You know, neither of these candidates is really concerned with children, or their parents, or family values. Don't be misled by their rhetoric. Every opinon, every word, every gesture they used was engineered and rehearsed to achieve one purpose: beating the other guy in the post-debate polls.
But neither candidate is truly concerned about children, and their families. How can I tell? About halfway through the debate, a teacher asked a question "How will you make the parents more accountable for their children's performance in school?" And in their responses, neither candidate addressed that question.
Bush drawled on about "consequences." He must have used that word a dozen times. He repeated the words "accountability" and "liability" several times over, too. But not once were any of those words applied to "parents" as the object.
Gore spent most of his time describing his pollyanna "vision." Then he went even further off topic and brought up teacher shortages and vouchers.
But the point is, neither candidate even considers the fact that the parent is the one responsible for raising a child and seeing to their welfare and education. They both think it's the government's job to protect children from trivial, everyday hazards -- not the parents'. So how can you expect either of them to have worthwhile opinions on filtering software? Both of them are willing to throw away our liberties to "protect the cheeel-druuun."
Bush's plan is just plain unoriginal. Hell, by now it's cliche. But it's a minimalist approach, and leaves plenty of opportunity for free speech outside of schools and libraries.
At least it's not insidious like Gore's. Gore wants to open the door to government interference with the relationship between an ISP and the user. And what the hell do you expect from Mister Tipper?
Do the right thing. Vote for somebody who respects you enough to believe you can raise your own children. Whoever it is, that somebody was not on the stage in St. Louis last night.
Ahem. The history file can easily be edited or erased... and on my home Macintosh, the View History doesn't extend back beyond the point at which you launched the browser.
they may well have been angling for this crack, in order to take advantage of some legal or PR leverage it would give them
Yeah - a chill ran down my back as I was reading the Salon article. I imagined this conversation transpiring:
Judge: "Why didn't you encrypt your music more strongly?"
RIAA: "We tried, but every encryption and watermarking scheme we tried proved vulnerable. It turns out to be physically impossible to secure digital media. So we just went with ROT13 as our copy protection to limit costs."
Judge: "Is this true? Is it impossible?"
Geek: "Well, ummm... in a word, Yes... mmmm - mayven"
Judge: "I see. Well, if it's impossible to protect the data, then any means of protection can be considered reasonable protection when applied to defend a copyright. [whack!] Rule in favor of the plaintiff."
This first example is becoming cliche, but stick with me a moment: In Japan, acts of violence and depravity are commonplace in anime and manga, and are accepted... yadda yadda. And their people commit one of the lowest rates of real violence in the world.
Contrast that with Germany, where entertainment that depicts violence committed by one human against another is verboten. Command and Conquer had to be retouched and its manual rewritten to depict its soldiers as robots, not people. Even then, it was sold only to adults. Forget about playing Panzer General. And God Forbid you even link to a web page that mentions Nazis in anything but a contemptful light. This is a reaction to their Fascist era, a time when elected German leaders executed 6 million minority citizens.
So yes. It is cultural. IANASociologist, so I won't get all Jungian and speculate about archetypes and cultural personality, but each society has to find what works -- and what doesn't -- for them. And in every society except stagnant, isolated ones, it's an ongoing search.
Now I'm going to use a word that will make a lot of you want to invoke Godwin's Law. But I'm not using that word in the sense in which Godwin usually encountered it. I'm going to use it in it's original sense. It's important that we, as informed citizens, be able to talk about this word, and know what it really means.
Get out your dictionary and look up the first definition of fascism - it's not about goosestepping and stiffarm saluting and gassing minorities. It's about efficiency. Fascism is the principle that any order, any rule, any law, is justified if it means the state will benefit: be more efficient, run smoother, be safer. Beginning to sound familiar? It should.
Because that's exactly what a lot of legislators have aimed for lately, without regard for individual liberty: anti-smoking laws, censorship of violence in media, drug wars, gun control, three strikes mandatory sentencing. Even worse, if it hasn't been effective at safety and efficiency, it's been successfully sold as such.
And it's not only state-oriented fascism, it's corporate-oriented fascism. Washington legislators are more than happy to exchan ge votes for the contributions of major corporations in order that they may run more efficiently. Laws are continually passed "for the good of the people" when they are really just good for business. To hell with the constitution, there's a buck to be made.
