Sadly, indeed : Whenever it is a large corporation doing something illegal they at most get a slap on the wrist and no one goes to jail, but whenever it is a single commoner you get thrown in so fast you'll leave skidmarks on the ground.
Money == More important than human rights, privacy or even laws themselves.
Don't forget that he sold six stolen items for only $250.. I mean, selling stolen goods is risky and can earn you a not-so-nice accommodation for a year or more, so why even bother for such a small amount of money?
Because FLAC is very poorly supported among both portable media devices and media center devices?
Indeed. Sure, my PC can support anything I throw at it and my phone does the same, but for example my car audio system doesn't play FLAC or anything, only MP3.
Further, the difference in actual perceptible quality between a high quality mp3/ogg/wma/whatever encoding and a FLAC encoding is between negligible and non-existent, negating pretty much any benefit of FLAC.
Again agreed. Atleast I can't hear any effing difference between FLAC and a good quality MP3. On a portable device the size of the files is much more important and if I can't hear the difference anyways then I obviously choose the smaller files. And since ALL of the devices I use to play music support MP3 then there's no need to do any kind of format conversions or anything and as such there is no loss of quality even over a longer timespan.
Basically I understand why some people want FLAC files, but for general populace FLAC files give absolutely no benefit whatsoever and still takes up more space.
I have it completely vice versa: I don't simply see anything worth saying that can be said in only 140 letters unless it's a link which i could go to directly
You conveyed the whole point of the comment incorrectly: if it's a link to which I could go directly to then it's even less worth of a tweet than something else. And you omitted completely the "Demonstrates quite well how different people can be." which I also meant as a part of my comment. As I said, Twitter simply isn't worth it.
To make the point clearer as to why I think it isn't worth it:
If you are going to post a link to something there isn't enough space for any kind of even remotely decent summary which I could use to determine what the link is actually about and whether or not it is worth visiting. Also without any kind of a summary it feels just like a link aggregator and there's plenty of much better tools for such than Twitter.
Secondly, with only 140 letters there is no space for having any kind of proper discussion about a select item, like for example this comment: I simply wouldn't be able to explain my opinions and arguments. To me the whole point of getting some kind of an overview of what others think about a select item is not only interesting but also useful, and there's often commenters who add something to the item that was omitted or not made clear enough. Again, not possible with only 140 characters.
You can put the minimize and maximize buttons back if you want
Alas, there is no window list or panel and as such minimizing windows will feel completely out of place.
Finally, as for using workspaces, what makes you think you will be forced to use it?
I haven't tried GNOME3 myself, but from all the videos and articles on it it does indeed seem like there is no sane way of using it without using workspaces. I need to make up a final opinion once I get to try GNOME3.
KDE is interesting and all but GNOME lets me actually get work done; it wasn't designed to appeal to a 3-year-old.
Indeed. I have myself tried KDE every now and then, all the way from KDE 3.x, and I still don't quite like it. It feels like they are simply trying to include way too much stuff and every imaginable configuration option. GNOME on the other hand feels much more consistent and clean and thus it suits my taste much better. I have only wished they'd switch over to Qt because it's quite a bit more powerful than GTK+, but in such a way as to keep the current feel to it all.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new. It would be a different matter if it was somehow more powerful and efficient than my current one, but it isn't.
Enforced terseness in messages is the only reason I (sometimes) follow Twitter
I have it completely vice versa: I don't simply see anything worth saying that can be said in only 140 letters, and if it is just a link to another site then I much rather skip the one extra step and go straight for the other site.
Demonstrates quite well how different people can be.
I'm not sure why we as geeks continue to portray the any-geek-girl-will-do caricature.
It is a stereotype being pushed onto us by the non-geek and it simply tends to stick to those geeks who are either easily affected or who have low self-esteem. Sad as it is. But it still is a stereotype that has no basis in reality.
