Well, if you had twice the neurons of the average person and your were running at "double" clock speed compared to a normal person you'd probably have both a higher capacity of processing "per cycle" but you'd also be quicker than normal people but that wouldn't necessarily mean the world would seem to be "slow", if it's all you've ever experienced then you'd probably just think everyone around you was dimwitted and had poor reflexes...
Excuse me, but are you saying "Strong AI can never happen because it conflicts with my personal superstitions."? Because that sure is what I'm seeing when I read your post...
(btw, you presented what I suppose you could call an hypothesis, that somehow there is an immaterial "higher" part to human consciousness, now please give some supporting evidence which isn't either in an ancient collection of tribal stories or based upon interpretations of reality based on said collection of stories.)
By the same kind reasoning my local grocery store is "a market" and thus I can clearly take them to court if they won't allow me to sell my own competing products in their store.
IE6 is no longer actively developed, is two major versions behind the manufacturer's (MS) current offering and even MS wants it to just die already. Safari and Opera are both actively developed (latest stable release of Safari is 4.0.4 which was released a late 2009, Opera's latest stable release was also released in late 2009, both browsers have unstable/development versions as well).
When it comes to browsers there is more to "dead" than market share. A browser with stable or growing market share that is being actively developed is not dead, a browser (IE6) that is slowly creeping down from 5-10% to 0% while receiving no updates except for critical security updates and which its manufacturer wishes would just die already is a great example of a "dead" browser though.
...(and to those about to hit "Reply", a "fake-finger" stylus is completely useless for anything beyond "Ah wanna fingerpaint but mah coorduh'nachun sucks")...
Pretty much any business-class connection won't have that crap anyway, it's mainly used for residential connections (sometimes it's even instated thanks to the "think of the children" crowd demanding various silly restrictions on their own connections).
Well, "portable sketchpad" was what a lot of us were hoping for with the iPad but since it's stylus-less (and to those about to hit "Reply", a "fake-finger" stylus is completely useless for anything beyond "Ah wanna fingerpaint but mah coorduh'nachun sucks") it won't be of any use for that.
Actually, on OS X Photoshop has a much nicer UI than the Windows versions have had (I haven't used the Win version of Photoshop since CS so it may have changed), one of the things that always bothered me with the Win version was how it handled windows and toolbars, on the OS X version the default behaviour is non-MDI (free-floating image windows) and that if Photoshop isn't the active program the toolbars are hidden. As for the "traditional" GIMP UI, well it's worse than the "traditional" Windows UI for Photoshop so I fail to see how they could possibly make it worse by changing it...
Well, personally I have a contract from my ISP that describes their service as being "best effort" and makes no mention of blocking any specific websites, hosts or services, if the grandparent has a similar contract then why would he/she need an SLA? The SLA is generally used to guarantee that should your service go down the ISP will end up paying $$$ if it's not up again within n hours, the contract is where the dangerous "also we block things that are against our xtian morals" bits would go (or they'd state in the contract that they also take it upon themselves to block certain things and a full list can be found on their website, and so on...).
What if the intent is both to damage and cause those observing the damage to think? As in, not so much smashing something you don't like because you hate it but smash it in a way that you hope will make people think about how said thing affects something else? Artistically your purpose is still very much to destroy or damage something but with the hope that those viewing the destruction will have thoughts "created" in their heads, basically creativity by proxy where the proxy happens to be the destruction and subsequent observation of the destruction.
Er, no. The Scene never dealt in ASF, that was the realm of retarded IRC download channels.
Yet I encountered tons of releases from various smaller scene groups based in the US that were, surprise surprise, using ASF.
The Scene actually has adopted.mkv pretty late, h.264 720p/1080p HDTV rips in Matroska Contaners were around way before the first HD Scene releases appeared sometime early 2008. The oldest h.264 encoded.mkv that's still available on a huge HD Tracker is from 2005-12-10 and I know personally that I didn't have problems playing those files with mplayer on Linux in 2006. Come on, if you're trolling at least try to get your facts straight.
That's strange because my experience with early scene MKV releases was the exact opposite, and I'm still waiting for people in the scene to stop pulling the whole "woohoo we released it first (because we didn't bother checking if the encode wasn't broken and we can just release a -PROPER later anyway!)" thing.
Well, I've never really seen any good reason to use Matroska containers for anything so personally I use MPEG4 containers with h.264 for video and AAC for audio when ripping movies but it seems that for some reason Matroska has become the "scene standard" which means you can expect it to stay around until it's painfully obsolete (kind of like ASF which was sort of a "scene standard" for those stuck on modem connections for way too long, I'm sure I'm not the only european who remembers americans on modems arguing that 200 MiB ASF files for entire movies were "good enough" even though they were so crappy that most of them would barely play in the video players of the day).
