... yet already it shows the same signs of stupidity all other digg/reddit/whatnot clones share with them: blatant sensationalism.
This picture has nothing to do with the actual thing and it's certainly not bullet-proof! It is only designed to not have any sharp edges/parts/whatever could hurt a woman if pressure or anything else is applied to her breasts.
Bye. No need to waste my time here. At least reddit doesn't fake as much.
OK, this is not meant to be a troll of any sort. I have a genuine
interest in this queston:
Who's they?
Who do you think has an interest in locking down conversation in a systematic
manner and forcing who to communicate via their means in only
their approved ways? I ask, because I'm not sure. See, Google for example
has a genuine business interest in data that could very well lead to people's
privacy being compromised in a bad way. Even without a restructuring of
the Internet. So far, Google's behaving fine. Some privacy issues here and
there, some dubious interaction with China, but overall - a good trade-off for
the average Westerner.
OK, wrong example. Dooh, I'm too drunk to formulate a nice description of my
queston. Let's try another time: What if I say that there is no such single
group having the power of controlling everything (all information, here),
without having to first compete with rivals of at least equal strength.
For now,
companies can only control a single, very limited amount of a certain market,
while government (overall) is losing influence on people's life in pretty much
all western states - or at least that's what I'm pulling out of my ass
right now (Remember that Soviet Russia line? In Soviet Russia, the the
government controls commerce). If I take a look at Europe and compare the
average today's citizen's life with that of the average life of a citizen who
lived here a hundered years ago, I'd say that companies nowadays have a lot more
influence on your life than goverment had (has, dear $DEITY, I'm not really able
to formulate adequate English sentences anymore. Forgive me, it's my 3rd
language). So, I'd argue that Google doesn't want to keep information down.
Neither does anyone else really interested in the Internet as business platform.
I'd argue that noone wants to seriously keep porn down, just as well as most of
government's war-on-drugs-propaganda is bogus - a lot of companies/government
institutions are making way too much money on that stuff. Porn, illegal
hacker/cracker darknets (wohooo. How many bad-buzzwords can you put in one
minimal sentence?), drugs, terrorism. There's always profit for
someone. Whether they're selling drugs, guns or people. As long as
there's money, there's power. And power equals safety for your branch of the
Dark Side's path. If someone devises a secure Internet (haha) that's
going to be a) too boring to be picked up by too many people or b) too insecure
to not be hacked.
Big media corps don't have an interest in shutting down communication and
controlling it. Some of their CEO's might think it's like this, but they don't
and they would notice as soon as their strategies would prove to be successful.
As long as there's demand (and we, the people are here to ensure that demand)
there's going to be a demand satisfied, or a revolution of some sorts. I don't
trust humans in general, I just trust their social momentum. It's a crisis/pain
equation: if the crisis is big enough, the pain you have to go through to revolt
against that crisis becomes bearable. A pressure thing.
Ok, that was a long post that didn't make any sense. Good thing I've got some
Karma to burn. Here's the gist: locking down information is locking down
progress. Nobody's interested in locking down progress, since that's what most
people make their money on: progress. As soon as someone tries to, this will
horribly backfire (see Soviet Russia), leaving a demand unfulfilled, that will
then develop into a crisis. A crisis is in no way a bad thing (overall), since
it also means progress (when it's overcome).
I better shut up now. No, I will not use the preview function. Good Night.
Those features you're talking about - and basically a lot of what Awesomebar wants to provide have previously been implemented into Vimperator.
I switched from Opera to FF2 for Vimperator, because that's just an
Awesomebrowser, not just the bar. Best keyboard support in a browser. Ever. One
of the great features of Vimperator is also the:buffers! command (accessible
via the 'b' shortcut) that essentially brings Awesomebar's functionality to your
tabs - rendering that tab bar unnecessary -- and I've disabled it. Along
with all the menu&button-clutter, see the screen shot below.
Screenie.
And while you're wondering... C-i will fire up Vim (gvim -f by default) when
you're above an input field, so you can edit your/. reply in a decent text
editor, instead of relying on GTK's horrible default capabilities. (of
course, that's configurable. You could even put Emacs there. *shudders*)
You're wrong. Most people are. That's because they don't know about the awesomeness that is eclim. It's a nifty little plugin that keeps a headless Eclipse instance running and exports its features to vim. So you can have automatic code highlighting, manage your classpath efficiently, have your get/setters done automatically, auto-completion, auto-whatnot.
