Is it just me, or am I the only one who won't use it just because they used the hackneyed "2.0" thing?
Come on, even a clumsy forced acronym like "READ IT" (READable Interactive Text) would be more explanatory, and wouldn't date it at circa 2010 for the rest of its product life.
I guess if you're Rom Houben, you'd have a legitimate need for one of these things.
I mean, someone like Dr Steven Laureys would presumably come in, attach the electrode cap to your head, post the operating instructions on the ceiling over your bed, and leave you alone with it. After a few hours, if you've typed out "OMG Help Me I'm trapped and I can't move -- oh and please scratch my nose!" then you're not comatose.
Are you unaware of the 500-lb gorilla status of its seller in the world of book publishing? Ever heard of a little company called Amazon.com? Or are you just trolling me?
Of all of the electronic formats for books, the Kindle format is the most likely to be an available option for a textbook. That was implicit in my point.
In theory, you're 100% correct. There's tons of material in The Silmarillion and the other early writings that are ideal for translation into screenplays... but there's two problems: 1) Licensing; the producers would have to pay even more money to Tolkein's estate; and 2) you can't fail by overestimating the American appetite for banality, but plenty of people have failed by overestimating their appetite for intelligence and depth.
You and I, as JRRT fans, would love to see a big screen representation of The Fall of Numenor or The Tale of Beren and Luthien. These tales are the right length and the right level of complexity to permit a screenwriter plenty of artistic license and still remain faithful to Tolkein's originals. But to a studio exec, those names aren't familiar. They're only familiar to a nerds and geeks, and a minority of them at that, and they're notoriously hard to please and, even worse, known pirates and downloaders.
Nope. The Hobbit has name recognition. Kids in the 70's and 80's were given that book to read in 9th grade Lit classes. Now those kids have money and their own kids. They're going to milk that name for all it's worth.
I'll give del Toro the benefit of the doubt. He earned that with Pan's Labyrinth. But as soon as he shows signs of kowtowing to the studio execs and marketing pressures, I'm out. It will happen, the question is how many movies will it take?
(Spoilerish bit follows. Only a spoiler for the worst of purists, but they have been warned.)
Rainbow's End has an act where an virtual book cartel deploys a giant vacuum/shredder/optical scanner to the UCSD Geisel Library. It sucks in books a shelf at a time, feeds them thru a wood chipper, and the shreds pass thru a tunnel lined with optical scanners. A photo is taken of each bit, and software reconstructs the books.
Needless to say, this idea displeases many people, and the climax of the novel takes place as the bibliovorous machine threatens the library.
(End spoilerish bit.)
Rainbow's End should be on Slashdot's list of top 10 reads. I'm surprised it hasn't spawned a half dozen cliches here, e.g., belief circles and Scooch-a-mouts.
If you don't find any bugs, then there must be some left in your software.
No, Cummings is not saying that.
Cummings is saying "There are always bugs. Therefore, if you don't find any, then you're not looking hard enough."
My SQA days for NASA manned space subcontractors taught me that no software is bug-free, unless it's trivially simple ("Hello World!"). The best you can hope for is to remove the critical ones. And the more you do to try and secure the software, make it safer and more error-tolerant, the more bugs you introduce. So you can never be 100% positive that there's not another critical bug hiding somewhere, even when you think you've found the "last one."
Especially when you think you've found the last one.
Revenue can't be the problem because if it were, then we might have to admit we need to raise taxes or fees.
An intransigent, ideologically motivated party, rancorous towards anyone who suggests raising revenue has blocked all attempts in the past 6 or 7 years to solve the revenue problem by any means except cutting funding for things like food stamps, libraries, schools, and parks. The 2/3rds Prop 13 obstacle is their lever.
Falling revenue is driven by an unemployment and recession problem, but spending is down too... you just can't cut the spending by as much as the revenue has fallen without closing entire schools, prisons, and bridges.
