It may be possible to invent a type of apparel that would give a false-positive to the photo manipulation algorighm, so when you wore it, it would always detect a manipulation in the photo, even if they weren't actually doctored.
They wouldn't be able to say 100% that it was an original, unretouched photo. That may give enough wiggle room to say that the glove didn't fit...
I'm picturing a shirt/mask/helmet with a pattern on it that resembled jpeg blocking artifacts.
Leave it to Honda to re-invent "public" transportation for Americans. Instead of taking a cab/bus/train/monorail and paying taxes/fees/fares to a central transportation authority, we will be convinced to buy our own automated transportation units, and drive on Honda-owned tollways to get where we want to go in the future.
Texas is in the midst of privatizing toll roads at this very moment.
I'm not completely against this model. I'd like to be able to "dial in" my destination and be told in advance exactly how long it will take to arrive, and let the transportation system drive me there while I do other things. It will make arriving on time very easy--schedule your destination in advance, and it tells you when you MUST be in your car, or you'll be late.
No more road rage. No more rude drivers. Just my Kamakiri:
With all screens and functions In sync lock with Tripstar This cool rolling bubble Is all set to samba --Donald Fagan, Kamakiriad
...That way, when he gets lost, he drops the fiber on the ground, waits ten minutes, then asks the operator of the backhoe cutting the fiber for directions.
It's hard for some of us not to look at grammatical or spelling errors and wince.
I can wince just fine without first looking at a spelling or grammar error.
However, it's hard for me to look at grammar or spelling errors and not wince, since my brain must first refactor the offending text before I can enjoy it.
...because that's the only way they can make their DRM a reality. The studios don't want you to own anything. They want you to license the rights to view a performance over and over again.
The problem is that DVD is a "good enough" technology that there's not a compelling reason (for most people) to want anything different. The same with CDs. They tried to kill the CD format by trying SACD and other variations, but they don't understand that to 99.9% of the listening public, the CD is a "good enough" format for their music. Sadly, MP3 is also a "good enough" format for a vast majority of people, even at a low bitrate with a crummy encoder. Let's face it, when I'm in my car, the noise floor is so loud that MP3 is just fine.
So, they're doing the best to stay "on message" and try to convince us that it's dead because that's the only way they're going to get any more money out of the people who already are happy with the status quo.
Wolfenstien 3D and Doom were technically compelling content to make a lot of people buy new computers. I've yet to see a movie that made me want to upgrade my home theater.
For my part, DVD is just fine to watch the mediocre movies that they put out. Especially on a TV set, or (gosh forbid) a portable media player.
That wouldn't be too hard, given that he's "hecho en Mexico." Vicente Fox's head in a jar could provoke the comment, making it just that much more subtle.
If you're going to find the USERS of such devices negligent, then the MANUFACTURERS of the devices should also be liable for shipping them in an unsecured default state.
Devices which are physically dangerous (power tools, lawn equipment) have warning labels on them which physically prevent their use until they are removed (and hopefully, read) by the end-user.
Devices which are virtually dangerous (Unpatched WinXP, Internet Explorer, WiFi routers) have no such barriers to use.
And, I wipe portions of my hard drive clean just like I clear my desktop of clutter, keep my icons lined up, organize my garage, and erase my office whiteboard periodically. There can be nothing incriminating about cleanliness just because it's in a digital domain.
You may just as well say "Aha! The user has emptied his Recycle bin! He must have recently deleted some incriminating evidence!"
Watching TV is a "social" event. You watch it with your family in the same room. You watch it with friends over for company. You dont sit in a private "viewing booth" and consume TV alone.
This will fail because if you log in and Google targets ads to an INDIVIDUAL, then that individual will no longer "want" to be watching TV with his/her friends and family, for the single reason that their PRIVATE internet/email behavior is dictating what types of ads they see in a SOCIAL television viewing setting.
It's similar to this: You invite your bible study group over to watch a football game, and they start to sense there's a theme to the adds that doesn't add up to your public image... You can't blame it on Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at that point.
Thanks, but no. I won't log in to watch TV. I don't want the TV people knowing what web sites I view and what email I send/read. Even in the aggregate. Even it if helps them present me with "more useful" advertising.
I own all of the Pixar feature films on DVD. My kids love them. They also love all of the short films that are included as bonus material. Now, as far as a "fair use" of this material, I've burned a special DVD that contains ONLY all of the short films that would have required a lot of time, attention, and DVD juggling to watch in a row. They love watching ~30 minutes of just the shorts, and that's about enough time (in my opinion) for a TV break.
