Congratulations on the Lil' OH, Jon! And best of luck to your friends and relatives stationed in Bushmistakistan.

As for Revil...you either put in on YouTube, or it never happened.

Congratulations Jon-OH! That's wonderful news! And like everyone else said, I hope your brother and friend make it through their tour in Iraq unscathed.

2009 is looking to be a weird year for me, since I'll literally be spending the first half of it away from home. I won't get back from Basic Training and Tech School until July. I'll miss my daughter's first birthday, my birthday, Valentine's Day, Easter and the 4th of July. Half a year is almost too long of a time to comprehend. But at least I'm not being sent into a war zone; those guys have it much worse and I feel for them.

tech school....

Air Force then?

s'matter? Didn't want to join the military

Yeah, I prefer to ride it out in the Chair Force.

The Reserves, even.

As a part-time Reservist.


...it hardly seems worth it to have to shave my goatee off, doesn't it?

I feel your pain KJB. I've gotta shave the beard today before I head off to some job interviews this week. It will be missed.

When Face = Shaven, Don't Forget A Scarf.

I had to shave just before going back to work as I usually let it grow when I'm off. Mainly because I can't be bothered. What it made me realise is that I need an electric shaver as my shoddy razor is okay for a few days growth but anything after that and you feel every hair being plucked from your face.

Not pleasant. I can't even soothe it afterwards as my after-shave seems to have been emptied.

Ah, an electric shaver. I think with some of the cash I got for X-mas, I'm gonna pick up an Electric Razor kit. I'm tired of spending a half hour or more clipping and then shaving off the beard. And if I get a job where I have to be clean shaven, I'll need an electric razor to make daily shaving a little less of a chore.

I want some of that techology they use to stop peoples faces from growing hair. You know the thing they use for sex change ops. Only I'm a little worried they'd forget how far they were going and get carried away.

I sometimes wonder if Nair would work on my face. Or that hot wax women use on their bikini areas.

Hm, hot wax over shaving? I don't know which I'd enjoy less.




Would you like the hormones that go with it? On second thought, you probably don't need 'em.

Do not try the Nair, that stuff burns. My best friend tried it on his back once and could only get one wipe before he had to stop. The hot wax would prolly just be a matter of temp and pain tolerance.

Hot....Wax....HURTS!!! You remember the night Trebor.

*The Ridge starts hitting his head against a wall.

MUST DESTROY MENTAL IMAGE!!!

It is truly a strange day when Ridge tries to get rid of horrible mental images, instead of suppling them.

It's been a long day. Not quite as hectic or weird as I'm used to. Shame...

Yeah, that was also you and Derek, and you're a couple of big babies.

My Uncle Derek was there? ARGGH!!!!!

*The Ridge writes 'Hayden Penetierre sux' across his forehead and waits for the spearing.

*Aaronc3477 spears Ridge through a concrete wall

Far be it from me to disappoint.


*Aaronc3477 scrubs the letters from Ridge's forehead and kicks him in the junk.

Man, Ridge just got...

Yay! I feel much better. Now I'm not quite sure what it was all about but I think I got the result I wanted. Phew sure is a crazy 1999 so far huh guys?

Uhm, I think you're about ten years. . .

Ya know what, yeah '99's been a blast so far.

*GelfOgre sees something on the ground, picks it up and hands it to Ridge


Umm... I think you dropped this... a spleen isn't it?

Hey everybody, look! Up in the sky, it's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a new ticker! Oooooooo.

*The Ridge grabs Twinky and throws him into a meatgrinder. As he catches the heart and stuffs it back into his chest.

DIBS!!!! I called it you all heard.

Happy New Years you enemies of that is pure and good. I'd actually mean the sentiment behind that greeting if as a whole I didn't find your antics filthy and disgusting. It's a good thing I'm here sometimes to help keep you dashing young men in line.

Why without me you'd run amok. AMOK I TELL YOU!!!

*Captain Family Values throws his shield, bouncing it off Trebor's head and knocking him into the elevator shaft as a result.

Nice aim you got there, Cap.

*KilljoyBob throws a cement filled Fruit Pie, ricocheting it off CFV's head and hitting Trebor's head as he tries to climb out of the Elevator Shaft, sending him falling again.

But mine's better.

Owww that hurt. You shall see the error of your ways maybe not today but that day is coming soon. Now if you'll excuse me I have things to do...

*Captain Family Values passes out.

*Trebor grabs ahold of CFV's leg as he pulls himself out of the elevator shaft and throws CFV down there.

Ow, now my head's gonna be lumpier for awhile.

At least we know it can't get any uglier.

