Like a cancer, humans have no way of controlling their own reproductive rate, even up to the destruction of their host environment.
Consider the coming destruction a doctors scalpel that may be able to save the planet for the survivors.
And if you look at the inevitability of the whole thing, the faster we bring it on, the quicker it will be over with and the survivors will be able to dig out and start the whole game over with.
Maybe this time if they eliminate religion (Or at least the walking environmental hazard called Christianity) they will have slightly better luck.
NOTHING is secure. Everything on the net lasts forever. It can easily be intercepted, archived and screwed with in a hundred different places, and since it's around so long, eventually someone is going to figure out the encryption.
So if you are worried about your companies cooked books, your mistress and your assanitation plan being discovered--DON'T write Email about them!
Also, by the way, if it's that important: Don't post it in a chat room or BBS, even "Anonymously", don't write or type it anywhere, don't get drunk and brag about it to your co-workers and prey that you don't talk in your sleep.
> If you were in congress and wanted to remain there (like they all do), to whom would you pledge your allegiance?
That's an obvious one, you would serve the contributors! There is a direct relation between how much you spend on a campaign and how many votes you get.
In the past 20 years or so I haven't observed a similar relationship between the issues a candidate believes in and his votes, or anything else.
The parent of your post was talking about corporations. You are talking about small, owner-operated businesses.
HUGE Difference, in fact, completely opposite.
You will find that the cases of loyalty these days exist in only a small and diminishing percentage of businesses due to the growth & mergers of the larger businesses/corporations.
>is it lawful if someone in another nation can steal my work and produce straight copies for $10 each?
Actually, yes. According to the Constitution you have no right to exclusively market your product except what we give you because we think that allowing you this TEMPORARY monopoly may help us in the long run.
Due do bribes by Disney and a couple other evil corporations, these exclusive rights are being abused to the point where they are no longer good for the average Citizen at all, and therefore they should be made illegal (according to the Constitution, anyway)
First of all, who are you trying to help, the well-to-do kids or the poor kids.
If you are in an area where the schools are all full of wealthy kids (central Orange County?) I can't help you much, but if you really want to help out some kids who need it I might have a suggestion...
Gather the computers your company (and those of any others that might like to participate) would be getting rid of and host a class for kids that can't afford their own computer.
Sit with the kids and teach them to pull parts from various computers and put them together to form a computer that they "Hand built".
Finally host light instruction and q&a sessions on installing and using Linux, hooking up to the Internet, etc. (Could you get your company to host a dial up Internet service for temporary use by "Graduates?" of your training course?)
I don't recommend doing this for adults unless you are willing to spend a lot more time and deal with a lot more frustration.
I worked with the housing authority of Portland to provide such a service and it was really rewarding.
What the hell is it about your post that inspires so much bitterness in the replies?? Sheesh. I don't use Ogg much, but crap.
The reason I checked is I was going to say that it was probably tagged as funny because squeezing another protocol into an existing limited space is probably next to impossible due to space constraints.
And if it isn't, saying it isn't like I just did will piss off someone enough that they will go do it just to prove me wrong.
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete
on
Google Suggest
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· Score: 1
And it's still responding instantly! Google is pretty amazing.
What is important is the ability to calculate the next symbol from a limited set of symbols as the code is being generated.
I was thinking along those lines for a development tool for a palm pilot where a list of possible symbols was always presented in a list on the right (preferably one that didn't have to scroll) so you could code an entire program by single-clicks.
This might require restructuring the way variable names and packages work in most languages--at least a little.
Also quite a few programming constructs are difficult to pronounce distinctly (no matter how you abbreviate it, parentheses will get annoying if your language is going to be c or lisp based).
Finally, the ultimate voice interface would be headless, (a watch or something) and it would take a savant to be able to track more than a trivial few lines of code in his head.
Now that I think about it--you might have to create a new language targeted at writing short simple routines.
If I remember correctly, APL can do an awful lot with a very small amount of code, and the code is often considered write-only or throw-away (Very difficult to read).
I'm not saying something based on APL would work, but if I were to define the requirements for a spoken-programming language it would be that it needs to do a lot with a small amount of code and the code could be write-only.
All the examples seem to be cases of a newer idea being overshadowed by old beliefs until the new idea becomes impossible to ignore.
Kinda like global warming.
Also, if you threw out the crackpots and the unsubstantiated claims from any of your examples, the results would seriously skew towards the "true facts".
Kind of like what happened with this report.