It's a revenue problem as much as anything else. But it's made worse when we can't fix that part of the equation.
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
And then there are a number of conservative urban areas, too, like San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Orange County.
But the state continues to be portrayed by the rest of the country as a homogeneous liberal wasteland, populated entirely by hippies and surfers.
In reality, NY State is more liberal than the state of CA.
These are probably the same ones who are recording from the cable box output and thus depending the box to stay on the channel that carries the programming they want to record.
After that will be advertising to let people know there's an alternative in order to drum up enough business so that the economy of scale permits a profit margin, and then administrative and lobbying costs to clear all of the state and municipal regulatory obstacles out of the way, and don't forget paying the lawyers fees for dealing with all of the anticompetitive practices that the megabaud monopolists will resort to once they see that I won't be stopped by all the passive barriers they've erected to protect their market.
Yea. Should be easy. I won't have any problem raising capital.
So, I've been waiting for something better than 150 kB/s service for years, despite the promises by AT&T and Verizon that they're "rolling out" fiber to the home. Not my home.
When can I finally stream in real time at least one channel of video content that's not so compressed that it's unwatchable? At a subscription rate of under $40/month? When that happens, I'll be impressed.
However, I'm fearing that USians have been living under monopoly conditions of artificial bandwidth scarcity for so long that we're going to let the AT&Ts and Verizons charge us an arm and a leg for this kind of service in the near term.
Warning: TFA is a video with a summary that's got little more than what's in the submission: Naka is obsessive about his food, and wants to run for office.
I know I'm not the only one who doesn't have patience for video articles. It's like sitting in class waiting for the teacher to explain every concept at the speed of the slowest learner in class. I can read a written article in 1/5th the time it takes me to watch a video.
Yeah, I don't get the "no competition" angle, either. It seems like TFAuthor lacks a few important clues, not just the VCR=time shift that's dominated so many threads.
I've been watching TV on an iMac for 4 years now, ever since I brought home a Plextor demodulator-encoder, which came bundled with EyeTV. Streaming MPEG video into USB, straight from my cableco's clear QAM. I haven't voluntarily watched a commercial at home for four years, and seldom watch anything live, or even from the live buffer. When I refer to it in front of an audience of non-geeks, I just call it a Tivo. At work, when we offer a buffered, streamed surveillance camera, we call the function a "Tivo capability," for the non-technical. The word is like Kleenex now.
I agree with sleep. If I get only one spell for 1st level adventuring mage, it's sleep. (The other three I mentioned are given to us upon graduation from Mage College, house rule.) Tactically, it's an order of magnitude superior to all of the others.
But the second choice depends on the character.
- My evil mages get something like chill touch or protection from good. - Mage/thieves get dungeoneering spells like knock or detect secret doors. - Combat oriented mages usually get armor or perhaps something like burning hands. - Munchkins get magic missile. What else am I gonna cast at the darkness?
That's 1200 students to spy on in the hope that they might catch one of them doing something naughty. Why would the school do this?
It wasn't a 'school' that did this, it was a person, or a small group of persons. And it's been shown time and time again that people who do things like this operate under one [or more] of several [nonexclusive] motives, including 1) presumption of guilt, 2) prurience, and 3) presumption of authority or privilege.
In other words, they were expecting to find something, that's why they did it. What specifically they expected is probably a function of whatever specific hangups the persons in authority possessed: drugs, sex, cheating, whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
the panties of perplexity
Which are only slightly worse than the Skivvies of Skepticism.
Is it just me, or am I the only one who won't use it just because they used the hackneyed "2.0" thing?
Come on, even a clumsy forced acronym like "READ IT" (READable Interactive Text) would be more explanatory, and wouldn't date it at circa 2010 for the rest of its product life.
I guess if you're Rom Houben, you'd have a legitimate need for one of these things.
