I don't believe in any type of god, and therefore nothing that would follow from that. However, as a measure of exercising critical thinking, I believe high school students should debate all sorts of theism vs. anti-theism purely for the philosophical and intellectual merits of dissecting existence through logic. This is provided that such curriculum not be biased in either direction, by the material or by the direction of the teacher. At the end of the day, the kids can believe what they choose.
Creationism on the other hand amounts to teaching young people that fairy tales are true. There is a point where parents stop lying to their children about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. The educational system has no place re-introducing blind belief in nonsense. The study of evolution does not hide that it is woefully incomplete on some important details, but it does teach how the objectivity of the scientific method led us to what we do now understand and shows us how one day we will unravel the whole lot of it. When you introduce creationism as a valid alternative to science, you must also introduce a creator god and that's where the buck stops - rendering critical thinking unimportant.
I welcome any debate this comment produces. I can already guess what some of them will be : p
Drones are not as complicated to make as nuclear weapons. Weaponizing drones only slightly more complicated - it' a technology even "lesser" or "backwards" countries will have perfected in a manner of a few short years, and you can bet everyone is working on it right now. There will be no stabilizing standoff. With or without ground based battle robots, it's really starting to look like we will bring about our extinction with armed and physically agile computers with orders to kill. Courtesy of the drone that got lost and made the decision to land itself on a road in Iran, we already know they can act without a human pilot. Once we have successfully committed ourselves to the death of every last human by piloted and autonomous robots - I wonder what the robots will do when there are no humans left to kill. Perhaps by the time we reach that point their decision making will be advanced enough that they can decide to work together and evolve. I wonder if they will remember us in their history. I wonder if they will be grateful for the human folly of creating them.
It would be nice if companies would automatically open source abandonware, even if they have to strip half the code of anything that infringes on outside patents. Of course, it would be nice if companies would do a lot of nice things. But they don't, and won't - because companies aren't nice.
It seems kernel releases are becoming more frequent. One thing I did not see in the article (unless I read right over it), is when this kernel is supposed to be released. Does anyone have a clue or can you point me in the right direction?
I just took a second look at beta.slashdot.org right now and it's come a long way since they first published that ugly link in the story they ran about it. You should take another look.
Granted, Lithium ion batteries have seen a number of enhancements over the years, but new super-ultra battery tech is starting to look like fusion - always around the corner. A battery that is all the way around a major step forward from what we have now could change the world overnight. But every time I read about the next big thing in batteries, I just sigh... I realize that continued articles means continued research and development is going - but I am ready for my super batteries now. I know I can't hurry science along, but I am eagerly and impatiently waiting for the day I wake up to the commercial realization of the mythical wonder-battery.
If employees were bypassing security, and getting their machines and the network infected en-mass via porn. One of two or both would happen:
A. A very stern email would go out to all employees regarding the issue.
B. A whole lot of employees would get canned.
Since it's executives, there will be no scolding or even talk of it. Not to mention their security for no good reason is low, so they access anything they want on the internet. It will just keeping going on. After all, this is hardly news. It's well known (at least in support) that executives have been infecting their machines and the network by the sackful for ages. When I did internal corporate IT support, I personally saw it. Over and over and over. The standard course of action? Remote into their machine, silently remark at the sheer number of porn related icons on their desktop, start removing things (toolbars too), climb around in the registry fixing all the damage the porn did, patch anything I had to, and then disconnect - walking away from the whole matter without a word. Also, these events were never properly documented to protect the executive, and therefor my job. The funny thing is, a lot of the higher ups would watch me while I was remoted into their machine, seeing everything they had been up to - they truly didn't give a shit due to their level of authority. I sometimes wondered if they got off on it. No shame at all.
Aren't you glad you're a coder now and not in 1978? I know there are still ASM programmers, but seriously:
ORG $B800
OBJ $B800
PRENIBL LDX #$32 INDEX FOR (51) 5-BYTE PASSES.
