I hope you were serious because I'm going to spend a bit of time giving you a serious answer.
Telcom Network management is a very vertical platform. We have cross-platform development issues, need to interact with many databases and needed a very strong client/server system. We bought a system from Dorado Software that did a lot of the base network management stuff (mapping, discovery, ability to add configuration, etc). We also leveraged a lot of the messaging, client/server and failover capabilities of J2EE.
This is a pretty damn hard problem space. On top of this large platform that contacted/interacted with/managed many MANY devices, you needed customers to be able to interface to their own specific devices using their devices' own little invented language which is often some off-flavor of SNMP or CMIP--for many devices you just had to programatically telnet/http to the device and interact with it as though you were a user.) We're talking many million dollar devices that take up a room and don't get updated all that often or devices where you have many million deployed... You don't change them, you learn to speak their language instead)
So as an end customer (say a large telephone company) you might have this Mangement platform from some vendor managing millions of dollars worth of room-sized T1/T2/T3/OC3 switches and terminators. It may also manage end-customer equipment like high-end routers, switches, DSUs, etc. You could even want to go down to the level of managing PCs or cable set-top boxes (imagine how many of those are hooked up to one head-end).
Now, each of those have software written by their vendor to integrate their hardware into Dorado's platform--either that or the customer has to write that software or contract it out.
Java was a real boon to this industry--When Java became popular the C stuff (which it all was up until then) pretty much VANISHED. The speed of development, vastly more controllable codebase, easier integration and ability to remove windows from the equation--Windows wasn't considered a professional platform by the Bells for a LONG time and they are slow to integrate changes. They still prefer Unix (not even Linux) for many deployments.
Java Is pretty much a perfect solution for this space. It let me scan a sparse class B network space in 15 minutes! I challenge you to do significantly better in another language. There is nothing wrong at all with the choice of language, Even with the old IO libraries I was able to singlehandedly replace the ping library with my fast one in a weekend including client/server integration relaying results, scheduling and database updates. I couldn't have done it in a month using C even with a small team, and few dynamic languages would have been quick enough.
In fact, I was in Network Management for 20+ years and from the time they moved from c to Java, things just took off. Tools started to be reusable, you could buy stuff "off the shelf" that EVERYONE previously had to spend years creating themselves, developers were available and pretty easy to find, the J2EE platform contained a bunch of powerful functionality for free, the list goes on.
Yes, but we live in a world where we have certain price/hardware/testing/platform constraints. Java was by far better than any other solution I've seen--There is an established base of developers, there are existing network management platforms. I can't even imagine starting over from scratch on propitiatory hardware and a language we had to learn from scratch, it would have made every project I've ever been on completely fail.
Not that it's not true in theory, if your theory ignores 100x longer delivery dates (no exaggeration) and 50x "other" cost overruns (Possible exaggeration, maybe not)
Okay, so the iPhone vetting process sucks and the Android is to easy to install malware.
I've noticed that with chrome, each extension I install asks for permission to use a specific list of services. I'm assuming that if they try to use a service that they haven't asked to use, they will be denied.
I'd really like this to be THE universal security measure. When I install a game, I expect it to tell me that it wants to use the registry (under it's name only), read/write the hard disk (under it's directory and user/saves) and the Network.
If I install word and it tells me it want's to use the network, I expect I'd be able to uncheck that selection and word would function but it would be completely blocked from using the internet at the OS level.
These apps really need to be sandboxed. This generally involves a virtual memory space, but I think Google should be able to pull it off.
In the long run I think Google is headed in the right direction, I'm not sure Apple will be able to keep up in the security arena. Apple is stuck compiling to C which is a little harder to sandbox--Google can manipulate it's code a little better and already has the right idea (if not in the right department yet).
I had a problem where the customer wanted to discover a class-b network in a reasonable amount of time.
Aside from Java's lack of ping causing huge heartaches the limitation was that when using old Java IO it allocated a thread per connection while waiting for a response.
This limited me to 2-4000 outstanding connection attempts at any time. Since most didn't connect, I needed at least 3 retries on each with progressive back-off times--the threads were absolutely the bottleneck.
