I've heard that the R2 (or R4?) version of Memento does have an alternate chapter ordering as to run through the main plot in order (starting with the B&W calls in the hotel room, ending with the death of Teddy). Sure, it wrecks the way the narration and discussion of the problem and how it's built into Leonard's discoveries in the reverse order, and some of the revelations made in the movie (how not only were others using Leonard but he himself was), but there are thsoe that might want to see it that way to figure it out. And it wouldn't have taken up that much space on the current disc, so I'm surprised it's in an R2 edit but not R1.
I'm sure that they meant odometer (the dial that measures distance the car travels), but there's no reason that you can't build a program that integrates a real-time reading from the speedometer (the dial that indicates your speed) to get at distance, and thus to count off every mile. In fact, assuming that the speedometer signal is electronic in nature (such as 0 speed = 0 mV, 120 mph = 5mV) it's probably easier to grab this value than to mechanically grab the odometer value.
Re:What about my old perl code?
on
Exegesis 4 Out
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· Score: 3, Informative
The way that Larry has planned to separate perl 5 from perl 6 code is that all perl 6 scripts will have a certain keyword that must be the first non-comment line in the file. Lacking that, the script is assumed to be perl 5 and interpretes it this way. Otherwise, the perl 6 interpreter is activated. Note that this doesn't not mean that upgrading to perl 6 may not break some perl 5 code; there's always a few limited cases of broken backwards compatibility, but these are typically few and far between in the case of perl.
If I had my druthers, there would be two games that I would love to see as movie conversions: Marathon and Half-Life. Half-Life is one of those that, sure, would probably end up as popcorn-flick, big-budget summer blockbusters, but there's enough interesting turns in the plot that it wouldn't simply be the same-old-same-old for 2hrs. (However, there's only one person that could play Gorden and that's Charlie Sheen, and I'm too thrilled on his acting for such a film...:-). Marathon has way more than enough plot for a few hours, and would even have to be condensed to fit into a good sci-fi/thriller catagory.
You've completely missed the point....
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 5, Informative
Scroll back to 1995, or the like. Good April's Fool jokes on the net were subtly masked along with real news or announcements, such as the IP over Avain RFC. The idea is that as you read through the group, you'd see real posts, and then a post that seems odd, weird, or out of place; at that point, you'd have people falling for it and otherwise responding negatively towards it until you give the user a subtle hint to check the date.
Today, every story you posted was fake. There was no subtly. In addition, there was little originality; most of what's posted has been done already in one form or another. One subtle 4-1 joke, such as the advertized story of the day at/. , would have been good. Having a Slashback with a summary of 4-1 jokes around the web including the Google one and the Debian one would have been a nice evening wrapup. But having every single story for a 24hr period as fake is not funny, particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).
Next time, take it easy. Make it subtle and find something that you *know* will get a humor-filled response by those that don't read the story, and you'll get much fewer flames and many more smiles.
Anyone remember the show "Almost Live!", which was based from Seattle and was where Bill Nye got his start? There used to be a segment called "The Lame List" where classic 80s punks would headbang as lame items were read off the list.
Boy, I realllllllly wish I had long hair right now for today's April 1st performance of Slashdot.
This is from: News.com on a panel discussion held by tech/content/gov't bigwigs on Sunday.
[Hilary] Rosen, however, said the proposed bill [CBADTA] is "recognition that people who make entertainment products are a value driver for technology products." But she added later that the movie industry is running into the same problems as the recording industry, and Hollywood is not heeding past lessons.
"It's amazing that they're not paying attention to what happened with music," she said. The film studios are "clearly waiting for the ideal security. You have to get out there and change your business model, and that lesson hasn't been learned yet."
There used to be a common pasttime for assembly and other budding programmers call Core Wars. The game system was a simple, stripped down, assembly language engine and a largish block of a virtual machine memory. Your task was to write assembly code that would survive and outlast other programs in that block of memory when put to the test. The trick was that your program's code was stored only in that block of memory, thus a common routine for enemy programs was to simply trounce random bits into your code, and thus ruining your code. So you could take a number of different steps; either make your program as small as possible as to avoid random trounces, or duplicate your code as much as possible, or so forth. Some programs were rather complexe and/or large, but managed to survive various opponents. Of course, this was before the proliferation of exe-viruses, which may have been why it drifted off to the wayside (another similar game around whereby you coded robots in a virtual arena to battle each other, sort of an electronic predecessor of Battlebots, became more popular after this.). One of the current KDE screensaver modes operates similar to Code Wars.
