Well, here we are again, facing zealots. There is something a bit different about these zealots:
1. They are very smart 2. They suddenly changed their minds
As every programmer knows, there are always many ways to solve a problem, whether it be how to get your characters formatted correctly, or something much more complex, say AI. When you take a stance on something and unequivically argue its truth, you risk throwing out all the other answers. This can't be right, especially when working within the confines of an extremely complex system; you can't just use a catch-all and hold to it.
Some of the greatest minds on earth have labored on how to create an ideal system for people. A lot of them have failed, some of them pretty badly. There are several reasons for this:
A small group of people has the smallest number of irreconcileable differences. Their "response range" to life is somewhat limited, therefore it is easier to create a ruleset to keep everyone happy, because there are fewer alternatives to consider.
The larger the group of people gets, the more responses the group can have [if this isn't clear, here is an example: 5 people can wear 5 shirts, 10 people can wear 10 shirts, the more people, the more shirts can be worn simultaneously]. Therefore it is harder to create a ruleset that will make them all happy. This leads to compromise, where most people are mostly happy. Obviously, that is not ideal.
So, their solution is to extend the trusted system by using governmental policies? Let's use the model i just explained to translate the expansion of the "trusted system": In order to extend your trusted system, you must get everyone to agree with each other, otherwise, you get people murdering you, robbing your bank, etc. But they aren't talking about crime that has some historical/legal/moral/logical precident, they are talking about legislating trust. That, my friends, is facism. Hilter didn't trust the jews. YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE TRUST. Under any system, diversity of thought is a nessesary requirement; without it, you are hiding yourself from the world; pulling the wool over your own eyes.
damn.. i have to go to class.. i wasn't quite done =]
It all costs money (as in millions of $) and given that you could never get enough monetary return from it, movies would simply not be made any more.
Perhaps, but look at television.. nearly all of the programs are paid for by advertising. The same goes for many 'free hompage' sites and other sites on the net.
If a hole is created, capitalistic ventures will find a way to fill that gap profitably, or bankrupt their sponsors trying.
Hmmm. Sounds interesting but, there are some fundamental flaws in the physiology of the model.
Electrolytes are important. Without proper numbers of K and Na and P, your nerves wouldn't work to well at all, hence you would have a hard time running, shooting, etc. (also, shouldn't they be working on developing world peace by 2025, not super-soldiers?)
The other most important performance indicator is the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles. Glycogen is ready-to-go fuel. I forget how much of this a typical person has at any given moment, but after several hours of hard work without refreshment, your blood sugar levels get low, as do glycogen levels, and you (as cyclists say) "bonk", ie. extreme glycogen depletion. You are pretty much useless after that point; severe performance degredation is a phrase that comes to mind.
Their patch is all well and good if it adresses these most basic issues (the article was rather brief and non-technical) or only one of them, ie. vitamins sorta implies electrolytes. However, the most severly performance limiting factor (as proven by trials in publications like Bicycling Magazine (they don't actually have it available online) is water. Performance has been shown to be affected in as little as an hour of physical activity without hydration. As the body's water content drops, blood gets thicker, resulting in poorer flow and consequently poorer delivery of oxygen and other needed chemicals to the muscles and brain.
So, in closing, yes, the patch is a good idea (but 25 years?!), but maybe a transdermal hydration system would be a bit of a better considering hydration is quicker to act and hampers performance certainly more than "vitamin" loss and probably more than electrolyte loss. Moreover, electrolytes could be intergrated into any hydration system, ie. gatorade.
I was under the impression that linux wouldn't run/work right with compaq PC's because of their large number of proprietary components. Proprietary stuff sucks.
I agree (for what it's worth) with Mekanix: leave the 0.0.1 updates to Freshmeat. I realize that the two websites aren't really related (they are just owned by the same company), but it would be nice to see some cooperation as that is what Open Source is all about...
The marketing people can attempt to circumvent pirating, but they will never succeed. The audio/video or whatever still has to be accessible to the hardware. I can record whatever I want simply because I have a sound card and a video card. I have the analoge signal!! It's really easy!
I can only hope for the day when everything is self-produced. Let big music/movies die a gruesome death.
Let me rephrase myself in terms a moron can understand:
DeCSS is simply a tool to watch DVD format movies on a machine running a non-windows operating system.
The proof for that assertion is that it is simple to pirate DVD's using any DVD player without using DeCSS.
My final point was that we need to stand behind Jon and try to attract as much attention as possible to the fact that Money-Grubbing Executives want to put a 16 year-old in jail for being an outstanding member of the Open Source community. Go fill out the petition!
Hahahaha!! Too bad everyone already has the DeCSS code. Not only that, but DVD's were being pirated the before DeCSS even came out. How you ask? It's really quite easy with a DVD player that has analoge outputs anda video capture card. These people don't seem to understand the fact that they already lost;
DVD's and everything else they ever release will always be pirated Since all we want is to watch their movies on our Linux box, it is imperative that we villanize these scapegoat-hungry purveyors of digital media. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell TIME magazine, tell anyone who will listen! A teenager's life is at stake.
