- for joe-6-packers that buy an AlienWare and except to run games at max FPS, it will probably be very effective at trying to give priority to the game network traffic among all the junk that flows thru the internets' pipes.
So it'll move my frames in front of the horses and the poker chips? Sweet!
In my experience (and I suppose, opinion), "twenty past three" is a colloquialism. The vast, vast, vast majority of people will simply say "three twenty," certainly anyone my age (20s). With the exception of things like "half after" and other relativisms (a quarter till, etc), which are still fairly unused, the hour-minute format of speech dominates.
I think it's largely a question of what's implied. When I ask someone the date, for example, it's usually said "the second" or "the fifteenth," with the month being implied. For proper dates it seems that "the fourth of July" and "the fifth of November" are the dominant format. Because I learned MM/DD/YY format in school, I was immensely confused when I first say the date written DD/MM/YY.
In any case, since using Linux/UNIX, I almost exclusively use YYYY/MM/DD - `date +%F`. Way easier for sorting files.
Macs have, depending on who you ask, anything up to a 15% market share. Macs are owned by people who tend to have more to spend on computers and software, since they accept a higher initial cost for lower costs down the road, and they are great machines and are quite capable of running the latest games.
You're the first person I've ever heard quote the market share of Macs above 10%. Regardless of wether or not the hardware is capable of running the games, it's still a question of cost. It's certainly cheaper to design/develop/etc for a Mac than a Linux box, but considering a great number of games use DirectX and not OpenGL, your point is moot. But maybe those Mac users would like to fork over the extra cash to buy a Windows XP license, too.
If you want the world to change, you need to get off your ass and do something about it instead of bitching and whining and leaving it up to someone else to fix it. I have no respect for the lazy or the armchair world-changers.
Uhhh...k. That might work for saving your local swamp, but I'm not sure it's very effective when it comes to Game Development.
want us to live a more sustainable lifestyle and I practice that, including recycling far more than most people do and driving a small fuel-efficient car and minimizing my driving and living close to where I work and working for a responsible company (a university). I actively encourage those I know to do the same.
I thought we were talkign about game development. If you want to go here, fine. I recycle as much as I throw away, in fact, I end up tossing out a significant number of recyclables because the recycling bins the waste mangagement company gives us simply aren't large enough. Arguing for anything bigger/more is useless, and the waste management people ignore any other containers.
I bike to work (I also work at a university). Go us. Responsible. Heh.
It's people like me who are going to create the changes for the better, not just regarding the environment but in other ways too (I'm a Mac user and I've bought Mac games, for instance), not those like the grandparent who just are content to sit on their butts and say "if it were like..." but don't lift a damn finger to make it happen.
Wow man, got much of an ego? Want to get off your high horse and step back into the trenches of reality with the rest of us? Many people have families (maybe you do too) and "lifting a damn finger" which may very well cost them their job would be a Bad Idea(TM). Why don't you go protest global warming in traffic? I bet that will be effective.
"Grow a pair and fix it."? So he should throw out his career and devote himself to developing games on a platform has almost no market share?
I know your intentions are good and I'd love to see a thriving linux game development market the rivals the windows one, but this has little to do with anything other than market share. Not only is the initial investment likely to be much, much higher to design, develop, and test the game, the linux market is a tiny fraction of the windows market, and only a fraction of that market are willing to pay/can afford to pay for a game.
I am so fucking sick of people always bringing up children dieing as the ultimate cause to not have war.
People die in war. I don't care if it's women, children, whatever. Shit happens. People die. There's no way it's not going to happen, especially when civilians are pretty much used as a human shield, which is pretty despicable but seems to be more or less overlooked by most anti-israeli groups.
I'm sure THOUSANDS of children died when the Allies bombed the shit out of Germany near the end of WW2. Why do people keep thinking women/children wont die during an armed conflict? I'm not sanctioning it, I'm not denying it happens, but seriously, no shit children die, now move on to more important topics, like stopping more children from dieing.
It's difficult to demonsize an enemy when you can see the bleeding faces of their children.
You'd think so, until you get passed the shock value (that's the only real reason for showing this.) Then the huge "DUH, they're being used as human shields" kicks in and you realize how fucking stupid all this shit really is.
I'm sure I'll be modded down on Slashdot for saying this and marked as Troll for giving my non-bleeding-heart-opinion, but I think my karma can handle it.
Have you forgoten that they are people, too?
Anyone who kills someone in cold blood pretty much stops being a person in my eyes. There's a lot of grey area here, of course, and it greatly depends on how you define murder. If you're morally bankrupt enough to think it's okay to shoot someone because they're wearing your favorite color, then aside from the sad fact that you share the same genetic makeup as me, I find you to be pretty much not human.
