Great, we're going backwards... this is USENET, isn't it? I love that people first complain that new technology doesn't do what they want, but rejoice when new technology does what the old technology did, just at four times the cost. Really people, can we invent something new for once?
Ehem, it would be very tough to make a good movie out of any of them. They're crap. Poor, unadulatered crap. Read any of his other books (Them Martian ones are funny) if you doubt this. It lets you look at the whole series in a new light, such as "THEY SUCK!" and "Wow, my 6th grade English teach was a religious zealot."
I'm not trolling, I'm reliving childhood trauma...
Re:I won't give them the satisfaction.
on
Paperless Billing?
·
· Score: 1
My credit card provider (AmEx) had this nifty "Pay online, no more stamps, no more paper bills!" offer, so I took t a chance and started paying my bill online and dumped my paper copy...
I was a fool to think they would do a good job of it. First, they kept sending me paper bills, ok, fine... then stopped, oh good. Then started again. Great. Then stopped. Uh huh. Then they started coming again. All without me saying anything half the time, so I didn't know if not getting a bill for a month was a good thing (They listened!) or a bad thing (It was stolen!)......and then... my due dates kept changing. My statement due date changed three or four times in a year, and not just back or forward a day or two. Two weeks forward or back. One month it's the 17th, another it's the 10th, a third it's the 24th, and so on. I haven't learned my lesson, I know don't get paper bills and pay online, but you have to be DAMN sure you check that website regularly.
But since you aren't exercising your right to vote... would you mind sending your absentee ballot over to my house so I can "test" the voter fraud system myself?
P.S. Yes, I have voted twice in an election, and I was 16 at the time. And oh, it was legal.;) Figure that one out!
They...they weren't really working of Fallout 3 were they? Because... if they were... and it's...it's 'shelved'... I think I might just... must find tall building... bridge... industrial dough mixer... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I actually develop and work with voice synthesizers that are phoneme and phrase based. We dig up an actor, or an unwitting researcher from another project, and make them rattle off a few thousand sample sentences. Then, in theory, we use that date to make a "realistic" human voice.
Yeah. Sure. Riiiiiight. If it worked, I'd be out of a job.:) Technology has come a very long way, but it is no where near what a real person can do. It can't even imitate. The spoken word is a thousand times easier than singing, I'll believe it when I hear it sing what I say within an hour of placing a request.
By the way, I proposed that we develop a rapping version of our synthesized voice, just for fun. The idea was trashed in 30 seconds, b/c who wants a voice that raps like an off duty LAPD Sergeant at Karaoke night? I doubt this thing can sing that well...
The $5,000,000 is for a little thing called overhead. To pay the guys in the lab where I work to do this (yep, they're upstairs) costs salaries, benefits, insurance, retirement plans, and so on. Then, add in the cut that USC and every other middleman takes and you're left without too much cash. Labor is the big cost. A dozen G5's to tinker with? Don't bother getting a discount. Need a digital video camera to put "content" on your intranet? Here's $3,000. And so on...
Ok, sorry, had to...but really, doesn't this sound like the setup for a sci-fi world saving movie where the original cause of the disaster was something incredibly stupid a scientist (the one equipping the rescuers) did?
"You bred the aliens on Earth?" "Doctor! You designed the Neutronomiconimeter Canon!?!" "My god! Humans spread the oil on the ocean, causing the sea monsters to attack from Atlantis!?!"
...and tell them I have a shift key and autorun disabled.
'Ere is the number, J.H.
SunnComm 602-267-7500
[Don't believe me? Look at the press release, near the bottom.]
Anybody want to go to court with me on 16 Septembe
on
Cringely on Identity Theft
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The same mail theft leading to attempted identity theft thing happened to me last year. Even better, the guy's court date is coming up in LA. Anybody want to Slashmob the jerk's trial?
Short version is, my entire family goes to Morocco and Italy for a month. While we're gone, the person who was supposed to be picking up the mail, ehm, forgot, let's say. So, when the morons at our escrow company decided to send the DEED to the house in regular ol' 1st class mail, not certified, not registered, and sure as hell without calling first, some nutbar picked it up.
Thank god he was too stupid to realize he was holding a $1,000,000+ piece of paper, with loan documents that included SSNs, account numbers, dates or birth, and (don't ask) mother's maiden names.
