Hee hee, now we can claim to be "trolling for Linux" and take the moral high ground when people start moaning at us... Finally, someobdy actually listens and learns from a troll:)
I think drugs are a problem for our society, with the possible exception of marajuna, which is, IMHO, far less harmful than tobacco.
Whilst I agree with your post in general, I think that the only reason drugs are a problem for society is because of the whole war on drugs and the attitude it has spawned - do you consider alcohol to be a problem for society despite the fact that it is worse than a lot of illegal drugs?
No, drugs can be very bad for individuals given misuse, as with anything, but their effects on society are minimal. Look at Holland, where they have been decriminalised. Does the society suffer for it? No, individuals might, but their society seems pretty damn stable and sane to me.
As for drug tests et al, they're such a bad idea. Not only are they invasive and a threat to your personal privacy, but a lot of the people I know who do a hell of a lot of drugs work in those sorts of places anyway and go out every weekend and get fucked. Doesn't seem to have made them lose their jobs because they're drug-crazed wasters...
Oops, yeah, I misread the italicised bits of your post... doh! But no, as both a user and someone concerned with personal rights, the whole thing does indeed sicken me - it seems to be an issue which is being kept alive for political capital and media scandal despite the fact that a significant number of people are pro-drugs. Unfortunately, speaking up about this is just asking to be demonised... yet again the law is forcing a social attitude on a society where that attitude is not wanted.
I'm curious at to why you believe that that would be a good thing. Do you approve of the rediculous efforts spent on the whole "War on Drugs" and the significant blows to individual liberty that it has bought with it? Having electronic drug sniffers on every street corner, whilst maybe effective, sounds like as big an invasion of privacy as any I can imagine.
Now, I may be a bit biased here, enjoying drugs on a recreational level here myself, but even apart from that I've still yet to hear a single good reason why drugs in general are such a menace to society that they must be demonised and their users treated as the worst kind of criminal.
There's an article here at SmokeDot about how and why marijuana became illegal, and I think it illustrates some of the petty reasons they became illegal in the first place, even though now those reasons have been buried.
True, but the code Delphi produces is actually quite well optimised - definitely smaller and faster than the equivalent C++ code. It's not like Borland haven't had enough time to get it all right is it?:)
good has visual programming environments provided for windows?
Well, giving people who wouldn't otherwise be bothered to code something the impetus to do it afterall - since it takes a hell of a lot less time using Delphi than direct API calls, you're more likely to start that program. And while you will get a lot of half-baked programs from "weenies" you'll also get quality programs that wouldn't have otherwise been written.
This is not an obnoxious question, I'm actually just making through now as an intern, and can get my jobs done faster by just using a commmand line anyways.
What kind of program though? Sure I wouldn't use Delphi for anything non-GUI based, but you can knock out a useful mini-application in quarter of an hour with Delphi once you're used to it.
The Linux solution to a graphical environment as far as I'm concerend is something along the lines of TCL/TK. Just put a wrapper around some decent code that already exists.
What do you think the VCL is? It's a framework which is going to be based around the underlying GUI, wrapping it up in a consistent and useful way. And the VCL framework is a real pleasure to use, especially after most GUI frameworks (especially MFC, ugh).
I'm into systems progamming, but how many, really, how many useful apps have been made with something like delphi or visual c or whatever?
Loads, Goldwave is one which someone mentions above, a good soundwave editor with a lot of useful tools, I've used it a lot when doing music. Lots of companies use Delphi - I'm here at work using it at the moment:) You'd be suprised how many people use it - I know here in the UK Delphi 3 has been out on magazine cover discs for free.
Have you ever used it yourself? If not, I really suggest you try it with an open mind. Delphi is a great tool, and what platform it runs on should be irrelevent.
Yes, I'm using Delphi at the moment, and just to test it, I just compiled and linked 339744 lines of code in about 30 seconds. Damn fast compared to any C++ compiler/linker I've ever seen.
Eh, not bad really:) The real tough part is having to wear a suit, ugh, that's really not me... and the code base here is pretty nasty. All in all it's going okay, settling in...
Sorry;-) A GUT is generally used to describe the theory in which the strong and electroweak forces are unified rather than all four. Predictions like proton decay have come from current GUT models, but they don't seem to work very well.
The weak nuclear force doesn't do anything else apart from cause radiative decay. The least interested force IMHO.
