Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems to me that the quote from the article "Many people with mental disorders... fear discrimination because of the stigma attached to mental illness, the study found" could be justified by the Slashdot headline "Surgeon General Says 1/5 of Americans are Nuts." Now, being an insensitive clod myself, I can appreciate the headline, and I find it amusing. But, at the same time, I realize that the word "nuts" might not be the most positive word to use.
I do my development work here at IBM on my Linux laptop. The windows box they gave me is good for running Lotus Notes and that's it.
I have a definite advantage over my team mates. My code moves very very easily from my Linux Java environment to the target AIX server. Theirs requires a few tweaks and other stupid things to move to the AIX box because it was written on a Windows machine.
Furthermore, I can mount all the test data I need through NFS. My windows using comrades always need to make copies every time the test data gets updated. I waste little time because of that.
IBM really likes Linux, and the managers are happy to let me use it.
Cash doesn't have value because the gubment says it does, it has value because the people consider the money to have value.
It's a good thing that money is not based in gold or other assemblage of atoms. What are atom-poor countries to do? If lower Freedonia has an insufficient number of gold atoms (or other suitable valuable atoms) to base their money on, but they have an overabundance of the very best programmers in the world, how can they hope to raise their standard of living with respect to the rest of the world? Internally their resources aren't valuable at all, so why would they base their currency on that?
Or, suppose that Freedonia discovered that they have a nugget of gold underneath their country the size of Mt. Everest. Meanwhile, the United States and all the other powerful countries in the world went back to the gold standard. Freedonia, wanting to cause a lot of trouble, decides to dig up the entire mountain, instantly causing the basis of the world's money to fall to a penny per ton. Imagine the havoc that would cause.
No thanks, I'll take money that is based on a mutual agreement between citizens of the world. It's more stable than mere aggregations of atoms.
Nova means new star. I think Nova means new star in Latin too. But of course, they don't speak Latin in Latin America anymore, they speak Spanish. I think that nova means star in Spanish.
What??? You're talking about a phone sex worker. You know, the ones that Oral Roberts and others claim are "Satans mistresses."
You're just facilitating the return of the anti-christ when you suggest that we actually give those in cahoots with the devil a chance to make the Y2K problem worse.
Sheesh! It's rough defending our nation's borders against the spawn of hell with just a shotgun and a chainsaw.
I realize that many people here are hackers, and the push to write great code is very strong. But none of us should discount the possibility that our DNA (which the article claims is 42% "junk") is merely heavily commented. That might be a bit overkill on the comments, but we should all resolve to take a hacker's lesson from our genetic heritage, and add a few comments in our code here and there.
1) Google loads fast. Pages that take more than 5 seconds to load had better have some pretty damn good content. 2) Google searches fast. It doesn't take forever to return results. 3) Google really is more accurate. Go to google, type "trek", hit "I feel lucky punk" and Blammo, you're there. With AltaVista, all you get is some other page. You have to hunt through a huge list to find what you want.
Boolean queries are nice, but they fall down sometimes. Google does a better job more often than Alta Vista.
Humans produce very little garbage. We should look at the material in landfills as an untapped resource, not garbage.
Likewise, all that space junk, drop in the bucket though it may be, is just some stuff that is slightly more organized than the stuff that was there before, but really little different than the rocks and sand that are also there.
In the future, when you refer to the Moon and Mars, and envision the possibilities for exploiting the resources there, remember that a small amount of steel, aluminum, and plastic might be available for you to work into your plans. Might as well break an old habit on a new world.
I wonder, would a cryptographic one-way function reverse direction of difficulty in a reverse time zone? Would it be really easy to factor large numbers, but really hard to multiply two small numbers?
Would a star located in such a zone actually be *colder* than surrounding space as it used energy to split helium atoms into hydrogens?
