I appreciate your attempt to help, but I don't think it's for me.
I didn't actually mention that I know someone famous - they're not. The Spacey character is fictional (though plausible from the facts), as is the character in the book. And I didn't mention that I'm well educated - I met Chang in Cambridge while visiting my friend, and didn't imply otherwise.
I am rich, and pretty "brilliant", and I have plenty of friends. My way sure worked well to pick up girls, and what I said is all true. Now why should I take your advice?
You're an idiot, Anonymous jealous Coward. I wasn't in Camridge to attend school - I was in Cambridge to meet Chang (and to hang out with my friend, his partner). I was already out of school for years, and I dropped out. From a school I had attended on full academic scholarship, though I worked a regular job for extra money - my parents didn't support me. I made my money on my wits and balls (and some luck, like most people who do). There are plenty of people at school in MIT, though, who don't come from money. My friend there, for example, came from broke immigrant parents, also there on scholarship.
I own the credit for making myself rich, though I am grateful to my parents (who were middle class, and supported me pretty well, including letting me buy a computer in the early 1980s with saved birthday present money). Mainly because they raised me to feel no shame at either making lots of money or not.
You, on the other hand, have major problems, with jealousy (and logic, and basic decency). Since you're also evidently not rich, you've got no business even talking to me.
My friend from the team has an extremely interesting story, of which the MIT team is only a part (though the one with the most fireworks for the screen). But I think he'd rather be rich than famous, and there is good reason to believe they'd have to choose one or the other;).
What's funny is that one of the team's central members spent their college years as a funloving anarchist. And some of the other counters I know are much more "socialist" (actual socialists) than I am.
Wait, no, the really funny thing is that I blew off the chance to join the team because I was too busy making money with my SW development corporation. My main customers were banks and giant publishing companies, as well as state/provincial/federal governments, global telecom corps... Like, I wore a suit and shaved and everything! I hope they never guessed I was a commie, while I was making all that capitalist money with my corporation telling the government what to do.
Except that I'm not making a mistake, as would be clear if you'd read either my reply or even just understood the difference between Kaplan's claims to be Spacey's character, and Kaplan's early, tangential role in the team.
Look, Anonymous jealous Coward, I have an interesting life, I get around, I've been there to do things that are notable. It's not my fault that while you do nothing but post from your mom's basement. I like sharing that with other people, but your whining is the boring part.
Except that Kaplan was not part of the events that make the story worth telling, the events that Spacey's character portrays. By the time that the team was recruiting from MIT students not already connected to the team, Kaplan wasn't part of the action.
There were plenty of people connected to the team who I didn't know. I wasn't there when it was started, or even for the majority of its adventures. But I knew it well enough to know that Kaplan wasn't the model for Spacey's character, or any other interesting story about the team. Which is all that I said.
That movie is pretty cool, but only if you use a lot of imagination, which defeats the point of the movie (except for scientists).
I always like movies of the Sun a lot better when they accurately show how gauzy the Sun actually is, because it's really a ball of gas, not as solid as pictures like that show. Some color, and some of the stars beyond shining through, all make these movies of the Sun hanging in space look a lot cooler, and a lot less like peering through a microscope.
I was close friends with John Chang's friend and partner in the "MIT blackjack team" during the 1990s. I met Chang in Cambridge, and almost joined the team (I was too busy with programming work I preferred, that also made me pretty rich). This was all before anyone (other than some security firms, and a lot of hookers) had ever heard of the team. I was there for some wild times with some of these actual characters, and was there when they returned from some extreme gambling junkets - some very lucrative, some losers, lots of them extremely exciting.
I heard _Bringing Down the House_ was being written while its author was interviewing my friend and his teammates. I read it, and was very disappointed in both the shabby writing style, and its omission of some of my favorite stories from those days. Maybe the team kept some of it quiet in self-defense, but those were much better stories than made it into the book. I asked my friend what he thought of the movie now that it's out, but he confirmed what I expected: even lamer than the book.
