Calling someone like a systems admin...selfish because on his off hours he wants to catch a movie is crap.
Absolutely and without hesitation would I call the sysadmin selfish. Why should I care about some other company's network when I'm watching a movie? I think I'd say the same for the heart surgeon. The point is - one heart surgeon serves hundreds of thousands of people. That means that when a heart surgeon is on call I am effectively wired in to hundreds of thousands of people's hearts. Any one of those hearts needs surgery and a few hundred people's movie experiences are spoiled. It's selfish to expose a few hundred people to the risk that one of several hundred thousand's people's hearts might fail (or whatever it is that prompts heart surgeons to spring into action).
Of course, I have no objection if you use vibrate mode. But even then, there's no need to answer the call in the cinema like many people do.
In a cinema there are often hundreds of people. The chance that at least one person out of those hundreds has an 'emergency' during the length of a movie is significant. This means that any time I see a movie I have to endure a significant chance of it being ruined because of someone else's problem. No thanks. If you're worried about emergencies DON'T WATCH MOVIES OR GO TO CONCERTS. It's as simple as that. You can wait for the DVD or buy the CD instead.
What does it have to do with the FCC? This is completely passive and emits no signal. I'm allowed to build a Faraday cage around my own house if I so desire. The only thing different here is the ability to switch the cage on and off.
What came first? The computer virus, or the computer. Early computers were not computer viruses. Viruses exploit features pre-existent in computers to reproduce. For example a virus is unlikely to contain a TCP/IP stack but might exploit one on its host to spread. Similarly, nobody expects early organisms to look like viruses (except now, maybe they do).
So Baigent and Leigh wrote (what they would claim is) a history book and Brown is sued for using the information in it. Maybe I should get sued for mentioning that Hitler was the dictator of Germany during WWII. Unless Brown has literally copied text (which I doubt as the former book is a 'non-fiction' work and Brown's is fiction) there isn't any kind of case here.
going up to your record player, carefully lifting the previous vinyl from the turntable making sure you don't scratch the record, slipping it back into the inner sleeve, slipping the sleve into the album cover, putting the album cover on the shelf, selecting the album you want to listen to, taking the inner sleeve out, carefully removing the vinyl from the sleeve so you don't scratch it, checking for dust on the vinyl and removing it if present, placing the vinyl on the turntable, pressing whatever buttons you need do, relaxing to enjoy the music for 25 minutes, getting up to turn the record over again, checking for dust again, putting the record back on the turntable again, pressing whatever buttons you need again, relaxing for 25 minutes with music.
Relaxing for 50 minutes with music.
Beauty 'n' all is a fine thing but don't get confused about simplicity.
Yeah, but scratches are analog and hence have a warmer feeling that's less obtrusive. You don't get the sharp angular sound that you get from digital distortion and so it's truer to the original recording. They don't upset the relative phase and so keep the sonic field in a good state, and if your audio cable has a prime number of cores in it the eddy currents caused by the scratch signals cause destructive interference that actually cleans the audio, especially when the aspect ratio of your room is the golden ratio. And anyway, if you keep your vinyl under a pyramid ths scratches heal themselves over time.
It's basically undergraduate level mathematics. What's hard is trying to shoehorn a description of a quantum system into something that looks like a description of a classical system. The result is that if your knowledge of math extends as far as being able to understand some basic things about vectors then it's easy to read the original paper on 'counterfactual computation'. Much easier, in fact, than trying to understand a description in a pop science article. And that's why physicists heads don't explode, but people who read Scientific American and New Scientist often leave a sticky mess on the ceiling above where they were standing.
I remember swapping a few emails with the author of a paper on this about ten years ago. Essentially you can get the result of the computation and yet the computer that runs destructively interferes with itself so that it essentially it remains unchanged at the end of the computation.
But this doesn't buy you anything. Quantum computers are reversible meaning they use no energy. And the computer has to spend just as long "doing nothing" as it would have spent doing the computation. And your computer is still tied up "doing nothing". So it's basically useless.
All a company has to do is follow a minimal set of guidelines and then they can convince a judge that they carried it out, how can it be their fault?
