NPR just ran an interview with the man behind this game a day or so ago. It certainly didn't sound like something worthy of such heavy handed treatment.
There are tons of bad sci-fi movies about man-made, or at least man-caused, seismic activity.
This is a little bit of a spoiler, but for a little different take, check out Jonathan Franzen's novel "Strong Motion" and get extra English Lit. points for reading a real author.
I don't know which version is correct, but the first time I saw this story reported the relevant facts were not that assistants had surreptitiously donated eggs, but that the primary researcher himself had compelled one or more assistants to donate their eggs.
Looks like a little further digging is in order to clear this up.
MP3 has always seemed like a logical medium for audio books to me. Ever since my wife and son caught the Harry Potter bug a few years ago, they will buy not only the dead-tree version, but also the audio version on CD.
Its always struck me as particularly wasteful that these things were available only as conventional audio. A single book can span 20 or more CDs.
That has always seemed somewhat wasteful to me. I'm presuming that an audio CD of a person reading a book is availing itself of the full harmonic range that would also be applied to a more elaborate production, like a symphony orchestra or a rock or jazz band that would make much fuller use of that range.
Voice telephony is based on transmitting only a narrow band of the harmonic range used by most human voice communication. Putting that narrower range together with the compression techniques available through MP3 or other similar audio formats, it seems to me that number of disks needed to store one of these books could be slashed to a small fraction of what are produced now.
This may only have a negligible effect on the final price of the item, and the popularity of MP3 enabled CD players may not have hit the critical mass needed to make this sort of thing profitable yet, but I'd think that enough popular releases, like Harry Potter or some others, might actually stimulate their adoption, or at least speed it up beyond the current rate.
Google already has a semblance of a TV presence now on Current TV (http://current.tv/ Every 30 minutes or so Current runs a short video bit derived from recent popular search items. You also get treated to a faux-Ramones (or is it real? I can't quite tell) version of "What a Wonderful World"
As riveting TV goes, I think Current has a way to go, but its off to a good start. A lot of the stuff is fairly iteresting, although some of the political humor, like "Super News", is dreadfully heavy handed. And as an added bonus, one of its guiding lights is the 43rd President of the United States and Internet-inventor Al Gore.
You also get access to all the native emacs features, of which there are a great deal.
If all you need to do is edit a file and get out, there may be no need to run emacs, but it has a lot of extra self either built-in or easily added, like a pretty good directory listing mode, source code control integration, a great mode for viewing man pages, a pretty good shell mode, a mode for editing rectangular areas of documents, etc.
Vim might have all that now, for all I know. Actually, I think I look at Vim now the way a lot of people look at emacs. It does so much more stuff than vi, that figuring out how to do it all is a job in itself.
Emacs isn't really just an editor. Its a whole generalized user environment in which to build editors. Its definitely a lot more than most people may need, but if you use it enough, chances are you'll find that it can do something for you, that you will soon not be able to do without.
I used to work with a guy who used Emacs exclusively for everything, on WinNT even, and I used to think it was a joke. I'd tried learning the standard key-bindings but while they weren't completely non-intuitive, they seemed unneccearily difficult. I used to joke with him that Emacs needed foot pedals in addition to a keyboard.
Then I discovered VIPER mode and the way became clear. I'd taught myself vi a few years earlier while going to school, forcing myself to write my CS homework assignments using it on a Linux box.
Perhaps Emacs is really no more difficult to learn than vi, but it set up a sort of cognitive dissonance in me that I could not overcome. Of course vi can be difficult and cryptic with it single letter keystrokes and love affair with the escape key, but it simply seems so much smaller than emacs, with just that little blank window and blinking cursor.
Emacs on the otherhand just looks so feature rich with all its cascading menus and multiple modes and such that I felt intimidated only learning the basic editing commands. It made me feel stupid, and try as I might, it did not appear to get any more accessible with use.
VIPER is just the ticket for me. All the run-of-the-mill editing is there at the tips of my fingers with familiar commands, and the deeper emacs stuff is still available if and when I care to use it.
