I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.
I'm sure they've fixed that by now. Probably. Possibly.
Your steak is burned on one side, but cold. There's a big pile of a yellow granular unidentified substance piled on top of it. Your waiter comes along and says, "Cook's oven not functioning correctly and unknown substance spilled on top." OK?
In short, most error messages are crap. The blame lies with LAZY system designers and LAZY developers.
I can't tell you how many times, I see error messages like "Default zone not selected.: OK?" or "Type error on search processing object 23: OK?" Every time I see this crap, I want to bitch slap some lazy son of a bitch and ban all dialogs that only have the "OK" button as a response.
The CORRECT response to the first example above is something like. "Sorry, you need to select a default zone first. Shall I bring up the dialog that allows you do to this?: "Yes", "No", "Cancel" The CORRECT response to the second example above is to fire the lazy system designer and/or programmer who couldn't be bothered to come up with an intelligent useful response to an error and because of their laziness, wasted thousands of hours of user time, just so they could take an early lunch.
Really. It wouldn't be months before we got the power back on. It might be years. It takes electricity to communicate, move goods by train, get oil and coal from point a to point b. I don't think anyone has really thought through just how devastating this would be.
Asia and Africa lose electricity and there goes all those lovely cell phones, or any phones. Asian cities lose power to keep those sewage plants and water supplies running and disease starts taking hold in a big way. Asia loses electricity and you can't even use trains very effectively because you use electricity to control traffic, so food and medicine supplies are diminished.
Thinking this would only effect white people in Europe and the Americas is racist nonsense. Thinking that people in Asia and Africa don't depend on electricity and petroleum as much as Europeans and people in the Americas is potentially dangerous delusion.
Money is more accurately described as a kind of swarm intelligence. The meme of money is the fundamental self replicator. Admittedly the ecology is complex, (dollars, derivatives, bonds, et al.) but the fundamental rules are the same.
Money want to reproduce. We (our collective cultural awareness) are merely hosts for money to exist.
Usually, money is symbiotic, benefiting the host and itself. Occasionally, it turns into a pathology that harms its hosts (i.e. tulip manias, compulsive gambling/banking, stock market crashes).
The delusion here is thinking that we can "control" the economy. The economy (our name for money's ecology), will always, to some degree, be out of control as long as the hosts are relatively free agents. We can garden (i.e. set up nice environments for money to replicate), but direct control is probably a pipe dream). Moreover, money replication isn't free. It takes real environmental resources to create and is therefore limited. Expanding the garden forever isn't an option. Sustaining a nice one probably is.
Inventors with patents used to make money, but corporations make the laws in this country and have for a long time, despite grade school propaganda to the contrary. The independent entrepreneur is always a threat to large entrenched interests and will always be suppressed as much as possible without making the peasants revolt.
Panama, the Bahamas, Canada. Citizenship can be had elsewhere. If I was starting a company tomorrow, I'd incorporate offshore, hire offshore and only make my software available via download or as a web app. The USA/IRS might try and tax me for domestic downloads. Good luck with that guys.
If the USA wants to make it difficult for independent software developers or other independent entrepreneurs to do business in the United States, I'm sure that those independents will be happy to oblige them - by taking their money, talents and ambition elsewhere.
This isn't a teenage drag race to the finish. It doesn't matter who gets on the moon again, or to Mars first. That stuff is trivial showboating. . How about "Put people in sustainable near earth artificial environments?" or "Build space based solar power generators?" or "Mine asteroids for rare earth metals" or "Build satellite based universally available internet" or *anything* else that doesn't involve us dropping to the bottom of yet *another* barren gravity well, grabbing our genitalia and shouting "First! Uh, Uh, Uh!"
Kennedy is dead. The sixties are gone. Get over it. Do something in space that makes sense for a change.
The symmetry of naming is "definition." There is no agreed upon definition for the name "life" which is kind of the point. What "life" is appears to be a subset of one specific kind of self replication process in the chemical domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, someone had to say it.
I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.
I'm sure they've fixed that by now. Probably. Possibly.
Imagine this scenario in a restaurant:
Your steak is burned on one side, but cold. There's a big pile of a yellow granular unidentified substance piled on top of it. Your waiter comes along and says, "Cook's oven not functioning correctly and unknown substance spilled on top." OK?
In short, most error messages are crap. The blame lies with LAZY system designers and LAZY developers.
I can't tell you how many times, I see error messages like "Default zone not selected.: OK?" or "Type error on search processing object 23: OK?" Every time I see this crap, I want to bitch slap some lazy son of a bitch and ban all dialogs that only have the "OK" button as a response.