I was involved with an IP lawyer a couple of years back. He told me to encrypt my mails to him so at a future date we could prove, if needed, that we'd made a reasonable effort to keep our R&D secret. He gave me some Norton tool with a horribly hobbled form of encryption. I was able to crack it in minutes by downloading an app from the.ru domain:-) I told the lawyer. But his response was that all we needed was to be able to prove "due diligence", not actually be secure. After all, what does some judge know about crack software downloaded off the web. The box containing the software used words like "SECURE".
And this is how the world works. Companies don't really try to make themselves secure - they just make them secure enough to convince other people that they are. I've been complicit in such things myself. One of our clients demanded we make our software development secure. We made loads of groups so we could control exactly who in the company had access to what source code. But this was braindead - people all through the company needed access to software all over the place. We couldn't partition things up in this way without hindering development. So I made all the groups and put everyone who asked in whatever groups they asked for. We could now report to the client that we had made the groups and denied permission to people outside these groups. We omitted to mention who was actually contained in each group and just said that people were in whatever groups they needed.
Oh, don't worry about that any more. It's much easier these days. There's a black box called a microcontroller and it does everything. You can't actually see what it does but as it's approximately Turing complete you know it can do anything. There you go, that's all you need to know about modern electronic equipment.
If it were possible to say when organisms have "a reason to do so" then we'd be able to look at the fossil record for a region of the world and make detailed predictions about the modern day flora and fauna found there (beyond saying they look like their ancestors). Nobody is able to make such predictions so I doubyt anyone's claim that "there was no reason to do so". (Note, I'm not disputing the main claim, just this claim of predictive power.)
Yeah. Not my choice. I use MacOS X at home. (And I agree with you on the direction there too - the brushed metal looks like something cooked up by some kid for Enlightenment.)
If aesthetic were important than a better place to start might be by having standards for the look and feel of X applications and then making Linux distributions adhere to it. Right now my X desktop looks like every application was designed and written by a completely different group of people (which of course they were, but it shouldn't be visible). This doesn't just apply to looks. It'd be nice if there were some commonality between the user interfaces too. This is far more imporant, to me, than a bunch of new features that will allow applications to look and behave even more differently from each other than before.
...don't corrupt their minds with imperative programming languages. bring them up on a pure functional language like Haskell from a young age, say 4 or 5 years. Don't let them even hear of side effects until they're 18 and make sure they never hear about non-constant global variables until they're 21. That way there's chance they won't write the kind of crap that passes for code nowadays. And they'll be smart - very smart.
When you produce good work, you should be paid for your effort invested, that's what makes you uniquely valuable.
Hello??? This would mean you could just feed all of your work to a competitor. What kind of system is that?
The product you create is just a commodity, meaningless.
It might be a commodity, but it's not meaningless. What kind of nonsensical statement is that? The commodity I produce is worth money to my employer and worth quite a bit to their competitors. What's "meaningless"?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I have no objection if you use vibrate mode. But even then, there's no need to answer the call in the cinema like many people do.
In a cinema there are often hundreds of people. The chance that at least one person out of those hundreds has an 'emergency' during the length of a movie is significant. This means that any time I see a movie I have to endure a significant chance of it being ruined because of someone else's problem. No thanks. If you're worried about emergencies DON'T WATCH MOVIES OR GO TO CONCERTS. It's as simple as that. You can wait for the DVD or buy the CD instead.
What does it have to do with the FCC? This is completely passive and emits no signal. I'm allowed to build a Faraday cage around my own house if I so desire. The only thing different here is the ability to switch the cage on and off.
What came first? The computer virus, or the computer. Early computers were not computer viruses. Viruses exploit features pre-existent in computers to reproduce. For example a virus is unlikely to contain a TCP/IP stack but might exploit one on its host to spread. Similarly, nobody expects early organisms to look like viruses (except now, maybe they do).
So Baigent and Leigh wrote (what they would claim is) a history book and Brown is sued for using the information in it. Maybe I should get sued for mentioning that Hitler was the dictator of Germany during WWII. Unless Brown has literally copied text (which I doubt as the former book is a 'non-fiction' work and Brown's is fiction) there isn't any kind of case here.
- going up to your record player, carefully lifting the previous vinyl from the turntable making sure you don't scratch the record, slipping it back into the inner sleeve, slipping the sleve into the album cover, putting the album cover on the shelf, selecting the album you want to listen to, taking the inner sleeve out, carefully removing the vinyl from the sleeve so you don't scratch it, checking for dust on the vinyl and removing it if present, placing the vinyl on the turntable, pressing whatever buttons you need do, relaxing to enjoy the music for 25 minutes, getting up to turn the record over again, checking for dust again, putting the record back on the turntable again, pressing whatever buttons you need again, relaxing for 25 minutes with music.