I mean, someone like Dr Steven Laureys would presumably come in, attach the electrode cap to your head, post the operating instructions on the ceiling over your bed, and leave you alone with it. After a few hours, if you've typed out "OMG Help Me I'm trapped and I can't move -- oh and please scratch my nose!" then you're not comatose.
Are you unaware of the 500-lb gorilla status of its seller in the world of book publishing? Ever heard of a little company called Amazon.com? Or are you just trolling me?
Of all of the electronic formats for books, the Kindle format is the most likely to be an available option for a textbook. That was implicit in my point.
You may be getting your wish.
Or perhaps it's been available for a while.
without a fuckin' elf
Actually, I'd pay good money to see an elf fucking. Preferably two elves.
In theory, you're 100% correct. There's tons of material in The Silmarillion and the other early writings that are ideal for translation into screenplays... but there's two problems: 1) Licensing; the producers would have to pay even more money to Tolkein's estate; and 2) you can't fail by overestimating the American appetite for banality, but plenty of people have failed by overestimating their appetite for intelligence and depth.
You and I, as JRRT fans, would love to see a big screen representation of The Fall of Numenor or The Tale of Beren and Luthien. These tales are the right length and the right level of complexity to permit a screenwriter plenty of artistic license and still remain faithful to Tolkein's originals. But to a studio exec, those names aren't familiar. They're only familiar to a nerds and geeks, and a minority of them at that, and they're notoriously hard to please and, even worse, known pirates and downloaders.
Nope. The Hobbit has name recognition. Kids in the 70's and 80's were given that book to read in 9th grade Lit classes. Now those kids have money and their own kids. They're going to milk that name for all it's worth.
I'll give del Toro the benefit of the doubt. He earned that with Pan's Labyrinth. But as soon as he shows signs of kowtowing to the studio execs and marketing pressures, I'm out. It will happen, the question is how many movies will it take?
Does no one here read Vernor Vinge?
(Spoilerish bit follows. Only a spoiler for the worst of purists, but they have been warned.)
Rainbow's End has an act where an virtual book cartel deploys a giant vacuum/shredder/optical scanner to the UCSD Geisel Library. It sucks in books a shelf at a time, feeds them thru a wood chipper, and the shreds pass thru a tunnel lined with optical scanners. A photo is taken of each bit, and software reconstructs the books.
Needless to say, this idea displeases many people, and the climax of the novel takes place as the bibliovorous machine threatens the library.
(End spoilerish bit.)
Rainbow's End should be on Slashdot's list of top 10 reads. I'm surprised it hasn't spawned a half dozen cliches here, e.g., belief circles and Scooch-a-mouts.
That's OK. I misread the first sentence to read, "one of the pirates to the case said."
If you don't find any bugs, then there must be some left in your software.
No, Cummings is not saying that.
Cummings is saying "There are always bugs. Therefore, if you don't find any, then you're not looking hard enough."
My SQA days for NASA manned space subcontractors taught me that no software is bug-free, unless it's trivially simple ("Hello World!"). The best you can hope for is to remove the critical ones. And the more you do to try and secure the software, make it safer and more error-tolerant, the more bugs you introduce. So you can never be 100% positive that there's not another critical bug hiding somewhere, even when you think you've found the "last one."
Especially when you think you've found the last one.
Revenue can't be the problem because if it were, then we might have to admit we need to raise taxes or fees.
An intransigent, ideologically motivated party, rancorous towards anyone who suggests raising revenue has blocked all attempts in the past 6 or 7 years to solve the revenue problem by any means except cutting funding for things like food stamps, libraries, schools, and parks. The 2/3rds Prop 13 obstacle is their lever.
Falling revenue is driven by an unemployment and recession problem, but spending is down too... you just can't cut the spending by as much as the revenue has fallen without closing entire schools, prisons, and bridges.
It's a revenue problem as much as anything else. But it's made worse when we can't fix that part of the equation.
Well at least you had branes. In my day... umm...