Finally, when most of the world was able to ignore the fact that it was round, it probably occurred to people to use words like Consensus to describe the shape. Even though it's scientifically obvious that global warming exists and is caused by humans, there are still people able to deceive themselves--so we use examples like this.
It's strange how some otherwise intelligent people are so adamant about points like this--almost like they have a personal stake in being right. I never got that.
Although your personal environmental practices are admirable, the fact of them does not address the fact that your parent is 100% right.
Whenever a group of Americans get together and talk global issues, there is always a large percentage of them who are in complete denial.
For instance, where 51% of us were doing the denial trick in the last election, the world percentages outside the US were more like 99% clued-in.
We just have to face that we live in the most dangerous, self-deluded country in the history of the world and it's going to take a miracle or a revolution to fix it.
There were aparently 2 really early MUDs. Scepter of Goth was the one I played on. Its lineage died off because they went commercial then the codebase got lost to debtors or something.
The other was "MUD" which I believe evolved into the compuseve thing. I had forgotten that compuserve existed that long ago--I was thinking it was a newer entity like AOL.
Oh, and yes, Gamenet charged, $.10/minute, and I think half of that between 1am and 6am. We figured it was cheaper than a movie, but you don't go to movies 6 hours a night every night.
I compared credit card bills with a friend, we were both in the multi-hundred dollar range (Actually he might have been over a thousand) for one year.
Then when our local site went down, we started looking around for a fix. There was another Gambit Multisystem in San Fransisco. We found one of those phone codes and started calling it.
Eventually we screwed up and got slapped with a pretty annoying phone bill.
Nope, this was a bit older, before the acronym "Mud" or Compuserve was created, Possibly before the IBM PC was created (I used a TRS-80 to connect). I think the internet existed but at the time it was just a rumor about some magical government experement.
It was called "Scepter of Goth" and was only available as part of a dial-in system that also had a chat room and a couple other games including a text version of a FPS. They fit an amazing amount into 640K ram.
I think the whole thing was written in C/Assembly and ran on a PC with an 8-port board and 8 modems. There was one in Orange County, one in SF and one in Canada.
We're talking circa '83-85 if I remember correctly. And yes there were severe penalties for dying. 1 point of CON and 2 levels (if you make your save) or 1/2 of your levels if you don't. If you run out of CON, you're done for--start another character.
Exciting, but I spent a LOT of time regaining lost levels because I refused to play conservatively (where's the rush in that?)
My guess is that the parent of this message hasn't been out of work recently.
In the last few years, it's not even worth trying to get into a company unless you have a CS degree or know someone in the company. Many of those "Or Equivalent Experience" postfixes have vanished in the past few years.
Degrees have become a first-level filter for the hundreds and sometimes thousands of resumes received for each job posting.
As for which college, I've seen cases where the hiring manager automatically preferred applicants from their college, or from ones they perceived as "peers" of their school. I'm sure there are still people like that, but that's hit-and-miss.
I'd guess that if you are looking for work with a smaller company or in some location not known for its computer industry, a state college just MIGHT help more than some large college because of the chance that you would be dealing with an alumni. At least when the interview goes quiet you can have that conversation about how great your college's sports team "the fighting dung beetles" is doing.
I completely agree. I had a financial mishap with play time charges for the first MUDs I played in my youth (One of the very first MUDs that existed--pre WEB, dialup only). Ever since then I absolutely refuse to pay repeated fees to waste my time playing a game.
On the other hand, I have little problem paying one-time purchase fees to waste my time. Bizarre.
You're correct about burning R & D money, but the difference is how the burn is handled.
IBM developed the thinkpad laptop and then management tried to shut the project down. Rumor has it that developers had to go around management directly to the media to get the button mouse to market.
Also, did Xerox make any money at all from Parc??? If not, does that make it a failure?
The ability to conceptualize fractions like 1/3 and 3/4 long-predates the ability to deal with decimals.
The first place that everyone learned fractions was looking at an old analog clock. It transfers to something you can use every day with ease, and moves those concepts into your brain at a very young age.
If you ask your kid what time it will be 33.3333333 minutes after the hour that has two disadvantages.
First of all they are learning decimal not fractions. Fractions aid visualization, decimals don't.
Secondly
Aaw, why am I bothering. You're pretty obviously a decendant of the base-10 tribe and won't get it no matter how long I go on.
As I understand it, there were two competing concepts at the beginning of communications. There were a bunch of not-terribly-smart people who saw that they had ten fingers and decided that was the number to which they would count.