I was interested to see that they've got them for download, but at 320x240, the quality just wouldn't be the same. I'm glad they are included as bonuses on the DVDs at much higher quality.
P.S. Parents, check out Animusic for another ~30 minute diversion (animusic.com).
Don't downplay the unique angst felt by every adolescent. It just shows you can't possibly relate to what they're going through. Each and every one of them is the first and only person ever to have felt that way.
A tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.... Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences. --C.S. Lewis
I sit in a direct line in front of an office door where I hear the occupant curse a blue streak almost constantly throughout the day. It's like he is not even aware of what he's saying.
Examples I have recently overheard include:
Jesus Christ, man, what the fuck? I don't even see how that's fucking possible. I'm about sick of this motherfucker. Like, how does it know if shit's global? That's my point. We've got a fuckin' global signal... why isn't it listed on the portlist? Well, in the words of my dad, you had a good idea, it just turned out not to be worth a shit.
I really don't fuckin' understand it. I mean how the fuck does it know what to do? See that fuckin' star? I mean, what's all that shit about? Can we please kill the dumbass that decided to put globals in all the standard cells. God damn, man, this is fucking ridiculous. Whoever made that decision, death is too good for them. Fuck. Let's get this goddamned problem solved.
It's not even as if he's really boiling mad about anything. Even the most minor disappointment or inconvenience is met with a stream of profanities. I sure hope he's on vacation during "take your child to work day."
My point is that I doubt he speaks this way to his wife and kid(s). Why does he do it at work? It's not impressing anyone, but nobody has the balls to tell him to stop, even though it's offensive and distracting to all within earshot of his rants.
Not all of us grow up wanting to live in a frathouse for the rest of our professional lives.
It is the job of the actuaries to determine the break-even point of having killed someone versus the financial impact on the current quarter's bottom line.
Bean counters give corporations permission to do bad things, and draw the line over which corporations should not step to still consider themselves having "fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders."
In essence, if you invest in a company (personally, or through a mutual fund which invests in them), then you are party to the companies' collected crimes, since you own part of that company, and they will claim they did it to make you more wealthy.
Should we blame the CEOs? The CFOs? The shareholders? When a company commits a crime, should we dissolve the company's charter, in essence "killing" it? Is a financial penalty more "useful" than putting hundreds/thousands of people out of work? These are murky questions.
Too late for Karma, but it seems like a bad movie plot that you play a disc, and 7 days later your player dies.
You didn't hear it from me, but if you could produce a "reasonable-looking" knockoff of a rental HD-DVD that had this new "The Ring" trojan/virus on it, and return it to NetFlix, Blockbuster, Hollywood, etc, then random people's players would start self-destructing and bad press would kill this technology.
Living in Austin, TX, we once found out that a night landing would take the orbiter overhead, and saw the most amazing sci-fi movie special effect of its plasma trail, followed several minutes later by a faint double-boom.
We went in to watch the landing, and the plasma trail was still boiling away overhead (faintly) when it touched down at the Cape just NINE MINUTES LATER.
Then we realized just how blazing fast this thing drops in for a "landing", since it traveled 1000 miles in under 10 minutes, and made a perfect landing. Rocket scientists deserve their title.
Stanley Coren's book, The Intelligence Of Dogs, ranks the Afghan hound dead last in "working intelligence." Why would they choose such a breed, one has to wonder, as the first clone?
"During initial training, these breeds (shih tzu, basset hound, mastiff, beagle, pekingese, bloodhound, borzoi, chow chow, bulldog, basenji, and Afghan hound) may need thirty or forty repetitions before they show the first inkling that they have a clue as to what is expected of them. It is not unusual for these dogs to require over a hundred reiterations of the basic practice activities, often spread over several training sessions, before any reliability is obtained. Even then, their performance may seem slow and unsteady. Once learning is achieved, practice sessions must be repeated a number of times; otherwise, the training seems to evaporate, and these dogs will behave as if they never learned the exercise in the first place."
I suspect that a breed which is normally considered people-attentive would have been more controversial than one which consistently gives you the 1000-yard stare when you talk to it, in case things didn't go quite right.
...to adjust the "fidget threshold" tolerated by this mouse. I routinely "tap" my fingers on my mouse and its buttons because I know my fidgeting won't use enough force to depress the buttons.
