My name is Pepijn, which is Pippin's name in the Dutch translation of the Lord of the Rings. My dad was a big Tolkien fan.
I have no problem with that. It's a good name in and of itself, it doesn't matter where the inspiration came from. Same for this person. They happen to like the name, what does it matter that it came from a computer game? By the time the kid's old enough to be a potential bullying target no one's gonna remember where it came from anyway.
That's a cop-out for people who want to pretend they're doing nothing wrong when sharing music illegally. The moral problem with theft is the same as with copyright infringement, namely taking something without compensating the people who created it and requested to be compensated for it, as is their moral right. Calling that stealing is entirely justified. If you don't agree with the price, or don't think the money goes to the right people, then don't buy it.
It's pretty silly to suppose that this thing will be able to generate a 3-D representation of a scene without without getting highly-detailed footage of everything from every angle. Otherwise, it would just be a completely bogus modelling system to pull a fast one on people who don't know any better.
I think the point is that it can create a 3D representation of the surfaces that it can see. And perhaps some intelligent guesswork to complete shapes, etc. But even if it didn't do that it could still be very useful. If a camera pans through a room it'll get pretty much everything except the backs of the objects.
> How is it fair to watch movies without paying for them at all?
So if you rent a movie, you had better not invite anyone over to see it. You had better not take it anywhere for anyone else to see. You had better not let anyone borrow it while it's rented. After all, all of those people will have seen it without paying for it... Ergo, they are criminals. ?
Do I really have to spell that out for you? *Sigh* OK, here goes: with renting it's implicit that you're not going to watch it alone, but with a small group of people. The person who rents the movie is doing the paying for all of them.
No no no no. Not in France. In France you can make a copy of a media (CD/DVD/VHS/Tape/Whatever...) of a friend for a personal use. That is why we pay a tax on blank media (for example on a DVD we pay 0.3 Eur for the media and 1.3 Eur for the Tax).
Regardless of whether or not it's legal, how is it fair? Do you think the artist sees a dime of that tax? And how about when you don't make the copy on a blank medium for which you've paid tax, but on your laptop? Or copy it straight to your MP3 player?
Copyright has been designed to protect the publishing and distribution rights so to make a copy for private use is "fair dealing"(UK) or "fair use"(US),...
Fair use would be to make a copy of a movie for which you have already paid. How is it fair to watch movies without paying for them at all? People have to make a living off of making those movies you know. And don't give me that "studios already make huge amounts of money" crap, that's no valid argument. If everybody said that, nobody would ever pay to see movies, and the entire movie business would be out of a job.
"P2P" is legal? P2P is legal anywhere in the world. What you mean is: "downloading copyrighted movies using P2P" is legal. Sloppyness like this is what will equate P2P more and more with illegal actions in the public's mind, and therefore make it more and more difficult to defend if.
Drudgereport seems to pop for me on Firefox all of a sudden.
Not for me (using Firefox 1.0). Firefox says that it blocked a popup, as it should. The site takes forever to load though, maybe it's trying various pop-under techniques. I'm also using Adblock, perhaps I've previously blocked something which is now preventing the drudgereport popup / -under.
Wow. Every single sentence in your post is wrong. How you even manage to breathe is beyond me:
Why is it that anyone who goes against the common, left-leaning attitude here on/. regarding politics or science is automatically branded with either "troll" or "overrated"?
They aren't. I see plenty of posts which go against the common, left-leaning attitude on/. which have been modded insightful or interesting.
The parent is 100% correct!
He is not.
We have practically no climate data of any real value beyond a few hundred years or so, yet we're expected to just ooh and aah every time some simulation from some scientist comes across that purports exactly how climates change over eons.
There is plenty of climate data beyond a few hundred years or so, such as ice cores, the fossil record, geological evidence, etc.
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Yet, we're supposed to believe that the climate can be accurately simulated for millions or billions of years by having a few hundred years of data and some simulations?
The one has nothing to do with the other. Weather is small scale (in space and in time) and chaotic, climate is large scale. It is much easier to predict large scale behaviour due to the law of averages. Don't make the mistake of thinking that climate must be chaotic because weather is; climate causes weather, not the other way around.