Another group (apparently either much more intelligent or endowed with an extra diget) noticed that 12 was a Very Nice Number. Where 10 is divisible by 1, 2, and 5 (Making those numbers very easy to use) it really had no other easy to use numbers. 12 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, making them all gret number to work with, and 8, 9 and 10 are pretty easy being multiples of some of the good numbers.
Many of the original concepts were founded by the smart people--the clock and spoken word apparently being two of them (ever notice that eleven and twelve use a very different pattern than thirteen through ninteen?)
Anyway, a base 10 clock would be lousy. The quarter hours are gone, the only division is the half hour. You also lose the rarely used ability to divide the hour into thirds easily.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the base 12ers won... I tend to think we'd be way ahead in mathematics because in basic math it would be so much easer to visualize the patters as opposed to route memorization of tables.
I always saw it as Function before Form. As "Does it fufil your needs" first, ask "How will people perceve it" second.
This fits the much more generic case that describes Trophy wives, cars, houses and children.
If you're looking at it in those terms, you can assume that the guy with the overpriced car that hates fat chicks is probably going to buy a computer to show off, whereas the guy with the beat-up Jeep (uh, that's me) is likely to use a computer until it falls apart, then patch it and use it some more.
My SONY VAIO craptop has a broken LCD display and every other key on the top row is broken. Do I throw it out or make it into a headless Linux web server for my RV wireless setup? I'll let you guess.
Couldn't we get him to study the election figures, by county for the last 10 elections and see if he noticed patterns indicating corruption (for instance, if electronic voting has helped any one canidate more than others relative to exit polls)?
He should be able to visualize patterns better than any computer because the program has to be pre-programmed to look for a pattern related to a specific cause, he should see it as easily as we would a peak in a graph.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm not saying down with humans or anything...
Like a cancer, humans have no way of controlling their own reproductive rate, even up to the destruction of their host environment.
Consider the coming destruction a doctors scalpel that may be able to save the planet for the survivors.
And if you look at the inevitability of the whole thing, the faster we bring it on, the quicker it will be over with and the survivors will be able to dig out and start the whole game over with.
Maybe this time if they eliminate religion (Or at least the walking environmental hazard called Christianity) they will have slightly better luck.
Okay, I'll say it. "Down with humans".
Okay, I've been wondering something since this story came out.
I can't hold my laser pointer on a car 2 streets down, how the HELL do you come within hundreds of FEET of a plane, let alone hit the cockpit????
NOTHING is secure. Everything on the net lasts forever. It can easily be intercepted, archived and screwed with in a hundred different places, and since it's around so long, eventually someone is going to figure out the encryption.
So if you are worried about your companies cooked books, your mistress and your assanitation plan being discovered--DON'T write Email about them!
Also, by the way, if it's that important: Don't post it in a chat room or BBS, even "Anonymously", don't write or type it anywhere, don't get drunk and brag about it to your co-workers and prey that you don't talk in your sleep.
> If you were in congress and wanted to remain there (like they all do), to whom would you pledge your allegiance?
That's an obvious one, you would serve the contributors! There is a direct relation between how much you spend on a campaign and how many votes you get.
In the past 20 years or so I haven't observed a similar relationship between the issues a candidate believes in and his votes, or anything else.
It's all money.
Democracy is broken.
The parent of your post was talking about corporations. You are talking about small, owner-operated businesses.
HUGE Difference, in fact, completely opposite.
You will find that the cases of loyalty these days exist in only a small and diminishing percentage of businesses due to the growth & mergers of the larger businesses/corporations.
>is it lawful if someone in another nation can steal my work and produce straight copies for $10 each?
Actually, yes. According to the Constitution you have no right to exclusively market your product except what we give you because we think that allowing you this TEMPORARY monopoly may help us in the long run.
Due do bribes by Disney and a couple other evil corporations, these exclusive rights are being abused to the point where they are no longer good for the average Citizen at all, and therefore they should be made illegal (according to the Constitution, anyway)
I remember that old PVCS POS. It was what we used on windows 3.0 in '91-2 if I remember correctly.
But I was wondering if you had used MKS. Obviously there is no comparision to the old PVCS, but I think it is the worst VCS in common usage.
If I ever want to go find an example of how to make a really bad UI, I can go to MKS.
First of all, who are you trying to help, the well-to-do kids or the poor kids.
If you are in an area where the schools are all full of wealthy kids (central Orange County?) I can't help you much, but if you really want to help out some kids who need it I might have a suggestion...
