Or more to the point, not that you want to see a 747 get knocked out of the air by one of these sub-orbital crafts and the people who built it end up in prison as terrorists.
But this seems pretty stupid to me. I've never really understood the idea of science fiction authors as inventors. Asimov no more invented humanoid robots or neural networks than Da Vinci did helicopters. The job of science fiction writers is to speculate about what might happen and write an interesting story which supposes that it does. The job of inventors is to find useful things that no one has yet made but which are possible with current technology. It may sometimes happen that a science fiction writer imagines something and twenty years later an inventor creates it, but trying to make this process a matter of policy seems like foolishness of the highest kind.
It is really impressive to see that Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's. The affordability of Linux is a definite plus, but too often Linux is played up in the media as being the "less expensive alternative to windows". I think that this downplays the other great advantages of Linux. Glad to see that Munich appreciates a great product when they see one.
If you are going to buy into the party line that there is no point in the EU fighting spam without North America and Asia follwing step-in-step, you must eventually decide that there is no point fighting spam at all. There will always be somewhere for spammers to run. Because when it comes down to it, even if North America, the EU and Asia all work together to pass anti-spam legislation, there is little chance of Antigua, Cyprus and Sealand following suit.
Really though, every little strike against spam makes real headway. If we can eventually drive all spammers to little off-shore havens, it will that much easier to block them. To be honest however, as a libertarian of sorts I can't help but think that filtering may actually be the better front on which to fight this war.
the point is, it's too late for people not to take us seriously. people are looking on-line for their entertainment and almost nothing is going to make them stop. bands that are frustrated with the mad struggle to get someone at a record company to listen to their demo are realizing that they can just release their stuff on-line. Sure, it may not make them rich, but it gets them heard. The ones that are good may get some money out of it in the end, but even if they don't people will keep doing it. I'm a tech person too, but there is a heavy hippie undertone to what's happening in the art community these days. It makes no difference how ceesy the "global village paradigm schtick" may be, a time is coming where people are producing art and putting it out there simply because the community wants to be entertained and it feels good to be the entertainer.
You don't have to be a flower-child to appreciate that..
makes me incredibly happy as an artist. We are slowly but surely moving away from the paradigm of a handful of millionaire artists with corporate backing to a new world where every other person is an artist. The community is once again entertaining itself in the tradition of the tribal storyteller, only now the community is global.
gives you a warm feeling inside if you can get past the pervading cynicism of the times for a moment.
> This will typically result in the computer not > going for the long shot royal flush and instead > going for the safer full house which is more > likely to happen.
Actually, a good computer might even be MORE likely to go for the long shot royal flush. It won't worry about odds of winning the hand, but rather about expected payoff vs. risk of any given gamble. If the full house is a hundred times easier to draw to (in that particular situation, but the royal flush has a hundred and fifty times the payout, it is usually worth it to go for the royal flush.
What would be REALLY impressive would be if the program had an intelligent way to analyse its own cash reserves and decide when to go for the big payouts and when to play more reservedly to avoid going bankrupt.
Absolutely. I don't see why it's news that people don't understand tech terms. If you are trying to get involved in computers and technology, you will pick up the jargon slowly, same as the rest of us.
The only time when it really matters that the public don't understand the jargon is when they are trying to buy a computer. And even still, the same basic thing applies across almost every big ticket consumer purchase. You need a real estate agent to tell you how much a house is worth because you can't figure it out yourself. And if you go try to buy a mountain bike without knowing anything about them, someone might just be able to convice you that the $300 department store bike with dual suspension is a really good buy.
If I was buying a car, I would ask someone who knew cars to help me pick a good one. Likewise, if you don't know anything about computers, ask a friend who does. I have helped many of my friends not get ripped off in the computer purchase decision (so long as they understand that helping them pick a box does not mean they are entitled to lifetime free tech support). If Joe Sixpack is too proud to ask his nephew to help him buy a computer, it's his own damn fault when he pays three grand for a Hewlett Packard that has been out of date for six months.
It's true. And when I was in university, all my friends who were ravers, punk rockers and football players were seriously into games like starcraft and quake.
The difference is that, although they played them heavily, none of them would have dreamed of subscribing to a gaming magazine or going to a LAN party or gaming event.
