I think most consumers will simply see this as another place where you can download music. The prices and file formats will be different, but that's about it.
I just refreshed it a few times. It's randomly either a golfer or NFL players. The idea being, I guess, that you're watching sports on your home theatre system.
I've been reading up on this recently as I'm planning to build myself a home theatre in my basement this summer. Rather than buying or building a screen, I'm simply going to paint it onto my wall using a new type of paint called "Screen Goo" (I read a review of it here). Supposedly, it gives excellent results.
As for the projector, I don't want to build this thing myself, I'm willing to spend the bucks. So I'll likely go for the Panasonic PT-AE700U, which I've seen reviewed here.
So that leaves me wondering what sort of PC or hi-def receiver to buy to power this thing, so that I can use cable, satellite, game console, DVD, PVR and the PC.
On my site, I'm guilty of reporting news that's essentially summaries of (and links to) other news reports too. But that's because my site is all about discussing and debating politics and other world events with people from all over the world and from all political perspectives-- so the story is just a means of sparking a debate. I quite often reprint Wikinews stories in their entirety (they gave me permission).
Occasionally, though, I (and others) post personal blogs on the site, which are editorials/opinion pieces. I wish there were more of those. If I had the time, I'd write more of them myself.
I still wonder what will become of my site. I had visions of it one day becoming a megalithic forum that everyone on the planet knew about. But building up a new community from scratch is hard. You don't get a lot of comments with out a lot of users, and you don't get a lot of users without a lot of comments. I still haven't hit upon the solution. But I do think that ultimately, a major web forum will exist, whose userbase dwarfs that of any web forum existing today.
For anyone interested, my site (The World Forum) has been officially cooperating with Wikinews to offer a place for people to discuss some of the stories posted there. If there is ever a story posted on Wikinews that you'd like to discuss, but it's not cross-posted to The World Forum yet, you can submit it yourself (word-for-word, it's allowed).
I posted a Wikinews story yesterday entitled "CIA Sending Suspects Overseas For 'Rendition'", which received almost 2000 hits due to being displayed on the front page of Google News for most of the day. This helps give Wikinews more readership, since they are not listed in Google News. Sadly, however, it does not result in increased discussion, since most people visiting from Google News are not people interested in posting comments.
I do not think North Korea will ever give up their nukes. Countries have stopped their pursuit of nuclear weapons technology in the past, but have any of them stopped after already building nuclear weapons? Not that I'm aware of. Why should they? Nuclear weapons demand respect, pure and simple. Owning them is the best deterrent against being invaded and everybody knows it. In North Korea's case, that deterrent is even more pronounced considering that total war is their declared strategy to counter a US preemptive attack, using both massive conventional warfare and weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea's military capability is extremely strong, and some analysts think they are one of the few nations that could conceivably engage in a total, all-out war with the United States. They have both the military strength and the political will.
An assessment of their military capabilities can be found here, although I think its estimate of North Korea already having 100 nuclear warheads is probably exaggerated. Not that anybody knows for sure. North Korea is one of the most secretive nations on the planet.
I just finished posting this same story (but with more detail and more links) on my own site, The World Forum. Here's a blurb from it:
This probably come as a surprise to Washington, since Bush seemed to deliberately use a softer tone towards North Korea in his State of the Union address, saying only that Washington was "working closely with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions." That's buch better than three years ago when he branded North Korea part of the "axis of evil".
Analysts in South Korea had predicted that the absence of harsh words would help restart the nuclear talks, since several weeks earlier North Korea had announced they were willing to return to six-party nuclear talks and would treat the United States as a friend if Washington would stop slandering their leader Kim Jong Il.
Further evidence that this came as a surprise to Washington came four hours before the official pullout statement, when a top Bush administration official told the New York Times that North Korea's return to the nuclear talks was expected by all other participants -- the United States, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China.
As a shameless self-plug, if you like to discuss stories like this, I urge you to sign up on The World Forum. It's goal is to become a major international forum where people from all walks of life and of all political perspectives can discuss politics and world issues, expressing their different points of view rationally and constructively. It's starting to get a lot of hits due to being prominently displayed in Google News, but it needs a much larger user base of people willing to participate in discussions if it is to succeed.
