The problem as I see it is that the Earth is going around the sun carrying a bunch of space junk with it. This space junk make it miserable for people who want to shoot more stuff into space. Therefore, all we have to do is get all our buddies together ( the moon and other satellites we want to keep), then just stop orbitting the sun for about 4 hours (distance to the moon/helocentric velocity). Then we should be in a nice clean portion of the orbit. Usually, it is heck of alot easier to litter and walk away than it is to pick it up and put it in the trash bin.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+moon+%2F+speed+of+earth+orbit
Here's the design: set off an H-bomb in a container with a valve on it. Whenever you want to go somewhere just open the valve!
Okay, now for the implementation phase...
The reason's I am picking these is because: 1) They are easy reads. 2) They are thought provoking. 3) They are different from each other.
1) George Orwell - 1984
The discussions resulting from this book should be rather lively as Orwell pretty much nailed our present. ++Good.
2) Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
After reading Orwell, reading this will be rejuvinating. You can discuss the questions of life, the universe, and everything.
4) William Gibson - Neuromancer
Neuromancer is kind of like a Moby Dick of Science fiction. The words used flow in a way that make you feel the world. It is probably the most difficult read on my list.
5) Arthur Clark / Ken Baxter - The Light of Other Days
The discussion of Privacy is likely to be lively.
A sound body is the best way to support a sound mind. Athletics should be required in school along with the 'hard' subjects. All students should be able to learn physical and mental dicipline. Those that don't want to learn one or the other should not be required to do so but should not be permitted to get in the way of those who do. There is nothing to prevent an athlete from being a scholar or a scholar from being an athlete except perhaps...distractions.. and this leads back to the teaching of dicipline.
Enterprise licenses will be priced via Engine Value Unit pricing. 50 EVU's will be defined as the performance of a standard engine from a manufacturer. This practice provides the licensing granularity customers need while offering them the flexibility to configure their systems to best support business objectives.
You wear the Gozone, it keeps track of your steps, then you download the steps via a USB port on your computer. and see your progress over time on the web page. You can win prizes for doing it as another incentive. If you have a business, you can incentivize your employees and use the data as evidence to lower your health insurance costs. A win win win situation.
http://www.virginhealthmiles.com/
I do not work for Virgin but I have to give them some credit for getting me from potato to marathon runner.
TV is the opiate of the proletariat, us highfalooting technocrats have the internet. That said, and given that I am too highfalootin to pay to watch commercials...
When the reception is good the new over the air DTV picture is way better than analog though often there is a noticable delay between the visual and the audio tracks. This is annoying. You see the mouth move then hear the words a tenth of a second too late. When the reception is bad, DTV degrades poorly and you see ghosts and block people moving around. This is annoying. Analog tv seemed to degrade in a nicer and recover faster as well. Losing a signal on DTV is like the DVDs when your watching a movie and it gets stuck and there is no way to advance the tracking. Then a blue screen comes up and says "Bad or no Signal".
I wonder what seeing block people does to your animus psyche/subconscious. You could be watching the news and just then the foxy weather lady looks like a new T4 with a hole in her body. It is mildly uncomfortable to watch more so than the analog.
This move to DTV is surely going to be a boon for the providers of paid tv. And as an old time cynical/.er, I would be interested to see if there is a tidy correlation between cable provider profits and over the air DTV complaints...
I agree. The more I learn the less I know. It is a strange place. Everything could be inscribed on an imaginary sphere.
On a computer, anything can happen between the execution of two instructions. A program can be stopped and restarted just where it left off at any time e.g. hibernate. What happens between the Planck distances is nobody's business.
I welcome fractal string theory and the continuum it represents. It would explain a lot of things but still doesn't tell me how life is and how here got here and why I think these thoughts some where over the rainbow...why oh why can't I....