There was only one other blackjack team in the world at the time that was as consistently in the money, and it wasn't at MIT - or even from the US, as far as I knew - according to the team that I knew, which was as inside as anyone could get. Maybe this other Boston guy was a player. But MIT isn't that big a place, and there wasn't some other team. Certainly not one that so closely resembled the one that showed up in the book, and now the movie.
Well, the WSJ editorial section is unreadable except to watch what corporatist predators are working against the population. But their news coverage has been fairly accurate, if you accept that it will ignore stories that don't add to or threaten corporate profits or power. However, that's before Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ (while launching a Fox Business Channel, with which of course the WSJ must correspond). So now I will not touch the WSJ. I don't even trust the Dow Jones Industrial Average and its other commercial statistical products anymore, because all that came with the WSJ as a product for the most dangerous fascist the world has seen since Hirohito surrendered.
The NYT I don't mention because it's more accurate. Only because I know it so well, after so long reading it (I'm a NY'er myself - I learned to read here, though I've lived elsewhere, including abroad and in illiterate places).
What I depend on for news is the Internet. I'm really only taking seriously info that I can corroborate from independent sources, that gets lots of public analysis by people with competing interests. News always gets the imprint of any bottleneck deeply impressed in it. I'm looking for a diversity of those impressions that can be left as background noise, not a brand.
Almost all of my music is in 2-channel stereo. But the 5.1 surround sounds better in the rooms without a dedicated hifi (all but one), especially the cheaper gear. Internet streams are fairly low-fi, so they benefit a lot from the surround logic.
Meanwhile, Mukasey's partner in crime Mike McConnell (the head of all US intel powers) is out there lying to shut down any constraints on Bush's powers to spy on us.
I would like to thank the millions of people who voted for Bush twice (in no more than two elections), and for Congressional Republicans for something like seven or more times, for making our country both safer and freer, and operated with more integrity, just like y'all said it would be.
I'm glad you mentioned _The Economist_ as your example. It's possibly the most corporatist journal available on newsstands. I could give you all kinds of examples of how wrong it's willing to be to advance a corporatist agenda, but the most outstanding is when it put the Taliban on the cover, welcoming them rolling into Kabul, in 1996, for which cheerleading it's never admitted it was horribly wrong. That's not to say that print journalism isn't useful, but what's always useful is to understand the media outlet's biases, and weight what you get accordingly. It's why I still read the NY Times: I've read it for decades, so I can see the fnords right there on the paper.
If you're going to depend on "someone" to hear important things that will affect your life, you're at the mercy of all that info until it gets to you. The most important info that affects most of your life is hidden. As knowledge is power, ignorance is slavery.
What makes us better off emotionally and politically is to grow your own internal filters and skepticism. Not to depend on ignorance.
Real journalism is supposed to use sources and evidence to find the facts, then understand what's happened/ing, and finally tell the story of the truth.
Instead, contemporary fake journalism is just gossip, finding different people to contradict each other, and never comparing any statements to any facts, measures or truth whatsoever. The current journalistic "fact" as reported is merely "X said Y", often leaving X anonymous and Y some buzzword generalization. Those statements are worth including in a report only as confirmation of some actual fact, not as the end fact in themselves.
But it's so cheap, easy and liability-free to produce and publish mere gossip, to never establish any conclusion but rather to perpetuate conflicts, that it's the vast bulk of reporting today. The corporate bottom line no longer has any use for real journalism, its costs and risks, or even its benefit of an informed populace.
All of which is why the Internet is much more important as a reporting medium. Because it's much more open, diverse, interactive, and available in archives. Because it's nearly trivial for any person to both link together existing content (including archived and new media) and to distribute it, whether large-scale on the Web or virally by direct messaging. That means the corporate bias against costs, risks, liabilities and just skepticism of corporatism is minimized. So the truth has a chance. So we have a chance to get it.
Which is why perpetuating the corporate mass media paradigm of "either liberal or conservative only" should find no takers on the Internet. We need analysis tools that are an accurate model of our multilateral, complex world. Not yet another oversimplified razor to cut it in half.
Stewart was right about fake duality being merely fake duopoly.