We're going to have global warming because the scientists so!
No, where going to have global warming because of polution of the atmosphere.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
First of all: no scientist ever said that we definitely were going to enter a new ice age. Scientists don't talk like that. They speak in theories and likelihoods. If a scientist says an event is likely, and it doesn't occur, that doesn't mean he was wrong. You clearly don't understand the first thing about science or scientists.
Secondly: we still might get an ice age. The global warming might trigger one because it may increase the cloud cover of the Earth, causing more sunlight to be reflected back into space.
Sailors from hundreds of years ago reported the unusually warm, Pacific waters hundreds of hears before the Industrial Revolution! Oh, wait! El Nino is actually being caused by global warming because the scientists said so!
Nobody says that El Nino is caused by global warming. Nobody actually knows what causes El Nino, since it is caused by an incredibly complex and diverse set of circumstances. All scientists ever said is that the likelihood of El Nino occurring seems to be increasing as the Earth warms up. That doesn't mean that El Nino couldn't be occurring already hundreds of years ago.
An asteroid is going to slam into us in 30 years because scientists said so!
No scientist ever said that. They said as far as they could tell with the available data, it was possible that it would hit the Earth.
Oh, wait! It's actually going to miss us by about 1 million miles because other scientists said so.
Wrong again. They were the same scientists, and the reason they were now saying it was probably going to miss the Earth is that they now had better data (since the asteroid was closer) so they could determine more accurately what the probably trajector of the asteroid was going to be.
And now... humans are the cause of global warming because some scientist said so, and the parent is a troll because some moderator said so. Oh, wait!...
Not some scientist said so, the majority of scientsts say so. Just not the ones in Bush's cozy little world...
Don't forget the huge books, toys and music departments. In the toys department you can buy a model Ferrari for your kids which costs the same (no kidding) as a real Ferrari.
Also don't forget that it's the best place for REAL high tea, with little cucumber sandwiches, carre fours, scones with strawberry jam and whipped cream, etc. Not to mention the other fourteen restaurants. And the pub in the basement, next to the hairdressers'.
And of course the jewelry department. There must be at least a couple of billion dollars worth of diamond rings, necklaces, watches, etc. in there.
Visit Harrods once. Seriously. Schedule at least a full day.
Oh yeah: furniture also. Not just antique, modern as well. It's hard to believe it all fits in one department store.
My dad worked at IBM and was always taking IBM PC's home. Usually they were PC 3270's, wich had a 3270 terminal emulator built in. You could switch on-the-fly between the 3270 emulator and the PC environment, which must have been one of the first forms of "multitasking" on the PC.
Those IBM PC's also had BASIC built into their BIOS. If you booted them without any boot medium, you would automatically get a rudimentary BASIC interpreter, in which I wrote many a program. I was soon writing clones of Hunt the Wumpus.
My dad also bought us a Sinclair ZX81. It must have been around 1981 or so, so I would have been seven years old. I remember writing an elaborate (for a computer with 4K bytes of memory) spaceship-console emulator. The ZX81 had a "fast mode", in which it would not update the screen (it would turn into something resembling shark fin soup), but your code would run four times as fast.
We later got the 16K expension pack which plugged into the back and enabled you to run Psion Flight Simulator (truly amazing that they could fit a fully functional flight simulator into that black brick). You had to be careful to keep the ZX81 perfectly still though, because if you wiggled the expansion pack it would reset.
But my love for computers and computer programming was really cemented when we got a ZX Spectrum. Color! (The first one we had had red and green reverserd, which was interesting.) Sound! 48 KB RAM! Real keys! I spent many happy years with my friends waiting for tapes to load and playing Manic Miner, etc. I learnt machine code programming and all kinds of advanced programming techniques such as the GO SUB command...
When it came time to choose a major for college, there really was no competition. I briefly considered physics, but computer science easily won me over. I guess it was inevitable, with my dad working at IBM (although he never pushed me to go into IT), and the many computers which were laying around the house. I'm now a Java software engineer, and I've never looked back.
