Did anyone here actually read the article? I doubt it. The shielding effects of cold plasma have nothing to do with phisical impacts of microdebris or anything else. It's effect, when properly tuned, is to reflect incoming electromagnetic waves such as lasers. It will not stop a physical object.
All that a rich megacorporation will have to do to register all the domains they want is blow some money setting up DBAs or puppet companies to register the rest of the domains they want. The individuals who don't have the money to do this will be the ones getting screwed here. If each conglomerate were only allowed one name though, that would be funny. The only commercial domains left would be disney.com, timewarner.com, generalelectric.com, sony.com, and a couple others. Everything is owned by just a few.
"I'm just excited that I can do rip-off Matrix-like visual effects under LINUX."
You can't, at least not by using this software package. It is a mocap-integration package, without much special effects potential on its own. So it does "realtime opengl render".. haha.. opengl render looks more like Quake than The Matrix. The site made no mentin of The Matrix on their brag list. They did make mention of The Weather Channel. We can now do weather-channel like effects under linux;)
This guy actually makes a good point. The effects in the matrix include at least tens, maybee hundreds of types of effects technology. Much of it was actually done using meatspace camera techniques such as cables and the 150-camera arrays this chap mentions. One port of one of the many software packages used isn't going to be enough for you to do "matrix like" or "matrix quality" effects. The "slo-mo" effects are actually not the products of a software package, but are done with a 150 camera array and greenscreening.
Not that this isn't a cool bit o software. Just don't run out and buy it thinking it does things it doesn't.
I won't make many friends saying this, but sometime the truth is bitter medicine. Most of us get lots of money working cushy, high-paying tech jobs, which are honestly easy work that can be mastered in just a few years. Some of us also go on napster and steal music because we're too cheap to pay someone else for the _real_ work that they do. Being a good musician is a lot of really hard work. It starts with a huge initial investment of time and energy. Years and years of practice, and then you're maybee able to perform something good. Then labels start getting interested. Most of them are out to shaft you. Alternatively you can try to self-promote. Self promotion is hellishly, soul-crushingly difficult, and you don't make much money. If you sign to a major label, fans get pissed that you sold out, but you manage to make enough to scrape by. A few people get rich, most just scrape by. So now you've been working your ass off playing music since you were a little kid, and you're pouring your heart and your life into your music, hoping that people will be decent enough to give you a little financial support in return for the work you're doing for them, and they say "screw money, just give us free music"? What a load of crap. Making music is hard work, and we live in a world where people need to get money for their work. Giving people the option to pay is giving them the option to not pay. How would you feel if the people you do your day job for had the option to not pay you. "I'm sorry, mr techie geek, but we don't want to pay you this week." If your employer didn't pay us for the work we did, we'd be fucking pissed, but we still think musicians should be obligated to give out their music for free? How lame is that? Using napster to check out tunes you might want to buy is one thing. It's an opportunity to be an informed buyer, and to find out that you really like some band you've never heard of. If you like it and listen to it all the time though, but don't buy, you are a thief. If music becomes free, in a few years all the music will suck, because noone can afford to work their ass off at something they don't get paid for. Pay for good music. It's money well spent.
I buy software cause it has pretty pictures or a nice big shiny box.
You do? I buy it because I want to use the capabilities of the stuff inside the box. If what you're saying is true, it would seem we are a match made in heaven. Let's go shopping for software together. We can split the cost, you get the box and I get the cd. Sound good?
The next shakespeare will come from MyVideoGames.com. And the next van gogh will produce all his work on his palm pilot. We'll all be driving hovering space vehicles for our morning commute, and video games build an intelligent, moral culture that is transforming the face of literature.
But seriously folks, anyone who thinks that pretending to be someone you aren't in some online fantasy game will make you a great storyteller...(you complete the sentence)
Real anonymous cowards don't know their ass form a hole in the ground, much less what a hacker is.
Real anonymous cowards don't know the difference between a hacker and a vampire, it seems.
