It is slashdot. So most people are mouthing off against the ID cards and intrusive govt, lack of privacy and States' rights and all that. Step in to the real world, you will find people who:
1. Frequent shopper cards from grocery stores so that they get 25cents off a loaf of bread. In return they let their grocery shop+pharmacy uniquely brand them with a number and track all their purchases, from birth control pills to diapers.
2. Use credit cards even after they send them a year end profile of expenses, making it a no secret how much data they collect and retain
3. are least bothered by the extensive data collection by their banks and their "partners" who pelt them with "new and exciting products".
Come on guys. The private sector is a bigger threat to your privacy and well being than US Govt is. You have some semblance of control over US govt, whereas you have none over the private sector. The interests of US Govt coincides with the interests of people lot more than the interests of private sector overlapping the interests of people.
But if you want mod points and build your karma, you have to blast the govt.
Yup, just sock the brain with enough alcohol to knock out an elephant before its development is complete,
and then you wonder how these half-naked fakirs [*] are overtaking your economy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6294409.stm
[*] before you mod me troll, that was what Sir Winston Churchill called a guy named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Even in windows you can script with bat, or perl or may be python or vbscript... Or get cygwin and get all the unix shells... Ages ago my brother wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident remeber those things in DOS world?) that was triggered by a hot key. It will look up the word at the cursor location (using ascii escape sequences for a 80x24 character terminal) and if that is a COBOL language keyword, it will pop up a window giving a syntax help messages, any other next key removes the popup window.
HP should have learnt by now. It should have used the Genuine OEM brand spies. You might find cheaper replacement spies on the internet, but they leak eventually, and ruin it all.
The year I graduated, 10 of my classmates scored 99+ in the AGRE (Advanced GRE has been renamed since). Since 2000 people sat for that test in that batch in the entire world, 50% of the top 1% of the world resided in that Postal zone. Of course a tradegroup with an obvious vested interest spinning to equate broadband access with intelligence would not consider such measures of intelligence.
When I first heard the experiment, I was thinking, "Finally! Eileen does not have hoard her sponges and search for sponge-worthy men!" Just zap and reuse! But these disasters are more Krameresque than Eileeny.
I had not either. But I had a bug in the Linux port of my code and discovered that deep inside the floating point processor of 32 bit intel chips, there are 80 bit registers and all intermediate calculations are accurate upto 80 bits and final result gets truncated and stored in 64 bit double words. I had to fiddle with compiler flags to disable the "extra" accuracy. A tree I was building was using 80 bit accurate key during insertion and 64 bit accurate stored value during the fetch.
IMHO most CIOs are just risk averse bean counters who have given us this Microsoft monopoly, completely ignoring Microsoft monopoly. The standard making body is working on Open Document specification and MS is poisoning it by incorporating "reproduce all my bugs exactly the same way I did way back in 1995" as the standar spec. All these CIOs are sitting on their butts, plotting and scheming and playing palace intrigue in corporate HQ. Why should they become CEOs?
Think about it, if the Fortune 500 companies each chip in $100,000 and institute a Document Exchange Format and Protocols Institute and write the spec and own the spec and level the playing field for all their IT vendors, they can reap enormous benefits. Competition benefits the consumer. They are the consumer. They should encourage competition. Thank God, these bunch of morons dont often become the CEOs.
there are people who will seek to take advantage of others for financial gain. It's generally referred to as "capitalism."
It would appear on the surface that Capitalism will inevitably lead to a highly oppressive society where rich people rule over large masses of poor people. But it is not true. Proven scientifically.
Robert Axelrod of Univ of Mich, showed, based on simulations of Prisoner's Dilemma problems, how cooperation emerges due to purely selfish reasons. He showed that nice, forgiving, non-envious strategies lead to prosperity, when nastiness is consistently punished. He showed later how enclaves of cooperation can form even in highly nasty selfish societies and how they can overhelm the oppressive selfish nasty behaviour. He also showed that the fundamental tit-for-tat strategy is not an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, once the nastiness has been reduced to zero. Then this strategy is no different from purely altruistic strategy. Once pure altruism, where nastiness is not punished at all, emerges in the population, it allows a foothold for nasty strategies. So you cant just equate Capitalism with nastiness and selfishness. Capitalism and enlightened self interest will always lead to cooperation and mutual benefit.