The point is that what we're seeing now, with the spyware vs anti-spyware, is the same as Code Wars, but now moving to real systems instead of that virtual block of memory. And these are no longer games, but programs that may or may not affect both those that write them and those whose system the battle takes place on. So I certainly think there's a geek side to this, no only in the YRO aspect, but also in light of what used to be considered a harmless game years ago.
The Academy will wait until 2004 to bestow Picture and Director; Jackson was able to pull off one of the books, but the Academy may be wanting to see if he can do all 3, particularly the second book which is probably the one with the most dramatics in it. The first is mostly setup that needed a good handling of both the initial chase and the caves of Moria, and the Elven council that is all plot set up. The last is mostly the flight of Frodo to destroy the ring and the otherwise huge battles. The second is where you deal with the consequences of the breaking up of the Fellowship, Frodo going mad with the power of the ring, and Samwise trying to stay close to his friend. Thus, I would expect a possible actor nod next year if it's pulled out well. But overall, the honor of Best Picture/Director should only go to LotR if no part of the trilogy disappoints, and that means waiting until 2004 Oscars to find out if Jackson is able to keep the vision up. I don't doubt he could, but I'd suspect that a similar feeling by the Academy is shared.
(Plus, I doubted Jackson had a chance against Howard, that was nearly a shoe-in for him. And I suspect that because they 'had' to give ABM the top nod given that they were unable to give the Best Actor nod to Russell Crowe (with Denzel in the competition), and that might have made up for it).
Another non-profit discussion site, JavaJunkies.org, based on the E2 engine and modeled after Perlmonks.org, apparently just had a similar tuffle with Sun on this. From what I understand and read, all they have to do was to put the appropriate TM's on the main pages, and to make sure they go by "JavaJunkies.org" as opposed to "JavaJunkies", in addition to removing a few images that involved a logo that looked like a steaming cup of coffee (as per Sun's Java logo). Most of it easily fixed on their end, and got confirmation from lawyers that all was well after various changes.
After season 7, there was a major shakeup in the production of the show, and this is typically where most fans of the early season Simpsons say when the show went downhill. I would also suspsect that if one were to look at the references cited in this lecture, they'd find a bulk of them in the early seasons as well. (Those cited in the LATimes story, for example, are mostly early seasons). Or, a better comparison is to look at the type of math references. The 'difficulty' of the cited math references (arithmatic being low, calculus being high) would decline after the first few seasons, and today's episodes would have very low difficulty math, if any.
While approaching the question from a very different direction, I think this study/lecture helps to suggest that there was a significant change in the aim of the show after Season 7. Instead of appealing to the male 18-30 block, with heavy emphasis on college students, the show now is trying to appeal to a younger audience as well as more diverse; the number of these more intelligent gags have dropped drastically since that point, in addition to other noticable changes. I would think it would be hard pressed to find a non-trivial math reference in any recent episode of late, but more than enough pop-culture references are still there.
It should be noted that due to lack of response from ICANN, one of the Houses of Congress (The House, I believe) passed a bill that would force the creation of a.kids TLD, and put it into the hands of NeuStar, the group that had originally proposed it to ICANN and was previous rejected. The bill would force NeuStar to police (with a good-faith effort) sites registered under.kids to make sure they are appropriate. Whether the other House has passed this, I don't know yet.
(I dont' remember the source of the story though I think it was news.com, it was about 2 months ago, and did try to submit here to/.)
I don't know how they work exactly, but it's certainly not hard to guess at some of the workings. Assuming they can determine what page hits are news articles and that they can strip the article text only from the body of the page, then one can simply grab words that aren't part of the common langauge, including proper nouns, legal terms, etc. Possibly donote some longer phases, such as "Space Shuttle" or "Artificial Intelligence" as phrases to watch for. This gives each page a set of keywords that make it 'unique' from other news articles on the same site. Then one can argue that articles that are written within the same timeframe (48hrs) and have similar sets of keywords are the same news story from difference sources, and they can group those together as they display now.
Of course, they might have a completely different formula, or they may have a large body of optimizations they can do, but that's one possibility.