What if it was your brother that was involved in drugs, or you son, or ever your parent?
I would be really, really, really heartbroken and wished I had intervened more in his or her life. In the end, people make their own choices and must face the consequences of those choices (including myself, for letting my son/daughter/sister/brother/whatever for slipping away like that).
Because the people you talk about have brothers and mothers and children, and people care about them.
Which is, again, heartbreaking, but that's life. But they have to face the consequences of their actions.
You also forget that these people are redeemable.
Redeemability is certainly subjective. Manslaughter due to negligence is redeemable. Gunning down a classroom of children is not. No, they aren't all redeemable.
O Henrey, a renound and classic writer, wrote some of his best stuff in prison.
Good for him. Should we let Stephen King kill people because he writes great fiction?
Many have gotten out of a life of crime, and added something great to society.
Most don't. Especially most people heavily involved in drugs/gangs/whatever. What great things would the people murdered have added to society? Unfortunately, they don't get an appeal process.
But in the end, the best arguement is that many of these people were conditioned by there enviornment to be criminals from children. These people weren't even given much of a chance to avoid crime; they were born into it. And it is unfair to condem people to death because of where they were born.
Woah there, double check your logic. I feel safe in saying no one has ever been convicted of being born in a certain area and thus sentenced to death. Sorry, I disagree that just because these people were born in an undeniably BAD situation that they automatically recieve a Get Out of Jail Free(TM) card. Granting a group of people special rights under the law because they were born in a specific geographic location or match a specific demographic is totally unconstitutional in the US (read the 4th amendment). "Because I was raised in bad environment x.y.z" is definitely not an excuse to comitt a crime.
Before you condem them to death, try to understand there plight. You can't know a person untill you walk a mile in thier shoes, as the saying goes.
Ah, my favorite logical falacy: appeal to emotion. I don't need to know their plight to condemn them to death and in my ever so humble opinion their plight has ZERO to do with wether or not they're guilty of committing a crime such as murder.
It's the 21st century. If you can't resist the urge to kill someone because he's wearing a red bandanna then you have no business in living our society, period.
You have an interesting concept of "serious danger." While I might be in "serious danger" of my boss if our site was compromised by such an injection, for the vast, vast, vast majority of sites out there calling it "serious danger" is way overkill.
When builders fuck up a building, people can die. When electricians fuck up your wiring, people can die. When gas installers fuck up your heater...people can die. When you fuck up your blog, no one really gives a shit. Determining where Amateur ends and Professional begins is a bit too much of a grey area.
Making (professional) programmers liable for their code is the job of their employer. If I hire you as a programmer and find out later you've been writing sloppy, insecure code (shame on me for not having someone else check it) and it's discovered that your sloppy code cost us a non-trivial amount of cash, I'd certainly consider firing you or at the very least not giving you a raise/promotion/whatever any time soon.
We're not listening for their 802.11b access points you know. The hydrogen line (http://www.setileague.org/askdr/hydrogen.htm) is considered to be the best place to listen for interstellar communications. The only assumption that is made here is that other civilizations are bothering to try to send communications; if so this is the best place to do it.
While there is still a long ways to go as far as communications are concerned, I'd say we have the basics down pretty well. If you want to transmit a signal to another group of people (whom you don't know) a long distance away (and again, your purpose is for communication) you're going to try the most obvious means possible. This means broadcasting a lot of power in a very narrow frequency with a very high SNR in adjacent frequencies, in a way that would be both meaningful and obseravable to the most simplistic receiver.
Once again, trying to communicate with other (lesser) species using the most complicated system you have available to you would be inherently DUMB. I would hope a hyper-advanced civilization had enough common sense to realize that to maximize your potential targets you must seek the lowest common denominator. This means you don't 1. Use fancy encryption 2. Use patterns that are common in nature 3. Make your signal hard to find by purposefully hiding it in the background noise of the universe, etc.
While your points are valid in that they do affect our chances of finding a signal, you're completely wrong that SETI researches make a bunch of different assumptions that are inherently flawed. The only *real* assumption they make is that another civilization WANTS TO BE HEARD. Everything else follows from that assumption.
There's other educational materials than laptops. Why do so many people seem to think the OLPC project is a silver bullet to education problems in the 3rd world? Access to free educational material certainly of all varieties hasn't solved education problems in many first world nations.
The best way to distribute money from productivity gains fairly is by equalizing bargaining power and information between labor and investors. How do you accomplish that? Unions and collective bargaining.
