Sci-Tech Dictionary: bicorn (bkörn) (mathematics) A plane curve whose equation in cartesian coordinates x and y is (x2 + 2ay - a2)2 = y2(a2 - x2), where a is a constant.
WordNet: bicorn The noun has one meaning: a cocked hat with the brim turned up to form two points
Synonym: bicorne
The adjective bicorn has one meaning: having two horns or horn-shaped parts
This takes an hour to watch, but well worth your time. In these videos a lawyer and then a cop explain very clearly why talking to cops never works in your favor. Watch it. Learn it. Live it.
As far as the article is concerned: He is bringing up old news that being put through the legal wringer will cost you time, money, and reputation in the community that you can not get back - even if you are innocent and/or found innocent. The best bet is to not do the crime (though if you watch the videos you will see that it is just about impossible to avoid breaking all laws).
Let churches do church stuff. Let the state do state stuff. The two rarely need to meet, and definitely do not need to meet on this topic. Marriage is a religious pact between two people and their beliefs. Civil-union is a legal provided by the state to give any consenting adults right of attorney, inheritance, and other legal protections.
Blah blah blah. Is this art. It is all in the eye of the beholder. The author goes on and on, but if you skip to the conclusion you will find
Citizen Kane is accessible and easy to like. It synthesized much of what was known about filmmaking up to that point into a coherent whole. It married technical innovations with a good story. It showed that a film could be high and low, art and spectacle, serious and entertaining all at once. A medium that can deliver all of that in one package is a great medium indeed.
By that definition, dance is art. Dance has highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle. If these little swans are art then so are these little morons. If we want to argue that the first is art then the same applies to the second, even though there is a pretty big quality difference.
For the players of games, each has their own Citizen Kane. Maybe it is Halo. Maybe it is Super Mario Brothers. Maybe it is WoW. The particular game does not matter - some people hate the movie Citizen Kane and no game is loved universally. The point is that games have highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle - just like every other medium considered to be 'art'.
Let's get past this dumb debate and move on to talking about the merits of the great games. AND! while we are doing that, let's avoid trying to compare games to other art forms directly. It would be insane to compare Citizen Kane, to the Mona Lisa, to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. That is part of the reason games are having trouble getting their art credits: Art is art and comparing it to other art only detracts from the appreciation of what is.
EA decides to buy their competitor, Take Two. Take Two opens its books for EA. After completely digesting the business model, plans, culture, and product line up EA changes its mind and walks away. Take Two then has to continue competing with EA as if it never happened; all the while knowing that EA has a leg up now that it has seen "the books" and knows the next few moves in advance.
I thought telecoms were immune to certain types of litigation because they are neutral carriers of data. If a person makes a phone call or uses a bulletin board to commit a crime, the teleco is not part of the conspiracy. They are neutral. If AT&T starts filtering out "criminal" activity (and what jury of peers determined that anyhow?!), then are they giving up their neutral status? If they try to filter any material, will they be liable for all the material that inevitably slips through their net?
Also, how do they pick out copyright material for which a license has been granted compared to material that is "criminal" activity?
One way for EA's vision of one console to come to fruition would be for one console maker to establish a monopoly-esque dominant position. Once one console has 90%+ of the market, the other console makers have three choices: 1) Jump on the bandwagon to make a better version of that platform - thus establishing the standard 2) Join forces to make a united platform console that developers and consumers like better than the monopoly console 3) roll over and die.
... ok 4) They could sue - monopolies always put enough blood in the water to attract lawyers.
f you get email spam we have a method that will help you to reduce it. Many spammers crawl the web looking for email addresses. When they see an email address on a web page, they send spam to the address. Mailhide allows you to safely post your email address on the web. Mailhide takes an address such as jsmith@example.com and turns it into jsm...@example.com. In order to reveal the address, a user must click on the "..." and solve a reCAPTCHA. If you use the Mailhide version of your email address, spammers won't be able to find your real email address and you'll get less spam.
Does that work? Or are there a thousand ways for the spammers to break this?
City Farming doesn't hold water
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
This idea is a non-starter. Other posts mention the high real estate costs, power costs, and lack of light to the plants. All good. What about the water? Urban centers do not use very much water compared to the amounts used for agriculture, not even close! If adding vertical farming to the urban scene makes it even harder to keep cities hydrated, then people will revolt and push farming back out into the country, thereby allowing the water load be dispersed over a larger geography.
