The word "c?nt" has something to do with a goddess.
This link has a dissertation on the etymology and history of 'cunt'.
Regarding the link to a goddess, it has this to say:
Barbara Walker cites the Indian 'kundas', "[descendants] of the Goddess Kunda [or 'Cunti']" (ibid.), and Terence Meaden (1992:33) suggests that legal suppression of 'cunt' is related to a desire to suppress the worship of such pagan idols and represents "a series of vicious witch hunts encouraged by an evil establishment wishing to suppress what amounted to apparent signs of Goddess beliefs".
The fraction of invalid data that this is going to put in the databases is unlikely to warrant the spam trawlers bothering to do anything about it.
Do they even bother checking anyway? Don't they just trawl millions of things-that-look-like-email addresses, and sell them on CDs to the ****s that send the spams?
There's still bound to be far more valid email addresses than false ones trawled, anyway.
Perhaps the Asimov reference is an ironic one referring to the story 'The Feeling of Power'.
In this (slightly heavy handed) story, the superpowers' computers battle each other, with fully automated weapons. Humans have become reliant on computers to do simple maths; why bother learning it when everyone has a computer?
But the military want a way to beat the enemy's computer weapons; it's too costly to put larger and larger computers in the weapons. So, they re-invent the idea of doing maths on paper (a shocking concept to those assembled, and they name it 'graphitics'), and with it the 'manned missile'.
The general drove on. "At the present time, our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of antimissile defenses in a unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal, and missile warfare is coming to a dead end; for the enemy , fortunately as well as for ourselves.
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned-"
But it bears a striking resemblance to the Hawkman hovercycle thingy that Flash Gordon escaped from the palace on, after Ming the Merciless' forces blew it up.
I seriously doubt you lost the drive to vibration if you were transporting it powered off.
Well... it was working before the trip, and was not working after the trip. So, it was either bumped to death or was a startling coincidence.
This was some time ago (it was an 850meg drive in the days when 850meg was All You Would Ever Need (tm)), hence my comment that shock resistance has probably improved a lot since.
I'll take your word for it that death-by-vibration is no longer a problem, at least not with the amount of bumping you'll get in a car.
Assuming a typical (at 128kbps) compression of around 10:1, and a typical 80 minute CD holding 700Mb (I know that's not an exact match), thats 157 hours worth of music on a disk, or slightly under a week's worth.
It doesn't seem to mention anything on the site, but I wonder if there's anything in the design to cushion the hard drive from the bumps and vibration you get in a car.
I've lost a hard drive before from bumps in the road when transporting my PC around. Since then I've been a lot more careful, making sure the case is cushioned with something to cut out the worst of the bumps.
It seems that the unit is mounted in the dashboard, and could get some nasty jolts when going over speed bumps etc. I know hard drive shock resistance has improved over the years, but this could still be a problem?
Linux.com Feature Story: Another Halloween Document
Ryan Gordon strikes again with another work of satire! Another 'leaked memo' from Microsoft on Hallowe'en, to celebrate the infamous 'Halloween Document' of years past. While clearly a work of satire, this one is sure to inspire some heated discussion. Check it out! By the way, that's Ryan juggling in today's Photo Of The Day.
Space has been agreed to be 'international territory' under the 'Treaty on Principles Covering the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies', a United Nations treaty.
So far, and correct me if I'm wrong, nobody's died in space yet. Challenger hadn't left the atmosphere before it blew up, and Apollo 13 got back safely (although by the skin of their teeth).
With the number of missions needed to put the station together, and the unprecedented EVA time needed, it's just a matter of time before there's a serious accident up there.
With all the trips, the odds of breaking a seal and suffocating, or a pressurised tank exploding, or some other major system failure.
And once it's all running, there's always the chance of sudden illness popping up amongst the station's crew (despite the medical checks, there's always the one-in-a-million chance), and it becoming fatal before medical help can be reached.
I thought I'd seen an article on the risks somewhere before... Google popped this one up, which seems similar enough to what I remember. According to a study, the odds are at least one astronaut will die in the next 15 years.
But don't movie cameras introduce temporal anti-aliasing, which would help reduce the effects of a lower framerate?
Absolutely.
Since computer graphics are instantaneous snapshots of the scene, it accentuates the frame rate a great deal.
Movie cameras show a 'blur' of the movement over the duration of the frame... i.e. temporal antialiasing.
Graphics cards are supporting spatial antialiasing, which give the impression of a higher resolution and smoothes those nasty jaggies at the edges. Temporal antialiasing could be the 'next big thing' (although the methods using accumulation buffers are years old, the hardware has to catch up). 3dfx have their T-buffer which could do such a thing, and aren't ATI producing a card with accumulation buffer support?
I do know that sometimes when playing games with a uber-high frame rate, I sometimes get a 'bluring' effect that I don't get a lower frame rates.
Your card may be rendering at 200fps, but I bet your monitor isn't set to 200Hz vertical refresh!
And I don't know many monitors that would even handle that.
Since the only way to render at framerates above monitor vertical refresh rate is (obviously) to disable vertical sync (pausing rendering until the screen is updated), then you'll get tearing effects, as part of the screen is being drawn from data rendered in one frame, and the next part of the refresh uses the next rendered frame.
In fact, this shows that your data's being wasted; say for example 200fps on a 100Hz monitor, only half the data from each frame is actually drawn.