I'd say that the fairest method is by companies competing for the workforce. Locking Employer and Employee in and endless struggle against each other is neither fair nor a good solution to the problem (what if I don't want to be in a union? Not so fair them is it?) Healthy competition has served us quite well in recent history.
Unions are more necessary than ever if we want all Americans to share in the prosperity that their hard work has created through productivity growth. Just because we're not fighting against a 72-hour workweek anymore doesn't mean the basic reason for the existence of unions, to create equal bargaining power for workers, is any less desirable.
No. A more balanced import and export sheet with the rest of the world and a great (high) education system will ensure American prosperity in the future. Modernization would be a boon as well. Relatively few Americans' hard work has created the productivity growth we've seen (I attribute most of that growth to the baby boomers). Some American's also don't deserve to share in those benefits. Prosperity is not a guarantee in life, nor should it be.
Having also worked in a union myself (not for the big G however), it's laughable to say that the basic reason for the existence of unions is to create equal bargaining power for workers. That might have been true a century ago when there were no such thing as child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, etc, but it is, quite frankly, a stupid reason to argue for their existence now. The laws are in place, they're not going anywhere, the workers have won...and there was much rejoicing.
Let me give some examples of how unions have failed America:
1. Cough. The automobile industry. 'nuff said.
2. Longshore union. They pretty much get first dibs on stuff coming in from over seas, and anything that goes, uh, "missing" is just shrinkage that gets added to the cost of business (read: we pay for it). Despite their jobs being completely useless in an age of robots, they've somehow terrorized shipping companies and lawmakers into giving them the 5 finger discount, 6 figure salaries, and pensions. How hard do they work? Most of them sit on their ass and watch machines do the work they used to do (it's okay to use a machine as long as you still pay the man who's job is being taken over). Useful!
3. If you lived in Southern California you should remember the strike that took place a few years ago in many grocery stores (Vons/Safeway). Not only do these people get paid damn good money for work that requires nothing more than a high school education, they had full healthcare benefits. Why'd they strike? Cause "The Man" wanted them to pay a co-pay like the rest of us. Solution: a strike that will eventually allow other nonunionized grocery chains to overtake them. Nothing says short term profit like long term unemployment!
4. Unionized government labor. Yes, I realize the parent here is one of those people. Thanks to this bullshit (read: pension plans) the City of San Diego is for all practical purposes bankrupt. Mmm. Fiscal 2007 budget: $2.6 billion. Pension fund deficit: $1.43 billion. Solution: cut funding to everything that doesn't have "political suicide" written on it and raise taxes. Sure am glad we have unions! (source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/pension/2 0060619-9999-1n19bankrupt.html
5. I would say that the downfall of American construction/manufacturing is directly tied to unions who tried to keep jobs no matter what. The resulting inability to compete in the global marketplace doomed the corporations that employed them. I wonder how many familys w
You might be surprised how many people think this way or in manners similiar to this. I recieve a few emails every month or so for a support request something to the effect of "I can't get to google, do you know why it's down?." Many, many, many people seem to think (especially Windows users, just browse some of their community forums) that if a website is down for them, it must be down for everybody, and they're completely oblivious to how things work.
Incidently, I used to have a roommate (before webmail like gmail was out) that would email important photos, documents (his resume, reports), etc to himself (his ISP's email box). He'd check his email and download all that stuff back into Outlook to "make sure it was still there," not realizing that he was downloading all the stuff back to his computer. One day he decided to format his computer and reinstall Windows 98, only to discover all of his emails were gone. When I told him what he had done (and that his shit was gone forever) he promptly put his keyboard through the drywall between our rooms.
You should link people some of these reports to read, preferably by reputable scientists who research the subject...infact, let me clarify that last part:
Reputable as in not politically biased (ie, Al Gore would certainly not be reputable), published multiple papers on the subject and/or adjacent subjects in notable Journals (ie, Nature, Science, whatever, not "Wicca Quarterly," "The Limbaugh Letter," or other nonsense), and preferably a resident at a University (not their Mom's basement). Knowing who funds the research is a big plus.
And of course, by scientist, I mean people who actually, you know, do science. Not some quasi-science bullshit like most people injest and take as the truth, either. The person better have cited his sources, included his scientific data (and not summarized it like a fucking news paper article), and lastly, included error analysis. No PhD = not a reputable scientist. This isn't Coast to Coast.
I have not read any serious reports on the subject. I've heard PLENTY of media spin to the point where I wouldn't believe the truth if they told it to me. It's pretty easy to do a google search and find about 10^6 links from unqualified bloggers, cheesy geocities pages, and your typical array of leftist banter, all claiming the sky is falling but never citing just who determined that. Last time I checked, I'd file under the category of "ignorant" with most of the world (even if they don't believe it.)