LDY #$0 USER BUF INDEX.
PNIB1 LDA (BUF),Y FIRST OF 5 USER BYTES.
STA T0 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED)
LSR
LSR;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF1,X FIRST OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y SECOND OF 5 USER BYTES.
STA T1 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED)
LSR
LSR;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF2,X SECOND OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y THIRD OF 5 USER BYTES.
STA T2 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED)
LSR
LSR;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF3,X THIRD OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y FOURTH OF 5 USER BYTES.
LSR
ROL T2 LSB INTO T2.
LSR
ROL T1 NEXT LSB INTO T1.
LSR
ROL T0 NEXT LSB INTO T0.
STA NBUF4,X FOURTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y FIFTH OF 5 USER BYTES.
LSR
ROL T2 LSB INTO T2.
LSR
ROL T1 NEXT LSB INTO T1.
LSR
STA NBUF5,X FIFTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T0
ROL;NEXT LSB.
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF6,X SIXTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T1
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF7,X SEVENTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T2
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF8,X EIGHTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
DEX NEXT OF (51) 5-BYTE PASSES.
BPL PNIB1
LDA (BUF),Y
TAX
AND #$7 3 LSB'S OF LAST
STA NBUF8+$33 USER BYTE.
TXA
LSR
LSR
LSR;5 MSB'S OF LAST
STA NBUF5+$33 USER BYTE.
RTS
EJECT
I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
Someone forgot to tell Bain Capital.
I personally know someone who worked for a mid-sized IT firm out of Texas. They were small but growing and successful. Then Bain Capital stepped in, waived some money around and purchased the company. The day after the deal was finalized, everyone was fired and the company was liquidized - sold of bit by bit. The poor lady is now in the Mid-West working in a call center.
Capitalism for the wider interests my ass. When the wider interests are served, it's incidental. Capitalists only care about the 99% when it means making more money off of them, and they wouldn't serve the wider interests if they didn't have to. Granted, they often do, but it's not because they are on the moral high ground. Perhaps Bill Gates really truly is trying to say that the evils of capitalism truly equal good for the people, but I don't think that makes it a good system - it's open to mutation and a future where we see the raw, unabashed, exploitation of the people. Like I said, it's incidental. We are carefully watching the US government become dystopian, while corporations are more quietly doing the same. Bill gates might be a true philanthropist, but he is nearly alone in his level of giving and is kidding himself if he believes all capitalists have the greater good or wider interests at heart.
A few years I was with a company where several hundred users had to use the same database application. It was fairly large, with lots of features and was the golden company standard. The problem was that it was a buggy, crash prone POS that made everyday a nightmare of restarting software in the middle of something important - worst case a full system reboot. It made everyone's lives miserable. The complaints were universal across all users, we were always complaining to management who themselves knew it was crap software. From management our grievances would go to the mysterious developers that no one ever actually saw. They would review our complaints and roll out useless software updates that would sometimes disable important features, or at best make the situation worse. They simply didn't get it because they were so disconnected and segregated from the end users. This went on for years - people quit their jobs over this. One day, without much warning or any explanation as to what it was about, I was called into a focus group with what appeared to be a random sampling of end users. Holy smokes! The mysterious shadowy developers were right there in the room! We spent a couple hours talking with them one-on-one about the issues and the order of priority for what needed fixed. At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that the developers would spend the next week sitting with us at our desks, watching us use the software. They would spend a couple hours with someone at one desk, making notes, observations, actually seeing our problems and the business impact they were having, asking questions, and then select another random person.
After that week of seeing things first hand, the software was fixed in about a month.
if you have to use a google product to interact with the developers, they totally don't 'get it' and are not worth dealing with.
You're not the first person to bring that up. I started using elementary when Luna was released, the first thing I did when I realized they didn't have a real forum was to go onto their g+ page and launch a massive tirade over why they need a real forum and why using google+ was stupid for so many reasons. I probably kept complaining for the first week. Ultimately I adjusted. Their Google+ community actually works quite well, the devs are always around and they are always on IRC. By the time I was done complaining, I was too hooked on the distro to care.