In my youth, 'twas no better place to write code than the middle of farm country, a thousand miles from home, and no hope of home until the job was done. Then, the promise of a meal at the amazing Arcola bowling alley, aka The French Embassy, crafted by Chef Jean-Louis http://will.illinois.edu/prairiefire/segment/pf1992-04-09-a/ a sublime motivator.
Now, place is not as important as time. The creative fruit comes when the time is ripe, until then, you plant seeds and nourish them.
When I was younger, I was Josh. Well, I may have been the Josh in the story, except for two things, I wrote clean well-documented code, and I generally friendly to people. Some brilliant people place a high value on beautiful code (code that works and reads well and is maintainable). I admit, my people skills were not (and still are not) up there with my tech skills but then I found Toastmasters, but that's another story...
Anyhow, I was there that Friday night. There was a dev staff meeting. There was a problem. I had a crazy idea that I was sure would work, the rest worked on a conservative approach that would have been 36 hours of hell for the entire staff. The customer (AT&T) needed time and cost sensitive international routing up on their switch before the Mother's day weekend.
I wrote a program that in turn wrote a 300K line program from a 250K line spreadsheet that saved the day and perhaps our business from that customer. It took about an hour, and I was very happy to have had the opportunity to have solved the problem and I may have hurt some feelings with my exuberence. --There are not many that get to brag about writing 300K lines of well documented working code in an hour!
I wanted to make one more point. I think the correlation between Brilliant (technically) and Quirky is going to be high for one major reason. Brilliant people get bored easy in the public schools, where brilliancy (and the brilliant ideas it puts in your head) is often rewarded by getting the crap beaten out of you. I suppose getting the crap beaten out of you can cause you to get quirky too.
When you become an adult, and find that your brilliacy is now rewarded (50K a year will buy a boatload of beer!) you can easily become like-a-superstar arrogant, to a certain extent. I got away with the leave-without-coming-back-for-a-few-days thing and I did the poor hygiene stint. And I did wear whatever t-shirt I wanted, and I played Black Flag and Dead Kennedy's loud from my office. And I helped make my employers rich too. Drinking 50K worth of beer can also make you quirky. Then I found hashers, but that's another story too...
I also was amongst the first group to get laid off when the going got rough when the telecom market busted. I can identify with Josh. I'm sure my lack of people skills contributed, or it may have been the quirkyness.
I'd like to think I am not Josh anymore.
In answer to the original question, brilliant people can be dangerous and make you rich like Bill Gates.
Zero. The bane of all. It was the gateway math to all modern problems. It would be so much simpler with just countables. Surely the current crisis, measured in trillions would look so much better without all those zeros. Whoever it was who invented zero should take responsibility for all the worlds problems, ex nehilo.
Someone scrawled "So long and thanks for all the fish" on the giant portrait of Lehman CEO Richard Fuld on which employees of the company wrote their final farewells (Artist Jeffrey Raymond).
25 years ago, coding on a mainframe meant an indestructable keyboard, an ashtray, and a green screen 3278. Today working on a mainframe is a lite-weight keyboard, a smoke-free environment, and a 3278 terminal emulator running on windoze with internet access. Now you can do your coding and documentation using more powerful text editors (kedit beats xedit any day) and better word processors (word sucks but beats anything on the mainframe for wysiwyg) and you can surf the net and read slash.dot, ycomb, and devx while your jobs are running and goog for ibm error messages. I think the hybrid mainframe/pc interface is 100x better but there's still a long long way to go in both worlds.
