Re:Wow, $336! Save $3 over a 2.53GHz Dell!
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 1
You didn't read the entire posting (which was updated 4/28, today is 5/19); it says at the bottom:
4/28 Update: The 10% coupon has expired so the final price is now $399.
Not quite as good a deal as your subject; you're paying an additional $63 for the Dell.
Also, looking at Dell's site it appears that the deal is over. The PC is now $499 (no rebate, it's now "$100 Instant Savings"), and only has a "free upgrade" for the hard drive, from 30 GB to 60 GB. barbeque
I just watched the version downloaded from torrentse.cx (someone seems to have hacked it; earlier today it was a blank page that said "what" at the top; now the "what" appears green-on-black and in various shades of green, i.e. "the matrix strikes back"), and have a few things to say. Here seems like the best place to put it.;-)
1. It was a tripod capture, with a few adjustments. At the beginning the "EXIT" sign is visible on the left, but then they zoom a bit to remove it. A couple times throughout the film, the picture is rotated slightly but they fixed it after a bit (less than a minute). There are some audio errors (pops and static) but none of the dialog is obscured. The credits are cut off, probably because the guy had to get out of there. There is, however, no audience noise, so perhaps it was a private screening of some sort?
2. I was greatly reminded of MST3K. Perhaps it was because of the somewhat tinny sound, but the music sounded exactly like some of the movies they parody. I couldn't shake that feeling throughout the movie, which made it a bit funnier than it probably should have been. The Architect also reminded me of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's audience line, "This man has no neck!"
3. I like what people have been saying, that when they escaped they only escaped into a "meta-matrix." This would explains Neo's "power" to overcome the sentinels at the end.
4. I caught one of Morpheus's quotes: "I have dreamed a dream, and now the dream is gone from me." (Thanks to watching it on the PC, I could call up Google after pausing it.) This is in Daniel 2:3-5 of the bible, and the title of Daniel 2 is "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream." They did a good job with the references, as I see from other comments many others have found them.
5. I enjoyed the first movie more. Sequels are difficult, but even so it had the best opening weekend of all time. It has some timeless qualities to it: choosing your mate over your tribe, and the consequences of that decision. And the "living in a box (within a box (within a box (within..." -- it'll be interesting to see how the Wachowski brothers decide to end the series. When I saw the first movie it was in the afternoon, and I walked outside to a sunny sky with a few clouds and thought, "whoa." Something inside me had changed; this movie didn't do that, although it was good entertainment.
6. I liked the gift of the spoon from one of the orphans.
7. The special effects were pretty cool, but I really don't see that powerful a difference between the first movie and the second. They spent a lot of money creating the process, and it was money well-spent because the process can be used for many future movies. But so many studios have been adding bullet-time to their films that it just didn't "stand out" like the original.
8. I will see it in the theatre. Perhaps that'll have the "whoa" effect, but perhaps not as I've already seen it. We'll see.
9. The movie didn't flow very straightforward. Some scenes were unmentioned dream scenes until you see Neo wake up, and some scenes were action inside the Matrix, then a meeting from previously, then Neo and Trinity on the ship, then back into the Matrix -- and the footage from the dream scenes was reused toward the end (to good effect, but they saved a little on effects;-). Because of this jumping around it felt somewhat like Pulp Fiction. I wonder what the brothers think of Quentin Tarantino?
As I said, I'll see it again in the theatre and I'll probably pick up some things I missed the first time around. Enjoy!
I think an attack on Flash would be grand. Remove those distractions once and for all.
Side note: if you use Mozilla, download the autoscroll patch. When you middle-click to start the scrolling process, the Flash ads disappear. This is a very cool side-effect.
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account. Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
While I was reading about the Space Elevator, I came across a neat article about something very similar to what you want.
It was a horizontal platform, very tall (kilometers?), looking like a series of "A"s, with a track running from the top of each "A" to the next. It would use electromagnets to generate thrust down the track, and the payload would achieve escape velocity by the time it reached the end.
After several minutes of Googling I couldn't find the link. Sorry 'bout that. Perhaps someone else recalls it?
Re:Constant recording and the effects of downtime
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 1
pot doesn't turn you into a maniac, dude. stereotypes like that don't help anyone, including yourself.