Finally, let me say this (and recall I've already admitted my ignorance of the subject): I question just how accurately temperatures from 2000 years ago can be measured, relative to, say, satellite technology now. If the global mean temperature has increased 3C (and from I've heard it's less than that...) and your error is +/-5C then just how useful is that data?
Of course classically F=ma and W=E=int(F dot ds). If the article simply used acceleration instead of velocity (I can't believe they associated something that doesn't change with growth. *sigh*.) then instead of momentum they'd have force. You could then of course measure "energy" by quantizing their growth in a specific direction(s).
If you're going to make an analogy of something with classical physics you could at LEAST get the "units"/equations right.
I don't recall exactly when, but shortly after GWB came to office I had to move and get a new job. I was forced from my coosh, parentally funded domicile into the small confines of a shared apartment room. I didn't think about it at the time, but ever since I've been forced to take really long exams, work to pay my rent, and even take out loans to pay for school from the Bush Administration! In the end I was left with a degree and an assload of debt. It's clearly Bush's fault.
This is only possible due to a lack of informed voters.
Maybe if we translate the Consitution (and all political material) into Spanish we wont have this problem in the future. Reading it in the original English is such a faux pas, anyways.
But seriously - how many students in America's high schools (or even colleges) do you think have actually read and understood the Constitution? In Southern California, we happily graduate anyone who can't read/write English from our high schools. In twenty years (probably less) this problem will be significantly worse.
It seems that the only freedom anyone knows about these days is the freedom of speech...as long as your speech doesn't offend anyone, of course.
...were really on the ball when they marked you "Insightful" all the way to +5. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. That way we can't do anything bad, ever.
I get the whole green/liberal/whatever slant to Slashdot. But seriously, this kind of shit post is just stupid. (And I realize that by calling something what it is on Slashdot, I have to pay for it with karma). An insightful comment would have been an a comment that offered a deeper understanding into what was going on or perhaps a suggestion of what is causing it to restore itself faster than expected.
Note that neither this post, nor the parent post, is insightful. Infact, if more of you retards did your job right (and some of you really, really do do good jobs), this kind of stuff would be marked troll. (This post included, although I could perhaps argue that I am giving mods some insight).
- Release patches quickly - Release patches with adequate testing
Yeah...and while they're at it, why don't you lobby them to open source Windows. Not that I'm surprised to see this comment from someone who's calling for Bush to go on trial for war crimes in their sig, but billions of dollars aside you might want to actually think about the logistics of testing patches. If they didn't test them "adequately" I imagine we'd see this kind of problem on a much larger scale and more often.
It puts too much power into the hands of whatever journal has the most clout. Under the right system of checks and balances such an idea might work for a relatively narrow range of patents. I'm sure there's plenty of things college professors aren't interested in reviewing.
No, all patents should be, at least at first, considered equal. Only after proper scrutiny and comparison to existant patents should a decision be made. From what I can tell, this is a rough idea of how the current system is supposed to work and the cause of the breakdown is that the current system is overburdened.
Saying abolishing software patents would solve the problem is stupid since not all (stupid) patents are on software. Not to mention I haven't been completely sold on the idea that *all* software patents are, somehow, inherently evil. If I implement an algorithim that's very efficient at, say, facial recognition, why shouldn't I be able to patent it and profit from my hard work? Don't like it? TFB. Invent a better one and beat me at my own game.
There is no doubt that patents are being misused and that the current system is shitty at best. But implemented and run properly the system can protect patent holders and drive innovation.
A lot of people *would* mind if GNU decided to use their ideas to make free stuff. While it might not be me or you, it is their idea and their right to protect it. We should respect that.
I'm definitely *not* saying that all ideas should be patentable. Just that those that are should be respected.
Your computer wasn't trying to draw a 1024x768 or greater resolution screen. Face it, the reality of computer modernity is not that the software has gotten too bulky, but that the environments we're accustomed too are far more complicated now.
Software has grown to take advantage of the hardware, like you said, and this is a Good Thing(TM). If we used something a lot less powerful we wouldn't be able to "waste remaining cycles on eyecandy" as they would be too busy actually doing something useful like redrawing your current window.
A $100 laptop might be great if you don't need/want to do much, and you wont be able to anyways. If you want to browse the web and send email this things for you. Just don't complain when you can't do X or Y or Z with it because it doesn't have enough {ram|CPU|disk space|screen size}.