... Someone strapped the laser to the side of a telescope! I do it so that I can use the green light to point at a spot in the sky and then not have to fiddle about finding that spot through the scope....
Well then perhaps it was you who was (inadvertently, I'm sure) the cause of these reports?
Re:God of the Gaps: Glass half-full or half-empty?
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 1
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
You make a good point, and I agree with it, but I do think the fact that the dude would have to be supremely clever (which is the understatement of the century) makes the chance that that hypothesis is true a lot smaller. In my opinion, our existence being the result of pure chance is a much, much more plausible explanation.
BTW is it just me, or does it seem in poor taste for News outlets like FOX and CNN to focus on possible American casualties when these kind of natural disasters happen?
Dutch media do that too (report about Dutch casualties, I mean). I guess that's how the news media work all over the world. I used to think it was slightly inappropriate, but now I think not. They are Dutch media after all, reporting to Dutch viewers. There's nothing wrong with relating the events to Dutch people. After all, people may be watching who have family or friends there. Same goes for American news media.
It would be inappropriate if the news media somehow gave the impression that Dutch people dying is in any way worse than locals or other nationalities, but I've never noticed that.
was interested in TV tuners and PVR software and so forth for a while, but then I realized that being able to watch and record TV on my computer still does nothing to improve the actual content that passes for entertainment on TV.
True. But there already is pretty decent content on TV. There are plenty of good movies, documentaries, series, etc. being shown. The problem is that it's at inconvenient or ever-changing times, or at the same time as something else, or painful to watch due to the many commercial breaks. A PVR will help with these things, making it several orders of magnitude easier to pick the good stuff from between the crap.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem dude, I am just saying France SUCKS!
Sarcasm, meet DanTMan. DanTMan, sarcasm.
Yeah, but who the hell wants to admit anything French is good!
Har har. I'm sorry, I meant freedom comic book...
Must ... resist ... urge ... to .. correct ... myself ...
Oh what the hell... It's a famous french comic book of course...
Must ... resist ... urge ... to .. correct ... joke ...
Oh what the hell... It's asteriSK! Asterix is the hero of a famous belgian comic book...
My name is Pepijn, which is Pippin's name in the Dutch translation of the Lord of the Rings. My dad was a big Tolkien fan.
I have no problem with that. It's a good name in and of itself, it doesn't matter where the inspiration came from. Same for this person. They happen to like the name, what does it matter that it came from a computer game? By the time the kid's old enough to be a potential bullying target no one's gonna remember where it came from anyway.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
That's a cop-out for people who want to pretend they're doing nothing wrong when sharing music illegally. The moral problem with theft is the same as with copyright infringement, namely taking something without compensating the people who created it and requested to be compensated for it, as is their moral right. Calling that stealing is entirely justified. If you don't agree with the price, or don't think the money goes to the right people, then don't buy it.
It allows you to disable almost all of the plugins, making Acrobat Reader pretty quick to load.
It's pretty silly to suppose that this thing will be able to generate a 3-D representation of a scene without without getting highly-detailed footage of everything from every angle. Otherwise, it would just be a completely bogus modelling system to pull a fast one on people who don't know any better.
I think the point is that it can create a 3D representation of the surfaces that it can see. And perhaps some intelligent guesswork to complete shapes, etc. But even if it didn't do that it could still be very useful. If a camera pans through a room it'll get pretty much everything except the backs of the objects.
> How is it fair to watch movies without paying for them at all?
So if you rent a movie, you had better not invite anyone over to see it. You had better not take it anywhere for anyone else to see. You had better not let anyone borrow it while it's rented. After all, all of those people will have seen it without paying for it... Ergo, they are criminals. ?
Do I really have to spell that out for you? *Sigh* OK, here goes: with renting it's implicit that you're not going to watch it alone, but with a small group of people. The person who rents the movie is doing the paying for all of them.
> for which you have already paid.