Uhm, let me get this straight. According to your sig you're a Republican (mod down accordingly, y'all). Now, this is the same Republican Party that believes that no one should have to tell the gov't if they have a gun, what kind of gun it is, or where they keep it, whether their house, car, or pocket.
So, a proud member of this same party wants to track all the money in everybody's pockets. Tell me, is it easier to get something with a gun, or with cash? Just change your comment to "gun" instead of "money" and you'll see how little sense your comment makes.
Now for a little info on the drug trade and the cash economy. Very large parts of the US economy are going cash only, such as illegal immigrants and deadbeat parents working under the table, taxless sales, and, of course, good ol' criminal activities like prostitution and drug dealing. So the next time a, ehem, generally Republican small business owner (check the Small Bus. Assoc. lobbying records of you think they're a bunch of liberals...) pays his Guatemalan bus boy or that Australian kid in cash, he'll find his wallet has burst into flames?
And just to wrap up, why bother discussing drug dealing as the big cash based underground business? Under the table wages are much bigger, and the big money in drug trafficking goes electronically. $1,000,000 will NOT fit into a regular briefcase, no matter how hard you stuff it! I've tried! Now just try cramming $100,000,000 into your little Cessna and flying somewhere with it, or driving through the US-Mexico border (the Canadian border is a joke, but you can try there too.) Now, launder that cash a little and voila! Your $100,000,000 just went to Liberia and Grand Cayman in 200ms. Which wad of cash exactly would burst into flames then? Oh, right, don't forget to run off with the company's pension fund, too!
Hmm, so I should take these dossier seriously? One (I'll let y'all guess) cites Paramount Pictures as a source. It also puts all "science" terms in quotes. You know why? Because it is not science, it is fiction! The only word you can throw in front of "fiction" to make it real is "non-" and it's only a prefix. These dossiers are jokes. Let's forget our worm holes and 4" light sabers and get back to work.
...because that would cause too high a turnover in screeners. ("Oh, great, Frank's losing it again...{hurrrrrrrlllllllllll}" These scanners show an image of your shape, not you skin, not you fine booty, not your tatoos, and definitely not you. Just b/c the images are the same shape as the person scanned does not link the two. This tech produces more of, say.. a checksum of your exterior, not an image of your posterior. The only reason someone even has to look is b/c image recognition is so terrible. So, for the modest, would you prefer a strip search? Once these devices become standard, all of the smaller airports will have to match up, and that means gettin' naked.
The point isn't that you have to record tracks through your soundcard as opposed to simply ripping them off the disc. That's not a big deal if you know what you're doing.
The problem is that the D/A (that's digital to analog) converter in these components isn't as sweet/mad expensive as the $10,000 box sitting on an audiophile's rack.
Also, plugging an analog component into your beautiful system can be a pain in the ass. Digital out means one plug into your D/A converter. Simple. Wiring a new connection to your pre-amps, now that's a pain in the wallet when you're using $100 a foot cable.
P.S. If you're using an audigy to record tracks, and pretty much any consumer targeted system, your recordings are going to suck. Throw down for something a little better if you plan to do a lot of that...
Ehem, I point y'all to here. They're the definitive source for easy to acccess campaign finance data. I work for campaigns (Democratic, thank you very much) and am in my office right now. When I can't find anything on GeekPAC or it's true name, American Open Technology whatever, I start to worry. Every other PAC, contributor, candidate, etc., no matter how small or how few votes or dollars they got, is in there. I would go as far to check the FEC, but what's the point? If GeekPAC hasn't set itself up as a legitimate PAC, then your money is just going down the drain b/c they'll be breaking the law. If they aren't filing their periodic disclosure forms, they aren't going to be making any contributions, and they aren't going to be in business.
You, my friend, are an idiot.
There is a reason why movies are screened in big, dark rooms with a packed audience, a screen that makes a tear look like a waterfall, and the sound turned WAY up. The emotional experience of seeing a film in that setting, (I hate this line) as it was intended, is significant.
Watch your pirated copy on your laptop, I do not care that it is stolen. Heck, mail $5 to the Skywalker Ranch if you want to. But your attempt to legitimize crap presentation is offensive. Compared to the real thing, it is junk. If George Lucas wanted TPM to look like archival footage he would've dug up the camera from "American Graffitti" and done the developing in his bathtub.
