Discarding hard evidence because it's incompatible with one's hopes/expectations is downright wrong.
Very true, but the article makes it clear they did not do this. Indeed, quite the opposite, their theory fits the current data better than the standard big bank theory, and in a much more concise and elegant manner. Occams razer suggests their theory to be more likely than the big bang theory, but...
1) Occams razer is merely a rule of thumb which is often correct, but not an absolute law which is always correct, so without hard data to differentiate the two theories it only offers a sense of likelihood, nothing more.
2) The truth will be in the experimentation, once an experiment can be derived to determine which, if either, theory is the correct one.
If both theories had been published at the same time, rather than this one appearing decades later after the other had gained widespread acceptance, it would likely be the one favored because of its simplicity. What we are dealing with here is inertia in the scientific establishment, a natural and long understood phenomenon of human nature not to want admit one has been wrong for the last several decades. Of course, critical thinking and the scientific method gets people beyond that and new ideas are accepted, after rigorously prooving themselves within the limits of the available data, as contrasted to say, some religious dogma that flies in the face of all evidence and is nevertheless clung to decades, centuries, even millennia after it has been demonstrably shown to be false.
You are right to denounce wishful thinking... science often offers us unpleasant answers to our questions, and we have to accept those answers in a realistic way even when we don't like them. But I think you are wrong to assume that is what is at play here, merely because the simpler theory also happens to be a little more appetizing to those of us who find a 30 billion year lifespan of the universe to be abysmally short.:-)
After I took the picture, I noticed that you could get two full browser windows plus a terminal window all visible at once if you put the dock on the bottom of the screen. Stunning. I plan to buy one in a few months. Enjoy!
If you've got an Apple laptop or G4, and (in the case of the laptop) don't mind the very real headaches the conversion dongle can cause (probably not an issue with the laptop as (a) it is an Apple product itself and (b) you can use it without the monitor if need be) then by all means the 23" Apple HD monitor will likely be everything you want. They are stunning, and I considered buying one until further research revealed the proprietary interface, the external dongle, the problems people are having with interference and static on the all-digital link, and the fact that there was absolutely no guarantee it would work with an PC's DVI interface (though with the converter it should, assuming you can get the scan frequencies to line up correctly).
I opted for the 24" Samsung instead. For a few hundred extra I get another 1" in size, the ability to plug analog VGA and digital DVI into the thing (as well as composite video and s-video), and the knowledge that others had already managed to get it working with XFree.
You will save some money over the Samsung though (the Apple costs about $600 less), so if you're using it with Apple equipment it is definitely the way to go. If you're using a PC however, you are taking a risk in trying to get the Apple monitor to work (the 22" monitors work, but the 23" monitors are an unknown and I could not get a straight answer out of any of the sales reps or technical support people... lucky for me as I discovered the Samsung a few days later, after having nearly given up on getting any kind of a big monitor in the near future).
Whichever monitor you end up with, if you're running X you'll want to make use of the very fine modeline generator attached to http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2001-Octobe r/012070.html (save to a local file and use Uudeview, a command-line MIME-ware decoder, to extract the source file, compile, and you've got an easy modeline generator that takes horizontal, vertical, and refresh arguments to create useful and relatively safe modelines for unusual X resolutions like 1920x1200).
Whichever HD ready monitor you get, you are going to find yourself grinning like an idiot as you stare at an unbelievably large, crisp, and fine resolution screen.:-)
It needs to be emphesized that the 'problem' Hollywood is confronted with has already been confronted, and solved, by the software industry.
No legislation of any kind is necessary, except the repeal of the DMCA of course.
Software is even more prone to illegal copying and distribution than video or music, yet the software manufactuerers gave up on 'copy protection' schemes years ago as unworkable, ineffective, and harmful to their legitimate customers' need to back up their software and data.
The solution instead is to serialize each instance of the software sold and cross-reference that serial number with the credit card or other identification of the purchaser, such that if 10,000 copies of program A, serial number #12345, appear on the web the copyright holder can go after the original purchaser as a first step.
This doesn't stop all copyright violations, but it does make most people very, very reluctant to share copies of their software, and, as a result, the software industry is flourishing.
There is absolutely no reason Hollywood couldn't attach a serial number to every digital movie or braodcast sold and downloaded on the web. Sure, some would crack the serial number and remove it, but the vast majority of people are not inclined to give away things they themselves had to pay for, especially if there is some risk (however remote) of their name staying attached to the illegal copies.
I say it again, Hollywood doesn't need this law any more than software manufactuerers needed it 15 years ago. The problem has already been solved without legislation, by the marketplace, and if Hollywood weren't so rigidly stuck in the 20th century they would have long since figured that out by now.
that's the price you risk paying when you are an early adopter of a technology in which the standards aren't even close to being agreed upon.
First, I'm not an early adopter, so I have no vested interest beyond that of a potential consumer who might consider purchasing HDTV equipment in the future, provided it hasn't been crippled to disallow recording and archiving material I wish to put in my video library, like I've been doing with my VCR sinc e the 80s.
The standard in the United States was agreed upon and legislated into law. Not everyone agreed, that is true, but not everyone ever agrees on any standard. As with virtually every other standard in place a consensus was reached and the appropriate standard stamped out.
Now the copyright cartels of Hollywood want to rewrite the standard specifically to shortchange consumers and deny them the capabilities with which they've grown accustomed, such as the ability to tape on-air broadcasts and either time-shift the show or stick the tape on the shelf as part of a collection, to watch again a few years later (or quite possibly never again, as with most 'home videos').
Having an agreed upon, legislated standard changed midstream, after consumer hardware is shipping, is not "a risk early adopters take," and if industries are going to be allowed to begin making such the order of the day you can kiss the entire phenominon of early adoption goodbye. There was a social, and in some facets legal, contract in place that people were buying equipment that complies with the HDTV standard as laid out by the FCC. Make all that equipment obsolete and you stand a good chance of killing the entire HDTV standard (in whatever form) dead, irrespective of whatever other merits it may have, and irrespective of how draconian the FCC becomes in trying to push it.
No one with a shred of sense is going to spend a sizeable amount of money a second time to chase a standard that should not have been changed in the first place, and there aren't enough people with the pocketbook or desire to sustain a second wave of early adopters needed to finance such a change.
Unless Hollywood is going to stard demanding government subsidized distribution of copy crippled HDTV equipment to the masses (who are unlikely to be interested at any price... even $0... when they discover their $100 VCR does what that expensive equipment cannot), the change these fools are demanding is simply going to kill the medium dead, a la consumer DAT audio tape.
Which may, in fact, be their goal to begin with, so they can start offering 10 channels of lowres, lowgrade tripe on the public airwaves congress criminally stole from us and granted them as part of this whole move to HDTV to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, I lust after a good 1920x1080 image as much as the next person, but the price they are demanding in terms of relinquishing my rights as an A/V consumer just simply aren't worth it, by orders of magnitude. Nor to is the price of the equipment they are about to make obsolete, but that's another story.
There is nothing worse than a troublesome dongle. It is worth the extra expense of a piece-o-shit Samsung to avoid all of the trouble the dongle is sure to cause. Yes sir.