It's great! Give it a try. I would never use Eclipse itself, but I wouldn't want to miss eclim...
We're increasing our nuclear arsenal? Ah, the bliss being completely ignorant. You Americans should have a trademark on that, seeing as you can't even follow your own news
Look, that's just how open source works. It's not only demand driven - most of the time it's just hackers getting interested in stuff they wanna try out - whether it makes sense or not... This way interesting things can happen and if they find someone to use 'em, they may become popular. It's not like the Linux kernel was aimed at becoming the most popular open source OS - actually people may very well have thought of Linux as an "over-engineered solution to non-existent problem" back then! I'm thinking of the micro kernel debate and the HURD system here.
Actually I don't know why carrier systems would want to be able to upgrade on the run. Maybe their boot-up procedures are so complicated and lengthy that they just don't want to reboot... this way they can still to a round robin upgrade, but keep the machines alive and thus save a lot of time (I imagine they have quite a few clusters/machines...)
Maybe Google could use that stuff, too. Instead of rebooting every machine in a cluster in order to upgrade it, they'll write a script that visits each worker in order and upgrades the system on the fly. That's still less down-time. And Google's clusters are really large. If you can reduce the downtime per worker machine by, let's say 50% (I suppose you could do a lot more. Maybe you could even go without testing on all of the machines if they are built the same way (they probably are) and just have one test subject) that's still a lot of time (and money) if you multiply it by those 2000-6000 machines...
The idea for this service apparently came when one of the piratebay's admin's friends was forced to take down his blog because he had posted some links to torrents.
You may very well not be allowed to post links to torrents on your own site, depending on your country's legislation (or the country the server is dwelling in). Baywords was started to remedy that situation. There's more info on TorrentFreak (this is actually TFA, but you apparently didn't read it, so here's another link). Note that TorrentFreak never ever post links to torrents on their site because they fear to be taken down. Quite ironic, isn't it? If they had started hosting their blog on Baywords, this might not have been the case.
By the way, not everyone can administer/afford/maintain their own server. In fact, I'm glad it's like this, because everyone and their dog renting a server and bandwidth for their own totally nonsensical blog would be a complete nightmare.
That's why I'm always saying Ahmadine-whatever should have his own atomic weapons.
Seriously, Iran may be as islamistic as it gets, but they're humans after all and hopefully not stupid enough start a nuclear war.
Their opponents however, who are trying to do everything to prevent them from producing A-bombs in the first place, are not to be trusted that much, because they (America, Israel) are the ones that have started wars in the last couple of years (the latter only in "defense", but I think they/their PR may be able to produce one such "defense" case quickly).
On the other hand, there shouldn't be yet another A-armed nation. But that's a vicious circle: how is a nation without A-bombs going to defend itself against, say, America? It's nearly impossible to defend yourself against America at all these days - if don't have that bomb, there's nothing you can do. If you do have it, however, it's likely you're not gonna be attacked in the first place.
Maybe this is the reason we haven't seen a war in Iran yet. They are afraid. Uhm... on the other hand it's more likely to be due to the pain in the neck that is Iraq and the upcoming elections in America.
I must admit that those are speculations I'm really just pulling out of my ass... but hey, that's what the comments threads are for, aren't they? Oh dear, I can se the "leftie"/"commie"/"antisemite"-responses rushing in... but please, in the name of whatever deity you believe in: a Semite may just as well be an Arab, so be correct and call me anti-Judaist. Which is not what I am, as I call some Jews my friends... btw: this article has not gotten the publicity it deserves.
Dude, his research is close to a tautology anyways: "His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
Who the hell gave the grant for this research? Of course, you can sort of create an apparatus that follows the same constraints as a Neanderthal larynx would have followed, but apart from piping/dev/urandom through it, you really can't do jack with it.
Now, we're fairly sure that concerning syntax, early human's language surely followed some sort of predicative model - that can be seen when analyzing more isolated and primitive languages (which are mostly dead by now) - especially aboriginal languages of America and Oceania/Australia. Sentences there usually are of the form "This is an Apple. This is red." - instead of "This is a red apple". Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way) or agglutinating languages (like early Nahuatl, they would incorporate subjects and objects into their words: "Thisapple and Thisred".) in the end. More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. But of course, this is one hypothesis and there is no way of proving any of this. You can only use fairly circumstantial evidence.
