> amounts to human experimentation *despite* the > defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing > this to a human being is in my eyes not any better > than the medical experiments conducted by the > Nazis.
and it's somehow worse than doing it to other animals? What makes humans so special that we should be exempt from any kind of experimentation? We generally know more about ourselves than we do any other species on the planet, seems like we'd be the best candidates.
Not that I'm suggesting we open the floodgates, I'm being rhetorical. But saying it's a bad idea just because the Nazi did it doesn't help either.
> not even an inkling, of a suitable Linux-based > desktop operating system. OS X, on the other hand, > just keeps getting better,
I would certainly hope so, since you know, OS X isn't free.
Not that cost is a surefire gauge of quality, but considering most people who use linux haven't paid for anything more than media (ie, cd's) I'd say overall it's doing pretty darn well in what it's accomplished.
If OS X had been introduced to the world the same way Linux had been.. would it have as much to brag about?
> Unfortunately, none of this shrink-wrap and > click-through stuff is a situation where you > really have any power or any ability to negotiate.
Yes we do.. just do what everyone else does. Ignore it.;)
EULA's are almost never enforced, because for the most part they're unenforcable. They mostly serve as CYA tactics in case problems ever do come up. Why do you think XP forces users to validate? Because Microsoft knows that EULA's are easily ignored and broken and they're powerless to stop it.
This stuff is only used when someone is actually going to court.. for stealing the software. And I'd wager you hardly need a EULA to realize that stealing is bad..
> Maybe they should have embraced more platforms > than just Windows. Every time there has been a > story on/. about Liquid Audio, many people bitch > about linux or mac support.
not to derail your totally valid and warranted rant here (supporting all platforms really shouldn't be as difficult as most companies make it sound), but you can HARDLY attribute the failure of a company to what platforms it supports.
No matter what you would like to SEE happen, windows is by far the most used platform in the world. Remember the old saying, 'you can never lose by buying blue'? The same holds, for the most part, with windows. You can never go wrong by picking windows.
If a company does fail, it's going to be due to a flawed business model, a poor product, whatever.
But at this point in time, failing to support mac or linux is not going to be a driving point in a company failing.
> For God's sake, the question titles are bigger > than the headline!
He addressed this in one of the questions, not directly but he kind of hinted at it: This is a problem with browser software, NOT the XHTML he submitted.
Your browser chose to draw that headline in a huge 72pt typeface, his XHTML didn't.
This reflects an inherent weakness in web browsers that's been around since netscape 1.1N.. users to not have sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display. It's been getting worse ever since, as web designers resort to more and more html hacks to try and strike a balance between pleasant design and varying browsers.
The original goal of HTML was to be a document "suggestion" format. Meaning a web page designer marked up his document in a way that a piece of client software could parse it, and order the final results in a way the reader wanted it. Since then, HTML has become more of a postscript type thing, where it's being forced to rigidly define what the user sees.
Obviously you want to ASK if it's okay to borrow some company bandwidth, and I have no pity for the guy that starts using it without asking. If they give the go-ahead however, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Some companies may give you free coffee, others may give you an ethernet port on a switch.. consider it a perk.
My website has been hosted, for free, for almost 3 years now on a machine that lives in exactly this situation. It exists with the full knowledge of the superiors, and the word is as long as the machine complies with company security policy, it can continue to exist.
he's been like that for years. I don't consider myself a shatner fan and I don't put effort into following him around, but he IS a pretty big name so stories with him in it do pop up quite often.
I wouldn't say he treats everything as a joke, but rather he's got an odd mix of humility and arrogance that makes everything he says come out like it did in the above interview.
qualities the world could use more of, people who don't take themselves too seriously but also feel free to be honest about their place and station in life.
> This is why adults like to play it: their > imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living > in a world without rules and regulations.
oh come on now. I'm as big a cynic as anyone, and I still wouldn't come out saying something like this.
I think the real lure to the "computerized dollhouse" is purely caused by entertaining our eyes. A real dollhouse that could boast the number of building options that the Sims has could cost a thousand dollars by itself, and that's not even getting into all the goodies the expansions offer. The sims also requires far less real estate; one or two gigs on a hard drive as opposed to half your bedroom.