Honestly, I think the default key-bindings of Emacs are its greatest impediment to common use. Perhaps every copy of this book (I own the 2nd. edition as well as the manual and references from GNU) should come with a vi quick ref just for good measure.
My understanding is that two factor authentication generally means two of the following: something you know, something you have, something you are.
Could the "something you have" in this case be some physical artifact that comes with the media or machine and might thereby be difficult to duplicate, threby reducing the opportunity for unauthorized copying and use of the underlying software?
Not distaste. Nostalgia can only be experienced by someone who was there the first time.
I can't be nostalgiac for the Swing era, because I hadn't been born yet.
For example, "Happy Days" and westerns are pseudo-nostalgiac to me because, while they hearken back to and celebrate particular eras, they don't get either quite right.
I think I can reasonably talk about pseudo-nostalgia and still think a rotary dial cell phone is pretty cool.
I'm not sure that I get this. Its my recollection that X11 was included "in the box" with Panther. You had to download their beta version on 10.2 or could use XDarwin otherwise.
Why is this worthy of comment?
Hey, look! An MSDN bulletin on a strange but useful utility called, um, lets's see, uh, Notepad!
Thanks for the concern about my reproductive prospects. My children thank you for it as well.
I think what is really at issue here is trusteeship of a public asset. The City of Greenwich spent its tax-payers hard earned money for that information, and I don't see why they should be entitled to hand it out wholesale to anyone who walks in the door.
I think the whole current climate of knee-jerk hostility to government is clouding any reasonable discussion on this matter. I can't imagine anyone making the same claim if the roles were changed to "corporation" and "shareholder".
The big question for me isn't the one about entitlement (no one is saying the man can't have any of the information, just that they won't give him the whole database at once), but about casting the argument in terms of security. I think they'd have a good case on other grounds, but are simply too lazy, and are going the cheap and easy route.
If I recall this from an earlier submission, the real issue isn't security at all, but economics, although the City of Greenwich has chosen the security issue to hide behind.
It is my recollection that the person requesting the data is a businessman who wants the data for some sort of real estate sales analysis and is leveraging the public availability of the data to his economic advantage.
This guy wants the full data set. I think the City will give him small chunks of it at a time with no problem, but sees giving out the full data set as essentially poor stewardship of tax payer resources.
Who wouldn't agree? If I'd shelled out $10,000,000.00 for something, I'd be a little testy with someone expecting to get it for free.
In short I question the motives of the person requesting the data, but more on grounds of economic exploitation that on grounds that he may be any sort of security risk.
Having said that, one thinks they could come up with a better argument. "Security" has become so overused as an excuse to cut off debate on things in the past four years that we seem to have lost any sense of descrimination at all.
We are so yesterday. One TV, one computer (for public use anyway) and everyone has to take turns.
There is a little cheating going on because I have my own laptop that no one else uses and a couple Linux boxes in the basement, but for all intents in purposes, there is only one of each. In addition, the TV accomodates a DVD, VCR, PS1 and GameCube in addition to regular TV programming.
I can't say what the effect is on my children's learning (also one each, girl 14 and boy 12), but they are both generally above average in their own ways.
Even so, my son still manages to tie up both TV and computer at the same time unless someone is riding heard on him.
Back in the very early 80's (dating myself), someone marketed a personal FM radio called the BoneFone that used bone conduction. Its my recollection that it didn't go over very well.
It came in two lobes that hung around your neck and down over your collarbones and some speakers laying over your collorbones provided the source for conduction.
It tried one in an electronics store once and thought it was interesting, but not compelling enough to spend money on. This is about the same time that the Walkman broke, so perhaps it was just bad timing.
I saw something like this (not quite, but similar) a few years ago working with Java Script.
