To be true with Tolkien, the Dwarves are more accurately Jewish: a small, tightly-knit subculture with strong cultural traditions living in mainstream society, but still seen as outsiders. Tolkien explicitly made this connection in his commentaries, and Khuzdul is based on Hebrew.
However, a lot of the same observations can be applied to the Scots as well. The fact that Dwarvish culture is explicitly Clan-based, and that they live in remote, mountainous areas makes the Highland Scots a good cultural template for Tolkien's Dwarves.
As I said in an earlier comment, Tolkien was a linguist and as such was extraordinarily sensitive to linguistic nuances like accent and the effect of social class on speech. If you render the common tongue as English, and keep in mind the history and social status of the various characters, choosing an accent becomes pretty obvious.
Actually if you wanted to Americanize LOTR, the Hobbits would have Southern accents (country bumpkins), the Rohirrim Texan accents (close to the Hobbits, still country but a little more refined), and the Gondorians a neutral General American/ Received Pronunciation accent (educated middle/upper-class).
I'd give the Elves a French accent (refined and a little snooty) when speaking the Common Tongue. Quenya played the role of Latin in Middle Earth (dead language used for formal purposes), and Sindarin was an everyday language evolved from it, so a Romance language would be the closest social analog to it. To an American listener a French accent would best convey the extreme refinement and cultured history (not to mention snobbishness) of the Elves. If you wanted to get even more specific I'd give Elrond and the Rivendell elves a French Canadian accent and the Galadhrim a Parisian accent. Linguistically, a Welsh accent would be most appropriate, as Sindarin was patterned after Welsh, but it just doesn't have the same social/class implications that French does.
If anyone had a Brooklyn accent, it would be a Dwarf. Tolkien explicitly equated the Dwarves with the Jews, and based Khuzdul on Hebrew... so a Brooklyn accent would be extremely appropriate for working-class Dwarves like Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur. Dwarvish nobility like Gimli and Thorin would have a milder, upper-class Jewish accent.
I have to agree with this article, I've always assumed it was just the American preconception of "old worlde". Different enough to be remote but still in the same language.
This is exactly why Tolkien chose to render Rohirric as Old English -- Rohirric had roughly the same old-but-understandable relationship to Westron (common speech) as Old English has to Modern English. (Incidentally, this creates one of the biggest challenges in translating LotR to other languages)
Tolkien was a linguist above all else, and as such was incredibly sensitive to linguistic nuances, something that's lost on most casual readers. Nevertheless, his work has had a huge influence on modern fantasy and sci-fi. Writers (consciously or unconsciously) mimic elements of Tolkien's style without necessarily understanding why he did it that way.
This is how Sleep Number stores operate. They have no inventory in the showroom besides the samples. They take your order and your merchandise gets shipped to you.
This is efficient, but still has room for improvement - the big cost is last-mile delivery. It's relatively inexpensive to ship a tractor-trailer full of goods from a regional depot to a store. Doing door-to-door delivery is substantially more expensive. Best Buy already has the pieces in place to solve this -- a fleet of trucks, depots, and local distribution points, as well as the web infrastructure to order online and pick your purchase up at the store. Going to smaller, showroom-and-pickup stores would save them a fortune.
While it is a bit disappointing that companies might need a law to avoid providing tools that censor free speech to overseas regimes
No more disappointing than the need to have laws to tell companies not to poison the environment, sell dangerous and defective products, commit fraud, etc.
The law has to recognize human nature. If all men were angels, we wouldn't need laws.
And how much of that 20TB changes from day to day? How fast is the data set growing? What is your business case for doing a full daily backup versus incremental / transaction log backups?
20TB isn't really all that huge by Big Data standards. The project I'm working on currently uses a ~60TB data set which grows at around 1TB/month. Without knowing specifics I can't architect a solution for you or estimate costs, but I've built several systems using Hadoop to solve this kind of problem. "Affordable" is relative, but Hadoop-based solutions are very cost-effective. What is your current TCO for your backup solution? I'm willing to bet I can architect something that's going to lower that by 25% or more while giving you additional analytical capabilities. My gmail name is the same as my name here.