Having just learned that dyanmic power dissipation in CMOS is directly proportional to the frequency it is switched at, I'd like to know more about what you and the parent have said (mainly, the math). Any chance you or someone else could enlighten us as to why it is the cube of the frequency?
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- for joe-6-packers that buy an AlienWare and except to run games at max FPS, it will probably be very effective at trying to give priority to the game network traffic among all the junk that flows thru the internets' pipes.
So it'll move my frames in front of the horses and the poker chips? Sweet!
In my experience (and I suppose, opinion), "twenty past three" is a colloquialism. The vast, vast, vast majority of people will simply say "three twenty," certainly anyone my age (20s). With the exception of things like "half after" and other relativisms (a quarter till, etc), which are still fairly unused, the hour-minute format of speech dominates.
I think it's largely a question of what's implied. When I ask someone the date, for example, it's usually said "the second" or "the fifteenth," with the month being implied. For proper dates it seems that "the fourth of July" and "the fifth of November" are the dominant format. Because I learned MM/DD/YY format in school, I was immensely confused when I first say the date written DD/MM/YY.
In any case, since using Linux/UNIX, I almost exclusively use YYYY/MM/DD - `date +%F`. Way easier for sorting files.
You're the first person I've ever heard quote the market share of Macs above 10%. Regardless of wether or not the hardware is capable of running the games, it's still a question of cost. It's certainly cheaper to design/develop/etc for a Mac than a Linux box, but considering a great number of games use DirectX and not OpenGL, your point is moot. But maybe those Mac users would like to fork over the extra cash to buy a Windows XP license, too.
Uhhh...k. That might work for saving your local swamp, but I'm not sure it's very effective when it comes to Game Development.
I thought we were talkign about game development. If you want to go here, fine. I recycle as much as I throw away, in fact, I end up tossing out a significant number of recyclables because the recycling bins the waste mangagement company gives us simply aren't large enough. Arguing for anything bigger/more is useless, and the waste management people ignore any other containers.
I bike to work (I also work at a university). Go us. Responsible. Heh.
Wow man, got much of an ego? Want to get off your high horse and step back into the trenches of reality with the rest of us? Many people have families (maybe you do too) and "lifting a damn finger" which may very well cost them their job would be a Bad Idea(TM). Why don't you go protest global warming in traffic? I bet that will be effective.
"Grow a pair and fix it."? So he should throw out his career and devote himself to developing games on a platform has almost no market share?
I know your intentions are good and I'd love to see a thriving linux game development market the rivals the windows one, but this has little to do with anything other than market share. Not only is the initial investment likely to be much, much higher to design, develop, and test the game, the linux market is a tiny fraction of the windows market, and only a fraction of that market are willing to pay/can afford to pay for a game.
and it's called DirectX.
Assuming your post isn't a rhetorical question, I'm a little scared you didn't already know this.
I am so fucking sick of people always bringing up children dieing as the ultimate cause to not have war.
People die in war. I don't care if it's women, children, whatever. Shit happens. People die. There's no way it's not going to happen, especially when civilians are pretty much used as a human shield, which is pretty despicable but seems to be more or less overlooked by most anti-israeli groups.
I'm sure THOUSANDS of children died when the Allies bombed the shit out of Germany near the end of WW2. Why do people keep thinking women/children wont die during an armed conflict? I'm not sanctioning it, I'm not denying it happens, but seriously, no shit children die, now move on to more important topics, like stopping more children from dieing.
It's difficult to demonsize an enemy when you can see the bleeding faces of their children.
You'd think so, until you get passed the shock value (that's the only real reason for showing this.) Then the huge "DUH, they're being used as human shields" kicks in and you realize how fucking stupid all this shit really is.
I'm sure I'll be modded down on Slashdot for saying this and marked as Troll for giving my non-bleeding-heart-opinion, but I think my karma can handle it.
Have you forgoten that they are people, too?
Anyone who kills someone in cold blood pretty much stops being a person in my eyes. There's a lot of grey area here, of course, and it greatly depends on how you define murder. If you're morally bankrupt enough to think it's okay to shoot someone because they're wearing your favorite color, then aside from the sad fact that you share the same genetic makeup as me, I find you to be pretty much not human.
What if it was your brother that was involved in drugs, or you son, or ever your parent?
I would be really, really, really heartbroken and wished I had intervened more in his or her life. In the end, people make their own choices and must face the consequences of those choices (including myself, for letting my son/daughter/sister/brother/whatever for slipping away like that).
Because the people you talk about have brothers and mothers and children, and people care about them.