You are not only a troll, you are an ignorant troll. Clearly you have never worked with frequency-adjusting dongles for modern digital monitors. I invite you to spend a few hours troubleshooting an SGI 1600SW dongle on a multiheaded box, or the troublesom signal interference one sees on a supposedly entirely digital DVI->Apple 22" LCD link that is clearly an artifact of the dongle, the fact that they foolishly send power and video signal over the same bundle of wires, or both. I invite you to manage several tens of computers with such devices, all of which in turn have nice big bricks connected at some point along their power cords. Bricks, and power supplies, that go out from time to time, taking the monitor down as well and requiring you to spend additional time neither you nor your user can really spare isolating the problem to that troublesom dongle's power supply and finding a replacement.
Contrast this to the generally plug-in-and-forget behavior of industry-standard monitors that do not require such hardware kludges.
At the very best these dongles represent Yet Another Source of Failure. More often, they represents an additional, ongoing source of problems and complications that rear their ugly heads all too frequently, problems that are easilly eliminated by purchasing a monitor that adheres to industry standards from the get-go, such as the Samsung you so transparently envy, or any number of other DVI equipped LCD monitors others have suggested here.
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain ["tired of continual sarcasms"] 2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm ["the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800"]
NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car?
I just bought a 24" 1920x1200 resolution Samsung SyncMaster 240T for $4200 (literally, I just got it yesterday).
If you are spending $3800 on a big monitor, for goodness sake spend the extra $500 and get an extra 3 inches in size and the ability to support true 1080i HD resolution up front. I work on 1600x1024 monitors during the day, and let me tell you, the added space 1920x1200 gets you is worth the price difference alone. The extra size (21" vs. 24") is also well worth the price difference. And unlike the Apple monitor, it has standard video interfaces (analog VGA, DVI-D, s-video and RCA video, though the latter two are IMHO unimportant) without a troublesome dongle.
Driving 1920x1200 through a DVI-D port from an NVidia card under XFree 4.2 on a gentoo GNU/Linux makes watching those old Babylon 5 divx's a real treat (even if the increased size makes some of the artifacts visible:).
The success of software has little to do with marketing plans. It really has nothing to do with conspiracies, sneaking it in the door, subversion, etc. The success relies solely upon what the software does and how well it does it.
I know this is a troll and I probably shouldn't respond, but someone needs to point out that what you say is, of course, is demonstrably false. If it were true, Microsoft would not have the monopoly it currently enjoys. Its products have consistently been inferior to its competitors in nearly every measurable degree since the late 1980s, yet they have a virtual lock on the desktop and have had for years. Why? Not because their products do anything well, but because of marketing muscle and a criminal willingness to violate the law again and again, even while in court defending against earlier such violations.
In short, it is all about marketing, conspiracy, and subversion... most end users aren't even qualified to recognize quality (and Microsoft has trained them to not expect it), much less choose on the basis of it. They choose based on what is marketed to them, nothing more, and currently Microsoft has 99% of all the marketing dollars, earned through ongoing illegal leveraging of their monopoly that goes back a good ten years.
I just got the channel a few months ago, it isn't what I thought it would be, I dont like it.
I don't imagine too many/. types will be fans of a network that is so Microsoft centric, with an occasional aside for Apple (though last night the guy said something to the effect of "well, they set me up with an Apple again and I've already shown you how to use the ipod, so will skip the 'tips' sequence and move on to something else...") and, even rarer, a mention of GNU/Linux. TechTV simply isn't relevant to what most of us do, nor are they particularly close to the leading edge of software.
That having been said, they do have an excellent show on in the evenings entitled "Big Thinkers," which last night featured an industrialist working on developing nano-technology, and a night or two ago had Lawrence Laessig on discussing the debacle that is current copyright law. That, and the airing of max headroom, will mean I'll end up watching techtv more than any other channel... all of 4 or 5 hours / week (OK, so I don't watch much TV. Since they cancelled Max Headroom there really hasn't been much on worth watching).
In short, it looks like they may have realized how out of touch they are with the tech savvy crowd, and are doing something constructive about it, "Screen Savers" notwithstanding.:-)
hy is it that so many of you nVidia fan boys refuse to accept the fact that on some pretty common hardware, the nVidia drivers still have problems for some people?!?
Actually, the binary NVidia drivers cause problems on a lot of systems. I have 20-odd systems at work with various NVidia drivers and hardware, running X in various configurations (some dual headed, some single headed, some PCI cards, some AGP, various processors, various versions of X, etc.).
They all suffer from these kind of stability issues, sufficiently often that those which are not using the dual-head features of the cards have been switched to using the free 'nv' driver, which lacks many of the features of the closed-source drivers but are significantly more stable and reliable.
For the rest, we are no longer purchasing NVidia cards because of the stability issues, and are migrating toward ATI and other solutions. Binary-only, proprietary drivers simply entail unnacceptable risks in stability, and leave our hands tied when problems arise.
The NVidia fans can complain, accuse myself and my predicessors of incompetence (they were not incompetent and neither am I, but that is neither here nor there), claim there are 'AGP' issues even on PCI-only systems, etc. etc., but when all is said and done, removing NVidia's binary-only drivers and replacing them with the free 'nv' drivers, or replacing the hardware with ATI hardware and its respective free drivers, turns the machine from a flakey box reminisicent of Windows stability to a rock solid, reliable workhorse with uptimes measured in the hundreds of days.
Before you get on your high horse, you would do well to remember that it was your pal Slick Willie who signed the DMCA into law. [...] Left-wingers have never been known to let the truth get in the way of an argument, though...why do you think we had eight years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations?
For the same reason we had 12 years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations before that [Reagan-Bush Sr] (including the sale of what were likely CIA drugs on American streets, Iran-Contra, and a war in the middle-east that was either engineered or a result of amazingly incompetent diplomacy), 4 years of the same before that [Carter], Eight years of the same before that [Nixon-Ford], etc. ad nauseum, back to probably within a generation or two of the founding of the Republic.
The draconian controls Copyright Cartels enjoy under the current legal regime over our popular culture, the draconian laws being enacted to impose an unnatural economic regime (capitalism as envisioned through monopolistic intellectual property regimes) on a domain with no inherent scarcity (electronic media and, specifically the internet) that will likely make the old Soviet attempt at doing something similiar (trying to impose an unrealistic communisim on a world of natural scarcity) look postively liberal in comparison, and the unconstitutional precedence copyright is taking over freedom of speech (despite the fact that virtually every constitutional scholar will point out that Amendmensts, even the first one, always take precedence over their antecedents when they conflict, and thus freedom of speech should constitutionally trump copyright every time) are neither a democratic or republican issue, and attempts to argue this in those terms are bound to result in failure.
Both parties have colluded in passing numerous extentions to the duration of copyright since the 1970s, legislatively robbing the public domain of its constitutionally guaranteed material.
Both parties passed the Sony Bono copyright extention act, which retroactively and unconstitutionally removed material from the public domain.
Both parties passed the DMCA, criminalizing copyright violation for the first time in American history (though not for the first time in western history... one man was even drawn and quartered for copyright violation in merry old England back in the 17th century IIRC).
Both parties have been in bed with the Moghuls of Old Guard Media, be they recording companies, Hollywood Studios, or television networks stealing billions in public airways for a pittance.
Both parties have blatently accepted legalized bribes and allowed their respective interests to purchase legislation in flagrant contradiction to the public interest, and with open scorn for the same.