Point being, the gamers that we tend to call "hard-core" are the ones who look to video games to provide them with a social life or community of friends through things such as mailing lists, on-line forums and even live events. These are the gamers who are almost inevitably "geeks".
The gamers who are the "cool kids" see gaming as something that they do for fun but which isn't really an important part of their life. They see it this way because they get their social life and sense of community from other things such as sports, fraternities or concerts.
Anyone who is a United States resident that would not mind taking a very small amount of work onto their hands and does not plan on entering the contest themselves, post contact information (preferably an e-mail address to this thread).
Anyone who wants to enter the contest but is not a United States resident, forward your desired entry on to the posted contact information.
Any U.S. resident proxy submitter may either accept or deny any offered submission as their one allowable submission under the official contest rules. In either case, it is polite to respond as promptly as possible so that the artist may offer their design to another proxy submitter.
In the case that a proxy submission wins, it shall be a gentleman's agreement that the proxy submitter is entitled to one t-shirt and $25 of the ThinkGeek gift certificate. The other two t-shirts and $50 should be mailed to the orignal designer (designer to pay postage).
Anyway, it's just an idea. I myself am a Canadian resident and will be quite happy to submit an entry in this fashion if any U.S. residents like the idea.
The 'Mom Test' is a serious benchmark; it's name is not to be invoked lightly. The Mom Test involves nothing less than installing an OS on your mom's home desktop and seeing if she can figure out how to do all the things she would normally do with MS-Windows. If, after a month or so, your mom hasn't called you and demanded that you return her to Microsoft-Land, then (and only then) can the OS be said to have passed the 'Mom Test'.
i saw it with my parents and they bought my SMB3 on the way home because they liked the movie so much. Few people ever did as much for the quality of my life as that movie did
I said they are usually special-cased out. They don't have to be. There are a lot of things we can't live with out and it can be very difficult sometimes to draw a line between things that are strictly necesarry and things that are functionally necessary (where does light fit in). To tell the truth, in many ways we could say that we are addicted to oxygen nutrients and water. The withdrawal effects are incredibly similar in some cases. The main difference is that oxygen withdrawal will definitely kill you whereas heroin withdrawal only might.
The only special case that I include is "necessary for survival" I think that that hardly counts as a magic-number type of anomaly. The distinction is in there basically for the purpose of making "addiction" a useful word in the human language.
They fit in perfectly with the medical addiction. If these people tried to stop they would have a lot of trouble doing so and experience measurable withdrawal syndromes. If they have no problem quitting whatsoever then I think you would be hard pressed to say they were ever addicted in the first place.
If someone is using the first definition I gave, then these people are not addicts. If you are using the second or third, they almost definitely are.
There are three popular and accepted definitions of an addict. The first is that they pursue their habit to the point where it has a strong negative impact on the rest of their life. The second is that if the person tries, in all earnestness, to give up the activity and finds themselves unable, they are an addict. The third is that they experience significant and measurable withdrawal symptoms when denied the substance or activity.
Medically the second and third are used, with the added caveat that it is not an activity or substance normally considered to be necessary for survival (otherwise we are all food, oxygen and sleep addicts). I should point out now that current psychology and medicine have given up on the distinction between physical and psychological addiction. There is no measurable difference between the two. Even activities such as computer gaming which are non-invasive promote distinct electrical and chemical activities in the brain which can be as strong a basis for addiction as anything.
In answer to your question, I would be pretty sure that anyone who describes themselves as a "hard-core gamer" probably is an addict in the medical sense. In common parlance however, we don't tend to call people addicts to accepted forms of entertainment unless they also fulfill the first requirement. So the actual answer (as addict is commonly used by non-medical people) is that the difference between a hard-core gamer and a gaming addict is that the addicts gaming has a negative impact on his life as a whole (failing school, losing their job, poor eating habits) whereas the hard-core gamer is still relatively well adjusted.
It can still have the same "GNU's not Unix" expansion (and someone can have a fun time trying to make up a full six word expansion) while at the same time suggesting by its pronunciation that it is in fact Unix; perhaps the New Unix.
> I seriously question this study - I've seen > numerous fellow employees at various companies > who have dealt with their RSI problems in > different ways.
I have to agree. I happen to currently work at a centre for adaptive technology people with disabilities. A pretty significant portion of our clientele are people with Repetitive Strain Injury and of those I'd estimate about 90 percent are coders or professional writers. I haven't made a graph or calculated p-values for this, but from what I remember of my undergrad stats course, I would say that that is a pretty damn significant correlation.
