 Card-carrying pedestrian. Is there any irony involved in complaining about the lack of sidewalks at the Department of Motor Vehicles office? By radar@poboxes.com.
Cut off. My network port was cut off becasue IT claims I have the Nachi virus on my work-provided laptop. However, every test they publically offers says the machine does not have it, every patch they offer says it's already up to date, and every update says it's already installed.
So, I can't get any mail from them telling me if they've taken care of it, because that requires having the laptop to run Outlook to connect to the exchange server. By radar@poboxes.com.
A completely incorrect position on quantum computing.
I guess I'm not the only person skeptical about quantum computing. The head of Darpa points out that analog computing doesn't scale well, and that's what quantum computers actually are.... [Thin Film Manufacturing: Katherine's Blog]
Just because Robert Leheny says that a quantum computer is an analog computer doesn't mean that it really is. A bold statement like that will require some proof to back it up, which will be all the harder bacause it isn't true.
The article quotes Leheny as saying ""What they do is to set up an equation, and let the quantum devices solve it over time. But that is an analog computer." But that's also an digital computer, so it's pretty much a non-statement. While quantum computing isn't a magic solution to all the worlds problems, it cannot be dismissed with out even examining its solution space. I have no buy-in for quantum computing and I think any application of it is way out there, but that does not mean I can prove that it's useless.
His claims that current fabrication technology is self-assembling are equally silly. Yes they are self-aligning to the tolerances of the process. But with tolerances on the order of the features themselves, you're lucky just to get anything to show up at all.
Dismissing "capable of something approaching human thought" lines aren't interesting any more, so they are left as an exercise for the reader. Here's a hint though: how much do we know about human thought? By radar@poboxes.com.
Why are children being held there in the first place?. From the "Things They Didn't Want You to Know" department:
Guantanamo may free children. The commander of the US Guantanamo military base says moves are being made to free children being held there. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
There are three kids between 13 and 15 being held in the black hole of Gitmo, isolagted from the others. They don't even have lawyers, but hey we've given them games and videos so it's okay.
Obviously it's Tom Ridge's job to make George II look smart by comparison.
By radar@poboxes.com.
Tool using hairless apes. PowerPoint is a tool. Like all tools, it neither makes your craftsmanship good or bad. Rather, it affects the craftsman's efficiency. If what you produced before was crap, PowerPoint will allow you to produce crap in an efficient manner.
PowerPoint is to presenters what the WWW is to authors: it looks like there's more crap because it provides an avenue for people that were so far down the curve that previously they would have had no choice but to give up. That may have been becasue of quality, bu tnot in all cases.
My advisor always ranted about how chalkboards will always be better than slides. In all his years, however, he's never learned that he needs to move out of the way of what he's just written on the board so that the audience can see it.
PowerPoint corrupts. Great Edward Tufte rant about PowerPoint and other slideware, and why we should all avoid it. I did a talk a couple months ago and the conference organizers nearly insisted that I bring a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my speech. I told them that I didn't believe in slides for the kind of talk I was giving, and they responded, "But what will keep the audience from getting bored?" Urr, possibly the words coming out of my mouth?
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
By radar@poboxes.com.
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