I wasn't that experienced with it, and as a result, certain pieces of my code were syntactically incorrect. Specifically, I was using the wrong characters for array indexing; I think I was using "()" instead of "[]". I would never have known there was even a problem if I hadn't been doing side by side testing with IE and Mozilla. A page that rendered correctly in IE would always show errors in Mozilla. This made absolutely no sense to me.
It wasn't until I viewed the source generated by each browser that I discovered the problem. IE was dynamically rewriting my JavaScript, replacing the incorrect delimiters with the correct ones, whereas Mozilla was simply taking my buggy code at face value.
For the first part of the interview he is trademark Stewart, mixing wise cracks with straight lines just about evenly, but about 15 minutes into the interview it really changes. The interviewer starts talking about the reputation that The Daily Show, the self-described "fake news show" has developed as one of the most perceptive analysts of the current state of American politics. Stewart is quite modest, but displays a marvelous level of understanding of the role of the media in America, and the way that its has abrogated its responsibility to be a skeptical filter and not simply an uncritical platform for the political spin-meister of the moment.
The great irony, of course, is that very few of the talking heads in the "non-fake news" business seem to have this level of understanding of the responsibility they bear.
Why should we be surprised by this? The entire Iraq war has been managed more as a political event than a military action. That this administration, which is profoundly unwilling to consider any views than those expressed in its own talking points, would spoon feed self-serving rhetoric to its hand picked Iraqi puppet shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.
I suspect Senator Finestein's shock is strictly rhetorical. I certainly hope it is.
This sort of fascinated and horrified me when I finally realized it was true, but then upon reflection, one sees that the U.S. was essentially born out of a property rights dispute with the English crown(taxation without representation), and in the Civil War, nearly tore itself apart over a property rights issue, that being human slavery.
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NPR just ran an interview with the man behind this game a day or so ago. It certainly didn't sound like something worthy of such heavy handed treatment.
There are tons of bad sci-fi movies about man-made, or at least man-caused, seismic activity.
This is a little bit of a spoiler, but for a little different take, check out Jonathan Franzen's novel "Strong Motion" and get extra English Lit. points for reading a real author.
I don't know which version is correct, but the first time I saw this story reported the relevant facts were not that assistants had surreptitiously donated eggs, but that the primary researcher himself had compelled one or more assistants to donate their eggs.
Looks like a little further digging is in order to clear this up.
MP3 has always seemed like a logical medium for audio books to me. Ever since my wife and son caught the Harry Potter bug a few years ago, they will buy not only the dead-tree version, but also the audio version on CD.
Its always struck me as particularly wasteful that these things were available only as conventional audio. A single book can span 20 or more CDs.
That has always seemed somewhat wasteful to me. I'm presuming that an audio CD of a person reading a book is availing itself of the full harmonic range that would also be applied to a more elaborate production, like a symphony orchestra or a rock or jazz band that would make much fuller use of that range.
Voice telephony is based on transmitting only a narrow band of the harmonic range used by most human voice communication. Putting that narrower range together with the compression techniques available through MP3 or other similar audio formats, it seems to me that number of disks needed to store one of these books could be slashed to a small fraction of what are produced now.
This may only have a negligible effect on the final price of the item, and the popularity of MP3 enabled CD players may not have hit the critical mass needed to make this sort of thing profitable yet, but I'd think that enough popular releases, like Harry Potter or some others, might actually stimulate their adoption, or at least speed it up beyond the current rate.
hmmm, at least there are two people watching it...
Google already has a semblance of a TV presence now on Current TV (http://current.tv/ Every 30 minutes or so Current runs a short video bit derived from recent popular search items. You also get treated to a faux-Ramones (or is it real? I can't quite tell) version of "What a Wonderful World"
As riveting TV goes, I think Current has a way to go, but its off to a good start. A lot of the stuff is fairly iteresting, although some of the political humor, like "Super News", is dreadfully heavy handed. And as an added bonus, one of its guiding lights is the 43rd President of the United States and Internet-inventor Al Gore.
You also get access to all the native emacs features, of which there are a great deal.