In short, politicians in both parties have earned the moniker of "whore" quite publicly, and the only real criticism of the term that is warrented is the lack of the adjective "cheap." How else can one describe selling out one's multi-trillion dollar nation, and multi-billion dollar growth industries, for a few hundred thousand in campagin donations (a total of a few tens of millions for the party, including all soft monies). These people, democrats and republicans alike, are not just whores, nor are they just "corporate" whores, they are cheap whores, who have sold every American man, woman, and child down the river for a pittance.
That all having been said, may I suggest you concentrate on fighting together to prevent further ravagement of our freedoms by both parties. The struggle for freedom of thought and expression, against the copyright and intellectual property regimes being forced down our throats by a particular, concentrated special interest, is a non-partison one, and the enemies to the same are most emphatically non-partison, for they encompass many in BOTH parties. This partisan bickering of conservatives vs. liberals misses the whole point, is divisive and hell, and quite frankly undermines your ability to act effectively in countering these attacks.
In other words, if you remain partisan and distracted from the issues you will have not only been divided, but very effectively conquered, before the battle is even joined.
NVIDIA actively support Linux by constantly releasing up to date drivers that are very high quality. The NVIDIA drivers are unquestionably the highest quality OpenGL implementation available on Linux without exception.
Well, perhaps... but NVIDIA's closed source drivers, while good in some respects, do occasionally cause X to hang for no apparant reason. Switching NVIDIA cards, or updating to the current drivers, does nothing to alleviate this, although switching from an NVIDIA card to an ATI Radeon card did solve the problem, as did using the Free Software Nvidia X driver ('nv') with the same hardware that was so troublesome with the 'nvidia' driver. And yes, this is with AGP settings in the safest, most conservative mode (cf the NVIDIA driver docs for details).
So while the OpenGL implimentation may be very good, the closed source nature of the driver means I'm forced to wait for an officially unsupported, binary-only driver, to be fixed someday, or I have to find an alternative. This seriously decreases the value of the NVIDIA driver and hardware for use where I work and live.
ATI does not suffer from this handicap, and while its OpenGL support may not be as good as NVIDIAs, it does work well, and without the system stability issues incurred by using NVIDIA. In addition, the free and open nature of the ati drivers insures that my hardware will never be orphaned, even if ATI has a change of heart (or financial troubles) down the road. The closed source NVIDIA drivers give me none of those guarantees (though the fallback nv driver helps, as long as you don't need digital out or multi-head support).
An Honest Restatement of the Microsoft Eula
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 2
Also please be advised that this software is probably worth exactly what you paid for it (nothing!), so if it destroys you computer I can't be held responsible. It is mainly a learning exercise for me, so use it at your own risk.
Nice huh?
Its just a more blunt way of saying exactly the same thing Microsoft says with any product you buy from them: namely that the product you buy may not be suitable for any purpose, and that the manufacturer (Microsoft in that case) absolves themselves of any and all damages their product may cause.
This particular free software product chooses to state that in more obvious terms. Personally, I find the honesty a breath of much needed fresh air.
However, it is also important to learn the basics yourself. Everyone in the entire university must take CS1 and most CS2, these are just intro programing classes to get people familure with coding and thinking on there own. That is their point, and to accomplish that, they must seperate the students out.
What utter nonsense. Please keep in mind that you are being taught that your University is right and its critics are wrong in each lecture you attend, if not overtly, then certainly on a subliminal level.
I attended the University of Illinois at a time when it was considered the 2nd or 3rd best university for computer science (Engineering College... there is also an LAS compsci program which I know little about). These rankings change from year to year (and source to source), so I don't know where the U of I stands currently, but I'd be surprised if it had slipped all that much.
In any event, that particular university had an impeachable reputation in computer science. They never had such an asinine rule that students could not discuss the subject and their homework assignments amongst themselves. Not only would such a rule have been unenforcable, or led to the kind of absurdities you are defending here, but it would have precluded one of the most important facets of education, through which people learn any subject, at any level, rudimentary freshman level through advanced post-doctorate: studying, discussing, and digesting the material.
Instead, the homework assignments were made to be sufficiently challenging that, even if you were to collaborate with others, you would learn the material and your grade would reflect how well you learned it. Keep in mind if your work resembles another's too closely you'll get nailed for cheating, so even if several people solved the problem together they'd essentially have to reimpliment it differently from one another... reinforcing the very lessons they are to be learning. And if you choose to be a lazy bastard and let someone else do all the work, then try to rewrite it so that it is sufficiently different, you'll either learn despite yourself, or screw it up sufficiently to get the grade your laziness has earned you.
Then there is the bell curve to contend with... so there is a disincentive for people to be too free with their solutions built in. In short, the complexity and demands of the assignments coupled with the grading model (bell curve), and a systematic check for plagorism, were sufficient to prevent and punish cheating without resorting to draconian absurdities such as disallowing any discussion of assignments amongst students.
Georgia Tech is simply wrong on all counts, and probably too arrogant to recognize and fix the real problem, which isn't their students, but their approach to education.
Maybe it is difficult to see looking in, but there is a good concept behind the rules. Yes, they might not need to be there if everyone was honest, but unfortunately this is not a perfect world, and the restrictive environment helps in the long run.
Now it becomes clear what Georgia Tech is teaching its students. Obedience, and the sublimation of one's intellect to the authority of others, without question. The fact that you would write something like that with a straight face (and for your sake, I truly hope this was a clever troll and not meant in earnestness) is indicitive of the kind of education you are receiving at your university.
I humbly suggest you start shopping around for a more sensible university to transfer to, one that concentrates on teaching science and technology rather than obedience.
You are right to be open minded about such things.
However, others are right to be skeptical of many of the claims... without significant evidence they are just that... claims. I think it is quite possible ancient civilizations have risen and fallen, and had their every trace eradicated by glaciers, erosion, and who knows what else. However, without physical evidence one should view these things as hypothetical possibilities, not probabilities. As for the alien slant I agree with you entirely... show me the alien, or stop wasting my time with nonsense. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Other interesting things are that geneticists have worked out that ALL current human beings are descended from around 2,000 humans at a point around 80,000 years ago.
Clarification. IIRC all humans are descended from a few thousand humans 80,000... when some natural catastrophe (possibly a yellowstone-like so-called super-volcano, possibly disease or climatic change) nearly wiped the species out.
However, everyone outside of Africa is believed to be descended from about 500 people who emigrated more recently. That's right, something like 90-95% of human genetic diversity is in Africa. The rest of us, be we European, Native American, Asian, or whatever, are all much more similar, having only 5-10% of the genetic diversity. I'll leave it as an excercize to the reader as to which group some future humans, having survived some arbitrary change in survival requirements and conditions, is most likely to come from (hint, the math can be done by any 10th grade algebra student).
That is why humanity is not like other animals like dogs for which there are a myriad of different shapes and forms.
First, dogs are not naturally occuring creatures. They were bred for specific characteristics and traits, indeed inbred extensively, which is why there are so many varieties of dogs, some taking very odd form. A better example would have been different wolves, or bears, whose differences exist because of natural selection and not human intervention.
Second, that bottleneck is one possible contributing factor to humankinds homogeneous nature. Other factors which may have been more important were the destruction of the Neanderthal and perhaps other intelligent primates we don't know about (i.e. the ethnic cleansing of a differing kind of primates, leaving homo sap alone to dominate the world), our ability to modify our environment (easing some evolutionary pressures that wolves and bears must endure), and probably numerous other things as well.