I reduced the time for this discovery process from days (or the machine just locked up) to 15 minutes. With nio I probably could have reduced it significantly more (although at some point packet collisions would have become problematic).
NIO may not be defective, it just may be solving a problem you haven't conceived of.
I can't tell what's a troll and what's not these days.
Are you talking about how Apple should have been more creative and not stolen the trademark from Apple records (by first swearing not to enter the music industry and then entering the industry)? or about iPood, something fairly creative and COMPLETELY outside the iPod's industry?
The problem that you seem to be missing is that morals are subjective. Your morals may not apply to me. For instance, if I feel it is morally wrong for you to discuss football because I feel that football and it's "Us vs them" mentality has destroyed American politics, do I have the right to find you and stop you (or punish you) for violating my morals?
The fact that everyone doesn't automatically recognize this fact instantly is what scares the GP (and me).
In fact, I'm reluctant to hit submit because it's hard to believe it's not a troll, but it was written with a sincere sounding naivety so I'll give it a go:)
Actually, a good compromise might be instead of "Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" (Which would break nearly every password field in the world), use the nearly as secure "PEmfarWD". You probably have to throw in a number to make some of the stupider password validators happy, but that should be just as easy to remember, and nearly as hard to crack (The reduced length hurts a little, but 8 completely random letters is nearly impossible unless you can iterate over them progmatically.
If you want it to be more secure, come up with a longer phrase. Include numbers...
ETomwhE9b!
Every Tree outside my window has Exactly 9 branches!
Pirates generally only steal if the cost + inconvenience of buying beats the inconvenience of stealing.
I buy a lot more game on Steam because I don't have to deal with the DAMN CDs. If manufactures would sell a good game for $15 and not require the CD to be in the drive, I'd have been buying them all along instead of piarating them (I haven't pirated for years now, I just gave up on computer games.) I buy them on my iPhone all the time though.
If someone finds the work of finding the ripped game, risking the viruses and not having the updates worth more than the $10 to download it on steam, I say let them have it--I'd encourage them to steal it rather than go without--it would probably STILL increase profits in the long run (exposure to friends, playing as a group and the guy will probably purchase it when he has the money).
In the case of newspaper article comments I'm not sure a real name is a bad idea.
I've seen (and left) a few in a local paper that were terribly insensitive--not always wrong, exactly, but when your grandma drives into a car and everyone is killed--the local paper, read by the family, might not be the best place to debate the merits of/problems associated with DWO.
I've seen articles about parental negligence, a 20 year old drowning because he didn't wear his life jacket, etc. with some very insensitive finger pointing.
I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).
So having a real name associated won't (and shouldn't) stop people from posting their opinions, but it might help them remember that they are communicating with real human beings with feelings and not throwing a comment into some abstract internet debate.
Kids will pretty much live up to what you expect of them--many do pretty impressive things before 15--possibly more than most of us will do in a liftime, and can be quite contemplative and thoughtful even at 8.
Of course, if you expect your 8 year old to sit in the corner staring at a bug, you're quite likely to get just that.
Boycotts don't work when the percentage of the "Purchasing" population that cares significantly outweighs the percentage that cares. No matter how hard you protest, you will never get to every idiot out there.
I think it would be interesting to create a 401K/IRA fund where tech workers can invest into the fund, the fund buys up significant percentage of the stock in a given company, changes it's policies and then backs down slowly to attack another company.
As a group, the investors could target specific problem companies to go after and vote for policies they want implemented. If their policies are workable, they may even increase the rate of growth of their investments.
In the same way, employees paid bonuses in stock could pull their stock to enable at least partial control over the company they work for (although it is pretty rare for companies to hand out voting stock to employees, probably for just this reason).
At 30mph someone could travel the 2 miles between his bus-stop and office in an amount of time that makes it not double his commute time--and get additional exercise, whereas that may take a prohibitive amount of time if he has to walk.
My commute turns from 25 minutes by car to 55 by MAX light rail--a large part of the difference is walking the 1/2 mile between the max station and my destination 4 times a day.
When I ride my bike it's much faster, but I don't want to deal with the extra mess when it's raining and walking with an umbrella is too slow, so I drive at least 1/3 of the year. I'd enjoy walking/rideing more, but there are limits to how much time/mess I'll commit to it.