*Soylent Daveage hefts a rather large and knobbly club marked "The Ugly Stick"

Oh, I dunno... Give me a few minutes...

Hit me next I've got a hot date later and I want to get rid of her before the millennium.

So, I was sitting here thinking about computers and I thought back to my first computer. It was a Commodore 64. So I looked it up on wikipedia. 1.02 MHz processor. 64 kb ram. No HD. 5 1/4 drive. I eventually bought a tape drive and a 1200 baud modem.

Here's the kicker: I looked all that information on my iTouch.
533 MHz
128 MB DRAM
16 GB HD
Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g)

Yeah, it's kind of strange sometimes thinking about how far things have advanced in that short a time.

Of course, I still think I had more fun playing games on the C-64 than I do on most modern systems... still do, sometimes.

I bet pretty soon there'll be a C-64 emulator for the iTouch in the apps store.

I'd fully expect it... pretty much every system that has had some form of downloadable content has had either a C-64 emulator (legal or otherwise) or at least ports of popular C-64 games.

Just let me know when I can play Airborne Ranger for free on my computer. I still think that was the best game on the C-64.

The thing that amazes me is what we are capable of with different programming languages. It actually scares me sometimes to think of what we could accomplish with a little grant money to survive and a fair amount of time to develop...

I'm immagining multiple internets. not only domain names, but seperate log on, variable speeds, different access. I know that it's essentially just a glorified LAN\WAN, but I can see specialization coming into play in the next 5-10 years if funded correctly.

Another recurring thought on this is how to develop a program that let's people fight wars without the costs of war. It would require a global standard of upkeep to enforce it(NATO-esque, but more strict). I just think that it would be an amazing innovation to allow people to bitch, fight, win\lose wars doing tactically whatever they want, and then have a total of 0 casualties.

I know I have ridiculous thoughts, but I let my mind wander while I'm at work(and other place too ).

a war with no casualties would serve to result in absolutely no changes.

because I'd agree to the terms of your game-show conflict resolution, wait 5 years until you don't have a good military, then invade your country with my very real armed force.

or never ever agree to compete rather than risk the kinds of things you stand to loose in war-far on what's tantamount to playing PvP.



alternatively, a world without real warfare would be a world with almost prepetual war.

if war costs no lives but only money, then there's no reason not to go ahead and have war.

For the most part, the language doesn't matter. There are a few different classifications of programming languages (functional vs. object-oriented, markup vs. scripting vs. full programming languages), but within those classifications, mostly what one language can do, the others can.

And yeah, there's a lot that can be done with sufficient time and effort. I think this is part of why programmers have to be careful to keep their egos in check; it's too easy to become arrogant when you have to be highly self-confident to do your job. And programmers do; when you go through the curriculum at a school, you have no idea where you're going to end up, and what they'll ask you to do, so you have to assume you are capable of doing anything in the field -- and given that the field includes simulating a substantial portion of virtually every other occupational field, that's a very large value of "anything". I've known colleagues who have gone on to do web design, work at Intel, work at NASA, work at all levels of the government, various private enterprises... and I knew some people who dropped out of the curriculum not because they weren't good enough, but because they didn't believe they were good enough. Like the old adage goes, "Whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right", and there's a you might ask yourself if you can if you let yourself get too caught up in the possibilities.

Of course, at the same time, there are also some problems that simply are not computable, no matter how good the programmer and the systems are.



I hope not... I can see this setting a really bad precedent. Possibly several bad precedents. If nothing else, it shoots network neutrality to pieces, and that's a can of worms I don't want to see opened. When start they controlling access and bandwidth based on the data type, it's a very small and difficult-to-detect step to doing the same based on the content. Bad enough some of the companies want to throttle bandwidth if we're downloading music... I think we all know darned well many of these companies would love to make it difficult to access sites that were unfavorable to them.


It's a nice thought, and among some countries, I could see it working. Unfortunately, the ones that are the biggest problem now would not be among those countries... when you get right down to it, a bloodless war is just another form of peaceful negotiation, and the same groups that refuse to engage in that now will refuse to engage in a digital war as opposed to one that kills actual people.

Besides, violence is in human nature, it's why we revel in fake violence so much.

*GelfOgre rips off Jon-OH's arm and beats him about the face and neck with it, until Jon-OH is nice and tenderized, the GelfOgre gets out the gardening tools and really goes to work.



That's Ogre nature. A little pruning goes a long way.

*The Ridge breaks Jon-Oh's legs.

Ahhh good times.

Of course, if you've ever read 1984, there's a way to have war WITH casualties and still have no change.

I love 1984, twas a cool book.