Gather the computers your company (and those of any others that might like to participate) would be getting rid of and host a class for kids that can't afford their own computer.
Sit with the kids and teach them to pull parts from various computers and put them together to form a computer that they "Hand built".
Finally host light instruction and q&a sessions on installing and using Linux, hooking up to the Internet, etc. (Could you get your company to host a dial up Internet service for temporary use by "Graduates?" of your training course?)
I don't recommend doing this for adults unless you are willing to spend a lot more time and deal with a lot more frustration.
I worked with the housing authority of Portland to provide such a service and it was really rewarding.
What the hell is it about your post that inspires so much bitterness in the replies?? Sheesh. I don't use Ogg much, but crap.
The reason I checked is I was going to say that it was probably tagged as funny because squeezing another protocol into an existing limited space is probably next to impossible due to space constraints.
And if it isn't, saying it isn't like I just did will piss off someone enough that they will go do it just to prove me wrong.
And it's still responding instantly! Google is pretty amazing.
What is important is the ability to calculate the next symbol from a limited set of symbols as the code is being generated.
I was thinking along those lines for a development tool for a palm pilot where a list of possible symbols was always presented in a list on the right (preferably one that didn't have to scroll) so you could code an entire program by single-clicks.
This might require restructuring the way variable names and packages work in most languages--at least a little.
Also quite a few programming constructs are difficult to pronounce distinctly (no matter how you abbreviate it, parentheses will get annoying if your language is going to be c or lisp based).
Finally, the ultimate voice interface would be headless, (a watch or something) and it would take a savant to be able to track more than a trivial few lines of code in his head.
Now that I think about it--you might have to create a new language targeted at writing short simple routines.
If I remember correctly, APL can do an awful lot with a very small amount of code, and the code is often considered write-only or throw-away (Very difficult to read).
I'm not saying something based on APL would work, but if I were to define the requirements for a spoken-programming language it would be that it needs to do a lot with a small amount of code and the code could be write-only.
All the examples seem to be cases of a newer idea being overshadowed by old beliefs until the new idea becomes impossible to ignore.
Kinda like global warming.
Also, if you threw out the crackpots and the unsubstantiated claims from any of your examples, the results would seriously skew towards the "true facts".
Kind of like what happened with this report.
Finally, when most of the world was able to ignore the fact that it was round, it probably occurred to people to use words like Consensus to describe the shape. Even though it's scientifically obvious that global warming exists and is caused by humans, there are still people able to deceive themselves--so we use examples like this.
It's strange how some otherwise intelligent people are so adamant about points like this--almost like they have a personal stake in being right. I never got that.
Thank you for theat amazing line, mind if I make it my new sig?
Although your personal environmental practices are admirable, the fact of them does not address the fact that your parent is 100% right.
Whenever a group of Americans get together and talk global issues, there is always a large percentage of them who are in complete denial.
For instance, where 51% of us were doing the denial trick in the last election, the world percentages outside the US were more like 99% clued-in.
We just have to face that we live in the most dangerous, self-deluded country in the history of the world and it's going to take a miracle or a revolution to fix it.
Found an article that lists both of them I think: http://www.linnaean.org/~lpb/muddex/mud-answers3.h tml.
There were aparently 2 really early MUDs. Scepter of Goth was the one I played on. Its lineage died off because they went commercial then the codebase got lost to debtors or something.
The other was "MUD" which I believe evolved into the compuseve thing. I had forgotten that compuserve existed that long ago--I was thinking it was a newer entity like AOL.
Oh, and yes, Gamenet charged, $.10/minute, and I think half of that between 1am and 6am. We figured it was cheaper than a movie, but you don't go to movies 6 hours a night every night.
I compared credit card bills with a friend, we were both in the multi-hundred dollar range (Actually he might have been over a thousand) for one year.
Then when our local site went down, we started looking around for a fix. There was another Gambit Multisystem in San Fransisco. We found one of those phone codes and started calling it.
Eventually we screwed up and got slapped with a pretty annoying phone bill.
Nope, this was a bit older, before the acronym "Mud" or Compuserve was created, Possibly before the IBM PC was created (I used a TRS-80 to connect). I think the internet existed but at the time it was just a rumor about some magical government experement.
It was called "Scepter of Goth" and was only available as part of a dial-in system that also had a chat room and a couple other games including a text version of a FPS. They fit an amazing amount into 640K ram.
I think the whole thing was written in C/Assembly and ran on a PC with an 8-port board and 8 modems. There was one in Orange County, one in SF and one in Canada.