Remove the financial incentive by declaring that becoming energy independent is a good idea anyway, and that using "Limited" resources such as coal and oil, at the very least, is taking it from our children and should be minimized wherever possible. Also, point out that developing new energy sources such as solar and wind will create many more jobs than cutting back on limited resources will cost.
We could even decide that the jobs related to the limited resources ARE going away regardless, it's just a matter of time (by definition) and that we can either slowly ween the work force off now or face (at some point in the future) having all those jobs forcefully terminate at the same time (Our children will be jobless instead of us).
Oh, finally, is there really something wrong with leaving a decent amount of oil in the earth just in case we find something amazingly useful for it--something more important than driving an SUV 3 blocks to the store?
Now, once you've based your politics on this very logical approach, how many arguments against global warming go away simply because there isn't any financial reason to keep the argument in the news?
I'm not saying it will change everyones mind at once, but there is no doubt in my mind that within 5 years there would be no public debate on the subject whatsoever.
3G is about the biggest battery hog you'll get. Disable it and run on edge for a few days to compare (You'll also get better general reception and no dropped calls). If I had to upgrade my first-gen iPhone I'm pretty sure I'd disable 3G except when I was doing large data transfers (which I wouldn't do because of the new metered rates)
A classic case of Good vs Evil (albeit evil dressed in a white suit).
The funny thing is that although most everyone will agree with the above statement, you will probably get a 50/50 split as to which is good and which is evil.
if he went back to his original format. On Sunday night I used to listen from 6 to 10 on KMET.
Back then he wouldn't just play wacky crap--at the time he claimed to have the largest music collection in the world and would play cuts from the 1920's, old jazz, and various bizarre stuff. I remember "My big 10 inch" long before Steven Tyler recorded it.
It also wasn't the same stuff over and over. The top 20 (I think it was 20 or 25 at the time, or was it always top 10?) rotated frequently and once a song got into the top n rotation he would stop playing it on the show to make room for other stuff.
There was a lot of exposure to songs from the 50s and 60s too, stuff that got airplay and was funny but was a little before my time.
When he started putting it in the 1-2 hour format it became shite--he cut out everything that was good and played the same "Funny 5" over and over again.
If he went back to the longer format and started rotating in some variety I'd totally give it another try... Perhaps reducing costs by doing it over the web will allow him to do just that.
Keeping people uninformed is generally bad. If you teach EXACTLY how silly ID is and how to think critically by trying to support/disprove ID in class it could be quite the inoculation for a generation of kids.
You could pretty easily implement a democracy inside a republic like the US. Simply start a party where each representative is bound to place every decision he encounters onto a public discussion board--and is required to vote with the majority.
If the board involved discussions like those at slashdot, the process would involve many more voters and ensure that they were more educated--perhaps even improving on a pure democracy by allowing people to vote on individual arguments and not simply the end result--this would record the true meaning behind election results for future refinement.
It would also be reasonable to require members of this party to install a microphone and camera in their office with a 24 hour broadcast.
Yeah, it would have to be iterative--like anything else it would have dozens of bugs and exploits to work out, but in the long run I think it could be made to work--reducing corruption and external financial influences by corporations and lobbyists to almost nill, and wouldn't require a single change to our existing laws.
I was thinking the same thing. The fact that you are beeping something out is just as bad as not beeping it out.
That said, I don't find people saying naughty words to be a problem or offensive in any way, I kind of appreciate it at times.
But if you are bothered by "fuck you", you should be just as bothered by "F*** you".
Re:My review--it hasn't improved
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
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· Score: 1
I'm a 20 year programmer, I've worked on it just about daily in C, C++, Java and a few others. I find that if I'm typing at my limit then I'm not thinking enough and probably messing something up and putting out WAY too much code for others to maintain.
I spend more time reducing the amount of code "Faster" typests put out.
I do know programmers who use vi and have used Eclipse as well. They generally call it a wash--although I did have one guy say something that kind of made sense--he had gotten so used to the way eclipse code-completes and brings up documentation mid-line at a keystroke that he had forgotten how to code without it, so he uses vi to force him to work harder and remember all that stuff. That sort of made sense to me I guess, although I'd just install eclipse myself.