Globally, of the three standard categories of freshwater use--for agriculture, industry, and domestic (personal, household, and municipal)--agriculture dominates. On a worldwide basis, agriculture accounts for about 69% of all annual water withdrawals; industry, about 23%; and domestic use, about 8%
"Spider-Man" can alter Times Square By Lisa M. Bowman Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: August 5, 2002, 12:28 PM PDT
Upholding the rights of filmmakers to superimpose digital images on real-life buildings in their movies, a federal judge in New York has thrown out a suit filed by billboard and building owners against the creators of the "Spider-Man" movie.
In a three-page ruling issued last week, Judge Richard Owen questioned claims that altering the billboards in the movies violated trademarks and amounted to trespassing.
Several billboard and building owners, including Sherwood 48 Associates and Super Sign, filed suit in April against Sony and other companies involved in making and distributing "Spider-Man," claiming their prime Times Square space becomes less valuable if they can't guarantee customers exclusive rights both on and off screen. In the "Spider-Man" movie and trailers, ads for companies such as Cingular Wireless and USA Today have been superimposed over those of Samsung and NBC.
The judge disagreed with the billboard owners' claims, however, saying the digital alterations are protected free speech. "What exists here is for artistic purposes a mixture of a fictionally and actually depicted Times Square...this has First Amendment protection," Owen wrote.
Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components....
Looks like a production car to me. Where do I collect my prize for bringing this car to the world's attention? I could use the money to buy a nice Bugatti Verron.
Judging the book by its cover, the book will involve a guy who climbs a hill faster than some other guys who also are climbing that hill. Then, he will look at something. Maybe he will tell us about what he sees. Sounds thrilling!
I read this book on the topic of how natural functions of the brain easily lead to the creation of 'god': Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Paperback) by Andrew Md Newberg (Author), Eugene G. D'Aquili (Author), Vince Rause (Author)
It gives good science, some annecdotes, and talks through reasonable conclusions for the data research presents. It tries to be objective, the authors are almost coy in avoiding to sound too scientific or too religious. It is a hard read in places (biology and neuroscience stuff), but it was good to fill my head with some well thought out data based conclusions, thus making it easier to reach my own conclusions.
There is no such thing as security. Whatever one person can put together, another person can take apart. Virus scanners, the locks on my house and home, and the passwords on my bank accounts are all meant for one thing: To keep honest people honest. If someone really wants to, any security I could encumber some part of my life with can be undone by someone of focused malicious intent.
The more society spends on 'security' the harder it is to undo that security. Build a Great Wall of China and it keeps the invaders out. Build a Great Wall of the Rio Grande and it keeps the Mexican immigrants out. But given time or motivation, invaders and immegrants find ways around the walls.
The more society relies on 'security' the more devestating it is when that security fails. These planes will have protection against missles (how many times have planes been shot down by missles anyhow?!). I am sure some motivated criminal will determine that using a high powered large caliber rifle or remote controlled airplane with C4 attached works just as well for bringing down a plane; or something else we haven't even considered.
In my view, the only way to minimize acts of terror, keep illegal immigrants at home, and make the world 'safe' is with economic development. If a person has a full stomach and something to do with their hands so they can avoid hunger tomorrow, then that person is too happy and busy to 'terrorize' or risk life and limb crossing the dessert.
Money spent on walls, airline bomb closets and anti-air to air missle lazers, and even super cool rail guns are all poor investments, in my view. Better to spend the money on starting businesses, funding schools, and giving incentives to entrapeneurs. If everyone is fed and busy, the world is as safe as it could be (though still not perfectly safe).
The corporate drones have to deal with passwords that expire every 30/60/90 days, and once expired those passwords can never be reused. So creating a hard password and then remembering it is not so trivial. The myspace users can come up with one hard password and keep it forever.
The ratings system for TV, movies, music, and video games is all baloney.
First of all, only the parent can determine what is offensive. Who can say what porn is? Is Janet Jackson flashing porn? How about a naked David sculpture? How about watching to monkeys get it on at the zoo? If a 2 frame flash of boob gives a TV show one rating, and 30 seconds of hot monkey sex gives another show another rating then that is whacky.
Second, there are not enough raters to rate everything on the same standard. If every game has to be rated, then I feel bad for the rater that gets the short straw and has to play every possible path in Chessmaster XX. If Grand Theft Auto has to have every scenario played just to be sure the princess pole dancers keep their skirts on, then Chessmaster should get the same treatment to make sure the queen doesn't get molested by a frisky knight.