PS. Sounds like you have an absolutely fantastic group of people around you and your husband doesn't sound bad either, I am somewhat envious of you:)
Uh, wouldn't a vibrator be a lot simpler and easier?
For some people, perhaps, but I have a hard time getting aroused by myself; I need stimulation from another person to be able to maintain arousal. Secondly, a vibe simply doesn't fill the need for a warm body, the sense of skin against skin, or the weight of another human on top of you. A vibe is just a quick-and-meaningless-release, nothing more, even though you guys get the completely opposite image from all the porn you watch.
I don't have a boyfriend right now, but that isn't such a huge problem. Getting one of these spiders isn't really that a huge problem either, it would probably cost a few thousands. Even getting the spider to bite the new boyfriend wouldn't really be such a huge issue even though he might not enjoy it that much... but the fact that I am seriously horrified by spiders is the real issue :
I actually don't think that's true. There's lots of pretty intelligent commenters here and surprisingly many here seem to already be happily married. I know you meant that as a joke, though. Besides, I normally keep my gender out of the discussion anyways as it plays no relevance to any meaningful arguments.
Well, shouldn't we try if interest in comics or such is a positive or a negative thing, as Microsoft is claiming here.
I'm 28 year old female, I love learning and experiencing new stuff, delight myself in meaningful conversations, play videogames on a daily basis and I am a manga-buff and really enjoy me some quality anime.
Now, how many people here would be put off by the last part of the above sentence?;)
Not because I'm ashamed of being interested in videogames, but because I know that all of those people would unfairly judge me for it.
That's one way to see it. I personally don't even try to hide that I enjoy videogames, if people judge me negatively because of that it is totally their own issue and doesn't affect me.
Well, are you sure would really want to tell right away to some girl you meet that you read comic books or watch anime? Things like can make people think about you wrongly. And for example, when I'm visiting Thailand I like the ladyboys there, but it's not something I'd say to anyone when I first meet them.
That is something I don't quite understand. I atleast always tell openly about my own interests and hobbies and am interested in hearing the other person's ones, too. If they really dislike my hobbies then it simply means we are not compatible and it's better that it comes out in the beginning already. I'd hate to find out later on that they actually dislike my hobbies.
If they don't personally have interest in my hobbies but they don't bother them either then all's good. And if we happen to share those interests then all the better. Simple.
As for comics being shameful: pssh. I don't really have interest in regular comics per se but I am a manga-buff myself, and I sure as hell wouldn't have any issues whatsoever if a possible candidate liked regular comics; it's their prerogative and doesn't really say anything meaningful about their personalities whatsoever.
Humans are actually quite good at floating point math as embodied by ballistic trajectories --- watch outfielders run straight to where a ball will be when it comes down rather than following a curve, or a marksman who can consistently shoot coins or aspirin out of the air (for the former always positioning the bullet hole so that the coin will be useful as a watch fob).
Integer math as expressed in the real world can be quite good too --- I knew one teller who could take a fresh stack of $100 bills and zip down to the exact number needed to pay one's travel authorization (usually in the range of $2,000 -- $3,500, but usually different for each person in line) w/ a single motion, or there was John Scarne who could take a new deck of cards, shuffle it an arbitrary number of times, then cut to the Ace of Spades _every_ time.
Both of these examples actually show that human brains are extraordinarily good at processing hundreds of things at the same time; brains aren't all that fast actually, but they are literally massively parallel and exceedingly good at organizing data. The people in your examples wouldn't for example be able to do what they do without sensory input: the feeling of wind on their skin, humidity, the weight of the materials they are holding and their texture, sound of wind blowing past or money rattling in their hands.. Brains combine all the sensory input, creates several different scenarios every millisecond and predicts the likely one, and still at the same time also manages to draw in data from memory and combine that too with all that.
But try and take for example feeling from their fingers away and see what happens: they'll instantly start making mistakes. Then slowly, with practice, they start relying more on the other inputs like eye-sight and audio. They still won't be as good as they were when they could still feel, however, and that's the whole point: computers trying to simulate human brains are never given access to as wide an array of sensory input as human brains, and if they were they'd have trouble processing it all.
