I get frustrated by the sheer level of cruft that's built up in existing OSs, and fantasize about somebody starting the whole thing over. New file system, new command system that looks more like a text adventure (ie. plain English) than Linux arcana, basic security fixes like prevention of buffer overflows, etc.. No worries about somebody buying ancient UNIX copyrights out from under you, no outdated abbrvns, and no code so old people are afraid to touch it.
(Of course you then start with no software or drivers.)
How do you get at a computer's assembly language without an OS? You'd have to write something in assembly that gets loaded on boot to even start doing higher-level stuff, right?
I find this argument from religionists odd, because it shows them to be the moral relativists. Its implication is that people who currently believe in a God would, if they lost that faith, immediately start looting and killing. Some of us who currently don't believe have refrained from doing those things, so us unbelievers must have some other type of internal restraint, ne?
I've just been reading david Brin's book The Transparent Society, in which he argues that there's no way to prevent big companies and government agencies from watching you. He adds that helping create strong encryption does more to help those same agencies hide what they're doing than to shield us from them. His alternative is to use technology and/or law to force those organizations to reveal what they're spying on. (Possibly with tit-for-tat measures like publicly posting personal data on CEOs' families, or putting the up-to-the-minute locations of all Congressmen on Google Maps!)
The "Evil Genius" books available at major bookstores contain plans for EMP devices and other dangerous things. This company sells the books and actual parts kits.
Explosive compression... couldn't bullets themselves be used to generate EMP?
I'm disappointed in NASA's failures, but happy to see private industry taking up the slack. It was never very likely that pure curiosity would drive space travel, since it'd always be a low priority for governments; going into space took another motivation. Profit's an enticing one.
Unfortunately, some scientists are still working to crush kids' dreams. When Stephen Hawking spoke about space colonization recently, MIT scientists came forward to say it was "very far off." Way to encourage the next generation of astronauts!
We should be doing whatever we can to promote private exploration and colonization of space, and even of other environments like the ocean surface. Unfortunately political concerns hold back both. The UN Law of the Sea Treaty is questionable for its mediocre seabed mining provisions and is delayed by Senate resistance, while the UN's Outer Space Treaty implies that no one should be allowed to claim land or resources beyond Earth. The Outer Space Treaty should be scrapped!
Yes you have freedom to express your views but being a member of the "press" and broadcasting "News" provide certain rights that should be balanced by some simple rules like "not lying".
How about proposing a Constitutional amendment to impose those duties on certain kinds of speech, then? 'Cause they're not in the First.
To clarify, I mean, is the problem with radio as a specific medium that happens to have this limit about the number of stations that can air at once? Would you support a Fairness Doctrine for a medium that doesn't work the same way -- so that if Limbaugh had gotten his start by podcasting, you'd have no problem with him not being "balanced?"
I've never understood this "public airwaves" argument. The radio spectrum is officially public property, to be regulated and censored, because... there's only a limited range in which people can broadcast? If that's the reason, why not declare "the public soundwaves" subject to regulation of ordinary speech? After all, it's much harder to have a large number of opinions being expressed (comprehensibly) at once by sound than it is by radio. Wouldn't it also follow that since newspapers distribute their dead-tree editions on public roads, the Dept. of Transporation should be able to control their content?
And is the limited-range argument even technologically relevant anymore, what with frequency-hopping phones and other inventions? How can the FCC justify regulating cable TV or the Internet?
Are you suggesting that the "right-wing lunatics" in question shouldn't have been allowed to become popular? That radio stations should've been forbidden to air them, or discouraged from doing so by being forced to air then-unpopular liberal shows in return?
The Republicans passed it after the 1994 election victory, but the Supreme Court shot it down.
The Pennsylvania Constitution has a sensible rule (Art. III, Sec. 3):
No bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title, except a general appropriation bill or a bill codifying or compiling the law or a part thereof.
Then again, it also says only those who believe in God have a guaranteed right to hold public office.
If we had a federal equivalent of PA III.3, Congress would still put all kinds of stuff into spending bills and budgets, but it would at least limit Congress' ability to do so with a Feeding the Homeless Children Bill.
Wasn't it in the eighties during Reagan's time that a bill was passed that removed the requirment for NEWS programs to offer balanced reports and present opposing views.
That's the "Fairness Doctrine," and yes. We have this crazy idea that people have a right to express whatever opinions they want without the feds ordering them to present a government-chosen "other side" of a many-sided debate.
Culture is as essential to humanity as air, food, shelter and water, and like it or not the RIAA and their related organizations have a near monopoly control...
So let's create our own culture! We don't need Britney Spears CDs or television.
That makes sense; Harry's an example of an "outsider" character who's allowed to ask stupid questions for the benefit of the reader. Ged starts out in a world very different than ours.
I suggest trying them out on Pullman's excellent "The Golden Compass." That one starts out in a somewhat normal setting.