Third, only the parent can keep material away from a child. Ratings or no ratings, parent's are the only ones with a shot at keeping stuff away from their kids. Look at cigarettes. Kids are not supposed to smoke. Everyone agrees which cigarettes are not supposed to smoke. All the merchants are told not to sell tabacco to kids. Yet, any day of the week you can drive by most highschools in the US and see kids outside smoking. If something as "black and white" (relatively) as tabacco can't be kept out of the hands of kids, then why all the hubbub over video games, movies, etc?
Tangent: Why don't books come with ratings? There are tens of thousands of books published every year. If protecting the children is so important, then shouldn't all illicit material get stampped M for mature, P for pansy, etc? Sounds whacky to apply it to books, so why apply it to other knowledge/entertainment mediums? If anyone wants to sound really stupid try the line of thought that says games are for kids and books are not.
My solution: Leave rating entirely in the hands of NGOs (non government organizations). Let the MPAA and ESRB rate stuff. If parent's want to heed the rating advice fine. If not, so what. If some parent's do not like the standards used by those organizations, then use an organization that is tougher/easier as desired. www.screenit.com for movies for instance. Or a parent could watch/listen/play/read everything before letting their kids at it. It sounds crazy, but some parent's do it. Surely the government has better things to do than try to censure material from kids.
Regardless of whether Homeland Security likes it or not, there is definitely a market for the technology. In fact, the government (of the people by the people) might even mandate such technology directly or indirectly by punishing companies for allowing consumer data to be stolen.
In a reasonable world the government (of the people by the people) shouldn't need too many more stories like the Fidelity data loss to start trying to legislate solutions to the laxity of companies around security. Another option is that market forces push companies to tighten security: eg HP threatens to quit using Fidelity services unless security is tightened. Either way, legistation or market forces, there is a growing market for this technolgoy.
I had heard rumors of this Lord British stuff. But now that I read it on the internet I know this funny story must be true!
From TFA
Probably the most infamous griefing ever happened to Ultima creator Richard Garrott, when his character, Lord British, was murdered while addressing the people of his kingdom near the end of the Ultima Online beta. Rainz, a thief, pinched a fire field scroll from another player in attendance, then roasted LB on the spot. It's something that shouldn't have been possible, but either through negligence or a glitch Garrott's character wasn't flagged as invincible. In the chaos that followed demons were summoned in retaliation, which then over zealously killed a whole mess of innocent bystanders. In the end LB was resurrected and Rainz was killed before being banned from every Origin game forever and ever, Amen. In later statements Origin and Garrott himself claimed that the player was only banned from the UO beta, and wasn't actually banned for killing Lord British, but instead got the boot for previously exploiting and failing to report bugs. "We had actually been looking for him in order to ban him before this," they said, which to be nice, sounds a little disingenuous. To be less nice, it reeks of bullshit. Of course, all this happened nearly a decade ago, which is like, three centuries in Internet years. The only part that really matters is that Ultima's creator got killed in his own game, while in the middle of bragging about his invincibility, and it was freaking awesome.
I would play more MMOs if I could watch griefers have deamons trained on them by GMs. That sounds like good entertainment compared to real life crime fighting.
All fun and games until...
on
Space Tourism?
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· Score: 1
Space tourism is great. The more people who go the faster prices will come down and the sooner I can make a trip. However, the first people to pay to go are real risk takers. Those space trips are not safe, yet. Anyone who has the bucks can go. Who cares? Its their money, and the people giving the ride must need the cash or they wouldn't provide the service.
Its all good fun and games until someone gets hurt. The first time one of these billionaires gets blown up that will hurt the industry for a while. But it will come back. Airplanes were a fad for the rich too for a few decades. But eventually volume went up, technology got better, and prices came down. Same will happen for space flight.... if there is somewhere to go.
Slashdot Mirror
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate
Bicorns do exist. Napoleon's hat was a bicorn.
Sci-Tech Dictionary: bicorn (bkörn)
(mathematics) A plane curve whose equation in cartesian coordinates x and y is (x2 + 2ay - a2)2 = y2(a2 - x2), where a is a constant.
WordNet: bicorn
The noun has one meaning: a cocked hat with the brim turned up to form two points
Synonym: bicorne
The adjective bicorn has one meaning: having two horns or horn-shaped parts
Do. Not. Talk. To. Cops.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
This takes an hour to watch, but well worth your time. In these videos a lawyer and then a cop explain very clearly why talking to cops never works in your favor. Watch it. Learn it. Live it.
