If I come out with a press release saying that "Us KKK members killed hundreds of black people." I wouldn't be arrested right? I mean, I am saying I am part of a group that committed murder but that isn't enough to arrest me right?
If the regular police didn't come after you for that, the grammar police might.
The hardware on which the Matrix was running was the humans' brains networked together.
So, wait... What do the machines get out of this, then? Are they just running the Matrix so they have a place to keep the humans? Or do they get some other benefit out of it?
But I seem to remember some kind of blatant violation of the laws of thermodynamics played an important part in the story...
Only in the movie... In the source material, it humans had their nervous system harvested. Which might actually make sense. Although I tend to think they could grow just the nervous system with a bit of genetic engineering.
Huh. What source material? What did they do with the nervous systems? I am curious.
You make a good point here. But on the other hand - those trailers, commercials, etc. are produced by people who are paid fairly large amounts of money to make people want to go see the movie. If this material, which ought to be the best representative material of the film, fails to impress people, then there actually is a fair chance the movie itself isn't worth seeing.
You also have a good point. Sometimes, the people putting together the promotional material are totally and utterly clueless and either put such obtuse and disjointed clips that it's not representative of the whole or they put all the best moments of the whole movie in the 2-minute trailer.
Well, I think when the promo people are idiots, then I don't necessarily need to give their movie a fair chance.:)
What I have seen of the movie has impressed me enough to make me excited about it coming out this weekend.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, myself. Don't know when I'll be able to actually see it, though.
Chris Nolan impressed me about a hundred times more with "Memento" than he every will with any lame-ass Batman movie.
Meh, "Memento" was basically a one-shot gimmick, kind of like "The Sixth Sense" but harder to understand. I enjoyed watching "Memento" and trying to make sense of the story, but the novelty wears off, you know?
I wish that a certain subset of Star Wars fans would STFU about a change which is completely ignorable if you choose to not watch the altered version of the movie, and doesn't even really change a thing anyway.
There was a period in which that wasn't much of a viable option, unless you wanted to watch on VHS or laserdisc. Even now, the DVDs you can buy with the original versions of the film are needlessly downgraded in quality (for instance, letterboxed as opposed to anamorphic widescreen). I can understand that producing another digital master of the film based on another source isn't a trivial thing, but I'm not about to waste money on inferior product either, you know?
I can see your point about STFU and all, but I think there are very good reasons to hate the change to the Greedo scene. It's almost incomprehensible that Greedo could miss from that range. Their edit to make it look like Solo dodged was laughable. And what was gained? Someone, somewhere feels a little better about accepting Han Solo as a hero, just on the basis that he didn't shoot someone who already had a gun pointed at him, until after they'd shot first? It's a change for the worse applied to a film I like.
Of course, there's lots wrong with the special editions... How about that highly redundant Jabba scene they added back in? The scene was known to fans already, and from that perspective it was interesting to see it completed and reinserted (with the original Harry Mudd Jabba replaced with the giant slug Jabba, of course... Who knew the big guy even could slump around a hangar bay?) but it basically just told us all the information we'd just heard in the Greedo scene. Some of the other changes they made were quite a bit worse IMO than the Greedo scene. And they didn't fix some little things that they probably should have...
Sometimes revisions of old movies works out nicely (i.e. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture") and sometimes it doesn't ("Wrath of Khan: Director's Cut")... When it doesn't,. the results can be pretty awful.:)
Off-topic maybe, but why do people use the word "advert"? It's like they're too lazy to type the real word, but they don't want to use too short an abbreviation, "ad", so they go with "advert". It's like saying "automo" instead of either automobile or auto.
It's a regional thing. Like "teevee" vs. "telly" for "television".
Some people here weren't even alive when Terminator 2 came out. Those people have lived their entire lives seeing flashy special effects in movies, therefore it is nothing special to them.
My classic example of this was The Matrix. Everybody raved about the special effects. Nobody could ever tell me what it was about. I concluded it wasn't actually about anything.