Exactly! Mod parent up. Right now the video game market is being driven largely by the consoles that have video cards from ten years ago. There's really not much to max out a ePenis like this card.
It isn't about some specific need per se; overclocking and tuning is a hobby, an expensive and not always such a smart hobby, but nevertheless there's some even worse hobbies in the world. It just happens to be fun to see how far you can push your PC, how much more you can squeeze. Is it useful? No. Does anyone need such power for anything? Not really, atleast home users don't. And games simply have trouble taking advantage of it all even as it is. It STILL is fun.
That said I personally would not buy such hardware even if I could afford it -- and I definitely can't -- and rather just buy cheap parts that I know will overclock well and/or are easily modified and thus still get a decent gaming rig.
The droids may have had some sensory autonomy but were largely "mindless", pretty much like a phone "app" whose data processing back end is in the cloud.
While irrevelevant to the article I thought to still stick my neck here: the droids still seem to process all the sensory-local data themselves, only co-ordinating with the Control ship such elements as they deem necessary. A billion droids sending all sensory data to the Control ship every millisecond would require such amounts of bandwidth that it would be completely impossible to achieve. Thus the droids are mostly in control of themselves.
One could also argue that it's the Control ship that itself is the robot, and all the droids are only its extremities; a plausible claim considering that there is no requirement for all the parts that make up the robot to be physically connected by definition, or that the parts can't have any level of autonomy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, indeed : Whenever it is a large corporation doing something illegal they at most get a slap on the wrist and no one goes to jail, but whenever it is a single commoner you get thrown in so fast you'll leave skidmarks on the ground.
Money == More important than human rights, privacy or even laws themselves.
If your underwear sees enough daylight to get anything charged, then something is wrong
....or very, very right!!
Don't forget that he sold six stolen items for only $250.. I mean, selling stolen goods is risky and can earn you a not-so-nice accommodation for a year or more, so why even bother for such a small amount of money?
It's a great thing I have no friends: they can't tag me in any photos if anyone even happened to take a photo of me in the first place!
No friends == better privacy obviously!
Or in CSI.
I tried converting my entire mp3 library to FLAC and couldn't hear any difference
WTF? You converted from a lossy format to lossless format and expected to get MORE audio data than you had in the beginning? *facepalm*
Because FLAC is very poorly supported among both portable media devices and media center devices?
Indeed. Sure, my PC can support anything I throw at it and my phone does the same, but for example my car audio system doesn't play FLAC or anything, only MP3.
Further, the difference in actual perceptible quality between a high quality mp3/ogg/wma/whatever encoding and a FLAC encoding is between negligible and non-existent, negating pretty much any benefit of FLAC.
Again agreed. Atleast I can't hear any effing difference between FLAC and a good quality MP3. On a portable device the size of the files is much more important and if I can't hear the difference anyways then I obviously choose the smaller files. And since ALL of the devices I use to play music support MP3 then there's no need to do any kind of format conversions or anything and as such there is no loss of quality even over a longer timespan.
Basically I understand why some people want FLAC files, but for general populace FLAC files give absolutely no benefit whatsoever and still takes up more space.
I have it completely vice versa: I don't simply see anything worth saying that can be said in only 140 letters unless it's a link which i could go to directly
You conveyed the whole point of the comment incorrectly: if it's a link to which I could go directly to then it's even less worth of a tweet than something else. And you omitted completely the "Demonstrates quite well how different people can be." which I also meant as a part of my comment. As I said, Twitter simply isn't worth it.
To make the point clearer as to why I think it isn't worth it:
If you are going to post a link to something there isn't enough space for any kind of even remotely decent summary which I could use to determine what the link is actually about and whether or not it is worth visiting. Also without any kind of a summary it feels just like a link aggregator and there's plenty of much better tools for such than Twitter.