I've used CLIPS myself to set up an expert system, and yes, it's definitely a possible tool.
However, as the author's indicated, it's not a ready-to-go tool whereby you simply add in your facts and let it run; in addition, (though in later versions, you can), it's not easy to set up dynamic ruleset changes as the author necessitated; that is, if the engineer got to the end of the question stream , and had to make their own decision on how to fix it, then someone would have to add another rule to handle the fact of what the engineer did to do so.
Now, there might be a program in the CLIPS language out there that might already do this, but OTTOMH, I don't know of one.
May be in response to Hollings' directive?
on
SDMI Gets a New Name
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· Score: 3, Interesting
They don't list specific groups involved, but the article states that it's mostly hardware (both computer and audio) that are working on this. Given that a few weeks ago, Sen. Hollings held the SSSCA over the industry like the Sword of Damecles, this could be activity in response to that build to hold the gov't at bay as they take steps to develop their own messures.
I agree that there's no direct quality control. However, there are ways for direct feedback from the readership to comment and critique a book, and that can be used to not only allow the sepearation of the good from the bad, but to allow related works to fall together. Half of that is just a moderation system ala/., the other half is something like Amazon's related works. This type of system can't easily work
with mainstream publishing because the only
critiques of books that get out are those done by professional book critics, and while these reviews may be better formulated, they may not
really reflect what the masses agree with (similar to how the Oscar's tend to lean heavily on art house films instead of movies with large ticket sales).
Heck, you have the same issue with the various scientific articles being published on the internet: such usually require peer review to validate the conclusions, but the sites that are offering the run-around the traditional journal publishers found a way to still allow this.
First, as others pointed out, just submitting the student's work doesn't transfer ownership, so there's no issue there.
Outside of that, it's good to know such a service exists, as long as it's used right. I think a major news story that surprisingly turns up few hits on news sites was a recent case of a biology class in Kansas. The teacher outlined the grading of the course from day 1, and stated that a term-long paper would be worth 50% of their grade. When she got the papers in (electronically), she ran them through turnitin , and found 20-some papers were possible plagiarized works. Because she stated that the work had to be the students' own, she immediately gave these 20-some students F's on the paper, and thus, failing the course. Parents of the students complained, and they somehow managed to get the school board to overturn the teacher's grading such that the paper was only worth 30% of the total grade, and those that failed the paper still managed to pass the course. The results have been tremendous. The teacher quit her job. The school board has been sued. The district is looking towards shrinking numbers as parents pull kids out to others. And, possibly most importantly, the students themselves, once identified with the school district, are getting unwanted 'discrimation'; on NPR this morning, for example, one student from the district taking the AP test in a different town was identified as being from the district due to her shirt, and the test moderator told her "Oh, you're from XXX? Don't cheat now.". This is a very bad stigma to leave high school with, and those that didn't cheat might find their education hampered. (A bit of the news story is at Yahoo, though there's more than just this around.
Now, assuming I was in the same position, my first thing after seeing that turnitin reported that high a number would be to actually read the affected papers vs what the site said was being plagiarized. Not knowning the matching algorithm, there could be a lot of error, but assuming that it goes by long, equivalent phrases, there's a good change that it's not wrong. But spending the extra few hours to make sure that the site was correct would be absolutely necessary (I'm not sure if in this case the teacher did that. It sounds like she did double check as she was flabbergasted that that many students did cheat). I'd then confer with the principle or a similar figure to confirm the numbers (many schools do have a person to monitor cheating in the schools), and decide on the action. I think the teacher, assuming that the cheating was confirmed, did the right course of action and stuck to her guns. Could she have caught this without such a site, and assuming she didn't have sufficient programming skill to work out her own? Maybe, maybe not. I've done enough TA'ing that it's very hard on a problem set to detect cheating, but it can be found out. It gets even tougher using reports. Tools like this are very very helpful to find cheaters out. And it is necessary to do this, as cheaters can not only hurt themselves, but also their classmates' reputations as they progress through school.
So yes, it's a very good tool but like all other tools, it's only that. No tool is perfect and thus some human evaluation must be done to make sure the tool is right.