Well, it's not really proof of superstring theory as such, but superstring theory has been used to proof Bernstein's (?) hypothosis that the surface area of a black hole is proportional to its entropy, which had resisted proof by other methods for 30 years. There's more about the proof in the book, which is well worth a read.
So no, nothing definite, but that's one of the goals of superstring theorists - to look for low-energy consequences of the theory that can be tested within the forseeable future. Until then, the theory is in an experimental limbo, but it does seem too good not to be true. But that is purely my opinion, and some quite famous physicists would disagree:)
And what id would that be? Because when you clicked on the "User Info" link it went to the real CmdrTaco's homepage, not the fake one. Are you just talking pants?
Hmm, that's the sort of thing that law courts will wrangle endlessly about, and lawyers make their fortunes off of. OTOH it has happened in the past - back in the days of the Atari ST/Amiga I remember that a German computer magazine published the source code to a bootsector virus which was subseqeuntly spread... Definitely a stupid move IMHO by them.
I can't really say that it's suprising that intentionally propagating a virus has become a crime - I don't think that anyone can argue that spreading a virus is not a nice thing, even if creating one is purely a "technical challenge". I expect that this legislation will be quickly followed by other states and countries, especially in light of the "ILOVEYOU" virus and its successors.
However, in the words of the article, "It also defines a computer virus for the first time". The definition of virus has already changed over the last few years, and as technology changes the pathogens that affect it will change as well. How soon will it be until this law and its definition of a "virus" becomes obsolete? Given current trends, not long at all.
A good law to have then, but as with all laws that attempt to regulate technology, the pace of advancement in the technology far outstrips that of the law to keep up with it.
I can't really say that it's suprising that intentionally propagating a virus has become a crime - I don't think that anyone can argue that spreading a virus is not a nice thing, even if creating one is purely a "technical challenge". I expect that this legislation will be quickly followed by other states and countries, especially in light of the "ILOVEYOU" virus and its successors.
However, in the words of the article, "It also defines a computer virus for the first time". The definition of virus has already changed over the last few years, and as technology changes the pathogens that affect it will change as well. How soon will it be until this law and its definition of a "virus" becomes obsolete? Given current trends, not long at all.
A good law to have then, but as with all laws that attempt to regulate technology, the pace of advancement in the technology far outstrips that of the law to keep up with it.
True:) I have to say I prefer Signail 11 to Signal 11 by a long shot... My fake CmdrTaco troll resulted in Rob changing the Slash code to convert & to & within an hour, possibly the fastest bug fix in the history of/. Guess he didn't like being impersonated for some reason;-)
So true, I've never felt confortable reading any text on the net for more than ten minutes or so, and when I get a good book I want to hide somwhere for ten hours to read it...
And what about "toilet books". You know, that great books that you read whilst engaging in bodily functions. I don't think many people are going to want their laptop/palmtop/e-book to be faced with that environment:)
It was only an example, if a bad one
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And maybe the wrong one at that:) No, I didn't mean to cast TOS as "definitive" early science fiction, I was merely talking about it being an example of a good idea being spoiled for me by very poor realism. The stuff I was actually talking about was a few decades prior to that really, so okay, maybe I should have come up with something else...
Re:Sounds interesting but...
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Yeah, I read the Ring years ago and found it really interesting, especially the whole idea of gravitic technology, something which will allow us to really play around with spacetime, and when it ended I looked around for the follow up but couldn't find it:( Only found it a few months ago by accident which was lucky:)
Sounds interesting but...
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Well, it certainly sounds interesting enough, and if I ever get the opportunity I'll give it a go, but in general I'm not a huge fan of older science fiction. Personally I find that a lot of it, although based on intruiging ideas, just puts me off because of a lack of any kind of realism - the original series of Star Trek springs to made as a well known example.
I'm not saying that all old sci-fi sucks, but it does seem like the genre has had a welcome influence of people who know what they're talking about over the last few decades. I find that a great idea in a story can be devalued when it is expressed in terms of science that a 16 year old could debunk.
Anyway, as for Dyson spheres, has anyone else here read The Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere by Roger Macbride Allen? Good books, if a little bit obscure:)
That is just the kind of high-handed interference that the rest of the world has come to know and "love" from the US. Do you know when it was passed or have any more info on it?
Re:Do it & it's adios. I'll tell banner ad folks t
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Yeah, he fixed it so that & characters in usernames were converted to & as they should be:) Strange how it only takes half an hour for him to change something when it's him that's being impersonated but ages otherwise...
