Stop. You have absolutely *NO* idea what my, or anybody else's, dietary needs actually are. Any argument otherwise is nonsense. You can generalize to a generic standard human being all you like, but I am not a generic standard human being and neither are you. Our dietary needs are different from each other, from those around us, from most everybody else that there is on the planet.
As they'd just stick an IR filtering lens on the thing. Problem solved. Cheaply too.
The thing with varying the framerate to introduce distortions sounds cool, but probably overly expensive for the limited scope of the actual problem itself.
That's why I said it was funny. All that filler material around the main point of the thing is quite entertaining. Doesn't prove anything or say anything of substance, but it's funny nonetheless.
It's filler material. What you call the "plot device" is the only actual claim of substance in the movie, and it's a stupid claim at that.
If anything else in the movie opened your eyes to the truth or something like that, then you're an idiot. I mean, seriously, it was just humor. Filler. That's all. It didn't have any real value of any kind. Certainly nothing that should convince anybody of anything. At nobody rational.
IMO, the biggest reason not to eat McD's is the taste. But that's me. I base my eating choices on things other than what some filmmaker moron's girlfriend thinks.
Go look at McDonald's Nutritional facts: http://www.mcdonalds.com/app_controller.nu trition. categories.nutrition.index.html Most of their salads have the same level of saturated fats as their sandwiches. There is no such thing as a healthy meal at McDonalds.
Umm.. what? The Fiesta Salad has 11g of saturated fats (13g with the Sour Cream), I grant you, but the rest of them are all 6g or under. By comparison, the Big Mac has 11g and the fries has anywhere from 2g-4.5g. So you're comparing less than 6 grams as roughly the same as 13-15.5g? Not to rain on your parade, but that's less than half the amount.
And a fiesta salad is basically a big ass taco salad: "Premium mixed greens topped with seasoned beef, cheddar-jack cheese, and thin, crispy tortilla strips and sour cream." If anyone thought that has less fat than a burger, they're an idiot anyway.
His point is that McD does not properly inform consumers of the fat content in their food. He uses a number of examples in the different McD shops to show that the nutritional info isn't clearly displayed.
That was supposed to be his point? That throwaway 5 minute bit in the middle of movie? C'mon, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Try it for yourself. Ask to see the nutritional info chart at McD.
Don't have to. It's posted on the wall. Been there for at least the last 4 years. Maybe he wasn't looking hard enough or something. I've never failed to see it when I was looking around waiting in line.
Now, I grant you, I don't eat a lot of McD's. The food tastes like week old sawdust to me. But that's a matter of my personal taste. I eat there less than once a year. Doesn't mean the movie is not a joke in terms of making a statement.
I haven't read their contract or TOS either, but I'd be shocked if it didn't have a similar loophole in it. Something along the lines of "we are not responsible if the janitor takes all your data home and grinds it up to feed to his dog" sort of thing.
Doesn't really change anything. If they didn't do the backups, they would never have them and few people would be putting their data on their systems after a short amount of time. Think about it.. They're a backup company. I trust market forces to solve the problem if they go out and lose the data without good explanations.
The thing is that many things in life are "bad for you". Alcohol is bad for you. Smoking is bad for you. The question that we should be asking is NOT whether or not something is bad for you BUT RATHER how bad is it?
Many doctors say that a glass of wine or two every day is, in fact, good for you.
No rule in health is fixed, because health is an individual thing. It varies depending on the person, the time, the moment to moment needs of the body.
Food, alcohol, smoking, these are simply things we ingest (inhale). They are neither good nor bad. They simply are. What makes them good or bad is you and your body's current needs.
Now, I grant you that there's likely never a time your body needs to inhale tobacco smoke, but nevertheless the smoke is not bad in and of itself. It's your body's reaction to that smoke and what happens inside *you* that makes eating/inhaling a thing good or bad.
Good or bad can only be defined in terms of people, and people are vastly different in their moment to moment needs. Too vastly different to be able to say that any particular food is good/bad. That's all I'm saying here.
It *does* matter what you eat, even if it's the same thing every day.
Granted, I think you do need a balance, but a sub is more likely to provide that balance than a BigMac anyway.
Jared is a marketing gimmick.
And yes, it does matter what you eat. But it matters in the context of the total diet, not in the individual choices of food.
Is it healthy to eat the same thing all the time? Most likely, no. Doesn't matter what it is, nothing provides everything you need to survive.
Can you lose weight by eating the same thing continously? Sure. If that meal is lacking in several things you need, your body will draw on stored resources to keep you alive, and guess what? You lose weight.
Can you gain weight by eating the same thing continously? Sure. If that meal has excessive amounts of resources, your body will store them and convert them to fats and other things. And you'll gain weight.
Balance is key though. If you want to maintain your current weight, or stay healthy overall, you have to eat what your body needs at any given moment. And there's a million years of evolution that will tell you exactly what you need at the moment. Your body knows what it needs. You just have to pay attention.
Overly simplistic example: Chocolate. It's good. But is it always good? Can you eat chocolate all the time? I know that if I have more than a few pieces, it stops tasting quite so good. Oh, the taste is the same, but the body tells the brain some things and the brain stops liking it as much. This is the type of signal that people should learn to pay attention to...