There are several varieties of RSI of which CTS is only one and not the most common. I notice that the article never mention the larger family of RSIs. I wonder if this is intentional. Perhaps keyboard use does not significantly increase risk for CTS but does for other RSIs and this is a matter of selective reporting by the researchers.
I'm concerned that this might just be a half assed study, but that it might end up being quoted to prevent a lot of people who definitely deserve work hazard or disability compensation from receiving it.
most of it is public by default and by definition. I may have left my tin-foil hat on by mistake, but asking for the right to hack into the boxes of suspected spammers when all the evidence is sitting in public mail routing logs strikes me as a serious breach of privacy for the general public. Now I have to worry about being a suspected terrorist AND a suspected spammer?
Seriously, most spammers are not organized criminals. I doubt that they have concealed themselves and their activities so well that a few well placed subpoenas can't get at them.
...I think that if you have a land line as well as a cell phone, you can probably afford to set up your cell phone as a white-list system (accepting only calls from people in your directory list on the phone's memory). I can think of a few reasons you might not want to do this, but it still seems like a pretty good solution to me.
It's hardly a surprise that this is happening though, this is really no different than what has happened with land-line phones, e-mail and ICQ/IRC in the past. Advertising expands to fill all available spaces. The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones (unlike the percentage-of-bandwidth types of measurement with e-mail spam). If anything this should speed up the passing of an anti-cellphone spam law. IANAL, but shouldn't the existing laws for landlines also cover cell phones in some cases anyway?
In fact I would say that even downloading Tcl/Tk or Perl could be overengineering the solution.
The truth is that the Perl environment for Windows is not always intuitive and can occasionally prompt windows errors which are relatively easily understood by someone with a lot of computing experience but can be intimidating to a fledgling coder.
What people have overlooked is that windows does come with a built in interpreter for at least one widely used language: Internet Explorer knows all about Java.
The best part is that the Web is an environment most twelve year old kids are already quite familiar with. You can teach them basic HTML (if they haven't picked it up already) and then get them started on using Javascript. Javascript on a web page has the same sort of instant gratification that I remember from making the screen on my vic20 flash red and proclaim that I was cooler than my sister. Once they are comfortable with Javascript you can move them on to writing full-feldged Java applets (of course all of this coding can be done in notepad (or your favorite syntax-highlighting text editor)). In this way they will learn about object oriented programming. If the kid gets a good handle on writing Java applets and is still interested, they are probabl ready to move onto real programming: teach them C, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Maybe even give them a Linux box.
It's a simple way to learn programming on a modern windows box without having to install any developers kits or worry about system calls etc., and it all works in an environment (the Web) with which kids are already familiar and interested in.
I think Justin Frankel would tell you that you can't ever be sure that you have any creative control over what you are doing on company time.
The only ways to remain certain that you have complete control are to either work on your own or with a small group in a small company and then leave as soon as they get bought out by the big guys.
yes it's a very rare virus
on
Steal This Idea
·
· Score: 1, Funny
it turns the title of the most recent article on slashdot red.
forward this comment to twenty friends or all the rest of the titles will turn red and other horrible things will happen.
David Fleer in Manitoba, Canada only forwarded this comment to 19 friends and this is what he said: "My god, it's full of red titles"
George Tan of Maine completely ignored this comment and later died of syphillis.
Coincidence? you be the judge.
also, if you forward this comment to five hundred people Bill Gates may or may not send you a check for $535(five hundred thirty five dollars) and you may or may not see a hilarious animation of some sort.
Yeah, and just as importantly, 1.7 pounds of foam has the same momentum as 1.7 pounds of depleted uranium.
At one point in the article they actually say that the force was equivalent to catching a basketball thrown at 500 mph. OF COURSE IT IS. It is equivalent to catching ANYTHING thrown at 500 mph which weighs about 1.7 pounds. The only real difference is elasticity(which is almost irrelevant at that velocity) and surface area of impact(the same amount of force to a much smaller area).
Reminds me of the old trick question you use to catch kids: "What weighs more: a kilogram of bricks or a kilogram of feathers?"
Slashdot Mirror
Or more to the point, not that you want to see a 747 get knocked out of the air by one of these sub-orbital crafts and the people who built it end up in prison as terrorists.