The nice thing about Hadoop (or any cluster-based system) is that it scales linearly. You don't need to provision 7 years worth of capacity up front; you can add additional nodes as they are needed.
My gmail ID is the same as my name here if you want to talk specifics.
What Ravi did was punch in the nose wrong - not 10 years in prison and deportation.
A punch in the nose can kill, even if you didn't intend it to. It may be a freak occurrence, but if it does, expect to be punished accordingly.
Ravi rejected a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail and would likely have allowed him to stay in this country. I have no sympathy for him on those grounds alone.
Personally, I'd feel justice was served if he got 6 months in gen pop followed by deportation. No reason for the US taxpayers to feed and clothe his ass for a decade.
A BS in math does not automatically make one a nerd or a geek. I know a number of math majors who are the most humorless, uptight, anally-retentive, and unimaginative people you'd ever (not) want to meet. There are a lot of intelligent people who have sticks in their asses.
Raw intelligence is a prerequisite for geekdom, but there's more to it than that -- it also requires creativity, curiosity, imagination, and a certain amount of skepticism for (if not outright denial of) arbitrary rules and social convention.
Sometimes damage control is the best you can do. Naive idealism doesn't prevent damage, pragmatic sacrifice does.
The two-party system has a virtual lock on the election process. Both parties are resistant to reform from within, and they conspire together to make it as difficult as possible for third-party candidates to get on the ballot.
Part of the problem is the nature of politics itself -- decent human beings generally don't get elected for public office, and when they do manage to get elected they're generally not effective. Sending an honest man to Congress is like throwing a kitten into a shark tank. You have to be a bastard to get elected, and you have to be a bigger bastard to get anything accomplished once in office.
Or a flint / obsidian / glass knife, for that matter. You can learn flintknapping well enough to make a serviceable blade with an online tutorial and a couple days practice.
If you don't think a stone knife is lethal, the Wooly Mammoth would like to have a word with you (if it wasn't hunted to extinction with stone age weapons)
SSH is more CPU-intensive(unnecessarily, since a chip could offload the CPU-intensive part of the workload), which means there will be times when SSH is exactly the wrong thing to use.
That may have been valid a decade ago, but unless you're dealing with something that's ridiculously underpowered (like *maybe* a controller on a minimalist embedded system), I can't see SSH adding appreciable overhead. In my experience, even a 200MHz ARM processor, which is found in LOTS of embedded systems, doesn't bog down running SSH.
If you're running a Linux box in as close to hard realtime mode as possible, your admin activities must have as light a fingerprint as possible.
In that scenario for remote admin you should ssh to a jumphost that's located close to the RTS, and use some internal firewalling to ensure that ONLY the jumphost has permission to connect to the realtime box. (Which isn't a bad idea anyway even if you're running ssh)
Sounds like a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but in a really secure environment, SSH *is* a huge can of worms, especially when combined with Corkscrew.
I once worked for a large company with a draconian firewall policy and no remote access solution. SSH connections were forbidden in both directions. So, I came up with a ssh reverse tunnel solution.
On a box inside the firewall, run this script as a daemon: #!/bin/bash while true do
nohup ssh -O ProxyCommand=/usr/local/bin/corkscrew \
-O TCPKeepAlive=1 \
-R 2222:localhost:22 homeuser@homebox done
This creates a persistent, automatically-restarting outbound ssh tunnel, inside a HTTP tunnel. For added obfuscation, I could run sshd on port 443 on homebox.
Now, (assuming proper corkscrew config), when I'm on homebox I can run:
ssh -p 2222 workuser@localhost
By running squid on homebox:3128 and modifying the corkscrewed connection with -L 3128:homebox:3128, When I'm at work I can set my browser's proxy settings to localhost:3218 and browse anonymously, incidentally bypassing their content filter.
There are a *lot* of stupid thieves. They'll steal stuff that is worthless to them just because it was there. Even if you bricked a phone and made it "worthless" they could still get a couple bucks for the battery, or even a couple cents for selling it to a recycler as scrap, and that's enough of a profit to make it worthwhile for some people.