You meant to say this!?! You seriously believe that eating even one big mac, yes even just one big mac, is HEALTHY!?! Where are you getting this health innformation? Please tell us, becuase I like to try and eat helthy and I would love to get a big mac if it's good for me. Or did you mean that it is not UNhealthy? Which is different somehow..?
What's healthy and unhealthy is not that easy to quantify. It depends on what your body needs right then and there, at the time of consumption. If you happen to need some extra carbs and fat in your body at the moment, your body will use them. If not, then your body will either reject them or incorporate them into your system for future needs (aka, store them as fat somewhere).
Nobody ever said life was simple. Treating it simplistically by thinking this/that is healthy/unhealthy is foolish.
No, I'm not. Obviously you can only grasp binary concepts, however the real world is not black and white.
Food is just food. There's nothing inherently healthy or unhealthy about any particular food. It's silly to state that this or that food is unhealthy because that's oversimplifing the situation.
The reality of the matter is that what's healthy or unhealthy, at any given moment, depends on the individual and their current dietary needs. Charactizing any particular food as healthy or unhealthy is meaningless without considering the current, changing from moment to moment, needs of the individual consuming the food in question.
I haven't seen it yet (I'm waiting to finish "Fast Food Nation" first) but I hear it's good.
It's very funny and well made, but his point utterly fails. First off, he does something inordinately stupid.. he comes up with "rules" that virtually guarantee he'll eat the biggest, most fattening thing that they offer. And then when he becomes sick, he expects you to have not expected this in the first place.
This is one of those "well, duh" moments. It's like when researchers announce that they've done some 3 years of studies and found that kids don't like to go to school. Well, duh.
If you eat nasty fattening shit all day, every day, you won't be healthy. If you override your body's desires for foods that it needs with some arbitrary set of rules, you won't be healthy.
Health isn't a matter of what kind of foods you eat. Not really. Health is a matter of balance. Sometimes you need fat in your meal. Other times you need salad. If you eat the same damn thing all the time, it doesn't matter *what* it is, you're not eating healthy by definition.
He's trying to make a point that this food is unhealthy. In this, he fails miserably. The food is not unhealthy. His behavior in eating nothing but that food is unhealthy. If he wanted to prove that any particular chain was unhealthy, he should have tried to eat a balanced diet using only foods from that chain. They have a big menu for a friggin' reason. They do offer salads. They do offer healthy choices (admittedly, not many). Just because they offer a lot of fatty foods doesn't mean you have to eat nothing but those fatty foods.
So the movie, while funny, utterly fails to make any commentary that has any real meaning. It's a mockumentary at best. He didn't actually prove anything that anybody wouldn't have known from hearing the premise. "Well, duh."
Sony's Connect store is the one only offering the ATRAC3 format files, which is only compatible with Sony players.
I admit that iTunes is only offering DRM Protected AAC, which is almost as bad, but at least AAC has a pretty high quality. By comparison, ATRAC3 sounds like you're hearing the music through a tube. Not to mention that ATRAC3 has some of the worst DRM and restrictive software I've ever seen.. You have to check music into and out of your portable player device, I believe. It's just wacky as hell.
My point is that sentence lets them off the hook for ever backing up your data, much less being ever to restore it.
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
Of course, the "harder" cases (with many objects that can pass through borders, physics, objects with short lifespans, and whatnot) are still left.;)
Objects passing through node borders we covered.. Authentication takes care of ownership of those objects, to some degree. The details need to be hammered down though.
Physics, as I see it, is a personal preference. If you want low gravity in your node, so be it. If a community of low gravity nodes wants to get together and call itself "Luna City" they're free to do so. They can create a community spaceport to link to earth bound nodes. Physics is all client side anyway, just let nodes define the settings of the client variables. Same with collision detection and other physical attributes of the world. Some systems may not want collision detection. I can think of when a nightclub atmosphere would be great if I wasn't bumping into people all the time.
Objects with short lifespans can be handled with authentication as well. An object can contain a chunk of signed code if you like. Obviously there would have to be limits here, but there's no need for an object to only consist of a 3d model. It'll need code that goes with the object in order to give it any kind of motion or movement or to make it do anything anyway. Java seems almost perfect for this.. An object is a jar file that contains some kind of 3d model, textures, and code to make it do what it's supposed to do.
Essentially, I was considering the network in terms of the definition of a single node.
My thinking is essentially to define "node" in terms of "space covered". Like the way that this Second Life thing is defining a server as 256x256 meters.
Think of it like this.. You build the protocol based on this sort of thing. Later down the road, you expand onto it as you see fit. You're not defining how a node works so much as the functions it serves and the sort of network traffic it must generate. If you build a simplest case node and want to expand your landmass, you run a second node attached to the first. Or if you want to write your own node that's twice the size, fine, do so. You can still do this while sticking to the protocol by pretending to be two nodes to clients and such. It's easy enough to create a protocol with future clients in mind this way, really. As long as any program sticks to the protocol, you can hook it to any other program doing the same. That's what protocols are for.;-)
Really, it's easy enough to write the protocol without defining any sizes or shapes to the land space. Hell, VRML did that. It's successor, X3D, is similar in scope. Neither has lived up to the concept, but the protocol is sound enough. However, in a community system where you can see other nodes from your node, edges need to fit together. Keeping the nodes square accomplishes that easily enough, while simplifying rendering. If somebody really wants to have an oddly shaped side, fill in the rest with grass or black or something and then don't connect it to any other nodes.
