Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
All those R's are mostly from the COPA, which was a result of listening to their (conservative) constiuencies (which is, after all, their job), not caving into commercial interests.
I'm more worried about people like Berman, who has the DMCA *and* the P2P bill under his belt.
Yes it's always fun to find things attributed to you on the web. Makes it seems more official.
I actually googled for the the quote first and found that same page. But I've found my sigs attributed to me on quote pages like that when I wasn't actually the original author of the quote, so I thought I'd ask first.
I'll give you credit for looking a level deeper than I did, but here was my thinking:
The pipe Magritte painted wasn't actually a pipe, because it wasn't actually a tangible thing you could use. It was simply a representation of a pipe. However, when I type a |, that is an actual pipe I can use; it is a tangible thing inasmuch as anything in the digital world is tangible. There is absolutely no difference between the pipe in this comment and the pipe in my xterm.
You're right that it's actually the shell that creates the piping action, but that's sort of on the meta- level. I can't think of any way to translate that back to the original idea of the smoking pipe (ummmmm... "I can put a tobacco pipe in front of you, but until the laws of science make the atoms of your fingers stop as they press against the atoms of the pipe when you pick it up, which triggers the nerve endings in your fingertips that signal to your brain that you're holding something tangible, that pipe is no more real than a picture of a pipe." -- how does that work? makes sense? maybe?)
Thanks for getting my brain working again on a friday evening! Cheers!
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 4, Funny
OK, here's the thing: Many people who keep blogs have *actual friends* with whom they like to keep in touch with. This idea of writing to friends may be an unfamiliar concept to you, but it's actually quite an attractive idea: You can tell people about your life, and those who care about you can read it and even write back! It's like writing letters, only you have a log of what you've written which could possibly be valuable at a later date, plus it's "write once, read everywhere" which saves you the time of having to compose a new letter each day for every person you want to know about you, and removes from them the burden of obligation to reply to everything you write!
AND (this gets even better) because it's publicly accessible, you can meet new people with whom you can make friends! You may not have grown up with access to the online world, but for the generation that has, the internet is a great venue for social interaction.
Does that help you understand why blogs appeal to some?
If you come across a blog whose contents do not interest you, it probably wasn't meant for you to read. That doesn't mean there aren't people who do care about that person and enjoy keeping in touch with them.
Oh yeah, and like the other guy said, your web page seems suspiciously weblog-like. And I liked the rant where you bitch about the Taliban's web page:-)
Actually that is a pipe, because I could copy it straight into an xterm. You'd need to make a painting of a '|', or just draw it on a piece of paper for the idea to work.
Your interests are going to coincide with your employer's interests, in at least a few areas, assuming you want to keep your job. If a large number of his constituents are employed by company X, he's probably going to support the interests of X, and his willingness to do so is multiplied by the amount of campaign contributions he gets from those employees.
"Traditional political reasons" sounds like conservative Republican rhetoric, so I'll assume that's why you can't look past his previous jobs and find out what he campaigned on that attracted people and what he did once he was in office.
Jesse Ventura's election was not strange at all. With two very poor candidates running for the democrats and republicans, the voters decided not simply elect for the lesser of two evils.
The last CD was the "internationalization" disk, and they wanted to keep it that way so that the english speakers wouldn't have to download the extra ISO.
Personally, I only buy 700MB blanks. They're nice for mix CDs, you can fit like 2 or 3 extra songs on.
I actually saw this article a little while ago. Thought about submitting it, then thought, "Nah, it's light on content and overly sensationalistic."
I should have known better;-)
Anyway, my favorite quote was at the end:
"The business will implode once you can download a movie, give it to your friends and not have a moral problem with doing it. Then we're screwed. Literally, our very lives are at stake now. George and I are just praying that we can finish 'Episode III' in time, before it's all over."
Personally, I'd like to see Lucas standing out on Hollywood Blvd holding a placard that says "The end is near! Repent from your evil filesharing ways!"
Here are two small tips for improving your "windows experience" straw man: First, HDs don't need IRQs. Second, IRQ conflicts are EXTREMELY rare with modern OSes and motherboards. You'd be better off sticking with the "shoddy drivers" and "I don't like evaluating hardware" angles.