If an anonymous coward were to somehow approach a real hacker and mouth off about their pet theory of what a hacker is, the hacker would respond "FOAD"
They are not supporting both sides of an arguement so much as they are supporting the right of both sides to take part in an arguement. Subtle but big difference. -N
First off, these are opinions, not facts, and you provide no references supporting your allegations against the ACLU.
Second, it seems you read tocqueville to the exclusion of any other plitical philosopher. Read a few more books and you may establish some balance in your opinions
Third, the ACLU does not try to censor people who speak against them, as you allege in another post. You seem well read on one political philosopher, but poorly read on the ACLU. The ACLU's mandate includes defending your right to speak freely, even when you say bad things about the ACLU.
The Arguement you are making is an arguement for censorship as a means of social control, to supress "dangerous" (read:different from yours) ideas. This is niether effective nor moral. When there is a disagreement between people, it is clearly more productive for them to discuss the disagreement and work toward a mutually acceptable solution than for one of them to gag the other and prevent the alternative view from being discussed. If there were an infalliable entity to tell us what is right and what is wrong, maybee they could make these decisions for us and we could safely and in good conscience try to stop wrong ideas, but there is no such entity. Don't even try to make an arguement for a religious text or person as an infalliable leader. history and experience both show that religion is not infalliable, nor is any one person. In light of this, people must try both as individuals and as a unit to do what they feel is right. No consensus, and no sustainable system, can exist unless people are allowed to express alternative ideas for consideration, so that the ideas can be judged on their merits by others.
I think I will go read some tocqueville. Based on your representation of him, he sounds like a bit of a boor and a knucklehead, but I'll give him his own chance to make a fool of himself(herself? not sure). It's only fair. I have the feeling that his arguement is against absolute individual freedom without a moral restraint, which is a somewhat more defesible stance than the one you are taking. I wonder, does he ever name the ACLU? Notice, though, that your postings here are an excercise of free speech which the ACLU defends and which many who think like _your_ representation of tocqueville would ban as dangerous.
from here on though, I'm out on this discussion. I've said my piece and more and I dont' want to burden poor ol slashdotters with any more on it, so expect no responses, bro.
-N
*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...
Good point. There are many, many organizations out there trying to do the right thing. I shouldn't have excluded them in the statement I made above. I take the ACLU fairly seriously because they are an effective legal body. They aren't as big as the bad boys but they are pheered, because they win in court, a lot.
At the same time, smaller organizations like eff are working hard on this stuff, and making a difference. I'll read the eff site again. Last time a looked, a long time ago, they didn't look very effective, but it seems that may be changing.
A few years back the CDA came around and threatened to take my net away. I joined CIEC and put a "free speech online" ribbon up on my site. CIEC went to court, and we won, partly because there were hundreds of thousands of names of voters like me on our petition. My personal contribution took less than an hour of my time, but it was because of little things like that that the CDA didn't stick. This brings me back to my original point.
If we take some time to support the causes we believe in, with money, petition signatures, calls to congressmen, and whatever else we have at our disposal, our time is much better spent than if we hide our views in the back annals of a slashdot discussion forum. Legislators don't read slashdot comments every day for advice on what to do at voting time, but they do listen if you call their office.
As an aside, the reason I included the link to the buffer overflow article on deCSS in my original post is because it outlines an interesting and innovative tactic for legally butting pressure on a large rich corporation, when you're a small poor.org. It's a little ambitious, but worth thinking about.
The government is currently in control of my lack of freedom. It would be better to have them in control of my freedom.
I do not agree with ACLU stances on every issue, but what other organization is doing anything productive for my desire for online privacy and anonymity? My right to express my beliefs without the government strongarming me into silence? My children's rights to speak against the actions of a school's administration while in school? I havn't got the time, the money, the legal expertise, or the charisma to effectively defend myself against the army of lawyers, so the best course of action i could find was to support the lawyers who seem to be slowing the evil ones down. Not ideal, but what are my options? Idealism and purist philosophy will accomplish nothing. If you want to change anything you need to ante up and try to do somehting real about it through the means that are available.