As far as the authentication goes, I think the power is here to do simple authentication now, but you'd need more powerful systems to handle it on a very large scale. The issue is one of trust. You can't trust everybody, and so you need a way to block rogue nodes from messing with the network. You could base it on IP's, but IP's change. You could base it on a centralized system to create ID's for everybody, but the idea is to avoid centralization. Using PKI lets you not worry about that side of things and is also powerful enough to apply to a wide range of problems.
Who cares who is in each node? Picture someone whose avatar is "Jane Doe". She enters (or is on the border of) a cheating node. Jane's computer asks the cheating node who is in it. The cheating node lies, and says that "John Doe" is in it - Jane's boyfriend. The cheating node has the fake "John Doe" break up with Jane.
Ahh.. Okay. So try this on for size.. Neighbor with a cheating node next to it. Jane is on the border of the good node next to the cheating node. Cheating node says John Doe is in there. In order to display John Doe, you have to contact John Doe directly to get his avatar's picture. This case eliminates part of your problem, because I can't, as a node, unilaterally fake an avatar without faking a real avatar to connect to. Although this causes problems with large scale avatar interaction, as I have to connect to every avatar I can see.
So we try another way... Bad node says John Doe is here and here's his avatar. Assuming John Doe is a "friend" of mine, I can verify he's my friend by a public key interaction, same way I mentioned about verifying objects. Of course, this still requires the direct connection as above, but now I have a way to verify that somebody in the game is the same as I knew them before. And we can work around the big user limitation by reversing the connection. When a node with someone in it informs Jane that John is here, it also informs John that Jane is nearby and looking in my direction. At which point I check and see Jane is on my friend list and connect to her to do a key verification. Jane gets connected to by John directly, and John proves to her that he is indeed John. Jane sees this happen because a friend icon appears above John's head.
Or she can verify by selecting John and clicking the "verify that he's John, my friend" button.
In any case, every avatar, being an object, has a keypair as well. I can give my public key to anybody, then they can verify that I am, in fact, me, assuming we've exchanged public keys previously.
I think you misread me about its neighbors. I said lie *to* the neighbors, not lie about. Lying to the neighbors is quite relevant. If the cheating node says that "John Doe" is in its territory, and that "John Doe" just crossed into the neighboring node's territory, the neighbor will start displaying the fake John Doe in its territory. If the cheater also says that John Doe's IP address is the cheater's client, the cheater can issue commands for the fake John Doe.
But only the real John Doe can prove he's John Doe with this public key that we've exchanged before. Now, how do you prevent somebody looking like John Doe and using John Doe's name? You don't. Avatars can be anything, and any name you like you can use. But you can't fake a keypair. You just have to exchange them beforehand. So everything that matters will have to work off generated keypairs.
Neighbor nodes *don't* talk to each other. Not really. They simply exist. Avatars wandering around talk to multiple nodes at the same time. This reduces traffic. If nobody's walking around, then there's no traffic (maybe a little bit on the back end for syncronizing community owned things, okay).
If I'm an avatar walking around, I'm talking to the node I'm in and any nodes I can see. I'm also talking to any other avatars I can see (although this might be handled through the node for public conversation and direct P2P communication for possible private conversations).
Everything else interacting between the nodes is handled through key exchanges of some kind. The nodes might talk to central authorities in some cases, or they might consider other nodes to be authorities in some other cases. That's the only time nodes really need to talk to other nodes.
Now, considering that my avatar and my public space are part of the same program, the line gets a bit fuzzy here. But consider them separate for ease of thinking about it. I can leave my space running without me actually being in the world itself, for example.
Okay, if you're going to make an actual game out of it, then you need some set of physics and objects that everybody shares. One way to do that is to have some single authority on this sort of thing. Whether that authority is centralized or a community in and of itself (say a distributed authority system, you simply query the nearest authority server to see if they really do have that Sword of Utter Annihilation) is unimportant.
Or you assign keys to objects. The one and only SwordOUA has this public key. If you have the private key, you can prove you own the sword via a query/sign/verification check and can therefore use it. If you want to transfer the sword to somebody else, you do so, and they make a new keypair. You then sign the public part of their keypair. Anytime a server wants to know if they have the sword after that, they send the signed public key over... The signed part can be verified (since only the original owner could have signed it) and the sword now gets a new public key on that system. This has a few minor problems to it (what if the guy cheated and gave it to two people, signing both of theirs), but you can work around that in some fashion I'm sure. Either an authority system again to hold the current keys for objects, or some method whereby nodes detect this sort of thing happening (if you see duplicated object) and stop trusting nodes that create these multiple objects. Either way.
Or reverse it and don't trust any object unless it is signed by the key of a trusted node. Then you have a list of trusted nodes.. trusted to create proper objects and not mess with the game, that is. Unless you're one of these trusted nodes, you can't give out objects that will actually work in these nodes.. This allows for the possibility of creating new games on the fly, actually, and getting other nodes to join in your game by trusting the objects you're creating and giving out for that game. I like it.
As for cheaters lying about their neighbors, you have a point, but I don't think it's a very good one. If a cheater lies to an avatar about who's next door, then when he goes next door actually into the neighbor, he won't be able to get back. The neighbor isn't going to lie and say that the cheating system is next door.
