: of, relating to, or being notes that are written differently (as A flat and G sharp) but sound the same in the
tempered scale
Of course, when you're playing an instrument without distinct set pitches (like a trombone or fretless bass guitar, as opposed to a clarinet or guitar), you're not playing in the tempered scale. You're playing in a Pythagorean tuning, because that actually sounds better (you get cleaner 5ths).
The tempered scale is just a kludge so you can play music in different keys on the same instrument when the pitches on that instrument can't be microtonally adjusted, like a piano--a piano's keys have distinct, set pitches (unless you're like John Cage and you stick crap in the strings). A tempered scale means that certain notes have been adjusted so that close ones like C# and Db are considered the same. Enharmonic is not equal, it's "close enough".
1. I agree needed are more TLD's, but they need to be logical ones. Sex sites on.sex, Map sites on.map, ISP's on.net or.isp, only real companies as.com's etc.
Personally, I think the Official Pr0n TLD should be.xxx. I think the pornsites would like that too, since they already try to get as many x's in their names as possible (at least, so I've heard...not that I'd know from firsthand experience...or anything...er...ahem).
2. There need to be rules and the registration services need to enforce them. aka if your not a company you don't get a.com
I'm more concerned about only nonprofits getting.org, no companies (sorry, Hemos).
5. A new central authority, the current ones don't work.
My favorite suggestion is to let each country manage their own DNS. So, say, pets.com would mean pets.com.au in Australia and pets.com.us in the USA. To get to a domain in another country, just qualify it with the ISO country code (pets.com.au would always be the same site no matter where you are). Of course, there would have to be restrictions: a country couldn't create a TLD that matched a country code.
I support capital punishment, but not in its present form. That guy who just got killed in Texas sat on death row for 19 years. That's not right. I would say that it's cruel and unusual punishment. If someone is sentenced to death, it should be carried out within the month.
Most of that time is there because of the appeals process. Appeals take a lot longer in capital-punishment cases because of the stakes. I know, if capital punishment is mandated, I want the judicial system to make damn certain that somebody is guilty of some serious sh!t before they snuff him. The fewer chances for screwups the better.
Any good judicial policy must take into consideration a simple fact: People Make Mistakes.
Then again, there are lots of people convicted of crimes they didn't commit, so maybe we do need some time for appeals. Regardless, the system is not right the way it is now. But people will always be convicted for crimes they didn't commit, so maybe the death penalty isn't such a good idea after all.
This is why I oppose the death penalty. At least with a life sentence you've got the rest of somebody's natural life to find exonerating evidence. Add to that the fact that keeping somebody in prison for life is actually cheaper for the public than executing the person (due to the expensive and long, yet very necessary appeals process), I think the choice should be clear. Not only is capital punishment a moral grey area, but it's more expensive than the alternative.
Why on earth is this modded up as funny? It sounds like the guy's honest opinion.
It looks like the moderator thought that the opinion was dumb, and wanted to do the Slashdot equivalent of "point and laugh". Since there's no +1 LookAtTheDancingFreak, he chose +1 Funny instead.
In San Francisco, in the Nihonmachi area, there are video shops where you can rent/buy Japanese videos taped from Japanese TV. (I pursued a don't-ask-don't-tell piracy policy back when I visited such a place.)
Anyhow, the place I remember in San Francisco was called Tokyo Video.
Heh. They follow the same policy you did. It's how they keep stuff in stock. They keep the box out where people can see it, but nine times out of ten you end up with a generic tape with a handwritten label.
And don't forget that the full title is "King of Iron Chef". I was an Iron Chef junkie way back when you could only see it on the Japanese-language channels.
Seeing it undubbed is more fun than dubbed. You can put words in the commentators' mouths a la "What's Up Tiger Lily". Loads of fun! And it's not like the dubbed version makes a whole lot more sense anyway...
most applications which can handle graphics (word processors, etc) on the Mac can also handle embedded Quicktime content (sounds and video and animation).