The first amendment protects speech, religion, and the right to openly demonstrate those.
It protects the right of association, and by implication the right not to be found guilty by association.
What is more, the constitution as a whole protects the right to privacy, as violating our privacy is a power not expressly granted the government except in very narrow cases (and therefor, according to the 10th amendment, explicitly denied the government).
It is a refreshing surprise that at least one court is attempting to hold the government to the constitution, something the government really hasn't done since prohibition and the creation of the FBI. How long this will last is anyone's guess, but I for one am glad Tattered Cover has the courage to at least fight the good fight, for all our sakes.
Not to mention GNU/Linux for several years
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Not to mention GNU/Linux, since 2.2.x on 64-bit architectures.
I believe most of the *BSD variants are 64-bit capable as well these days.
Indeed, AFAIK the only 'mainstream' OS that is struggling with 64-bit and so late to the game is... Microsoft Windows.
But with their propogandists to convince everyone who'll listen that 64-bit computing didn't exist before their johnny-come-lately (and johnny-can't-do-it-quite-right-for-several-more-it erations) operating system finally gets a modicum of 64-bit capability, many will look at 64-bit computing as another Microsoft "innovation," reality be damned.
Yes, it's very annoying. But it's always funny seeing people complain about the quality of things that they get for free.
Oh, good Lord. Please take your libertarian Money Ueber Alles tripe and go home.
Installing unrequested and nonconsentual software onto someone's harddrive is deceptive and akin to vandalism at best, and outright destruction of property at worst (these scumware packages can and occasionally do have bugs that result in harm abov e and beyond pollution of the user's operating environment).
If someone shovelled raw sewage (shit) into your living room, would you still argue that "yes, it's very annoying. But it's always funny seeing people complain about the quality of things that they get for free"? I rather doubt it.
This is the digital equivelent, and people who do this should be going to jail for illegally hacking their customer's computers. I guarantee you if this was a snot-nosed kid doing this, rather than a corporate entity, they'd be doing time in jail. And rightly so.
"bing-bong. Brimish Rull regret that mumble maz bem dermumble a mir mumble
That sounds remarkably like the Chicago El.
[squeel] Welcome [screetch] mumble Passengers mumble no Radio Playing mumble [static] [static] mumble. The next stations [bzzt] [static] mumble muble [squeel]
Yeah, I mean, it's not like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson or John Brunner wrote about digital technology. No, they just wrote about... er, computers changing society.
Or Star Trek for that matter... or 2001 a space oddyssee... or,
Oh wait, he means the Luddite inspired tripe Hollywood thinks of as Sci Fi. He's right, Hollywood Sci Fi isn't in a position to predict the Microwave prior to its being on the market and demanding some product placement, much less something as significant as computers and the internet.
Which is why those of us who are true Sci Fi fans have such disdain for the dreck Hollywood markets and labels as such. When I see Greg Egan's "Diaspora" in an unadulterated film format, maybe I'll gain some shred of respect for the media moghuls. In the meantime, most of 'em wouldn't know SciFi if it kicked them in the face.
I doubt there is a paradox, or a new 'dimension'
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Time Travel
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Even if time travel is possible, I doubt there is a temporal paradox, or a new dimension/universe created (think of the energy involved in the 'creation' of a universe and you'll see just how unlikely that explanaition is).
Timetravel by definition represents a discontinuity in cause and effect. This discontinuity likely means that if cause is on one side of the discontinuity (time traveller creates time machine because of memory of father's untimely death) and the effect on the other (time traveller goes back in time and warns father), then removing the cause likely won't remove the effect.
Put another way, a time traveller altering history such that s/he was never born likely would continue to exist, as an orphan of time in a world whose history would likely unfold differently from what they remember.
The wavefront of change would propogate forward from the time traveller's intervention. It wouldn't jump back across the discontinuity to affect the time traveler themself in any way... and the time traveller's memories of what had been would be all that remain of the way history unfolded the first time.
In short, no new universes, no paradoxes, simply a history that unfolds differently from the first iteration, and a lone person who remembers how different things once were.
You can kill your grandfather, but you'll still exist... without a family, without childhood friends that remember you, without a birth certificate, but very much a living, breathing, time travelling murderer.
Saying LCDs are bad because you can see JPEG compression artifacts is like saying microscopes are bad because you can see germs in them.
Absolutely. I watch my old DivX encoded B5 episodes on an LCD, as well as my current crop of Enterprise MPEG4 encoded episodes, and on the 18.1" LCD you do see the artifacts (though it is quite watchable from typical TV viewing distance).
Watch the same videos on a CRT and most of the artifacts go away... indeed, the DivX v. DVD comparison starts to make DivX look pretty good.
Do the same thing with MJPEG or raw ieee1394 on the other hand, and the LCD, sans the glare of the CRT, looks much better. No flicker, no glare, just crisp, clear, beautiful video. And for viewing DVDs.... it is very nice (although interestingly the DVDs have many more atifacts than either the raw ieee1394 or MJPEG video does, on both the CRT and LCD... go figure).
And on my 4x3 18.1" ViewSonic I've not been able to create scaling or motion artifacts (though on a colleagues 16:10 SGI Flatpanel they are regrettebly there, in the form of ugly horizontal lines about 1/4 inch long, that go away if a max screened xine is moved one or two pixels to the right. Most odd.)
On a totally different extreme, Eric Raymond is a vocal Liberterian, which is certainly fringe whacked politics from the point of view of the norm.
Yes, and although I have some libertarian leanings myself in some respects, I find his gun nuttery ("everyone on the plane should have had guns and 9/11 would never have happened!") to be beyond extreme (that particular example is akin to expecting sanity and safety if everyone has an H-bomb strapped to their back, as anyone with a gun can bring the plane down killing everyone aboard).
However, as the folks at the FSF are at pains to point out, Eric Raymond has no affiliation with the FSF or Free Software at all... his movement is the (from the FSF point of view) unrelated (but oft eqauted to the Free Software Movement) Open Source movement.
I'm sure somewhere on the planet is a Free Software proponent who also adheres to 'whacked' political views, but if so they certainly aren't anywhere to be found near the top of the Free Software Foundation's organization.:-)
I just think it's irrelevant to the software debate.
Amen, and absolutely correct. I felt it important to point out a common misperception which you inadvertantly were propogating further, a misperception with no basis in fact and one which stems from rather malicious personal attacks on RMS by those with opposing political or personal aims. I don't particularly get along with RMS, and for most of my tenure in the Free Software/Open Source movement I haven't much agreed with him on many points (though the Blender incident has caused me to take a hard look at those points, and now I find myself suprised at just how much I've come to agree with much of what RMS says these days), but he is entitled to some defense against such compeletely baseless myths that are being promulgated about him, and while I know you almost certainly had no ill intention in doing so, there are plenty of others who do, and such misinformation needs to be fought with the truth wherever it arises.
If you need more information and aren't just a troll, you can do any further research on your own. Google is your friend (except when censored by corporate interests such as the Scientologists, but that doesn't appear to have happened WRT this subject, yet).
Slashdot Mirror
Discarding hard evidence because it's incompatible with one's hopes/expectations is downright wrong.
...