Way back in my previous life, as one of the starving PIGS[*], I was the root (of all evil according to some of my students) in a CFD lab and I manage SunOS running on 386 chip. Deja Vu all over again!
Improving communications is so important for the agriculture sector. So many poor Indian farmers harvest their perishable crop and bring it to the market to sell at market price manipulated by the local agents/middlemen. Knowing what is the price in the town 15 km to the south vs the price in 14 km to west will mean a difference of 30% in revenue to the guy tending a half acre plot growing eggplants.
One of the interesting side effects of the cell phone explosion in rural India is that these farmers negotiate deals with big city wholesalers directly and skip one, two or sometimes even three levels of aggregators. Savvy farmers are cutting out the commissions to the middlemen by a large extent.
Of course weather prediction is another huge factor for Indian agriculture.
Money is definitely not a zero sum game. Infact we have been manufacturing money for many centuries now. Manufacturing money without creating underlying wealth leads to inflation. But we know that we have been creating wealth, whether you measure it by current dollar, rupee value or by constant dollar/rupee value or in non monetary terms like square feet of constructed building, miles of roads or acres of irrigated fields. No sir, money/wealth is not a zero sum game.
Your argument about misplaced priorities, spending resources on space/nuclear program when millions of Indians are starving, has been around for a long long time. Even USA's NASA program came under the same criticism. It has its roots in the old socialistic ethos where equal distribution of poverty was desired more than unequal distribution of prosperity. Glad finally India is also coming around the view, that prosperity is better than poverty.
India has to become the leading edge on a few fields. No one country can dominate all fields, and definitely not India. It can even play cricket well or win an olympic medal. But if India finds a few niches where it can thrive in
the global economy and bring home the moolah/bacon/bread/dough it will benefit all, including the poor who everyone is claiming to be sympathetic to. So you should see the investment in space program as an investment to find a
tech niche in a growing field, the nuclear program as an investment against the invaders who have been pillaging
India for centuries. India has suffered enough investing it all in butter and nothing in guns. In India v2.0 it will do well, I hope.
easier to buy local politicians at the cost of the latency of the transatlantic lines.
Whatever gave you the idea that Euro policies are less difficult to buy? Atleast in the USA you buy politicians with campaign contributions and with disclosure laws you know how much they cost. In EU with all that murky old boy networks, and well entrenched political system, you dont really have to buy the politicians but bureucrats. And they come much cheaper than the politicians.
I am a big fan of OO and I use it even though our company has bulk license and unlimited installs. I have no problem doing good high quality presentations. I mail PDF attachments. Everything is good. Except Excel's charting and annotating is still far superior to OO. I have been meaning to download the SDK and implement the support I need myself. But after looking at my code for five days I just can do more hacking during weekends. I must be getting old. Further my forte is C++ for non graphical non user interface fast scientific code develepment. So my productivity in the new build environment would be low. Bur definitely I would encourage people to improve the charting support. Just use gnuplot as the engine and slap good UI on it. Someone. anyone.
Buried fly wheels can be in vaccum canisters floating on magnetic bearings. Absolutely no servicing.
Further the energy stored in a flywheel is proportional to the moment of inertia of the wheel and square of the angular velocity (or rpm). Thus to increase the capcity it is better to jack up the speed than size. With electronics integrated in the housing, you would actually have a few dozen small flywheels rather than one large one. Again remove and replace the small defective flywheel.
The aliens knew they could not send out probes that carry enough energy to beam back the information. So they built generalized adaptive Turing machines, (a machine that can build itself) of incredibly small dimension. They created billions and billions of these machines and scattered them. These machines are so tiny, they get carried by the solar wind and other cosmic radiation.