/snooze
/drool
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
And then there are a number of conservative urban areas, too, like San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Orange County.
But the state continues to be portrayed by the rest of the country as a homogeneous liberal wasteland, populated entirely by hippies and surfers.
In reality, NY State is more liberal than the state of CA.
These are probably the same ones who are recording from the cable box output and thus depending the box to stay on the channel that carries the programming they want to record.
Is there ANY place to buy equipment with assurance of getting it through a 100% manufacturer authorized supply chain?
Umm... Maybe.
After that will be advertising to let people know there's an alternative in order to drum up enough business so that the economy of scale permits a profit margin, and then administrative and lobbying costs to clear all of the state and municipal regulatory obstacles out of the way, and don't forget paying the lawyers fees for dealing with all of the anticompetitive practices that the megabaud monopolists will resort to once they see that I won't be stopped by all the passive barriers they've erected to protect their market.
Yea. Should be easy. I won't have any problem raising capital.
Got a few megabucks to spare?
So, I've been waiting for something better than 150 kB/s service for years, despite the promises by AT&T and Verizon that they're "rolling out" fiber to the home. Not my home.
When can I finally stream in real time at least one channel of video content that's not so compressed that it's unwatchable? At a subscription rate of under $40/month? When that happens, I'll be impressed.
However, I'm fearing that USians have been living under monopoly conditions of artificial bandwidth scarcity for so long that we're going to let the AT&Ts and Verizons charge us an arm and a leg for this kind of service in the near term.
Yea, the real hardcore raiders use socks. Only casuals use Dew bottles.
Egad, then there must have been a secret War on Stupidity here in the US for the past 30 years.
I say it's time for a War on Peace!
Warning: TFA is a video with a summary that's got little more than what's in the submission: Naka is obsessive about his food, and wants to run for office.
I know I'm not the only one who doesn't have patience for video articles. It's like sitting in class waiting for the teacher to explain every concept at the speed of the slowest learner in class. I can read a written article in 1/5th the time it takes me to watch a video.
Besides. Video is so twentieth century.
(My lawn. You're standing on it.)
Yeah, I don't get the "no competition" angle, either. It seems like TFAuthor lacks a few important clues, not just the VCR=time shift that's dominated so many threads.
I've been watching TV on an iMac for 4 years now, ever since I brought home a Plextor demodulator-encoder, which came bundled with EyeTV. Streaming MPEG video into USB, straight from my cableco's clear QAM. I haven't voluntarily watched a commercial at home for four years, and seldom watch anything live, or even from the live buffer. When I refer to it in front of an audience of non-geeks, I just call it a Tivo. At work, when we offer a buffered, streamed surveillance camera, we call the function a "Tivo capability," for the non-technical. The word is like Kleenex now.
I agree with sleep. If I get only one spell for 1st level adventuring mage, it's sleep. (The other three I mentioned are given to us upon graduation from Mage College, house rule.) Tactically, it's an order of magnitude superior to all of the others.
But the second choice depends on the character.
- My evil mages get something like chill touch or protection from good.
- Mage/thieves get dungeoneering spells like knock or detect secret doors.
- Combat oriented mages usually get armor or perhaps something like burning hands.
- Munchkins get magic missile. What else am I gonna cast at the darkness?
I'll start with magic missile, please. (Also, sleep is a popular entry-level choice.)
And I believe read magic, write magic, and cantrip are bundled.
That's 1200 students to spy on in the hope that they might catch one of them doing something naughty. Why would the school do this?
It wasn't a 'school' that did this, it was a person, or a small group of persons. And it's been shown time and time again that people who do things like this operate under one [or more] of several [nonexclusive] motives, including 1) presumption of guilt, 2) prurience, and 3) presumption of authority or privilege.
In other words, they were expecting to find something, that's why they did it. What specifically they expected is probably a function of whatever specific hangups the persons in authority possessed: drugs, sex, cheating, whatever...