Imagine how much better it would work if it were instantly enforceable to the point of disabling the engine as soon as it was reported stolen
I CAN imagine what would happen if that were possible, and the word "better" isn't the one that springs to mind. "Kafkaesque Nightmare" is more like it.
Do you REALLY want to give some anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrat the ability to remotely disable your car at the touch of a button? REALLY???
Do you really trust the government (or big business) to able to do that without making mistakes or abusing that power?
Do you really think a system like that WOULDN'T get hacked?
Do you really think that moneyed interests wouldn't use their influence to ensure that such a system was used to increase their profits by creating artificial scarcity and removing usable goods from the secondary marketplace?
It has comments so that when I read this code in say 6 months time I can still understand it.
Exactly - comments are messages to Future You.
How many times have you looked at your old code and said "WTF was I thinking when I wrote this?" Comments are there so you can answer that question. You may have done something dodgy or non-intuitive because you didn't know any better at the time, but on the other hand you may have done it for a very good reason.
I often write comments BEFORE I write the code, especially for smaller projects - the comments are the design document.
This ruling isn't an impeachment of copyright trolling. If anything, it's an affirmation of it.
As far as I can tell, the court didn't rule that trolling is bad or that Righthaven was doing anything illegal or unethical - it just said they were deadbeats and it's forcing them to liquidate their assets to pay their debts. It just happens that their assets are the bait they troll with, and the buyers are likely to be other trolls.
So 9/11 was OUR fault? Is this like that whole "blame the rape victim" thing, where its OUR fault for being such a tempting target?
So you're saying the Arab world DOESN'T have legitimate grievances regarding US foreign policy in their region? That we haven't overtly supported brutal dictatorships and subverted popularly-elected governments? That we haven't been meddling in their internal politics since the 40s?
If you keep poking a nest of hornets with a stick, it shouldn't come as a surprise when you get stung. There's a pretty simple cause and effect relationship there that even a 4 year old can understand.
The fact that the GOP maintains a platform which is explicitly anti-science is relevant to any discussion about science, particularly any research which is publicly funded and doesn't directly benefit large corporations.
Maybe you should learn to use the toilet without urinating on yourself. Most of us manage to do it well before kindergarten, but I guess there are always a few slow learners.
No, but then I wouldn't be surprised if you substituted Python, Perl, Java, or C for Ruby in that statement. The proportion of programmers who can write secure code is a relatively small proportion of the number that can write code in any language.
A great big helping of THIS. It is insanely difficult to write really secure code in any language. (Although it's harder in some than in others).
Look at Postfix -- it was designed and written specifically with security in mind by one of the world's foremost experts on TCP/IP security, and it STILL has had security bugs. If a hacker god like Wietse Venema has security bugs in his code, what chance do mere mortals like us have of writing secure code?
This is something that has to be tackled on multiple levels -- in library code, at the compiler, at the operating system, and even in the language itself. Modern languages have garbage collection that prevents (most) memory leak issues; we need a similar language-level mechanism to address common security issues. Perl's taint mode is a definite step in the right direction, but there needs to be more research done on language-level security features.
Likewise, we have static and dynamic code checkers that highlight problematic code; while there are some for security, we need more/better tools in this area, and more importantly we need to teach young programmers to actually USE them, or better yet build them into the compiler so you HAVE to use them.
My guess is that this is a technology demonstrator, and will not be available to average punters on real cameras. Saying that an old large format camera with a 8*8 back would be very cool
Large format photography has always been the realm of professional photographers and serious artists - no one else is willing to deal with the expense and inconvenience.
A medium-format digital back (1/4 the size) goes for 10K - 35K. If this ever makes it to market, I'd be surprised if it was less than $100K. There are photographers for whom that would be a good investment, but most people will never even see one.
Slashdot Mirror
To be true with Tolkien, the Dwarves are more accurately Jewish: a small, tightly-knit subculture with strong cultural traditions living in mainstream society, but still seen as outsiders. Tolkien explicitly made this connection in his commentaries, and Khuzdul is based on Hebrew.