And what this guy did was in no fucking way making "Neanderthals talk". Not even close. He just explored what kind of restrictions the anatomy of a Neanderthal's speech tract would impose on their phonetics (not even phonology let alone phonotaxis), so basically, he can now say: this is what it would have sounded like, but not more. Talk about misleading summaries/headlines/articles.
As long as they suffer the same sort of demise SCO has suffered in the end - I don't really mind.
Besides, RIAA gives us plenty of reason to bitch about them, as long as they do, I actually want to stay informed. I'd be glad to see a rapid decline in bitch-against-RIAA-stories on/. and reddit, but only because that would go hand in hand with a decrease in corruption and braindeadtivity on the MAFIAA's side.
Doesn't sound so absurd if you consider that Google's algorithm is based solely on stochastic measures, without applying too much linguistics. Like, dictionaries. They sure as hell have one, but it's probably only another weight in a complex system.
There's a problem with the linguistics in computational linguistics:
"Every time I fire a linguist, the recognition rate goes up!" -- Jelinek, IBM 1988
Unfortunately, still true.
Of course, the linguist will tell you "there's a problem with the computational in computational linguistics". Nevermind that linguist. He's probably wrong:-P (beware of biting sarcasm).
The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.
First of all, let me tell you that I agree with you in almost all points regarding the recording industries and found your explanations about the indigenous people of America really interesting - however, there's a slight problem in your last paragraph, I highlighted it.
It's not that easy. I'm an artist myself - I'd love to create content just like that, seed it on The Pirate Bay, announce it on last.fm and thus get people to listen to my music (since I'm major in a CS-related subject, I don't even care that much about the money - I'll have job some day... hopefully). But boy is it hard.
When you have a deal with record company it's not just the money you - as an artist - get out of them. Friends of mine have a really successful band - one of their singles peeked the German charts at 4 - and I'm really jealous... not about the publicity they're getting, but about their possibilities. See, to make a record it's not like the only thing you need is a guitar. You need a place to rehearse with your band. You need a good studio to record what you have rehearsed over the past weeks/months/years. The studio's not empty: you need a professional sound engineer, you need someone to master you records, mix everything... You also need a producer - or at least, it's better if you have one. Let's make a comparison: when you write a novel, the publishing house - before publishing - hire an editor to proof read what you've written. Because you missed out on some stuff, for sure. It's just goddamn impossible to be perfect (sic!). You need someone objective, and who's closer to the audience. That's what the producer is good for. He'll have totally new ideas, he'll have suggestions and most of all: he's likely to have a lot more experience than you have. You'll need that. My friends have all that, because they have a record deal. I don't have that, so I have to stick with my NI external sound card, my laptop, my (bass) guitar, microphones, and the hydrogen drum computer. I've not recorded anything in months, because it takes at least a day to prepare all this, nevermind making a good recording. And then mixing it! Don't tell me you can do that by yourself in Audacity or Ardour. You can't. Mixing a record is a hard job and it really takes quite some experience to do it properly.
Now, I see record labels as some sort of governments: you (the artist/the people) pay them (your share of your copyrights/taxes) and you're getting the infrastructure in return (studios, sound engineers, whatnot/streets, police, judicial system). You're also getting PR out of the record labels. So they are useful to the artists, even in their current form. Not every band can have a genius among them, or several ones, to assume the different roles of the guys the label will provide you with. And who the fuck wants all musicians to be singer-songwriters, because that's the only music that's easy to just do all by yourself?? We'd have a whole cult of Jack Johnsons! What a nightmare...
Now, I'm not telling you "respect the record companies, they help the artists". Not at all. They're bitches, most of them. They are capitalists, most of them. And thus we artists hate them, for being capitalists and c
why the fuck stupid Microsoft didn't get busted for something similar.
It's good to see Sony pay though. I hope this gets mainstream news coverage - I really can't stand those Hippocr... ah, excuse me, my choleric side is breaking through again...
They can do what they want, but they'll never see through my tinfoil overall. I even have a catheter, so I never have to go pee. They've got cameras in the toilets, too!
Yes of course we could. If you download Celestia you can see all sorts of interesting things in space.
Now, my version is heavily modded (and it's the alpha version), but I can see Apollo still orbiting good ol' Moon in Celestia. And witness a nice dawn together with Apollo. *sigh* it's a pity that you go through that military drill to become an astronaut. I surely would like to be one.
Essentially, that's the same as putting a satellite around Earth, as Earth orbits Sun like Moon orbits Earth.