If you were to make the climate inhospitable enough and reduce the population by 99.99999% or so, it would be nearly impossible to recover. You could never again sustain large populations and the lack of genetic diversity (and food diversity) with the restricted population size would probably end it within a few thousand years with no hope of creating a population large enough to do anything about it either through terraforming or space exploration.
And I really don't think we're that far from such a shift. Imagine two large mountains with a slight valley between them and a ball rolling back and forth between the peaks. That ball is our ecology rolling back and forth between ice age and arid--in general it wants to self-correct back to the middle, but if you happen to crest a peak and it heads down the other side, it's not coming back--we're venus or mars in no time (say a few thousand years max)
Re:The problem is that iPad is not a computer
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 1
Legally a DS cannot be programmed by a user. Legally an iPad cannot be programmed by a user.
I've seen a couple routers that legally allow a general purpose Linux OS to be loaded and any program to be run.
My argument isn't about how the device CAN be used, it's how it's allowed to be used, what it's intended to do.
All of these things are intended as appliances. A few routers and (up until recently) the PS/3 are the appliances I know of that are allowed to also be general purpose computers--I know there are others but the DS and iPad are certainly not in that category.
Solar has a SERIOUS problem that makes it completely resistant to corporate investment... It's that it is virtually impossible to monopolize the market.
What would you invest in if you were a corporation only interested in your own profits, solar panels that everyone could buy once and put on their roofs for 10 years or a nuclear reactor where you can sell electricity every day of the year at an ever increasing cost? If you picked solar, you've just been fired by the shareholders!
Although solar is picking up steams, the steps are slower. there is investment in research, research, experimentation, revision, testing, production, mass production--all of which are required to reach "affordable product" (Pulled that out of the air, but I hope you get what I mean)
Anyway, when you have someone funding that entire cycle at all stages, it moves orders of magnitude faster.
Actually a corporation might even be better off manipulating the darker/less public parts of a government to hamper solar production--not that anyone would do such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you were serious because I'm going to spend a bit of time giving you a serious answer.
Telcom Network management is a very vertical platform. We have cross-platform development issues, need to interact with many databases and needed a very strong client/server system. We bought a system from Dorado Software that did a lot of the base network management stuff (mapping, discovery, ability to add configuration, etc). We also leveraged a lot of the messaging, client/server and failover capabilities of J2EE.
This is a pretty damn hard problem space. On top of this large platform that contacted/interacted with/managed many MANY devices, you needed customers to be able to interface to their own specific devices using their devices' own little invented language which is often some off-flavor of SNMP or CMIP--for many devices you just had to programatically telnet/http to the device and interact with it as though you were a user.) We're talking many million dollar devices that take up a room and don't get updated all that often or devices where you have many million deployed... You don't change them, you learn to speak their language instead)
So as an end customer (say a large telephone company) you might have this Mangement platform from some vendor managing millions of dollars worth of room-sized T1/T2/T3/OC3 switches and terminators. It may also manage end-customer equipment like high-end routers, switches, DSUs, etc. You could even want to go down to the level of managing PCs or cable set-top boxes (imagine how many of those are hooked up to one head-end).
Now, each of those have software written by their vendor to integrate their hardware into Dorado's platform--either that or the customer has to write that software or contract it out.
Java was a real boon to this industry--When Java became popular the C stuff (which it all was up until then) pretty much VANISHED. The speed of development, vastly more controllable codebase, easier integration and ability to remove windows from the equation--Windows wasn't considered a professional platform by the Bells for a LONG time and they are slow to integrate changes. They still prefer Unix (not even Linux) for many deployments.
Java Is pretty much a perfect solution for this space. It let me scan a sparse class B network space in 15 minutes! I challenge you to do significantly better in another language. There is nothing wrong at all with the choice of language, Even with the old IO libraries I was able to singlehandedly replace the ping library with my fast one in a weekend including client/server integration relaying results, scheduling and database updates. I couldn't have done it in a month using C even with a small team, and few dynamic languages would have been quick enough.
In fact, I was in Network Management for 20+ years and from the time they moved from c to Java, things just took off. Tools started to be reusable, you could buy stuff "off the shelf" that EVERYONE previously had to spend years creating themselves, developers were available and pretty easy to find, the J2EE platform contained a bunch of powerful functionality for free, the list goes on.