It's scary how the children of men who fought against fascism in WW2 are so willing to embrace it. It's scary how easily we've forgotten. Too many liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike are willing to sacrifice our liberties for safety and efficiency. My grandfather, a WW2 B-29 pilot, is probably pounding the walls of his coffin in frustration.
But that's the dark corners of the big picture. We still have defenders of the liberties endowed upon us by the constitution: From the EFF to the NRA. The entire state of Nevada and most of Texas. From PETA and Greenpeace to Larry Flynt. The Libertarian Party and even Nader. Anyone who argues for the rights of anything other than big business and "what's best for the country."
We aren't going to wind up like modern Germany. There's an equilibrium somewhere between libertarian anarchy and fascism, and we're seeking it. There are too many of us who paid attention in high school Civics class and know what's in the bill of rights. There are too many of us who own guns and know how to use them properly... and accurately. There are too many of us who entertain ourselves simulating small unit combat and tactics...
So you see, in the end, FPS and RTS games are one of the weapons in our arsenal against bad government. They fit right in alongside free press and the right to bear arms. No wonder they're being condemned by government. I suggest that these games -- weapon and combat simulators, really -- should be protected under the second amendment, as well as the first.
No, the link was easy to miss, and then, once you're there, it's easy to think you missed something. Those images only technically satisfy Rob's first rule of art... if you're running 1280x1024 or bigger, they don't quite look like Rob-qualified art. Crisco pulled out the best links for us, though.
I wager that if you write to the folks who run the TRACE gallery site, they will point you to images that you have to scale down to fit on your desktop. At least, this worked for me for Hubble Space Telescope images.
In the meantime, check out the awesome image I use for my desktop. (Tips: Click on the small one to see the real eyecandy. Crop off the credits, and place on black background. Collect compliments from fiends and cow-orkers. Distribute only the original, please.)
ObNostalgia: Actually, up until around 1978, beverage cans were steel, not tin. These are easily recognizeable by the seam that runs down the side of the can. Coincidentally, these cans had IDs nearly identical to the OD of a tennis ball. When I was a lad, playing D&D and Traveller using inexpensive little saddle-stapled rule booklets, we'd use these cans to build lighter-fluid-fueled tennis ball cannons.
Alas, this practice all but ended with the switch to aluminum cans. Only Hansen's juices and nectars kept to the steel cans... but they switched to Al, too, a year or two ago.
But you can still soak a tennis ball in lighter fluid, ignite it, and kick it around...
Well, I agree with the title of your post, flatpack, but I also find myself in the rare position of being in partial agreement with one of Jon's points:
Flaming does inhibit free speech - at least that's it's intent - inasmuch as the speech that the flamer seeks to inhibit is inane, is in violation of protocol, or is otherwise undesireable in the specific forum in which the flamer and flamee encounter one another. Where I myself have flamed, this has been the intent, and the flames were in response to persons who violated the simple and easy to follow rules of certain alt hierarchy usenet forums: trim your quotes, don't post binaries or html, and read the faq before posting, dammit. The flames are more public notice or "open letter" than directed hostility.
Equally as often, however, there is no inhibition intended or exercised. It's just a simple matter of two personalities conflicting in an environment where one can only express oneself with words. Flaming is an inevitable emergence from such a situation, and will never be eliminated. In other words, it's no different from a schoolyard fight. I saw this kind of flame war most often in my BBS days, and actually, most of us considered them entertainment. Even the participants.
Anyone who is on the receiving end of a flame that sees more into it than that is blowing it way out of proportion. Especially if the flamee is participating in a usenet forum, or publishes half-baked rubbish in online magazines.
That's actually a Tobacco Mosaic virus, iirc. The same archetypical representative virus that's depicted in just about every high school biology textbook ever printed.
Which is why it's even more important these days for the individual to receive a proper education - it reqiures more and more education just to achieve the rudimentary skills necessary to be a functional member of society (and not a victim of it). Whether they be technical skills, to operate a computer or DVD player, or consumer skills, to avoid being scammed by marketdroids and commercials, or social skills, to avoid getting beat up by jocks or shot by gangsters - the level of skill necessary is greater than ever before.
And ironically, in many states our public education system is worse than it's been in more than 50 years. I live in CA, and I don't have to tell residents about how bad our public schools are... 49th out of 50 in some studies.
I dislike the term "virtual community" too. But I've been a member of several, starting with 1200 baud BBSes, sometimes on borrowed equipment, and beyond the cost of getting on I can assure you there's no elitism involved. There's politics, romance, territorialism, backstabbing, mischief, antipathy, and all out hostility, but seldom have I ever witnessed elitism. And when I have, it's always been petty egotism.