But this one-way travel/viewing can be detected and blocked. Every avatar gets a list of visible neighbors from a node. They then actually query that neighbor for info on how to see him. Part of that query would need to contain what node you're currently in. If the neighbor node sees a query from somebody who shouldn't be able to see him, he says "sorry, this ain't my neighbor" and doesn't send the data. Cheating attempt blocked.
As for who's in any given node, who cares? Neighbors don't need to know who's actually in any node that isn't their own. They only need to know who's querying info to display about them and what node they're in to check if they're allowed to see this node or not.
What I'm thinking would be to make it a lot like the internet.. That is, a network for networks.
Do it in stages. First off, we define our game. Assume it's simple for now, something similar to Second Life but smaller. A group of people running clients define their local world. You can take it down a notch and let every computer define it's own local building if you like. This would make the most sense.. if you're not connected, your building isn't there. It's just a blank spot of land. If you want to support more users or more complex buildings, update your hardware to be faster or throw more PC's at the problem. We can use a public key authentication mechanism of some type to verify who owns what land. This key mechanism will come in handy for the next bit.
Next, we step it up and make communities possible. Areas owned by a group of people, probably in the same geographic real-life area. They can all collaborate to build this space, and all their machines are in a P2P network to handle its existance. If somebody in the network starts cheating, its up to the community to throw the guy off their communal space. This could be done by several methods, but the most obvious of which would be to revoke his key to the space. See, in order to go in and change the community space, you have to have your key signed by others in that community. If we have a revocation mechanism, they can revoke that signature and suddenly he can't access that space anymore. We can go a step further and ban him from that space if we choose. For bigger spaces or something, we simply throw more computing power at the problem. Each community is sharing the load already, so more power in the community makes for more power to throw at the group spaces. Somebody will have to have power in this community to control access, but it'll likely be a small group of like minded individuals anyway, so they can work out their own leadership issues.
Next, we link these all together into a city or even into a world. Two ways to do this... The P2P way is to let communities form larger communities, providing links between them. Essentially, two communities agree to link to each other in some way, and then users can wander from one community to another via some shared community space. Think of it like a road that both communities agree to build between themselves. No need to limit it to two per road though, the road can go anywhere you like, it can branch three ways if three communities want to deal with it. That sort of thing. The more computing power the community has, the more shared community spaces they can support, obviously. It scales up from there.. Anywhere in the world that isn't connected is an island. Anywhere that is connected is on the same continent (or if you prefer, has a road between their islands.. same thing, really.. depends on if they want to make land between them or a bridge;-) ).
The other way to do it requires a central server system. Somebody hosting the world and controlling who owns what. Much like the Metaverse in Snow Crash, you have the main people who created the world and host the road around it. Those who want space on the world have to buy or otherwise obtain it, but at that point what's actually on that space is entirely controlled by the processor power you throw at that space. Each person carries their own load.
Cheating in this sort of thing is really a non-issue. Each person is hosting their own mess. If you want to screw up your mess, feel free to do so, but nobody will link to your space and you'll just be an island. Let small groups band together on their own to form community spaces and enforce whatever rules they see fit. Let communities connect to each other if they want to do so. It's all up to them at that point.
Practical matters: For a user wandering this space, he has to drop into the world somewhere by connecting to some community. This is all a matter of the protocol, really. Just standardize the protocol and let the guy hop from system to system a
The Linksys box probably gets 12VDC from its AC power adapter... So I doubt there's a whole lot in the way of electronics involved except for something to limit the current flow and thus not fry the thing.. And all you need for that is the right resistor.
There's been a number of good shows that never really had a chance at gaining an audience.
Take FOX's main revenue stream: The Simpsons. It didn't have a whole lot of eyeballs it's first couple of seasons. But FOX was new, and didn't have anything better to try out. It also put the Simpsons on in arguably the best time slots there could possibly be for a new show, with no heavy hitters up against it on other channels. Simpsons eventually drew the crowd. All the news propaganda and churches denouncing the show (highly controversial stuff at the time) didn't hurt either, I admit.
Now take Futurama. They put it in possibly the worst position they could: After NFL games, pre-empted a number of times with no repeats. Heck, even my Tivo couldn't figure out when it was airing half the time. 6 or 7 of the episodes I saw for the first time was when it aired on Cartoon Network, and I loved the show! Family Guy was pretty much the same way, with the same results. They didn't give it much of a chance.
Recently, they did the same to the show Wonderfalls. A very good show.. Produced a whole season, put it in a bad time slot, showed 4 episodes, then pulled it. That's not even a geek humor show, they just killed it dead.
Firefly aired for what, 3 episodes? Maybe 4? And out of order as well? And I believe it was up against ER or something with equally ridiculous high ratings draw too.
Shows have to build an audience. You don't get an instant hit overnight, or even over one season. The success of so many of these shows on DVD shows a couple of things: a) TV execs are morons who have no idea how to build a fanbase. b) Brilliant shows do have a large fanbase despite the total BS numbers that Nielsen provides.
More than anything, the fact that shows like Firefly, which didn't even air a whole season, are selling so many DVD copies should show the inaccuracy of the Nielsen system in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no way to meet your dietary needs
Stop. You have absolutely *NO* idea what my, or anybody else's, dietary needs actually are. Any argument otherwise is nonsense. You can generalize to a generic standard human being all you like, but I am not a generic standard human being and neither are you. Our dietary needs are different from each other, from those around us, from most everybody else that there is on the planet.