I work in a biophysics lab that uses short-pulse lasers. here is part of a paper that talks about short pulses: ---- Infinitely short pulses of one particular wavelength would be ideal [for bio purposes]. However, from the Heisenburg uncertainty priciple (deltaE*deltaT > h/2) it is immediately clear that these cannot be obtained. ---- however, another part of the paper says: A completely different method was developed and applied to study ultrafast processes [in bio]. Pulses from a CPM laser were amplified, and then the light was chirped in an optical fiber. With the use of pulse compression ultrashort pulses of 6-12 femptoseconds were obtained. The ultashort pulses correspond to a broad specral range because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. ----- So, we can create ultrashort pulses, but encoding 100 million waveforms for a 20Tbit/s connection would take 100 million individual modulators to encode the signal.
There is a lot of evidence in the article to suggest a hoax or at least a scam, but after looking at the pictures at their site, I had to say "hmmmm."
There are many details that don't make sense in context to what I know:
The skull looks strikingly humanoid, especially the 'seams' (not the right word, but whatever) on the back of the skull where the pieces of skull grew together after birth. The mere presence of those 'seams' mean that the 'alien' was born in a mammilian way. Seems like life from another planet should be a little more original...
Humans can't breed with aliens. You don't believe me? Try having impregnating chimp - their genes are 99% identical to ours and it still doesn't work. Unless the 'aliens' engineered a special breed that could procreate with humans there is no way. This is a little stupid though, if they can create a compatible being, why not just clone humans in the lab? Why mess with humans at all if they have genetic (or equivalent) mastery?
While the article discussed genetic disorders as a cause of deformation, it did not explore other avenues of deformation: False Hellebore (Veratrum viride), when eaten by pregnant sheep causes the baby to be born with only one eye socket with both eyes in it! I was unable to find documentation on the web, but I read this (and saw a picture) doing research for a project of mine (don't ask:).
They don't seem to be getting much funding at all. It normally seems that fanatics jump all over this kind of thing. Why then, are they having trouble making money? A: they are really bad at communicating with sponsors OR B: the sponsors back out after getting some information not included in the webpage. It also seems strange that not one of the 'experts' they talked to wanted to have their name used anywhere.
Otherwise, i quite liked the site and the big hi-res pictures.
Hey! I think I just spotted an alien! Oh, wait, it's just my roommate, nevermind.
Once again those who seek to make lots of money are 'beaten' by those who love computing/coding. Once again, this has really pissed of the people who want our money.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here we are again, facing zealots. There is something a bit different about these zealots:
1. They are very smart 2. They suddenly changed their minds
As every programmer knows, there are always many ways to solve a problem, whether it be how to get your characters formatted correctly, or something much more complex, say AI. When you take a stance on something and unequivically argue its truth, you risk throwing out all the other answers. This can't be right, especially when working within the confines of an extremely complex system; you can't just use a catch-all and hold to it.
Some of the greatest minds on earth have labored on how to create an ideal system for people. A lot of them have failed, some of them pretty badly. There are several reasons for this:
A small group of people has the smallest number of irreconcileable differences. Their "response range" to life is somewhat limited, therefore it is easier to create a ruleset to keep everyone happy, because there are fewer alternatives to consider.
The larger the group of people gets, the more responses the group can have [if this isn't clear, here is an example: 5 people can wear 5 shirts, 10 people can wear 10 shirts, the more people, the more shirts can be worn simultaneously]. Therefore it is harder to create a ruleset that will make them all happy. This leads to compromise, where most people are mostly happy. Obviously, that is not ideal.
So, their solution is to extend the trusted system by using governmental policies? Let's use the model i just explained to translate the expansion of the "trusted system": In order to extend your trusted system, you must get everyone to agree with each other, otherwise, you get people murdering you, robbing your bank, etc. But they aren't talking about crime that has some historical/legal/moral/logical precident, they are talking about legislating trust. That, my friends, is facism. Hilter didn't trust the jews. YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE TRUST. Under any system, diversity of thought is a nessesary requirement; without it, you are hiding yourself from the world; pulling the wool over your own eyes.
damn.. i have to go to class.. i wasn't quite done =]
It all costs money (as in millions of $) and given that you could never get enough monetary return from it, movies would simply not be made any more.
Perhaps, but look at television.. nearly all of the programs are paid for by advertising. The same goes for many 'free hompage' sites and other sites on the net.
If a hole is created, capitalistic ventures will find a way to fill that gap profitably, or bankrupt their sponsors trying.
Hmmm. Sounds interesting but, there are some fundamental flaws in the physiology of the model.
Electrolytes are important. Without proper numbers of K and Na and P, your nerves wouldn't work to well at all, hence you would have a hard time running, shooting, etc. (also, shouldn't they be working on developing world peace by 2025, not super-soldiers?)
The other most important performance indicator is the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles. Glycogen is ready-to-go fuel. I forget how much of this a typical person has at any given moment, but after several hours of hard work without refreshment, your blood sugar levels get low, as do glycogen levels, and you (as cyclists say) "bonk", ie. extreme glycogen depletion. You are pretty much useless after that point; severe performance degredation is a phrase that comes to mind.