Heh, Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter are two of my favourite authors, if not my favourites:) I've read all of their stuff. They are probably the best at coming up with truly interesting ideas that are actually based on bizarre but plausible parts of science, especially some of the stuff in Vacuum Diagrams - a lifeform made from mathematical hypotheses?
My view is that we can't really bet on life evolving anywhere else. Until we have proof we have to consider the chance that we are indeed alone.
Whilst it is my opinion that there is life elsewhere, I agree that we cannot assume that at all - there are too many unknown factors at this point in time. Anyone making a definite statement is jumping the gun by a long shot.
And assuming we don't develop FTL travel within a reasonable timescale, then Mars is the ideal stepping stone to the rest of the Solar System - lower gravity, closer to the asteroid belt and its vast store of useful resources. I think colonising it is worthwhile for many reasons.
OTOH, given past history, it will be done at some point no matter how good the objections. It's better to plan now while there's still some time to go:)
I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself.
I agree with this. Given that the time span over which life arose on Earth is far too short for purely random processes, it does seem like there are organising principles that come into play very early on in a planet's development. This would tend to point to life being relatively common on worlds with the conditions required to support it.
And given some of the places we find life on Earth today - hydrothermal vents, arctic wastes, miles below the Earth's surface and so on - the range of conditions under which life of some description could arise would also seem to be fairly broad, again supporting the theory that life might be fairly common.
OTOH intelligent life is a totally different question. Out of all of Earth's species it only seems to have arisen once - as a surivival adaption it seems that there are a lot better routes which living creatures have followed. After all, look at sharks and crocodiles, animals which have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. There's no need for intelligence to produce an animal capable of surviving for huge spans of time.
So I think colonising Mars is a good thing. Eggs and baskets, you know:) Sure it's not going to solve the population crisis - if you had a thousand spaceships each taking a thousand people to Mars each year that's still only a million people every year - currently only 1/5000 of the Earth's population.
But it gives us a better foothold in space, and Mars' gravity well is much easier to get out of than Earth's is, allowing it to be used as a base to reach the asteroids and beyond.
Go to bottomquark to get the stories I've been submitting. It's another Slash site for science stories, lots of interesting stories there even if there's precious little people.
Slashdot Mirror
Hee hee, now we can claim to be "trolling for Linux" and take the moral high ground when people start moaning at us... Finally, someobdy actually listens and learns from a troll :)
I think drugs are a problem for our society, with the possible exception of marajuna, which is, IMHO, far less harmful than tobacco.
Whilst I agree with your post in general, I think that the only reason drugs are a problem for society is because of the whole war on drugs and the attitude it has spawned - do you consider alcohol to be a problem for society despite the fact that it is worse than a lot of illegal drugs?
No, drugs can be very bad for individuals given misuse, as with anything, but their effects on society are minimal. Look at Holland, where they have been decriminalised. Does the society suffer for it? No, individuals might, but their society seems pretty damn stable and sane to me.
As for drug tests et al, they're such a bad idea. Not only are they invasive and a threat to your personal privacy, but a lot of the people I know who do a hell of a lot of drugs work in those sorts of places anyway and go out every weekend and get fucked. Doesn't seem to have made them lose their jobs because they're drug-crazed wasters...
Oh yeah, sorry about the rant.
Oops, yeah, I misread the italicised bits of your post... doh! But no, as both a user and someone concerned with personal rights, the whole thing does indeed sicken me - it seems to be an issue which is being kept alive for political capital and media scandal despite the fact that a significant number of people are pro-drugs. Unfortunately, speaking up about this is just asking to be demonised... yet again the law is forcing a social attitude on a society where that attitude is not wanted.
I'm curious at to why you believe that that would be a good thing. Do you approve of the rediculous efforts spent on the whole "War on Drugs" and the significant blows to individual liberty that it has bought with it? Having electronic drug sniffers on every street corner, whilst maybe effective, sounds like as big an invasion of privacy as any I can imagine.
Now, I may be a bit biased here, enjoying drugs on a recreational level here myself, but even apart from that I've still yet to hear a single good reason why drugs in general are such a menace to society that they must be demonised and their users treated as the worst kind of criminal.
There's an article here at SmokeDot about how and why marijuana became illegal, and I think it illustrates some of the petty reasons they became illegal in the first place, even though now those reasons have been buried.
True, but the code Delphi produces is actually quite well optimised - definitely smaller and faster than the equivalent C++ code. It's not like Borland haven't had enough time to get it all right is it? :)
good has visual programming environments provided for windows?