Well, of course nobody could tell you what it was about... Nobody can tell you what the Matrix is!
But I seem to remember some kind of blatant violation of the laws of thermodynamics played an important part in the story...
So you're basing your opinion on trailers, commercials, and little else? The movie isn't out yet and you're already saying it's forgettable "shit"?
You make a good point here. But on the other hand - those trailers, commercials, etc. are produced by people who are paid fairly large amounts of money to make people want to go see the movie. If this material, which ought to be the best representative material of the film, fails to impress people, then there actually is a fair chance the movie itself isn't worth seeing.
Stallman should be more concerned about the trend that caused this one: the drastically decreasing numbers of people who actually create stuff on a computer. Twenty years ago there were lots of geeks out there and Stallman's desire to modify and study other people's work was understandable. It is even understandable that he thought everyone should have these freedoms he so enjoyed. Today such an attitude is unthinkable; computer users no longer create stuff, they merely consume it. The current trend toward the extinction of the desktop and its replacement by mobile devices or cloud computing is the natural consequence of this change. You can't create anything on your smartphone except raw pictures and video. You can, however, consume content that somebody used a desktop to create. And so, each year, there are more and more consumers, and less and less content worth consuming. What will be the point of having the freedom to modify and study code when nobody wants to DO anything?
I like your point, because I believe it's important to create things and not just consume them. It's part of my philosophy of life, you could say.
But I am unconvinced that there was a point in the past where a greater number of people were creating things on computers. There have always been the "creators" and the "consumers" - there have always been people who had no apparent interest in making things themselves - regardless of whether they were using computers at the time or not. I think the people who aren't now firing up a video editor or 3-D animation package or whatever else are probably mostly the same people who never did such a thing in the first place. I'd contend that the number of geeks is probably about the same - it's just that the concentration is lower because there's a higher number of non-geeks also using computers... And the types who might have played around 20 years ago with building simple games or utilities might now be playing around with microcontrollers and such instead.
For instance, on Youtube: there's tons of people who post "video logs" or random home movies. A substantial number who post material they got from elsewhere (reposts of flash things like YTMND or Weebl's stuff, episodes of TV shows or music or music videos)... And a relatively small number who create and upload new (and non-trivial) content of their own. I don't think that pattern's really ever changed much.
On the other hand, it's generally been my impression that you're right about computing as a hobby. I don't think there's as many people interested in computing for its own sake as there used to be (though, again, this could just be an illusion of proportions based on the gradual introduction of large numbers of non-computing-enthusiasts to computers) - I think there's the perception that computing is much less a "frontier" than it was, and therefore, less interesting to explore as a hobby. But if that's true, there's not much to be done about it IMO. Just about all the hobbies I've ever been a part of have generally been regarded as "dying" (i.e. scale modeling, amateur radio, etc. - people always talking about how young people aren't getting involved and the hobby's in decline, etc... And it's a shame that that happens, but trying to recruit people isn't going to change much. Large-scale changes to the landscape surrounding the hobby are what causes this IMO - trying to recruit a handful of new participants isn't going to change that.) I think there's a real temptation there to cling to the past... Succumbing to that temptation can seriously damage one's enjoyment of the future.:)
People store personal information on Facebook, whose privacy policies are a constant subject of debate and, it seems, in constant flux
People store information on facebook with the purpose of sharing it. Anyone using facebook for private storage does not understand the purpose of facebook.
I put information on Facebook in order to share that information with my friends and family...
I mean, I know Facebook does other things with that information, and for the time being I have accepted that. But that's not the reason I put things on Facebook.
In general I agree with RMS's position here. Entrusting our information to other parties is rather careless. But still, when he reacts to the industry's method of framing a discussion by careful choice of terminology by doing the same thing himself (i.e. "it's not trusted computing, it's treacherous computing!" or "it's not cloud computing, it's careless computing!") I can't help but think of a whiny kid in a schoolyard name-calling match.