- Relaxing for 50 minutes with music.
Beauty 'n' all is a fine thing but don't get confused about simplicity.Did he have a Quadratic Residue Diffuser in his room? Or use Golden Section Stranding?
Yeah, but scratches are analog and hence have a warmer feeling that's less obtrusive. You don't get the sharp angular sound that you get from digital distortion and so it's truer to the original recording. They don't upset the relative phase and so keep the sonic field in a good state, and if your audio cable has a prime number of cores in it the eddy currents caused by the scratch signals cause destructive interference that actually cleans the audio, especially when the aspect ratio of your room is the golden ratio. And anyway, if you keep your vinyl under a pyramid ths scratches heal themselves over time.
It's basically undergraduate level mathematics. What's hard is trying to shoehorn a description of a quantum system into something that looks like a description of a classical system. The result is that if your knowledge of math extends as far as being able to understand some basic things about vectors then it's easy to read the original paper on 'counterfactual computation'. Much easier, in fact, than trying to understand a description in a pop science article. And that's why physicists heads don't explode, but people who read Scientific American and New Scientist often leave a sticky mess on the ceiling above where they were standing.
Being a mathenatician I used 'result' to mean 'theoretical result' not 'experimental result' :-)
But this doesn't buy you anything. Quantum computers are reversible meaning they use no energy. And the computer has to spend just as long "doing nothing" as it would have spent doing the computation. And your computer is still tied up "doing nothing". So it's basically useless.
I was involved with an IP lawyer a couple of years back. He told me to encrypt my mails to him so at a future date we could prove, if needed, that we'd made a reasonable effort to keep our R&D secret. He gave me some Norton tool with a horribly hobbled form of encryption. I was able to crack it in minutes by downloading an app from the .ru domain :-) I told the lawyer. But his response was that all we needed was to be able to prove "due diligence", not actually be secure. After all, what does some judge know about crack software downloaded off the web. The box containing the software used words like "SECURE".
And this is how the world works. Companies don't really try to make themselves secure - they just make them secure enough to convince other people that they are. I've been complicit in such things myself. One of our clients demanded we make our software development secure. We made loads of groups so we could control exactly who in the company had access to what source code. But this was braindead - people all through the company needed access to software all over the place. We couldn't partition things up in this way without hindering development. So I made all the groups and put everyone who asked in whatever groups they asked for. We could now report to the client that we had made the groups and denied permission to people outside these groups. We omitted to mention who was actually contained in each group and just said that people were in whatever groups they needed.
Oh, don't worry about that any more. It's much easier these days. There's a black box called a microcontroller and it does everything. You can't actually see what it does but as it's approximately Turing complete you know it can do anything. There you go, that's all you need to know about modern electronic equipment.
If aesthetic were important than a better place to start might be by having standards for the look and feel of X applications and then making Linux distributions adhere to it. Right now my X desktop looks like every application was designed and written by a completely different group of people (which of course they were, but it shouldn't be visible). This doesn't just apply to looks. It'd be nice if there were some commonality between the user interfaces too. This is far more imporant, to me, than a bunch of new features that will allow applications to look and behave even more differently from each other than before.
...don't corrupt their minds with imperative programming languages. bring them up on a pure functional language like Haskell from a young age, say 4 or 5 years. Don't let them even hear of side effects until they're 18 and make sure they never hear about non-constant global variables until they're 21. That way there's chance they won't write the kind of crap that passes for code nowadays. And they'll be smart - very smart.
That's because fun = evil
...about computer science but no, it's just a story about venture capitalists. The Y combinator is fun to play with.
You mean people will be able to stick singing dancing pop up (or even pop under) advertising in documents. No thanks!
Um...I don't know many products that take 100 years to take to market.
As far as I can tell from the description this application implements this piece of Haskell code:
/. and sell it for $20,000 a pop.
code [] = []
code ("Phe":s) = "UUU":code s
code ("Leu":s) = "UUA":code s
. . .
code ("Gly":s) = "GGU":code s
I've left out about 20 lines because I don't want to give it away when I could advertise in on