A little more subtly, the sims feeds an innate human urge to tinker around with stuff they otherwise couldn't. Want to see what happens when you put a slob and a neat freak into a house together? The sims lets you see what it's like. Want to see what happens when you pick fights with everyone you meet? The sims lets you watch it happen.
Think of the sims as more of an human interaction LEGO system. They give you hundreds of pieces to do with as you will, tinkering for as long as it suits your fancy.
I'm not a sims fan myself, but at least I can see it offers more than a cynical photograph of what goes on in the average adult's mind.
> The results show that the bot is not really that > intelligent, and relies more on human input."
so do we have any proof that if a human baby is given no "input", they will grow up to be intelligent?
Seems like someone's expecting too much out of a computer program. You can't just go into it expecting intelligence to sprout into existence. It's something that takes time to develop.
The article states that next August, when mars gets the closest to it has ever been, it will be 34.6 million miles away from earth. The article later goes on to say that in 1988, Mars went through a similar (though less extreme) event that closed the distance to earth to 36.5 million miles.
Now I know the 2 million miles is still a huge distance when you think about it, but that's barely a 6% difference. All the numbers about the planet being 6 times larger or 85 times brighter, when you get down to it, won't be perceptible by the average joe unless he's shown two pictures pointing out the difference.
Unless mars starts to compete with the moon for being the brightest object in the sky, who really cares beyond some numbers geek being impressed at winning a celestial lottery?;)
Re:But what about...?
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> 1) how to implement other operation: OR, NOT,
well, following on the system he started you can probably get the effect of OR or NOT by altering how the "computer" reacts to the outputs, using the existing gate.
You could make an OR gate by wiring the two outputs together. Get water in either jet, and you get a 1. Put water in both jets and you get a 1. Put no water in either jet, you get a 0.
A NOT is just as simple, except you need a constant jet feeding through the gate. No water in the other jet means a 0 converts to a 1, water in both jets dumps into waste and creates a 0.
So there you have it.. by tweaking he inputs/outputs of the single existing gate you can create pretty much any conditional you desire.
next week i'll be releasing a distributed computing screensaver for all major operating systems to try and figure it out, we're just putting some finishing touches on the code.
If US was somehow ranked number 1 in the list, would that motivate the media at ALL to represent stories in a fair and unbiased perspective? Or would they continue on with their trend of digging up dirt on anyone and everyone in the public eye, all in the name of increasing ratings?
But instead of course, they'd dig up dirt on more secretive events.
It'd be like complaining about a carton of sour milk when one has a lactose intolerance..
It's not the eden of windows managers, but what it DOES offer is the ability to manage every window on your desktop via the keyboard, it maximizes the amount of your desktop you get to use for working, yet still retains the ability to keep the mouse useful. It also offers rudimentary window managing features so those odd applications that refuse to cooperate can still be used (such as gimp).
I use it full time these days, it took me a couple days to get into the rhythm but now, considering using anything else is unthinkable.
I tried ratpoison, liked the philosophy, but it seemed to me it took the keyboard driven GUI philosophy way too far to be useful for an X session.
> Here at home it's taken about 4 Billion years for > the technology to evolve allowing for an > intelligent search for extraterrestrial life. If > the Galaxy is 14 billion years old then older > technologies should have at least sparsely spread > over the Galaxy by now.
If that's the case, it may simply be that other civilizations in the galaxy/universe haven't been around long enough to be sending signals for us to recieve. Consider that about 10 billion years after the universe came into being, planets capable of supporting life began to appear, plus or minus one billion years.
If humans are average, and our solar system is average, and you consider how long earth has been a source of radio emissions (maybe a hundred years?), in the scheme of things we've barely been making noise for a fraction of a second.