As they'd just stick an IR filtering lens on the thing. Problem solved. Cheaply too.
The thing with varying the framerate to introduce distortions sounds cool, but probably overly expensive for the limited scope of the actual problem itself.
That's why I said it was funny. All that filler material around the main point of the thing is quite entertaining. Doesn't prove anything or say anything of substance, but it's funny nonetheless.
It's filler material. What you call the "plot device" is the only actual claim of substance in the movie, and it's a stupid claim at that.
If anything else in the movie opened your eyes to the truth or something like that, then you're an idiot. I mean, seriously, it was just humor. Filler. That's all. It didn't have any real value of any kind. Certainly nothing that should convince anybody of anything. At nobody rational.
IMO, the biggest reason not to eat McD's is the taste. But that's me. I base my eating choices on things other than what some filmmaker moron's girlfriend thinks.
These same ads are often the ones in the top bar of slashdot.. Occasionally there's a vertical one on the main page that's pretty much the same thing.
Go look at McDonald's Nutritional facts:u trition. categories.nutrition.index.html
http://www.mcdonalds.com/app_controller.n
Most of their salads have the same level of saturated fats as their sandwiches. There is no such thing as a healthy meal at McDonalds.
Umm.. what? The Fiesta Salad has 11g of saturated fats (13g with the Sour Cream), I grant you, but the rest of them are all 6g or under. By comparison, the Big Mac has 11g and the fries has anywhere from 2g-4.5g. So you're comparing less than 6 grams as roughly the same as 13-15.5g? Not to rain on your parade, but that's less than half the amount.
And a fiesta salad is basically a big ass taco salad: "Premium mixed greens topped with seasoned beef, cheddar-jack cheese, and thin, crispy tortilla strips and sour cream." If anyone thought that has less fat than a burger, they're an idiot anyway.
His point is that McD does not properly inform consumers of the fat content in their food. He uses a number of examples in the different McD shops to show that the nutritional info isn't clearly displayed.
That was supposed to be his point? That throwaway 5 minute bit in the middle of movie? C'mon, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Try it for yourself. Ask to see the nutritional info chart at McD.
Don't have to. It's posted on the wall. Been there for at least the last 4 years. Maybe he wasn't looking hard enough or something. I've never failed to see it when I was looking around waiting in line.
Now, I grant you, I don't eat a lot of McD's. The food tastes like week old sawdust to me. But that's a matter of my personal taste. I eat there less than once a year. Doesn't mean the movie is not a joke in terms of making a statement.
I haven't read their contract or TOS either, but I'd be shocked if it didn't have a similar loophole in it. Something along the lines of "we are not responsible if the janitor takes all your data home and grinds it up to feed to his dog" sort of thing.
Doesn't really change anything. If they didn't do the backups, they would never have them and few people would be putting their data on their systems after a short amount of time. Think about it.. They're a backup company. I trust market forces to solve the problem if they go out and lose the data without good explanations.
The thing is that many things in life are "bad for you". Alcohol is bad for you. Smoking is bad for you. The question that we should be asking is NOT whether or not something is bad for you BUT RATHER how bad is it?
Many doctors say that a glass of wine or two every day is, in fact, good for you.
No rule in health is fixed, because health is an individual thing. It varies depending on the person, the time, the moment to moment needs of the body.
Food, alcohol, smoking, these are simply things we ingest (inhale). They are neither good nor bad. They simply are. What makes them good or bad is you and your body's current needs.
Now, I grant you that there's likely never a time your body needs to inhale tobacco smoke, but nevertheless the smoke is not bad in and of itself. It's your body's reaction to that smoke and what happens inside *you* that makes eating/inhaling a thing good or bad.
Good or bad can only be defined in terms of people, and people are vastly different in their moment to moment needs. Too vastly different to be able to say that any particular food is good/bad. That's all I'm saying here.
All I have is one word: Jared.
It *does* matter what you eat, even if it's the same thing every day.
Granted, I think you do need a balance, but a sub is more likely to provide that balance than a BigMac anyway.
Jared is a marketing gimmick.
And yes, it does matter what you eat. But it matters in the context of the total diet, not in the individual choices of food.
Is it healthy to eat the same thing all the time? Most likely, no. Doesn't matter what it is, nothing provides everything you need to survive.
Can you lose weight by eating the same thing continously? Sure. If that meal is lacking in several things you need, your body will draw on stored resources to keep you alive, and guess what? You lose weight.
Can you gain weight by eating the same thing continously? Sure. If that meal has excessive amounts of resources, your body will store them and convert them to fats and other things. And you'll gain weight.
Balance is key though. If you want to maintain your current weight, or stay healthy overall, you have to eat what your body needs at any given moment. And there's a million years of evolution that will tell you exactly what you need at the moment. Your body knows what it needs. You just have to pay attention.
Overly simplistic example: Chocolate. It's good. But is it always good? Can you eat chocolate all the time? I know that if I have more than a few pieces, it stops tasting quite so good. Oh, the taste is the same, but the body tells the brain some things and the brain stops liking it as much. This is the type of signal that people should learn to pay attention to...
You meant to say this!?! You seriously believe that eating even one big mac, yes even just one big mac, is HEALTHY!?! Where are you getting this health innformation? Please tell us, becuase I like to try and eat helthy and I would love to get a big mac if it's good for me. Or did you mean that it is not UNhealthy? Which is different somehow..?