If all you need to do is edit a file and get out, there may be no need to run emacs, but it has a lot of extra self either built-in or easily added, like a pretty good directory listing mode, source code control integration, a great mode for viewing man pages, a pretty good shell mode, a mode for editing rectangular areas of documents, etc.
Vim might have all that now, for all I know. Actually, I think I look at Vim now the way a lot of people look at emacs. It does so much more stuff than vi, that figuring out how to do it all is a job in itself.
Emacs isn't really just an editor. Its a whole generalized user environment in which to build editors. Its definitely a lot more than most people may need, but if you use it enough, chances are you'll find that it can do something for you, that you will soon not be able to do without.
I used to work with a guy who used Emacs exclusively for everything, on WinNT even, and I used to think it was a joke. I'd tried learning the standard key-bindings but while they weren't completely non-intuitive, they seemed unneccearily difficult. I used to joke with him that Emacs needed foot pedals in addition to a keyboard.
Then I discovered VIPER mode and the way became clear. I'd taught myself vi a few years earlier while going to school, forcing myself to write my CS homework assignments using it on a Linux box.
Perhaps Emacs is really no more difficult to learn than vi, but it set up a sort of cognitive dissonance in me that I could not overcome. Of course vi can be difficult and cryptic with it single letter keystrokes and love affair with the escape key, but it simply seems so much smaller than emacs, with just that little blank window and blinking cursor.
Emacs on the otherhand just looks so feature rich with all its cascading menus and multiple modes and such that I felt intimidated only learning the basic editing commands. It made me feel stupid, and try as I might, it did not appear to get any more accessible with use.
VIPER is just the ticket for me. All the run-of-the-mill editing is there at the tips of my fingers with familiar commands, and the deeper emacs stuff is still available if and when I care to use it.
Honestly, I think the default key-bindings of Emacs are its greatest impediment to common use. Perhaps every copy of this book (I own the 2nd. edition as well as the manual and references from GNU) should come with a vi quick ref just for good measure.
This reminds me of an old Woody Allen line.
It went something like: "I was kicked out of college for cheating on a metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."
This isn't exactly new. There was an SDK available for Windows more than a year ago when it was still called Rendezvous.
Would this be like a stand-alone Terminal Services client?
My understanding is that two factor authentication generally means two of the following: something you know, something you have, something you are.
Could the "something you have" in this case be some physical artifact that comes with the media or machine and might thereby be difficult to duplicate, threby reducing the opportunity for unauthorized copying and use of the underlying software?
Todays Trib has a pretty good story on Podcasting that quotes many of the regulars (Adam Curry, etc.).
The story is here and may require registration.
I suspect that the planet will be fine in either case. Now perhaps not good news for it inhabitants...
Not distaste. Nostalgia can only be experienced by someone who was there the first time.
I can't be nostalgiac for the Swing era, because I hadn't been born yet.
For example, "Happy Days" and westerns are pseudo-nostalgiac to me because, while they hearken back to and celebrate particular eras, they don't get either quite right.
I think I can reasonably talk about pseudo-nostalgia and still think a rotary dial cell phone is pretty cool.
I'm not sure that I get this. Its my recollection that X11 was included "in the box" with Panther. You had to download their beta version on 10.2 or could use XDarwin otherwise.
Why is this worthy of comment?
Hey, look! An MSDN bulletin on a strange but useful utility called, um, lets's see, uh, Notepad!
Thanks for the concern about my reproductive prospects. My children thank you for it as well.
I think what is really at issue here is trusteeship of a public asset. The City of Greenwich spent its tax-payers hard earned money for that information, and I don't see why they should be entitled to hand it out wholesale to anyone who walks in the door.
I think the whole current climate of knee-jerk hostility to government is clouding any reasonable discussion on this matter. I can't imagine anyone making the same claim if the roles were changed to "corporation" and "shareholder".
The big question for me isn't the one about entitlement (no one is saying the man can't have any of the information, just that they won't give him the whole database at once), but about casting the argument in terms of security. I think they'd have a good case on other grounds, but are simply too lazy, and are going the cheap and easy route.