Now you'll be able to more accurately take the piss out of windows users.
Once again, be careful about drinking the marketing kool-aid. Dolby Labs and Home Theater mag are both out to SELL EQUIPMENT, so take their "findings" with a grain of salt. Show me an actual scientific study in a peer-reviewed journal, and then I'll take a gulp.
You're right about low frequencies being felt more than heard, that's because those sounds are very large compressions and rarefactions of air molecules. It literally is a tangible sensation. Perhaps you didn't understand this, because there's also no way you could be cooked by your music. Music isn't on the "electromagnetic list". It's an entirely different phenomena (namely, sound, rather than light.)
I've never heard of a scientific study that showed our eardrums are actually sensitive higher than 20kHz (and it's usually a lot lower.)
I'd be careful about drinking Sony's marketing kool-aid. I am fully aware of how it all works out mathematically, but I'd still maintain that these "gains" largely make to difference to the end consumer.
1. The engineers can mix however they want. That's not the issue here. The dynamic range of a CD is ~96dB; if you set up your PA in a subway tunnel that's loud enough to drown out the train going by. 120dBs is equivilant to a jet taxiing down the runway. *How much more headroom do they need?* Still, if the engineers need more, they can mix at whatever rate they want, as long as the final result is in CD format. Which I guess leads to point 2:
2. Theoretically dithering down to CD 44.1/16 introduces artifacts. But try to find an actual audible example of this. Double-blind tests have been done, and the VAST majority of listeners never hear anything wrong.
Sure, DVD-Audio sounds better... to your pet bat. Otherwise, the 44.1 kHz sampling rate more than covers the frequencies our ears are capable of hearing, and with a greater dynamic range than LPs. Hello? No human could hear 100kHz frequencies, even at ear-splitting dynamic ranges over 120dB, *even* if they could afford the speakers to reproduce them.
These new formats are ploys to sell new hardware and foist copy-protection on us, at higher prices. Do us all a favor and don't buy into this crap.
Flamebait? What I said was true, and the "smart-aleck" while meant to be good natured, was still (IMHO) deserved.
Now if you wanna see some flamebait, I think the MODERATORS today are TOO FSCKING CLUELESS to know the difference between BINARY and ASCII. I think they're SUCH NEWBIES they've never even FTP'd a file before, or if they have they never figured out why their DOWNLOADED EXECUTABLES WOULDN'T RUN and their MP3s were all COOKED.
In FACT, they probably never even REALISED why open-source advocates like to see SOURCE CODE in PLAIN TEXT rather than simply DOWNLOADING "BINARY" EXECUTABLES?
AND, to TOP IT ALL OFF, these SO-CALLED "MODERATORS" *CLEARLY* haven't been around the net long enough to have seen a REAL FLAMEWAR. They wouldn't know a FLAME if I shot one right up their FAT ARSES!
Now bring it on, lusers, I've got plenty of karma to burn.
That's binary in the sense that it can't be decoded using a plain-text character encoding standard (such as ASCII). It's a common usage of the term, smart-aleck.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between an introverted computer scientist and an extroverted computer scientist?
The extroverted computer scientist looks at YOUR shoes.
Hooray for pimping e2!
(/me goes to vote up stew's w/u.)
I'm more worried about people like Berman, who has the DMCA *and* the P2P bill under his belt.
Just wanted to say I like the sig! (proud to be living in the Dead Milkmen's hometown)
Troll.
I actually googled for the the quote first and found that same page. But I've found my sigs attributed to me on quote pages like that when I wasn't actually the original author of the quote, so I thought I'd ask first.
Like the sig -- is it a quote from something, or just something you made up?
The pipe Magritte painted wasn't actually a pipe, because it wasn't actually a tangible thing you could use. It was simply a representation of a pipe. However, when I type a |, that is an actual pipe I can use; it is a tangible thing inasmuch as anything in the digital world is tangible. There is absolutely no difference between the pipe in this comment and the pipe in my xterm.