But "tuning out" is just a way to stay apathetic and uninformed, and therefore powerless. Stay tuned, but stay skeptical and independent. The world is indeed a big bad ugly place - and a big bad beautiful place, and a big nice ugly place, and a big nice beautiful place, and points between. We need everyone we can to stay connected. To each other, not just to a fake duopoly that really just divides us in two.
What is the point of providing only two "balancing" stories with "liberal" vs "conservative" biases, when neither "liberal" nor "conservative" are labels with any real meaning except propaganda buzzwords, when the two illusory groups agree on so much but also mutually exclude so much not falling under their convenient labels, and when there are so many other viewpoints? A point other than validating the grossest oversimplification of the world since "right brain / left brain" dumbed down psychology to meaningless twaddle, that is.
And when one or the other is just wrong, why dignify them as "balance"? What's the point of balancing lies against truth?
What's the necessity of that (cool) hack? Why not just put 3 5.1 soundcards in a single machine, and pump their audio into 3 rooms, with 5.1 sound in each room? Why not put 5 5.1 soundcards, or more if the machine's got that many PCI and USB slots? Why not mix and match 5.1 and 7.1, cards?
Seems to me that while their hack is a superior hack, the superior sound quality and lower complexity hack is just using multiple soundcards in the "single" host that DRM forces one to use.
Of course, the idea that I bought some music that DRM prohibits me from playing in two rooms of my own apartment while I'm alone is a gross violation of my rights, merely to perpetuate the profit of the record company, without any defensible basis whatsoever. Since they've wiped out the boundary between actual rights and arbitrary privileges they grab, of course people will exploit any chance to push back at their flimsy artificial copyright "rights". They're going to lose this war of disrespect permanently, just as they've been losing every battle all along.
I might say that if my grandma let anyone with a car offer her a ride home anytime in any neighborhood, after surviving all her decades, then she'd deserve to get robbed. And if she didn't believe the robbers when they threatened to beat her for it, then she'd deserve to get beaten.
But believing anything you read isn't the same as getting beaten and robbed.
If you're stupid enough to believe anything you read, you're to blame for being so stupid and vulnerable.
I don't think a $300 mobile (or stationary) projector is going to do 1080p anytime soon. Certainly not one as nice as my 50" DLP.
I wonder how long it will take before "dual mode" TVs are available. I don't want to watch a 200" screen all the time, especially if it needs a darkened room.
Maybe some kind of fiberoptic bundle that can plug into the enclosed rear projector, maybe with extra lumens for the bigger projection, but sharing all the other equipment. A fiber bundle could even point at an arbitrary wall without moving the enclosed set.
I'd love to see a homebrew version that just sticks a fiber bundle "pickup" in the path inside the enclosure, and points it at a wall through a lens box at the outside end. But I'm not ready to sacrifice my set for the experiments:).
Who thinks blogs are pure as the driven snow? Who thinks any media is pure? Those suckers deserve to get scammed.
One good development from the popularity of blogs and other unreliable (but testable for corroboration) online media is that more info consumers are less likely to believe what they read (and see/hear in pics and video). Soon enough we'll have services that let us point at something published to search for similar or related items, and trace the memes. We'll be able to see who believes it, who repeats, whether we'd believe what they believe. Our healthy skepticism is just getting its wings. Soon enough it will have the kind of bionics that just reading and writing now have.
And since media has always suffered from a scarcity of skepticism and the means to act on it, we'll be much better off than we were before.
So shouldn't I be able to get a lens or two to compensate? It seems cheaper than buying a second TV for the bigger projection (and the extra storage for the redundancy).
I've got a 1080p DLP rear projector with a 50" screen. Why can't I just take off the screen and project the picture onto an even larger wall from further away?
I have a very powerful laser pointer. If someone's using one of these projectors annoyingly in public, I will just zap all over their picture. Perhaps from hundreds of feet away.
If they try to get tough, I'll just dial the laser up to "stun".
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate your attempt to help, but I don't think it's for me.