... science often offers us unpleasant answers to our questions, and we have to accept those answers in a realistic way even when we don't like them. But I think you are wrong to assume that is what is at play here, merely because the simpler theory also happens to be a little more appetizing to those of us who find a 30 billion year lifespan of the universe to be abysmally short. :-)
Very true, but the article makes it clear they did not do this. Indeed, quite the opposite, their theory fits the current data better than the standard big bank theory, and in a much more concise and elegant manner. Occams razer suggests their theory to be more likely than the big bang theory, but
1) Occams razer is merely a rule of thumb which is often correct, but not an absolute law which is always correct, so without hard data to differentiate the two theories it only offers a sense of likelihood, nothing more.
2) The truth will be in the experimentation, once an experiment can be derived to determine which, if either, theory is the correct one.
If both theories had been published at the same time, rather than this one appearing decades later after the other had gained widespread acceptance, it would likely be the one favored because of its simplicity. What we are dealing with here is inertia in the scientific establishment, a natural and long understood phenomenon of human nature not to want admit one has been wrong for the last several decades. Of course, critical thinking and the scientific method gets people beyond that and new ideas are accepted, after rigorously prooving themselves within the limits of the available data, as contrasted to say, some religious dogma that flies in the face of all evidence and is nevertheless clung to decades, centuries, even millennia after it has been demonstrably shown to be false.
You are right to denounce wishful thinking
After I took the picture, I noticed that you could get two full browser windows plus a terminal window all visible at once if you put the dock on the bottom of the screen. Stunning. I plan to buy one in a few months. Enjoy!
... lucky for me as I discovered the Samsung a few days later, after having nearly given up on getting any kind of a big monitor in the near future).
e r/012070.html
:-)
If you've got an Apple laptop or G4, and (in the case of the laptop) don't mind the very real headaches the conversion dongle can cause (probably not an issue with the laptop as (a) it is an Apple product itself and (b) you can use it without the monitor if need be) then by all means the 23" Apple HD monitor will likely be everything you want. They are stunning, and I considered buying one until further research revealed the proprietary interface, the external dongle, the problems people are having with interference and static on the all-digital link, and the fact that there was absolutely no guarantee it would work with an PC's DVI interface (though with the converter it should, assuming you can get the scan frequencies to line up correctly).
I opted for the 24" Samsung instead. For a few hundred extra I get another 1" in size, the ability to plug analog VGA and digital DVI into the thing (as well as composite video and s-video), and the knowledge that others had already managed to get it working with XFree.
You will save some money over the Samsung though (the Apple costs about $600 less), so if you're using it with Apple equipment it is definitely the way to go. If you're using a PC however, you are taking a risk in trying to get the Apple monitor to work (the 22" monitors work, but the 23" monitors are an unknown and I could not get a straight answer out of any of the sales reps or technical support people
Whichever monitor you end up with, if you're running X you'll want to make use of the very fine modeline generator attached to http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2001-Octob
(save to a local file and use Uudeview, a command-line MIME-ware decoder, to extract the source file, compile, and you've got an easy modeline generator that takes horizontal, vertical, and refresh arguments to create useful and relatively safe modelines for unusual X resolutions like 1920x1200).
Whichever HD ready monitor you get, you are going to find yourself grinning like an idiot as you stare at an unbelievably large, crisp, and fine resolution screen.
It needs to be emphesized that the 'problem' Hollywood is confronted with has already been confronted, and solved, by the software industry.
No legislation of any kind is necessary, except the repeal of the DMCA of course.
Software is even more prone to illegal copying and distribution than video or music, yet the software manufactuerers gave up on 'copy protection' schemes years ago as unworkable, ineffective, and harmful to their legitimate customers' need to back up their software and data.
The solution instead is to serialize each instance of the software sold and cross-reference that serial number with the credit card or other identification of the purchaser, such that if 10,000 copies of program A, serial number #12345, appear on the web the copyright holder can go after the original purchaser as a first step.
This doesn't stop all copyright violations, but it does make most people very, very reluctant to share copies of their software, and, as a result, the software industry is flourishing.
There is absolutely no reason Hollywood couldn't attach a serial number to every digital movie or braodcast sold and downloaded on the web. Sure, some would crack the serial number and remove it, but the vast majority of people are not inclined to give away things they themselves had to pay for, especially if there is some risk (however remote) of their name staying attached to the illegal copies.
I say it again, Hollywood doesn't need this law any more than software manufactuerers needed it 15 years ago. The problem has already been solved without legislation, by the marketplace, and if Hollywood weren't so rigidly stuck in the 20th century they would have long since figured that out by now.
that's the price you risk paying when you are an early adopter of a technology in which the standards aren't even close to being agreed upon.
... even $0 ... when they discover their $100 VCR does what that expensive equipment cannot), the change these fools are demanding is simply going to kill the medium dead, a la consumer DAT audio tape.
First, I'm not an early adopter, so I have no vested interest beyond that of a potential consumer who might consider purchasing HDTV equipment in the future, provided it hasn't been crippled to disallow recording and archiving material I wish to put in my video library, like I've been doing with my VCR sinc e the 80s.
The standard in the United States was agreed upon and legislated into law. Not everyone agreed, that is true, but not everyone ever agrees on any standard. As with virtually every other standard in place a consensus was reached and the appropriate standard stamped out.
Now the copyright cartels of Hollywood want to rewrite the standard specifically to shortchange consumers and deny them the capabilities with which they've grown accustomed, such as the ability to tape on-air broadcasts and either time-shift the show or stick the tape on the shelf as part of a collection, to watch again a few years later (or quite possibly never again, as with most 'home videos').
Having an agreed upon, legislated standard changed midstream, after consumer hardware is shipping, is not "a risk early adopters take," and if industries are going to be allowed to begin making such the order of the day you can kiss the entire phenominon of early adoption goodbye. There was a social, and in some facets legal, contract in place that people were buying equipment that complies with the HDTV standard as laid out by the FCC. Make all that equipment obsolete and you stand a good chance of killing the entire HDTV standard (in whatever form) dead, irrespective of whatever other merits it may have, and irrespective of how draconian the FCC becomes in trying to push it.
No one with a shred of sense is going to spend a sizeable amount of money a second time to chase a standard that should not have been changed in the first place, and there aren't enough people with the pocketbook or desire to sustain a second wave of early adopters needed to finance such a change.
Unless Hollywood is going to stard demanding government subsidized distribution of copy crippled HDTV equipment to the masses (who are unlikely to be interested at any price
Which may, in fact, be their goal to begin with, so they can start offering 10 channels of lowres, lowgrade tripe on the public airwaves congress criminally stole from us and granted them as part of this whole move to HDTV to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, I lust after a good 1920x1080 image as much as the next person, but the price they are demanding in terms of relinquishing my rights as an A/V consumer just simply aren't worth it, by orders of magnitude. Nor to is the price of the equipment they are about to make obsolete, but that's another story.
There is nothing worse than a troublesome dongle. It is worth the extra expense of a piece-o-shit Samsung to avoid all of the trouble the dongle is sure to cause. Yes sir.