(And yeah, "the scene" seemed to adopt MKV before the big name media players (VLC and mplayer) had decent support for the container format which resulted in lots of people being extremely frustrated and the scenesters telling them to "run Windows and download <SomeGiantCodecPack> and use Media Player Classic, n00b!".)
It probably doesn't help that any touchscreen placed somewhere where the general public has access to it will be subjected to vandalism and stupidity in the form of people pouring liquids on it, banging on it and (in the case of stupidity) trying to jab it really really hard without checking if it's possible to, you know, just touch it lightly.
As for the parent's comment about cash registers I'm willing to bet quite a few coworkers took out their frustrations with customers, the cash registers themselves and management on the cash registers (when I worked in tech support I had a co-worker who went through several mice per month since he would vent his anger by hitting his mouse with a closed fist, doesn't take long for a mouse to fall apart under those conditions).
The only reason we send XHTML as text/html at all is because a certain browser doesn't understand application/xml+xhtml and some turnkey firewall boxes insist on every application/whatever MIME-type being "teh ewul exxxe filez of pr0n and virooseses!!1".
As for XHTML being stricter than HTML 4, that's a good thing IMO.
Of course, most of us barely bother to support IE6 (and that's mostly a "well, let's make sure they can at least view the site" effort) because pretty much any browsers of that era had serious issues with rendering anything properly.
At work I'm in charge of a website which has a 500+ line file called "ie6screen.css", the entire purpose of this file is to make IE6 behave somewhat properly. And this isn't even counting all the CSS in the regular stylesheets (for all browsers) that's been tweaked and messed with just so it won't break IE6/7 in some strange way.
The main impediment to trouble-free XHTML/HTML5 + CSS development is IE in general and IE6 more specifically. No sane web developer bothers testing in IE5.x anymore much like you won't find anyone testing their site in NS4.x or that it renders fine in 640x480, hell most developers have finally managed to give up on 800x600 as well and are targeting 1024x768 and above (really, if your desktop machine or netbook isn't capable of 1024 pixels horizontally it's time to take the plunge and leave the mid-90s already).
If formal documents are written according to a certain set of rules while the average teenager write as he or she sees fit then it is clear that the average teenager is the one who is wrong. Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable. When you add numerous typos due to pure laziness ("wat gsu men u odn unsterna?!! lrn 2 raeed ckocglnbi faget!!1") the end result is not only unreadable but also completely without any kind of consistency, learning how one person communicates in "txt speek" rarely aides in the understanding of "txt speek" written by another individual.
/Mikael
Re:The whole secrecy only adds to the resistance
on
Making Sense of ACTA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So what? Its on the front page of a half-dead geek website every other day. How often is it mentioned on the cover of a
national paper? How often is it mentioned on a news channel on TV? What percentage of the population has even heard of
ACTA? Maybe 5%? How many care? 1%?
Well, here in Sweden it's been mentioned in the national media, but then we also have Pirate party representatives in the EU parliament...
I (and the book I paraphrased) wasn't talking about "humanity defeats the invaders" but rather "humanity turns out to be the bloodthirsty invaders once they acquire the technology necessary for this". And there are plenty of "alien invasion" sci-fi books out there.
Why am I even replying to an AC that's (purposefully?) misinterpreting my post?
Of course, it's entirely possible that we'll end up either being the invading force or turning a would-be invader into the conquered one. One of my favorite sc-fi themes is that humanity is essentially the real-life equivalent of a cross between the borg, the klingons and the romulans. I can't remember the exact wording (or where I read it) but in some sci-fi where earth was "invaded" there was a line that read something like "...unfortunately for them it turned out that man was very gifted when it came to killing things.". Tying in to this idea is the idea that the only reason we haven't heard from any other civilizations is because they're actively avoiding us out of fear of what would happen should we figure out FTL travel (and that there are other planets to colonize).
(And the tablet mouse is/hideous/. Thanks for stating that at least someone actually uses those. I'd figured none.)
The tablet mice are mostly useful when coding or doing other keyboard-heavy input since you don't have to devote any attention to the orientation of the mouse since the orientation of the tablet relative to the keyboard tends to stay the same, at first it felt a bit weird for me but once I got used to it regular mice started to feel troublesome as I became aware of the "orientation phase" every time I'd reach for the mouse when using a regular mouse.
Somehow having the entire surface be pressure sensitive seems like a bad idea unless you want to start practicing hand acrobatics to avoid touching the surface of the device with your hand while drawing or writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you had twice the neurons of the average person and your were running at "double" clock speed compared to a normal person you'd probably have both a higher capacity of processing "per cycle" but you'd also be quicker than normal people but that wouldn't necessarily mean the world would seem to be "slow", if it's all you've ever experienced then you'd probably just think everyone around you was dimwitted and had poor reflexes...