I didn't actually mention that I know someone famous - they're not. The Spacey character is fictional (though plausible from the facts), as is the character in the book. And I didn't mention that I'm well educated - I met Chang in Cambridge while visiting my friend, and didn't imply otherwise.
I am rich, and pretty "brilliant", and I have plenty of friends. My way sure worked well to pick up girls, and what I said is all true. Now why should I take your advice?
You're an idiot, Anonymous jealous Coward. I wasn't in Camridge to attend school - I was in Cambridge to meet Chang (and to hang out with my friend, his partner). I was already out of school for years, and I dropped out. From a school I had attended on full academic scholarship, though I worked a regular job for extra money - my parents didn't support me. I made my money on my wits and balls (and some luck, like most people who do). There are plenty of people at school in MIT, though, who don't come from money. My friend there, for example, came from broke immigrant parents, also there on scholarship.
I own the credit for making myself rich, though I am grateful to my parents (who were middle class, and supported me pretty well, including letting me buy a computer in the early 1980s with saved birthday present money). Mainly because they raised me to feel no shame at either making lots of money or not.
You, on the other hand, have major problems, with jealousy (and logic, and basic decency). Since you're also evidently not rich, you've got no business even talking to me.
My friend from the team has an extremely interesting story, of which the MIT team is only a part (though the one with the most fireworks for the screen). But I think he'd rather be rich than famous, and there is good reason to believe they'd have to choose one or the other ;).
What's funny is that one of the team's central members spent their college years as a funloving anarchist. And some of the other counters I know are much more "socialist" (actual socialists) than I am.
Wait, no, the really funny thing is that I blew off the chance to join the team because I was too busy making money with my SW development corporation. My main customers were banks and giant publishing companies, as well as state/provincial/federal governments, global telecom corps... Like, I wore a suit and shaved and everything! I hope they never guessed I was a commie, while I was making all that capitalist money with my corporation telling the government what to do.
Except that I'm not making a mistake, as would be clear if you'd read either my reply or even just understood the difference between Kaplan's claims to be Spacey's character, and Kaplan's early, tangential role in the team.
Look, Anonymous jealous Coward, I have an interesting life, I get around, I've been there to do things that are notable. It's not my fault that while you do nothing but post from your mom's basement. I like sharing that with other people, but your whining is the boring part.
Except that Kaplan was not part of the events that make the story worth telling, the events that Spacey's character portrays. By the time that the team was recruiting from MIT students not already connected to the team, Kaplan wasn't part of the action.
There were plenty of people connected to the team who I didn't know. I wasn't there when it was started, or even for the majority of its adventures. But I knew it well enough to know that Kaplan wasn't the model for Spacey's character, or any other interesting story about the team. Which is all that I said.
That movie is pretty cool, but only if you use a lot of imagination, which defeats the point of the movie (except for scientists).
I always like movies of the Sun a lot better when they accurately show how gauzy the Sun actually is, because it's really a ball of gas, not as solid as pictures like that show. Some color, and some of the stars beyond shining through, all make these movies of the Sun hanging in space look a lot cooler, and a lot less like peering through a microscope.
I was close friends with John Chang's friend and partner in the "MIT blackjack team" during the 1990s. I met Chang in Cambridge, and almost joined the team (I was too busy with programming work I preferred, that also made me pretty rich). This was all before anyone (other than some security firms, and a lot of hookers) had ever heard of the team. I was there for some wild times with some of these actual characters, and was there when they returned from some extreme gambling junkets - some very lucrative, some losers, lots of them extremely exciting.
I heard _Bringing Down the House_ was being written while its author was interviewing my friend and his teammates. I read it, and was very disappointed in both the shabby writing style, and its omission of some of my favorite stories from those days. Maybe the team kept some of it quiet in self-defense, but those were much better stories than made it into the book. I asked my friend what he thought of the movie now that it's out, but he confirmed what I expected: even lamer than the book.
There was only one other blackjack team in the world at the time that was as consistently in the money, and it wasn't at MIT - or even from the US, as far as I knew - according to the team that I knew, which was as inside as anyone could get. Maybe this other Boston guy was a player. But MIT isn't that big a place, and there wasn't some other team. Certainly not one that so closely resembled the one that showed up in the book, and now the movie.