No no no no. Not in France. In France you can make a copy of a media (CD/DVD/VHS/Tape/Whatever...) of a friend for a personal use. That is why we pay a tax on blank media (for example on a DVD we pay 0.3 Eur for the media and 1.3 Eur for the Tax).
Regardless of whether or not it's legal, how is it fair? Do you think the artist sees a dime of that tax? And how about when you don't make the copy on a blank medium for which you've paid tax, but on your laptop? Or copy it straight to your MP3 player?
Copyright has been designed to protect the publishing and distribution rights so to make a copy for private use is "fair dealing"(UK) or "fair use"(US), ...
Fair use would be to make a copy of a movie for which you have already paid. How is it fair to watch movies without paying for them at all? People have to make a living off of making those movies you know. And don't give me that "studios already make huge amounts of money" crap, that's no valid argument. If everybody said that, nobody would ever pay to see movies, and the entire movie business would be out of a job.
"P2P" is legal? P2P is legal anywhere in the world. What you mean is: "downloading copyrighted movies using P2P" is legal. Sloppyness like this is what will equate P2P more and more with illegal actions in the public's mind, and therefore make it more and more difficult to defend if.
Although in this I can see (see me not judging, merely observing) the trend of French trying systematically to piss off America, ...
Wow. You are so arrogant that you think even matters completely internal to another country must be about America...
Drudgereport seems to pop for me on Firefox all of a sudden.
Not for me (using Firefox 1.0). Firefox says that it blocked a popup, as it should. The site takes forever to load though, maybe it's trying various pop-under techniques. I'm also using Adblock, perhaps I've previously blocked something which is now preventing the drudgereport popup / -under.
Wow. Every single sentence in your post is wrong. How you even manage to breathe is beyond me:
Why is it that anyone who goes against the common, left-leaning attitude here on /. regarding politics or science is automatically branded with either "troll" or "overrated"?
They aren't. I see plenty of posts which go against the common, left-leaning attitude on /. which have been modded insightful or interesting.
The parent is 100% correct!
He is not.
We have practically no climate data of any real value beyond a few hundred years or so, yet we're expected to just ooh and aah every time some simulation from some scientist comes across that purports exactly how climates change over eons.
There is plenty of climate data beyond a few hundred years or so, such as ice cores, the fossil record, geological evidence, etc.
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Yet, we're supposed to believe that the climate can be accurately simulated for millions or billions of years by having a few hundred years of data and some simulations?
The one has nothing to do with the other. Weather is small scale (in space and in time) and chaotic, climate is large scale. It is much easier to predict large scale behaviour due to the law of averages. Don't make the mistake of thinking that climate must be chaotic because weather is; climate causes weather, not the other way around.
We're going to have global warming because the scientists so!
No, where going to have global warming because of polution of the atmosphere.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
First of all: no scientist ever said that we definitely were going to enter a new ice age. Scientists don't talk like that. They speak in theories and likelihoods. If a scientist says an event is likely, and it doesn't occur, that doesn't mean he was wrong. You clearly don't understand the first thing about science or scientists.
Secondly: we still might get an ice age. The global warming might trigger one because it may increase the cloud cover of the Earth, causing more sunlight to be reflected back into space.
Sailors from hundreds of years ago reported the unusually warm, Pacific waters hundreds of hears before the Industrial Revolution! Oh, wait! El Nino is actually being caused by global warming because the scientists said so!
Nobody says that El Nino is caused by global warming. Nobody actually knows what causes El Nino, since it is caused by an incredibly complex and diverse set of circumstances. All scientists ever said is that the likelihood of El Nino occurring seems to be increasing as the Earth warms up. That doesn't mean that El Nino couldn't be occurring already hundreds of years ago.
An asteroid is going to slam into us in 30 years because scientists said so!
No scientist ever said that. They said as far as they could tell with the available data, it was possible that it would hit the Earth.
Oh, wait! It's actually going to miss us by about 1 million miles because other scientists said so.
Wrong again. They were the same scientists, and the reason they were now saying it was probably going to miss the Earth is that they now had better data (since the asteroid was closer) so they could determine more accurately what the probably trajector of the asteroid was going to be.