And someone explain to me the ponzi analogy. I don't see it. How am I making money on the latecomers? The way I see it, I bore more than my share of the burden, pioneering. I saw a commercial last nite for a deal that would give me a PC and free internet access, and I don't have to even begin making payments for 6 months. That's real easy to take advantage of, honestly or dishonestly. The barriers I had to struggle past are all but gone. The PC is going down the same road as the telephone, TV, VCR, and CD player. It sounds to me like Katz has found someone else who's as good as turning facts into bovine fecal matter as he is...
Combine this with the fact that the recovery programs are only remarking upon the last two years as ones with big drug problems, and you come to one obvious conclusion:
It's poseurs who are doing the drugs, the dot-com workers who are there only for the money, not because they enjoy the work.
(And since they don't enjoy the work, they need speed to keep up with those who do...)
Overall, I found this article shrill and alarmist. It's like an article describing the disturbing increase in use of shaving cream among teenage males ages 14-20. Puh-leeze.
The article implies that pixel count is the only area where CMOS imagers (specifically, CMOS Active Pixel Sensors) performance does not compare well with CCDs. In truth, the CCD still has a number of advantages over CMOS:
- Signal to Noise Ratio: The CMOS APS suffers from inferior SNR due to the fact that it must use a surface channel FET to "read out" the individual pixel. CCDs use only buried channels to transfer charge to the readout amp. One company (name fails me) has developed a CMOS "Active Column Sensor" that offers better SNR, but still not as good as a CCD. This property is very important for getting a good contrast in images that have both light and dark areas.
- Fill Factor: The photosensitive area of CCDs can cover 100% of the silicon, whereas in CMOS APS devices, some area of each pixel must be devoted to switching elements, resulting in less than a 100% fill factor.
- Pixel Size: This is related to fill factor. Since the switches can only get so small, the smaller your pixel size, the worse your fill factor. Thus, to maintain a reasonable fill factor (>50%), CMOS pixels have larger minimum pixel size than CCDs, about 18 microns, whereas CCDs are now sold with pixels as small as 6 microns.
- Modulation Transfer Function (MTF): This is a subtle concept, but anyone familiar with electronic filter design can relate to it - it's the transfer function of signal strength as a function of spatial frequency. In layman's terms, it's the ability of a camera to preserve the contrast in regular patterns (like stripes or arrays) imaged by the system. Fill factor comes into play again here - focal planes with less than 100% fill factors introduce aliasing into the MTF, amplifying weirdnesses like what happens when the sportscaster wears a plaid jacket...
Finally, there are some things that people don't take into account when they compare electronic sensors and film:
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.
- A close friend and colleague of mine worked on developing a 12 megapixel CCD intended for use in Cinematic cameras, going so far as fabricating and testing the device. When my friend's company showed the CCD to Dreamworks, the digital cinema folks weren't interested: they had determined that the needed resolution for acceptable cinema was only about 1280x1024 (I know the aspect ratio is wrong, but this is the example they gave). Thus, they weren't at all interested in a 3k x 4k CCD.
Counterintuitive, yes! But it becomes believeable when you remember the descriptions about how flaws and "noise" had to be added after early digital cinema trials resluted in audience dissatifaction about how the image looked too "perfect" or "fake."
One more thing of note: For the past couple of years, Sarnoff Labs and MIT Lincoln Labs have been working on CCDs built using CMOS foundries. MIT uses a SOI process that is very promising, and Sarnoff just uses a big giant P-well to build its CCD in. With these kind of devices, you can achieve same high levels of integration as a CMOS APS and still get the performance of CCDs. The only element that does not improve much is power. CCDs will always require a lot more power than CMOS APSes.
Deja is nice little service that loosens up those messy newsgroups and makes my entry a lot less painful.
Well, if I could get a newsreader to talk past my corp firewall, I sure would prefer to use that.
I consider this trick to be the last straw. I've permanently switched to RemarQ, even though they do attach an ad to each post. RemarQ's interface, while still not a newsreader, is a lot easier to use, and noticably faster. (Not that RemarQ doesn't come with it's own ObPeeves...)