If I recall this from an earlier submission, the real issue isn't security at all, but economics, although the City of Greenwich has chosen the security issue to hide behind.
It is my recollection that the person requesting the data is a businessman who wants the data for some sort of real estate sales analysis and is leveraging the public availability of the data to his economic advantage.
This guy wants the full data set. I think the City will give him small chunks of it at a time with no problem, but sees giving out the full data set as essentially poor stewardship of tax payer resources.
Who wouldn't agree? If I'd shelled out $10,000,000.00 for something, I'd be a little testy with someone expecting to get it for free.
In short I question the motives of the person requesting the data, but more on grounds of economic exploitation that on grounds that he may be any sort of security risk.
Having said that, one thinks they could come up with a better argument. "Security" has become so overused as an excuse to cut off debate on things in the past four years that we seem to have lost any sense of descrimination at all.
We are so yesterday. One TV, one computer (for public use anyway) and everyone has to take turns.
There is a little cheating going on because I have my own laptop that no one else uses and a couple Linux boxes in the basement, but for all intents in purposes, there is only one of each. In addition, the TV accomodates a DVD, VCR, PS1 and GameCube in addition to regular TV programming.
I can't say what the effect is on my children's learning (also one each, girl 14 and boy 12), but they are both generally above average in their own ways.
Even so, my son still manages to tie up both TV and computer at the same time unless someone is riding heard on him.
So this can go on approximately 1 1/2 times as long as it has so far? That's good news?
Back in the very early 80's (dating myself), someone marketed a personal FM radio called the BoneFone that used bone conduction. Its my recollection that it didn't go over very well.
It came in two lobes that hung around your neck and down over your collarbones and some speakers laying over your collorbones provided the source for conduction.
It tried one in an electronics store once and thought it was interesting, but not compelling enough to spend money on. This is about the same time that the Walkman broke, so perhaps it was just bad timing.
I saw something like this (not quite, but similar) a few years ago working with Java Script.
I wasn't that experienced with it, and as a result, certain pieces of my code were syntactically incorrect. Specifically, I was using the wrong characters for array indexing; I think I was using "()" instead of "[]". I would never have known there was even a problem if I hadn't been doing side by side testing with IE and Mozilla. A page that rendered correctly in IE would always show errors in Mozilla. This made absolutely no sense to me.
It wasn't until I viewed the source generated by each browser that I discovered the problem. IE was dynamically rewriting my JavaScript, replacing the incorrect delimiters with the correct ones, whereas Mozilla was simply taking my buggy code at face value.
If you like the Daily Show, you should take a listeng to this FreshAir interview with John Stewart that was broadcast on NPR today.
For the first part of the interview he is trademark Stewart, mixing wise cracks with straight lines just about evenly, but about 15 minutes into the interview it really changes. The interviewer starts talking about the reputation that The Daily Show, the self-described "fake news show" has developed as one of the most perceptive analysts of the current state of American politics. Stewart is quite modest, but displays a marvelous level of understanding of the role of the media in America, and the way that its has abrogated its responsibility to be a skeptical filter and not simply an uncritical platform for the political spin-meister of the moment.
The great irony, of course, is that very few of the talking heads in the "non-fake news" business seem to have this level of understanding of the responsibility they bear.
Why should we be surprised by this? The entire Iraq war has been managed more as a political event than a military action. That this administration, which is profoundly unwilling to consider any views than those expressed in its own talking points, would spoon feed self-serving rhetoric to its hand picked Iraqi puppet shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.
I suspect Senator Finestein's shock is strictly rhetorical. I certainly hope it is.
This sort of fascinated and horrified me when I finally realized it was true, but then upon reflection, one sees that the U.S. was essentially born out of a property rights dispute with the English crown(taxation without representation), and in the Civil War, nearly tore itself apart over a property rights issue, that being human slavery.
I guess we take them seriously here.