Not sterotyping at all, simply reporting the story as my wife told it to me. Chill.
Drugs aren't the issue; his actions were. However, if he was "hopped up on goofballs" at the time, it should be an issue for his employer, since he was supposed to be providing security services. Or do you think people should work stoned too?
Constant recording and the effects of downtime
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My vote is for them to constantly be recording, and save older recordings to DVD-R (if the hard drives start to fill up). With the rapid advance of hard drives (there was an article here saying they improved 10,000-fold over the last decade or so, IIRC), and the opposite advances in video compression (DIVX/XVID et al), there should be no reason not to record everything.
Then it will be mighty suspicious if a cop's video "suddenly breaks." Perhaps two independent recorders would be called for?
My wife was visiting a friend in Brazil recently, and they were staying at a hotel. Her friend was accosted one night by a security guard who had red eyes and was acting funny (likely he smoked pot), and hit on her and put his arm against the wall, blocking her path. He followed her up to her room.
She has a friend who is a cop, and he was with her that night just prior to dropping her off; he has the receipt from the restaurant they ate at, marking the exact time they left, and they went directly to the hotel. Strangely, ALL VIDEO stopped working that night.
Which is actually better for my wife's friend: now the hotel has broken two laws, a sexual harassment as well as a federal law of destroying evidence. I hope she wins.
We're entering the strage era of having no privacy outside the home (and little privacy inside, as cops use thermal imaging to detect tomato growers). If we're going to record, I think it best that we record everything, especially all government employees -- including politicians, police, and military. As others have said, these recordings will reduce police corruption.
And if we recorded politicians 24/7, we'd end the era of "big oil" deals, and RIAA/MPAA-mandated legislation, and all sorts of crap that goes on in back rooms that nobody ever hears about.
Why not merge it with the video file, and if it's not already installed, install it?
I mean, for a movie (700 MB), adding 400K won't really be noticeable.
Yeah, I know all those Linux bigots will bitch and say they're not supported, why should we cater to the lowest common denominator etc. -- and the answer is because the LCD has over 90% market share.
And if it's only 400K for Windows, I'd bet it's similar (or less) for Linux. So add less than 1 MB to the video file and you have installers for both OSes.
If there were not, everything from high speed police pursuits to arrest using firearms would be illegal. Do you really think that's a good idea?
I disagree. It's one thing for the cops to violate laws trying to catch violent offenders.
It's quite another thing for a cop to say, "I'm not a cop, can I buy some crack from you?" This violates ethics. (Not to mention that making substances illegal is an unworkable plan, which we learned from prohibition back in the 1920s.)
The only things that should be illegal are actions, and only those actions which cause harm to another human being. Not thoughts, not self-destructive behavior, not objects or their possession.
As for the people involved in prostitution, it's a vicious cycle: they're hurting because it's illegal. So we keep it illegal because they're hurting. Meanwhile, visit Amsterdam or Nevada to see the industry done right.
People are talking about how this will revolutionize RAM, but I think the first application would be to create a multiple-terabyte hard drive. Using current bus, i/o, etc. standards. Yes, it would be much slower than it theoretically could be but they could produce hard drives that would push data at the maximum bus speeds, and (it appears) wildly undercut the current hard drive manufacturers.
Having a computer running with NRAM as its RAM would be great, but that would involve a whole redesign of the motherboard, processor, potentially operating system, etc. Making incremental changes, while not quite as whiz-bang revolutionary, would make more money and have more of an impact on the market.
For examples just look at the revolutionary Itanium vs. AMD's evolutionary 64-bit chips. AMD can run current applications, so therefore has more potential marketspace.
Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become.
Where did you get that information? I went to nyse.com and did a "Symbol Lookup" for Microsoft, which sent me to this page showing that Microsoft is a NASDAQ company.
So obviously it's not "now traded on the NYSE." Is it going to be?
Soliciting almost every illegal activity I can think of right now is punishable. What makes the solicitation by P2P special?
So how does it make it right when cops do the soliciting?
Vice squads are a blight on humanity/morality. If you have to resort to breaking the law in order to catch the law-breakers, then there's something wrong with the system.