Of course, just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Is there any advantage to embedding stuff like animation and sound in a word processor file? Does it make something more convenient? It seems to me that word processor documents are meant to be printed out--and until someone invents a printer that can produce diffraction gratings, or staple flipbooks to a page, dead trees will never be an effective medium for animation. Likewise sound files.
Nope, Zardoz. That was the title of the movie and the name of the false god. See the movie to understand it...it's a really crappy flick but loads of fun to watch.
Not a command line, a natural language command line. So instead of typing "cd files" you can type "take me to where I saved my spreadsheet".
I'd be seriously shocked if it was actually natural language rather than a natural-language-ish approximation (like AppleScript). True natural language processing has eluded AI researchers for a long time.
Specifically, I'd like to see how well it handles anaphora like "the", "that", "it", "such" etc. Anaphora are any words that refer to words previously used. Try here for a pretty good explanation (and ignore the stuff at the end about creating a system of anaphora, that's geared towards constructed-language design hobbyists).
In fact juice has the potential to be more secure. Java is susceptible to attacks that are based on constructing bytecode sequences that trick the jvm. In juice the Slim Binary technology is used and that means that you can't build something that breaks the scope rules of the language..
That's an interesting point. Of course, potential is not necessarily reality, but if Juice does have (or develop) a security model, it could potentially outdo Java in this respect too. I'll have to keep my eye on this technology.
The ads -- they are the same anti-drug progpaganda that ONDCP and Barry McCaffrey have been cramming down our throat for the past however many (65?) years.
You mean like that "Winners Don't Use Drugs" screen that shows up on every freaking arcade machine?
And why couldn't they just put these graphics on their own site--why get DoubleClick involved?
The Government may not be maintaining the database but you can bet they could access the collected data any time they desired...
Only with a court order. Otherwise it would be illegal, in which case it would have no real advantage over just doing it from the government servers--and disadvantages, because they'd have to jump through a few more hoops to get it this way.
In addition to voice control -- a staple of Microsoft videos for almost a decade -- the new software would offer users new ways to control use of their personal information and a new ``type-in bar,'' a sort of natural- language command line where users could issue instructions to their machines. If the computer needed clarification or additional information, it would talk back, out loud, in a synthesized human voice.
A command line. Wow. With a screen reader! Funny, a friend of mine (who happens to be blind) had something like this years ago...it's called using a DOS app with a screen reader.
Another feature, called Smart Tags, would enable the PC to recognize specific types of information, such as dates and personal and company names, and give them appropriate special treatment.
News flash: Microsoft invents metadata!
.NET programs would also make it easier for users to combine different types of data, including video, into their documents -- another long-promised capability that Microsoft has now dubbed Universal Canvas.
Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents? This will fall flat on its @$$.
Frankly, the only new part of this whole thing is the fact that they'll be cramming all of this into a few XML formats. Can you imagine the complexity required of the DTDs for this? Yikes!
I'm not sure about Juice's security model. It's been a few years since I messed with Juice, and then only because I was doing research on Oberon.
Yeah, they don't have any info on security on their site. They'd really need to address this if they were to try to get some widespread adoption. Personally, I think Java's model is particularly well thought-out, but anything that allows the host application to explicitly allow and disallow certain features would work.
Digital signatures by themselves don't cut it. Trojan horses are too easy to write, and a clever virus writer could easily make his mischief untraceable to even a signed applet. (For more detail, try reading a message I wrote on netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist.
However, everything associated with Juice is open-source, and the API is documented. If you're curious, you can check it out here.
Are you sure? The license doesn't seem to fit the Open Source Definition. I may be wrong though.
I submitted a story two whole friggin' months ago about this project, and it didn't get accepted. Now, only when it's been put up on eBay does Slashdot run anything on it. Grrr!
I would've thought that the very existence of a working replica of the Mach 5 would be "News for Nerds", if not stuff that matters. The eBay sale was already planned when I submitted the story too!