What's even more interesting: you could put a spacecraft in the Lagrange-point between Earth and Moon, so it wouldn't move - well with respect to Earth and Moon, of course.
And you? You're thinking what now? Are you insightful? Hardly... Want to get modded as such? Try harder... I decided not to spend my modpoints on you
Get over with it: memes are an essential part of/. culture. That's the way things are here. Not all of them are funny to you, but some of them are worth it. Another meme is to use a useless meme in the first post. Well, you even overlooked that one this time, since the first post in this article actually is that tired old meme.
Why didn't you see it? Well surely because you don't browse at -1. See, that's what moderation is good for. It works - far better than on digg or reddit IMHO. Use it, and those pesky 'slashtards' won't actually bother you all that much.
The wars you're talking about are not like the wars back then. Let's face it: most don't care about wars like the ones in Rwanda where American or at least Western soldiers are not killed. There a genocide is seen as terrible, but only until Paris Hilton decides to expose her genitals on the very same news show. Those wars are being talked about by the 'intellectuals', but not by everyone.
The other kind of wars, like the recent ones in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kosovo, where Western soldiers could die are where the public interest would actually last longer than one news show. That's because this kind of war is also fought for entirely different motives than those before: it's not about crushing your opponent, it's not about gaining territory. Sometimes nobody really knows what it's all about (like the last Iraq war). And that's where people at home actually care for the soldiers over there - and not for any other soldiers, but for their own. How many Iraqi soldiers left their life during the invasion? Do you know? Do you care? IIRC it was about a thousand more than lost their lives on September 11th 2001 in the Twin Towers. But somehow - even here in Europe - it seems that the only body count that's getting mentioned on mainstream news is the American one (I may be a bit wrong on that since I generally don't follow mainstream media...)
Aw common, you're being a crank now. What's the point of this strange things, supposedly able to move all by themselves? They stink, they're slower than horses, and they're ugly, too! You'll never get laid if you ride such a thing, but think about riding a nice beautiful horse! Now that's what the ladies like!
Seriously though, imagine we could get the size of that thing down. Substantially. Like, totally. There are several possibilities:
a) implant to the retina. Make the goggles go away, wire it directly to the brain. Like Terminator's interface, only this one makes sense!
b) get it down to a size where it would at least fit into glasses. What about making blind people 'recognize' what they can't see? All you need is some glasses with this technology and a bud in your ear that would tell you: 'street' or 'car, incoming, rapidly' or 'woman, age: mid-30, attractive, married'. OK, the system would need a great deal of sophistication for the latter...
This project is all but pointless! You can enhance a human's possibilities, whether they're impaired (visually or otherwise) or not!
And also help to track down that pesky journalist/blogger/dissident always posting images the government doesn't like? No, I'm not referring to any government in particular.
So we'll have journalist's contact lenses if those things become the DRM of digital photography?
Like with most advancements in modern electronics, this one does not go down my throat without a huge grain of salt.
Depending on your particular point in time. See, I'm not far a way from Paris, since I live in Europe. Someone in Tokyo though is pretty far away from Paris. Now you have to understand that 'time' is nothing more than another dimension. The only difference is that so far we only know how to move in one direction. So if something is far away from you in time, this could mean it's either in the future or very, very old, from your point of view.
From our point of view, this galaxy is very old, since it existed (in the form in which we are seeing it today) a looong time ago. But if we take, say the Big Bang as the point in time to relate to, this thing isn't all that old, but rather new, young, so to speak.
Keep in mind though, that we are seeing a very young galaxy now because the light has been traveling a while. Sort of like... I take a picture of me and then send it to India. Because of the crude nature of the Indian postal system (and the ones in between), you will only receive this picture one month or so after it was taken. So I might have grown a beard. You are seeing a young galaxy, because the medium you're seeing it through took a while to reach us. But in reality, this galaxy is rather old, because it has been growing old ever since the photons that create the image we are seeing today departed from that galaxy to finally interact with our eyes and fulfill their destiny (ouch, that was really a pathetic attempt at making this sound great).
sigh. I'm only a layman, so I might have explained this pretty badly. You might want to take a look at this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone it explains the general concept behind this all. Ah yeah, and relativity is worth a read, too;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but you're so wrong, it's hilarious. Google for double negation and you shall see.
This has been in use for quite a while. I remember translating Cicero, and he used a lot of it, so it's at least 2000 years old.
See, I already know that you're probably using a linksys router.