Films are constructed. Every element is precisely inserted for greatest effect. Find out what it's like, drop the $9 and get your ass in line.
Palabra.
Excuse me, I may be trolling but give me a goddamn break! Best book ever written, hmm, yeah, leave out, ohhhhhh.... Dostoyevsky, Milton, Whitman, Marquez, and a about 100 others who outshine Mr. Tolkien like diamonds against mud. Oh, so only English/American authors? Okay, I'll take Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Whitman. What? Only fantasy/Sci-Fi with epic battles? Alright, Asimov, Herbert, and ooh ooh, I got one, Homer! Can't forget Beowulf, there's some sword-swingin' action for ya!
If LOTR is your idea of great literature, go take a comp lit class or something, please, spare us all. Oh, and Tolkien's poetry is some of the worst you'll see. Use it as a model to avoid.
Actually, Monster cable is the stupidest thing since Bose's convoluted horn design. I'm talking about real considerations here. If actually wanting to be able to produce a quailty product and take some of my audio editing work home with me is kooky, I'll remember to tell anybody who telecommutes. A little buzz might be unnoticeable while playing music or a round of Wolf, but when you're trying to get a product out the door, the little things matter. A little hum goes a long way in an immersive theater.
Well, this sounds all good, but what about some other practical issues? The first I can think of is now you have more noise in your power, the bane of any audiophile or DAW user. I have a tough enough time trying to keep my sound cabling away from my power lines as it is, will this product make the lines that much more noisy? The 60 cycles will still be there, but what frequency is the networking stuff on?
Also, what the hell are power cleaners going to think of this? I don't think putting more stress on your components is going to help them any. Might be a good idea to keep the network off of the circuits with your audio gear, unless your computer is your audio gear...
Slashdot Mirror
Great, we're going backwards... this is USENET, isn't it? I love that people first complain that new technology doesn't do what they want, but rejoice when new technology does what the old technology did, just at four times the cost. Really people, can we invent something new for once?
Ehem, it would be very tough to make a good movie out of any of them. They're crap. Poor, unadulatered crap. Read any of his other books (Them Martian ones are funny) if you doubt this. It lets you look at the whole series in a new light, such as "THEY SUCK!" and "Wow, my 6th grade English teach was a religious zealot."
I'm not trolling, I'm reliving childhood trauma...
My credit card provider (AmEx) had this nifty "Pay online, no more stamps, no more paper bills!" offer, so I took t a chance and started paying my bill online and dumped my paper copy...
...and then... my due dates kept changing. My statement due date changed three or four times in a year, and not just back or forward a day or two. Two weeks forward or back. One month it's the 17th, another it's the 10th, a third it's the 24th, and so on. I haven't learned my lesson, I know don't get paper bills and pay online, but you have to be DAMN sure you check that website regularly.
I was a fool to think they would do a good job of it. First, they kept sending me paper bills, ok, fine... then stopped, oh good. Then started again. Great. Then stopped. Uh huh. Then they started coming again. All without me saying anything half the time, so I didn't know if not getting a bill for a month was a good thing (They listened!) or a bad thing (It was stolen!)...
You sir, are a moron.
;) Figure that one out!
But since you aren't exercising your right to vote... would you mind sending your absentee ballot over to my house so I can "test" the voter fraud system myself?
P.S. Yes, I have voted twice in an election, and I was 16 at the time. And oh, it was legal.
They...they weren't really working of Fallout 3 were they? Because... if they were... and it's...it's 'shelved'... I think I might just... must find tall building... bridge... industrial dough mixer... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I'm going to go cry now...
I actually develop and work with voice synthesizers that are phoneme and phrase based. We dig up an actor, or an unwitting researcher from another project, and make them rattle off a few thousand sample sentences. Then, in theory, we use that date to make a "realistic" human voice. Yeah. Sure. Riiiiiight. If it worked, I'd be out of a job. :) Technology has come a very long way, but it is no where near what a real person can do. It can't even imitate. The spoken word is a thousand times easier than singing, I'll believe it when I hear it sing what I say within an hour of placing a request.
By the way, I proposed that we develop a rapping version of our synthesized voice, just for fun. The idea was trashed in 30 seconds, b/c who wants a voice that raps like an off duty LAPD Sergeant at Karaoke night? I doubt this thing can sing that well...