1) On the SSSCA front, it's been reported that the House of Reps isn't too happy about this type of legislation. Part of it is sane thinking ("Gov't has no right to be intruding into this area"), with a dash of "what's good for the goose" politics: specifically, because Hollings will most likely defeat Tuazin-Dungill single-handedly, the House will frown upon anything that Hollings is a major contributor on. (Story is at DSLReports and Wired)
2) Make sure you read today's Foxtrot (3/4/02, should by on United Media's site in two weeks for those without paper version), which refers to copy-protected CDs. Bill Amend, what's your slashdot handle?:-)
Note the date on the Action Alert; Issued Sep 2001, to expire Oct 2001. This is about when the SSSCA bill was 'leaked' to the net.
Not that pro-active writing can't hurt, but if you look at the various tidbits that came out today, it appears that Hollings will hold back on SSSCA as a threat to tech industry, saying that if they don't help with DRM, they he'll introduce the bill and let the 'fun' begin. Which means that *at this time*, SSSCA as a bill in Congress doens't exist. In fact, say a few more months down the road, things aren't working out and Hollings decides to introduce it, the bill's name might be changed, or similar action. And thus, warning your Senator or Congressman about a non-existant bill might go unheard.
It's still not unreasonable to write them now, telling them how you feel about the overpowering of commercial interests and refer to comments made of late about this situation, but now's not the critical time; only until the bill is put befiore the committees prior to going to the full house is when letters will be most effective.
Google's cash flow is only slightly enhanced by the ad placement (not in the search results, but as boxes on the side). Google's biggest income source is the licensing of their search technology out as intranet solutions. Of late, there was a story about Google's new search-engine-in-box, a rack-mountable, scalable solution for companies looking to search-index all internal documents.
Re:Wait a minute...
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It wasn't a Compusa employee, just the author of the article; he did try to get a Compusa employee to do something, but the employee acted as if the writer was stupid.
A late-added amendment that was included in the bill says that the ILECs still must offer access to the equipment and COs to CLECs at rates that the FCC sets. In addition, a second amendment ups the penalties for the ILECS in not cooperating with CLECs and other necessary groups up to $1mill from $100k per incident. While this does not necessarily prevent the ILECs from trying to monopolize the lines, it does still offer a chance for CLECs to play fair. Of course, concern over what those rates are that the FCC sets is in question.
But again, this has a strong battle in the Senate, and Hollings was very loud-spoken in stating that this bill won't get through the Senate in a form close to the House version, and he's the one right now with the most power on the Senate treatment of the bill.
While we need to argue against Hollings on this bill, he's the person we need to cheer on if the T-D bill passes in the House; Hollings has repeated stated he's against the mechanism of that bill to increase broadband, and has his own that he wants to get into Congress that actually forces more competition on the last mile and away from the Bells and increase penalties for not following the Telecom Act provisions, up to a $1mill per incident (up from $120k).
Slashdot Mirror
</joke>
Today, every story you posted was fake. There was no subtly. In addition, there was little originality; most of what's posted has been done already in one form or another. One subtle 4-1 joke, such as the advertized story of the day at /. , would have been good. Having a Slashback with a summary of 4-1 jokes around the web including the Google one and the Debian one would have been a nice evening wrapup. But having every single story for a 24hr period as fake is not funny, particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).
Next time, take it easy. Make it subtle and find something that you *know* will get a humor-filled response by those that don't read the story, and you'll get much fewer flames and many more smiles.
Boy, I realllllllly wish I had long hair right now for today's April 1st performance of Slashdot.
The point is that what we're seeing now, with the spyware vs anti-spyware, is the same as Code Wars, but now moving to real systems instead of that virtual block of memory. And these are no longer games, but programs that may or may not affect both those that write them and those whose system the battle takes place on. So I certainly think there's a geek side to this, no only in the YRO aspect, but also in light of what used to be considered a harmless game years ago.
(Plus, I doubted Jackson had a chance against Howard, that was nearly a shoe-in for him. And I suspect that because they 'had' to give ABM the top nod given that they were unable to give the Best Actor nod to Russell Crowe (with Denzel in the competition), and that might have made up for it).
While approaching the question from a very different direction, I think this study/lecture helps to suggest that there was a significant change in the aim of the show after Season 7. Instead of appealing to the male 18-30 block, with heavy emphasis on college students, the show now is trying to appeal to a younger audience as well as more diverse; the number of these more intelligent gags have dropped drastically since that point, in addition to other noticable changes. I would think it would be hard pressed to find a non-trivial math reference in any recent episode of late, but more than enough pop-culture references are still there.