/. Probably many of us use a linksys router. Aw, now the others know about my router, too...
Then again, it's
... yet already it shows the same signs of stupidity all other digg/reddit/whatnot clones share with them: blatant sensationalism.
This picture has nothing to do with the actual thing and it's certainly not bullet-proof! It is only designed to not have any sharp edges/parts/whatever could hurt a woman if pressure or anything else is applied to her breasts.
Bye. No need to waste my time here. At least reddit doesn't fake as much.
OK, this is not meant to be a troll of any sort. I have a genuine interest in this queston:
Who's they?
Who do you think has an interest in locking down conversation in a systematic manner and forcing who to communicate via their means in only their approved ways? I ask, because I'm not sure. See, Google for example has a genuine business interest in data that could very well lead to people's privacy being compromised in a bad way. Even without a restructuring of the Internet. So far, Google's behaving fine. Some privacy issues here and there, some dubious interaction with China, but overall - a good trade-off for the average Westerner.
OK, wrong example. Dooh, I'm too drunk to formulate a nice description of my queston. Let's try another time: What if I say that there is no such single group having the power of controlling everything (all information, here), without having to first compete with rivals of at least equal strength.
For now, companies can only control a single, very limited amount of a certain market, while government (overall) is losing influence on people's life in pretty much all western states - or at least that's what I'm pulling out of my ass right now (Remember that Soviet Russia line? In Soviet Russia, the the government controls commerce). If I take a look at Europe and compare the average today's citizen's life with that of the average life of a citizen who lived here a hundered years ago, I'd say that companies nowadays have a lot more influence on your life than goverment had (has, dear $DEITY, I'm not really able to formulate adequate English sentences anymore. Forgive me, it's my 3rd language).
So, I'd argue that Google doesn't want to keep information down.
Neither does anyone else really interested in the Internet as business platform.
I'd argue that noone wants to seriously keep porn down, just as well as most of government's war-on-drugs-propaganda is bogus - a lot of companies/government institutions are making way too much money on that stuff. Porn, illegal hacker/cracker darknets (wohooo. How many bad-buzzwords can you put in one minimal sentence?), drugs, terrorism. There's always profit for someone. Whether they're selling drugs, guns or people. As long as there's money, there's power. And power equals safety for your branch of the Dark Side's path. If someone devises a secure Internet (haha) that's going to be a) too boring to be picked up by too many people or b) too insecure to not be hacked.
Big media corps don't have an interest in shutting down communication and controlling it. Some of their CEO's might think it's like this, but they don't and they would notice as soon as their strategies would prove to be successful. As long as there's demand (and we, the people are here to ensure that demand) there's going to be a demand satisfied, or a revolution of some sorts. I don't trust humans in general, I just trust their social momentum. It's a crisis/pain equation: if the crisis is big enough, the pain you have to go through to revolt against that crisis becomes bearable. A pressure thing.
Ok, that was a long post that didn't make any sense. Good thing I've got some Karma to burn. Here's the gist: locking down information is locking down progress. Nobody's interested in locking down progress, since that's what most people make their money on: progress. As soon as someone tries to, this will horribly backfire (see Soviet Russia), leaving a demand unfulfilled, that will then develop into a crisis. A crisis is in no way a bad thing (overall), since it also means progress (when it's overcome).
I better shut up now. No, I will not use the preview function. Good Night.
Those features you're talking about - and basically a lot of what Awesomebar wants to provide have previously been implemented into Vimperator. :buffers! command (accessible
via the 'b' shortcut) that essentially brings Awesomebar's functionality to your
tabs - rendering that tab bar unnecessary -- and I've disabled it. Along
with all the menu&button-clutter, see the screen shot below.
/. reply in a decent text
editor, instead of relying on GTK's horrible default capabilities. (of
course, that's configurable. You could even put Emacs there. *shudders*)
I switched from Opera to FF2 for Vimperator, because that's just an Awesomebrowser, not just the bar. Best keyboard support in a browser. Ever. One of the great features of Vimperator is also the
Screenie.
And while you're wondering... C-i will fire up Vim (gvim -f by default) when you're above an input field, so you can edit your
You're wrong. Most people are. That's because they don't know about the awesomeness that is eclim. It's a nifty little plugin that keeps a headless Eclipse instance running and exports its features to vim. So you can have automatic code highlighting, manage your classpath efficiently, have your get/setters done automatically, auto-completion, auto-whatnot.