And then, another fun twist: isn't this almost exactly the "client-server ideal" from years back? A thin client connecting to a server somewhere, offering convenient and reliable storage of your data from various terminals or devices? The only difference is that the server is owned by Google.
Definition of activist judge: any judge who makes a decision you disagree with for partisan or moral reasons.
They don't call it "practicing law" for nothing!
I know, right? What do these damned activist judges think they're doing, making decisions I may disagree with? Don't they know my tax dollars pay their salary*?
(* Quite naturally, I assume that it is the specific tax dollars which I paid to the government which comprise the majority of the salary of any given authority figure I may take issue with... This can be quite useful in dealing with police officers as well.)
More seriously - I think it can potentially be a difficult problem. Judges should judge according to the law, right? But if one of them has a personal agenda, they may be able to use their position to promote that agenda and then justify it in terms of law... And then again, on the other hand, shouldn't judges make the decisions they believe are right? Isn't that exactly what we've entrusted them to do? As with many things in the world I think it is unavoidably an imperfect system.
The same guy that went after Michael Mann and others after it was thrown out. He's a young Republican with an agenda that he's forcing down everyone's throat since day one. From trying to change the state seal (it has a mammary in it!) to just stating that "Homosexuality is wrong."
Damn those activist judges!
Re:The limitations of USB keyboards for chording
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
I don't know of any that use USB 2.0 in order to shove more shit down the pipe in a single poll, but that's also a workable option.
You don't even need USB 2.0. USB 1.0 "Full Speed" is enough to deliver the full state of the keyboard in a single packet.
Re:The limitations of USB keyboards for chording
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
Could not a packing scheme be devised where the more commonly pressed keys use less bits, and the less commonly pressed use more? Some kind of Huffman coding, or a scheme like UTF-8 where a high-order bit set means a double-length code.
Probably, but this packing scheme wouldn't be part of the current HID descriptor standard, meaning that your keyboard would need to have special drivers in order to work. A variable-length encoding would also have the disadvantage of turning what is presently an apparently (to the user) meaningless and arbitrary limitation into an inconsistent, meaningless, and arbitrary limitation...
(Incidentally - I think in my previous post I got the common limitations of USB keyboards slightly wrong: I have read online that it's common for the modifier keys to be represented more compactly... References to "6+4" keys - I guess 6 byte-size scancodes and up to 4 modifier keys at a time... It's been a while since I've done USB development.)
A better solution, I think, is just to build a "full speed" keyboard. The packet size limit is motivated by the fact that USB has to give time slices to all the different devices on the bus. Higher speeds get a higher limit on packet payload sizes - 1023 bytes is the limit for full speed, IIRC. You would only need 13 bytes to return a bitset containing the state of every key on a 104 keyboard... And that's something you can express in a standard HID descriptor, too.
If I were planning to use a keyboard with a home theater PC I might consider a wireless one instead
I've been told that most wireless keyboards and mice have noticeable lag between when you do something and when it registers at the PC. Has this improved lately?
Couldn't tell ya. (Though I've never had any trouble with Bluetooth-based game controllers, for instance...) But for a home theater PC I think I'd rather deal with that than run a cord across the room.
Incidentally, you can disable things like Stickykeys via the control panel if you so desire. Google it.
Yes, I know. That's the first thing I did after I accidentally enabled it. The only reason this has happened to me more than once is because I've changed PCs and wound up with a clean install of Windows.
It is nevertheless annoying. Still, I can understand the compromise that leads to that annoyance: people who need it, need to be able to activate it easily.
Slashdot Mirror
If I come out with a press release saying that "Us KKK members killed hundreds of black people." I wouldn't be arrested right? I mean, I am saying I am part of a group that committed murder but that isn't enough to arrest me right?
If the regular police didn't come after you for that, the grammar police might.
The hardware on which the Matrix was running was the humans' brains networked together.