What's healthy and unhealthy is not that easy to quantify. It depends on what your body needs right then and there, at the time of consumption. If you happen to need some extra carbs and fat in your body at the moment, your body will use them. If not, then your body will either reject them or incorporate them into your system for future needs (aka, store them as fat somewhere).
Nobody ever said life was simple. Treating it simplistically by thinking this/that is healthy/unhealthy is foolish.
Umm, so you're saying McDonald's food IS healthy?
No, I'm not. Obviously you can only grasp binary concepts, however the real world is not black and white.
Food is just food. There's nothing inherently healthy or unhealthy about any particular food. It's silly to state that this or that food is unhealthy because that's oversimplifing the situation.
The reality of the matter is that what's healthy or unhealthy, at any given moment, depends on the individual and their current dietary needs. Charactizing any particular food as healthy or unhealthy is meaningless without considering the current, changing from moment to moment, needs of the individual consuming the food in question.
This isn't iTunes. That would be Apple's store.
This is Sony. They have an online music store called "Connect".
Two entirely different people.
Not that your point isn't valid, but you might want to RTFA next time.
I haven't seen it yet (I'm waiting to finish "Fast Food Nation" first) but I hear it's good.
It's very funny and well made, but his point utterly fails. First off, he does something inordinately stupid.. he comes up with "rules" that virtually guarantee he'll eat the biggest, most fattening thing that they offer. And then when he becomes sick, he expects you to have not expected this in the first place.
This is one of those "well, duh" moments. It's like when researchers announce that they've done some 3 years of studies and found that kids don't like to go to school. Well, duh.
If you eat nasty fattening shit all day, every day, you won't be healthy. If you override your body's desires for foods that it needs with some arbitrary set of rules, you won't be healthy.
Health isn't a matter of what kind of foods you eat. Not really. Health is a matter of balance. Sometimes you need fat in your meal. Other times you need salad. If you eat the same damn thing all the time, it doesn't matter *what* it is, you're not eating healthy by definition.
He's trying to make a point that this food is unhealthy. In this, he fails miserably. The food is not unhealthy. His behavior in eating nothing but that food is unhealthy. If he wanted to prove that any particular chain was unhealthy, he should have tried to eat a balanced diet using only foods from that chain. They have a big menu for a friggin' reason. They do offer salads. They do offer healthy choices (admittedly, not many). Just because they offer a lot of fatty foods doesn't mean you have to eat nothing but those fatty foods.
So the movie, while funny, utterly fails to make any commentary that has any real meaning. It's a mockumentary at best. He didn't actually prove anything that anybody wouldn't have known from hearing the premise. "Well, duh."
It's thousand island dressing. With a little tiny amount of extra pickle in it.
;-)
"'Cause Knowledge is power!"
Sony's Connect store is the one only offering the ATRAC3 format files, which is only compatible with Sony players.
I admit that iTunes is only offering DRM Protected AAC, which is almost as bad, but at least AAC has a pretty high quality. By comparison, ATRAC3 sounds like you're hearing the music through a tube. Not to mention that ATRAC3 has some of the worst DRM and restrictive software I've ever seen.. You have to check music into and out of your portable player device, I believe. It's just wacky as hell.
My point is that sentence lets them off the hook for ever backing up your data, much less being ever to restore it.
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
No, I do understand it. I just had a brain fart and didn't type it out properly. Not enough coffee yesterday. :P
Of course, the "harder" cases (with many objects that can pass through borders, physics, objects with short lifespans, and whatnot) are still left. ;)
Objects passing through node borders we covered.. Authentication takes care of ownership of those objects, to some degree. The details need to be hammered down though.
Physics, as I see it, is a personal preference. If you want low gravity in your node, so be it. If a community of low gravity nodes wants to get together and call itself "Luna City" they're free to do so. They can create a community spaceport to link to earth bound nodes. Physics is all client side anyway, just let nodes define the settings of the client variables. Same with collision detection and other physical attributes of the world. Some systems may not want collision detection. I can think of when a nightclub atmosphere would be great if I wasn't bumping into people all the time.
Objects with short lifespans can be handled with authentication as well. An object can contain a chunk of signed code if you like. Obviously there would have to be limits here, but there's no need for an object to only consist of a 3d model. It'll need code that goes with the object in order to give it any kind of motion or movement or to make it do anything anyway. Java seems almost perfect for this.. An object is a jar file that contains some kind of 3d model, textures, and code to make it do what it's supposed to do.
Essentially, I was considering the network in terms of the definition of a single node.
;-)
My thinking is essentially to define "node" in terms of "space covered". Like the way that this Second Life thing is defining a server as 256x256 meters.
Think of it like this.. You build the protocol based on this sort of thing. Later down the road, you expand onto it as you see fit. You're not defining how a node works so much as the functions it serves and the sort of network traffic it must generate. If you build a simplest case node and want to expand your landmass, you run a second node attached to the first. Or if you want to write your own node that's twice the size, fine, do so. You can still do this while sticking to the protocol by pretending to be two nodes to clients and such. It's easy enough to create a protocol with future clients in mind this way, really. As long as any program sticks to the protocol, you can hook it to any other program doing the same. That's what protocols are for.