No.
The $5,000,000 is for a little thing called overhead. To pay the guys in the lab where I work to do this (yep, they're upstairs) costs salaries, benefits, insurance, retirement plans, and so on. Then, add in the cut that USC and every other middleman takes and you're left without too much cash. Labor is the big cost. A dozen G5's to tinker with? Don't bother getting a discount. Need a digital video camera to put "content" on your intranet? Here's $3,000. And so on...
Okay, this sounds to me like vapor ware.
Ok, sorry, had to...but really, doesn't this sound like the setup for a sci-fi world saving movie where the original cause of the disaster was something incredibly stupid a scientist (the one equipping the rescuers) did?
"You bred the aliens on Earth?"
"Doctor! You designed the Neutronomiconimeter Canon!?!"
"My god! Humans spread the oil on the ocean, causing the sea monsters to attack from Atlantis!?!"
...and tell them I have a shift key and autorun disabled.
'Ere is the number, J.H.
SunnComm
602-267-7500
[Don't believe me? Look at the press release, near the bottom.]
The same mail theft leading to attempted identity theft thing happened to me last year. Even better, the guy's court date is coming up in LA. Anybody want to Slashmob the jerk's trial?
Short version is, my entire family goes to Morocco and Italy for a month. While we're gone, the person who was supposed to be picking up the mail, ehm, forgot, let's say. So, when the morons at our escrow company decided to send the DEED to the house in regular ol' 1st class mail, not certified, not registered, and sure as hell without calling first, some nutbar picked it up.
Thank god he was too stupid to realize he was holding a $1,000,000+ piece of paper, with loan documents that included SSNs, account numbers, dates or birth, and (don't ask) mother's maiden names.
As in, the link will be Slashdotted in under 5 minutes? Typical second rate contractors...promising more for less.
Anybody get a mirror?
So the trains have a GPS doohicky in 'em, alright. And ya say that there doohicky can stop the train if the driver doesn't? Okeydokey.
And so you're sayin' I could sit next to the tracks and stop trains with the WiFi card in my Zaurus? Neat-o.
Saves having to follow the schedule!
Seen any dingos in the area?
They might also be carrying a baby...
Uhm, let me get this straight. According to your sig you're a Republican (mod down accordingly, y'all). Now, this is the same Republican Party that believes that no one should have to tell the gov't if they have a gun, what kind of gun it is, or where they keep it, whether their house, car, or pocket.
So, a proud member of this same party wants to track all the money in everybody's pockets. Tell me, is it easier to get something with a gun, or with cash? Just change your comment to "gun" instead of "money" and you'll see how little sense your comment makes.
Now for a little info on the drug trade and the cash economy. Very large parts of the US economy are going cash only, such as illegal immigrants and deadbeat parents working under the table, taxless sales, and, of course, good ol' criminal activities like prostitution and drug dealing. So the next time a, ehem, generally Republican small business owner (check the Small Bus. Assoc. lobbying records of you think they're a bunch of liberals...) pays his Guatemalan bus boy or that Australian kid in cash, he'll find his wallet has burst into flames?
And just to wrap up, why bother discussing drug dealing as the big cash based underground business? Under the table wages are much bigger, and the big money in drug trafficking goes electronically. $1,000,000 will NOT fit into a regular briefcase, no matter how hard you stuff it! I've tried! Now just try cramming $100,000,000 into your little Cessna and flying somewhere with it, or driving through the US-Mexico border (the Canadian border is a joke, but you can try there too.) Now, launder that cash a little and voila! Your $100,000,000 just went to Liberia and Grand Cayman in 200ms. Which wad of cash exactly would burst into flames then? Oh, right, don't forget to run off with the company's pension fund, too!
I'm a Democrat. Punk.
Concerning your recent letter threatening legal action, I didn't buy my smart card programmer to steal DirectTV service...
I bought it to steal an election.
Thank you.
Hmm, so I should take these dossier seriously? One (I'll let y'all guess) cites Paramount Pictures as a source. It also puts all "science" terms in quotes. You know why? Because it is not science, it is fiction! The only word you can throw in front of "fiction" to make it real is "non-" and it's only a prefix. These dossiers are jokes. Let's forget our worm holes and 4" light sabers and get back to work.