You are not only a troll, you are an ignorant troll. Clearly you have never worked with frequency-adjusting dongles for modern digital monitors. I invite you to spend a few hours troubleshooting an SGI 1600SW dongle on a multiheaded box, or the troublesom signal interference one sees on a supposedly entirely digital DVI->Apple 22" LCD link that is clearly an artifact of the dongle, the fact that they foolishly send power and video signal over the same bundle of wires, or both. I invite you to manage several tens of computers with such devices, all of which in turn have nice big bricks connected at some point along their power cords. Bricks, and power supplies, that go out from time to time, taking the monitor down as well and requiring you to spend additional time neither you nor your user can really spare isolating the problem to that troublesom dongle's power supply and finding a replacement.
Contrast this to the generally plug-in-and-forget behavior of industry-standard monitors that do not require such hardware kludges.
At the very best these dongles represent Yet Another Source of Failure. More often, they represents an additional, ongoing source of problems and complications that rear their ugly heads all too frequently, problems that are easilly eliminated by purchasing a monitor that adheres to industry standards from the get-go, such as the Samsung you so transparently envy, or any number of other DVI equipped LCD monitors others have suggested here.
c.f.
sarcasm ('sär-"ka-z&m)
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain ["tired of continual sarcasms"]
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm ["the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800"]
synonym see WIT
source: Merriam-Webster
NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car?
:).
I just bought a 24" 1920x1200 resolution Samsung SyncMaster 240T for $4200 (literally, I just got it yesterday).
If you are spending $3800 on a big monitor, for goodness sake spend the extra $500 and get an extra 3 inches in size and the ability to support true 1080i HD resolution up front. I work on 1600x1024 monitors during the day, and let me tell you, the added space 1920x1200 gets you is worth the price difference alone. The extra size (21" vs. 24") is also well worth the price difference.
And unlike the Apple monitor, it has standard video interfaces (analog VGA, DVI-D, s-video and RCA video, though the latter two are IMHO unimportant) without a troublesome dongle.
Driving 1920x1200 through a DVI-D port from an NVidia card under XFree 4.2 on a gentoo GNU/Linux makes watching those old Babylon 5 divx's a real treat (even if the increased size makes some of the artifacts visible
The success of software has little to do with marketing plans. It really has nothing to do with conspiracies, sneaking it in the door, subversion, etc. The success relies solely upon what the software does and how well it does it.
... most end users aren't even qualified to recognize quality (and Microsoft has trained them to not expect it), much less choose on the basis of it. They choose based on what is marketed to them, nothing more, and currently Microsoft has 99% of all the marketing dollars, earned through ongoing illegal leveraging of their monopoly that goes back a good ten years.
I know this is a troll and I probably shouldn't respond, but someone needs to point out that what you say is, of course, is demonstrably false. If it were true, Microsoft would not have the monopoly it currently enjoys. Its products have consistently been inferior to its competitors in nearly every measurable degree since the late 1980s, yet they have a virtual lock on the desktop and have had for years. Why? Not because their products do anything well, but because of marketing muscle and a criminal willingness to violate the law again and again, even while in court defending against earlier such violations.
In short, it is all about marketing, conspiracy, and subversion
I just got the channel a few months ago, it isn't what I thought it would be, I dont like it.
/. types will be fans of a network that is so Microsoft centric, with an occasional aside for Apple (though last night the guy said something to the effect of "well, they set me up with an Apple again and I've already shown you how to use the ipod, so will skip the 'tips' sequence and move on to something else...") and, even rarer, a mention of GNU/Linux. TechTV simply isn't relevant to what most of us do, nor are they particularly close to the leading edge of software.
... all of 4 or 5 hours / week (OK, so I don't watch much TV. Since they cancelled Max Headroom there really hasn't been much on worth watching).
:-)
I don't imagine too many
That having been said, they do have an excellent show on in the evenings entitled "Big Thinkers," which last night featured an industrialist working on developing nano-technology, and a night or two ago had Lawrence Laessig on discussing the debacle that is current copyright law. That, and the airing of max headroom, will mean I'll end up watching techtv more than any other channel
In short, it looks like they may have realized how out of touch they are with the tech savvy crowd, and are doing something constructive about it, "Screen Savers" notwithstanding.
hy is it that so many of you nVidia fan boys refuse to accept the fact that on some pretty common hardware, the nVidia drivers still have problems for some people?!?
Actually, the binary NVidia drivers cause problems on a lot of systems. I have 20-odd systems at work with various NVidia drivers and hardware, running X in various configurations (some dual headed, some single headed, some PCI cards, some AGP, various processors, various versions of X, etc.).
They all suffer from these kind of stability issues, sufficiently often that those which are not using the dual-head features of the cards have been switched to using the free 'nv' driver, which lacks many of the features of the closed-source drivers but are significantly more stable and reliable.
For the rest, we are no longer purchasing NVidia cards because of the stability issues, and are migrating toward ATI and other solutions. Binary-only, proprietary drivers simply entail unnacceptable risks in stability, and leave our hands tied when problems arise.
The NVidia fans can complain, accuse myself and my predicessors of incompetence (they were not incompetent and neither am I, but that is neither here nor there), claim there are 'AGP' issues even on PCI-only systems, etc. etc., but when all is said and done, removing NVidia's binary-only drivers and replacing them with the free 'nv' drivers, or replacing the hardware with ATI hardware and its respective free drivers, turns the machine from a flakey box reminisicent of Windows stability to a rock solid, reliable workhorse with uptimes measured in the hundreds of days.
Before you get on your high horse, you would do well to remember that it was your pal Slick Willie who signed the DMCA into law. [...] Left-wingers have never been known to let the truth get in the way of an argument, though...why do you think we had eight years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations?
... one man was even drawn and quartered for copyright violation in merry old England back in the 17th century IIRC).
For the same reason we had 12 years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations before that [Reagan-Bush Sr] (including the sale of what were likely CIA drugs on American streets, Iran-Contra, and a war in the middle-east that was either engineered or a result of amazingly incompetent diplomacy), 4 years of the same before that [Carter], Eight years of the same before that [Nixon-Ford], etc. ad nauseum, back to probably within a generation or two of the founding of the Republic.
The draconian controls Copyright Cartels enjoy under the current legal regime over our popular culture, the draconian laws being enacted to impose an unnatural economic regime (capitalism as envisioned through monopolistic intellectual property regimes) on a domain with no inherent scarcity (electronic media and, specifically the internet) that will likely make the old Soviet attempt at doing something similiar (trying to impose an unrealistic communisim on a world of natural scarcity) look postively liberal in comparison, and the unconstitutional precedence copyright is taking over freedom of speech (despite the fact that virtually every constitutional scholar will point out that Amendmensts, even the first one, always take precedence over their antecedents when they conflict, and thus freedom of speech should constitutionally trump copyright every time) are neither a democratic or republican issue, and attempts to argue this in those terms are bound to result in failure.
Both parties have colluded in passing numerous extentions to the duration of copyright since the 1970s, legislatively robbing the public domain of its constitutionally guaranteed material.
Both parties passed the Sony Bono copyright extention act, which retroactively and unconstitutionally removed material from the public domain.
Both parties passed the DMCA, criminalizing copyright violation for the first time in American history (though not for the first time in western history
Both parties have been in bed with the Moghuls of Old Guard Media, be they recording companies, Hollywood Studios, or television networks stealing billions in public airways for a pittance.
Both parties have blatently accepted legalized bribes and allowed their respective interests to purchase legislation in flagrant contradiction to the public interest, and with open scorn for the same.