/Mikael
Excuse me, but are you saying "Strong AI can never happen because it conflicts with my personal superstitions."? Because that sure is what I'm seeing when I read your post...
(btw, you presented what I suppose you could call an hypothesis, that somehow there is an immaterial "higher" part to human consciousness, now please give some supporting evidence which isn't either in an ancient collection of tribal stories or based upon interpretations of reality based on said collection of stories.)
/Mikael
What laws exist that prohibit you from designing, building and selling your own cellphone complete with an appstore service?
/Mikael
By the same kind reasoning my local grocery store is "a market" and thus I can clearly take them to court if they won't allow me to sell my own competing products in their store.
/Mikael
IE6 is no longer actively developed, is two major versions behind the manufacturer's (MS) current offering and even MS wants it to just die already. Safari and Opera are both actively developed (latest stable release of Safari is 4.0.4 which was released a late 2009, Opera's latest stable release was also released in late 2009, both browsers have unstable/development versions as well).
When it comes to browsers there is more to "dead" than market share. A browser with stable or growing market share that is being actively developed is not dead, a browser (IE6) that is slowly creeping down from 5-10% to 0% while receiving no updates except for critical security updates and which its manufacturer wishes would just die already is a great example of a "dead" browser though.
/Mikael
...(and to those about to hit "Reply", a "fake-finger" stylus is completely useless for anything beyond "Ah wanna fingerpaint but mah coorduh'nachun sucks")...
Pretty much any business-class connection won't have that crap anyway, it's mainly used for residential connections (sometimes it's even instated thanks to the "think of the children" crowd demanding various silly restrictions on their own connections).
/Mikael
Well, "portable sketchpad" was what a lot of us were hoping for with the iPad but since it's stylus-less (and to those about to hit "Reply", a "fake-finger" stylus is completely useless for anything beyond "Ah wanna fingerpaint but mah coorduh'nachun sucks") it won't be of any use for that.
/Mikael
Actually, on OS X Photoshop has a much nicer UI than the Windows versions have had (I haven't used the Win version of Photoshop since CS so it may have changed), one of the things that always bothered me with the Win version was how it handled windows and toolbars, on the OS X version the default behaviour is non-MDI (free-floating image windows) and that if Photoshop isn't the active program the toolbars are hidden. As for the "traditional" GIMP UI, well it's worse than the "traditional" Windows UI for Photoshop so I fail to see how they could possibly make it worse by changing it...
/Mikael
Well, personally I have a contract from my ISP that describes their service as being "best effort" and makes no mention of blocking any specific websites, hosts or services, if the grandparent has a similar contract then why would he/she need an SLA? The SLA is generally used to guarantee that should your service go down the ISP will end up paying $$$ if it's not up again within n hours, the contract is where the dangerous "also we block things that are against our xtian morals" bits would go (or they'd state in the contract that they also take it upon themselves to block certain things and a full list can be found on their website, and so on...).
/Mikael
The word you are looking for is "permit".
Also, laws that dictate property rights do not dictate whether or not an action, lawful or not, is artistic.
/Mikael
What if the intent is both to damage and cause those observing the damage to think? As in, not so much smashing something you don't like because you hate it but smash it in a way that you hope will make people think about how said thing affects something else? Artistically your purpose is still very much to destroy or damage something but with the hope that those viewing the destruction will have thoughts "created" in their heads, basically creativity by proxy where the proxy happens to be the destruction and subsequent observation of the destruction.
/Mikael
Er, no. The Scene never dealt in ASF, that was the realm of retarded IRC download channels.
Yet I encountered tons of releases from various smaller scene groups based in the US that were, surprise surprise, using ASF.
The Scene actually has adopted .mkv pretty late, h.264 720p/1080p HDTV rips in Matroska Contaners were around way before the first HD Scene releases appeared sometime early 2008. The oldest h.264 encoded .mkv that's still available on a huge HD Tracker is from 2005-12-10 and I know personally that I didn't have problems playing those files with mplayer on Linux in 2006. Come on, if you're trolling at least try to get your facts straight.
That's strange because my experience with early scene MKV releases was the exact opposite, and I'm still waiting for people in the scene to stop pulling the whole "woohoo we released it first (because we didn't bother checking if the encode wasn't broken and we can just release a -PROPER later anyway!)" thing.
/Mikael
Well, I've never really seen any good reason to use Matroska containers for anything so personally I use MPEG4 containers with h.264 for video and AAC for audio when ripping movies but it seems that for some reason Matroska has become the "scene standard" which means you can expect it to stay around until it's painfully obsolete (kind of like ASF which was sort of a "scene standard" for those stuck on modem connections for way too long, I'm sure I'm not the only european who remembers americans on modems arguing that 200 MiB ASF files for entire movies were "good enough" even though they were so crappy that most of them would barely play in the video players of the day).