But this seems pretty stupid to me. I've never really understood the idea of science fiction authors as inventors. Asimov no more invented humanoid robots or neural networks than Da Vinci did helicopters. The job of science fiction writers is to speculate about what might happen and write an interesting story which supposes that it does. The job of inventors is to find useful things that no one has yet made but which are possible with current technology. It may sometimes happen that a science fiction writer imagines something and twenty years later an inventor creates it, but trying to make this process a matter of policy seems like foolishness of the highest kind.
It is really impressive to see that Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's. The affordability of Linux is a definite plus, but too often Linux is played up in the media as being the "less expensive alternative to windows". I think that this downplays the other great advantages of Linux. Glad to see that Munich appreciates a great product when they see one.
t only overly pessimistic, but utterly defeatist.
If you are going to buy into the party line that there is no point in the EU fighting spam without North America and Asia follwing step-in-step, you must eventually decide that there is no point fighting spam at all. There will always be somewhere for spammers to run. Because when it comes down to it, even if North America, the EU and Asia all work together to pass anti-spam legislation, there is little chance of Antigua, Cyprus and Sealand following suit.
Really though, every little strike against spam makes real headway. If we can eventually drive all spammers to little off-shore havens, it will that much easier to block them. To be honest however, as a libertarian of sorts I can't help but think that filtering may actually be the better front on which to fight this war.
the point is, it's too late for people not to take us seriously. people are looking on-line for their entertainment and almost nothing is going to make them stop. bands that are frustrated with the mad struggle to get someone at a record company to listen to their demo are realizing that they can just release their stuff on-line. Sure, it may not make them rich, but it gets them heard. The ones that are good may get some money out of it in the end, but even if they don't people will keep doing it. I'm a tech person too, but there is a heavy hippie undertone to what's happening in the art community these days. It makes no difference how ceesy the "global village paradigm schtick" may be, a time is coming where people are producing art and putting it out there simply because the community wants to be entertained and it feels good to be the entertainer.
You don't have to be a flower-child to appreciate that..
makes me incredibly happy as an artist. We are slowly but surely moving away from the paradigm of a handful of millionaire artists with corporate backing to a new world where every other person is an artist. The community is once again entertaining itself in the tradition of the tribal storyteller, only now the community is global.
gives you a warm feeling inside if you can get past the pervading cynicism of the times for a moment.
> This will typically result in the computer not
> going for the long shot royal flush and instead
> going for the safer full house which is more
> likely to happen.
Actually, a good computer might even be MORE likely to go for the long shot royal flush. It won't worry about odds of winning the hand, but rather about expected payoff vs. risk of any given gamble. If the full house is a hundred times easier to draw to (in that particular situation, but the royal flush has a hundred and fifty times the payout, it is usually worth it to go for the royal flush.
What would be REALLY impressive would be if the program had an intelligent way to analyse its own cash reserves and decide when to go for the big payouts and when to play more reservedly to avoid going bankrupt.
Absolutely. I don't see why it's news that people don't understand tech terms. If you are trying to get involved in computers and technology, you will pick up the jargon slowly, same as the rest of us.
The only time when it really matters that the public don't understand the jargon is when they are trying to buy a computer. And even still, the same basic thing applies across almost every big ticket consumer purchase. You need a real estate agent to tell you how much a house is worth because you can't figure it out yourself. And if you go try to buy a mountain bike without knowing anything about them, someone might just be able to convice you that the $300 department store bike with dual suspension is a really good buy.
If I was buying a car, I would ask someone who knew cars to help me pick a good one. Likewise, if you don't know anything about computers, ask a friend who does. I have helped many of my friends not get ripped off in the computer purchase decision (so long as they understand that helping them pick a box does not mean they are entitled to lifetime free tech support). If Joe Sixpack is too proud to ask his nephew to help him buy a computer, it's his own damn fault when he pays three grand for a Hewlett Packard that has been out of date for six months.
It's true. And when I was in university, all my friends who were ravers, punk rockers and football players were seriously into games like starcraft and quake.
The difference is that, although they played them heavily, none of them would have dreamed of subscribing to a gaming magazine or going to a LAN party or gaming event.
Point being, the gamers that we tend to call "hard-core" are the ones who look to video games to provide them with a social life or community of friends through things such as mailing lists, on-line forums and even live events. These are the gamers who are almost inevitably "geeks".