So, wait... What do the machines get out of this, then? Are they just running the Matrix so they have a place to keep the humans? Or do they get some other benefit out of it?
Only in the movie ... In the source material, it humans had their nervous system harvested. Which might actually make sense. Although I tend to think they could grow just the nervous system with a bit of genetic engineering.
Huh. What source material? What did they do with the nervous systems? I am curious.
Relax, it was a joke
Fair enough. :)
You make a good point here. But on the other hand - those trailers, commercials, etc. are produced by people who are paid fairly large amounts of money to make people want to go see the movie. If this material, which ought to be the best representative material of the film, fails to impress people, then there actually is a fair chance the movie itself isn't worth seeing.
You also have a good point. Sometimes, the people putting together the promotional material are totally and utterly clueless and either put such obtuse and disjointed clips that it's not representative of the whole or they put all the best moments of the whole movie in the 2-minute trailer.
Well, I think when the promo people are idiots, then I don't necessarily need to give their movie a fair chance. :)
What I have seen of the movie has impressed me enough to make me excited about it coming out this weekend.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, myself. Don't know when I'll be able to actually see it, though.
Chris Nolan impressed me about a hundred times more with "Memento" than he every will with any lame-ass Batman movie.
Meh, "Memento" was basically a one-shot gimmick, kind of like "The Sixth Sense" but harder to understand. I enjoyed watching "Memento" and trying to make sense of the story, but the novelty wears off, you know?
I wish that a certain subset of Star Wars fans would STFU about a change which is completely ignorable if you choose to not watch the altered version of the movie, and doesn't even really change a thing anyway.
There was a period in which that wasn't much of a viable option, unless you wanted to watch on VHS or laserdisc. Even now, the DVDs you can buy with the original versions of the film are needlessly downgraded in quality (for instance, letterboxed as opposed to anamorphic widescreen). I can understand that producing another digital master of the film based on another source isn't a trivial thing, but I'm not about to waste money on inferior product either, you know?
I can see your point about STFU and all, but I think there are very good reasons to hate the change to the Greedo scene. It's almost incomprehensible that Greedo could miss from that range. Their edit to make it look like Solo dodged was laughable. And what was gained? Someone, somewhere feels a little better about accepting Han Solo as a hero, just on the basis that he didn't shoot someone who already had a gun pointed at him, until after they'd shot first? It's a change for the worse applied to a film I like.
Of course, there's lots wrong with the special editions... How about that highly redundant Jabba scene they added back in? The scene was known to fans already, and from that perspective it was interesting to see it completed and reinserted (with the original Harry Mudd Jabba replaced with the giant slug Jabba, of course... Who knew the big guy even could slump around a hangar bay?) but it basically just told us all the information we'd just heard in the Greedo scene. Some of the other changes they made were quite a bit worse IMO than the Greedo scene. And they didn't fix some little things that they probably should have...
Sometimes revisions of old movies works out nicely (i.e. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture") and sometimes it doesn't ("Wrath of Khan: Director's Cut")... When it doesn't,. the results can be pretty awful. :)
Off-topic maybe, but why do people use the word "advert"? It's like they're too lazy to type the real word, but they don't want to use too short an abbreviation, "ad", so they go with "advert". It's like saying "automo" instead of either automobile or auto.
It's a regional thing. Like "teevee" vs. "telly" for "television".
Some people here weren't even alive when Terminator 2 came out. Those people have lived their entire lives seeing flashy special effects in movies, therefore it is nothing special to them.
s/Terminator 2/Star Wars/;
My classic example of this was The Matrix. Everybody
raved about the special effects. Nobody could ever tell me what it was about. I concluded
it wasn't actually about anything.
Well, of course nobody could tell you what it was about... Nobody can tell you what the Matrix is!
But I seem to remember some kind of blatant violation of the laws of thermodynamics played an important part in the story...
They tried that in the second and third installments of the Matrix trilogy and it put us to sleep.