(And yeah, "the scene" seemed to adopt MKV before the big name media players (VLC and mplayer) had decent support for the container format which resulted in lots of people being extremely frustrated and the scenesters telling them to "run Windows and download <SomeGiantCodecPack> and use Media Player Classic, n00b!".)
/Mikael
It probably doesn't help that any touchscreen placed somewhere where the general public has access to it will be subjected to vandalism and stupidity in the form of people pouring liquids on it, banging on it and (in the case of stupidity) trying to jab it really really hard without checking if it's possible to, you know, just touch it lightly.
As for the parent's comment about cash registers I'm willing to bet quite a few coworkers took out their frustrations with customers, the cash registers themselves and management on the cash registers (when I worked in tech support I had a co-worker who went through several mice per month since he would vent his anger by hitting his mouse with a closed fist, doesn't take long for a mouse to fall apart under those conditions).
/Mikael
The only reason we send XHTML as text/html at all is because a certain browser doesn't understand application/xml+xhtml and some turnkey firewall boxes insist on every application/whatever MIME-type being "teh ewul exxxe filez of pr0n and virooseses!!1".
As for XHTML being stricter than HTML 4, that's a good thing IMO.
/Mikael
Of course, most of us barely bother to support IE6 (and that's mostly a "well, let's make sure they can at least view the site" effort) because pretty much any browsers of that era had serious issues with rendering anything properly.
At work I'm in charge of a website which has a 500+ line file called "ie6screen.css", the entire purpose of this file is to make IE6 behave somewhat properly. And this isn't even counting all the CSS in the regular stylesheets (for all browsers) that's been tweaked and messed with just so it won't break IE6/7 in some strange way.
The main impediment to trouble-free XHTML/HTML5 + CSS development is IE in general and IE6 more specifically. No sane web developer bothers testing in IE5.x anymore much like you won't find anyone testing their site in NS4.x or that it renders fine in 640x480, hell most developers have finally managed to give up on 800x600 as well and are targeting 1024x768 and above (really, if your desktop machine or netbook isn't capable of 1024 pixels horizontally it's time to take the plunge and leave the mid-90s already).
/Mikael
If formal documents are written according to a certain set of rules while the average teenager write as he or she sees fit then it is clear that the average teenager is the one who is wrong. Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable. When you add numerous typos due to pure laziness ("wat gsu men u odn unsterna?!! lrn 2 raeed ckocglnbi faget!!1") the end result is not only unreadable but also completely without any kind of consistency, learning how one person communicates in "txt speek" rarely aides in the understanding of "txt speek" written by another individual.
/Mikael
So what? Its on the front page of a half-dead geek website every other day. How often is it mentioned on the cover of a national paper? How often is it mentioned on a news channel on TV? What percentage of the population has even heard of ACTA? Maybe 5%? How many care? 1%?
Well, here in Sweden it's been mentioned in the national media, but then we also have Pirate party representatives in the EU parliament...
/Mikael
I (and the book I paraphrased) wasn't talking about "humanity defeats the invaders" but rather "humanity turns out to be the bloodthirsty invaders once they acquire the technology necessary for this". And there are plenty of "alien invasion" sci-fi books out there.
Why am I even replying to an AC that's (purposefully?) misinterpreting my post?
/Mikael
Of course, it's entirely possible that we'll end up either being the invading force or turning a would-be invader into the conquered one. One of my favorite sc-fi themes is that humanity is essentially the real-life equivalent of a cross between the borg, the klingons and the romulans. I can't remember the exact wording (or where I read it) but in some sci-fi where earth was "invaded" there was a line that read something like "...unfortunately for them it turned out that man was very gifted when it came to killing things.". Tying in to this idea is the idea that the only reason we haven't heard from any other civilizations is because they're actively avoiding us out of fear of what would happen should we figure out FTL travel (and that there are other planets to colonize).
/Mikael
That was my first thought as well, somehow I doubt this will be used by the police or military...
/Mikael
(And the tablet mouse is /hideous/. Thanks for stating that at least someone actually uses those. I'd figured none.)
The tablet mice are mostly useful when coding or doing other keyboard-heavy input since you don't have to devote any attention to the orientation of the mouse since the orientation of the tablet relative to the keyboard tends to stay the same, at first it felt a bit weird for me but once I got used to it regular mice started to feel troublesome as I became aware of the "orientation phase" every time I'd reach for the mouse when using a regular mouse.
/Mikael
Somehow having the entire surface be pressure sensitive seems like a bad idea unless you want to start practicing hand acrobatics to avoid touching the surface of the device with your hand while drawing or writing.
/Mikael
"...they can charge so much for the Cintiq...", somehow I missed a word when typing.