One of these Turing machines reached Earth about 4 billion years ago. It first had to start by building very simple amino acids, then it graduated to proteins, then to RNA and then to DNA, and then these DNA machines built bodies around them and started using natural selection to evolve into more and more capable organisms. The final aim of these DNA structures is to build powerful radio beacons and send the information back to the original aliens who created these molecules and scattered them to the (solar) wind.
All along the Erie canal in the NY State, you will find charming little towns, stuck in 18th century seemingly progress bypassed them. But way back when Erie canal was the main transporatation artery, the barge companies controlled the local govt and made sure none of the "new fangled" railroads touch their towns. Well, they kept the railroads out and they got bogged down in 17th century.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Frequent shopper cards from grocery stores so that they get 25cents off a loaf of bread. In return they let their grocery shop+pharmacy uniquely brand them with a number and track all their purchases, from birth control pills to diapers.
2. Use credit cards even after they send them a year end profile of expenses, making it a no secret how much data they collect and retain
3. are least bothered by the extensive data collection by their banks and their "partners" who pelt them with "new and exciting products".
Come on guys. The private sector is a bigger threat to your privacy and well being than US Govt is. You have some semblance of control over US govt, whereas you have none over the private sector. The interests of US Govt coincides with the interests of people lot more than the interests of private sector overlapping the interests of people.
But if you want mod points and build your karma, you have to blast the govt.
[*] before you mod me troll, that was what Sir Winston Churchill called a guy named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Even in windows you can script with bat, or perl or may be python or vbscript... Or get cygwin and get all the unix shells... Ages ago my brother wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident remeber those things in DOS world?) that was triggered by a hot key. It will look up the word at the cursor location (using ascii escape sequences for a 80x24 character terminal) and if that is a COBOL language keyword, it will pop up a window giving a syntax help messages, any other next key removes the popup window.
So what it can do that csh cant?
HP should have learnt by now. It should have used the Genuine OEM brand spies. You might find cheaper replacement spies on the internet, but they leak eventually, and ruin it all.
Thanks for the correction. Elaine it should have been.
The year I graduated, 10 of my classmates scored 99+ in the AGRE (Advanced GRE has been renamed since). Since 2000 people sat for that test in that batch in the entire world, 50% of the top 1% of the world resided in that Postal zone. Of course a tradegroup with an obvious vested interest spinning to equate broadband access with intelligence would not consider such measures of intelligence.
When I first heard the experiment, I was thinking, "Finally! Eileen does not have hoard her sponges and search for sponge-worthy men!" Just zap and reuse! But these disasters are more Krameresque than Eileeny.
I had not either. But I had a bug in the Linux port of my code and discovered that deep inside the floating point processor of 32 bit intel chips, there are 80 bit registers and all intermediate calculations are accurate upto 80 bits and final result gets truncated and stored in 64 bit double words. I had to fiddle with compiler flags to disable the "extra" accuracy. A tree I was building was using 80 bit accurate key during insertion and 64 bit accurate stored value during the fetch.
And yes, there are places with 80 bit words.
Think about it, if the Fortune 500 companies each chip in $100,000 and institute a Document Exchange Format and Protocols Institute and write the spec and own the spec and level the playing field for all their IT vendors, they can reap enormous benefits. Competition benefits the consumer. They are the consumer. They should encourage competition. Thank God, these bunch of morons dont often become the CEOs.
It would appear on the surface that Capitalism will inevitably lead to a highly oppressive society where rich people rule over large masses of poor people. But it is not true. Proven scientifically.
Robert Axelrod of Univ of Mich, showed, based on simulations of Prisoner's Dilemma problems, how cooperation emerges due to purely selfish reasons. He showed that nice, forgiving, non-envious strategies lead to prosperity, when nastiness is consistently punished. He showed later how enclaves of cooperation can form even in highly nasty selfish societies and how they can overhelm the oppressive selfish nasty behaviour. He also showed that the fundamental tit-for-tat strategy is not an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, once the nastiness has been reduced to zero. Then this strategy is no different from purely altruistic strategy. Once pure altruism, where nastiness is not punished at all, emerges in the population, it allows a foothold for nasty strategies. So you cant just equate Capitalism with nastiness and selfishness. Capitalism and enlightened self interest will always lead to cooperation and mutual benefit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axelrod
But hey, they shipped pizzatool along with suntool in the OS. Oh! yeah!