This guy is bluffing.
Well, the WSJ editorial section is unreadable except to watch what corporatist predators are working against the population. But their news coverage has been fairly accurate, if you accept that it will ignore stories that don't add to or threaten corporate profits or power. However, that's before Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ (while launching a Fox Business Channel, with which of course the WSJ must correspond). So now I will not touch the WSJ. I don't even trust the Dow Jones Industrial Average and its other commercial statistical products anymore, because all that came with the WSJ as a product for the most dangerous fascist the world has seen since Hirohito surrendered.
The NYT I don't mention because it's more accurate. Only because I know it so well, after so long reading it (I'm a NY'er myself - I learned to read here, though I've lived elsewhere, including abroad and in illiterate places).
What I depend on for news is the Internet. I'm really only taking seriously info that I can corroborate from independent sources, that gets lots of public analysis by people with competing interests. News always gets the imprint of any bottleneck deeply impressed in it. I'm looking for a diversity of those impressions that can be left as background noise, not a brand.
Almost all of my music is in 2-channel stereo. But the 5.1 surround sounds better in the rooms without a dedicated hifi (all but one), especially the cheaper gear. Internet streams are fairly low-fi, so they benefit a lot from the surround logic.
Meanwhile, Mukasey's partner in crime Mike McConnell (the head of all US intel powers) is out there lying to shut down any constraints on Bush's powers to spy on us.
Feel safer?
I would like to thank the millions of people who voted for Bush twice (in no more than two elections), and for Congressional Republicans for something like seven or more times, for making our country both safer and freer, and operated with more integrity, just like y'all said it would be.
But I can't, because that would be a lie.
I'm glad you mentioned _The Economist_ as your example. It's possibly the most corporatist journal available on newsstands. I could give you all kinds of examples of how wrong it's willing to be to advance a corporatist agenda, but the most outstanding is when it put the Taliban on the cover, welcoming them rolling into Kabul, in 1996, for which cheerleading it's never admitted it was horribly wrong. That's not to say that print journalism isn't useful, but what's always useful is to understand the media outlet's biases, and weight what you get accordingly. It's why I still read the NY Times: I've read it for decades, so I can see the fnords right there on the paper.
If you're going to depend on "someone" to hear important things that will affect your life, you're at the mercy of all that info until it gets to you. The most important info that affects most of your life is hidden. As knowledge is power, ignorance is slavery.
What makes us better off emotionally and politically is to grow your own internal filters and skepticism. Not to depend on ignorance.
Real journalism is supposed to use sources and evidence to find the facts, then understand what's happened/ing, and finally tell the story of the truth.
Instead, contemporary fake journalism is just gossip, finding different people to contradict each other, and never comparing any statements to any facts, measures or truth whatsoever. The current journalistic "fact" as reported is merely "X said Y", often leaving X anonymous and Y some buzzword generalization. Those statements are worth including in a report only as confirmation of some actual fact, not as the end fact in themselves.
But it's so cheap, easy and liability-free to produce and publish mere gossip, to never establish any conclusion but rather to perpetuate conflicts, that it's the vast bulk of reporting today. The corporate bottom line no longer has any use for real journalism, its costs and risks, or even its benefit of an informed populace.
All of which is why the Internet is much more important as a reporting medium. Because it's much more open, diverse, interactive, and available in archives. Because it's nearly trivial for any person to both link together existing content (including archived and new media) and to distribute it, whether large-scale on the Web or virally by direct messaging. That means the corporate bias against costs, risks, liabilities and just skepticism of corporatism is minimized. So the truth has a chance. So we have a chance to get it.
Which is why perpetuating the corporate mass media paradigm of "either liberal or conservative only" should find no takers on the Internet. We need analysis tools that are an accurate model of our multilateral, complex world. Not yet another oversimplified razor to cut it in half.
Stewart was right about fake duality being merely fake duopoly.