As far as the article is concerned: He is bringing up old news that being put through the legal wringer will cost you time, money, and reputation in the community that you can not get back - even if you are innocent and/or found innocent. The best bet is to not do the crime (though if you watch the videos you will see that it is just about impossible to avoid breaking all laws).
Good luck.
I agree. Bump this post up.
Let churches do church stuff. Let the state do state stuff. The two rarely need to meet, and definitely do not need to meet on this topic. Marriage is a religious pact between two people and their beliefs. Civil-union is a legal provided by the state to give any consenting adults right of attorney, inheritance, and other legal protections.
By that definition, dance is art. Dance has highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle. If these little swans are art then so are these little morons. If we want to argue that the first is art then the same applies to the second, even though there is a pretty big quality difference.
For the players of games, each has their own Citizen Kane. Maybe it is Halo. Maybe it is Super Mario Brothers. Maybe it is WoW. The particular game does not matter - some people hate the movie Citizen Kane and no game is loved universally. The point is that games have highs and lows, can entertain, incorporate a story, and bring spectacle - just like every other medium considered to be 'art'.
Let's get past this dumb debate and move on to talking about the merits of the great games. AND! while we are doing that, let's avoid trying to compare games to other art forms directly. It would be insane to compare Citizen Kane, to the Mona Lisa, to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. That is part of the reason games are having trouble getting their art credits: Art is art and comparing it to other art only detracts from the appreciation of what is.
If DARPA gets this technology then it will be used keep women out of combat.
A means to read women's minds is beyond the possibility of any science!
EA decides to buy their competitor, Take Two. Take Two opens its books for EA. After completely digesting the business model, plans, culture, and product line up EA changes its mind and walks away. Take Two then has to continue competing with EA as if it never happened; all the while knowing that EA has a leg up now that it has seen "the books" and knows the next few moves in advance.
EA needs a shower after that groping.
I thought telecoms were immune to certain types of litigation because they are neutral carriers of data. If a person makes a phone call or uses a bulletin board to commit a crime, the teleco is not part of the conspiracy. They are neutral. If AT&T starts filtering out "criminal" activity (and what jury of peers determined that anyhow?!), then are they giving up their neutral status? If they try to filter any material, will they be liable for all the material that inevitably slips through their net?
Also, how do they pick out copyright material for which a license has been granted compared to material that is "criminal" activity?
One way for EA's vision of one console to come to fruition would be for one console maker to establish a monopoly-esque dominant position. Once one console has 90%+ of the market, the other console makers have three choices: 1) Jump on the bandwagon to make a better version of that platform - thus establishing the standard 2) Join forces to make a united platform console that developers and consumers like better than the monopoly console 3) roll over and die.
... ok 4) They could sue - monopolies always put enough blood in the water to attract lawyers.
From http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/m14/m14chap2_2.sh
The verdict...
From http://news.com.com/2100-1023-948441.html
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/press/Lupo_3L_in_Guine ss_World_Record
Looks like a production car to me. Where do I collect my prize for bringing this car to the world's attention? I could use the money to buy a nice Bugatti Verron.
Judging the book by its cover, the book will involve a guy who climbs a hill faster than some other guys who also are climbing that hill. Then, he will look at something. Maybe he will tell us about what he sees. Sounds thrilling!
I read this book on the topic of how natural functions of the brain easily lead to the creation of 'god':
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Paperback) by Andrew Md Newberg (Author), Eugene G. D'Aquili (Author), Vince Rause (Author)
It gives good science, some annecdotes, and talks through reasonable conclusions for the data research presents. It tries to be objective, the authors are almost coy in avoiding to sound too scientific or too religious. It is a hard read in places (biology and neuroscience stuff), but it was good to fill my head with some well thought out data based conclusions, thus making it easier to reach my own conclusions.
There is no such thing as security. Whatever one person can put together, another person can take apart. Virus scanners, the locks on my house and home, and the passwords on my bank accounts are all meant for one thing: To keep honest people honest. If someone really wants to, any security I could encumber some part of my life with can be undone by someone of focused malicious intent.
The more society spends on 'security' the harder it is to undo that security. Build a Great Wall of China and it keeps the invaders out. Build a Great Wall of the Rio Grande and it keeps the Mexican immigrants out. But given time or motivation, invaders and immegrants find ways around the walls.