I hadn't heard of this. Does Juice have a security model similar to Java? If it doesn't allow similar restrictions and checking, then it's like cross-platform ActiveX (which, if signed, has free reign to do whatever the hell it wants to your system). If it does have validation, security manager, et al., sweet!
c sharp is not the same thing as d flat. ask someone who plays a fretless string instrument.
That's right, because fretless string players don't play exactly in equal temperament. In equal tempered tuning, which almost all Western instruments are in, C sharp is the same tone as d flat. In just intonation, however, they are subtly different.
Quick primer on tunings, because it's not common knowledge (it is pretty offtopic, but germane to this thread): our old pal Pythagoras discovered that pitch is directly related to the length of the vibrating body (a string, an air column, etc.), and that the simplest ratios of the lengths of two strings are consonant. The most consonant ratio is 2:1 (an octave), followed by 3:2 (a perfect fifth), etc.
To get a scale, start at any pitch and find the next note one perfect fifth up, then the next, and so on until you reach an octave equivalent of your first note, which is your key. Find the octave equivalents of all of those notes and and you've got your scale. This is called just intonation. The only problem is that you're stuck in one key on that instrument, because the octave equivalent isn't exactly an octave equivalent.
To get around this, various methods have been created. The one that caught on was equal temperament (although well temperament was popular in the baroque era--hence the title of "The Well-Tempered Clavier"), in which the intervals between consecutive pitches are equalized, and certain close pitches are made equal (E# F, C# Db, etc.). In essence, every note in an equal tempered scale is a wrong note! They're just close enough that it's not particularly jarring.
I don't even think it is reasonable to put the burden of proof on the accused
It's not reasonable, and that's why that's not how it's done! Ever hear the expression "presumed innocent until proven guilty"? That's how juries are supposed to approach a case. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
for them to prove their own ignorance. It should be up to the accusers to prove that the accused knew what they were doing was illegal. It should be up to the accusers to prove that the accused knew what they were doing was illegal, or at least prove that common sense and common action would dictate that they should have known it was illegal.
This sounds nice and fair, but unfortunately it opens a huge legal loophole. Anyone could just say "oops, didn't know!" and get off scott free, because it would be almost impossible to prove otherwise short of finding someone to testify that the defendant expressed knowledge of the deed's legality ("Yes, your honor, on the night of the 25th I overheard him say 'Boy, laundering money through an offshore bank sure is illegal!'"). And "common sense" is way too nebulous a concept for a court of law...escpecially since it seems increasingly uncommon.
IANAL either, of course./PL --- Zardoz has spoken!
Copyright should apply to individuals and not corporate entities.
This wouls probably be the most effective way of preventing IP abuse. It's simple, logical, and doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of actually passing:(
Here's a neat trick for defending copyright: place a copy (if it's digital, a CDROM is preferable) in an envelope, seal it, and mail it to yourself. When you receive it, don't open it, but instead keep it in a safe place. The time stamp added by the post office is considered legal evidence of the date as long as the envelope remains sealed!
Slashdot Mirror
C++ has inner classes now? Since when? Boy, am I out of the loop!
Or do you mean nested classes? That's not quite the same thing.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Of course, when you're playing an instrument without distinct set pitches (like a trombone or fretless bass guitar, as opposed to a clarinet or guitar), you're not playing in the tempered scale. You're playing in a Pythagorean tuning, because that actually sounds better (you get cleaner 5ths).
The tempered scale is just a kludge so you can play music in different keys on the same instrument when the pitches on that instrument can't be microtonally adjusted, like a piano--a piano's keys have distinct, set pitches (unless you're like John Cage and you stick crap in the strings). A tempered scale means that certain notes have been adjusted so that close ones like C# and Db are considered the same. Enharmonic is not equal, it's "close enough".
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Zardoz has spoken!
Personally, I think the Official Pr0n TLD should be .xxx. I think the pornsites would like that too, since they already try to get as many x's in their names as possible (at least, so I've heard...not that I'd know from firsthand experience...or anything...er...ahem).
I'm more concerned about only nonprofits getting .org, no companies (sorry, Hemos).