Secondly, with only 140 letters there is no space for having any kind of proper discussion about a select item, like for example this comment: I simply wouldn't be able to explain my opinions and arguments. To me the whole point of getting some kind of an overview of what others think about a select item is not only interesting but also useful, and there's often commenters who add something to the item that was omitted or not made clear enough. Again, not possible with only 140 characters.
You can put the minimize and maximize buttons back if you want
Alas, there is no window list or panel and as such minimizing windows will feel completely out of place.
Finally, as for using workspaces, what makes you think you will be forced to use it?
I haven't tried GNOME3 myself, but from all the videos and articles on it it does indeed seem like there is no sane way of using it without using workspaces. I need to make up a final opinion once I get to try GNOME3.
You're confused. They don't mean the UI is hard to understand, they mean GNOME as a loose organization of developers and goals.
KDE is interesting and all but GNOME lets me actually get work done; it wasn't designed to appeal to a 3-year-old.
Indeed. I have myself tried KDE every now and then, all the way from KDE 3.x, and I still don't quite like it. It feels like they are simply trying to include way too much stuff and every imaginable configuration option. GNOME on the other hand feels much more consistent and clean and thus it suits my taste much better. I have only wished they'd switch over to Qt because it's quite a bit more powerful than GTK+, but in such a way as to keep the current feel to it all.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new. It would be a different matter if it was somehow more powerful and efficient than my current one, but it isn't.
Oh well.
Enforced terseness in messages is the only reason I (sometimes) follow Twitter
I have it completely vice versa: I don't simply see anything worth saying that can be said in only 140 letters, and if it is just a link to another site then I much rather skip the one extra step and go straight for the other site.
Demonstrates quite well how different people can be.
I'm not sure why we as geeks continue to portray the any-geek-girl-will-do caricature.
It is a stereotype being pushed onto us by the non-geek and it simply tends to stick to those geeks who are either easily affected or who have low self-esteem. Sad as it is. But it still is a stereotype that has no basis in reality.
PS. Sounds like you have an absolutely fantastic group of people around you and your husband doesn't sound bad either, I am somewhat envious of you :)
Uh, wouldn't a vibrator be a lot simpler and easier?
For some people, perhaps, but I have a hard time getting aroused by myself; I need stimulation from another person to be able to maintain arousal. Secondly, a vibe simply doesn't fill the need for a warm body, the sense of skin against skin, or the weight of another human on top of you. A vibe is just a quick-and-meaningless-release, nothing more, even though you guys get the completely opposite image from all the porn you watch.
Well, my girlfriend might not approve of such even if it was!
I don't have a boyfriend right now, but that isn't such a huge problem. Getting one of these spiders isn't really that a huge problem either, it would probably cost a few thousands. Even getting the spider to bite the new boyfriend wouldn't really be such a huge issue even though he might not enjoy it that much... but the fact that I am seriously horrified by spiders is the real issue :
I actually don't think that's true. There's lots of pretty intelligent commenters here and surprisingly many here seem to already be happily married. I know you meant that as a joke, though. Besides, I normally keep my gender out of the discussion anyways as it plays no relevance to any meaningful arguments.
and you would not enjoy hanging out with them. :)
Quite possible, indeed :3
Well, shouldn't we try if interest in comics or such is a positive or a negative thing, as Microsoft is claiming here.
I'm 28 year old female, I love learning and experiencing new stuff, delight myself in meaningful conversations, play videogames on a daily basis and I am a manga-buff and really enjoy me some quality anime.
Now, how many people here would be put off by the last part of the above sentence? ;)
Not because I'm ashamed of being interested in videogames, but because I know that all of those people would unfairly judge me for it.
That's one way to see it. I personally don't even try to hide that I enjoy videogames, if people judge me negatively because of that it is totally their own issue and doesn't affect me.