Glossary: PIGS= Poor Indian Grad Students
One of the interesting side effects of the cell phone explosion in rural India is that these farmers negotiate deals with big city wholesalers directly and skip one, two or sometimes even three levels of aggregators. Savvy farmers are cutting out the commissions to the middlemen by a large extent.
Of course weather prediction is another huge factor for Indian agriculture.
sorry to follow up to myself. Crucial typo: India CAN'T even play cricket well.
Your argument about misplaced priorities, spending resources on space/nuclear program when millions of Indians are starving, has been around for a long long time. Even USA's NASA program came under the same criticism. It has its roots in the old socialistic ethos where equal distribution of poverty was desired more than unequal distribution of prosperity. Glad finally India is also coming around the view, that prosperity is better than poverty.
India has to become the leading edge on a few fields. No one country can dominate all fields, and definitely not India. It can even play cricket well or win an olympic medal. But if India finds a few niches where it can thrive in the global economy and bring home the moolah/bacon/bread/dough it will benefit all, including the poor who everyone is claiming to be sympathetic to. So you should see the investment in space program as an investment to find a tech niche in a growing field, the nuclear program as an investment against the invaders who have been pillaging India for centuries. India has suffered enough investing it all in butter and nothing in guns. In India v2.0 it will do well, I hope.
Whatever gave you the idea that Euro policies are less difficult to buy? Atleast in the USA you buy politicians with campaign contributions and with disclosure laws you know how much they cost. In EU with all that murky old boy networks, and well entrenched political system, you dont really have to buy the politicians but bureucrats. And they come much cheaper than the politicians.
I am a big fan of OO and I use it even though our company has bulk license and unlimited installs. I have no problem doing good high quality presentations. I mail PDF attachments. Everything is good. Except Excel's charting and annotating is still far superior to OO. I have been meaning to download the SDK and implement the support I need myself. But after looking at my code for five days I just can do more hacking during weekends. I must be getting old. Further my forte is C++ for non graphical non user interface fast scientific code develepment. So my productivity in the new build environment would be low. Bur definitely I would encourage people to improve the charting support. Just use gnuplot as the engine and slap good UI on it. Someone. anyone.
Buried fly wheels can be in vaccum canisters floating on magnetic bearings. Absolutely no servicing. Further the energy stored in a flywheel is proportional to the moment of inertia of the wheel and square of the angular velocity (or rpm). Thus to increase the capcity it is better to jack up the speed than size. With electronics integrated in the housing, you would actually have a few dozen small flywheels rather than one large one. Again remove and replace the small defective flywheel.
Heck, the pirate can randomly filter out a few more bits and thus fingering some other patsy instead of him/herself?
Then hex diff it, find the missing bits add them, and then.... profit!
... how come so many more people, billions infact, are non Nobel Laureates, eh?
I was shooting for funny. Got insightful. Shows how difficult comedy is.
One of these Turing machines reached Earth about 4 billion years ago. It first had to start by building very simple amino acids, then it graduated to proteins, then to RNA and then to DNA, and then these DNA machines built bodies around them and started using natural selection to evolve into more and more capable organisms. The final aim of these DNA structures is to build powerful radio beacons and send the information back to the original aliens who created these molecules and scattered them to the (solar) wind.
All along the Erie canal in the NY State, you will find charming little towns, stuck in 18th century seemingly progress bypassed them. But way back when Erie canal was the main transporatation artery, the barge companies controlled the local govt and made sure none of the "new fangled" railroads touch their towns. Well, they kept the railroads out and they got bogged down in 17th century.