But "tuning out" is just a way to stay apathetic and uninformed, and therefore powerless. Stay tuned, but stay skeptical and independent. The world is indeed a big bad ugly place - and a big bad beautiful place, and a big nice ugly place, and a big nice beautiful place, and points between. We need everyone we can to stay connected. To each other, not just to a fake duopoly that really just divides us in two.
What is the point of providing only two "balancing" stories with "liberal" vs "conservative" biases, when neither "liberal" nor "conservative" are labels with any real meaning except propaganda buzzwords, when the two illusory groups agree on so much but also mutually exclude so much not falling under their convenient labels, and when there are so many other viewpoints? A point other than validating the grossest oversimplification of the world since "right brain / left brain" dumbed down psychology to meaningless twaddle, that is.
And when one or the other is just wrong, why dignify them as "balance"? What's the point of balancing lies against truth?
What's the necessity of that (cool) hack? Why not just put 3 5.1 soundcards in a single machine, and pump their audio into 3 rooms, with 5.1 sound in each room? Why not put 5 5.1 soundcards, or more if the machine's got that many PCI and USB slots? Why not mix and match 5.1 and 7.1, cards?
Seems to me that while their hack is a superior hack, the superior sound quality and lower complexity hack is just using multiple soundcards in the "single" host that DRM forces one to use.
Of course, the idea that I bought some music that DRM prohibits me from playing in two rooms of my own apartment while I'm alone is a gross violation of my rights, merely to perpetuate the profit of the record company, without any defensible basis whatsoever. Since they've wiped out the boundary between actual rights and arbitrary privileges they grab, of course people will exploit any chance to push back at their flimsy artificial copyright "rights". They're going to lose this war of disrespect permanently, just as they've been losing every battle all along.
I might say that if my grandma let anyone with a car offer her a ride home anytime in any neighborhood, after surviving all her decades, then she'd deserve to get robbed. And if she didn't believe the robbers when they threatened to beat her for it, then she'd deserve to get beaten.
But believing anything you read isn't the same as getting beaten and robbed.
If you're stupid enough to believe anything you read, you're to blame for being so stupid and vulnerable.
I don't think a $300 mobile (or stationary) projector is going to do 1080p anytime soon. Certainly not one as nice as my 50" DLP.
:).
I wonder how long it will take before "dual mode" TVs are available. I don't want to watch a 200" screen all the time, especially if it needs a darkened room.
Maybe some kind of fiberoptic bundle that can plug into the enclosed rear projector, maybe with extra lumens for the bigger projection, but sharing all the other equipment. A fiber bundle could even point at an arbitrary wall without moving the enclosed set.
I'd love to see a homebrew version that just sticks a fiber bundle "pickup" in the path inside the enclosure, and points it at a wall through a lens box at the outside end. But I'm not ready to sacrifice my set for the experiments
Who thinks blogs are pure as the driven snow? Who thinks any media is pure? Those suckers deserve to get scammed.
One good development from the popularity of blogs and other unreliable (but testable for corroboration) online media is that more info consumers are less likely to believe what they read (and see/hear in pics and video). Soon enough we'll have services that let us point at something published to search for similar or related items, and trace the memes. We'll be able to see who believes it, who repeats, whether we'd believe what they believe. Our healthy skepticism is just getting its wings. Soon enough it will have the kind of bionics that just reading and writing now have.
And since media has always suffered from a scarcity of skepticism and the means to act on it, we'll be much better off than we were before.
My thumb in your eye socket, jackass.
So shouldn't I be able to get a lens or two to compensate? It seems cheaper than buying a second TV for the bigger projection (and the extra storage for the redundancy).
I've got a 1080p DLP rear projector with a 50" screen. Why can't I just take off the screen and project the picture onto an even larger wall from further away?
I have a very powerful laser pointer. If someone's using one of these projectors annoyingly in public, I will just zap all over their picture. Perhaps from hundreds of feet away.
If they try to get tough, I'll just dial the laser up to "stun".
The Irish are not British. Talk that way gets you blown up and your family kneecapped.