Granted the distance between stars and the time it takes for radio waves to go between them, if all forms of life all across the galaxy started broadcasting radio emissions at the same time we did, radio signals may not even start to cross earth's path for another ten thousand years (the milky way is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter). If a civilization got a one billion year jump start on us, either they came and went while we were still evolving a vertebrae, or they never got past inventing fire, or we already missed their radio signals. Same story if they have a five hundred million year jump, or a 250 million years, or even 1 million years. If we were the first intelligent beings in the galaxy, it could be millions of years before anyone starts broadcasting anything.
Conclusion being, given how short a period we've been gathering data from space, to suggest there's nothing out there because we haven't found it is a logical fallacy. The galaxy just isn't old enough, and we don't have enough of a data set, to make any conclusions.
> And do people really want to argue that the > majority of game CDs burned are for legitimate > reasons ?
and this is an argument defending stronger copying protections in what way?
Whether or not the copies are used for legitemete purposes aren't at issue here, that's not something you, I, or the media outlets have a right to make a judgement on until something illegal actually happens.
What's at issue is that consumers DO have the right to make a backup copy of any media they own, and apparently the manufacturers are trying to prevent that.
The legality of pirating something or duplicating it are two totally seperate topics.
Too bad for them. I refuse to buy console systems, so that means when games stop coming out for my PC, I stop playing games. That = lost revenue for them. For me, it means I'm not whittling my life away playing said games anymore, which in the long run is probably better for me.
> You will also want to broadcast at 50k to 100k > watts to cover a decent area.
I think you can squeak by with a bit less than that.
There's a smaller station in the chicago area that runs at 1000 watts, and the signal can still be picked up about 40 miles out from the city. Yes the signal is prone to a decent amount of static, but recall that the original poster implied this was for a small town type setting.
Wish I could be more specific but I read about this in an article somewhere recently, and can't for the life of me find it again.
> that simply selling tunes direct to the customer > on a website could put the power back where it > belongs - in the hands of the people who have the > talent.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your sentiment, but the issue with doing things like this revolves around promotion.
Modern radio stations and recording labels have a symbiotic reliance on each other; label needs to pimp new album to drive sales, radio needs to play new songs to get more listeners to increase ad dollars.
Most radio stations can't afford big risks giving self-produced bands the airtime they need to reach a critical mass (ie, sell a million albums).
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of bands out there producing some really great music, and a lot of them probably have websites that let you download music. But 90% of the music listening world will never find them because there's no advocacy network in place.
Why? Because the promotion system is in effect already owned by the big recording labels. And it won't change until the radio corporations see that there is a value in playing independent artists.
I fail to see how blowing up the image and putting me a lot closer to it is going to make it any easier to watch anakin explain to the senator how her skin isn't like sand.
I have a feeling it'd have the opposite effect.
Now maybe if they just took the last 20 minutes of the movie and put it on replay for an hour and half they'd be on to something.
Read the article, and he's changed his opinion three times in roughly as many months.
I mean, duh. Of COURSE the trading of mp3's is going to effect the sale of CD's. The only question that remains is to gauge what percentage the decline in sales mp3's are responsible for.. which appears to be precisely the problem he's grappling with.
Is it 0.0000001%, or 10%, or 50%?
He said it best himself:
"It is certainly not conclusive, by any means, that there's real damage going on from MP3s. [...] We're seeing a medium impact, which still could be explained by other things -- but we can't discount the MP3 possibility."
> We're past the point where we should be teaching > ourselves elaborate new routines to accommodate > new technologies.
You learned to read and write as a child, didn't you? It's simply a fact of life that to communicate you have to learn things that aren't neccessarily intuitive.
Who's to say that using chords is any more complicated than a standard 101 key board?
Slashdot Mirror
> amounts to human experimentation *despite* the
> defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing
> this to a human being is in my eyes not any better
> than the medical experiments conducted by the
> Nazis.
and it's somehow worse than doing it to other animals? What makes humans so special that we should be exempt from any kind of experimentation? We generally know more about ourselves than we do any other species on the planet, seems like we'd be the best candidates.
Not that I'm suggesting we open the floodgates, I'm being rhetorical. But saying it's a bad idea just because the Nazi did it doesn't help either.