The CORRECT response to the first example above is something like. "Sorry, you need to select a default zone first. Shall I bring up the dialog that allows you do to this?: "Yes", "No", "Cancel"
The CORRECT response to the second example above is to fire the lazy system designer and/or programmer who couldn't be bothered to come up with an intelligent useful response to an error and because of their laziness, wasted thousands of hours of user time, just so they could take an early lunch.
Really. It wouldn't be months before we got the power back on. It might be years. It takes electricity to communicate, move goods by train, get oil and coal from point a to point b. I don't think anyone has really thought through just how devastating this would be.
Asia and Africa lose electricity and there goes all those lovely cell phones, or any phones. Asian cities lose power to keep those sewage plants and water supplies running and disease starts taking hold in a big way. Asia loses electricity and you can't even use trains very effectively because you use electricity to control traffic, so food and medicine supplies are diminished.
Thinking this would only effect white people in Europe and the Americas is racist nonsense. Thinking that people in Asia and Africa don't depend on electricity and petroleum as much as Europeans and people in the Americas is potentially dangerous delusion.
Almost everything you eat, wear or buy comes from overseas, where child labor, or slave labor conditions exist.
Slavery has never been eliminated, only renamed and exported where we wouldn't have to look at it, or more importantly, pay for it.
Apple suddenly realizing this is like suddenly noticing that the sky is blue. All the rest is PR kaka.
1 unit goo = planck? Seems too large to me.
that connects state one to state two.
I too seem to be born with a natural repellent.
Sadly, I can claim that it has as much predictive power as any other economic theory.
And of course it's just a theory - untested. It is, to some degree testable in silica, more so than many of the current models.
I'm a *psychologist* you insensitive clod (Well, I have the degree anyway - actually I develop software for a living)
Seriously.
Money is more accurately described as a kind of swarm intelligence. The meme of money is the fundamental self replicator. Admittedly the ecology is complex, (dollars, derivatives, bonds, et al.) but the fundamental rules are the same.
Money want to reproduce. We (our collective cultural awareness) are merely hosts for money to exist.
Usually, money is symbiotic, benefiting the host and itself. Occasionally, it turns into a pathology that harms its hosts (i.e. tulip manias, compulsive gambling/banking, stock market crashes).
The delusion here is thinking that we can "control" the economy. The economy (our name for money's ecology), will always, to some degree, be out of control as long as the hosts are relatively free agents. We can garden (i.e. set up nice environments for money to replicate), but direct control is probably a pipe dream). Moreover, money replication isn't free. It takes real environmental resources to create and is therefore limited. Expanding the garden forever isn't an option. Sustaining a nice one probably is.
Theoretically, very true.
Arrrrr. Aye Matey, I wish this *was* a joke.
http://www.sea-code.com/
Inventors with patents used to make money, but corporations make the laws in this country and have for a long time, despite grade school propaganda to the contrary. The independent entrepreneur is always a threat to large entrenched interests and will always be suppressed as much as possible without making the peasants revolt.
Panama, the Bahamas, Canada. Citizenship can be had elsewhere. If I was starting a company tomorrow, I'd incorporate offshore, hire offshore and only make my software available via download or as a web app. The USA/IRS might try and tax me for domestic downloads. Good luck with that guys.
If the USA wants to make it difficult for independent software developers or other independent entrepreneurs to do business in the United States, I'm sure that those independents will be happy to oblige them - by taking their money, talents and ambition elsewhere.
How much magic is left in the Apple Lisa?
I wouldn't depend on *that* for long.
This isn't a teenage drag race to the finish. It doesn't matter who gets on the moon again, or to Mars first. That stuff is trivial showboating.
.
How about "Put people in sustainable near earth artificial environments?" or "Build space based solar power generators?" or "Mine asteroids for rare earth metals" or "Build satellite based universally available internet" or *anything* else that doesn't involve us dropping to the bottom of yet *another* barren gravity well, grabbing our genitalia and shouting "First! Uh, Uh, Uh!"
Kennedy is dead. The sixties are gone. Get over it. Do something in space that makes sense for a change.
My breathless wait is over.
Seriously? Woo hoo! THANKS!
Interesting. Was it ILM? I know they've used Python forever.
I mean, exclusively coding in Python? Who's got a paying job? Just curious.
Missed that one. I tend to stick to Cowboy Neal.
Now, all of you, GET OFF MY LAWN!
Humor. It's a concept.
FYI, 52 year old male. Software developer. Intermittently Incompetent. Or is that Mittently competent? Dammit, now I'm confused again.
The symmetry of naming is "definition." There is no agreed upon definition for the name "life" which is kind of the point. What "life" is appears to be a subset of one specific kind of self replication process in the chemical domain.