I've been relying on Deja for 3 or 4 years, since it was Deja-news. When I needed a WWW gateway to Usenet, it was the only one. Being long familiar with the standard newsreader interface, I found Deja frustrating and sometimes infuriating. They've changed the interface 3 times, and each time it's become more cumbersome, more slow, and more frustrating to use. Now, with context-sensitive linking, even more servers have to coordinate to deliver you just one message... no thanks. It's like they don't want you to use their service for browsing.
This time, their news service was flaky for ten days. If you tried to browse one of your regular group, Deja would present you with a search results screen instead: a search for keyword "*" in the newsgroup you wanted to browse, and the results were all at least two weeks old. Threads were ignored. Useless for browsing. When I emailed their support team with a "what's happening?" note, I got a reply four days later telling me it was regular database maintenance that got out of hand.
Yeah, maybe so, but when browsing came back, the newsgroups were soon buzzing with complaints about Deja's linking. I had already switched to RemarQ and was happy to have evaded it.
Look, you either make available for public consumption, or you don't. You either make it world veiwable, or you don't.
Exactly. Those are my sentiments exactly.
This "trespassing" argument is bullshit, and the only reason any judge would rule in favor of it is because he's been misled. Either Bidder's Edge infringed upon Ebay's trademark or they didn't. Period. And if they can't win on that angle, case closed.
ITRW, you can't put up a sign saying "Welcome All! Please Enter and Enjoy" and then prosecute someone for trespassing, regardless of how they behaved once they entered. It doesn't matter if they do it live, or via script, or bot.
Sue them for their behavior, if you can. Try them for crimes they committed. TOS them for heaven's sake. But you can't accuse them of trespassing, because you're a public marketplace! Geezus, what kind of manure did they force-feed the judge to get him to rule like that?
It's like someone who sells inventory lists of all a city's flea markets being convicted of trespassing at a flea market, during its open hours, while researching his list. Absolutely ludicrous.
Delusions aside, you sound like one of the rabid paternalists that insist upon directing everyone elses behavior. You don't like pot. Fine. That should be end of story.
But no, let's proceed to label them illegal. In all caps, no less. You sound just like the director of the FDA in the early 80's who, when ordered to reclassify pot to lessen federal penalties, adamantly refused. When asked, on camera, why he disobeyed a federal judge, he replied, "Because it's evil."
Do you know how marijuana became illegal? Do you have any idea why?
Hemp was once a major crop in the US, and the flowers were considered a useful herb, similar to Goldenseal Root, Ginko Biloba, or Cod Liver Oil. Hemp was primarily used to make textiles, paper, and vegetable oils. It is hardy, disease resistant, grows fast, and grows anywhere. Washington and Jefferson grew it on their estates, and not because they wanted to smoke it.
Over the course of just one decade, though, nobody farmed hemp anymore. Why? Because in the 1920's timber owners needed to sell their trees to papermills. Hemp was in their way; the timber owners included some of the biggest and most vicious capitalists of the era, while the hemp lobby were just the last in a long line of farmers. Marijuana was subjected to an intensive and pervasive smear campaign in the media and on Capitol Hill. And it worked. by the late '30s, all newspapers were made of dead trees, everyone knew about "the evil weed," and hemp farming was a federal crime.
So, the only thing evil about marijuana is how and why it became illegal. Go chew on that for awhile.
My parrot already uses the internet. He gets along quite well with Mozilla on a PII linux box, although I do have to set up the button bar, and configure the network drivers.
Problem is, he's figured out how to access the root account, and even though he's disabled all the unused ports, changed all the default passwords, and installed the latest security patches...
Sorry - since the invention of the reel-to-reel, private music trading is and has always been about trading copies. Ask any Grateful Dead or Black Crowes "taper." They record concerts, and trade copies of those concerts for copies of concerts that they didn't attend, or couldn't record.
The only real change over the years has been the recording technology. Each successive generation has had access to more and more user-freindly media and equipment, making the practice of private trading accessible to more and more people. And the people who make the most profit from commercial distribution have screamed bloody murder at the introduction of each new enabling technology.
I mean, hell, we've polluted the environment, we've abused species diversity, and we're about to screw up global climate. Until we prove we have enough foresight to manage these things, we are foolish to tinker with the human genome. (Somebody moderate this parent up so that it's more visible.)
If you want likely, then there's this: A reactionary response to DNA twiddling renders it illegal, promoting an underground culture of gene tweaking that is demonized by the mainstream. Those who propose to decriminalize it are castigated, ridiculed, and threatened... until one day mainstream scientists will have learned enough to allow a sufficiently open-minded generation to recognize that genetic engineering is just a technique, morally no different than surgery.
