enough to disrupt civilized way of live for a while, but not the "end of world".
If we go into biotechnology, I'm more scared of completely synthetic viruses/bacterias/nanobots. Our current tech is still way off, but one day it will be possible to create things for which humans have no resistance whatsoever. Something like polyethylene membrane coated bacterias. I know this specific example wouldn't work, but if something as exotic was created, our immune system would be completely helpless.
And chemical weapons are not even that scary. You need quite a lot of chemicals to cover a relatively small area. And most dangerous ones are organic and get broken down/degraded in nature. I don't think you would be able to kill >1% of world population even if you tried with chemical weapons. And to destroy entire biosphere- impossible.
--Coder
Unless we get nuclear winter, and plants cannot grow anymore- no more food. Or radiation levels become so high that people die before reaching adulthood or cannot reproduce.
The conventional bombs we have to detonate to kill a couple of people are peanuts compared to MIRV missiles with 10 warheads each having 0.5 MT yield. And we have thousands of these.
I know there are lots of humans all over the place, but global thermonuclear war could have enough effect on the biosphere to render it unlivable.
--Coder