The gamers who are the "cool kids" see gaming as something that they do for fun but which isn't really an important part of their life. They see it this way because they get their social life and sense of community from other things such as sports, fraternities or concerts.
I propose a submission proxy system.
Anyone who is a United States resident that would not mind taking a very small amount of work onto their hands and does not plan on entering the contest themselves, post contact information (preferably an e-mail address to this thread).
Anyone who wants to enter the contest but is not a United States resident, forward your desired entry on to the posted contact information.
Any U.S. resident proxy submitter may either accept or deny any offered submission as their one allowable submission under the official contest rules. In either case, it is polite to respond as promptly as possible so that the artist may offer their design to another proxy submitter.
In the case that a proxy submission wins, it shall be a gentleman's agreement that the proxy submitter is entitled to one t-shirt and $25 of the ThinkGeek gift certificate. The other two t-shirts and $50 should be mailed to the orignal designer (designer to pay postage).
Anyway, it's just an idea. I myself am a Canadian resident and will be quite happy to submit an entry in this fashion if any U.S. residents like the idea.
Seriously...
The 'Mom Test' is a serious benchmark; it's name is not to be invoked lightly. The Mom Test involves nothing less than installing an OS on your mom's home desktop and seeing if she can figure out how to do all the things she would normally do with MS-Windows. If, after a month or so, your mom hasn't called you and demanded that you return her to Microsoft-Land, then (and only then) can the OS be said to have passed the 'Mom Test'.
Sorry, informative moderation or not, this flat out isn't true.
Here is a link to another article on the exact same technology with more numbers on costs and savings.
i saw it with my parents and they bought my SMB3 on the way home because they liked the movie so much. Few people ever did as much for the quality of my life as that movie did
I said they are usually special-cased out. They don't have to be. There are a lot of things we can't live with out and it can be very difficult sometimes to draw a line between things that are strictly necesarry and things that are functionally necessary (where does light fit in). To tell the truth, in many ways we could say that we are addicted to oxygen nutrients and water. The withdrawal effects are incredibly similar in some cases. The main difference is that oxygen withdrawal will definitely kill you whereas heroin withdrawal only might.
The only special case that I include is "necessary for survival" I think that that hardly counts as a magic-number type of anomaly. The distinction is in there basically for the purpose of making "addiction" a useful word in the human language.
They fit in perfectly with the medical addiction. If these people tried to stop they would have a lot of trouble doing so and experience measurable withdrawal syndromes. If they have no problem quitting whatsoever then I think you would be hard pressed to say they were ever addicted in the first place.
If someone is using the first definition I gave, then these people are not addicts. If you are using the second or third, they almost definitely are.
There are three popular and accepted definitions of an addict. The first is that they pursue their habit to the point where it has a strong negative impact on the rest of their life. The second is that if the person tries, in all earnestness, to give up the activity and finds themselves unable, they are an addict. The third is that they experience significant and measurable withdrawal symptoms when denied the substance or activity.
Medically the second and third are used, with the added caveat that it is not an activity or substance normally considered to be necessary for survival (otherwise we are all food, oxygen and sleep addicts). I should point out now that current psychology and medicine have given up on the distinction between physical and psychological addiction. There is no measurable difference between the two. Even activities such as computer gaming which are non-invasive promote distinct electrical and chemical activities in the brain which can be as strong a basis for addiction as anything.
In answer to your question, I would be pretty sure that anyone who describes themselves as a "hard-core gamer" probably is an addict in the medical sense. In common parlance however, we don't tend to call people addicts to accepted forms of entertainment unless they also fulfill the first requirement. So the actual answer (as addict is commonly used by non-medical people) is that the difference between a hard-core gamer and a gaming addict is that the addicts gaming has a negative impact on his life as a whole (failing school, losing their job, poor eating habits) whereas the hard-core gamer is still relatively well adjusted.
I recommend GNUnix [NOO-nicks].
It can still have the same "GNU's not Unix" expansion (and someone can have a fun time trying to make up a full six word expansion) while at the same time suggesting by its pronunciation that it is in fact Unix; perhaps the New Unix.
> I seriously question this study - I've seen
> numerous fellow employees at various companies
> who have dealt with their RSI problems in
> different ways.