Really, it's easy enough to write the protocol without defining any sizes or shapes to the land space. Hell, VRML did that. It's successor, X3D, is similar in scope. Neither has lived up to the concept, but the protocol is sound enough. However, in a community system where you can see other nodes from your node, edges need to fit together. Keeping the nodes square accomplishes that easily enough, while simplifying rendering. If somebody really wants to have an oddly shaped side, fill in the rest with grass or black or something and then don't connect it to any other nodes.
As far as the authentication goes, I think the power is here to do simple authentication now, but you'd need more powerful systems to handle it on a very large scale. The issue is one of trust. You can't trust everybody, and so you need a way to block rogue nodes from messing with the network. You could base it on IP's, but IP's change. You could base it on a centralized system to create ID's for everybody, but the idea is to avoid centralization. Using PKI lets you not worry about that side of things and is also powerful enough to apply to a wide range of problems.
Who cares who is in each node? Picture someone whose avatar is "Jane Doe". She enters (or is on the border of) a cheating node. Jane's computer asks the cheating node who is in it. The cheating node lies, and says that "John Doe" is in it - Jane's boyfriend. The cheating node has the fake "John Doe" break up with Jane.
Ahh.. Okay. So try this on for size.. Neighbor with a cheating node next to it. Jane is on the border of the good node next to the cheating node. Cheating node says John Doe is in there. In order to display John Doe, you have to contact John Doe directly to get his avatar's picture. This case eliminates part of your problem, because I can't, as a node, unilaterally fake an avatar without faking a real avatar to connect to. Although this causes problems with large scale avatar interaction, as I have to connect to every avatar I can see.
So we try another way... Bad node says John Doe is here and here's his avatar. Assuming John Doe is a "friend" of mine, I can verify he's my friend by a public key interaction, same way I mentioned about verifying objects. Of course, this still requires the direct connection as above, but now I have a way to verify that somebody in the game is the same as I knew them before. And we can work around the big user limitation by reversing the connection. When a node with someone in it informs Jane that John is here, it also informs John that Jane is nearby and looking in my direction. At which point I check and see Jane is on my friend list and connect to her to do a key verification. Jane gets connected to by John directly, and John proves to her that he is indeed John. Jane sees this happen because a friend icon appears above John's head.
Or she can verify by selecting John and clicking the "verify that he's John, my friend" button.
In any case, every avatar, being an object, has a keypair as well. I can give my public key to anybody, then they can verify that I am, in fact, me, assuming we've exchanged public keys previously.
I think you misread me about its neighbors. I said lie *to* the neighbors, not lie about. Lying to the neighbors is quite relevant. If the cheating node says that "John Doe" is in its territory, and that "John Doe" just crossed into the neighboring node's territory, the neighbor will start displaying the fake John Doe in its territory. If the cheater also says that John Doe's IP address is the cheater's client, the cheater can issue commands for the fake John Doe.
But only the real John Doe can prove he's John Doe with this public key that we've exchanged before. Now, how do you prevent somebody looking like John Doe and using John Doe's name? You don't. Avatars can be anything, and any name you like you can use. But you can't fake a keypair. You just have to exchange them beforehand. So everything that matters will have to work off generated keypairs.
Try thinking about it another way..
Neighbor nodes *don't* talk to each other. Not really. They simply exist. Avatars wandering around talk to multiple nodes at the same time. This reduces traffic. If nobody's walking around, then there's no traffic (maybe a little bit on the back end for syncronizing community owned things, okay).
If I'm an avatar walking around, I'm talking to the node I'm in and any nodes I can see. I'm also talking to any other avatars I can see (although this might be handled through the node for public conversation and direct P2P communication for possible private conversations).
Everything else interacting between the nodes is handled through key exchanges of some kind. The nodes might talk to central authorities in some cases, or they might consider other nodes to be authorities in some other cases. That's the only time nodes really need to talk to other nodes.
Now, considering that my avatar and my public space are part of the same program, the line gets a bit fuzzy here. But consider them separate for ease of thinking about it. I can leave my space running without me actually being in the world itself, for example.
Okay, if you're going to make an actual game out of it, then you need some set of physics and objects that everybody shares. One way to do that is to have some single authority on this sort of thing. Whether that authority is centralized or a community in and of itself (say a distributed authority system, you simply query the nearest authority server to see if they really do have that Sword of Utter Annihilation) is unimportant.
Or you assign keys to objects. The one and only SwordOUA has this public key. If you have the private key, you can prove you own the sword via a query/sign/verification check and can therefore use it. If you want to transfer the sword to somebody else, you do so, and they make a new keypair. You then sign the public part of their keypair. Anytime a server wants to know if they have the sword after that, they send the signed public key over... The signed part can be verified (since only the original owner could have signed it) and the sword now gets a new public key on that system. This has a few minor problems to it (what if the guy cheated and gave it to two people, signing both of theirs), but you can work around that in some fashion I'm sure. Either an authority system again to hold the current keys for objects, or some method whereby nodes detect this sort of thing happening (if you see duplicated object) and stop trusting nodes that create these multiple objects. Either way.
Or reverse it and don't trust any object unless it is signed by the key of a trusted node. Then you have a list of trusted nodes.. trusted to create proper objects and not mess with the game, that is. Unless you're one of these trusted nodes, you can't give out objects that will actually work in these nodes.. This allows for the possibility of creating new games on the fly, actually, and getting other nodes to join in your game by trusting the objects you're creating and giving out for that game. I like it.