(I dont' remember the source of the story though I think it was news.com, it was about 2 months ago, and did try to submit here to /.)
Of course, they might have a completely different formula, or they may have a large body of optimizations they can do, but that's one possibility.
...such as the computer the boys recieved from a neighbor in a recent episode of Malcolm in the Middle. "*That's* a laptop?" P
Now, there might be a program in the CLIPS language out there that might already do this, but OTTOMH, I don't know of one.
Heck, you have the same issue with the various scientific articles being published on the internet: such usually require peer review to validate the conclusions, but the sites that are offering the run-around the traditional journal publishers found a way to still allow this.
First, as others pointed out, just submitting the student's work doesn't transfer ownership, so there's no issue there.
Outside of that, it's good to know such a service exists, as long as it's used right. I think a major news story that surprisingly turns up few hits on news sites was a recent case of a biology class in Kansas. The teacher outlined the grading of the course from day 1, and stated that a term-long paper would be worth 50% of their grade. When she got the papers in (electronically), she ran them through turnitin , and found 20-some papers were possible plagiarized works. Because she stated that the work had to be the students' own, she immediately gave these 20-some students F's on the paper, and thus, failing the course. Parents of the students complained, and they somehow managed to get the school board to overturn the teacher's grading such that the paper was only worth 30% of the total grade, and those that failed the paper still managed to pass the course. The results have been tremendous. The teacher quit her job. The school board has been sued. The district is looking towards shrinking numbers as parents pull kids out to others. And, possibly most importantly, the students themselves, once identified with the school district, are getting unwanted 'discrimation'; on NPR this morning, for example, one student from the district taking the AP test in a different town was identified as being from the district due to her shirt, and the test moderator told her "Oh, you're from XXX? Don't cheat now.". This is a very bad stigma to leave high school with, and those that didn't cheat might find their education hampered. (A bit of the news story is at Yahoo, though there's more than just this around.
Now, assuming I was in the same position, my first thing after seeing that turnitin reported that high a number would be to actually read the affected papers vs what the site said was being plagiarized. Not knowning the matching algorithm, there could be a lot of error, but assuming that it goes by long, equivalent phrases, there's a good change that it's not wrong. But spending the extra few hours to make sure that the site was correct would be absolutely necessary (I'm not sure if in this case the teacher did that. It sounds like she did double check as she was flabbergasted that that many students did cheat). I'd then confer with the principle or a similar figure to confirm the numbers (many schools do have a person to monitor cheating in the schools), and decide on the action. I think the teacher, assuming that the cheating was confirmed, did the right course of action and stuck to her guns. Could she have caught this without such a site, and assuming she didn't have sufficient programming skill to work out her own? Maybe, maybe not. I've done enough TA'ing that it's very hard on a problem set to detect cheating, but it can be found out. It gets even tougher using reports. Tools like this are very very helpful to find cheaters out. And it is necessary to do this, as cheaters can not only hurt themselves, but also their classmates' reputations as they progress through school.
So yes, it's a very good tool but like all other tools, it's only that. No tool is perfect and thus some human evaluation must be done to make sure the tool is right.
2) Make sure you read today's Foxtrot (3/4/02, should by on United Media's site in two weeks for those without paper version), which refers to copy-protected CDs. Bill Amend, what's your slashdot handle? :-)
Not that pro-active writing can't hurt, but if you look at the various tidbits that came out today, it appears that Hollings will hold back on SSSCA as a threat to tech industry, saying that if they don't help with DRM, they he'll introduce the bill and let the 'fun' begin. Which means that *at this time*, SSSCA as a bill in Congress doens't exist. In fact, say a few more months down the road, things aren't working out and Hollings decides to introduce it, the bill's name might be changed, or similar action. And thus, warning your Senator or Congressman about a non-existant bill might go unheard.
It's still not unreasonable to write them now, telling them how you feel about the overpowering of commercial interests and refer to comments made of late about this situation, but now's not the critical time; only until the bill is put befiore the committees prior to going to the full house is when letters will be most effective.
But again, this has a strong battle in the Senate, and Hollings was very loud-spoken in stating that this bill won't get through the Senate in a form close to the House version, and he's the one right now with the most power on the Senate treatment of the bill.