Do you have any facts to back these statements up? As I see it the aclu is trying to prevent situations where differences are illegal. It is not supporting, and I am not supporting, the idea that everyone should be the same. What actions of the ACLU are making me more like you? Give me a link to factual information from a reliable source. If you can prove your point, the ACLU won't be getting any more cash from me. I do consider myself fairly well read on the subject though, and if you prove your point, not only will I leave the aclu, but I'll eat my hat;) I don't agree with the ACLU on every issue, but I agree with them nearly all the time, and their willingness to support my right to be who I am without interference from the government and corporatist america is worth it to me. Where is the "obsessive equality" in an organization that has defended the rights nearly every different extremist group in the country?
Something is better than nothing. There is no one action that will "win the war" it takes lots of little ones. Take some little ones and you will be contributing to fixing the problem. Organizing all the geeks would be fun, but i don't know that it's either feasable or the solution. Every little bit helps.
Yesterday I made a donation to the ACLU, one of very few entities with enough legal clout to actually stand for personal freedoms which corpratist america, the government, and mainstream media are taking away from us every day. Did you know that a treaty is in a the works which would effectively destroy anonymity and privacy online? this is a major international issue which gets very little news coverage. Call your congressmen, make yourself heard, spend some money on your freedoms. Ranting in a forum won't fix it, but there are many tools are our disposal that can help, if we use them.
*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...
Athlons are not going to have RDRAM because RDRAM sucks too much. It has much higher bandwidth than SDRAM, but SDRAM bandwidth is already higher than your computer is going to make use of. Latency is a bigger problem with SDRAM but RDRAM has worse latency. This means, in plain english, that RDRAM systems actually do worse in most benchmarks than SDRAM. And SDRAM costs less. DDR SDRAM (probably avialable for athlons this summer) has significantly higher bandwidth than RDRAM _Without_ the latency problems.
RDram is a waste of time. SDRAM performs _better_ than rdram to begin with. There's nothing wrong with attaching a shield/heat sink to sdram, but it probably won't gain you much if anything. RDram only needs the heat sink because it runs so bloody hot to begin with. Wait for DDR SDRAm and you will be hapier and less poor.
An Interface that one's non-techie mom can use is often not any good for real power computing. Software that has just a few big buttons to do the common tasks with is easy to figure out, but as soon as you want to do anything uncommon, or interesting, there's not a tool in sight.
Pretty interfaces often are not ideal either. Having rows and rows of hieroglyphic icons in a program looks nice, but is rather counterintuitive. My Favorite UIs are those with a lot of text buttons, like newteks Amiga-style designs. Lightwave 3d has my favorite interface of any program.
There is no perfect interface. everyone has different preferences. The Ideal solution as I see it is to start with a strong and well tested interface, and allow a huge degree of cutomization. It's not always easy to code, but imho is worth it to allow users complete control of look and feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the kind of kelp they were getting. fraud, anyone?
electroluminescent wire is cheaper, waterproof, and way cool
Neon tubes are filled with.. you guessed it.. neon.
Did anyone here actually read the article? I doubt it. The shielding effects of cold plasma have nothing to do with phisical impacts of microdebris or anything else. It's effect, when properly tuned, is to reflect incoming electromagnetic waves such as lasers. It will not stop a physical object.
All that a rich megacorporation will have to do to register all the domains they want is blow some money setting up DBAs or puppet companies to register the rest of the domains they want. The individuals who don't have the money to do this will be the ones getting screwed here. If each conglomerate were only allowed one name though, that would be funny. The only commercial domains left would be disney.com, timewarner.com, generalelectric.com, sony.com, and a couple others. Everything is owned by just a few.
You can't, at least not by using this software package. It is a mocap-integration package, without much special effects potential on its own. So it does "realtime opengl render".. haha.. opengl render looks more like Quake than The Matrix. The site made no mentin of The Matrix on their brag list. They did make mention of The Weather Channel. We can now do weather-channel like effects under linux;)
Read all about it at the Kaydara website.