As for cheaters lying about their neighbors, you have a point, but I don't think it's a very good one. If a cheater lies to an avatar about who's next door, then when he goes next door actually into the neighbor, he won't be able to get back. The neighbor isn't going to lie and say that the cheating system is next door.
But this one-way travel/viewing can be detected and blocked. Every avatar gets a list of visible neighbors from a node. They then actually query that neighbor for info on how to see him. Part of that query would need to contain what node you're currently in. If the neighbor node sees a query from somebody who shouldn't be able to see him, he says "sorry, this ain't my neighbor" and doesn't send the data. Cheating attempt blocked.
As for who's in any given node, who cares? Neighbors don't need to know who's actually in any node that isn't their own. They only need to know who's querying info to display about them and what node they're in to check if they're allowed to see this node or not.
What I'm thinking would be to make it a lot like the internet.. That is, a network for networks.
;-) ).
Do it in stages. First off, we define our game. Assume it's simple for now, something similar to Second Life but smaller. A group of people running clients define their local world. You can take it down a notch and let every computer define it's own local building if you like. This would make the most sense.. if you're not connected, your building isn't there. It's just a blank spot of land. If you want to support more users or more complex buildings, update your hardware to be faster or throw more PC's at the problem. We can use a public key authentication mechanism of some type to verify who owns what land. This key mechanism will come in handy for the next bit.
Next, we step it up and make communities possible. Areas owned by a group of people, probably in the same geographic real-life area. They can all collaborate to build this space, and all their machines are in a P2P network to handle its existance. If somebody in the network starts cheating, its up to the community to throw the guy off their communal space. This could be done by several methods, but the most obvious of which would be to revoke his key to the space. See, in order to go in and change the community space, you have to have your key signed by others in that community. If we have a revocation mechanism, they can revoke that signature and suddenly he can't access that space anymore. We can go a step further and ban him from that space if we choose. For bigger spaces or something, we simply throw more computing power at the problem. Each community is sharing the load already, so more power in the community makes for more power to throw at the group spaces. Somebody will have to have power in this community to control access, but it'll likely be a small group of like minded individuals anyway, so they can work out their own leadership issues.
Next, we link these all together into a city or even into a world. Two ways to do this...
The P2P way is to let communities form larger communities, providing links between them. Essentially, two communities agree to link to each other in some way, and then users can wander from one community to another via some shared community space. Think of it like a road that both communities agree to build between themselves. No need to limit it to two per road though, the road can go anywhere you like, it can branch three ways if three communities want to deal with it. That sort of thing. The more computing power the community has, the more shared community spaces they can support, obviously. It scales up from there.. Anywhere in the world that isn't connected is an island. Anywhere that is connected is on the same continent (or if you prefer, has a road between their islands.. same thing, really.. depends on if they want to make land between them or a bridge
The other way to do it requires a central server system. Somebody hosting the world and controlling who owns what. Much like the Metaverse in Snow Crash, you have the main people who created the world and host the road around it. Those who want space on the world have to buy or otherwise obtain it, but at that point what's actually on that space is entirely controlled by the processor power you throw at that space. Each person carries their own load.
Cheating in this sort of thing is really a non-issue. Each person is hosting their own mess. If you want to screw up your mess, feel free to do so, but nobody will link to your space and you'll just be an island. Let small groups band together on their own to form community spaces and enforce whatever rules they see fit. Let communities connect to each other if they want to do so. It's all up to them at that point.
Practical matters: For a user wandering this space, he has to drop into the world somewhere by connecting to some community. This is all a matter of the protocol, really. Just standardize the protocol and let the guy hop from system to system a
The Linksys box probably gets 12VDC from its AC power adapter... So I doubt there's a whole lot in the way of electronics involved except for something to limit the current flow and thus not fry the thing.. And all you need for that is the right resistor.
There's been a number of good shows that never really had a chance at gaining an audience.
Take FOX's main revenue stream: The Simpsons. It didn't have a whole lot of eyeballs it's first couple of seasons. But FOX was new, and didn't have anything better to try out. It also put the Simpsons on in arguably the best time slots there could possibly be for a new show, with no heavy hitters up against it on other channels. Simpsons eventually drew the crowd. All the news propaganda and churches denouncing the show (highly controversial stuff at the time) didn't hurt either, I admit.
Now take Futurama. They put it in possibly the worst position they could: After NFL games, pre-empted a number of times with no repeats. Heck, even my Tivo couldn't figure out when it was airing half the time. 6 or 7 of the episodes I saw for the first time was when it aired on Cartoon Network, and I loved the show! Family Guy was pretty much the same way, with the same results. They didn't give it much of a chance.
Recently, they did the same to the show Wonderfalls. A very good show.. Produced a whole season, put it in a bad time slot, showed 4 episodes, then pulled it. That's not even a geek humor show, they just killed it dead.
Firefly aired for what, 3 episodes? Maybe 4? And out of order as well? And I believe it was up against ER or something with equally ridiculous high ratings draw too.
Shows have to build an audience. You don't get an instant hit overnight, or even over one season. The success of so many of these shows on DVD shows a couple of things:
a) TV execs are morons who have no idea how to build a fanbase.
b) Brilliant shows do have a large fanbase despite the total BS numbers that Nielsen provides.
More than anything, the fact that shows like Firefly, which didn't even air a whole season, are selling so many DVD copies should show the inaccuracy of the Nielsen system in the first place.