My issue is more with victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use, but it also applies to P2P: no money is changing hands, so the laws (as written) don't exactly apply.
If you can make pretty much anything at home, using nanodevices, then information becomes the key input. But how would the auto industry feel about a Napster for Ferraris?
They would hate it. And they would be powerless to stop it.
Just like the buggy whip manufacturers were powerless to stop the automobile industry (although they did try to pass laws that required any moving vehicle to have a horse in front of it).
Nanotechnology is going to completely rock our world. In Engines of Creation, Drexler talked about a "retreat" he and his MIT buddies had at which they drew a line down a blackboard, and listed on one side the technologies/industries that nanotechnology would profoundly affect, and on the other side, those that would not be affected.
One half of that blackboard was empty.
Money won't matter when you can create anything just by shoveling dirt into your replicator. And "blueprints" will be traded on-line, not so much like MP3s but more like Open Source software. In fact, Christine Peterson (Drexler's wife and business partner) was heavily into open source technologies many years ago, in conjunction with their involvement with the Foresigt Institute.
Either you like it, and want it, and recognize the value in its production and distribution, and should pay for it, or you find the music valueless and should not want to spend any of your time/effort/bandwidth downloading it.
But what if the value you place on it is, say, 50% of the value they want to charge you for it?
Your alternatives are overpay or infringe copyright (I was going to say "steal" -- see how they've polluted my brain?).
Apple's music store is great because it gives you the opportunity to purchase single tracks instead of pay $20 to get that one song you wanted.
I have had the same urge, also the "empty intersection but it's red" syndrome.
Outside of America this is necessary.
In Rio de Janeiro, for example, if you wait at a red light when there are no cars going through the intersection, you're liable to be either a) beat up by the people in the cars behind you, or b) mugged by pedestrians.
Kazaa has 700MB movies in DIVX which are (essentially) DVD-quality.
These fit on a single CD.
It takes a couple hours to download them (at cable modem speeds).
The only drawback? Movies (especially new releases) tend to be misnamed, so you end up getting (for example) Swedish porn or older movies when looking for, for instance, Xmen2 or Matrix Reloaded.
These are kids offering their movies, renamed, in order to "look cool" -- if it was the MPAA doing it, they'd be offering 700MB of/dev/random instead of an actual movie.
The future is now.
A response said "your grandmother" can't get a movie on her 120 MHz Pentium -- but she's not the target audience. Kids and young adults have the most dispensable income of all age groups; that's their target market. And that market has the highest percentage of newer computers and faster connections.
I agree with most of what you said, but this caught me:
I suppose a minimum death penalty for certain crimes without any option for parole fits in here, because most lifers never thought they'd be there for life
I am completely opposed to the death penalty. The most glaring reason is because sometimes, justice is inaccurate. If we lock a guy up for 10 years and find out we did wrong, we can't give him his 10 years back, but we can set him free and clear his record.
If we kill a guy, and find out we did wrong, he stays dead.
A supporting reason is the statistic that it costs more to kill a prisoner than to feed him for the rest of his life (court costs and attorneys). So it's less economically viable to kill prisoners. See here:
A 1993 California study shows that each death penalty case costs at least $1.25 million more than a regular murder case and a sentence of life without possibility of parole.
The Miami Herald reported that in 1988 the state of Florida spent 57 million dollars on executions. The average per man w as $3.2 million. It also stated that it was possible to keep a man in prison for life for just 1/16 of that dollar amount. The "Sacramento Bee" reported that California spent 90 million dollars a year to maintain the death penalty. In 1993 the Dallas Morning News stated that in Texas it would cost three times the amount to execute a man instead of keeping him in prison for life (Jacobs 46).
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
This would be like ignoring the low oil pressure light on your car - you might be able to keep running for a while, but disaster could strike further down the road.
OT but true story: I had an old car on which the idiot light blew out. So I didn't know I was running low on oil, and BLAM -- $2,000 engine rebuild job. Ahhh, high school memories.
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Not quite as good a deal as your subject; you're paying an additional $63 for the Dell.