We're talking circa '83-85 if I remember correctly. And yes there were severe penalties for dying. 1 point of CON and 2 levels (if you make your save) or 1/2 of your levels if you don't. If you run out of CON, you're done for--start another character.
Exciting, but I spent a LOT of time regaining lost levels because I refused to play conservatively (where's the rush in that?)
My guess is that the parent of this message hasn't been out of work recently.
In the last few years, it's not even worth trying to get into a company unless you have a CS degree or know someone in the company. Many of those "Or Equivalent Experience" postfixes have vanished in the past few years.
Degrees have become a first-level filter for the hundreds and sometimes thousands of resumes received for each job posting.
As for which college, I've seen cases where the hiring manager automatically preferred applicants from their college, or from ones they perceived as "peers" of their school. I'm sure there are still people like that, but that's hit-and-miss.
I'd guess that if you are looking for work with a smaller company or in some location not known for its computer industry, a state college just MIGHT help more than some large college because of the chance that you would be dealing with an alumni. At least when the interview goes quiet you can have that conversation about how great your college's sports team "the fighting dung beetles" is doing.
I completely agree. I had a financial mishap with play time charges for the first MUDs I played in my youth (One of the very first MUDs that existed--pre WEB, dialup only). Ever since then I absolutely refuse to pay repeated fees to waste my time playing a game.
On the other hand, I have little problem paying one-time purchase fees to waste my time. Bizarre.
You're correct about burning R & D money, but the difference is how the burn is handled.
IBM developed the thinkpad laptop and then management tried to shut the project down. Rumor has it that developers had to go around management directly to the media to get the button mouse to market.
Also, did Xerox make any money at all from Parc??? If not, does that make it a failure?
Pointlessly abusive, eh?
The ability to conceptualize fractions like 1/3 and 3/4 long-predates the ability to deal with decimals.
The first place that everyone learned fractions was looking at an old analog clock. It transfers to something you can use every day with ease, and moves those concepts into your brain at a very young age.
If you ask your kid what time it will be 33.3333333 minutes after the hour that has two disadvantages.
First of all they are learning decimal not fractions. Fractions aid visualization, decimals don't.
Secondly
Aaw, why am I bothering. You're pretty obviously a decendant of the base-10 tribe and won't get it no matter how long I go on.
The real example of what not to do is sell a company with such a team--you're doomed to lose.
Espically to a group typically known as "Assholes Online". Wouldn't you think that was doomed from conception?
Damn good rant, even if it is a little o/t, and me without mod points--crying shame.
As I understand it, there were two competing concepts at the beginning of communications. There were a bunch of not-terribly-smart people who saw that they had ten fingers and decided that was the number to which they would count.
Another group (apparently either much more intelligent or endowed with an extra diget) noticed that 12 was a Very Nice Number. Where 10 is divisible by 1, 2, and 5 (Making those numbers very easy to use) it really had no other easy to use numbers. 12 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, making them all gret number to work with, and 8, 9 and 10 are pretty easy being multiples of some of the good numbers.
Many of the original concepts were founded by the smart people--the clock and spoken word apparently being two of them (ever notice that eleven and twelve use a very different pattern than thirteen through ninteen?)
Anyway, a base 10 clock would be lousy. The quarter hours are gone, the only division is the half hour. You also lose the rarely used ability to divide the hour into thirds easily.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the base 12ers won... I tend to think we'd be way ahead in mathematics because in basic math it would be so much easer to visualize the patters as opposed to route memorization of tables.
I always saw it as Function before Form. As "Does it fufil your needs" first, ask "How will people perceve it" second.
This fits the much more generic case that describes Trophy wives, cars, houses and children.
If you're looking at it in those terms, you can assume that the guy with the overpriced car that hates fat chicks is probably going to buy a computer to show off, whereas the guy with the beat-up Jeep (uh, that's me) is likely to use a computer until it falls apart, then patch it and use it some more.
My SONY VAIO craptop has a broken LCD display and every other key on the top row is broken. Do I throw it out or make it into a headless Linux web server for my RV wireless setup? I'll let you guess.
Couldn't we get him to study the election figures, by county for the last 10 elections and see if he noticed patterns indicating corruption (for instance, if electronic voting has helped any one canidate more than others relative to exit polls)?
He should be able to visualize patterns better than any computer because the program has to be pre-programmed to look for a pattern related to a specific cause, he should see it as easily as we would a peak in a graph.