There's a lot of XML-bashing going on here from people talking about how XML is just a buzzword and how XML is not necessary. Sure it's a buzzword, and sure it's unnecessary in some situations. But that doesn't make it useless.
I create data-driven web apps for a living (i.e. data-driven graphics, UI and text via SVG and HTML), and I firmly believe that XML is the way to go for such creations. It offers a hierarchical structure that is excellent for temporarily storing data pulled from a database, which can then be converted to HTML or SVG or some UI markup (XUL, XForms, or your own thing) via XSLT.
I don't really care that XML is human-readable--I like the fact that because it is extremely well structured, it is therefore easy to create with authoring applications as well as being easy to manipulate real-time by with script (i.e. manipulating its DOM).
I have long wished for a true binary XML spec to make the transmission and parsing/decoding quicker, and this spec isn't it. But I think one day we'll have it, and that won't mean that we've "come full circle" and therefore XML is useless. It just means that we'll have the best of both worlds--speed plus standardized, hierarchical data structures.
If you're saying that programmers who can solve puzzles in real-time are not, on average, better than programmers who need more time, I think I disagree. It's the same as with IQ tests. Some may say that they can answer the questions very well, just not in the time allotted. But studies have shown that being able to solve problems quickly means you can also solve more complicated problems. It's all about the neurons in your brain and how well they are organized. Someone that thinks more quickly is able to organize their thoughts better and can solve problems that a slow thinker simply cannot. So with the programmer's case here, using real-time problem solving as a way to find better programmers should work, I think. Because those quick thinkers, whose solutions you may not like, could most likely come up with the same or better solutions than the slower thinkers if given the time to do so, except that they would probably do so faster.
Aside from that though, from a practical point of view, what other choice is there? If the interviewers do not make the interviewee solve problems for them right then and there, they have no way of knowing what the programmer's potential really is. They would simply have to trust them at their word or trust the word of their references. When you have to screen so many applicants, why wouldn't you use real-time tests as a way to do so?
Funny, I was thinking of exactly that book when I wrote this, but was too lazy to mention it. I saw the author on "NOW, with Bill Moyers" (I think) awhile ago. I remember being a little skeptical when he kept asserting that the voting public typically "gets it right". By what standard do we judge that?
For instance, maybe the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administation are horribly flawed and will result in the world being in a horrible mess in the coming years. Maybe future historians will look back and wonder what the voters were thinking. Then again, for every expert today that hates the Bush administration, there's another that likes it. Or at least it seems that way. I wonder if the same is true for with degrees in political science and history?
I thought the author's statement about how the article had been "edited into mediocrity", contrary to the faith that the articles should improve with each editing, was very interesting. It reminds me of what the late physicist Richard Feynman said in one of his biographical books. He had been asked to review a high school science textbook, along with many engineers at some company. He gave it a scathing review, but was then told (rather haughtily) that all those other engineers had like it just fine. His reaction to this, in the book, was to say that sure, he is not the most intelligent person in the entire world. But is he more intelligent than the average intelligence of a hundred people? Certainly!
In other words, a hundred ill-informed opinions are still worse than one well-informed one. And simply having more people contributing to a piece of work does not necessarily make it better.
I wrote a long story on this this morning and posted it on The World Forum. It contains a bunch of links to articles on this elsewhere, as well as links to articles on all the other claims by researchers to have found Atlantis, placing it in southern Spain, off the coast of Cuba, at the edge of the Celtic Shelf off the south-west coast of England, under the South China Sea, near the Azores Islands, in the Mid-Atlantic in the island chain known as the Azores, west of the Straits of Gibraltar on a submerged mud shoal now known as Spartel Island, in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca, Ireland itself, and more.
Yeah, I wrote about this yesterday on www.sciscoop.com and I refused to call it a robot, no matter how many times the articles called it that. Sure, technically it could be considered a robot, but no more so than my washing machine. Even less, really, since at least my washing machine has moving parts.
I'm in the market for a gaming notebook, so I've done some research. I think the best bet may be the the ABS G1 Gamer's Notebook, which Tom's Hardware Guide reviewed last week. A WAY better price than, say, the top-of-the-line Voodoo PC ENVY m:860. It may not have the ATI 9700, but the 9600 is still pretty good.