Which is, again, heartbreaking, but that's life. But they have to face the consequences of their actions.
You also forget that these people are redeemable.
Redeemability is certainly subjective. Manslaughter due to negligence is redeemable. Gunning down a classroom of children is not. No, they aren't all redeemable.
O Henrey, a renound and classic writer, wrote some of his best stuff in prison.
Good for him. Should we let Stephen King kill people because he writes great fiction?
Many have gotten out of a life of crime, and added something great to society.
Most don't. Especially most people heavily involved in drugs/gangs/whatever. What great things would the people murdered have added to society? Unfortunately, they don't get an appeal process.
But in the end, the best arguement is that many of these people were conditioned by there enviornment to be criminals from children. These people weren't even given much of a chance to avoid crime; they were born into it. And it is unfair to condem people to death because of where they were born.
Woah there, double check your logic. I feel safe in saying no one has ever been convicted of being born in a certain area and thus sentenced to death. Sorry, I disagree that just because these people were born in an undeniably BAD situation that they automatically recieve a Get Out of Jail Free(TM) card. Granting a group of people special rights under the law because they were born in a specific geographic location or match a specific demographic is totally unconstitutional in the US (read the 4th amendment). "Because I was raised in bad environment x.y.z" is definitely not an excuse to comitt a crime.
Before you condem them to death, try to understand there plight. You can't know a person untill you walk a mile in thier shoes, as the saying goes.
Ah, my favorite logical falacy: appeal to emotion. I don't need to know their plight to condemn them to death and in my ever so humble opinion their plight has ZERO to do with wether or not they're guilty of committing a crime such as murder.
It's the 21st century. If you can't resist the urge to kill someone because he's wearing a red bandanna then you have no business in living our society, period.
You have an interesting concept of "serious danger." While I might be in "serious danger" of my boss if our site was compromised by such an injection, for the vast, vast, vast majority of sites out there calling it "serious danger" is way overkill.
When builders fuck up a building, people can die. When electricians fuck up your wiring, people can die. When gas installers fuck up your heater...people can die. When you fuck up your blog, no one really gives a shit. Determining where Amateur ends and Professional begins is a bit too much of a grey area.
Making (professional) programmers liable for their code is the job of their employer. If I hire you as a programmer and find out later you've been writing sloppy, insecure code (shame on me for not having someone else check it) and it's discovered that your sloppy code cost us a non-trivial amount of cash, I'd certainly consider firing you or at the very least not giving you a raise/promotion/whatever any time soon.
We're not listening for their 802.11b access points you know. The hydrogen line (http://www.setileague.org/askdr/hydrogen.htm) is considered to be the best place to listen for interstellar communications. The only assumption that is made here is that other civilizations are bothering to try to send communications; if so this is the best place to do it.
While there is still a long ways to go as far as communications are concerned, I'd say we have the basics down pretty well. If you want to transmit a signal to another group of people (whom you don't know) a long distance away (and again, your purpose is for communication) you're going to try the most obvious means possible. This means broadcasting a lot of power in a very narrow frequency with a very high SNR in adjacent frequencies, in a way that would be both meaningful and obseravable to the most simplistic receiver.
Once again, trying to communicate with other (lesser) species using the most complicated system you have available to you would be inherently DUMB. I would hope a hyper-advanced civilization had enough common sense to realize that to maximize your potential targets you must seek the lowest common denominator. This means you don't 1. Use fancy encryption 2. Use patterns that are common in nature 3. Make your signal hard to find by purposefully hiding it in the background noise of the universe, etc.
While your points are valid in that they do affect our chances of finding a signal, you're completely wrong that SETI researches make a bunch of different assumptions that are inherently flawed. The only *real* assumption they make is that another civilization WANTS TO BE HEARD. Everything else follows from that assumption.
There's other educational materials than laptops. Why do so many people seem to think the OLPC project is a silver bullet to education problems in the 3rd world? Access to free educational material certainly of all varieties hasn't solved education problems in many first world nations.
IMHO AIDS trumps OLPC anyday.
The best way to distribute money from productivity gains fairly is by equalizing bargaining power and information between labor and investors. How do you accomplish that? Unions and collective bargaining.
I'd say that the fairest method is by companies competing for the workforce. Locking Employer and Employee in and endless struggle against each other is neither fair nor a good solution to the problem (what if I don't want to be in a union? Not so fair them is it?) Healthy competition has served us quite well in recent history.
Unions are more necessary than ever if we want all Americans to share in the prosperity that their hard work has created through productivity growth. Just because we're not fighting against a 72-hour workweek anymore doesn't mean the basic reason for the existence of unions, to create equal bargaining power for workers, is any less desirable.