I want to be able to go to a site, move the stuff around and have it stay the way I put it when I come back. When I go to a site i don't like, I want to be able to delete it from my web experience and get a 404 next time I go there. Then I want to be able to grab links real easy to make my home page real time instead of having to go out and run a html editor or a editing program to do this. I want a macro language like REXX in my Web Editor to so I can auto surf any way I chose and write my own surfing macros. I want to be able to have my web editor do OCR on PDF files and read the pages to me. I want it to recognize my voice when I say google the distance to paris in light millisenconds and give me a answer. I want it to be able to send the results to someone when I click on their picture. I want the bookmarks that I want to be saved to have their own readily sizable icons with pictures of my choosing and sizes and colors of my choosing based on importance. I want to be able to add links from one site to another in my own little web and share my web with others and be able to see other's shared webs. I want to be able to share a portion of my computer's processor and hard drive on the net via a device link. I want to be able to access device links on the net and hook them to other devices virtual and not. I want to be able to create aliases to various web pages and links and whatnot and be able to surf by aliases I've made up, and share those aliases with others. I want to be able to have a record and playback mode so I can create 'macros' tha preenter fields and click buttons so I don't have to keep repeating myself. Browse is like so read only, I want to be able to create and edit the web realtime not just consume it.
I am just wondering when the Internet will wake up. Just a few more self heeling feedback loops and links to a couple of super colliders and... Wham! Hey! What's for breakfast???
At the time the movie came my work was to reverse-engineer a Digital Switch Corp DTS Payphone Interface Unit and add credit card/calling card capture capability and call screening to its capabilities. I was constantly burning eproms and having them installed and I had a couple of modems in my office polling the payphones in my office making tests. (asside...I wonder how many kids today have missed out on the sounds of a modem making a connection.) Anyhow a fellow applications programmer who was hearing the modemming out of my office named me.
Incidentally, there was a BBS that you could dial into, don't remember what it was, but it simulated the movie computer. The following is from fuzzy memory, not precise, perhaps someone can supply an accurate version of the dialog.
You have connected NORAD. It is a violation of US..... Login accepted... Defcom 4.. Congratulations! You have initiated Global Nuclear War.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem as I see it is that the Earth is going around the sun carrying a bunch of space junk with it. This space junk make it miserable for people who want to shoot more stuff into space. Therefore, all we have to do is get all our buddies together ( the moon and other satellites we want to keep), then just stop orbitting the sun for about 4 hours (distance to the moon/helocentric velocity). Then we should be in a nice clean portion of the orbit. Usually, it is heck of alot easier to litter and walk away than it is to pick it up and put it in the trash bin. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+moon+%2F+speed+of+earth+orbit
Did you consider a smarter rat might learn some ratonal hygiene and stop carrying deseases? Rats would write more ratonal software.
Yet if it were infantessimally small Achilles could not outrun the tortoise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes
Here's the design: set off an H-bomb in a container with a valve on it. Whenever you want to go somewhere just open the valve! Okay, now for the implementation phase...
I see non-functioning fully intact big screen tv's on the side of the road all the time and think to myself 'if only I was an EE...'.
Now if we can get these lights to emit coherent low-divergence beams and infect sharks' heads...
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?"
1) George Orwell - 1984 The discussions resulting from this book should be rather lively as Orwell pretty much nailed our present. ++Good.
2) Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy After reading Orwell, reading this will be rejuvinating. You can discuss the questions of life, the universe, and everything.
3) Greg Bear - Eon http://books.google.com/books?id=7yHURwnbFvAC&lpg=PP1&ots=H8tcoydu_h&dq=eon&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false The many ideas in this book are awesome. You could assign your class an essay 'You go 1000km and dig a whole and find a new universe, write about it'.
4) William Gibson - Neuromancer Neuromancer is kind of like a Moby Dick of Science fiction. The words used flow in a way that make you feel the world. It is probably the most difficult read on my list.
5) Arthur Clark / Ken Baxter - The Light of Other Days The discussion of Privacy is likely to be lively.
I could recommend many more...
A sound body is the best way to support a sound mind. Athletics should be required in school along with the 'hard' subjects. All students should be able to learn physical and mental dicipline. Those that don't want to learn one or the other should not be required to do so but should not be permitted to get in the way of those who do. There is nothing to prevent an athlete from being a scholar or a scholar from being an athlete except perhaps...distractions.. and this leads back to the teaching of dicipline.
http://www.chess4ever.com/thoughtsonchess/research/sportofchess/part1a.html = The importance of physical conditioning in chess was recognized long ago by the Russians.