I gave my parents a PC with Windows 98 four or five years ago, and my Mom has become reasonably adept at using email and surfing the web. But anything else, like installing updates (she actually reads the MS EULA's and gets very worried) or fixing any sort of problem--forget it. I'll often get phone calls about toolbars that have disappeared, which are easy enough to walk through even if I don't remember the nuances of Windows 98, but sometimes I'll get hard questions like "the computer is so slow now that it lags 20 seconds behind while typing or using the mouse" or "the computer's been slower ever since you installed the firewall." Now those are difficult to help with since I live 6 hours drive away. I can't expect her to look at all the processes using Task Manager, nor to start fiddling with ZoneAlarm or Spybot.
So my solution, upon my next visit, will be to upgrade her to Windows XP so that I can use Remote Desktop to fix all of her problems from here.
For anyone interested, this story's author, apsmith, also wrote a longer, more detailed version of this story entitled "Politicians Catch The Space Bug", available here. It's an excellent read.
That's why I created Sci-Fi Today last November. Since Slashdot focuses mainly on computer science & technology, they can't post all the worthy science stories. SFT focuses solely on science/technology and science fiction, so we can post more of them and we can hopefully reach a wider audience. So you'll always have a good chance of getting your stories posted on SFT. Of course, we're a bit like kuro5hin in that our stories tend to have more meat on them, typically summarizing from many different sources, providing lots of useful links and often a touch of personal opinion or speculation.
I wrote a detailed article about this on Sci-Fi Today Sunday night. I then submitted the story to Slashdot Monday morning but it was promptly rejected. Perhaps they don't accept links to other weblogs? Anyway, enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most consumers will simply see this as another place where you can download music. The prices and file formats will be different, but that's about it.
Since Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hasn't been made yet.
Thanks for the excellent advice.
Yeah, I agree. There's no way I'd want an ugly, noisy, low-res projector like that in my living room.
I just refreshed it a few times. It's randomly either a golfer or NFL players. The idea being, I guess, that you're watching sports on your home theatre system.
As for the projector, I don't want to build this thing myself, I'm willing to spend the bucks. So I'll likely go for the Panasonic PT-AE700U, which I've seen reviewed here.
So that leaves me wondering what sort of PC or hi-def receiver to buy to power this thing, so that I can use cable, satellite, game console, DVD, PVR and the PC.
Any advice would be most appreciated.
On my site, I'm guilty of reporting news that's essentially summaries of (and links to) other news reports too. But that's because my site is all about discussing and debating politics and other world events with people from all over the world and from all political perspectives-- so the story is just a means of sparking a debate. I quite often reprint Wikinews stories in their entirety (they gave me permission).
Occasionally, though, I (and others) post personal blogs on the site, which are editorials/opinion pieces. I wish there were more of those. If I had the time, I'd write more of them myself.
I still wonder what will become of my site. I had visions of it one day becoming a megalithic forum that everyone on the planet knew about. But building up a new community from scratch is hard. You don't get a lot of comments with out a lot of users, and you don't get a lot of users without a lot of comments. I still haven't hit upon the solution. But I do think that ultimately, a major web forum will exist, whose userbase dwarfs that of any web forum existing today.
I posted a Wikinews story yesterday entitled "CIA Sending Suspects Overseas For 'Rendition'", which received almost 2000 hits due to being displayed on the front page of Google News for most of the day. This helps give Wikinews more readership, since they are not listed in Google News. Sadly, however, it does not result in increased discussion, since most people visiting from Google News are not people interested in posting comments.
North Korea's military capability is extremely strong, and some analysts think they are one of the few nations that could conceivably engage in a total, all-out war with the United States. They have both the military strength and the political will.
An assessment of their military capabilities can be found here, although I think its estimate of North Korea already having 100 nuclear warheads is probably exaggerated. Not that anybody knows for sure. North Korea is one of the most secretive nations on the planet.
I create data-driven web apps for a living (i.e. data-driven graphics, UI and text via SVG and HTML), and I firmly believe that XML is the way to go for such creations. It offers a hierarchical structure that is excellent for temporarily storing data pulled from a database, which can then be converted to HTML or SVG or some UI markup (XUL, XForms, or your own thing) via XSLT.
I don't really care that XML is human-readable--I like the fact that because it is extremely well structured, it is therefore easy to create with authoring applications as well as being easy to manipulate real-time by with script (i.e. manipulating its DOM).