Well, giving people who wouldn't otherwise be bothered to code something the impetus to do it afterall - since it takes a hell of a lot less time using Delphi than direct API calls, you're more likely to start that program. And while you will get a lot of half-baked programs from "weenies" you'll also get quality programs that wouldn't have otherwise been written.
This is not an obnoxious question, I'm actually just making through now as an intern, and can get my jobs done faster by just using a commmand line anyways.
What kind of program though? Sure I wouldn't use Delphi for anything non-GUI based, but you can knock out a useful mini-application in quarter of an hour with Delphi once you're used to it.
The Linux solution to a graphical environment as far as I'm concerend is something along the lines of TCL/TK. Just put a wrapper around some decent code that already exists.
What do you think the VCL is? It's a framework which is going to be based around the underlying GUI, wrapping it up in a consistent and useful way. And the VCL framework is a real pleasure to use, especially after most GUI frameworks (especially MFC, ugh).
I'm into systems progamming, but how many, really, how many useful apps have been made with something like delphi or visual c or whatever?
Loads, Goldwave is one which someone mentions above, a good soundwave editor with a lot of useful tools, I've used it a lot when doing music. Lots of companies use Delphi - I'm here at work using it at the moment :) You'd be suprised how many people use it - I know here in the UK Delphi 3 has been out on magazine cover discs for free.
Have you ever used it yourself? If not, I really suggest you try it with an open mind. Delphi is a great tool, and what platform it runs on should be irrelevent.
Yes, I'm using Delphi at the moment, and just to test it, I just compiled and linked 339744 lines of code in about 30 seconds. Damn fast compared to any C++ compiler/linker I've ever seen.
Eh, not bad really :) The real tough part is having to wear a suit, ugh, that's really not me... and the code base here is pretty nasty. All in all it's going okay, settling in...
Sorry ;-) A GUT is generally used to describe the theory in which the strong and electroweak forces are unified rather than all four. Predictions like proton decay have come from current GUT models, but they don't seem to work very well.
The weak nuclear force doesn't do anything else apart from cause radiative decay. The least interested force IMHO.
Well, it's not really proof of superstring theory as such, but superstring theory has been used to proof Bernstein's (?) hypothosis that the surface area of a black hole is proportional to its entropy, which had resisted proof by other methods for 30 years. There's more about the proof in the book, which is well worth a read.
So no, nothing definite, but that's one of the goals of superstring theorists - to look for low-energy consequences of the theory that can be tested within the forseeable future. Until then, the theory is in an experimental limbo, but it does seem too good not to be true. But that is purely my opinion, and some quite famous physicists would disagree :)
And what id would that be? Because when you clicked on the "User Info" link it went to the real CmdrTaco's homepage, not the fake one. Are you just talking pants?
Hmm, that's the sort of thing that law courts will wrangle endlessly about, and lawyers make their fortunes off of. OTOH it has happened in the past - back in the days of the Atari ST/Amiga I remember that a German computer magazine published the source code to a bootsector virus which was subseqeuntly spread... Definitely a stupid move IMHO by them.
I can't really say that it's suprising that intentionally propagating a virus has become a crime - I don't think that anyone can argue that spreading a virus is not a nice thing, even if creating one is purely a "technical challenge". I expect that this legislation will be quickly followed by other states and countries, especially in light of the "ILOVEYOU" virus and its successors.
However, in the words of the article, "It also defines a computer virus for the first time". The definition of virus has already changed over the last few years, and as technology changes the pathogens that affect it will change as well. How soon will it be until this law and its definition of a "virus" becomes obsolete? Given current trends, not long at all.
A good law to have then, but as with all laws that attempt to regulate technology, the pace of advancement in the technology far outstrips that of the law to keep up with it.
I can't really say that it's suprising that intentionally propagating a virus has become a crime - I don't think that anyone can argue that spreading a virus is not a nice thing, even if creating one is purely a "technical challenge". I expect that this legislation will be quickly followed by other states and countries, especially in light of the "ILOVEYOU" virus and its successors.
However, in the words of the article, "It also defines a computer virus for the first time". The definition of virus has already changed over the last few years, and as technology changes the pathogens that affect it will change as well. How soon will it be until this law and its definition of a "virus" becomes obsolete? Given current trends, not long at all.