> not even an inkling, of a suitable Linux-based
> desktop operating system. OS X, on the other hand,
> just keeps getting better,
I would certainly hope so, since you know, OS X isn't free.
Not that cost is a surefire gauge of quality, but considering most people who use linux haven't paid for anything more than media (ie, cd's) I'd say overall it's doing pretty darn well in what it's accomplished.
If OS X had been introduced to the world the same way Linux had been.. would it have as much to brag about?
> Unfortunately, none of this shrink-wrap and
;)
> click-through stuff is a situation where you
> really have any power or any ability to negotiate.
Yes we do.. just do what everyone else does. Ignore it.
EULA's are almost never enforced, because for the most part they're unenforcable. They mostly serve as CYA tactics in case problems ever do come up. Why do you think XP forces users to validate? Because Microsoft knows that EULA's are easily ignored and broken and they're powerless to stop it.
This stuff is only used when someone is actually going to court.. for stealing the software. And I'd wager you hardly need a EULA to realize that stealing is bad..
> Maybe they should have embraced more platforms /. about Liquid Audio, many people bitch
> than just Windows. Every time there has been a
> story on
> about linux or mac support.
not to derail your totally valid and warranted rant here (supporting all platforms really shouldn't be as difficult as most companies make it sound), but you can HARDLY attribute the failure of a company to what platforms it supports.
No matter what you would like to SEE happen, windows is by far the most used platform in the world. Remember the old saying, 'you can never lose by buying blue'? The same holds, for the most part, with windows. You can never go wrong by picking windows.
If a company does fail, it's going to be due to a flawed business model, a poor product, whatever.
But at this point in time, failing to support mac or linux is not going to be a driving point in a company failing.
> For God's sake, the question titles are bigger
> than the headline!
He addressed this in one of the questions, not directly but he kind of hinted at it: This is a problem with browser software, NOT the XHTML he submitted.
Your browser chose to draw that headline in a huge 72pt typeface, his XHTML didn't.
This reflects an inherent weakness in web browsers that's been around since netscape 1.1N.. users to not have sufficient control over the rendering of pages to achieve a visually pleasing display. It's been getting worse ever since, as web designers resort to more and more html hacks to try and strike a balance between pleasant design and varying browsers.
The original goal of HTML was to be a document "suggestion" format. Meaning a web page designer marked up his document in a way that a piece of client software could parse it, and order the final results in a way the reader wanted it. Since then, HTML has become more of a postscript type thing, where it's being forced to rigidly define what the user sees.
i was gonna mod bomb you for actually defending microsoft, but then I made this post and it took away the moderate option. :(
since i lack the capacity to assault you with witty verbal abuse, I just wanna let you know I'm REALLY REALLY MAD instead.
-- a typical slashdot moderator
> a behavior which can justify their termination
not all employers are sour pusses, you know.
Obviously you want to ASK if it's okay to borrow some company bandwidth, and I have no pity for the guy that starts using it without asking. If they give the go-ahead however, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Some companies may give you free coffee, others may give you an ethernet port on a switch.. consider it a perk.
My website has been hosted, for free, for almost 3 years now on a machine that lives in exactly this situation. It exists with the full knowledge of the superiors, and the word is as long as the machine complies with company security policy, it can continue to exist.
> He seemed to treat this whole thing as a joke.
he's been like that for years. I don't consider myself a shatner fan and I don't put effort into following him around, but he IS a pretty big name so stories with him in it do pop up quite often.
I wouldn't say he treats everything as a joke, but rather he's got an odd mix of humility and arrogance that makes everything he says come out like it did in the above interview.
qualities the world could use more of, people who don't take themselves too seriously but also feel free to be honest about their place and station in life.
> Did I miss any?
Just the one about people spending time itemizing all possible comment types.
> This is why adults like to play it: their
> imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living
> in a world without rules and regulations.
oh come on now. I'm as big a cynic as anyone, and I still wouldn't come out saying something like this.