Not that this isn't a cool bit o software. Just don't run out and buy it thinking it does things it doesn't.
I won't make many friends saying this, but sometime the truth is bitter medicine. Most of us get lots of money working cushy, high-paying tech jobs, which are honestly easy work that can be mastered in just a few years. Some of us also go on napster and steal music because we're too cheap to pay someone else for the _real_ work that they do. Being a good musician is a lot of really hard work. It starts with a huge initial investment of time and energy. Years and years of practice, and then you're maybee able to perform something good. Then labels start getting interested. Most of them are out to shaft you. Alternatively you can try to self-promote. Self promotion is hellishly, soul-crushingly difficult, and you don't make much money. If you sign to a major label, fans get pissed that you sold out, but you manage to make enough to scrape by. A few people get rich, most just scrape by. So now you've been working your ass off playing music since you were a little kid, and you're pouring your heart and your life into your music, hoping that people will be decent enough to give you a little financial support in return for the work you're doing for them, and they say "screw money, just give us free music"? What a load of crap. Making music is hard work, and we live in a world where people need to get money for their work. Giving people the option to pay is giving them the option to not pay. How would you feel if the people you do your day job for had the option to not pay you. "I'm sorry, mr techie geek, but we don't want to pay you this week." If your employer didn't pay us for the work we did, we'd be fucking pissed, but we still think musicians should be obligated to give out their music for free? How lame is that? Using napster to check out tunes you might want to buy is one thing. It's an opportunity to be an informed buyer, and to find out that you really like some band you've never heard of. If you like it and listen to it all the time though, but don't buy, you are a thief. If music becomes free, in a few years all the music will suck, because noone can afford to work their ass off at something they don't get paid for. Pay for good music. It's money well spent.
You do? I buy it because I want to use the capabilities of the stuff inside the box. If what you're saying is true, it would seem we are a match made in heaven. Let's go shopping for software together. We can split the cost, you get the box and I get the cd. Sound good?
But seriously folks, anyone who thinks that pretending to be someone you aren't in some online fantasy game will make you a great storyteller ...(you complete the sentence)
Real anonymous cowards don't know the difference between a hacker and a vampire, it seems.
If an anonymous coward were to somehow approach a real hacker and mouth off about their pet theory of what a hacker is, the hacker would respond "FOAD"
They are not supporting both sides of an arguement so much as they are supporting the right of both sides to take part in an arguement. Subtle but big difference. -N
Second, it seems you read tocqueville to the exclusion of any other plitical philosopher. Read a few more books and you may establish some balance in your opinions
Third, the ACLU does not try to censor people who speak against them, as you allege in another post. You seem well read on one political philosopher, but poorly read on the ACLU. The ACLU's mandate includes defending your right to speak freely, even when you say bad things about the ACLU.
The Arguement you are making is an arguement for censorship as a means of social control, to supress "dangerous" (read:different from yours) ideas. This is niether effective nor moral. When there is a disagreement between people, it is clearly more productive for them to discuss the disagreement and work toward a mutually acceptable solution than for one of them to gag the other and prevent the alternative view from being discussed. If there were an infalliable entity to tell us what is right and what is wrong, maybee they could make these decisions for us and we could safely and in good conscience try to stop wrong ideas, but there is no such entity. Don't even try to make an arguement for a religious text or person as an infalliable leader. history and experience both show that religion is not infalliable, nor is any one person. In light of this, people must try both as individuals and as a unit to do what they feel is right. No consensus, and no sustainable system, can exist unless people are allowed to express alternative ideas for consideration, so that the ideas can be judged on their merits by others.