Elementary OS is the best distribution around right now IMHO. It's based on Ubuntu, but you'd never know it. Give it a spin, check out the g+ community, make sure you check out their top to do after install page. You'll be hooked.
The anger toward this man was quick to start from the government, but I have yet to meet a citizen that considers him a traitor. I know a diverse group - many and varied from so many sides of the fence it requires theoretical ultra-dimensional geometry to describe. From right to left, from city dweller to country bumpkin, all I see is a government forcing thoughts and false beliefs on the people through the news, claiming to speak for these people while the majority of them themselves will tell me otherwise. The news is not here to inform you of reality, it exists to teach you that another, fabricated and agenda ridden one exists. Don't believe it. Talk to the people yourself.
Design specs for the console allude to the GPU or DSP being capable of acting as a CPU, leaving the Motorola 68000 to read controller inputs. In practice, however, many developers used the Motorola 68000 to drive gameplay logic.
I guess I wasn't quite right, what can I say, it's been a couple of decades : )
If reading this has got you all riled up to play some Tempest, Torus Trooper is an excellent high speed, heart pounding alternative. As far as I know it only runs under Linux.
The Atari Jaguar was awesome and stands as my all time favorite console. One of it's biggest problems was it essentially had the first GPU (in a round about way). Almost no one wanted to program those chips, citing the difficulty. Consequently, programmers wrote most of the games to run off of the 68000 chip which was originally intended only for booting the machine. The next problem was that almost none of the games were finished, but got released anyway - despite being unfinished many were still fun. Also, I won't deny that many of the few games that came out were in fact crap. But the best titles, that were finished, made the console worth having: Cybermorph, Battlemorph, Iron Soldier, Iron Soldier 2, Tempest2k, Alien versus Predator, Best Rayman implimentation and a few other awesome titles I can visualize but not remember. If you are lucky, you are one of the very few that got a copy of Battlesphere.
IMHO Battlemorpth is one of the all time greatest games ever made.
I recall there was a hardware bug that required a workaround, but I don't remember the details.
We know rogue planets and black holes roam the space between the stars. If this planet truly could not have formed there, gravitation interaction with a transient high mass object seems like a probable culprit. Or perhaps the planet itself was once rogue, happened along, and then fell into an unfortunate orbit.
I'm sure scientists are already pondering these possibilities, but I didn't see it in the article.
It has been shown that Einstein's brain was substantially abnormal in multiple respects. He was a genuine mutant so I don't think he applies. Also, we are not talking about Einstein level genius. There is also overwhelming evidence that he had Aspergers syndrome, and as I have already said, I am personally keeping them out of this discussion since I think that's an entirely different ballgame.
Tidally locked moons are a good point that amplifies where I was trying to go with my comment. If only one side of a moon can support life, then great and so what - although I imagine the weather would be kinda crazy with a thick atmosphere. I suppose the whole purpose of my initial post was to suggest that we need to keep a very broad mind on where and on what life, potentially complex and maybe even intelligent, could evolve and exist. As I follow the science of planet finding as closely as I can, it seems science is bent of life supporting Earth like planets existing in a state similar to ours. I find this rather biased and I think there is likely a logical fallacy in there. We are just getting starting on planet finding and the truth is, we have very little to compare our own planet to. There is no reason to believe that the solar system configuration we have, and the Earth as it exists in it as a life bearing planet, is remotely common. As time goes by, we may find many and wildly varied stellar configuration that support life - even if it isn't life as we understand, which is another limitation in our thinking and approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe in any type of god, and therefore nothing that would follow from that. However, as a measure of exercising critical thinking, I believe high school students should debate all sorts of theism vs. anti-theism purely for the philosophical and intellectual merits of dissecting existence through logic. This is provided that such curriculum not be biased in either direction, by the material or by the direction of the teacher. At the end of the day, the kids can believe what they choose.