Yes, but we live in a world where we have certain price/hardware/testing/platform constraints. Java was by far better than any other solution I've seen--There is an established base of developers, there are existing network management platforms. I can't even imagine starting over from scratch on propitiatory hardware and a language we had to learn from scratch, it would have made every project I've ever been on completely fail.
Not that it's not true in theory, if your theory ignores 100x longer delivery dates (no exaggeration) and 50x "other" cost overruns (Possible exaggeration, maybe not)
Okay, so the iPhone vetting process sucks and the Android is to easy to install malware.
I've noticed that with chrome, each extension I install asks for permission to use a specific list of services. I'm assuming that if they try to use a service that they haven't asked to use, they will be denied.
I'd really like this to be THE universal security measure. When I install a game, I expect it to tell me that it wants to use the registry (under it's name only), read/write the hard disk (under it's directory and user/saves) and the Network.
If I install word and it tells me it want's to use the network, I expect I'd be able to uncheck that selection and word would function but it would be completely blocked from using the internet at the OS level.
These apps really need to be sandboxed. This generally involves a virtual memory space, but I think Google should be able to pull it off.
In the long run I think Google is headed in the right direction, I'm not sure Apple will be able to keep up in the security arena. Apple is stuck compiling to C which is a little harder to sandbox--Google can manipulate it's code a little better and already has the right idea (if not in the right department yet).
I had a problem where the customer wanted to discover a class-b network in a reasonable amount of time.
Aside from Java's lack of ping causing huge heartaches the limitation was that when using old Java IO it allocated a thread per connection while waiting for a response.
This limited me to 2-4000 outstanding connection attempts at any time. Since most didn't connect, I needed at least 3 retries on each with progressive back-off times--the threads were absolutely the bottleneck.
I reduced the time for this discovery process from days (or the machine just locked up) to 15 minutes. With nio I probably could have reduced it significantly more (although at some point packet collisions would have become problematic).
NIO may not be defective, it just may be solving a problem you haven't conceived of.
I can't tell what's a troll and what's not these days.
Are you talking about how Apple should have been more creative and not stolen the trademark from Apple records (by first swearing not to enter the music industry and then entering the industry)? or about iPood, something fairly creative and COMPLETELY outside the iPod's industry?
The problem that you seem to be missing is that morals are subjective. Your morals may not apply to me. For instance, if I feel it is morally wrong for you to discuss football because I feel that football and it's "Us vs them" mentality has destroyed American politics, do I have the right to find you and stop you (or punish you) for violating my morals?
The fact that everyone doesn't automatically recognize this fact instantly is what scares the GP (and me).
In fact, I'm reluctant to hit submit because it's hard to believe it's not a troll, but it was written with a sincere sounding naivety so I'll give it a go :)
Actually, a good compromise might be instead of "Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" (Which would break nearly every password field in the world), use the nearly as secure "PEmfarWD". You probably have to throw in a number to make some of the stupider password validators happy, but that should be just as easy to remember, and nearly as hard to crack (The reduced length hurts a little, but 8 completely random letters is nearly impossible unless you can iterate over them progmatically.
If you want it to be more secure, come up with a longer phrase. Include numbers...
ETomwhE9b!
Every Tree outside my window has Exactly 9 branches!
Pirates generally only steal if the cost + inconvenience of buying beats the inconvenience of stealing.
I buy a lot more game on Steam because I don't have to deal with the DAMN CDs. If manufactures would sell a good game for $15 and not require the CD to be in the drive, I'd have been buying them all along instead of piarating them (I haven't pirated for years now, I just gave up on computer games.) I buy them on my iPhone all the time though.
If someone finds the work of finding the ripped game, risking the viruses and not having the updates worth more than the $10 to download it on steam, I say let them have it--I'd encourage them to steal it rather than go without--it would probably STILL increase profits in the long run (exposure to friends, playing as a group and the guy will probably purchase it when he has the money).
In the case of newspaper article comments I'm not sure a real name is a bad idea.