However, a lot of the same observations can be applied to the Scots as well. The fact that Dwarvish culture is explicitly Clan-based, and that they live in remote, mountainous areas makes the Highland Scots a good cultural template for Tolkien's Dwarves.
As I said in an earlier comment, Tolkien was a linguist and as such was extraordinarily sensitive to linguistic nuances like accent and the effect of social class on speech. If you render the common tongue as English, and keep in mind the history and social status of the various characters, choosing an accent becomes pretty obvious.
Actually if you wanted to Americanize LOTR, the Hobbits would have Southern accents (country bumpkins), the Rohirrim Texan accents (close to the Hobbits, still country but a little more refined), and the Gondorians a neutral General American/ Received Pronunciation accent (educated middle/upper-class).
I'd give the Elves a French accent (refined and a little snooty) when speaking the Common Tongue. Quenya played the role of Latin in Middle Earth (dead language used for formal purposes), and Sindarin was an everyday language evolved from it, so a Romance language would be the closest social analog to it. To an American listener a French accent would best convey the extreme refinement and cultured history (not to mention snobbishness) of the Elves. If you wanted to get even more specific I'd give Elrond and the Rivendell elves a French Canadian accent and the Galadhrim a Parisian accent. Linguistically, a Welsh accent would be most appropriate, as Sindarin was patterned after Welsh, but it just doesn't have the same social/class implications that French does.
If anyone had a Brooklyn accent, it would be a Dwarf. Tolkien explicitly equated the Dwarves with the Jews, and based Khuzdul on Hebrew... so a Brooklyn accent would be extremely appropriate for working-class Dwarves like Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur. Dwarvish nobility like Gimli and Thorin would have a milder, upper-class Jewish accent.
I have to agree with this article, I've always assumed it was just the American preconception of "old worlde". Different enough to be remote but still in the same language.
This is exactly why Tolkien chose to render Rohirric as Old English -- Rohirric had roughly the same old-but-understandable relationship to Westron (common speech) as Old English has to Modern English. (Incidentally, this creates one of the biggest challenges in translating LotR to other languages)
Tolkien was a linguist above all else, and as such was incredibly sensitive to linguistic nuances, something that's lost on most casual readers. Nevertheless, his work has had a huge influence on modern fantasy and sci-fi. Writers (consciously or unconsciously) mimic elements of Tolkien's style without necessarily understanding why he did it that way.
This is how Sleep Number stores operate. They have no inventory in the showroom besides the samples. They take your order and your merchandise gets shipped to you.
This is efficient, but still has room for improvement - the big cost is last-mile delivery. It's relatively inexpensive to ship a tractor-trailer full of goods from a regional depot to a store. Doing door-to-door delivery is substantially more expensive. Best Buy already has the pieces in place to solve this -- a fleet of trucks, depots, and local distribution points, as well as the web infrastructure to order online and pick your purchase up at the store. Going to smaller, showroom-and-pickup stores would save them a fortune.
While it is a bit disappointing that companies might need a law to avoid providing tools that censor free speech to overseas regimes
No more disappointing than the need to have laws to tell companies not to poison the environment, sell dangerous and defective products, commit fraud, etc.
The law has to recognize human nature. If all men were angels, we wouldn't need laws.
And how much of that 20TB changes from day to day? How fast is the data set growing? What is your business case for doing a full daily backup versus incremental / transaction log backups?
20TB isn't really all that huge by Big Data standards. The project I'm working on currently uses a ~60TB data set which grows at around 1TB/month. Without knowing specifics I can't architect a solution for you or estimate costs, but I've built several systems using Hadoop to solve this kind of problem. "Affordable" is relative, but Hadoop-based solutions are very cost-effective. What is your current TCO for your backup solution? I'm willing to bet I can architect something that's going to lower that by 25% or more while giving you additional analytical capabilities. My gmail name is the same as my name here.
The nice thing about Hadoop (or any cluster-based system) is that it scales linearly. You don't need to provision 7 years worth of capacity up front; you can add additional nodes as they are needed.