I have long wished for a true binary XML spec to make the transmission and parsing/decoding quicker, and this spec isn't it. But I think one day we'll have it, and that won't mean that we've "come full circle" and therefore XML is useless. It just means that we'll have the best of both worlds--speed plus standardized, hierarchical data structures.
Aside from that though, from a practical point of view, what other choice is there? If the interviewers do not make the interviewee solve problems for them right then and there, they have no way of knowing what the programmer's potential really is. They would simply have to trust them at their word or trust the word of their references. When you have to screen so many applicants, why wouldn't you use real-time tests as a way to do so?
Funny, I was thinking of exactly that book when I wrote this, but was too lazy to mention it. I saw the author on "NOW, with Bill Moyers" (I think) awhile ago. I remember being a little skeptical when he kept asserting that the voting public typically "gets it right". By what standard do we judge that?
For instance, maybe the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administation are horribly flawed and will result in the world being in a horrible mess in the coming years. Maybe future historians will look back and wonder what the voters were thinking. Then again, for every expert today that hates the Bush administration, there's another that likes it. Or at least it seems that way. I wonder if the same is true for with degrees in political science and history?
In other words, a hundred ill-informed opinions are still worse than one well-informed one. And simply having more people contributing to a piece of work does not necessarily make it better.
I wrote a long story on this this morning and posted it on The World Forum. It contains a bunch of links to articles on this elsewhere, as well as links to articles on all the other claims by researchers to have found Atlantis, placing it in southern Spain, off the coast of Cuba, at the edge of the Celtic Shelf off the south-west coast of England, under the South China Sea, near the Azores Islands, in the Mid-Atlantic in the island chain known as the Azores, west of the Straits of Gibraltar on a submerged mud shoal now known as Spartel Island, in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca, Ireland itself, and more.
Yeah, I wrote about this yesterday on www.sciscoop.com and I refused to call it a robot, no matter how many times the articles called it that. Sure, technically it could be considered a robot, but no more so than my washing machine. Even less, really, since at least my washing machine has moving parts.
Corel changed their logo years ago.
For anyone interested, I wrote a fairly indepth article on this topic, with plenty of links, and posted it here at SciScoop.
I'm in the market for a gaming notebook, so I've done some research. I think the best bet may be the the ABS G1 Gamer's Notebook, which Tom's Hardware Guide reviewed last week. A WAY better price than, say, the top-of-the-line Voodoo PC ENVY m:860. It may not have the ATI 9700, but the 9600 is still pretty good.
I gave my parents a PC with Windows 98 four or five years ago, and my Mom has become reasonably adept at using email and surfing the web. But anything else, like installing updates (she actually reads the MS EULA's and gets very worried) or fixing any sort of problem--forget it. I'll often get phone calls about toolbars that have disappeared, which are easy enough to walk through even if I don't remember the nuances of Windows 98, but sometimes I'll get hard questions like "the computer is so slow now that it lags 20 seconds behind while typing or using the mouse" or "the computer's been slower ever since you installed the firewall." Now those are difficult to help with since I live 6 hours drive away. I can't expect her to look at all the processes using Task Manager, nor to start fiddling with ZoneAlarm or Spybot.
So my solution, upon my next visit, will be to upgrade her to Windows XP so that I can use Remote Desktop to fix all of her problems from here.
For anyone interested, this story's author, apsmith, also wrote a longer, more detailed version of this story entitled "Politicians Catch The Space Bug", available here. It's an excellent read.
That's why I created Sci-Fi Today last November. Since Slashdot focuses mainly on computer science & technology, they can't post all the worthy science stories. SFT focuses solely on science/technology and science fiction, so we can post more of them and we can hopefully reach a wider audience. So you'll always have a good chance of getting your stories posted on SFT. Of course, we're a bit like kuro5hin in that our stories tend to have more meat on them, typically summarizing from many different sources, providing lots of useful links and often a touch of personal opinion or speculation.
Another article on this (with a ton of links) can be found here.
Just wrote an article on this at SFT, with links to video clips of the launch and Carl Sagan discussing the significance of the gold plaque.
I wrote a detailed article about this on Sci-Fi Today Sunday night. I then submitted the story to Slashdot Monday morning but it was promptly rejected. Perhaps they don't accept links to other weblogs? Anyway, enjoy.