I've seen (and left) a few in a local paper that were terribly insensitive--not always wrong, exactly, but when your grandma drives into a car and everyone is killed--the local paper, read by the family, might not be the best place to debate the merits of/problems associated with DWO.
I've seen articles about parental negligence, a 20 year old drowning because he didn't wear his life jacket, etc. with some very insensitive finger pointing.
I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).
So having a real name associated won't (and shouldn't) stop people from posting their opinions, but it might help them remember that they are communicating with real human beings with feelings and not throwing a comment into some abstract internet debate.
Kids will pretty much live up to what you expect of them--many do pretty impressive things before 15--possibly more than most of us will do in a liftime, and can be quite contemplative and thoughtful even at 8.
Of course, if you expect your 8 year old to sit in the corner staring at a bug, you're quite likely to get just that.
Boycotts don't work when the percentage of the "Purchasing" population that cares significantly outweighs the percentage that cares. No matter how hard you protest, you will never get to every idiot out there.
I think it would be interesting to create a 401K/IRA fund where tech workers can invest into the fund, the fund buys up significant percentage of the stock in a given company, changes it's policies and then backs down slowly to attack another company.
As a group, the investors could target specific problem companies to go after and vote for policies they want implemented. If their policies are workable, they may even increase the rate of growth of their investments.
In the same way, employees paid bonuses in stock could pull their stock to enable at least partial control over the company they work for (although it is pretty rare for companies to hand out voting stock to employees, probably for just this reason).
Your post doesn't seem very well thought out.
At 30mph someone could travel the 2 miles between his bus-stop and office in an amount of time that makes it not double his commute time--and get additional exercise, whereas that may take a prohibitive amount of time if he has to walk.
My commute turns from 25 minutes by car to 55 by MAX light rail--a large part of the difference is walking the 1/2 mile between the max station and my destination 4 times a day.
When I ride my bike it's much faster, but I don't want to deal with the extra mess when it's raining and walking with an umbrella is too slow, so I drive at least 1/3 of the year. I'd enjoy walking/rideing more, but there are limits to how much time/mess I'll commit to it.
How would a moving sidewalk hurt?
Remove the financial incentive by declaring that becoming energy independent is a good idea anyway, and that using "Limited" resources such as coal and oil, at the very least, is taking it from our children and should be minimized wherever possible. Also, point out that developing new energy sources such as solar and wind will create many more jobs than cutting back on limited resources will cost.
We could even decide that the jobs related to the limited resources ARE going away regardless, it's just a matter of time (by definition) and that we can either slowly ween the work force off now or face (at some point in the future) having all those jobs forcefully terminate at the same time (Our children will be jobless instead of us).
Oh, finally, is there really something wrong with leaving a decent amount of oil in the earth just in case we find something amazingly useful for it--something more important than driving an SUV 3 blocks to the store?
Now, once you've based your politics on this very logical approach, how many arguments against global warming go away simply because there isn't any financial reason to keep the argument in the news?
I'm not saying it will change everyones mind at once, but there is no doubt in my mind that within 5 years there would be no public debate on the subject whatsoever.
The title sounded to me like the pirating sites (from Russia) were physically threatening the RIAA executives or something.
Oh well, maybe in time...
3G is about the biggest battery hog you'll get. Disable it and run on edge for a few days to compare (You'll also get better general reception and no dropped calls). If I had to upgrade my first-gen iPhone I'm pretty sure I'd disable 3G except when I was doing large data transfers (which I wouldn't do because of the new metered rates)
Hmph, time to start looking into Android.
A classic case of Good vs Evil (albeit evil dressed in a white suit).
The funny thing is that although most everyone will agree with the above statement, you will probably get a 50/50 split as to which is good and which is evil.
if he went back to his original format. On Sunday night I used to listen from 6 to 10 on KMET.
Back then he wouldn't just play wacky crap--at the time he claimed to have the largest music collection in the world and would play cuts from the 1920's, old jazz, and various bizarre stuff. I remember "My big 10 inch" long before Steven Tyler recorded it.
It also wasn't the same stuff over and over. The top 20 (I think it was 20 or 25 at the time, or was it always top 10?) rotated frequently and once a song got into the top n rotation he would stop playing it on the show to make room for other stuff.