Really, I think this mouse would be awesome, and smacks of excellent design. But I think I fidget too much with my fingertips to make it anything but confused if I use it.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be possible to invent a type of apparel that would give a false-positive to the photo manipulation algorighm, so when you wore it, it would always detect a manipulation in the photo, even if they weren't actually doctored.
They wouldn't be able to say 100% that it was an original, unretouched photo. That may give enough wiggle room to say that the glove didn't fit...
I'm picturing a shirt/mask/helmet with a pattern on it that resembled jpeg blocking artifacts.
Leave it to Honda to re-invent "public" transportation for Americans. Instead of taking a cab/bus/train/monorail and paying taxes/fees/fares to a central transportation authority, we will be convinced to buy our own automated transportation units, and drive on Honda-owned tollways to get where we want to go in the future.
Texas is in the midst of privatizing toll roads at this very moment.
I'm not completely against this model. I'd like to be able to "dial in" my destination and be told in advance exactly how long it will take to arrive, and let the transportation system drive me there while I do other things. It will make arriving on time very easy--schedule your destination in advance, and it tells you when you MUST be in your car, or you'll be late.
No more road rage. No more rude drivers. Just my Kamakiri:
With all screens and functions
In sync lock with Tripstar
This cool rolling bubble
Is all set to samba --Donald Fagan, Kamakiriad
...That way, when he gets lost, he drops the fiber on the ground, waits ten minutes, then asks the operator of the backhoe cutting the fiber for directions.
...by an NSA agent.
It's hard for some of us not to look at grammatical or spelling errors and wince.
I can wince just fine without first looking at a spelling or grammar error.
However, it's hard for me to look at grammar or spelling errors and not wince, since my brain must first refactor the offending text before I can enjoy it.
...because that's the only way they can make their DRM a reality. The studios don't want you to own anything. They want you to license the rights to view a performance over and over again.
The problem is that DVD is a "good enough" technology that there's not a compelling reason (for most people) to want anything different. The same with CDs. They tried to kill the CD format by trying SACD and other variations, but they don't understand that to 99.9% of the listening public, the CD is a "good enough" format for their music. Sadly, MP3 is also a "good enough" format for a vast majority of people, even at a low bitrate with a crummy encoder. Let's face it, when I'm in my car, the noise floor is so loud that MP3 is just fine.
So, they're doing the best to stay "on message" and try to convince us that it's dead because that's the only way they're going to get any more money out of the people who already are happy with the status quo.
Wolfenstien 3D and Doom were technically compelling content to make a lot of people buy new computers. I've yet to see a movie that made me want to upgrade my home theater.
For my part, DVD is just fine to watch the mediocre movies that they put out. Especially on a TV set, or (gosh forbid) a portable media player.
That wouldn't be too hard, given that he's "hecho en Mexico."
Vicente Fox's head in a jar could provoke the comment, making it just that much more subtle.
If you're going to find the USERS of such devices negligent, then the MANUFACTURERS of the devices should also be liable for shipping them in an unsecured default state.
Devices which are physically dangerous (power tools, lawn equipment) have warning labels on them which physically prevent their use until they are removed (and hopefully, read) by the end-user.
Devices which are virtually dangerous (Unpatched WinXP, Internet Explorer, WiFi routers) have no such barriers to use.
And, I wipe portions of my hard drive clean just like I clear my desktop of clutter, keep my icons lined up, organize my garage, and erase my office whiteboard periodically. There can be nothing incriminating about cleanliness just because it's in a digital domain.
You may just as well say "Aha! The user has emptied his Recycle bin! He must have recently deleted some incriminating evidence!"
I'd much rather face the RIAA if faced with death by Snu-snu!
...a double feature:
Supersize Me
McLibel
Horse pucky. I'll bet you've crashed the car at least a few dozen times in the first hour. If not, you don't stand a chance of winning the race.
Watching TV is a "social" event. You watch it with your family in the same room. You watch it with friends over for company. You dont sit in a private "viewing booth" and consume TV alone.
This will fail because if you log in and Google targets ads to an INDIVIDUAL, then that individual will no longer "want" to be watching TV with his/her friends and family, for the single reason that their PRIVATE internet/email behavior is dictating what types of ads they see in a SOCIAL television viewing setting.
It's similar to this: You invite your bible study group over to watch a football game, and they start to sense there's a theme to the adds that doesn't add up to your public image... You can't blame it on Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at that point.