Their patch is all well and good if it adresses these most basic issues (the article was rather brief and non-technical) or only one of them, ie. vitamins sorta implies electrolytes. However, the most severly performance limiting factor (as proven by trials in publications like Bicycling Magazine (they don't actually have it available online) is water. Performance has been shown to be affected in as little as an hour of physical activity without hydration. As the body's water content drops, blood gets thicker, resulting in poorer flow and consequently poorer delivery of oxygen and other needed chemicals to the muscles and brain.
So, in closing, yes, the patch is a good idea (but 25 years?!), but maybe a transdermal hydration system would be a bit of a better considering hydration is quicker to act and hampers performance certainly more than "vitamin" loss and probably more than electrolyte loss. Moreover, electrolytes could be intergrated into any hydration system, ie. gatorade.
I was under the impression that linux wouldn't run/work right with compaq PC's because of their large number of proprietary components. Proprietary stuff sucks.
fine.. i changed it...
Hello!?!?!
aren't we supposed to be trying NOT to fund the MPAA's lawyers? heh.. besides.. Tux could have kicked those stupid broom's asses...
I agree (for what it's worth) with Mekanix: leave the 0.0.1 updates to Freshmeat. I realize that the two websites aren't really related (they are just owned by the same company), but it would be nice to see some cooperation as that is what Open Source is all about...
The marketing people can attempt to circumvent pirating, but they will never succeed. The audio/video or whatever still has to be accessible to the hardware. I can record whatever I want simply because I have a sound card and a video card. I have the analoge signal!! It's really easy!
I can only hope for the day when everything is self-produced. Let big music/movies die a gruesome death.
Let me rephrase myself in terms a moron can understand:
DeCSS is simply a tool to watch DVD format movies on a machine running a non-windows operating system.
The proof for that assertion is that it is simple to pirate DVD's using any DVD player without using DeCSS.
My final point was that we need to stand behind Jon and try to attract as much attention as possible to the fact that Money-Grubbing Executives want to put a 16 year-old in jail for being an outstanding member of the Open Source community. Go fill out the petition!
Hahahaha!!
Too bad everyone already has the DeCSS code. Not only that, but DVD's were being pirated the before DeCSS even came out. How you ask? It's really quite easy with a DVD player that has analoge outputs anda video capture card. These people don't seem to understand the fact that they already lost;
DVD's and everything else they ever release will always be pirated
Since all we want is to watch their movies on our Linux box, it is imperative that we villanize these scapegoat-hungry purveyors of digital media. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell TIME magazine, tell anyone who will listen! A teenager's life is at stake.
I work in a biophysics lab that uses short-pulse lasers.
here is part of a paper that talks about short pulses:
----
Infinitely short pulses of one particular wavelength would be ideal [for bio purposes]. However, from the Heisenburg uncertainty priciple (deltaE*deltaT > h/2) it is immediately clear that these cannot be obtained.
----
however, another part of the paper says:
A completely different method was developed and applied to study ultrafast processes [in bio]. Pulses from a CPM laser were amplified, and then the light was chirped in an optical fiber. With the use of pulse compression ultrashort pulses of 6-12 femptoseconds were obtained. The ultashort pulses correspond to a broad specral range because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
-----
So, we can create ultrashort pulses, but encoding 100 million waveforms for a 20Tbit/s connection would take 100 million individual modulators to encode the signal.
The java version is a little different than the version I remember playing.
Anyhow here is a link to an even different version.
There is a lot of evidence in the article to suggest a hoax or at least a scam, but after looking at the pictures at their site, I had to say "hmmmm."
There are many details that don't make sense in context to what I know:
The skull looks strikingly humanoid, especially the 'seams' (not the right word, but whatever) on the back of the skull where the pieces of skull grew together after birth. The mere presence of those 'seams' mean that the 'alien' was born in a mammilian way. Seems like life from another planet should be a little more original...
Humans can't breed with aliens. You don't believe me? Try having impregnating chimp - their genes are 99% identical to ours and it still doesn't work. Unless the 'aliens' engineered a special breed that could procreate with humans there is no way. This is a little stupid though, if they can create a compatible being, why not just clone humans in the lab? Why mess with humans at all if they have genetic (or equivalent) mastery?
While the article discussed genetic disorders as a cause of deformation, it did not explore other avenues of deformation: False Hellebore (Veratrum viride), when eaten by pregnant sheep causes the baby to be born with only one eye socket with both eyes in it! I was unable to find documentation on the web, but I read this (and saw a picture) doing research for a project of mine (don't ask:).
They don't seem to be getting much funding at all. It normally seems that fanatics jump all over this kind of thing. Why then, are they having trouble making money? A: they are really bad at communicating with sponsors OR B: the sponsors back out after getting some information not included in the webpage. It also seems strange that not one of the 'experts' they talked to wanted to have their name used anywhere.
Otherwise, i quite liked the site and the big hi-res pictures.
Hey! I think I just spotted an alien! Oh, wait, it's just my roommate, nevermind.
Once again those who seek to make lots of money are 'beaten' by those who love computing/coding. Once again, this has really pissed of the people who want our money.