It's great! Give it a try. I would never use Eclipse itself, but I wouldn't want to miss eclim...
Look, that's just how open source works. It's not only demand driven - most of the time it's just hackers getting interested in stuff they wanna try out - whether it makes sense or not... This way interesting things can happen and if they find someone to use 'em, they may become popular. It's not like the Linux kernel was aimed at becoming the most popular open source OS - actually people may very well have thought of Linux as an "over-engineered solution to non-existent problem" back then! I'm thinking of the micro kernel debate and the HURD system here.
Actually I don't know why carrier systems would want to be able to upgrade on the run. Maybe their boot-up procedures are so complicated and lengthy that they just don't want to reboot... this way they can still to a round robin upgrade, but keep the machines alive and thus save a lot of time (I imagine they have quite a few clusters/machines...)
Maybe Google could use that stuff, too. Instead of rebooting every machine in a cluster in order to upgrade it, they'll write a script that visits each worker in order and upgrades the system on the fly. That's still less down-time. And Google's clusters are really large. If you can reduce the downtime per worker machine by, let's say 50% (I suppose you could do a lot more. Maybe you could even go without testing on all of the machines if they are built the same way (they probably are) and just have one test subject) that's still a lot of time (and money) if you multiply it by those 2000-6000 machines...
The idea for this service apparently came when one of the piratebay's admin's friends was forced to take down his blog because he had posted some links to torrents.
You may very well not be allowed to post links to torrents on your own site, depending on your country's legislation (or the country the server is dwelling in). Baywords was started to remedy that situation. There's more info on TorrentFreak (this is actually TFA, but you apparently didn't read it, so here's another link). Note that TorrentFreak never ever post links to torrents on their site because they fear to be taken down. Quite ironic, isn't it? If they had started hosting their blog on Baywords, this might not have been the case.
By the way, not everyone can administer/afford/maintain their own server. In fact, I'm glad it's like this, because everyone and their dog renting a server and bandwidth for their own totally nonsensical blog would be a complete nightmare.
That's why I'm always saying Ahmadine-whatever should have his own atomic weapons.
Seriously, Iran may be as islamistic as it gets, but they're humans after all and hopefully not stupid enough start a nuclear war.
Their opponents however, who are trying to do everything to prevent them from producing A-bombs in the first place, are not to be trusted that much, because they (America, Israel) are the ones that have started wars in the last couple of years (the latter only in "defense", but I think they/their PR may be able to produce one such "defense" case quickly).
On the other hand, there shouldn't be yet another A-armed nation. But that's a vicious circle: how is a nation without A-bombs going to defend itself against, say, America? It's nearly impossible to defend yourself against America at all these days - if don't have that bomb, there's nothing you can do. If you do have it, however, it's likely you're not gonna be attacked in the first place.
Maybe this is the reason we haven't seen a war in Iran yet. They are afraid. Uhm... on the other hand it's more likely to be due to the pain in the neck that is Iraq and the upcoming elections in America.
I must admit that those are speculations I'm really just pulling out of my ass... but hey, that's what the comments threads are for, aren't they? Oh dear, I can se the "leftie"/"commie"/"antisemite"-responses rushing in... but please, in the name of whatever deity you believe in: a Semite may just as well be an Arab, so be correct and call me anti-Judaist. Which is not what I am, as I call some Jews my friends... btw: this article has not gotten the publicity it deserves.
Dude, his research is close to a tautology anyways: "His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
/dev/urandom through it, you really can't do jack with it.
Who the hell gave the grant for this research? Of course, you can sort of create an apparatus that follows the same constraints as a Neanderthal larynx would have followed, but apart from piping
Now, we're fairly sure that concerning syntax, early human's language surely followed some sort of predicative model - that can be seen when analyzing more isolated and primitive languages (which are mostly dead by now) - especially aboriginal languages of America and Oceania/Australia. Sentences there usually are of the form "This is an Apple. This is red." - instead of "This is a red apple". Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way) or agglutinating languages (like early Nahuatl, they would incorporate subjects and objects into their words: "Thisapple and Thisred".) in the end. More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. But of course, this is one hypothesis and there is no way of proving any of this. You can only use fairly circumstantial evidence.
And what this guy did was in no fucking way making "Neanderthals talk". Not even close. He just explored what kind of restrictions the anatomy of a Neanderthal's speech tract would impose on their phonetics (not even phonology let alone phonotaxis), so basically, he can now say: this is what it would have sounded like, but not more. Talk about misleading summaries/headlines/articles.