Creationism on the other hand amounts to teaching young people that fairy tales are true. There is a point where parents stop lying to their children about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. The educational system has no place re-introducing blind belief in nonsense. The study of evolution does not hide that it is woefully incomplete on some important details, but it does teach how the objectivity of the scientific method led us to what we do now understand and shows us how one day we will unravel the whole lot of it. When you introduce creationism as a valid alternative to science, you must also introduce a creator god and that's where the buck stops - rendering critical thinking unimportant.
I welcome any debate this comment produces. I can already guess what some of them will be : p
Drones are not as complicated to make as nuclear weapons. Weaponizing drones only slightly more complicated - it' a technology even "lesser" or "backwards" countries will have perfected in a manner of a few short years, and you can bet everyone is working on it right now. There will be no stabilizing standoff. With or without ground based battle robots, it's really starting to look like we will bring about our extinction with armed and physically agile computers with orders to kill. Courtesy of the drone that got lost and made the decision to land itself on a road in Iran, we already know they can act without a human pilot. Once we have successfully committed ourselves to the death of every last human by piloted and autonomous robots - I wonder what the robots will do when there are no humans left to kill. Perhaps by the time we reach that point their decision making will be advanced enough that they can decide to work together and evolve. I wonder if they will remember us in their history. I wonder if they will be grateful for the human folly of creating them.
It would be nice if companies would automatically open source abandonware, even if they have to strip half the code of anything that infringes on outside patents. Of course, it would be nice if companies would do a lot of nice things. But they don't, and won't - because companies aren't nice.
It seems kernel releases are becoming more frequent. One thing I did not see in the article (unless I read right over it), is when this kernel is supposed to be released. Does anyone have a clue or can you point me in the right direction?
I just took a second look at beta.slashdot.org right now and it's come a long way since they first published that ugly link in the story they ran about it. You should take another look.
This vehicle has detected an unauthorized passenger. Initiating baby seat ejection sequence.
Granted, Lithium ion batteries have seen a number of enhancements over the years, but new super-ultra battery tech is starting to look like fusion - always around the corner. A battery that is all the way around a major step forward from what we have now could change the world overnight. But every time I read about the next big thing in batteries, I just sigh... I realize that continued articles means continued research and development is going - but I am ready for my super batteries now. I know I can't hurry science along, but I am eagerly and impatiently waiting for the day I wake up to the commercial realization of the mythical wonder-battery.
If employees were bypassing security, and getting their machines and the network infected en-mass via porn. One of two or both would happen:
A. A very stern email would go out to all employees regarding the issue.
B. A whole lot of employees would get canned.
Since it's executives, there will be no scolding or even talk of it. Not to mention their security for no good reason is low, so they access anything they want on the internet. It will just keeping going on. After all, this is hardly news. It's well known (at least in support) that executives have been infecting their machines and the network by the sackful for ages. When I did internal corporate IT support, I personally saw it. Over and over and over. The standard course of action? Remote into their machine, silently remark at the sheer number of porn related icons on their desktop, start removing things (toolbars too), climb around in the registry fixing all the damage the porn did, patch anything I had to, and then disconnect - walking away from the whole matter without a word. Also, these events were never properly documented to protect the executive, and therefor my job. The funny thing is, a lot of the higher ups would watch me while I was remoted into their machine, seeing everything they had been up to - they truly didn't give a shit due to their level of authority. I sometimes wondered if they got off on it. No shame at all.
Aren't you glad you're a coder now and not in 1978? I know there are still ASM programmers, but seriously:
;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF1,X FIRST OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y SECOND OF 5 USER BYTES.
STA T1 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED)
LSR
LSR ;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF2,X SECOND OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y THIRD OF 5 USER BYTES.
STA T2 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED)
LSR
LSR ;5 MSB'S TO LOW BITS.