I think the real lure to the "computerized dollhouse" is purely caused by entertaining our eyes. A real dollhouse that could boast the number of building options that the Sims has could cost a thousand dollars by itself, and that's not even getting into all the goodies the expansions offer. The sims also requires far less real estate; one or two gigs on a hard drive as opposed to half your bedroom.
A little more subtly, the sims feeds an innate human urge to tinker around with stuff they otherwise couldn't. Want to see what happens when you put a slob and a neat freak into a house together? The sims lets you see what it's like. Want to see what happens when you pick fights with everyone you meet? The sims lets you watch it happen.
Think of the sims as more of an human interaction LEGO system. They give you hundreds of pieces to do with as you will, tinkering for as long as it suits your fancy.
I'm not a sims fan myself, but at least I can see it offers more than a cynical photograph of what goes on in the average adult's mind.
> The results show that the bot is not really that
> intelligent, and relies more on human input."
so do we have any proof that if a human baby is given no "input", they will grow up to be intelligent?
Seems like someone's expecting too much out of a computer program. You can't just go into it expecting intelligence to sprout into existence. It's something that takes time to develop.
The article states that next August, when mars gets the closest to it has ever been, it will be 34.6 million miles away from earth. The article later goes on to say that in 1988, Mars went through a similar (though less extreme) event that closed the distance to earth to 36.5 million miles.
;)
Now I know the 2 million miles is still a huge distance when you think about it, but that's barely a 6% difference. All the numbers about the planet being 6 times larger or 85 times brighter, when you get down to it, won't be perceptible by the average joe unless he's shown two pictures pointing out the difference.
Unless mars starts to compete with the moon for being the brightest object in the sky, who really cares beyond some numbers geek being impressed at winning a celestial lottery?
> 1) how to implement other operation: OR, NOT,
well, following on the system he started you can probably get the effect of OR or NOT by altering how the "computer" reacts to the outputs, using the existing gate.
You could make an OR gate by wiring the two outputs together. Get water in either jet, and you get a 1. Put water in both jets and you get a 1. Put no water in either jet, you get a 0.
A NOT is just as simple, except you need a constant jet feeding through the gate. No water in the other jet means a 0 converts to a 1, water in both jets dumps into waste and creates a 0.
So there you have it.. by tweaking he inputs/outputs of the single existing gate you can create pretty much any conditional you desire.
next week i'll be releasing a distributed computing screensaver for all major operating systems to try and figure it out, we're just putting some finishing touches on the code.
we WILL know.
If US was somehow ranked number 1 in the list, would that motivate the media at ALL to represent stories in a fair and unbiased perspective? Or would they continue on with their trend of digging up dirt on anyone and everyone in the public eye, all in the name of increasing ratings?
But instead of course, they'd dig up dirt on more secretive events.
It'd be like complaining about a carton of sour milk when one has a lactose intolerance..
It's not the eden of windows managers, but what it DOES offer is the ability to manage every window on your desktop via the keyboard, it maximizes the amount of your desktop you get to use for working, yet still retains the ability to keep the mouse useful. It also offers rudimentary window managing features so those odd applications that refuse to cooperate can still be used (such as gimp).
I use it full time these days, it took me a couple days to get into the rhythm but now, considering using anything else is unthinkable.
I tried ratpoison, liked the philosophy, but it seemed to me it took the keyboard driven GUI philosophy way too far to be useful for an X session.
> Here at home it's taken about 4 Billion years for
> the technology to evolve allowing for an
> intelligent search for extraterrestrial life. If
> the Galaxy is 14 billion years old then older
> technologies should have at least sparsely spread
> over the Galaxy by now.
If that's the case, it may simply be that other civilizations in the galaxy/universe haven't been around long enough to be sending signals for us to recieve. Consider that about 10 billion years after the universe came into being, planets capable of supporting life began to appear, plus or minus one billion years.
If humans are average, and our solar system is average, and you consider how long earth has been a source of radio emissions (maybe a hundred years?), in the scheme of things we've barely been making noise for a fraction of a second.