Wait, there were sequels to the Matrix? I don't remember any sequels to the Matrix...
So you're basing your opinion on trailers, commercials, and little else? The movie isn't out yet and you're already saying it's forgettable "shit"?
You make a good point here. But on the other hand - those trailers, commercials, etc. are produced by people who are paid fairly large amounts of money to make people want to go see the movie. If this material, which ought to be the best representative material of the film, fails to impress people, then there actually is a fair chance the movie itself isn't worth seeing.
Actually sounds kinda fun. I won't be there, of course; I'll enjoy other people going deaf though.
WHAT?
Stallman should be more concerned about the trend that caused this one: the drastically decreasing numbers of people who actually create stuff on a computer. Twenty years ago there were lots of geeks out there and Stallman's desire to modify and study other people's work was understandable. It is even understandable that he thought everyone should have these freedoms he so enjoyed. Today such an attitude is unthinkable; computer users no longer create stuff, they merely consume it. The current trend toward the extinction of the desktop and its replacement by mobile devices or cloud computing is the natural consequence of this change. You can't create anything on your smartphone except raw pictures and video. You can, however, consume content that somebody used a desktop to create. And so, each year, there are more and more consumers, and less and less content worth consuming. What will be the point of having the freedom to modify and study code when nobody wants to DO anything?
I like your point, because I believe it's important to create things and not just consume them. It's part of my philosophy of life, you could say.
But I am unconvinced that there was a point in the past where a greater number of people were creating things on computers. There have always been the "creators" and the "consumers" - there have always been people who had no apparent interest in making things themselves - regardless of whether they were using computers at the time or not. I think the people who aren't now firing up a video editor or 3-D animation package or whatever else are probably mostly the same people who never did such a thing in the first place. I'd contend that the number of geeks is probably about the same - it's just that the concentration is lower because there's a higher number of non-geeks also using computers... And the types who might have played around 20 years ago with building simple games or utilities might now be playing around with microcontrollers and such instead.
For instance, on Youtube: there's tons of people who post "video logs" or random home movies. A substantial number who post material they got from elsewhere (reposts of flash things like YTMND or Weebl's stuff, episodes of TV shows or music or music videos)... And a relatively small number who create and upload new (and non-trivial) content of their own. I don't think that pattern's really ever changed much.
On the other hand, it's generally been my impression that you're right about computing as a hobby. I don't think there's as many people interested in computing for its own sake as there used to be (though, again, this could just be an illusion of proportions based on the gradual introduction of large numbers of non-computing-enthusiasts to computers) - I think there's the perception that computing is much less a "frontier" than it was, and therefore, less interesting to explore as a hobby. But if that's true, there's not much to be done about it IMO. Just about all the hobbies I've ever been a part of have generally been regarded as "dying" (i.e. scale modeling, amateur radio, etc. - people always talking about how young people aren't getting involved and the hobby's in decline, etc... And it's a shame that that happens, but trying to recruit people isn't going to change much. Large-scale changes to the landscape surrounding the hobby are what causes this IMO - trying to recruit a handful of new participants isn't going to change that.) I think there's a real temptation there to cling to the past... Succumbing to that temptation can seriously damage one's enjoyment of the future. :)
who is Stallman anyway ?
He was one of the robot masters in Mega Man 10.
But I thought information wants to be free?
That expression doesn't mean what you think it means.
He previously called the cloud a joke. But here is the reality of the situation. I like having my email available on multiple devices.
What, you mean like with IMAP?
People store personal information on Facebook, whose privacy policies are a constant subject of debate and, it seems, in constant flux
People store information on facebook with the purpose of sharing it. Anyone using facebook for private storage does not understand the purpose of facebook.
I put information on Facebook in order to share that information with my friends and family...
I mean, I know Facebook does other things with that information, and for the time being I have accepted that. But that's not the reason I put things on Facebook.