As long as they suffer the same sort of demise SCO has suffered in the end - I don't really mind.
/. and reddit, but only because that would go hand in hand with a decrease in corruption and braindeadtivity on the MAFIAA's side.
Besides, RIAA gives us plenty of reason to bitch about them, as long as they do, I actually want to stay informed. I'd be glad to see a rapid decline in bitch-against-RIAA-stories on
Doesn't sound so absurd if you consider that Google's algorithm is based solely on stochastic measures, without applying too much linguistics. Like, dictionaries. They sure as hell have one, but it's probably only another weight in a complex system.
:-P (beware of biting sarcasm).
Unfortunately, that's the only link I could find regarding that 2005 contest which Google won. They're probably still the best... http://www.astahost.com/googles-translation-wins-hands-down-t11662.html
There's a problem with the linguistics in computational linguistics:
"Every time I fire a linguist, the recognition rate goes up!" -- Jelinek, IBM 1988
Unfortunately, still true.
Of course, the linguist will tell you "there's a problem with the computational in computational linguistics". Nevermind that linguist. He's probably wrong
The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.
First of all, let me tell you that I agree with you in almost all points regarding the recording industries and found your explanations about the indigenous people of America really interesting - however, there's a slight problem in your last paragraph, I highlighted it.
It's not that easy. I'm an artist myself - I'd love to create content just like that, seed it on The Pirate Bay, announce it on last.fm and thus get people to listen to my music (since I'm major in a CS-related subject, I don't even care that much about the money - I'll have job some day... hopefully). But boy is it hard.
When you have a deal with record company it's not just the money you - as an artist - get out of them. Friends of mine have a really successful band - one of their singles peeked the German charts at 4 - and I'm really jealous... not about the publicity they're getting, but about their possibilities. See, to make a record it's not like the only thing you need is a guitar. You need a place to rehearse with your band. You need a good studio to record what you have rehearsed over the past weeks/months/years. The studio's not empty: you need a professional sound engineer, you need someone to master you records, mix everything... You also need a producer - or at least, it's better if you have one. Let's make a comparison: when you write a novel, the publishing house - before publishing - hire an editor to proof read what you've written. Because you missed out on some stuff, for sure. It's just goddamn impossible to be perfect (sic!). You need someone objective, and who's closer to the audience. That's what the producer is good for. He'll have totally new ideas, he'll have suggestions and most of all: he's likely to have a lot more experience than you have. You'll need that.
My friends have all that, because they have a record deal. I don't have that, so I have to stick with my NI external sound card, my laptop, my (bass) guitar, microphones, and the hydrogen drum computer. I've not recorded anything in months, because it takes at least a day to prepare all this, nevermind making a good recording. And then mixing it! Don't tell me you can do that by yourself in Audacity or Ardour. You can't. Mixing a record is a hard job and it really takes quite some experience to do it properly.
Now, I see record labels as some sort of governments: you (the artist/the people) pay them (your share of your copyrights/taxes) and you're getting the infrastructure in return (studios, sound engineers, whatnot/streets, police, judicial system). You're also getting PR out of the record labels. So they are useful to the artists, even in their current form. Not every band can have a genius among them, or several ones, to assume the different roles of the guys the label will provide you with. And who the fuck wants all musicians to be singer-songwriters, because that's the only music that's easy to just do all by yourself?? We'd have a whole cult of Jack Johnsons! What a nightmare...
Now, I'm not telling you "respect the record companies, they help the artists". Not at all. They're bitches, most of them. They are capitalists, most of them. And thus we artists hate them, for being capitalists and c
why the fuck stupid Microsoft didn't get busted for something similar.
It's good to see Sony pay though. I hope this gets mainstream news coverage - I really can't stand those Hippocr... ah, excuse me, my choleric side is breaking through again...
Sue the bastards!
This should really be tagged software, shouldn't it?
While we're at it, might add that Duke Bend'Em Forever tag, too...
They can do what they want, but they'll never see through my tinfoil overall. I even have a catheter, so I never have to go pee. They've got cameras in the toilets, too!
Yes of course we could. If you download Celestia you can see all sorts of interesting things in space.
Now, my version is heavily modded (and it's the alpha version), but I can see Apollo still orbiting good ol' Moon in Celestia. And witness a nice dawn together with Apollo. *sigh* it's a pity that you go through that military drill to become an astronaut. I surely would like to be one.