At high frame rates, the tearing effect probably causes the 'blurring' you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
Who gets to own the chicken.coop?
And I thought I spent too much time playing games as a kid...
:-P).
There's nearly 1200 games there (at least, there's 1196 lines of text after cutting out descriptions of the systems). That's madness.
An average game takes what, about a week to play through? (Some more, some less, also depends on how much sleep you get
It'd take about 23 years to play all of those games.
Regarding the link to a goddess, it has this to say:
Most offensive swear word:
The fraction of invalid data that this is going to put in the databases is unlikely to warrant the spam trawlers bothering to do anything about it.
Do they even bother checking anyway? Don't they just trawl millions of things-that-look-like-email addresses, and sell them on CDs to the ****s that send the spams?
There's still bound to be far more valid email addresses than false ones trawled, anyway.
Although I don't remember the three-headed knight being sponsored by a certain major oil company.
I see the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch made it in; even if it does look like a Lego man's head with the eyes rubbed off.
Would there be a Zeroth Law for telepathic RFPs?
</obscure Asimov pun>
In this (slightly heavy handed) story, the superpowers' computers battle each other, with fully automated weapons. Humans have become reliant on computers to do simple maths; why bother learning it when everyone has a computer?
But the military want a way to beat the enemy's computer weapons; it's too costly to put larger and larger computers in the weapons. So, they re-invent the idea of doing maths on paper (a shocking concept to those assembled, and they name it 'graphitics'), and with it the 'manned missile'.
Full story can be found at this site.
It's hardly a hoverboard... it's a bit too big.
:-)
But it bears a striking resemblance to the Hawkman hovercycle thingy that Flash Gordon escaped from the palace on, after Ming the Merciless' forces blew it up.
Fantasically cheesy film
'Gordon's alive?'
There's been new episodes every couple of days for the past couple of weeks at least...
Pokey hovers between 'insane' and 'surreal'. It's strangely hypnotic.
This was some time ago (it was an 850meg drive in the days when 850meg was All You Would Ever Need (tm)), hence my comment that shock resistance has probably improved a lot since.
I'll take your word for it that death-by-vibration is no longer a problem, at least not with the amount of bumping you'll get in a car.
It's already accounted for in the 128kbps.
700meg at 128kbps ~= 12.4 hours.
81gig at 128kbps ~= 23.4 weeks.
It doesn't seem to mention anything on the site, but I wonder if there's anything in the design to cushion the hard drive from the bumps and vibration you get in a car.
I've lost a hard drive before from bumps in the road when transporting my PC around. Since then I've been a lot more careful, making sure the case is cushioned with something to cut out the worst of the bumps.
It seems that the unit is mounted in the dashboard, and could get some nasty jolts when going over speed bumps etc. I know hard drive shock resistance has improved over the years, but this could still be a problem?
ASCI White
8,192 processors, sure, but central processing units?
Linux.com front page:
Linux.com Feature Story: Another Halloween Document
Ryan Gordon strikes again with another work of satire! Another 'leaked memo' from Microsoft on Hallowe'en, to celebrate the infamous 'Halloween Document' of years past. While clearly a work of satire, this one is sure to inspire some heated discussion. Check it out! By the way, that's Ryan juggling in today's Photo Of The Day.
Next please.
The traditional way of carving up territory is, of course, war.
I doubt space will be any different in the long run.
Here is a list of signatories of the treaty.
The United States signed it in 1967.
Space has been agreed to be 'international territory' under the 'Treaty on Principles Covering the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies', a United Nations treaty.
So far, and correct me if I'm wrong, nobody's died in space yet. Challenger hadn't left the atmosphere before it blew up, and Apollo 13 got back safely (although by the skin of their teeth).
With the number of missions needed to put the station together, and the unprecedented EVA time needed, it's just a matter of time before there's a serious accident up there.
With all the trips, the odds of breaking a seal and suffocating, or a pressurised tank exploding, or some other major system failure.
And once it's all running, there's always the chance of sudden illness popping up amongst the station's crew (despite the medical checks, there's always the one-in-a-million chance), and it becoming fatal before medical help can be reached.
I thought I'd seen an article on the risks somewhere before... Google popped this one up, which seems similar enough to what I remember. According to a study, the odds are at least one astronaut will die in the next 15 years.
Since computer graphics are instantaneous snapshots of the scene, it accentuates the frame rate a great deal.
Movie cameras show a 'blur' of the movement over the duration of the frame... i.e. temporal antialiasing.
Graphics cards are supporting spatial antialiasing, which give the impression of a higher resolution and smoothes those nasty jaggies at the edges. Temporal antialiasing could be the 'next big thing' (although the methods using accumulation buffers are years old, the hardware has to catch up). 3dfx have their T-buffer which could do such a thing, and aren't ATI producing a card with accumulation buffer support?
And I don't know many monitors that would even handle that.
Since the only way to render at framerates above monitor vertical refresh rate is (obviously) to disable vertical sync (pausing rendering until the screen is updated), then you'll get tearing effects, as part of the screen is being drawn from data rendered in one frame, and the next part of the refresh uses the next rendered frame.
In fact, this shows that your data's being wasted; say for example 200fps on a 100Hz monitor, only half the data from each frame is actually drawn.
At high frame rates, the tearing effect probably causes the 'blurring' you describe.
Damned preview button mangling tags again. Anyone know if it's going to be fixed anytime soon?