A good law to have then, but as with all laws that attempt to regulate technology, the pace of advancement in the technology far outstrips that of the law to keep up with it.
True :) I have to say I prefer Signail 11 to Signal 11 by a long shot... My fake CmdrTaco troll resulted in Rob changing the Slash code to convert & to & within an hour, possibly the fastest bug fix in the history of /. Guess he didn't like being impersonated for some reason ;-)
So true, I've never felt confortable reading any text on the net for more than ten minutes or so, and when I get a good book I want to hide somwhere for ten hours to read it...
And what about "toilet books". You know, that great books that you read whilst engaging in bodily functions. I don't think many people are going to want their laptop/palmtop/e-book to be faced with that environment :)
And maybe the wrong one at that :) No, I didn't mean to cast TOS as "definitive" early science fiction, I was merely talking about it being an example of a good idea being spoiled for me by very poor realism. The stuff I was actually talking about was a few decades prior to that really, so okay, maybe I should have come up with something else...
Yeah, I read the Ring years ago and found it really interesting, especially the whole idea of gravitic technology, something which will allow us to really play around with spacetime, and when it ended I looked around for the follow up but couldn't find it :( Only found it a few months ago by accident which was lucky :)
Well, it certainly sounds interesting enough, and if I ever get the opportunity I'll give it a go, but in general I'm not a huge fan of older science fiction. Personally I find that a lot of it, although based on intruiging ideas, just puts me off because of a lack of any kind of realism - the original series of Star Trek springs to made as a well known example.
I'm not saying that all old sci-fi sucks, but it does seem like the genre has had a welcome influence of people who know what they're talking about over the last few decades. I find that a great idea in a story can be devalued when it is expressed in terms of science that a 16 year old could debunk.
Anyway, as for Dyson spheres, has anyone else here read The Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere by Roger Macbride Allen? Good books, if a little bit obscure :)
That is just the kind of high-handed interference that the rest of the world has come to know and "love" from the US. Do you know when it was passed or have any more info on it?
Yeah, he fixed it so that & characters in usernames were converted to & as they should be :) Strange how it only takes half an hour for him to change something when it's him that's being impersonated but ages otherwise...
Are you sure that he wasn't yanking your chain? OTOH, there are some pretty clueless people out there...
Heh, Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter are two of my favourite authors, if not my favourites :) I've read all of their stuff. They are probably the best at coming up with truly interesting ideas that are actually based on bizarre but plausible parts of science, especially some of the stuff in Vacuum Diagrams - a lifeform made from mathematical hypotheses?
My view is that we can't really bet on life evolving anywhere else. Until we have proof we have to consider the chance that we are indeed alone.
Whilst it is my opinion that there is life elsewhere, I agree that we cannot assume that at all - there are too many unknown factors at this point in time. Anyone making a definite statement is jumping the gun by a long shot.
And assuming we don't develop FTL travel within a reasonable timescale, then Mars is the ideal stepping stone to the rest of the Solar System - lower gravity, closer to the asteroid belt and its vast store of useful resources. I think colonising it is worthwhile for many reasons.
OTOH, given past history, it will be done at some point no matter how good the objections. It's better to plan now while there's still some time to go :)
P.S. Do you have his web page address?
I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself.
I agree with this. Given that the time span over which life arose on Earth is far too short for purely random processes, it does seem like there are organising principles that come into play very early on in a planet's development. This would tend to point to life being relatively common on worlds with the conditions required to support it.
And given some of the places we find life on Earth today - hydrothermal vents, arctic wastes, miles below the Earth's surface and so on - the range of conditions under which life of some description could arise would also seem to be fairly broad, again supporting the theory that life might be fairly common.
OTOH intelligent life is a totally different question. Out of all of Earth's species it only seems to have arisen once - as a surivival adaption it seems that there are a lot better routes which living creatures have followed. After all, look at sharks and crocodiles, animals which have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. There's no need for intelligence to produce an animal capable of surviving for huge spans of time.
So I think colonising Mars is a good thing. Eggs and baskets, you know :) Sure it's not going to solve the population crisis - if you had a thousand spaceships each taking a thousand people to Mars each year that's still only a million people every year - currently only 1/5000 of the Earth's population.
But it gives us a better foothold in space, and Mars' gravity well is much easier to get out of than Earth's is, allowing it to be used as a base to reach the asteroids and beyond.
Go to bottomquark to get the stories I've been submitting. It's another Slash site for science stories, lots of interesting stories there even if there's precious little people.