In short, politicians in both parties have earned the moniker of "whore" quite publicly, and the only real criticism of the term that is warrented is the lack of the adjective "cheap." How else can one describe selling out one's multi-trillion dollar nation, and multi-billion dollar growth industries, for a few hundred thousand in campagin donations (a total of a few tens of millions for the party, including all soft monies). These people, democrats and republicans alike, are not just whores, nor are they just "corporate" whores, they are cheap whores, who have sold every American man, woman, and child down the river for a pittance.
That all having been said, may I suggest you concentrate on fighting together to prevent further ravagement of our freedoms by both parties. The struggle for freedom of thought and expression, against the copyright and intellectual property regimes being forced down our throats by a particular, concentrated special interest, is a non-partison one, and the enemies to the same are most emphatically non-partison, for they encompass many in BOTH parties. This partisan bickering of conservatives vs. liberals misses the whole point, is divisive and hell, and quite frankly undermines your ability to act effectively in countering these attacks.
In other words, if you remain partisan and distracted from the issues you will have not only been divided, but very effectively conquered, before the battle is even joined.
NVIDIA actively support Linux by constantly releasing up to date drivers that are very high quality. The NVIDIA drivers are unquestionably the highest quality OpenGL implementation available on Linux without exception.
... but NVIDIA's closed source drivers, while good in some respects, do occasionally cause X to hang for no apparant reason. Switching NVIDIA cards, or updating to the current drivers, does nothing to alleviate this, although switching from an NVIDIA card to an ATI Radeon card did solve the problem, as did using the Free Software Nvidia X driver ('nv') with the same hardware that was so troublesome with the 'nvidia' driver. And yes, this is with AGP settings in the safest, most conservative mode (cf the NVIDIA driver docs for details).
Well, perhaps
So while the OpenGL implimentation may be very good, the closed source nature of the driver means I'm forced to wait for an officially unsupported, binary-only driver, to be fixed someday, or I have to find an alternative. This seriously decreases the value of the NVIDIA driver and hardware for use where I work and live.
ATI does not suffer from this handicap, and while its OpenGL support may not be as good as NVIDIAs, it does work well, and without the system stability issues incurred by using NVIDIA. In addition, the free and open nature of the ati drivers insures that my hardware will never be orphaned, even if ATI has a change of heart (or financial troubles) down the road. The closed source NVIDIA drivers give me none of those guarantees (though the fallback nv driver helps, as long as you don't need digital out or multi-head support).
Also please be advised that this software is probably worth exactly what you paid for it (nothing!), so if it destroys you computer I can't be held responsible. It is mainly a learning exercise for me, so use it at your own risk.
Nice huh?
Its just a more blunt way of saying exactly the same thing Microsoft says with any product you buy from them: namely that the product you buy may not be suitable for any purpose, and that the manufacturer (Microsoft in that case) absolves themselves of any and all damages their product may cause.
This particular free software product chooses to state that in more obvious terms. Personally, I find the honesty a breath of much needed fresh air.
However, it is also important to learn the basics yourself. Everyone in the entire university must take CS1 and most CS2, these are just intro programing classes to get people familure with coding and thinking on there own. That is their point, and to accomplish that, they must seperate the students out.
... there is also an LAS compsci program which I know little about). These rankings change from year to year (and source to source), so I don't know where the U of I stands currently, but I'd be surprised if it had slipped all that much.
... reinforcing the very lessons they are to be learning. And if you choose to be a lazy bastard and let someone else do all the work, then try to rewrite it so that it is sufficiently different, you'll either learn despite yourself, or screw it up sufficiently to get the grade your laziness has earned you.
... so there is a disincentive for people to be too free with their solutions built in. In short, the complexity and demands of the assignments coupled with the grading model (bell curve), and a systematic check for plagorism, were sufficient to prevent and punish cheating without resorting to draconian absurdities such as disallowing any discussion of assignments amongst students.
What utter nonsense. Please keep in mind that you are being taught that your University is right and its critics are wrong in each lecture you attend, if not overtly, then certainly on a subliminal level.
I attended the University of Illinois at a time when it was considered the 2nd or 3rd best university for computer science (Engineering College
In any event, that particular university had an impeachable reputation in computer science. They never had such an asinine rule that students could not discuss the subject and their homework assignments amongst themselves. Not only would such a rule have been unenforcable, or led to the kind of absurdities you are defending here, but it would have precluded one of the most important facets of education, through which people learn any subject, at any level, rudimentary freshman level through advanced post-doctorate: studying, discussing, and digesting the material.
Instead, the homework assignments were made to be sufficiently challenging that, even if you were to collaborate with others, you would learn the material and your grade would reflect how well you learned it. Keep in mind if your work resembles another's too closely you'll get nailed for cheating, so even if several people solved the problem together they'd essentially have to reimpliment it differently from one another
Then there is the bell curve to contend with
Georgia Tech is simply wrong on all counts, and probably too arrogant to recognize and fix the real problem, which isn't their students, but their approach to education.
Maybe it is difficult to see looking in, but there is a good concept behind the rules. Yes, they might not need to be there if everyone was honest, but unfortunately this is not a perfect world, and the restrictive environment helps in the long run.
Now it becomes clear what Georgia Tech is teaching its students. Obedience, and the sublimation of one's intellect to the authority of others, without question. The fact that you would write something like that with a straight face (and for your sake, I truly hope this was a clever troll and not meant in earnestness) is indicitive of the kind of education you are receiving at your university.
I humbly suggest you start shopping around for a more sensible university to transfer to, one that concentrates on teaching science and technology rather than obedience.
You are right to be open minded about such things.
... without significant evidence they are just that ... claims. I think it is quite possible ancient civilizations have risen and fallen, and had their every trace eradicated by glaciers, erosion, and who knows what else. However, without physical evidence one should view these things as hypothetical possibilities, not probabilities. As for the alien slant I agree with you entirely ... show me the alien, or stop wasting my time with nonsense. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
... when some natural catastrophe (possibly a yellowstone-like so-called super-volcano, possibly disease or climatic change) nearly wiped the species out.
However, others are right to be skeptical of many of the claims
Other interesting things are that geneticists have worked out that ALL current human beings are descended from around 2,000 humans at a point around 80,000 years ago.
Clarification. IIRC all humans are descended from a few thousand humans 80,000
However, everyone outside of Africa is believed to be descended from about 500 people who emigrated more recently. That's right, something like 90-95% of human genetic diversity is in Africa. The rest of us, be we European, Native American, Asian, or whatever, are all much more similar, having only 5-10% of the genetic diversity. I'll leave it as an excercize to the reader as to which group some future humans, having survived some arbitrary change in survival requirements and conditions, is most likely to come from (hint, the math can be done by any 10th grade algebra student).
That is why humanity is not like other animals like dogs for which there are a myriad of different shapes and forms.
First, dogs are not naturally occuring creatures. They were bred for specific characteristics and traits, indeed inbred extensively, which is why there are so many varieties of dogs, some taking very odd form. A better example would have been different wolves, or bears, whose differences exist because of natural selection and not human intervention.
Second, that bottleneck is one possible contributing factor to humankinds homogeneous nature. Other factors which may have been more important were the destruction of the Neanderthal and perhaps other intelligent primates we don't know about (i.e. the ethnic cleansing of a differing kind of primates, leaving homo sap alone to dominate the world), our ability to modify our environment (easing some evolutionary pressures that wolves and bears must endure), and probably numerous other things as well.