No. A more balanced import and export sheet with the rest of the world and a great (high) education system will ensure American prosperity in the future. Modernization would be a boon as well. Relatively few Americans' hard work has created the productivity growth we've seen (I attribute most of that growth to the baby boomers). Some American's also don't deserve to share in those benefits. Prosperity is not a guarantee in life, nor should it be.
Having also worked in a union myself (not for the big G however), it's laughable to say that the basic reason for the existence of unions is to create equal bargaining power for workers. That might have been true a century ago when there were no such thing as child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, etc, but it is, quite frankly, a stupid reason to argue for their existence now. The laws are in place, they're not going anywhere, the workers have won...and there was much rejoicing.
Let me give some examples of how unions have failed America:
1. Cough. The automobile industry. 'nuff said.
2. Longshore union. They pretty much get first dibs on stuff coming in from over seas, and anything that goes, uh, "missing" is just shrinkage that gets added to the cost of business (read: we pay for it). Despite their jobs being completely useless in an age of robots, they've somehow terrorized shipping companies and lawmakers into giving them the 5 finger discount, 6 figure salaries, and pensions. How hard do they work? Most of them sit on their ass and watch machines do the work they used to do (it's okay to use a machine as long as you still pay the man who's job is being taken over). Useful!
3. If you lived in Southern California you should remember the strike that took place a few years ago in many grocery stores (Vons/Safeway). Not only do these people get paid damn good money for work that requires nothing more than a high school education, they had full healthcare benefits. Why'd they strike? Cause "The Man" wanted them to pay a co-pay like the rest of us. Solution: a strike that will eventually allow other nonunionized grocery chains to overtake them. Nothing says short term profit like long term unemployment!
4. Unionized government labor. Yes, I realize the parent here is one of those people. Thanks to this bullshit (read: pension plans) the City of San Diego is for all practical purposes bankrupt. Mmm. Fiscal 2007 budget: $2.6 billion. Pension fund deficit: $1.43 billion. Solution: cut funding to everything that doesn't have "political suicide" written on it and raise taxes. Sure am glad we have unions! (source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/pension/2 0060619-9999-1n19bankrupt.html
5. I would say that the downfall of American construction/manufacturing is directly tied to unions who tried to keep jobs no matter what. The resulting inability to compete in the global marketplace doomed the corporations that employed them. I wonder how many familys w
You might be surprised how many people think this way or in manners similiar to this. I recieve a few emails every month or so for a support request something to the effect of "I can't get to google, do you know why it's down?." Many, many, many people seem to think (especially Windows users, just browse some of their community forums) that if a website is down for them, it must be down for everybody, and they're completely oblivious to how things work.
Incidently, I used to have a roommate (before webmail like gmail was out) that would email important photos, documents (his resume, reports), etc to himself (his ISP's email box). He'd check his email and download all that stuff back into Outlook to "make sure it was still there," not realizing that he was downloading all the stuff back to his computer. One day he decided to format his computer and reinstall Windows 98, only to discover all of his emails were gone. When I told him what he had done (and that his shit was gone forever) he promptly put his keyboard through the drywall between our rooms.
He didn't get his deposit back.
You should link people some of these reports to read, preferably by reputable scientists who research the subject...infact, let me clarify that last part:
Reputable as in not politically biased (ie, Al Gore would certainly not be reputable), published multiple papers on the subject and/or adjacent subjects in notable Journals (ie, Nature, Science, whatever, not "Wicca Quarterly," "The Limbaugh Letter," or other nonsense), and preferably a resident at a University (not their Mom's basement). Knowing who funds the research is a big plus.
And of course, by scientist, I mean people who actually, you know, do science. Not some quasi-science bullshit like most people injest and take as the truth, either. The person better have cited his sources, included his scientific data (and not summarized it like a fucking news paper article), and lastly, included error analysis. No PhD = not a reputable scientist. This isn't Coast to Coast.
I have not read any serious reports on the subject. I've heard PLENTY of media spin to the point where I wouldn't believe the truth if they told it to me. It's pretty easy to do a google search and find about 10^6 links from unqualified bloggers, cheesy geocities pages, and your typical array of leftist banter, all claiming the sky is falling but never citing just who determined that. Last time I checked, I'd file under the category of "ignorant" with most of the world (even if they don't believe it.)
Finally, let me say this (and recall I've already admitted my ignorance of the subject): I question just how accurately temperatures from 2000 years ago can be measured, relative to, say, satellite technology now. If the global mean temperature has increased 3C (and from I've heard it's less than that...) and your error is +/-5C then just how useful is that data?