My favorite suggestion is to let each country manage their own DNS. So, say, pets.com would mean pets.com.au in Australia and pets.com.us in the USA. To get to a domain in another country, just qualify it with the ISO country code (pets.com.au would always be the same site no matter where you are). Of course, there would have to be restrictions: a country couldn't create a TLD that matched a country code.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Most of that time is there because of the appeals process. Appeals take a lot longer in capital-punishment cases because of the stakes. I know, if capital punishment is mandated, I want the judicial system to make damn certain that somebody is guilty of some serious sh!t before they snuff him. The fewer chances for screwups the better.
Any good judicial policy must take into consideration a simple fact: People Make Mistakes.
This is why I oppose the death penalty. At least with a life sentence you've got the rest of somebody's natural life to find exonerating evidence. Add to that the fact that keeping somebody in prison for life is actually cheaper for the public than executing the person (due to the expensive and long, yet very necessary appeals process), I think the choice should be clear. Not only is capital punishment a moral grey area, but it's more expensive than the alternative.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Why on earth is this modded up as funny? It sounds like the guy's honest opinion.
It looks like the moderator thought that the opinion was dumb, and wanted to do the Slashdot equivalent of "point and laugh". Since there's no +1 LookAtTheDancingFreak, he chose +1 Funny instead.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Please don't give them any ideas...
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Zardoz has spoken!
Heh. They follow the same policy you did. It's how they keep stuff in stock. They keep the box out where people can see it, but nine times out of ten you end up with a generic tape with a handwritten label.
And don't forget that the full title is "King of Iron Chef". I was an Iron Chef junkie way back when you could only see it on the Japanese-language channels.
Seeing it undubbed is more fun than dubbed. You can put words in the commentators' mouths a la "What's Up Tiger Lily". Loads of fun! And it's not like the dubbed version makes a whole lot more sense anyway...
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Zardoz has spoken!
yankeehack's wondering if people still use Game Boys? Hasn't heard of Pokemon?
That is a Game Boy game, you know...
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Zardoz has spoken!
Of course, just because something is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Is there any advantage to embedding stuff like animation and sound in a word processor file? Does it make something more convenient? It seems to me that word processor documents are meant to be printed out--and until someone invents a printer that can produce diffraction gratings, or staple flipbooks to a page, dead trees will never be an effective medium for animation. Likewise sound files.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Nope, Zardoz. That was the title of the movie and the name of the false god. See the movie to understand it...it's a really crappy flick but loads of fun to watch.
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Zardoz has spoken!
I'd be seriously shocked if it was actually natural language rather than a natural-language-ish approximation (like AppleScript). True natural language processing has eluded AI researchers for a long time.
Specifically, I'd like to see how well it handles anaphora like "the", "that", "it", "such" etc. Anaphora are any words that refer to words previously used. Try here for a pretty good explanation (and ignore the stuff at the end about creating a system of anaphora, that's geared towards constructed-language design hobbyists).
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Zardoz has spoken!
As opposed to a very baked market segment? ;)
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Zardoz has spoken!
That's an interesting point. Of course, potential is not necessarily reality, but if Juice does have (or develop) a security model, it could potentially outdo Java in this respect too. I'll have to keep my eye on this technology.
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Zardoz has spoken!
You mean like that "Winners Don't Use Drugs" screen that shows up on every freaking arcade machine?
And why couldn't they just put these graphics on their own site--why get DoubleClick involved?
I don't smell conspiracy. I smell stupidity.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Only with a court order. Otherwise it would be illegal, in which case it would have no real advantage over just doing it from the government servers--and disadvantages, because they'd have to jump through a few more hoops to get it this way.
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Zardoz has spoken!
According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, their innovation sounds highly dubious. Some examples:
A command line. Wow. With a screen reader! Funny, a friend of mine (who happens to be blind) had something like this years ago...it's called using a DOS app with a screen reader.
News flash: Microsoft invents metadata!
Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents? This will fall flat on its @$$.