The first amendment protects speech, religion, and the right to openly demonstrate those.
It protects the right of association, and by implication the right not to be found guilty by association.
What is more, the constitution as a whole protects the right to privacy, as violating our privacy is a power not expressly granted the government except in very narrow cases (and therefor, according to the 10th amendment, explicitly denied the government).
It is a refreshing surprise that at least one court is attempting to hold the government to the constitution, something the government really hasn't done since prohibition and the creation of the FBI. How long this will last is anyone's guess, but I for one am glad Tattered Cover has the courage to at least fight the good fight, for all our sakes.
Not to mention GNU/Linux, since 2.2.x on 64-bit architectures.
... Microsoft Windows.
t erations) operating system finally gets a modicum of 64-bit capability, many will look at 64-bit computing as another Microsoft "innovation," reality be damned.
I believe most of the *BSD variants are 64-bit capable as well these days.
Indeed, AFAIK the only 'mainstream' OS that is struggling with 64-bit and so late to the game is
But with their propogandists to convince everyone who'll listen that 64-bit computing didn't exist before their johnny-come-lately (and johnny-can't-do-it-quite-right-for-several-more-i
Yes, it's very annoying. But it's always funny seeing people complain about the quality of things that they get for free.
Oh, good Lord. Please take your libertarian Money Ueber Alles tripe and go home.
Installing unrequested and nonconsentual software onto someone's harddrive is deceptive and akin to vandalism at best, and outright destruction of property at worst (these scumware packages can and occasionally do have bugs that result in harm abov e and beyond pollution of the user's operating environment).
If someone shovelled raw sewage (shit) into your living room, would you still argue that "yes, it's very annoying. But it's always funny seeing people complain about the quality of things that they get for free"? I rather doubt it.
This is the digital equivelent, and people who do this should be going to jail for illegally hacking their customer's computers. I guarantee you if this was a snot-nosed kid doing this, rather than a corporate entity, they'd be doing time in jail. And rightly so.
"bing-bong. Brimish Rull regret that mumble maz bem dermumble a mir mumble
That sounds remarkably like the Chicago El.
[squeel] Welcome [screetch] mumble Passengers mumble no Radio Playing mumble [static] [static] mumble. The next stations [bzzt] [static] mumble muble [squeel]
Yeah, I mean, it's not like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson or John Brunner wrote about digital technology. No, they just wrote about... er, computers changing society.
... or 2001 a space oddyssee ... or,
Or Star Trek for that matter
Oh wait, he means the Luddite inspired tripe Hollywood thinks of as Sci Fi. He's right, Hollywood Sci Fi isn't in a position to predict the Microwave prior to its being on the market and demanding some product placement, much less something as significant as computers and the internet.
Which is why those of us who are true Sci Fi fans have such disdain for the dreck Hollywood markets and labels as such. When I see Greg Egan's "Diaspora" in an unadulterated film format, maybe I'll gain some shred of respect for the media moghuls. In the meantime, most of 'em wouldn't know SciFi if it kicked them in the face.
Even if time travel is possible, I doubt there is a temporal paradox, or a new dimension/universe created (think of the energy involved in the 'creation' of a universe and you'll see just how unlikely that explanaition is).
... and the time traveller's memories of what had been would be all that remain of the way history unfolded the first time.
... without a family, without childhood friends that remember you, without a birth certificate, but very much a living, breathing, time travelling murderer.
Timetravel by definition represents a discontinuity in cause and effect. This discontinuity likely means that if cause is on one side of the discontinuity (time traveller creates time machine because of memory of father's untimely death) and the effect on the other (time traveller goes back in time and warns father), then removing the cause likely won't remove the effect.
Put another way, a time traveller altering history such that s/he was never born likely would continue to exist, as an orphan of time in a world whose history would likely unfold differently from what they remember.
The wavefront of change would propogate forward from the time traveller's intervention. It wouldn't jump back across the discontinuity to affect the time traveler themself in any way
In short, no new universes, no paradoxes, simply a history that unfolds differently from the first iteration, and a lone person who remembers how different things once were.
You can kill your grandfather, but you'll still exist
Saying LCDs are bad because you can see JPEG compression artifacts is like saying microscopes are bad because you can see germs in them.
... indeed, the DivX v. DVD comparison starts to make DivX look pretty good.
.... it is very nice (although interestingly the DVDs have many more atifacts than either the raw ieee1394 or MJPEG video does, on both the CRT and LCD ... go figure).
Absolutely. I watch my old DivX encoded B5 episodes on an LCD, as well as my current crop of Enterprise MPEG4 encoded episodes, and on the 18.1" LCD you do see the artifacts (though it is quite watchable from typical TV viewing distance).
Watch the same videos on a CRT and most of the artifacts go away
Do the same thing with MJPEG or raw ieee1394 on the other hand, and the LCD, sans the glare of the CRT, looks much better. No flicker, no glare, just crisp, clear, beautiful video. And for viewing DVDs
And on my 4x3 18.1" ViewSonic I've not been able to create scaling or motion artifacts (though on a colleagues 16:10 SGI Flatpanel they are regrettebly there, in the form of ugly horizontal lines about 1/4 inch long, that go away if a max screened xine is moved one or two pixels to the right. Most odd.)
On a totally different extreme, Eric Raymond is a vocal Liberterian, which is certainly fringe whacked politics from the point of view of the norm.
... his movement is the (from the FSF point of view) unrelated (but oft eqauted to the Free Software Movement) Open Source movement.
:-)
Yes, and although I have some libertarian leanings myself in some respects, I find his gun nuttery ("everyone on the plane should have had guns and 9/11 would never have happened!") to be beyond extreme (that particular example is akin to expecting sanity and safety if everyone has an H-bomb strapped to their back, as anyone with a gun can bring the plane down killing everyone aboard).
However, as the folks at the FSF are at pains to point out, Eric Raymond has no affiliation with the FSF or Free Software at all
I'm sure somewhere on the planet is a Free Software proponent who also adheres to 'whacked' political views, but if so they certainly aren't anywhere to be found near the top of the Free Software Foundation's organization.
I just think it's irrelevant to the software debate.
Amen, and absolutely correct. I felt it important to point out a common misperception which you inadvertantly were propogating further, a misperception with no basis in fact and one which stems from rather malicious personal attacks on RMS by those with opposing political or personal aims. I don't particularly get along with RMS, and for most of my tenure in the Free Software/Open Source movement I haven't much agreed with him on many points (though the Blender incident has caused me to take a hard look at those points, and now I find myself suprised at just how much I've come to agree with much of what RMS says these days), but he is entitled to some defense against such compeletely baseless myths that are being promulgated about him, and while I know you almost certainly had no ill intention in doing so, there are plenty of others who do, and such misinformation needs to be fought with the truth wherever it arises.
I don't suppose you can back up that assertion with links to authoritative source(s), can you?
Yes.
The Relevant Patent
The Hollings bill S-2048
A less authoritative but nevertheless informative article summarizing the issues
If you need more information and aren't just a troll, you can do any further research on your own. Google is your friend (except when censored by corporate interests such as the Scientologists, but that doesn't appear to have happened WRT this subject, yet).
It's called the OFF switch. Once we start using it, the Disney droids will go into full retreat.
"An Off switch? You'll get years for that."
Off switches have been illegal since the Hollings Act of 2002.