Also, looking at Dell's site it appears that the deal is over. The PC is now $499 (no rebate, it's now "$100 Instant Savings"), and only has a "free upgrade" for the hard drive, from 30 GB to 60 GB. barbeque
1. It was a tripod capture, with a few adjustments. At the beginning the "EXIT" sign is visible on the left, but then they zoom a bit to remove it. A couple times throughout the film, the picture is rotated slightly but they fixed it after a bit (less than a minute). There are some audio errors (pops and static) but none of the dialog is obscured. The credits are cut off, probably because the guy had to get out of there. There is, however, no audience noise, so perhaps it was a private screening of some sort?
2. I was greatly reminded of MST3K. Perhaps it was because of the somewhat tinny sound, but the music sounded exactly like some of the movies they parody. I couldn't shake that feeling throughout the movie, which made it a bit funnier than it probably should have been. The Architect also reminded me of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's audience line, "This man has no neck!"
3. I like what people have been saying, that when they escaped they only escaped into a "meta-matrix." This would explains Neo's "power" to overcome the sentinels at the end.
4. I caught one of Morpheus's quotes: "I have dreamed a dream, and now the dream is gone from me." (Thanks to watching it on the PC, I could call up Google after pausing it.) This is in Daniel 2:3-5 of the bible, and the title of Daniel 2 is "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream." They did a good job with the references, as I see from other comments many others have found them.
5. I enjoyed the first movie more. Sequels are difficult, but even so it had the best opening weekend of all time. It has some timeless qualities to it: choosing your mate over your tribe, and the consequences of that decision. And the "living in a box (within a box (within a box (within..." -- it'll be interesting to see how the Wachowski brothers decide to end the series. When I saw the first movie it was in the afternoon, and I walked outside to a sunny sky with a few clouds and thought, "whoa." Something inside me had changed; this movie didn't do that, although it was good entertainment.
6. I liked the gift of the spoon from one of the orphans.
7. The special effects were pretty cool, but I really don't see that powerful a difference between the first movie and the second. They spent a lot of money creating the process, and it was money well-spent because the process can be used for many future movies. But so many studios have been adding bullet-time to their films that it just didn't "stand out" like the original.
8. I will see it in the theatre. Perhaps that'll have the "whoa" effect, but perhaps not as I've already seen it. We'll see.
9. The movie didn't flow very straightforward. Some scenes were unmentioned dream scenes until you see Neo wake up, and some scenes were action inside the Matrix, then a meeting from previously, then Neo and Trinity on the ship, then back into the Matrix -- and the footage from the dream scenes was reused toward the end (to good effect, but they saved a little on effects ;-). Because of this jumping around it felt somewhat like Pulp Fiction . I wonder what the brothers think of Quentin Tarantino?
As I said, I'll see it again in the theatre and I'll probably pick up some things I missed the first time around. Enjoy!
Side note: if you use Mozilla, download the autoscroll patch. When you middle-click to start the scrolling process, the Flash ads disappear. This is a very cool side-effect.
While I was reading about the Space Elevator , I came across a neat article about something very similar to what you want.
It was a horizontal platform, very tall (kilometers?), looking like a series of "A"s, with a track running from the top of each "A" to the next. It would use electromagnets to generate thrust down the track, and the payload would achieve escape velocity by the time it reached the end.
After several minutes of Googling I couldn't find the link. Sorry 'bout that. Perhaps someone else recalls it?
Not sterotyping at all, simply reporting the story as my wife told it to me. Chill.
Drugs aren't the issue; his actions were. However, if he was "hopped up on goofballs" at the time, it should be an issue for his employer, since he was supposed to be providing security services. Or do you think people should work stoned too?
Then it will be mighty suspicious if a cop's video "suddenly breaks." Perhaps two independent recorders would be called for?
My wife was visiting a friend in Brazil recently, and they were staying at a hotel. Her friend was accosted one night by a security guard who had red eyes and was acting funny (likely he smoked pot), and hit on her and put his arm against the wall, blocking her path. He followed her up to her room.
She has a friend who is a cop, and he was with her that night just prior to dropping her off; he has the receipt from the restaurant they ate at, marking the exact time they left, and they went directly to the hotel. Strangely, ALL VIDEO stopped working that night.
Which is actually better for my wife's friend: now the hotel has broken two laws, a sexual harassment as well as a federal law of destroying evidence. I hope she wins.