Granted the distance between stars and the time it takes for radio waves to go between them, if all forms of life all across the galaxy started broadcasting radio emissions at the same time we did, radio signals may not even start to cross earth's path for another ten thousand years (the milky way is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter). If a civilization got a one billion year jump start on us, either they came and went while we were still evolving a vertebrae, or they never got past inventing fire, or we already missed their radio signals. Same story if they have a five hundred million year jump, or a 250 million years, or even 1 million years. If we were the first intelligent beings in the galaxy, it could be millions of years before anyone starts broadcasting anything.
Conclusion being, given how short a period we've been gathering data from space, to suggest there's nothing out there because we haven't found it is a logical fallacy. The galaxy just isn't old enough, and we don't have enough of a data set, to make any conclusions.
> And do people really want to argue that the
> majority of game CDs burned are for legitimate
> reasons ?
and this is an argument defending stronger copying protections in what way?
Whether or not the copies are used for legitemete purposes aren't at issue here, that's not something you, I, or the media outlets have a right to make a judgement on until something illegal actually happens.
What's at issue is that consumers DO have the right to make a backup copy of any media they own, and apparently the manufacturers are trying to prevent that.
The legality of pirating something or duplicating it are two totally seperate topics.
> Contribute to whoever's running against them. Even $20 will be appreciated.
;)
So what if his opponent is a scumbag of equal quality, but in different areas?
Gotta love this system us americans have created for ourselves, when election time means little more than deciding the lesser of the two evils.
Would be nice if elected officials were required to poll/run votes in their home region and only support what his people tell him to support.
Too bad for them. I refuse to buy console systems, so that means when games stop coming out for my PC, I stop playing games. That = lost revenue for them. For me, it means I'm not whittling my life away playing said games anymore, which in the long run is probably better for me.
Or perhaps more accuratley, better for my gut.
> You will also want to broadcast at 50k to 100k
> watts to cover a decent area.
I think you can squeak by with a bit less than that.
There's a smaller station in the chicago area that runs at 1000 watts, and the signal can still be picked up about 40 miles out from the city. Yes the signal is prone to a decent amount of static, but recall that the original poster implied this was for a small town type setting.
Wish I could be more specific but I read about this in an article somewhere recently, and can't for the life of me find it again.
> that simply selling tunes direct to the customer
> on a website could put the power back where it
> belongs - in the hands of the people who have the
> talent.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your sentiment, but the issue with doing things like this revolves around promotion.
Modern radio stations and recording labels have a symbiotic reliance on each other; label needs to pimp new album to drive sales, radio needs to play new songs to get more listeners to increase ad dollars.
Most radio stations can't afford big risks giving self-produced bands the airtime they need to reach a critical mass (ie, sell a million albums).
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of bands out there producing some really great music, and a lot of them probably have websites that let you download music. But 90% of the music listening world will never find them because there's no advocacy network in place.
Why? Because the promotion system is in effect already owned by the big recording labels. And it won't change until the radio corporations see that there is a value in playing independent artists.
I fail to see how blowing up the image and putting me a lot closer to it is going to make it any easier to watch anakin explain to the senator how her skin isn't like sand.
I have a feeling it'd have the opposite effect.
Now maybe if they just took the last 20 minutes of the movie and put it on replay for an hour and half they'd be on to something.
Read the article, and he's changed his opinion three times in roughly as many months.
I mean, duh. Of COURSE the trading of mp3's is going to effect the sale of CD's. The only question that remains is to gauge what percentage the decline in sales mp3's are responsible for.. which appears to be precisely the problem he's grappling with.
Is it 0.0000001%, or 10%, or 50%?
He said it best himself:
"It is certainly not conclusive, by any means, that there's real damage going on from MP3s. [...] We're seeing a medium impact, which still could be explained by other things -- but we can't discount the MP3 possibility."
Which makes sense to me.
> We're past the point where we should be teaching
> ourselves elaborate new routines to accommodate
> new technologies.
You learned to read and write as a child, didn't you? It's simply a fact of life that to communicate you have to learn things that aren't neccessarily intuitive.
Who's to say that using chords is any more complicated than a standard 101 key board?