Enterprise licenses will be priced via Engine Value Unit pricing. 50 EVU's will be defined as the performance of a standard engine from a manufacturer. This practice provides the licensing granularity customers need while offering them the flexibility to configure their systems to best support business objectives.
Lucas wanted to steal the bombing sequence from the Dam Busters and needed a plausible reason to recreate that.
Reminds me of the "Smile you son-of-a..." scene from Jaws
You wear the Gozone, it keeps track of your steps, then you download the steps via a USB port on your computer. and see your progress over time on the web page. You can win prizes for doing it as another incentive. If you have a business, you can incentivize your employees and use the data as evidence to lower your health insurance costs. A win win win situation.
http://www.virginhealthmiles.com/
I do not work for Virgin but I have to give them some credit for getting me from potato to marathon runner.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011.
say x2c(b2x(01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011))
ur a geek
When the reception is good the new over the air DTV picture is way better than analog though often there is a noticable delay between the visual and the audio tracks. This is annoying. You see the mouth move then hear the words a tenth of a second too late. When the reception is bad, DTV degrades poorly and you see ghosts and block people moving around. This is annoying. Analog tv seemed to degrade in a nicer and recover faster as well. Losing a signal on DTV is like the DVDs when your watching a movie and it gets stuck and there is no way to advance the tracking. Then a blue screen comes up and says "Bad or no Signal".
I wonder what seeing block people does to your animus psyche/subconscious. You could be watching the news and just then the foxy weather lady looks like a new T4 with a hole in her body. It is mildly uncomfortable to watch more so than the analog.
This move to DTV is surely going to be a boon for the providers of paid tv. And as an old time cynical /.er, I would be interested to see if there is a tidy correlation between cable provider profits and over the air DTV complaints...
--A future cable subscriber.
I agree. The more I learn the less I know. It is a strange place. Everything could be inscribed on an imaginary sphere. On a computer, anything can happen between the execution of two instructions. A program can be stopped and restarted just where it left off at any time e.g. hibernate. What happens between the Planck distances is nobody's business. I welcome fractal string theory and the continuum it represents. It would explain a lot of things but still doesn't tell me how life is and how here got here and why I think these thoughts some where over the rainbow...why oh why can't I....
Money, Time, and Quality.
In my youth, 'twas no better place to write code than the middle of farm country, a thousand miles from home, and no hope of home until the job was done. Then, the promise of a meal at the amazing Arcola bowling alley, aka The French Embassy, crafted by Chef Jean-Louis http://will.illinois.edu/prairiefire/segment/pf1992-04-09-a/ a sublime motivator.
Now, place is not as important as time. The creative fruit comes when the time is ripe, until then, you plant seeds and nourish them.
When I was younger, I was Josh. Well, I may have been the Josh in the story, except for two things, I wrote clean well-documented code, and I generally friendly to people. Some brilliant people place a high value on beautiful code (code that works and reads well and is maintainable). I admit, my people skills were not (and still are not) up there with my tech skills but then I found Toastmasters, but that's another story...
Anyhow, I was there that Friday night. There was a dev staff meeting. There was a problem. I had a crazy idea that I was sure would work, the rest worked on a conservative approach that would have been 36 hours of hell for the entire staff. The customer (AT&T) needed time and cost sensitive international routing up on their switch before the Mother's day weekend.
I wrote a program that in turn wrote a 300K line program from a 250K line spreadsheet that saved the day and perhaps our business from that customer. It took about an hour, and I was very happy to have had the opportunity to have solved the problem and I may have hurt some feelings with my exuberence. --There are not many that get to brag about writing 300K lines of well documented working code in an hour!