...because that would cause too high a turnover in screeners. ("Oh, great, Frank's losing it again...{hurrrrrrrlllllllllll}"
These scanners show an image of your shape, not you skin, not you fine booty, not your tatoos, and definitely not you. Just b/c the images are the same shape as the person scanned does not link the two. This tech produces more of, say.. a checksum of your exterior, not an image of your posterior. The only reason someone even has to look is b/c image recognition is so terrible.
So, for the modest, would you prefer a strip search? Once these devices become standard, all of the smaller airports will have to match up, and that means gettin' naked.
The point isn't that you have to record tracks through your soundcard as opposed to simply ripping them off the disc. That's not a big deal if you know what you're doing.
The problem is that the D/A (that's digital to analog) converter in these components isn't as sweet/mad expensive as the $10,000 box sitting on an audiophile's rack.
Also, plugging an analog component into your beautiful system can be a pain in the ass. Digital out means one plug into your D/A converter. Simple. Wiring a new connection to your pre-amps, now that's a pain in the wallet when you're using $100 a foot cable.
P.S. If you're using an audigy to record tracks, and pretty much any consumer targeted system, your recordings are going to suck. Throw down for something a little better if you plan to do a lot of that...
Why Canadian Beer sucks? ...or is it the more trying...
What can we add to hockey rinks to make hockey more interesting?
Ehem, I point y'all to here. They're the definitive source for easy to acccess campaign finance data. I work for campaigns (Democratic, thank you very much) and am in my office right now. When I can't find anything on GeekPAC or it's true name, American Open Technology whatever, I start to worry. Every other PAC, contributor, candidate, etc., no matter how small or how few votes or dollars they got, is in there. I would go as far to check the FEC, but what's the point? If GeekPAC hasn't set itself up as a legitimate PAC, then your money is just going down the drain b/c they'll be breaking the law. If they aren't filing their periodic disclosure forms, they aren't going to be making any contributions, and they aren't going to be in business.
You, my friend, are an idiot.
There is a reason why movies are screened in big, dark rooms with a packed audience, a screen that makes a tear look like a waterfall, and the sound turned WAY up. The emotional experience of seeing a film in that setting, (I hate this line) as it was intended, is significant.
Watch your pirated copy on your laptop, I do not care that it is stolen. Heck, mail $5 to the Skywalker Ranch if you want to. But your attempt to legitimize crap presentation is offensive. Compared to the real thing, it is junk. If George Lucas wanted TPM to look like archival footage he would've dug up the camera from "American Graffitti" and done the developing in his bathtub.
Films are constructed. Every element is precisely inserted for greatest effect. Find out what it's like, drop the $9 and get your ass in line.
Palabra.
Excuse me, I may be trolling but give me a goddamn break! Best book ever written, hmm, yeah, leave out, ohhhhhh.... Dostoyevsky, Milton, Whitman, Marquez, and a about 100 others who outshine Mr. Tolkien like diamonds against mud. Oh, so only English/American authors? Okay, I'll take Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Whitman. What? Only fantasy/Sci-Fi with epic battles? Alright, Asimov, Herbert, and ooh ooh, I got one, Homer! Can't forget Beowulf, there's some sword-swingin' action for ya!
If LOTR is your idea of great literature, go take a comp lit class or something, please, spare us all. Oh, and Tolkien's poetry is some of the worst you'll see. Use it as a model to avoid.
Actually, Monster cable is the stupidest thing since Bose's convoluted horn design. I'm talking about real considerations here. If actually wanting to be able to produce a quailty product and take some of my audio editing work home with me is kooky, I'll remember to tell anybody who telecommutes. A little buzz might be unnoticeable while playing music or a round of Wolf, but when you're trying to get a product out the door, the little things matter. A little hum goes a long way in an immersive theater.
Well, this sounds all good, but what about some other practical issues? The first I can think of is now you have more noise in your power, the bane of any audiophile or DAW user. I have a tough enough time trying to keep my sound cabling away from my power lines as it is, will this product make the lines that much more noisy? The 60 cycles will still be there, but what frequency is the networking stuff on?
Also, what the hell are power cleaners going to think of this? I don't think putting more stress on your components is going to help them any. Might be a good idea to keep the network off of the circuits with your audio gear, unless your computer is your audio gear...