Does it sound familiar? It should... it's the typical response of human societies to new and strange things that threaten their belief systems.
If you and the ACs out there think the point I made relies on those popular culture references, then either you didn't read the comment, or your logic skills are a few beads short of an abacus.
Pity either way, really. Read it again and maybe you'll discern the observations from the arguments.
Christianity has the full weight of Divine Truth behind it[...]
Yeah, well I have the full weight of a Pastrami Dip and Large Chili Cheese Fries behind me, and anyone else who has accepted such a meal will feel it in their hearts, too. In other words, your "divine truth" does not engender your belief system with more validity than anyone else's. Deal with it. Do not expect me to tolerate your intolerance of other beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
And by no means does New Scientist own a copyright on the UNC researchers' results ...
But neither candidate is truly concerned about children, and their families. How can I tell? About halfway through the debate, a teacher asked a question "How will you make the parents more accountable for their children's performance in school?" And in their responses, neither candidate addressed that question.
Bush drawled on about "consequences." He must have used that word a dozen times. He repeated the words "accountability" and "liability" several times over, too. But not once were any of those words applied to "parents" as the object.
Gore spent most of his time describing his pollyanna "vision." Then he went even further off topic and brought up teacher shortages and vouchers.
But the point is, neither candidate even considers the fact that the parent is the one responsible for raising a child and seeing to their welfare and education. They both think it's the government's job to protect children from trivial, everyday hazards -- not the parents'. So how can you expect either of them to have worthwhile opinions on filtering software? Both of them are willing to throw away our liberties to "protect the cheeel-druuun."
Bush's plan is just plain unoriginal. Hell, by now it's cliche. But it's a minimalist approach, and leaves plenty of opportunity for free speech outside of schools and libraries.
At least it's not insidious like Gore's. Gore wants to open the door to government interference with the relationship between an ISP and the user. And what the hell do you expect from Mister Tipper?
Do the right thing. Vote for somebody who respects you enough to believe you can raise your own children. Whoever it is, that somebody was not on the stage in St. Louis last night.
Ahem. The history file can easily be edited or erased... and on my home Macintosh, the View History doesn't extend back beyond the point at which you launched the browser.
Nobody would watch it if it were called "Waldo Wars."
Yeah - a chill ran down my back as I was reading the Salon article. I imagined this conversation transpiring:
Judge: "Why didn't you encrypt your music more strongly?"
RIAA: "We tried, but every encryption and watermarking scheme we tried proved vulnerable. It turns out to be physically impossible to secure digital media. So we just went with ROT13 as our copy protection to limit costs."
Judge: "Is this true? Is it impossible?"
Geek: "Well, ummm... in a word, Yes... mmmm - mayven"
Judge: "I see. Well, if it's impossible to protect the data, then any means of protection can be considered reasonable protection when applied to defend a copyright. [whack!] Rule in favor of the plaintiff."
This first example is becoming cliche, but stick with me a moment: In Japan, acts of violence and depravity are commonplace in anime and manga, and are accepted... yadda yadda. And their people commit one of the lowest rates of real violence in the world.
Contrast that with Germany, where entertainment that depicts violence committed by one human against another is verboten. Command and Conquer had to be retouched and its manual rewritten to depict its soldiers as robots, not people. Even then, it was sold only to adults. Forget about playing Panzer General. And God Forbid you even link to a web page that mentions Nazis in anything but a contemptful light. This is a reaction to their Fascist era, a time when elected German leaders executed 6 million minority citizens.
So yes. It is cultural. IANASociologist, so I won't get all Jungian and speculate about archetypes and cultural personality, but each society has to find what works -- and what doesn't -- for them. And in every society except stagnant, isolated ones, it's an ongoing search.
Now I'm going to use a word that will make a lot of you want to invoke Godwin's Law. But I'm not using that word in the sense in which Godwin usually encountered it. I'm going to use it in it's original sense. It's important that we, as informed citizens, be able to talk about this word, and know what it really means.
Get out your dictionary and look up the first definition of fascism - it's not about goosestepping and stiffarm saluting and gassing minorities. It's about efficiency. Fascism is the principle that any order, any rule, any law, is justified if it means the state will benefit: be more efficient, run smoother, be safer. Beginning to sound familiar? It should.