I wanted to make one more point. I think the correlation between Brilliant (technically) and Quirky is going to be high for one major reason. Brilliant people get bored easy in the public schools, where brilliancy (and the brilliant ideas it puts in your head) is often rewarded by getting the crap beaten out of you. I suppose getting the crap beaten out of you can cause you to get quirky too.
When you become an adult, and find that your brilliacy is now rewarded (50K a year will buy a boatload of beer!) you can easily become like-a-superstar arrogant, to a certain extent. I got away with the leave-without-coming-back-for-a-few-days thing and I did the poor hygiene stint. And I did wear whatever t-shirt I wanted, and I played Black Flag and Dead Kennedy's loud from my office. And I helped make my employers rich too. Drinking 50K worth of beer can also make you quirky. Then I found hashers, but that's another story too...
I also was amongst the first group to get laid off when the going got rough when the telecom market busted. I can identify with Josh. I'm sure my lack of people skills contributed, or it may have been the quirkyness.
I'd like to think I am not Josh anymore.
In answer to the original question, brilliant people can be dangerous and make you rich like Bill Gates.
Zero. The bane of all. It was the gateway math to all modern problems. It would be so much simpler with just countables. Surely the current crisis, measured in trillions would look so much better without all those zeros.
Whoever it was who invented zero should take responsibility for all the worlds problems, ex nehilo.
Someone scrawled "So long and thanks for all the fish" on the giant portrait of Lehman CEO Richard Fuld on which employees of the company wrote their final farewells (Artist Jeffrey Raymond).
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94640730
25 years ago, coding on a mainframe meant an indestructable keyboard, an ashtray, and a green screen 3278. Today working on a mainframe is a lite-weight keyboard, a smoke-free environment, and a 3278 terminal emulator running on windoze with internet access. Now you can do your coding and documentation using more powerful text editors (kedit beats xedit any day) and better word processors (word sucks but beats anything on the mainframe for wysiwyg) and you can surf the net and read slash.dot, ycomb, and devx while your jobs are running and goog for ibm error messages. I think the hybrid mainframe/pc interface is 100x better but there's still a long long way to go in both worlds.
I want to be able to go to a site, move the stuff around and have it stay the way I put it when I come back. When I go to a site i don't like, I want to be able to delete it from my web experience and get a 404 next time I go there. Then I want to be able to grab links real easy to make my home page real time instead of having to go out and run a html editor or a editing program to do this. I want a macro language like REXX in my Web Editor to so I can auto surf any way I chose and write my own surfing macros. I want to be able to have my web editor do OCR on PDF files and read the pages to me. I want it to recognize my voice when I say google the distance to paris in light millisenconds and give me a answer. I want it to be able to send the results to someone when I click on their picture. I want the bookmarks that I want to be saved to have their own readily sizable icons with pictures of my choosing and sizes and colors of my choosing based on importance. I want to be able to add links from one site to another in my own little web and share my web with others and be able to see other's shared webs. I want to be able to share a portion of my computer's processor and hard drive on the net via a device link. I want to be able to access device links on the net and hook them to other devices virtual and not. I want to be able to create aliases to various web pages and links and whatnot and be able to surf by aliases I've made up, and share those aliases with others. I want to be able to have a record and playback mode so I can create 'macros' tha preenter fields and click buttons so I don't have to keep repeating myself. Browse is like so read only, I want to be able to create and edit the web realtime not just consume it.
Now if he were just to be able to leave his process running while the rest of the world shipped off at the speed of light...
I am just wondering when the Internet will wake up. Just a few more self heeling feedback loops and links to a couple of super colliders and... Wham! Hey! What's for breakfast???
Incidentally, there was a BBS that you could dial into, don't remember what it was, but it simulated the movie computer. The following is from fuzzy memory, not precise, perhaps someone can supply an accurate version of the dialog.
You have connected NORAD. It is a violation of US
Login accepted.
Defcom 4
Congratulations! You have initiated Global Nuclear War.