My gmail ID is the same as my name here if you want to talk specifics.
What Ravi did was punch in the nose wrong - not 10 years in prison and deportation.
A punch in the nose can kill, even if you didn't intend it to. It may be a freak occurrence, but if it does, expect to be punished accordingly.
Ravi rejected a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail and would likely have allowed him to stay in this country. I have no sympathy for him on those grounds alone.
Personally, I'd feel justice was served if he got 6 months in gen pop followed by deportation. No reason for the US taxpayers to feed and clothe his ass for a decade.
A BS in math does not automatically make one a nerd or a geek. I know a number of math majors who are the most humorless, uptight, anally-retentive, and unimaginative people you'd ever (not) want to meet. There are a lot of intelligent people who have sticks in their asses.
Raw intelligence is a prerequisite for geekdom, but there's more to it than that -- it also requires creativity, curiosity, imagination, and a certain amount of skepticism for (if not outright denial of) arbitrary rules and social convention.
Decent men are not racists. If you think otherwise, you are mentally ill.
Decent men don't criminalize speech that they disagree with. If you think otherwise, you are an authoritarian goon.
The correct response to a racist comment is rebuttal, not censorship. Censorship is a lazy and cowardly way to deal with dissenting viewpoints.
Sometimes damage control is the best you can do. Naive idealism doesn't prevent damage, pragmatic sacrifice does.
The two-party system has a virtual lock on the election process. Both parties are resistant to reform from within, and they conspire together to make it as difficult as possible for third-party candidates to get on the ballot.
Part of the problem is the nature of politics itself -- decent human beings generally don't get elected for public office, and when they do manage to get elected they're generally not effective. Sending an honest man to Congress is like throwing a kitten into a shark tank. You have to be a bastard to get elected, and you have to be a bigger bastard to get anything accomplished once in office.
Or a flint / obsidian / glass knife, for that matter. You can learn flintknapping well enough to make a serviceable blade with an online tutorial and a couple days practice.
If you don't think a stone knife is lethal, the Wooly Mammoth would like to have a word with you (if it wasn't hunted to extinction with stone age weapons)
SSH is more CPU-intensive(unnecessarily, since a chip could offload the CPU-intensive part of the workload), which means there will be times when SSH is exactly the wrong thing to use.
That may have been valid a decade ago, but unless you're dealing with something that's ridiculously underpowered (like *maybe* a controller on a minimalist embedded system), I can't see SSH adding appreciable overhead. In my experience, even a 200MHz ARM processor, which is found in LOTS of embedded systems, doesn't bog down running SSH.
If you're running a Linux box in as close to hard realtime mode as possible, your admin activities must have as light a fingerprint as possible.
In that scenario for remote admin you should ssh to a jumphost that's located close to the RTS, and use some internal firewalling to ensure that ONLY the jumphost has permission to connect to the realtime box. (Which isn't a bad idea anyway even if you're running ssh)
Sounds like a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but in a really secure environment, SSH *is* a huge can of worms, especially when combined with Corkscrew.
I once worked for a large company with a draconian firewall policy and no remote access solution. SSH connections were forbidden in both directions. So, I came up with a ssh reverse tunnel solution.
On a box inside the firewall, run this script as a daemon:
#!/bin/bash
while true
do
nohup ssh -O ProxyCommand=/usr/local/bin/corkscrew \
-O TCPKeepAlive=1 \
-R 2222:localhost:22 homeuser@homebox
done
This creates a persistent, automatically-restarting outbound ssh tunnel, inside a HTTP tunnel. For added obfuscation, I could run sshd on port 443 on homebox.
Now, (assuming proper corkscrew config), when I'm on homebox I can run:
ssh -p 2222 workuser@localhost
By running squid on homebox:3128 and modifying the corkscrewed connection with -L 3128:homebox:3128, When I'm at work I can set my browser's proxy settings to localhost:3218 and browse anonymously, incidentally bypassing their content filter.
So why does anyone steal them?
Why do people steal anything?