I think I will go read some tocqueville. Based on your representation of him, he sounds like a bit of a boor and a knucklehead, but I'll give him his own chance to make a fool of himself(herself? not sure). It's only fair. I have the feeling that his arguement is against absolute individual freedom without a moral restraint, which is a somewhat more defesible stance than the one you are taking. I wonder, does he ever name the ACLU? Notice, though, that your postings here are an excercise of free speech which the ACLU defends and which many who think like _your_ representation of tocqueville would ban as dangerous.
from here on though, I'm out on this discussion. I've said my piece and more and I dont' want to burden poor ol slashdotters with any more on it, so expect no responses, bro.
-N
*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...
At the same time, smaller organizations like eff are working hard on this stuff, and making a difference. I'll read the eff site again. Last time a looked, a long time ago, they didn't look very effective, but it seems that may be changing.
A few years back the CDA came around and threatened to take my net away. I joined CIEC and put a "free speech online" ribbon up on my site. CIEC went to court, and we won, partly because there were hundreds of thousands of names of voters like me on our petition. My personal contribution took less than an hour of my time, but it was because of little things like that that the CDA didn't stick. This brings me back to my original point.
If we take some time to support the causes we believe in, with money, petition signatures, calls to congressmen, and whatever else we have at our disposal, our time is much better spent than if we hide our views in the back annals of a slashdot discussion forum. Legislators don't read slashdot comments every day for advice on what to do at voting time, but they do listen if you call their office.
As an aside, the reason I included the link to the buffer overflow article on deCSS in my original post is because it outlines an interesting and innovative tactic for legally butting pressure on a large rich corporation, when you're a small poor .org. It's a little ambitious, but worth thinking about.
The government is currently in control of my lack of freedom. It would be better to have them in control of my freedom.
I do not agree with ACLU stances on every issue, but what other organization is doing anything productive for my desire for online privacy and anonymity? My right to express my beliefs without the government strongarming me into silence? My children's rights to speak against the actions of a school's administration while in school? I havn't got the time, the money, the legal expertise, or the charisma to effectively defend myself against the army of lawyers, so the best course of action i could find was to support the lawyers who seem to be slowing the evil ones down. Not ideal, but what are my options? Idealism and purist philosophy will accomplish nothing. If you want to change anything you need to ante up and try to do somehting real about it through the means that are available.
Do you have any facts to back these statements up? As I see it the aclu is trying to prevent situations where differences are illegal. It is not supporting, and I am not supporting, the idea that everyone should be the same. What actions of the ACLU are making me more like you? Give me a link to factual information from a reliable source. If you can prove your point, the ACLU won't be getting any more cash from me. I do consider myself fairly well read on the subject though, and if you prove your point, not only will I leave the aclu, but I'll eat my hat;) I don't agree with the ACLU on every issue, but I agree with them nearly all the time, and their willingness to support my right to be who I am without interference from the government and corporatist america is worth it to me. Where is the "obsessive equality" in an organization that has defended the rights nearly every different extremist group in the country?
Something is better than nothing. There is no one action that will "win the war" it takes lots of little ones. Take some little ones and you will be contributing to fixing the problem. Organizing all the geeks would be fun, but i don't know that it's either feasable or the solution. Every little bit helps.
*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...
Athlons are not going to have RDRAM because RDRAM sucks too much. It has much higher bandwidth than SDRAM, but SDRAM bandwidth is already higher than your computer is going to make use of. Latency is a bigger problem with SDRAM but RDRAM has worse latency. This means, in plain english, that RDRAM systems actually do worse in most benchmarks than SDRAM. And SDRAM costs less. DDR SDRAM (probably avialable for athlons this summer) has significantly higher bandwidth than RDRAM _Without_ the latency problems.
Documentation at tom's hardware.
Pretty interfaces often are not ideal either. Having rows and rows of hieroglyphic icons in a program looks nice, but is rather counterintuitive. My Favorite UIs are those with a lot of text buttons, like newteks Amiga-style designs. Lightwave 3d has my favorite interface of any program.
There is no perfect interface. everyone has different preferences. The Ideal solution as I see it is to start with a strong and well tested interface, and allow a huge degree of cutomization. It's not always easy to code, but imho is worth it to allow users complete control of look and feel.