The more society relies on 'security' the more devestating it is when that security fails. These planes will have protection against missles (how many times have planes been shot down by missles anyhow?!). I am sure some motivated criminal will determine that using a high powered large caliber rifle or remote controlled airplane with C4 attached works just as well for bringing down a plane; or something else we haven't even considered.
In my view, the only way to minimize acts of terror, keep illegal immigrants at home, and make the world 'safe' is with economic development. If a person has a full stomach and something to do with their hands so they can avoid hunger tomorrow, then that person is too happy and busy to 'terrorize' or risk life and limb crossing the dessert.
Money spent on walls, airline bomb closets and anti-air to air missle lazers, and even super cool rail guns are all poor investments, in my view. Better to spend the money on starting businesses, funding schools, and giving incentives to entrapeneurs. If everyone is fed and busy, the world is as safe as it could be (though still not perfectly safe).
Have you got a source?
The corporate drones have to deal with passwords that expire every 30/60/90 days, and once expired those passwords can never be reused. So creating a hard password and then remembering it is not so trivial. The myspace users can come up with one hard password and keep it forever.
The ratings system for TV, movies, music, and video games is all baloney.
First of all, only the parent can determine what is offensive. Who can say what porn is? Is Janet Jackson flashing porn? How about a naked David sculpture? How about watching to monkeys get it on at the zoo? If a 2 frame flash of boob gives a TV show one rating, and 30 seconds of hot monkey sex gives another show another rating then that is whacky.
Second, there are not enough raters to rate everything on the same standard. If every game has to be rated, then I feel bad for the rater that gets the short straw and has to play every possible path in Chessmaster XX. If Grand Theft Auto has to have every scenario played just to be sure the princess pole dancers keep their skirts on, then Chessmaster should get the same treatment to make sure the queen doesn't get molested by a frisky knight.
Third, only the parent can keep material away from a child. Ratings or no ratings, parent's are the only ones with a shot at keeping stuff away from their kids. Look at cigarettes. Kids are not supposed to smoke. Everyone agrees which cigarettes are not supposed to smoke. All the merchants are told not to sell tabacco to kids. Yet, any day of the week you can drive by most highschools in the US and see kids outside smoking. If something as "black and white" (relatively) as tabacco can't be kept out of the hands of kids, then why all the hubbub over video games, movies, etc?
Tangent: Why don't books come with ratings? There are tens of thousands of books published every year. If protecting the children is so important, then shouldn't all illicit material get stampped M for mature, P for pansy, etc? Sounds whacky to apply it to books, so why apply it to other knowledge/entertainment mediums? If anyone wants to sound really stupid try the line of thought that says games are for kids and books are not.
My solution: Leave rating entirely in the hands of NGOs (non government organizations). Let the MPAA and ESRB rate stuff. If parent's want to heed the rating advice fine. If not, so what. If some parent's do not like the standards used by those organizations, then use an organization that is tougher/easier as desired. www.screenit.com for movies for instance. Or a parent could watch/listen/play/read everything before letting their kids at it. It sounds crazy, but some parent's do it. Surely the government has better things to do than try to censure material from kids.
"Humans are 70%+ water. Most people take the path of least resistance. Some rare people use their humanity to go against the flow." -- Benjamin Bias
Regardless of whether Homeland Security likes it or not, there is definitely a market for the technology. In fact, the government (of the people by the people) might even mandate such technology directly or indirectly by punishing companies for allowing consumer data to be stolen. In a reasonable world the government (of the people by the people) shouldn't need too many more stories like the Fidelity data loss to start trying to legislate solutions to the laxity of companies around security. Another option is that market forces push companies to tighten security: eg HP threatens to quit using Fidelity services unless security is tightened. Either way, legistation or market forces, there is a growing market for this technolgoy.
The interview was less than inspired.
The answers were PR fluff and tired.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20
Space tourism is great. The more people who go the faster prices will come down and the sooner I can make a trip. However, the first people to pay to go are real risk takers. Those space trips are not safe, yet. Anyone who has the bucks can go. Who cares? Its their money, and the people giving the ride must need the cash or they wouldn't provide the service.
... if there is somewhere to go.
Its all good fun and games until someone gets hurt. The first time one of these billionaires gets blown up that will hurt the industry for a while. But it will come back. Airplanes were a fad for the rich too for a few decades. But eventually volume went up, technology got better, and prices came down. Same will happen for space flight.