There are a *lot* of stupid thieves. They'll steal stuff that is worthless to them just because it was there. Even if you bricked a phone and made it "worthless" they could still get a couple bucks for the battery, or even a couple cents for selling it to a recycler as scrap, and that's enough of a profit to make it worthwhile for some people.
This has already been tried out in the UK and Australia successfully.
Bandwagon Fallacy
It's been tried. The "successfully" part is highly debatable.
Imagine how much better it would work if it were instantly enforceable to the point of disabling the engine as soon as it was reported stolen
I CAN imagine what would happen if that were possible, and the word "better" isn't the one that springs to mind. "Kafkaesque Nightmare" is more like it.
Do you REALLY want to give some anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrat the ability to remotely disable your car at the touch of a button? REALLY???
Do you really trust the government (or big business) to able to do that without making mistakes or abusing that power?
Do you really think a system like that WOULDN'T get hacked?
Do you really think that moneyed interests wouldn't use their influence to ensure that such a system was used to increase their profits by creating artificial scarcity and removing usable goods from the secondary marketplace?
It has comments so that when I read this code in say 6 months time I can still understand it.
Exactly - comments are messages to Future You.
How many times have you looked at your old code and said "WTF was I thinking when I wrote this?" Comments are there so you can answer that question. You may have done something dodgy or non-intuitive because you didn't know any better at the time, but on the other hand you may have done it for a very good reason.
I often write comments BEFORE I write the code, especially for smaller projects - the comments are the design document.
This ruling isn't an impeachment of copyright trolling. If anything, it's an affirmation of it.
As far as I can tell, the court didn't rule that trolling is bad or that Righthaven was doing anything illegal or unethical - it just said they were deadbeats and it's forcing them to liquidate their assets to pay their debts. It just happens that their assets are the bait they troll with, and the buyers are likely to be other trolls.
So 9/11 was OUR fault? Is this like that whole "blame the rape victim" thing, where its OUR fault for being such a tempting target?
So you're saying the Arab world DOESN'T have legitimate grievances regarding US foreign policy in their region? That we haven't overtly supported brutal dictatorships and subverted popularly-elected governments? That we haven't been meddling in their internal politics since the 40s?
If you keep poking a nest of hornets with a stick, it shouldn't come as a surprise when you get stung. There's a pretty simple cause and effect relationship there that even a 4 year old can understand.
The fact that the GOP maintains a platform which is explicitly anti-science is relevant to any discussion about science, particularly any research which is publicly funded and doesn't directly benefit large corporations.
Maybe you should learn to use the toilet without urinating on yourself. Most of us manage to do it well before kindergarten, but I guess there are always a few slow learners.
I agree. I refuse to purchase anything contaminated by Steam.
Sorry, Sid. I've bought every Civ game that's ever come out, but you've lost me as a customer.
You find people driving drunk all the time despite the fact that they know it's unsafe and illegal.
Just because people do it frequently doesn't mean it's a good idea.
A great big helping of THIS. It is insanely difficult to write really secure code in any language. (Although it's harder in some than in others).
Look at Postfix -- it was designed and written specifically with security in mind by one of the world's foremost experts on TCP/IP security, and it STILL has had security bugs. If a hacker god like Wietse Venema has security bugs in his code, what chance do mere mortals like us have of writing secure code?
This is something that has to be tackled on multiple levels -- in library code, at the compiler, at the operating system, and even in the language itself. Modern languages have garbage collection that prevents (most) memory leak issues; we need a similar language-level mechanism to address common security issues. Perl's taint mode is a definite step in the right direction, but there needs to be more research done on language-level security features.
Likewise, we have static and dynamic code checkers that highlight problematic code; while there are some for security, we need more/better tools in this area, and more importantly we need to teach young programmers to actually USE them, or better yet build them into the compiler so you HAVE to use them.
Large format photography has always been the realm of professional photographers and serious artists - no one else is willing to deal with the expense and inconvenience.
A medium-format digital back (1/4 the size) goes for 10K - 35K. If this ever makes it to market, I'd be surprised if it was less than $100K. There are photographers for whom that would be a good investment, but most people will never even see one.