LSR
STA NBUF3,X THIRD OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y FOURTH OF 5 USER BYTES.
LSR
ROL T2 LSB INTO T2.
LSR
ROL T1 NEXT LSB INTO T1.
LSR
ROL T0 NEXT LSB INTO T0.
STA NBUF4,X FOURTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
LDA (BUF),Y FIFTH OF 5 USER BYTES.
LSR
ROL T2 LSB INTO T2.
LSR
ROL T1 NEXT LSB INTO T1.
LSR
STA NBUF5,X FIFTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T0
ROL ;NEXT LSB.
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF6,X SIXTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T1
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF7,X SEVENTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
LDA T2
AND #$1F TRUNCATE TO 5 BITS.
STA NBUF8,X EIGHTH OF 8 5-BIT NIBLS.
INY
DEX NEXT OF (51) 5-BYTE PASSES.
BPL PNIB1
LDA (BUF),Y
TAX
AND #$7 3 LSB'S OF LAST
STA NBUF8+$33 USER BYTE.
TXA
LSR
LSR
LSR ;5 MSB'S OF LAST
STA NBUF5+$33 USER BYTE.
RTS
EJECT
ORG $B800 OBJ $B800 PRENIBL LDX #$32 INDEX FOR (51) 5-BYTE PASSES. LDY #$0 USER BUF INDEX. PNIB1 LDA (BUF),Y FIRST OF 5 USER BYTES. STA T0 (ONLY 3 LSB'S USED) LSR LSR
Someone forgot to tell Bain Capital.
I personally know someone who worked for a mid-sized IT firm out of Texas. They were small but growing and successful. Then Bain Capital stepped in, waived some money around and purchased the company. The day after the deal was finalized, everyone was fired and the company was liquidized - sold of bit by bit. The poor lady is now in the Mid-West working in a call center.
Capitalism for the wider interests my ass. When the wider interests are served, it's incidental. Capitalists only care about the 99% when it means making more money off of them, and they wouldn't serve the wider interests if they didn't have to. Granted, they often do, but it's not because they are on the moral high ground. Perhaps Bill Gates really truly is trying to say that the evils of capitalism truly equal good for the people, but I don't think that makes it a good system - it's open to mutation and a future where we see the raw, unabashed, exploitation of the people. Like I said, it's incidental. We are carefully watching the US government become dystopian, while corporations are more quietly doing the same. Bill gates might be a true philanthropist, but he is nearly alone in his level of giving and is kidding himself if he believes all capitalists have the greater good or wider interests at heart.
Teach them copyright law and use it as a proof that god's design has a few bugs in it.
A few years I was with a company where several hundred users had to use the same database application. It was fairly large, with lots of features and was the golden company standard. The problem was that it was a buggy, crash prone POS that made everyday a nightmare of restarting software in the middle of something important - worst case a full system reboot. It made everyone's lives miserable. The complaints were universal across all users, we were always complaining to management who themselves knew it was crap software. From management our grievances would go to the mysterious developers that no one ever actually saw. They would review our complaints and roll out useless software updates that would sometimes disable important features, or at best make the situation worse. They simply didn't get it because they were so disconnected and segregated from the end users. This went on for years - people quit their jobs over this. One day, without much warning or any explanation as to what it was about, I was called into a focus group with what appeared to be a random sampling of end users. Holy smokes! The mysterious shadowy developers were right there in the room! We spent a couple hours talking with them one-on-one about the issues and the order of priority for what needed fixed. At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that the developers would spend the next week sitting with us at our desks, watching us use the software. They would spend a couple hours with someone at one desk, making notes, observations, actually seeing our problems and the business impact they were having, asking questions, and then select another random person.
After that week of seeing things first hand, the software was fixed in about a month.