Because that's exactly what a lot of legislators have aimed for lately, without regard for individual liberty: anti-smoking laws, censorship of violence in media, drug wars, gun control, three strikes mandatory sentencing. Even worse, if it hasn't been effective at safety and efficiency, it's been successfully sold as such.
And it's not only state-oriented fascism, it's corporate-oriented fascism. Washington legislators are more than happy to exchan ge votes for the contributions of major corporations in order that they may run more efficiently. Laws are continually passed "for the good of the people" when they are really just good for business. To hell with the constitution, there's a buck to be made.
It's scary how the children of men who fought against fascism in WW2 are so willing to embrace it. It's scary how easily we've forgotten. Too many liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike are willing to sacrifice our liberties for safety and efficiency. My grandfather, a WW2 B-29 pilot, is probably pounding the walls of his coffin in frustration.
But that's the dark corners of the big picture. We still have defenders of the liberties endowed upon us by the constitution: From the EFF to the NRA. The entire state of Nevada and most of Texas. From PETA and Greenpeace to Larry Flynt. The Libertarian Party and even Nader. Anyone who argues for the rights of anything other than big business and "what's best for the country."
We aren't going to wind up like modern Germany. There's an equilibrium somewhere between libertarian anarchy and fascism, and we're seeking it. There are too many of us who paid attention in high school Civics class and know what's in the bill of rights. There are too many of us who own guns and know how to use them properly... and accurately. There are too many of us who entertain ourselves simulating small unit combat and tactics...
So you see, in the end, FPS and RTS games are one of the weapons in our arsenal against bad government. They fit right in alongside free press and the right to bear arms. No wonder they're being condemned by government. I suggest that these games -- weapon and combat simulators, really -- should be protected under the second amendment, as well as the first.
No, the link was easy to miss, and then, once you're there, it's easy to think you missed something. Those images only technically satisfy Rob's first rule of art... if you're running 1280x1024 or bigger, they don't quite look like Rob-qualified art. Crisco pulled out the best links for us, though.
I wager that if you write to the folks who run the TRACE gallery site, they will point you to images that you have to scale down to fit on your desktop. At least, this worked for me for Hubble Space Telescope images.
In the meantime, check out the awesome image I use for my desktop. (Tips: Click on the small one to see the real eyecandy. Crop off the credits, and place on black background. Collect compliments from fiends and cow-orkers. Distribute only the original, please.)
Alas, this practice all but ended with the switch to aluminum cans. Only Hansen's juices and nectars kept to the steel cans... but they switched to Al, too, a year or two ago.
But you can still soak a tennis ball in lighter fluid, ignite it, and kick it around...
Flaming does inhibit free speech - at least that's it's intent - inasmuch as the speech that the flamer seeks to inhibit is inane, is in violation of protocol, or is otherwise undesireable in the specific forum in which the flamer and flamee encounter one another. Where I myself have flamed, this has been the intent, and the flames were in response to persons who violated the simple and easy to follow rules of certain alt hierarchy usenet forums: trim your quotes, don't post binaries or html, and read the faq before posting, dammit. The flames are more public notice or "open letter" than directed hostility.
Equally as often, however, there is no inhibition intended or exercised. It's just a simple matter of two personalities conflicting in an environment where one can only express oneself with words. Flaming is an inevitable emergence from such a situation, and will never be eliminated. In other words, it's no different from a schoolyard fight. I saw this kind of flame war most often in my BBS days, and actually, most of us considered them entertainment. Even the participants.
Anyone who is on the receiving end of a flame that sees more into it than that is blowing it way out of proportion. Especially if the flamee is participating in a usenet forum, or publishes half-baked rubbish in online magazines.
That's actually a Tobacco Mosaic virus, iirc. The same archetypical representative virus that's depicted in just about every high school biology textbook ever printed.
No? And it's only 450x450x450? Geez, I'll stick to my GeForce2 Ultra and a cheap-ass ViewSonic CRT.
And ironically, in many states our public education system is worse than it's been in more than 50 years. I live in CA, and I don't have to tell residents about how bad our public schools are... 49th out of 50 in some studies.
I dislike the term "virtual community" too. But I've been a member of several, starting with 1200 baud BBSes, sometimes on borrowed equipment, and beyond the cost of getting on I can assure you there's no elitism involved. There's politics, romance, territorialism, backstabbing, mischief, antipathy, and all out hostility, but seldom have I ever witnessed elitism. And when I have, it's always been petty egotism.