A good friend of mine from the Netherlands was talking to another friend of mine (who is now his wife) and he used the term "Merkins" in conversation to be funny. Anyway, my American friend got a shocked look on her face and said "Don't you know what a Merkin is?" My Dutch friend said that he didn't know it was a real word and she replied with a straight face that a merkin was a toupee for "down there" because when you're old, even that hair starts falling out!
Hooo hhooo heeee heeeee. I still smile to this day when I hear the word Merkin!
Hahahaha! Bill Clintons brain is an overclocked 486/66. But's he's got one of those overhead projectors and specialized MPEG hardware for looking at pr0n.
The U.S. is right to watch out for civilians during wartime. WWI was about 10 soldiers killed for every 1 civilian. WWII was about at parity: 1 soldier for 1 civilian. Wars after that have been 10 civilians or more killed for every 1 soldier. War is a messy business, and it's getting messier.
I have to say though that most of what you object to is NOT illegal, so calling them war crimes makes you look silly. The civilain people killed by mines in Vietnam were not specifically targeted, so the mines were not illegal. War is messy, what can you do about that except not fight wars?
Hop in your car, and drive straight to the sun. Our sun is 93 million miles away, just a short 8 light-minutes from Earth. A hop, skip, and a jump in cosmic terms.
Anyway, hop in your car and start driving to the sun. Go straight to the sun, and drive 100 miles an hour.
It will take you more than 100 years to get there!
If I had some moderator points I would make that one funny. But, you forgot to put the smiley faces in, and too many people would get overly worked up. Oh well, it made me laugh.
If you're being paid to be prepared, then do your job. This means policemen, firemen, hospital workers, the CDC, and the uniformed services of the government.
The rest of you, don't cause any trouble with all that stockpiled ammunition and champaigne! The millennium party is going to be excellent, and you've got 13 and 1/2 months to get ready for it.
Technology isn't good or evil, it just exists. People create things and solve problems, and technology is both the solution to problems, and the source of new ones. To ascribe words like good or evil or tragic to technology is to ignore the problem that we are trying to address in making technology.
Stupid Example: Problem: It's a bit chilly in the room. Solution: Make a heat source. This might involving developing technologies that involve rubbing two sticks together, or a phosphorus match, or a method whereby you burn stuff remotely, convert the energy into electricty, and the convert the electricy back into heat within that space that is chilly. This fire causes pollution, and might burn your house down.
Is fire tragic? hardly. It's just the way we solved the problem. Without the problem of a cold room to solve, the technology of fire wouldn't be required. At a deeper level, the cause of the tragedy isn't fire (the technology) at all, it's the fact that the room is cold (the problem).
I might argue that it's tragic that it's chilly in the room sometimes, but that's just life. There will always be problems. We can try to work towards a minimal subset of those problems. The algorithm for determining the global minimum value of problems in the world is left as an excercise for the reader.
Thanks HP for choosing an existing licence instead of making up yet another open source licence. I hope you saved some money on lawyers by going that route.
No, RedHat will not become a monopoly. Their core system cannot be owned and controlled by them. Do you suppose that you could buy a copy of NT, make some changes, resell it, and compete against Microsoft?
That's what Mandrake did, as well as many others. I'm thinking of two guys still in high school getting rave reviews for their distro. The mere fact that these guys can do what they are doing shows that Red Hat will never enjoy monopoly power. Remember, monopoly power doesn't necessarily mean market share. Red Hat will get to be a big company, but never a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems to me that the quote from the article "Many people with mental disorders ... fear discrimination because of the stigma attached to mental illness, the study found" could be justified by the Slashdot headline "Surgeon General Says 1/5 of Americans are Nuts." Now, being an insensitive clod myself, I can appreciate the headline, and I find it amusing. But, at the same time, I realize that the word "nuts" might not be the most positive word to use.
I do my development work here at IBM on my Linux laptop. The windows box they gave me is good for running Lotus Notes and that's it.
I have a definite advantage over my team mates. My code moves very very easily from my Linux Java environment to the target AIX server. Theirs requires a few tweaks and other stupid things to move to the AIX box because it was written on a Windows machine.