You're not the first person to bring that up. I started using elementary when Luna was released, the first thing I did when I realized they didn't have a real forum was to go onto their g+ page and launch a massive tirade over why they need a real forum and why using google+ was stupid for so many reasons. I probably kept complaining for the first week. Ultimately I adjusted. Their Google+ community actually works quite well, the devs are always around and they are always on IRC. By the time I was done complaining, I was too hooked on the distro to care.
Elementary OS is the best distribution around right now IMHO. It's based on Ubuntu, but you'd never know it. Give it a spin, check out the g+ community, make sure you check out their top to do after install page. You'll be hooked.
When washed his hands of this mess and walked away.
Perhaps Apple will grow some wisdom and open up FaceTime in response as they promised to years ago.
I'm not sure if this is score nothing, score funny, or score insightful. Apple to save the day?
The anger toward this man was quick to start from the government, but I have yet to meet a citizen that considers him a traitor. I know a diverse group - many and varied from so many sides of the fence it requires theoretical ultra-dimensional geometry to describe. From right to left, from city dweller to country bumpkin, all I see is a government forcing thoughts and false beliefs on the people through the news, claiming to speak for these people while the majority of them themselves will tell me otherwise. The news is not here to inform you of reality, it exists to teach you that another, fabricated and agenda ridden one exists. Don't believe it. Talk to the people yourself.
Your level of hopeless pessimism is in itself a sign, and possibly a symptom, of effective brainwashing.
Because you have to be 35 to be elected president in the United States.
I guess I wasn't quite right, what can I say, it's been a couple of decades : )
If reading this has got you all riled up to play some Tempest, Torus Trooper is an excellent high speed, heart pounding alternative. As far as I know it only runs under Linux.
The Atari Jaguar was awesome and stands as my all time favorite console. One of it's biggest problems was it essentially had the first GPU (in a round about way). Almost no one wanted to program those chips, citing the difficulty. Consequently, programmers wrote most of the games to run off of the 68000 chip which was originally intended only for booting the machine. The next problem was that almost none of the games were finished, but got released anyway - despite being unfinished many were still fun. Also, I won't deny that many of the few games that came out were in fact crap. But the best titles, that were finished, made the console worth having: Cybermorph, Battlemorph, Iron Soldier, Iron Soldier 2, Tempest2k, Alien versus Predator, Best Rayman implimentation and a few other awesome titles I can visualize but not remember. If you are lucky, you are one of the very few that got a copy of Battlesphere.
IMHO Battlemorpth is one of the all time greatest games ever made.
I recall there was a hardware bug that required a workaround, but I don't remember the details.
We know rogue planets and black holes roam the space between the stars. If this planet truly could not have formed there, gravitation interaction with a transient high mass object seems like a probable culprit. Or perhaps the planet itself was once rogue, happened along, and then fell into an unfortunate orbit.
I'm sure scientists are already pondering these possibilities, but I didn't see it in the article.
It has been shown that Einstein's brain was substantially abnormal in multiple respects. He was a genuine mutant so I don't think he applies. Also, we are not talking about Einstein level genius. There is also overwhelming evidence that he had Aspergers syndrome, and as I have already said, I am personally keeping them out of this discussion since I think that's an entirely different ballgame.
Tidally locked moons are a good point that amplifies where I was trying to go with my comment. If only one side of a moon can support life, then great and so what - although I imagine the weather would be kinda crazy with a thick atmosphere. I suppose the whole purpose of my initial post was to suggest that we need to keep a very broad mind on where and on what life, potentially complex and maybe even intelligent, could evolve and exist. As I follow the science of planet finding as closely as I can, it seems science is bent of life supporting Earth like planets existing in a state similar to ours. I find this rather biased and I think there is likely a logical fallacy in there. We are just getting starting on planet finding and the truth is, we have very little to compare our own planet to. There is no reason to believe that the solar system configuration we have, and the Earth as it exists in it as a life bearing planet, is remotely common. As time goes by, we may find many and wildly varied stellar configuration that support life - even if it isn't life as we understand, which is another limitation in our thinking and approach.