As for my ideas, while they are theoretically possible I'm aware of all the stated flaws. My comment about the NATO-esque organization was to maintain a real life military to enforce those that do not wish to abide by the virtual realm. I understand that the probability of this happening are slim to none, and the chance of it working are even less. The main goal of it would be to alleviate those with just minimal tensions, so that we can better focus our resources.

As for the bandwidth thing, a few years ago a bunch of ISP's tried to instate what you mentioned, they wanted to limit bandwidth for smaller websites and pay for higher access speeds.

I generally code using OOP languages(Java and languages of the C genre were the main ones taught at R.I.T. while I was there). I was interested in learning Python a while back, but have since dropped that idea as I have more pressing matters. I am currently working on learning the ins and outs of PHP. It's fun so far. So, yes; I wholeheartedly agree that programmers must be careful. I however disagree as I feel that given enough time that anything is possible to be coded, it's just a matter of how advanced the technology is at the time and the ingenuity of the programmer. It's just my opinion, not meant to offend.


*retro22 wanders over to Jon-Oh and pinches him...

You had enough injuries, I just wanted to add insult to them .

No offense taken, and I hope none given, but it's a matter of fact, not opinion, that there are some problems that are not computable. The Halting Problem is one of the textbook cases, but there are others.

news flash, Edith:

the human condition doesn't change. All of history is just a series of brutally violent events with little long-term benifit. This is followed by lulls of stability where someone is being opressed for the benifit for the socially influencial, a build up of tention leading to the above mentioned period of violence where someone is being opressed by the socially influencial, or a slow relaxing of tentions from the above mentioned periods of violence where someone is STILL being opressed by the socially influencial.

OH sure there's brief periods where the opressed can say "free at last, free at last" but it's usually just an elaborate ruse by the socially influential to keep the opressed under thumb by giving them the smallest hint of influence for themselves so they stop striving to get more influence - but only for long enough that they get complacient or worse yet - thankful - so the socially influencial can re-exert a satisfactory level of domination.

unless there's a full coup.

in that case the socially influential just becomes a different group of poeple who are opressing somebody else.

and I'm NOT a cynic, but I play one on TV.

As for the halting problem I know that it isn't computable, but I still find that to be up to the limitation of time(ie: a computer with a finite number of states will eventually repeat itself given until the end of time). So while we will never know the answer I guess what I am trying to say is that perhaps in theory the knowledge is out there, however unachieved it may be. I suppose it boils down to faith for me. Also, what I meant by able to be coded was less existencial things. If a concept can be thought of it can be coded, whether or not the code will yield the desired results(based on what is most likely attributable to human error) is a different matter, as you have mentioned with the halting problem.

Related to this: is a simpler way of saying this that it's impossible to cram an infinite amount of numbers into a finite space?

To lighten this discussion up I will post this.

If you are computer and poetry inclined(or just like Dr. Suess) you may enjoy that link.



@Jon-OH:
I do not disagree with you for the most part. For my solution to work we must already live in a world where the use of such a program will achieve almost nothing. It's a moot point, but heck; it's still a discussion .

I feel that while what you said is a good general guideline there could be some key anomalies. I think Ghandi(Socially influencial and opressed), Hitler(Revered and Ostracized), and Peter Wiggin[Fictional] (Ambitious to a fault, regardless the level of power achieved). I think that while certain people may exemplify these traits, it is possible to be in both situations simultaneously.

Also, what would you define as a full coup?

Many groups have advanced within their internal heirarchies in recent years(Women, African-Americans, etc.); are those the relaxing of tensions to attempt to make them complacent or is it a genuine attempt to move in the 'right' direction?

I don't know; it's just a question I pose.


P.S. - My full name is...
Names 1-3
Names 4-5
Names 6-7

My, how the pink and purple dots make the room seem to grow angry! I wonder if it is infectious...*Trips over a part of Jon-o's body* Whoops! How did that get there. Oh well...*Throws it down the elevator shaft* now...I need to find matching carpet! All this blood on the floor cannot be good for the environment!

a 'full coup' is a theoretical really, when an opressed persons over-throws their opressors and then takes their place and there-by becoming opressors themselves.

Now, women and african americans have made considerable strides toward tipping the oppression/influence scale in their favor.


Obviously when i spoke earlier i over-simplified the highly complicated nature of social power stratification for the sake of sounding more bitter than i really am.... most of the time... it's clearly more complex then i suggested, and as with any theoretical statement there's going to be what you'd have to call 'aborations' which go against the general trends of history or society. But extraordinary cases cannot usually inform a greater body of information.

It's why when people say "yeah... well I know this one guy who..." when talking about anything whatever they were about to say is probably irrelevant.