Furthermore, I can mount all the test data I need through NFS. My windows using comrades always need to make copies every time the test data gets updated. I waste little time because of that.
IBM really likes Linux, and the managers are happy to let me use it.
Cash doesn't have value because the gubment says it does, it has value because the people consider the money to have value.
It's a good thing that money is not based in gold or other assemblage of atoms. What are atom-poor countries to do? If lower Freedonia has an insufficient number of gold atoms (or other suitable valuable atoms) to base their money on, but they have an overabundance of the very best programmers in the world, how can they hope to raise their standard of living with respect to the rest of the world? Internally their resources aren't valuable at all, so why would they base their currency on that?
Or, suppose that Freedonia discovered that they have a nugget of gold underneath their country the size of Mt. Everest. Meanwhile, the United States and all the other powerful countries in the world went back to the gold standard. Freedonia, wanting to cause a lot of trouble, decides to dig up the entire mountain, instantly causing the basis of the world's money to fall to a penny per ton. Imagine the havoc that would cause.
No thanks, I'll take money that is based on a mutual agreement between citizens of the world. It's more stable than mere aggregations of atoms.
Well, if you're going to one-up me and actually introduce facts into this forum, I'll have to hit my dictionary:
Spanish nova is the same as the English nova, which is an astronomical term for a star (or car) that blows up.
So, I guess a car that blows up is even worse than a car that doesn't go.
Patrick "what does Pinto mean in Spanish?" Draper
Thanks, I just registered all these names.
:-)
I'll charge you $200 each....
Nova means new star. I think Nova means new star in Latin too. But of course, they don't speak Latin in Latin America anymore, they speak Spanish. I think that nova means star in Spanish.
So what's with this urban legend about No va?
Patrick "Funny, he doesn't *look* Latin" Draper
The person who posted this is the same guy that was interviewed. That's right! He's the featured man of the day.
It's FUNNY. Just mark the think up to 5 and leave it there. Right now the struggle between moderators is wasting a lot of points.
This article posted with my default of +2 in an effort to make it appear close to the FUNNY comment. Please leave it at +2 for that purpose.
Thanks
What??? You're talking about a phone sex worker. You know, the ones that Oral Roberts and others claim are "Satans mistresses."
You're just facilitating the return of the anti-christ when you suggest that we actually give those in cahoots with the devil a chance to make the Y2K problem worse.
Sheesh! It's rough defending our nation's borders against the spawn of hell with just a shotgun and a chainsaw.
I realize that many people here are hackers, and the push to write great code is very strong. But none of us should discount the possibility that our DNA (which the article claims is 42% "junk") is merely heavily commented. That might be a bit overkill on the comments, but we should all resolve to take a hacker's lesson from our genetic heritage, and add a few comments in our code here and there.
1) Google loads fast. Pages that take more than 5 seconds to load had better have some pretty damn good content.
2) Google searches fast. It doesn't take forever to return results.
3) Google really is more accurate. Go to google, type "trek", hit "I feel lucky punk" and Blammo, you're there. With AltaVista, all you get is some other page. You have to hunt through a huge list to find what you want.
Boolean queries are nice, but they fall down sometimes. Google does a better job more often than Alta Vista.
Humans produce very little garbage. We should look at the material in landfills as an untapped resource, not garbage.
Likewise, all that space junk, drop in the bucket though it may be, is just some stuff that is slightly more organized than the stuff that was there before, but really little different than the rocks and sand that are also there.
In the future, when you refer to the Moon and Mars, and envision the possibilities for exploiting the resources there, remember that a small amount of steel, aluminum, and plastic might be available for you to work into your plans. Might as well break an old habit on a new world.
Damn that was *funny*.
I wonder, would a cryptographic one-way function reverse direction of difficulty in a reverse time zone? Would it be really easy to factor large numbers, but really hard to multiply two small numbers?
Would a star located in such a zone actually be *colder* than surrounding space as it used energy to split helium atoms into hydrogens?