Essentially, that's the same as putting a satellite around Earth, as Earth orbits Sun like Moon orbits Earth.
What's even more interesting: you could put a spacecraft in the Lagrange-point between Earth and Moon, so it wouldn't move - well with respect to Earth and Moon, of course.
And you? You're thinking what now? Are you insightful? Hardly... Want to get modded as such? Try harder... I decided not to spend my modpoints on you
/. culture. That's the way things are here. Not all of them are funny to you, but some of them are worth it. Another meme is to use a useless meme in the first post. Well, you even overlooked that one this time, since the first post in this article actually is that tired old meme.
Get over with it: memes are an essential part of
Why didn't you see it? Well surely because you don't browse at -1. See, that's what moderation is good for. It works - far better than on digg or reddit IMHO. Use it, and those pesky 'slashtards' won't actually bother you all that much.
Now, stop grunting and go say something useful.
The wars you're talking about are not like the wars back then. Let's face it: most don't care about wars like the ones in Rwanda where American or at least Western soldiers are not killed. There a genocide is seen as terrible, but only until Paris Hilton decides to expose her genitals on the very same news show. Those wars are being talked about by the 'intellectuals', but not by everyone.
The other kind of wars, like the recent ones in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kosovo, where Western soldiers could die are where the public interest would actually last longer than one news show. That's because this kind of war is also fought for entirely different motives than those before: it's not about crushing your opponent, it's not about gaining territory. Sometimes nobody really knows what it's all about (like the last Iraq war). And that's where people at home actually care for the soldiers over there - and not for any other soldiers, but for their own. How many Iraqi soldiers left their life during the invasion? Do you know? Do you care? IIRC it was about a thousand more than lost their lives on September 11th 2001 in the Twin Towers. But somehow - even here in Europe - it seems that the only body count that's getting mentioned on mainstream news is the American one (I may be a bit wrong on that since I generally don't follow mainstream media...)
Aw common, you're being a crank now. What's the point of this strange things, supposedly able to move all by themselves? They stink, they're slower than horses, and they're ugly, too! You'll never get laid if you ride such a thing, but think about riding a nice beautiful horse! Now that's what the ladies like!
Seriously though, imagine we could get the size of that thing down. Substantially. Like, totally. There are several possibilities:
a) implant to the retina. Make the goggles go away, wire it directly to the brain. Like Terminator's interface, only this one makes sense!
b) get it down to a size where it would at least fit into glasses. What about making blind people 'recognize' what they can't see? All you need is some glasses with this technology and a bud in your ear that would tell you: 'street' or 'car, incoming, rapidly' or 'woman, age: mid-30, attractive, married'. OK, the system would need a great deal of sophistication for the latter...
This project is all but pointless! You can enhance a human's possibilities, whether they're impaired (visually or otherwise) or not!
And also help to track down that pesky journalist/blogger/dissident always posting images the government doesn't like? No, I'm not referring to any government in particular.
So we'll have journalist's contact lenses if those things become the DRM of digital photography?
Like with most advancements in modern electronics, this one does not go down my throat without a huge grain of salt.
Depending on your particular point in time. See, I'm not far a way from Paris, since I live in Europe. Someone in Tokyo though is pretty far away from Paris. Now you have to understand that 'time' is nothing more than another dimension. The only difference is that so far we only know how to move in one direction. So if something is far away from you in time, this could mean it's either in the future or very, very old, from your point of view.
;-)
From our point of view, this galaxy is very old, since it existed (in the form in which we are seeing it today) a looong time ago. But if we take, say the Big Bang as the point in time to relate to, this thing isn't all that old, but rather new, young, so to speak.
Keep in mind though, that we are seeing a very young galaxy now because the light has been traveling a while. Sort of like... I take a picture of me and then send it to India. Because of the crude nature of the Indian postal system (and the ones in between), you will only receive this picture one month or so after it was taken. So I might have grown a beard. You are seeing a young galaxy, because the medium you're seeing it through took a while to reach us. But in reality, this galaxy is rather old, because it has been growing old ever since the photons that create the image we are seeing today departed from that galaxy to finally interact with our eyes and fulfill their destiny (ouch, that was really a pathetic attempt at making this sound great).
sigh. I'm only a layman, so I might have explained this pretty badly. You might want to take a look at this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone it explains the general concept behind this all. Ah yeah, and relativity is worth a read, too
So let's call 'dupe' on this one?