Of course classically F=ma and W=E=int(F dot ds). If the article simply used acceleration instead of velocity (I can't believe they associated something that doesn't change with growth. *sigh*.) then instead of momentum they'd have force. You could then of course measure "energy" by quantizing their growth in a specific direction(s).
If you're going to make an analogy of something with classical physics you could at LEAST get the "units"/equations right.
I don't recall exactly when, but shortly after GWB came to office I had to move and get a new job. I was forced from my coosh, parentally funded domicile into the small confines of a shared apartment room. I didn't think about it at the time, but ever since I've been forced to take really long exams, work to pay my rent, and even take out loans to pay for school from the Bush Administration! In the end I was left with a degree and an assload of debt. It's clearly Bush's fault.
Anyone else remember anything along these lines?
This is only possible due to a lack of informed voters.
Maybe if we translate the Consitution (and all political material) into Spanish we wont have this problem in the future. Reading it in the original English is such a faux pas, anyways.
But seriously - how many students in America's high schools (or even colleges) do you think have actually read and understood the Constitution? In Southern California, we happily graduate anyone who can't read/write English from our high schools. In twenty years (probably less) this problem will be significantly worse.
It seems that the only freedom anyone knows about these days is the freedom of speech...as long as your speech doesn't offend anyone, of course.
...were really on the ball when they marked you "Insightful" all the way to +5. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. That way we can't do anything bad, ever.
I get the whole green/liberal/whatever slant to Slashdot. But seriously, this kind of shit post is just stupid. (And I realize that by calling something what it is on Slashdot, I have to pay for it with karma). An insightful comment would have been an a comment that offered a deeper understanding into what was going on or perhaps a suggestion of what is causing it to restore itself faster than expected.
Note that neither this post, nor the parent post, is insightful. Infact, if more of you retards did your job right (and some of you really, really do do good jobs), this kind of stuff would be marked troll. (This post included, although I could perhaps argue that I am giving mods some insight).
You obviously don't use Gentoo.
omg, and so does France, it's a conspiracy!
They can, will, and had better do both:
- Release patches quickly
- Release patches with adequate testing
Yeah...and while they're at it, why don't you lobby them to open source Windows. Not that I'm surprised to see this comment from someone who's calling for Bush to go on trial for war crimes in their sig, but billions of dollars aside you might want to actually think about the logistics of testing patches. If they didn't test them "adequately" I imagine we'd see this kind of problem on a much larger scale and more often.
...that everyone here just assumes all problems started =6 years ago.
It puts too much power into the hands of whatever journal has the most clout. Under the right system of checks and balances such an idea might work for a relatively narrow range of patents. I'm sure there's plenty of things college professors aren't interested in reviewing.
No, all patents should be, at least at first, considered equal. Only after proper scrutiny and comparison to existant patents should a decision be made. From what I can tell, this is a rough idea of how the current system is supposed to work and the cause of the breakdown is that the current system is overburdened.
Saying abolishing software patents would solve the problem is stupid since not all (stupid) patents are on software. Not to mention I haven't been completely sold on the idea that *all* software patents are, somehow, inherently evil. If I implement an algorithim that's very efficient at, say, facial recognition, why shouldn't I be able to patent it and profit from my hard work? Don't like it? TFB. Invent a better one and beat me at my own game.
There is no doubt that patents are being misused and that the current system is shitty at best. But implemented and run properly the system can protect patent holders and drive innovation.
A lot of people *would* mind if GNU decided to use their ideas to make free stuff. While it might not be me or you, it is their idea and their right to protect it. We should respect that.
I'm definitely *not* saying that all ideas should be patentable. Just that those that are should be respected.
Your computer wasn't trying to draw a 1024x768 or greater resolution screen. Face it, the reality of computer modernity is not that the software has gotten too bulky, but that the environments we're accustomed too are far more complicated now.
Software has grown to take advantage of the hardware, like you said, and this is a Good Thing(TM). If we used something a lot less powerful we wouldn't be able to "waste remaining cycles on eyecandy" as they would be too busy actually doing something useful like redrawing your current window.
A $100 laptop might be great if you don't need/want to do much, and you wont be able to anyways. If you want to browse the web and send email this things for you. Just don't complain when you can't do X or Y or Z with it because it doesn't have enough {ram|CPU|disk space|screen size}.
Having just learned that dyanmic power dissipation in CMOS is directly proportional to the frequency it is switched at, I'd like to know more about what you and the parent have said (mainly, the math). Any chance you or someone else could enlighten us as to why it is the cube of the frequency?