Why do you suppose they weren't as interested in Earthsea? I remember Earthsea has a substantial, believable setting, while the Harry Potter world is a nonsensical fake England hidden implausibly inside the real one. I'm interested in the difference because I focus on the setting in my writing. If what kids want is action to the exclusion of setting, that could be a problem. Earthsea did have action; was the problem that it was too complex, or was it just not fast-paced enough? For comparison, how did your kids react to Tolkein, Narnia, or any science fiction they've read?
For the Python instruction, I suggest using IDLE. It's a simple IDE that comes with the language. Because of its simplicity, students won't become dependent on a particular fancy graphic system to keep track of their projects, but they'll still get the convenience of a console window and easy "compilation" of the programs.
I'm not a food scientist, but I think labeling laws and food safety inspection regulations are very necessary. Who doesn't think that?
Government isn't the only possible way to deal with that and other situations.
I'm a Republican swinging towards libertarianism, so this was an interesting debate. A libertarian response, I think, to your comments would be that since government's purpose is to protect individual rights, it is government's job to stop any abuses that corporations are committing. Preventing Shell and the like from killing people seems fully compatible with the notion of protecting individual rights. In contrast, "restraining the power of corporations" is usually the sort of talk heard not from "minarchists" but from the socialists we've got now, who want laws restricting people's freedom to make their own economic decisions. Eg., look at the flap over such a little thing as Microsoft including a search bar in the next IE. "We've got to stop this lawfully organized group from offering people a product that gives them the option of using a tool that will make the same organization money!"
As I understand it, "single nucleotide polymorphism" studies are a way of doing the hashing you speak of -- identifying a person by their DNA without actually storing the full sequence or any information such as presence of cancer-associated genes.
I'm referring to the recent news story about not JFK, but Rep. Patrick Kennedy, whom police carefully refrained from giving a breath test when he crashed his car. Although Ted Kennedy has supposedly done worse and gotten away with it.
The short version of the theory: we're all going to be monitored, because those in power want to. The best retaliation is to stalk them right back. The problem with it is, certain activities by the politicians are going to be kept secret by them exempting themselves from surveillance, and certain politicians, like Kennedy, can get away even with breaking the law.
I'd like to see a site that monitors the location of every member of Congress 24/7, who they talk to, etc..
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I get frustrated by the sheer level of cruft that's built up in existing OSs, and fantasize about somebody starting the whole thing over. New file system, new command system that looks more like a text adventure (ie. plain English) than Linux arcana, basic security fixes like prevention of buffer overflows, etc.. No worries about somebody buying ancient UNIX copyrights out from under you, no outdated abbrvns, and no code so old people are afraid to touch it.
(Of course you then start with no software or drivers.)
How do you get at a computer's assembly language without an OS? You'd have to write something in assembly that gets loaded on boot to even start doing higher-level stuff, right?
I find this argument from religionists odd, because it shows them to be the moral relativists. Its implication is that people who currently believe in a God would, if they lost that faith, immediately start looting and killing. Some of us who currently don't believe have refrained from doing those things, so us unbelievers must have some other type of internal restraint, ne?
I've just been reading david Brin's book The Transparent Society, in which he argues that there's no way to prevent big companies and government agencies from watching you. He adds that helping create strong encryption does more to help those same agencies hide what they're doing than to shield us from them. His alternative is to use technology and/or law to force those organizations to reveal what they're spying on. (Possibly with tit-for-tat measures like publicly posting personal data on CEOs' families, or putting the up-to-the-minute locations of all Congressmen on Google Maps!)
I was recently at a social event, where I saw someone walking around with a real version of a an SL t-shirt advertising an SL business.
The "Evil Genius" books available at major bookstores contain plans for EMP devices and other dangerous things. This company sells the books and actual parts kits. Explosive compression... couldn't bullets themselves be used to generate EMP?
I'm disappointed in NASA's failures, but happy to see private industry taking up the slack. It was never very likely that pure curiosity would drive space travel, since it'd always be a low priority for governments; going into space took another motivation. Profit's an enticing one.
Unfortunately, some scientists are still working to crush kids' dreams. When Stephen Hawking spoke about space colonization recently, MIT scientists came forward to say it was "very far off." Way to encourage the next generation of astronauts!
We should be doing whatever we can to promote private exploration and colonization of space, and even of other environments like the ocean surface. Unfortunately political concerns hold back both. The UN Law of the Sea Treaty is questionable for its mediocre seabed mining provisions and is delayed by Senate resistance, while the UN's Outer Space Treaty implies that no one should be allowed to claim land or resources beyond Earth. The Outer Space Treaty should be scrapped!
Yes you have freedom to express your views but being a member of the "press" and broadcasting "News" provide certain rights that should be balanced by some simple rules like "not lying".
How about proposing a Constitutional amendment to impose those duties on certain kinds of speech, then? 'Cause they're not in the First.
"Any bill with unrelated crap attached gets automatically vetoed. No exceptions."
That by itself would almost make me vote for whoever said it!