And someone explain to me the ponzi analogy. I don't see it. How am I making money on the latecomers? The way I see it, I bore more than my share of the burden, pioneering. I saw a commercial last nite for a deal that would give me a PC and free internet access, and I don't have to even begin making payments for 6 months. That's real easy to take advantage of, honestly or dishonestly. The barriers I had to struggle past are all but gone. The PC is going down the same road as the telephone, TV, VCR, and CD player. It sounds to me like Katz has found someone else who's as good as turning facts into bovine fecal matter as he is...
(One tin per week, $3 per tin: $156)
Combine this with the fact that the recovery programs are only remarking upon the last two years as ones with big drug problems, and you come to one obvious conclusion:
It's poseurs who are doing the drugs, the dot-com workers who are there only for the money, not because they enjoy the work.
(And since they don't enjoy the work, they need speed to keep up with those who do...)
Overall, I found this article shrill and alarmist. It's like an article describing the disturbing increase in use of shaving cream among teenage males ages 14-20. Puh-leeze.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. Again.
Sometimes I suspect that /. articles are written that way so the moderators can know who actually read the external articles and who didn't.
- Signal to Noise Ratio: The CMOS APS suffers from inferior SNR due to the fact that it must use a surface channel FET to "read out" the individual pixel. CCDs use only buried channels to transfer charge to the readout amp. One company (name fails me) has developed a CMOS "Active Column Sensor" that offers better SNR, but still not as good as a CCD. This property is very important for getting a good contrast in images that have both light and dark areas.
- Fill Factor: The photosensitive area of CCDs can cover 100% of the silicon, whereas in CMOS APS devices, some area of each pixel must be devoted to switching elements, resulting in less than a 100% fill factor.
- Pixel Size: This is related to fill factor. Since the switches can only get so small, the smaller your pixel size, the worse your fill factor. Thus, to maintain a reasonable fill factor (>50%), CMOS pixels have larger minimum pixel size than CCDs, about 18 microns, whereas CCDs are now sold with pixels as small as 6 microns.
- Modulation Transfer Function (MTF): This is a subtle concept, but anyone familiar with electronic filter design can relate to it - it's the transfer function of signal strength as a function of spatial frequency. In layman's terms, it's the ability of a camera to preserve the contrast in regular patterns (like stripes or arrays) imaged by the system. Fill factor comes into play again here - focal planes with less than 100% fill factors introduce aliasing into the MTF, amplifying weirdnesses like what happens when the sportscaster wears a plaid jacket...
Finally, there are some things that people don't take into account when they compare electronic sensors and film:
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.
- A close friend and colleague of mine worked on developing a 12 megapixel CCD intended for use in Cinematic cameras, going so far as fabricating and testing the device. When my friend's company showed the CCD to Dreamworks, the digital cinema folks weren't interested: they had determined that the needed resolution for acceptable cinema was only about 1280x1024 (I know the aspect ratio is wrong, but this is the example they gave). Thus, they weren't at all interested in a 3k x 4k CCD.
Counterintuitive, yes! But it becomes believeable when you remember the descriptions about how flaws and "noise" had to be added after early digital cinema trials resluted in audience dissatifaction about how the image looked too "perfect" or "fake."
One more thing of note: For the past couple of years, Sarnoff Labs and MIT Lincoln Labs have been working on CCDs built using CMOS foundries. MIT uses a SOI process that is very promising, and Sarnoff just uses a big giant P-well to build its CCD in. With these kind of devices, you can achieve same high levels of integration as a CMOS APS and still get the performance of CCDs. The only element that does not improve much is power. CCDs will always require a lot more power than CMOS APSes.
Well, if I could get a newsreader to talk past my corp firewall, I sure would prefer to use that.
I consider this trick to be the last straw. I've permanently switched to RemarQ, even though they do attach an ad to each post. RemarQ's interface, while still not a newsreader, is a lot easier to use, and noticably faster. (Not that RemarQ doesn't come with it's own ObPeeves...)
I've been relying on Deja for 3 or 4 years, since it was Deja-news. When I needed a WWW gateway to Usenet, it was the only one. Being long familiar with the standard newsreader interface, I found Deja frustrating and sometimes infuriating. They've changed the interface 3 times, and each time it's become more cumbersome, more slow, and more frustrating to use. Now, with context-sensitive linking, even more servers have to coordinate to deliver you just one message... no thanks. It's like they don't want you to use their service for browsing.