A good friend of mine from the Netherlands was talking to another friend of mine (who is now his wife) and he used the term "Merkins" in conversation to be funny. Anyway, my American friend got a shocked look on her face and said "Don't you know what a Merkin is?" My Dutch friend said that he didn't know it was a real word and she replied with a straight face that a merkin was a toupee for "down there" because when you're old, even that hair starts falling out!
Hooo hhooo heeee heeeee. I still smile to this day when I hear the word Merkin!
What a disappointment it was for that character to get to Unreal City, only to find out that it was destroyed in a earthQuakeTest.
Gotta get this book. It sounds like a good read.
Hahahaha! Bill Clintons brain is an overclocked 486/66. But's he's got one of those overhead projectors and specialized MPEG hardware for looking at pr0n.
The U.S. is right to watch out for civilians during wartime. WWI was about 10 soldiers killed for every 1 civilian. WWII was about at parity: 1 soldier for 1 civilian. Wars after that have been 10 civilians or more killed for every 1 soldier. War is a messy business, and it's getting messier.
I have to say though that most of what you object to is NOT illegal, so calling them war crimes makes you look silly. The civilain people killed by mines in Vietnam were not specifically targeted, so the mines were not illegal. War is messy, what can you do about that except not fight wars?
Hop in your car, and drive straight to the sun. Our sun is 93 million miles away, just a short 8 light-minutes from Earth. A hop, skip, and a jump in cosmic terms.
Anyway, hop in your car and start driving to the sun. Go straight to the sun, and drive 100 miles an hour.
It will take you more than 100 years to get there!
It was that virus that Enkidu wrote...
You're the phone company? You ran your own wires? You own the fiber and all the backhoes you need to lay it?
Or, did you pay someone *who has a license* to let you use their fiber optic cable?
If I had some moderator points I would make that one funny. But, you forgot to put the smiley faces in, and too many people would get overly worked up. Oh well, it made me laugh.
If you're being paid to be prepared, then do your job. This means policemen, firemen, hospital workers, the CDC, and the uniformed services of the government.
The rest of you, don't cause any trouble with all that stockpiled ammunition and champaigne! The millennium party is going to be excellent, and you've got 13 and 1/2 months to get ready for it.
I'll worry when the temple is rebuilt. There's a great big mosque there right now. Until then, party time.
Technology isn't good or evil, it just exists. People create things and solve problems, and technology is both the solution to problems, and the source of new ones. To ascribe words like good or evil or tragic to technology is to ignore the problem that we are trying to address in making technology.
Stupid Example:
Problem: It's a bit chilly in the room.
Solution: Make a heat source. This might involving developing technologies that involve rubbing two sticks together, or a phosphorus match, or a method whereby you burn stuff remotely, convert the energy into electricty, and the convert the electricy back into heat within that space that is chilly. This fire causes pollution, and might burn your house down.
Is fire tragic? hardly. It's just the way we solved the problem. Without the problem of a cold room to solve, the technology of fire wouldn't be required. At a deeper level, the cause of the tragedy isn't fire (the technology) at all, it's the fact that the room is cold (the problem).
I might argue that it's tragic that it's chilly in the room sometimes, but that's just life. There will always be problems. We can try to work towards a minimal subset of those problems. The algorithm for determining the global minimum value of problems in the world is left as an excercise for the reader.
Thanks HP for choosing an existing licence instead of making up yet another open source licence. I hope you saved some money on lawyers by going that route.
No, RedHat will not become a monopoly. Their core system cannot be owned and controlled by them. Do you suppose that you could buy a copy of NT, make some changes, resell it, and compete against Microsoft?
That's what Mandrake did, as well as many others. I'm thinking of two guys still in high school getting rave reviews for their distro. The mere fact that these guys can do what they are doing shows that Red Hat will never enjoy monopoly power. Remember, monopoly power doesn't necessarily mean market share. Red Hat will get to be a big company, but never a monopoly.