Frankly, the only new part of this whole thing is the fact that they'll be cramming all of this into a few XML formats. Can you imagine the complexity required of the DTDs for this? Yikes!
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Zardoz has spoken!
Yeah, they don't have any info on security on their site. They'd really need to address this if they were to try to get some widespread adoption. Personally, I think Java's model is particularly well thought-out, but anything that allows the host application to explicitly allow and disallow certain features would work.
Digital signatures by themselves don't cut it. Trojan horses are too easy to write, and a clever virus writer could easily make his mischief untraceable to even a signed applet. (For more detail, try reading a message I wrote on netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist.
Are you sure? The license doesn't seem to fit the Open Source Definition. I may be wrong though.
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Zardoz has spoken!
I submitted a story two whole friggin' months ago about this project, and it didn't get accepted. Now, only when it's been put up on eBay does Slashdot run anything on it. Grrr!
I would've thought that the very existence of a working replica of the Mach 5 would be "News for Nerds", if not stuff that matters. The eBay sale was already planned when I submitted the story too!
Grumble grumble mutter mutter
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Zardoz has spoken!
I hadn't heard of this. Does Juice have a security model similar to Java? If it doesn't allow similar restrictions and checking, then it's like cross-platform ActiveX (which, if signed, has free reign to do whatever the hell it wants to your system). If it does have validation, security manager, et al., sweet!
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Zardoz has spoken!
That's right, because fretless string players don't play exactly in equal temperament. In equal tempered tuning, which almost all Western instruments are in, C sharp is the same tone as d flat. In just intonation, however, they are subtly different.
Quick primer on tunings, because it's not common knowledge (it is pretty offtopic, but germane to this thread): our old pal Pythagoras discovered that pitch is directly related to the length of the vibrating body (a string, an air column, etc.), and that the simplest ratios of the lengths of two strings are consonant. The most consonant ratio is 2:1 (an octave), followed by 3:2 (a perfect fifth), etc.
To get a scale, start at any pitch and find the next note one perfect fifth up, then the next, and so on until you reach an octave equivalent of your first note, which is your key. Find the octave equivalents of all of those notes and and you've got your scale. This is called just intonation. The only problem is that you're stuck in one key on that instrument, because the octave equivalent isn't exactly an octave equivalent.
To get around this, various methods have been created. The one that caught on was equal temperament (although well temperament was popular in the baroque era--hence the title of "The Well-Tempered Clavier"), in which the intervals between consecutive pitches are equalized, and certain close pitches are made equal (E# F, C# Db, etc.). In essence, every note in an equal tempered scale is a wrong note! They're just close enough that it's not particularly jarring.
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Zardoz has spoken!
It's not reasonable, and that's why that's not how it's done! Ever hear the expression "presumed innocent until proven guilty"? That's how juries are supposed to approach a case. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
This sounds nice and fair, but unfortunately it opens a huge legal loophole. Anyone could just say "oops, didn't know!" and get off scott free, because it would be almost impossible to prove otherwise short of finding someone to testify that the defendant expressed knowledge of the deed's legality ("Yes, your honor, on the night of the 25th I overheard him say 'Boy, laundering money through an offshore bank sure is illegal!'"). And "common sense" is way too nebulous a concept for a court of law...escpecially since it seems increasingly uncommon.
IANAL either, of course./PL
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Zardoz has spoken!
This is the best haiku I've seen on Slashdot in a long time.
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Zardoz has spoken!
I think the fungus that lives on wheat and produces the stuff might like a few words with him too.
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Zardoz has spoken!
This wouls probably be the most effective way of preventing IP abuse. It's simple, logical, and doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of actually passing :(
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Zardoz has spoken!
Here's a neat trick for defending copyright: place a copy (if it's digital, a CDROM is preferable) in an envelope, seal it, and mail it to yourself. When you receive it, don't open it, but instead keep it in a safe place. The time stamp added by the post office is considered legal evidence of the date as long as the envelope remains sealed!
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Zardoz has spoken!