This time, their news service was flaky for ten days. If you tried to browse one of your regular group, Deja would present you with a search results screen instead: a search for keyword "*" in the newsgroup you wanted to browse, and the results were all at least two weeks old. Threads were ignored. Useless for browsing. When I emailed their support team with a "what's happening?" note, I got a reply four days later telling me it was regular database maintenance that got out of hand.
Yeah, maybe so, but when browsing came back, the newsgroups were soon buzzing with complaints about Deja's linking. I had already switched to RemarQ and was happy to have evaded it.
Exactly. Those are my sentiments exactly.
This "trespassing" argument is bullshit, and the only reason any judge would rule in favor of it is because he's been misled. Either Bidder's Edge infringed upon Ebay's trademark or they didn't. Period. And if they can't win on that angle, case closed.
ITRW, you can't put up a sign saying "Welcome All! Please Enter and Enjoy" and then prosecute someone for trespassing, regardless of how they behaved once they entered. It doesn't matter if they do it live, or via script, or bot.
Sue them for their behavior, if you can. Try them for crimes they committed. TOS them for heaven's sake. But you can't accuse them of trespassing, because you're a public marketplace! Geezus, what kind of manure did they force-feed the judge to get him to rule like that?
It's like someone who sells inventory lists of all a city's flea markets being convicted of trespassing at a flea market, during its open hours, while researching his list. Absolutely ludicrous.
But no, let's proceed to label them illegal. In all caps, no less. You sound just like the director of the FDA in the early 80's who, when ordered to reclassify pot to lessen federal penalties, adamantly refused. When asked, on camera, why he disobeyed a federal judge, he replied, "Because it's evil."
Do you know how marijuana became illegal? Do you have any idea why?
Hemp was once a major crop in the US, and the flowers were considered a useful herb, similar to Goldenseal Root, Ginko Biloba, or Cod Liver Oil. Hemp was primarily used to make textiles, paper, and vegetable oils. It is hardy, disease resistant, grows fast, and grows anywhere. Washington and Jefferson grew it on their estates, and not because they wanted to smoke it.
Over the course of just one decade, though, nobody farmed hemp anymore. Why? Because in the 1920's timber owners needed to sell their trees to papermills. Hemp was in their way; the timber owners included some of the biggest and most vicious capitalists of the era, while the hemp lobby were just the last in a long line of farmers. Marijuana was subjected to an intensive and pervasive smear campaign in the media and on Capitol Hill. And it worked. by the late '30s, all newspapers were made of dead trees, everyone knew about "the evil weed," and hemp farming was a federal crime.
So, the only thing evil about marijuana is how and why it became illegal. Go chew on that for awhile.
Problem is, he's figured out how to access the root account, and even though he's disabled all the unused ports, changed all the default passwords, and installed the latest security patches...
I can't get him to perform regular backups!
The only real change over the years has been the recording technology. Each successive generation has had access to more and more user-freindly media and equipment, making the practice of private trading accessible to more and more people. And the people who make the most profit from commercial distribution have screamed bloody murder at the introduction of each new enabling technology.
Same old $hit, different platform.
I mean, hell, we've polluted the environment, we've abused species diversity, and we're about to screw up global climate. Until we prove we have enough foresight to manage these things, we are foolish to tinker with the human genome. (Somebody moderate this parent up so that it's more visible.)
If you want likely, then there's this: A reactionary response to DNA twiddling renders it illegal, promoting an underground culture of gene tweaking that is demonized by the mainstream. Those who propose to decriminalize it are castigated, ridiculed, and threatened... until one day mainstream scientists will have learned enough to allow a sufficiently open-minded generation to recognize that genetic engineering is just a technique, morally no different than surgery.
Does it sound familiar? It should... it's the typical response of human societies to new and strange things that threaten their belief systems.
Pity either way, really. Read it again and maybe you'll discern the observations from the arguments.
Yeah, well I have the full weight of a Pastrami Dip and Large Chili Cheese Fries behind me, and anyone else who has accepted such a meal will feel it in their hearts, too. In other words, your "divine truth" does not engender your belief system with more validity than anyone else's. Deal with it. Do not expect me to tolerate your intolerance of other beliefs.
ObFrankenstein: My Lord of Pastrami and Chili has just instructed me to devote my life to genetically engineering women so that they may choose to gestate industrial products and medical supplies in their wombs in exchange for monetary compensation.