To clarify, I mean, is the problem with radio as a specific medium that happens to have this limit about the number of stations that can air at once? Would you support a Fairness Doctrine for a medium that doesn't work the same way -- so that if Limbaugh had gotten his start by podcasting, you'd have no problem with him not being "balanced?"
I've never understood this "public airwaves" argument. The radio spectrum is officially public property, to be regulated and censored, because... there's only a limited range in which people can broadcast? If that's the reason, why not declare "the public soundwaves" subject to regulation of ordinary speech? After all, it's much harder to have a large number of opinions being expressed (comprehensibly) at once by sound than it is by radio. Wouldn't it also follow that since newspapers distribute their dead-tree editions on public roads, the Dept. of Transporation should be able to control their content?
And is the limited-range argument even technologically relevant anymore, what with frequency-hopping phones and other inventions? How can the FCC justify regulating cable TV or the Internet?
Are you suggesting that the "right-wing lunatics" in question shouldn't have been allowed to become popular? That radio stations should've been forbidden to air them, or discouraged from doing so by being forced to air then-unpopular liberal shows in return?
The Republicans passed it after the 1994 election victory, but the Supreme Court shot it down.
The Pennsylvania Constitution has a sensible rule (Art. III, Sec. 3): No bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title, except a general appropriation bill or a bill codifying or compiling the law or a part thereof.
Then again, it also says only those who believe in God have a guaranteed right to hold public office.
If we had a federal equivalent of PA III.3, Congress would still put all kinds of stuff into spending bills and budgets, but it would at least limit Congress' ability to do so with a Feeding the Homeless Children Bill.
Wasn't it in the eighties during Reagan's time that a bill was passed that removed the requirment for NEWS programs to offer balanced reports and present opposing views.
That's the "Fairness Doctrine," and yes. We have this crazy idea that people have a right to express whatever opinions they want without the feds ordering them to present a government-chosen "other side" of a many-sided debate.
Culture is as essential to humanity as air, food, shelter and water, and like it or not the RIAA and their related organizations have a near monopoly control...
So let's create our own culture! We don't need Britney Spears CDs or television.
That makes sense; Harry's an example of an "outsider" character who's allowed to ask stupid questions for the benefit of the reader. Ged starts out in a world very different than ours. I suggest trying them out on Pullman's excellent "The Golden Compass." That one starts out in a somewhat normal setting.
Why do you suppose they weren't as interested in Earthsea? I remember Earthsea has a substantial, believable setting, while the Harry Potter world is a nonsensical fake England hidden implausibly inside the real one. I'm interested in the difference because I focus on the setting in my writing. If what kids want is action to the exclusion of setting, that could be a problem. Earthsea did have action; was the problem that it was too complex, or was it just not fast-paced enough? For comparison, how did your kids react to Tolkein, Narnia, or any science fiction they've read?
Great, so the first true AIs will exist to wreck computer systems? When are we due for the Sigma Virus?
For the Python instruction, I suggest using IDLE. It's a simple IDE that comes with the language. Because of its simplicity, students won't become dependent on a particular fancy graphic system to keep track of their projects, but they'll still get the convenience of a console window and easy "compilation" of the programs.
I'm not a food scientist, but I think labeling laws and food safety inspection regulations are very necessary. Who doesn't think that?
Government isn't the only possible way to deal with that and other situations.
I'm a Republican swinging towards libertarianism, so this was an interesting debate. A libertarian response, I think, to your comments would be that since government's purpose is to protect individual rights, it is government's job to stop any abuses that corporations are committing. Preventing Shell and the like from killing people seems fully compatible with the notion of protecting individual rights. In contrast, "restraining the power of corporations" is usually the sort of talk heard not from "minarchists" but from the socialists we've got now, who want laws restricting people's freedom to make their own economic decisions. Eg., look at the flap over such a little thing as Microsoft including a search bar in the next IE. "We've got to stop this lawfully organized group from offering people a product that gives them the option of using a tool that will make the same organization money!"
As I understand it, "single nucleotide polymorphism" studies are a way of doing the hashing you speak of -- identifying a person by their DNA without actually storing the full sequence or any information such as presence of cancer-associated genes.
I can't find the article at the moment, but I've heard of a network of private cameras being linked up for centralized monitoring.
I'm referring to the recent news story about not JFK, but Rep. Patrick Kennedy, whom police carefully refrained from giving a breath test when he crashed his car. Although Ted Kennedy has supposedly done worse and gotten away with it.
The short version of the theory: we're all going to be monitored, because those in power want to. The best retaliation is to stalk them right back. The problem with it is, certain activities by the politicians are going to be kept secret by them exempting themselves from surveillance, and certain politicians, like Kennedy, can get away even with breaking the law.
I'd like to see a site that monitors the location of every member of Congress 24/7, who they talk to, etc..
I don't know if it's true, but presumably the reference is to Echelon, Carnivore and/or Total Information Awareness.