Thanks, but no. I won't log in to watch TV. I don't want the TV people knowing what web sites I view and what email I send/read. Even in the aggregate. Even it if helps them present me with "more useful" advertising.
For a while now I've only ever read The Onion online by using their low-bandwidth, text-only portal for mobile devices:
http://mobile.theonion.com/content/
This gets you no splash/flash advertisement, and direct links to the "content". It's much less annoying.
I own all of the Pixar feature films on DVD. My kids love them. They also love all of the short films that are included as bonus material. Now, as far as a "fair use" of this material, I've burned a special DVD that contains ONLY all of the short films that would have required a lot of time, attention, and DVD juggling to watch in a row. They love watching ~30 minutes of just the shorts, and that's about enough time (in my opinion) for a TV break.
I was interested to see that they've got them for download, but at 320x240, the quality just wouldn't be the same. I'm glad they are included as bonuses on the DVDs at much higher quality.
P.S. Parents, check out Animusic for another ~30 minute diversion (animusic.com).
Don't downplay the unique angst felt by every adolescent. It just shows you can't possibly relate to what they're going through. Each and every one of them is the first and only person ever to have felt that way.
A tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive....
Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they
do so with the approval of their consciences. --C.S. Lewis
Examples I have recently overheard include:
It's not even as if he's really boiling mad about anything. Even the most minor disappointment or inconvenience is met with a stream of profanities. I sure hope he's on vacation during "take your child to work day."
My point is that I doubt he speaks this way to his wife and kid(s). Why does he do it at work? It's not impressing anyone, but nobody has the balls to tell him to stop, even though it's offensive and distracting to all within earshot of his rants.
Not all of us grow up wanting to live in a frathouse for the rest of our professional lives.
"In the corporate eye," losing money is worse.
It is the job of the actuaries to determine the break-even point of having killed someone versus the financial impact on the current quarter's bottom line.
Bean counters give corporations permission to do bad things, and draw the line over which corporations should not step to still consider themselves having "fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders."
In essence, if you invest in a company (personally, or through a mutual fund which invests in them), then you are party to the companies' collected crimes, since you own part of that company, and they will claim they did it to make you more wealthy.
Should we blame the CEOs? The CFOs? The shareholders? When a company commits a crime, should we dissolve the company's charter, in essence "killing" it? Is a financial penalty more "useful" than putting hundreds/thousands of people out of work? These are murky questions.
We have printers on our network with the following names:
shredder
pc_load_a4
toner_low
paper_jam
warming_up
fax_machine
The helpdesk tickets are rather amusing.
This sounds just like a set of open-source bomb defusing instructions I read:
1. Remove bomb housing
2. Unscrew blasting cap cover, counter-clockwise
3. Locate red wire with a white stripe
4. Cut red wire with white stripe near blast cap connector
5. Now the bomb should be defused, but before you begin, move the bomb to a remote, secured area and wear appropriate protective gear.
Too late for Karma, but it seems like a bad movie plot that you play a disc, and 7 days later your player dies.
You didn't hear it from me, but if you could produce a "reasonable-looking" knockoff of a rental HD-DVD that had this new "The Ring" trojan/virus on it, and return it to NetFlix, Blockbuster, Hollywood, etc, then random people's players would start self-destructing and bad press would kill this technology.
Living in Austin, TX, we once found out that a night landing would take the orbiter overhead, and saw the most amazing sci-fi movie special effect of its plasma trail, followed several minutes later by a faint double-boom.
We went in to watch the landing, and the plasma trail was still boiling away overhead (faintly) when it touched down at the Cape just NINE MINUTES LATER.
Then we realized just how blazing fast this thing drops in for a "landing", since it traveled 1000 miles in under 10 minutes, and made a perfect landing. Rocket scientists deserve their title.
Wait... is that going to be Standard Time or the new Dimwit Savings Time?
I suspect that a breed which is normally considered people-attentive would have been more controversial than one which consistently gives you the 1000-yard stare when you talk to it, in case things didn't go quite right.
...to adjust the "fidget threshold" tolerated by this mouse. I routinely "tap" my fingers on my mouse and its buttons because I know my fidgeting won't use enough force to depress the buttons.
I can imagine two sliders:
[<-----X----------->] Fidget threshold
[<-----------X----->] Caffeine intake
Really, I think this mouse would be awesome, and smacks of excellent design. But I think I fidget too much with my fingertips to make it anything but confused if I use it.