You're right that it's actually the shell that creates the piping action, but that's sort of on the meta- level. I can't think of any way to translate that back to the original idea of the smoking pipe (ummmmm... "I can put a tobacco pipe in front of you, but until the laws of science make the atoms of your fingers stop as they press against the atoms of the pipe when you pick it up, which triggers the nerve endings in your fingertips that signal to your brain that you're holding something tangible, that pipe is no more real than a picture of a pipe." -- how does that work? makes sense? maybe?)
Thanks for getting my brain working again on a friday evening! Cheers!
AND (this gets even better) because it's publicly accessible, you can meet new people with whom you can make friends! You may not have grown up with access to the online world, but for the generation that has, the internet is a great venue for social interaction.
Does that help you understand why blogs appeal to some?
If you come across a blog whose contents do not interest you, it probably wasn't meant for you to read. That doesn't mean there aren't people who do care about that person and enjoy keeping in touch with them.
Oh yeah, and like the other guy said, your web page seems suspiciously weblog-like. And I liked the rant where you bitch about the Taliban's web page :-)
You should post the 'l33t j03 FAQ' again. I loved that damn thing.
Drexel sucks. You fucking whore.
<g>
Actually that is a pipe, because I could copy it straight into an xterm. You'd need to make a painting of a '|', or just draw it on a piece of paper for the idea to work.
I think Opensecrets has a fair way of reporting.
"Traditional political reasons" sounds like conservative Republican rhetoric, so I'll assume that's why you can't look past his previous jobs and find out what he campaigned on that attracted people and what he did once he was in office.
Jesse Ventura's election was not strange at all. With two very poor candidates running for the democrats and republicans, the voters decided not simply elect for the lesser of two evils.
Personally, I only buy 700MB blanks. They're nice for mix CDs, you can fit like 2 or 3 extra songs on.
I should have known better ;-)
Anyway, my favorite quote was at the end:
Personally, I'd like to see Lucas standing out on Hollywood Blvd holding a placard that says "The end is near! Repent from your evil filesharing ways!"
Now you'll be able to more accurately take the piss out of windows users.
Cheers!
At least the ones on now know how to call a spade a spade.
Personally, I'd bet on them noticing, and personally, I'd rather fight for a fair deal for everyone, not just the biggest of the little guys.
You're right about low frequencies being felt more than heard, that's because those sounds are very large compressions and rarefactions of air molecules. It literally is a tangible sensation. Perhaps you didn't understand this, because there's also no way you could be cooked by your music. Music isn't on the "electromagnetic list". It's an entirely different phenomena (namely, sound, rather than light.)
I've never heard of a scientific study that showed our eardrums are actually sensitive higher than 20kHz (and it's usually a lot lower.)
1. The engineers can mix however they want. That's not the issue here. The dynamic range of a CD is ~96dB; if you set up your PA in a subway tunnel that's loud enough to drown out the train going by. 120dBs is equivilant to a jet taxiing down the runway. *How much more headroom do they need?* Still, if the engineers need more, they can mix at whatever rate they want, as long as the final result is in CD format. Which I guess leads to point 2:
2. Theoretically dithering down to CD 44.1/16 introduces artifacts. But try to find an actual audible example of this. Double-blind tests have been done, and the VAST majority of listeners never hear anything wrong.
These new formats are ploys to sell new hardware and foist copy-protection on us, at higher prices. Do us all a favor and don't buy into this crap.
Now if you wanna see some flamebait, I think the MODERATORS today are TOO FSCKING CLUELESS to know the difference between BINARY and ASCII. I think they're SUCH NEWBIES they've never even FTP'd a file before, or if they have they never figured out why their DOWNLOADED EXECUTABLES WOULDN'T RUN and their MP3s were all COOKED.
In FACT, they probably never even REALISED why open-source advocates like to see SOURCE CODE in PLAIN TEXT rather than simply DOWNLOADING "BINARY" EXECUTABLES?
AND, to TOP IT ALL OFF, these SO-CALLED "MODERATORS" *CLEARLY* haven't been around the net long enough to have seen a REAL FLAMEWAR. They wouldn't know a FLAME if I shot one right up their FAT ARSES!
Now bring it on, lusers, I've got plenty of karma to burn.
That's binary in the sense that it can't be decoded using a plain-text character encoding standard (such as ASCII). It's a common usage of the term, smart-aleck.