There was a lot of exposure to songs from the 50s and 60s too, stuff that got airplay and was funny but was a little before my time.
When he started putting it in the 1-2 hour format it became shite--he cut out everything that was good and played the same "Funny 5" over and over again.
If he went back to the longer format and started rotating in some variety I'd totally give it another try... Perhaps reducing costs by doing it over the web will allow him to do just that.
Keeping people uninformed is generally bad. If you teach EXACTLY how silly ID is and how to think critically by trying to support/disprove ID in class it could be quite the inoculation for a generation of kids.
If they would just wait for the free market to kick in, this would be solved once and for all!
You could pretty easily implement a democracy inside a republic like the US. Simply start a party where each representative is bound to place every decision he encounters onto a public discussion board--and is required to vote with the majority.
If the board involved discussions like those at slashdot, the process would involve many more voters and ensure that they were more educated--perhaps even improving on a pure democracy by allowing people to vote on individual arguments and not simply the end result--this would record the true meaning behind election results for future refinement.
It would also be reasonable to require members of this party to install a microphone and camera in their office with a 24 hour broadcast.
Yeah, it would have to be iterative--like anything else it would have dozens of bugs and exploits to work out, but in the long run I think it could be made to work--reducing corruption and external financial influences by corporations and lobbyists to almost nill, and wouldn't require a single change to our existing laws.
I was thinking the same thing. The fact that you are beeping something out is just as bad as not beeping it out.
That said, I don't find people saying naughty words to be a problem or offensive in any way, I kind of appreciate it at times.
But if you are bothered by "fuck you", you should be just as bothered by "F*** you".
I'm a 20 year programmer, I've worked on it just about daily in C, C++, Java and a few others. I find that if I'm typing at my limit then I'm not thinking enough and probably messing something up and putting out WAY too much code for others to maintain.
I spend more time reducing the amount of code "Faster" typests put out.
I do know programmers who use vi and have used Eclipse as well. They generally call it a wash--although I did have one guy say something that kind of made sense--he had gotten so used to the way eclipse code-completes and brings up documentation mid-line at a keystroke that he had forgotten how to code without it, so he uses vi to force him to work harder and remember all that stuff. That sort of made sense to me I guess, although I'd just install eclipse myself.
Actually, I'd disagree.
If you were to make the climate inhospitable enough and reduce the population by 99.99999% or so, it would be nearly impossible to recover. You could never again sustain large populations and the lack of genetic diversity (and food diversity) with the restricted population size would probably end it within a few thousand years with no hope of creating a population large enough to do anything about it either through terraforming or space exploration.
And I really don't think we're that far from such a shift. Imagine two large mountains with a slight valley between them and a ball rolling back and forth between the peaks. That ball is our ecology rolling back and forth between ice age and arid--in general it wants to self-correct back to the middle, but if you happen to crest a peak and it heads down the other side, it's not coming back--we're venus or mars in no time (say a few thousand years max)
Legally a DS cannot be programmed by a user.
Legally an iPad cannot be programmed by a user.
I've seen a couple routers that legally allow a general purpose Linux OS to be loaded and any program to be run.
My argument isn't about how the device CAN be used, it's how it's allowed to be used, what it's intended to do.
All of these things are intended as appliances. A few routers and (up until recently) the PS/3 are the appliances I know of that are allowed to also be general purpose computers--I know there are others but the DS and iPad are certainly not in that category.
Solar has a SERIOUS problem that makes it completely resistant to corporate investment... It's that it is virtually impossible to monopolize the market.
What would you invest in if you were a corporation only interested in your own profits, solar panels that everyone could buy once and put on their roofs for 10 years or a nuclear reactor where you can sell electricity every day of the year at an ever increasing cost? If you picked solar, you've just been fired by the shareholders!
Although solar is picking up steams, the steps are slower. there is investment in research, research, experimentation, revision, testing, production, mass production--all of which are required to reach "affordable product" (Pulled that out of the air, but I hope you get what I mean)
Anyway, when you have someone funding that entire cycle at all stages, it moves orders of magnitude faster.
Actually a corporation might even be better off manipulating the darker/less public parts of a government to hamper solar production--not that anyone would do such a thing.