In general I agree with RMS's position here. Entrusting our information to other parties is rather careless. But still, when he reacts to the industry's method of framing a discussion by careful choice of terminology by doing the same thing himself (i.e. "it's not trusted computing, it's treacherous computing!" or "it's not cloud computing, it's careless computing!") I can't help but think of a whiny kid in a schoolyard name-calling match.
And then, another fun twist: isn't this almost exactly the "client-server ideal" from years back? A thin client connecting to a server somewhere, offering convenient and reliable storage of your data from various terminals or devices? The only difference is that the server is owned by Google.
Damn those activist judges!
Definition of activist judge: any judge who makes a decision you disagree with for partisan or moral reasons.
They don't call it "practicing law" for nothing!
I know, right? What do these damned activist judges think they're doing, making decisions I may disagree with? Don't they know my tax dollars pay their salary*?
(* Quite naturally, I assume that it is the specific tax dollars which I paid to the government which comprise the majority of the salary of any given authority figure I may take issue with... This can be quite useful in dealing with police officers as well.)
More seriously - I think it can potentially be a difficult problem. Judges should judge according to the law, right? But if one of them has a personal agenda, they may be able to use their position to promote that agenda and then justify it in terms of law... And then again, on the other hand, shouldn't judges make the decisions they believe are right? Isn't that exactly what we've entrusted them to do? As with many things in the world I think it is unavoidably an imperfect system.
>>Bow-ties are cool.
Only the worst Doctor who of the series would have this option.
Hey, don't you bad-mouth Troughton!
The same guy that went after Michael Mann and others after it was thrown out. He's a young Republican with an agenda that he's forcing down everyone's throat since day one. From trying to change the state seal (it has a mammary in it!) to just stating that "Homosexuality is wrong."
Damn those activist judges!
I don't know of any that use USB 2.0 in order to shove more shit down the pipe in a single poll, but that's also a workable option.
You don't even need USB 2.0. USB 1.0 "Full Speed" is enough to deliver the full state of the keyboard in a single packet.
Could not a packing scheme be devised where the more commonly pressed keys use less bits, and the less commonly pressed use more? Some kind of Huffman coding, or a scheme like UTF-8 where a high-order bit set means a double-length code.
Probably, but this packing scheme wouldn't be part of the current HID descriptor standard, meaning that your keyboard would need to have special drivers in order to work. A variable-length encoding would also have the disadvantage of turning what is presently an apparently (to the user) meaningless and arbitrary limitation into an inconsistent, meaningless, and arbitrary limitation...
(Incidentally - I think in my previous post I got the common limitations of USB keyboards slightly wrong: I have read online that it's common for the modifier keys to be represented more compactly... References to "6+4" keys - I guess 6 byte-size scancodes and up to 4 modifier keys at a time... It's been a while since I've done USB development.)
A better solution, I think, is just to build a "full speed" keyboard. The packet size limit is motivated by the fact that USB has to give time slices to all the different devices on the bus. Higher speeds get a higher limit on packet payload sizes - 1023 bytes is the limit for full speed, IIRC. You would only need 13 bytes to return a bitset containing the state of every key on a 104 keyboard... And that's something you can express in a standard HID descriptor, too.
If I were planning to use a keyboard with a home theater PC I might consider a wireless one instead
I've been told that most wireless keyboards and mice have noticeable lag between when you do something and when it registers at the PC. Has this improved lately?
Couldn't tell ya. (Though I've never had any trouble with Bluetooth-based game controllers, for instance...) But for a home theater PC I think I'd rather deal with that than run a cord across the room.
Incidentally, you can disable things like Stickykeys via the control panel if you so desire. Google it.
Yes, I know. That's the first thing I did after I accidentally enabled it. The only reason this has happened to me more than once is because I've changed PCs and wound up with a clean install of Windows.
It is nevertheless annoying. Still, I can understand the compromise that leads to that annoyance: people who need it, need to be able to activate it easily.