Well, are you sure would really want to tell right away to some girl you meet that you read comic books or watch anime? Things like can make people think about you wrongly. And for example, when I'm visiting Thailand I like the ladyboys there, but it's not something I'd say to anyone when I first meet them.
That is something I don't quite understand. I atleast always tell openly about my own interests and hobbies and am interested in hearing the other person's ones, too. If they really dislike my hobbies then it simply means we are not compatible and it's better that it comes out in the beginning already. I'd hate to find out later on that they actually dislike my hobbies.
If they don't personally have interest in my hobbies but they don't bother them either then all's good. And if we happen to share those interests then all the better. Simple.
As for comics being shameful: pssh. I don't really have interest in regular comics per se but I am a manga-buff myself, and I sure as hell wouldn't have any issues whatsoever if a possible candidate liked regular comics; it's their prerogative and doesn't really say anything meaningful about their personalities whatsoever.
Humans are actually quite good at floating point math as embodied by ballistic trajectories --- watch outfielders run straight to where a ball will be when it comes down rather than following a curve, or a marksman who can consistently shoot coins or aspirin out of the air (for the former always positioning the bullet hole so that the coin will be useful as a watch fob).
Integer math as expressed in the real world can be quite good too --- I knew one teller who could take a fresh stack of $100 bills and zip down to the exact number needed to pay one's travel authorization (usually in the range of $2,000 -- $3,500, but usually different for each person in line) w/ a single motion, or there was John Scarne who could take a new deck of cards, shuffle it an arbitrary number of times, then cut to the Ace of Spades _every_ time.
Both of these examples actually show that human brains are extraordinarily good at processing hundreds of things at the same time; brains aren't all that fast actually, but they are literally massively parallel and exceedingly good at organizing data. The people in your examples wouldn't for example be able to do what they do without sensory input: the feeling of wind on their skin, humidity, the weight of the materials they are holding and their texture, sound of wind blowing past or money rattling in their hands.. Brains combine all the sensory input, creates several different scenarios every millisecond and predicts the likely one, and still at the same time also manages to draw in data from memory and combine that too with all that.
But try and take for example feeling from their fingers away and see what happens: they'll instantly start making mistakes. Then slowly, with practice, they start relying more on the other inputs like eye-sight and audio. They still won't be as good as they were when they could still feel, however, and that's the whole point: computers trying to simulate human brains are never given access to as wide an array of sensory input as human brains, and if they were they'd have trouble processing it all.
Exactly! Mod parent up. Right now the video game market is being driven largely by the consoles that have video cards from ten years ago. There's really not much to max out a ePenis like this card.
It isn't about some specific need per se; overclocking and tuning is a hobby, an expensive and not always such a smart hobby, but nevertheless there's some even worse hobbies in the world. It just happens to be fun to see how far you can push your PC, how much more you can squeeze. Is it useful? No. Does anyone need such power for anything? Not really, atleast home users don't. And games simply have trouble taking advantage of it all even as it is. It STILL is fun.
That said I personally would not buy such hardware even if I could afford it -- and I definitely can't -- and rather just buy cheap parts that I know will overclock well and/or are easily modified and thus still get a decent gaming rig.
The droids may have had some sensory autonomy but were largely "mindless", pretty much like a phone "app" whose data processing back end is in the cloud.
While irrevelevant to the article I thought to still stick my neck here: the droids still seem to process all the sensory-local data themselves, only co-ordinating with the Control ship such elements as they deem necessary. A billion droids sending all sensory data to the Control ship every millisecond would require such amounts of bandwidth that it would be completely impossible to achieve. Thus the droids are mostly in control of themselves.
One could also argue that it's the Control ship that itself is the robot, and all the droids are only its extremities; a plausible claim considering that there is no requirement for all the parts that make up the robot to be physically connected by definition, or that the parts can't have any level of autonomy.
Personally, I think we need clearer definitions.
I actually thought "The Danish Man" was a name for some book that is somehow so important that I should have heard of it. Apparently not.