And now ... humans are the cause of global warming because some scientist said so, and the parent is a troll because some moderator said so. Oh, wait! ...
Not some scientist said so, the majority of scientsts say so. Just not the ones in Bush's cozy little world...
Dumbass...
Don't forget the huge books, toys and music departments. In the toys department you can buy a model Ferrari for your kids which costs the same (no kidding) as a real Ferrari.
Also don't forget that it's the best place for REAL high tea, with little cucumber sandwiches, carre fours, scones with strawberry jam and whipped cream, etc. Not to mention the other fourteen restaurants. And the pub in the basement, next to the hairdressers'.
And of course the jewelry department. There must be at least a couple of billion dollars worth of diamond rings, necklaces, watches, etc. in there.
Visit Harrods once. Seriously. Schedule at least a full day.
Oh yeah: furniture also. Not just antique, modern as well. It's hard to believe it all fits in one department store.
Which makes it OK?
I think you're overanalyzing (to several degrees) the situation. Just go for it man, and take it how it comes!
Those IBM PC's also had BASIC built into their BIOS. If you booted them without any boot medium, you would automatically get a rudimentary BASIC interpreter, in which I wrote many a program. I was soon writing clones of Hunt the Wumpus.
My dad also bought us a Sinclair ZX81. It must have been around 1981 or so, so I would have been seven years old. I remember writing an elaborate (for a computer with 4K bytes of memory) spaceship-console emulator. The ZX81 had a "fast mode", in which it would not update the screen (it would turn into something resembling shark fin soup), but your code would run four times as fast.
We later got the 16K expension pack which plugged into the back and enabled you to run Psion Flight Simulator (truly amazing that they could fit a fully functional flight simulator into that black brick). You had to be careful to keep the ZX81 perfectly still though, because if you wiggled the expansion pack it would reset.
But my love for computers and computer programming was really cemented when we got a ZX Spectrum. Color! (The first one we had had red and green reverserd, which was interesting.) Sound! 48 KB RAM! Real keys! I spent many happy years with my friends waiting for tapes to load and playing Manic Miner, etc. I learnt machine code programming and all kinds of advanced programming techniques such as the GO SUB command...
When it came time to choose a major for college, there really was no competition. I briefly considered physics, but computer science easily won me over. I guess it was inevitable, with my dad working at IBM (although he never pushed me to go into IT), and the many computers which were laying around the house. I'm now a Java software engineer, and I've never looked back.
Well then perhaps it was you who was (inadvertently, I'm sure) the cause of these reports?
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
You make a good point, and I agree with it, but I do think the fact that the dude would have to be supremely clever (which is the understatement of the century) makes the chance that that hypothesis is true a lot smaller. In my opinion, our existence being the result of pure chance is a much, much more plausible explanation.
It's a disturbing sign of the state democracy is in in America that this has been modded "Funny"...
You should bring your keyboard back to the dealer, it seems to be changing random letters to e's.
BTW is it just me, or does it seem in poor taste for News outlets like FOX and CNN to focus on possible American casualties when these kind of natural disasters happen?
Dutch media do that too (report about Dutch casualties, I mean). I guess that's how the news media work all over the world. I used to think it was slightly inappropriate, but now I think not. They are Dutch media after all, reporting to Dutch viewers. There's nothing wrong with relating the events to Dutch people. After all, people may be watching who have family or friends there. Same goes for American news media.
It would be inappropriate if the news media somehow gave the impression that Dutch people dying is in any way worse than locals or other nationalities, but I've never noticed that.
was interested in TV tuners and PVR software and so forth for a while, but then I realized that being able to watch and record TV on my computer still does nothing to improve the actual content that passes for entertainment on TV.
True. But there already is pretty decent content on TV. There are plenty of good movies, documentaries, series, etc. being shown. The problem is that it's at inconvenient or ever-changing times, or at the same time as something else, or painful to watch due to the many commercial breaks. A PVR will help with these things, making it several orders of magnitude easier to pick the good stuff from between the crap.