I have to agree. I happen to currently work at a centre for adaptive technology people with disabilities. A pretty significant portion of our clientele are people with Repetitive Strain Injury and of those I'd estimate about 90 percent are coders or professional writers. I haven't made a graph or calculated p-values for this, but from what I remember of my undergrad stats course, I would say that that is a pretty damn significant correlation.
There are several varieties of RSI of which CTS is only one and not the most common. I notice that the article never mention the larger family of RSIs. I wonder if this is intentional. Perhaps keyboard use does not significantly increase risk for CTS but does for other RSIs and this is a matter of selective reporting by the researchers.
I'm concerned that this might just be a half assed study, but that it might end up being quoted to prevent a lot of people who definitely deserve work hazard or disability compensation from receiving it.
most of it is public by default and by definition. I may have left my tin-foil hat on by mistake, but asking for the right to hack into the boxes of suspected spammers when all the evidence is sitting in public mail routing logs strikes me as a serious breach of privacy for the general public. Now I have to worry about being a suspected terrorist AND a suspected spammer?
Seriously, most spammers are not organized criminals. I doubt that they have concealed themselves and their activities so well that a few well placed subpoenas can't get at them.
...I think that if you have a land line as well as a cell phone, you can probably afford to set up your cell phone as a white-list system (accepting only calls from people in your directory list on the phone's memory). I can think of a few reasons you might not want to do this, but it still seems like a pretty good solution to me.
It's hardly a surprise that this is happening though, this is really no different than what has happened with land-line phones, e-mail and ICQ/IRC in the past. Advertising expands to fill all available spaces. The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones (unlike the percentage-of-bandwidth types of measurement with e-mail spam). If anything this should speed up the passing of an anti-cellphone spam law. IANAL, but shouldn't the existing laws for landlines also cover cell phones in some cases anyway?
In fact I would say that even downloading Tcl/Tk or Perl could be overengineering the solution.
The truth is that the Perl environment for Windows is not always intuitive and can occasionally prompt windows errors which are relatively easily understood by someone with a lot of computing experience but can be intimidating to a fledgling coder.
What people have overlooked is that windows does come with a built in interpreter for at least one widely used language: Internet Explorer knows all about Java.
The best part is that the Web is an environment most twelve year old kids are already quite familiar with. You can teach them basic HTML (if they haven't picked it up already) and then get them started on using Javascript. Javascript on a web page has the same sort of instant gratification that I remember from making the screen on my vic20 flash red and proclaim that I was cooler than my sister. Once they are comfortable with Javascript you can move them on to writing full-feldged Java applets (of course all of this coding can be done in notepad (or your favorite syntax-highlighting text editor)). In this way they will learn about object oriented programming. If the kid gets a good handle on writing Java applets and is still interested, they are probabl ready to move onto real programming: teach them C, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Maybe even give them a Linux box.
It's a simple way to learn programming on a modern windows box without having to install any developers kits or worry about system calls etc., and it all works in an environment (the Web) with which kids are already familiar and interested in.
I think Justin Frankel would tell you that you can't ever be sure that you have any creative control over what you are doing on company time.
The only ways to remain certain that you have complete control are to either work on your own or with a small group in a small company and then leave as soon as they get bought out by the big guys.
it turns the title of the most recent article on slashdot red.
forward this comment to twenty friends or all the rest of the titles will turn red and other horrible things will happen.
David Fleer in Manitoba, Canada only forwarded this comment to 19 friends and this is what he said: "My god, it's full of red titles"
George Tan of Maine completely ignored this comment and later died of syphillis.
Coincidence? you be the judge.
also, if you forward this comment to five hundred people Bill Gates may or may not send you a check for $535(five hundred thirty five dollars) and you may or may not see a hilarious animation of some sort.
but pay for the book, godammit!
Yeah, and just as importantly, 1.7 pounds of foam has the same momentum as 1.7 pounds of depleted uranium.
At one point in the article they actually say that the force was equivalent to catching a basketball thrown at 500 mph. OF COURSE IT IS. It is equivalent to catching ANYTHING thrown at 500 mph which weighs about 1.7 pounds. The only real difference is elasticity(which is almost irrelevant at that velocity) and surface area of impact(the same amount of force to a much smaller area).
Reminds me of the old trick question you use to catch kids: "What weighs more: a kilogram of bricks or a kilogram of feathers?"