We're entering the strage era of having no privacy outside the home (and little privacy inside, as cops use thermal imaging to detect tomato growers). If we're going to record, I think it best that we record everything, especially all government employees -- including politicians, police, and military. As others have said, these recordings will reduce police corruption.
And if we recorded politicians 24/7, we'd end the era of "big oil" deals, and RIAA/MPAA-mandated legislation, and all sorts of crap that goes on in back rooms that nobody ever hears about.
Honda ASIMO-V should be really cool.
Why not merge it with the video file, and if it's not already installed, install it?
I mean, for a movie (700 MB), adding 400K won't really be noticeable.
Yeah, I know all those Linux bigots will bitch and say they're not supported, why should we cater to the lowest common denominator etc. -- and the answer is because the LCD has over 90% market share.
And if it's only 400K for Windows, I'd bet it's similar (or less) for Linux. So add less than 1 MB to the video file and you have installers for both OSes.
Sorry BSD.
I disagree. It's one thing for the cops to violate laws trying to catch violent offenders.
It's quite another thing for a cop to say, "I'm not a cop, can I buy some crack from you?" This violates ethics. (Not to mention that making substances illegal is an unworkable plan, which we learned from prohibition back in the 1920s.)
The only things that should be illegal are actions, and only those actions which cause harm to another human being. Not thoughts, not self-destructive behavior, not objects or their possession.
As for the people involved in prostitution, it's a vicious cycle: they're hurting because it's illegal. So we keep it illegal because they're hurting. Meanwhile, visit Amsterdam or Nevada to see the industry done right.
Look at the fifth-to-last word of the Abstract:
Yeah, I know, I'm a grammar nazi right now but this is important legalese! There is no definition of "non0volatility".
Having a computer running with NRAM as its RAM would be great, but that would involve a whole redesign of the motherboard, processor, potentially operating system, etc. Making incremental changes, while not quite as whiz-bang revolutionary, would make more money and have more of an impact on the market.
For examples just look at the revolutionary Itanium vs. AMD's evolutionary 64-bit chips. AMD can run current applications, so therefore has more potential marketspace.
Where did you get that information? I went to nyse.com and did a "Symbol Lookup" for Microsoft, which sent me to this page showing that Microsoft is a NASDAQ company.
So obviously it's not "now traded on the NYSE." Is it going to be?
So how does it make it right when cops do the soliciting?
Vice squads are a blight on humanity/morality. If you have to resort to breaking the law in order to catch the law-breakers, then there's something wrong with the system.
My issue is more with victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use, but it also applies to P2P: no money is changing hands, so the laws (as written) don't exactly apply.
They would hate it. And they would be powerless to stop it.
Just like the buggy whip manufacturers were powerless to stop the automobile industry (although they did try to pass laws that required any moving vehicle to have a horse in front of it).
Nanotechnology is going to completely rock our world. In Engines of Creation, Drexler talked about a "retreat" he and his MIT buddies had at which they drew a line down a blackboard, and listed on one side the technologies/industries that nanotechnology would profoundly affect, and on the other side, those that would not be affected.
One half of that blackboard was empty.
Money won't matter when you can create anything just by shoveling dirt into your replicator. And "blueprints" will be traded on-line, not so much like MP3s but more like Open Source software. In fact, Christine Peterson (Drexler's wife and business partner) was heavily into open source technologies many years ago, in conjunction with their involvement with the Foresigt Institute.
But what if the value you place on it is, say, 50% of the value they want to charge you for it?
Your alternatives are overpay or infringe copyright (I was going to say "steal" -- see how they've polluted my brain?).
Apple's music store is great because it gives you the opportunity to purchase single tracks instead of pay $20 to get that one song you wanted.
Cheers!
One day I came in and as I was walking down the hall, I was looking for guns and ammo to pick up. Freaky.
Also, it was the first (and only -- I think it conditioned a lot of us) game to make me crane my neck to see around corners. And duck.
Outside of America this is necessary.
In Rio de Janeiro, for example, if you wait at a red light when there are no cars going through the intersection, you're liable to be either a) beat up by the people in the cars behind you, or b) mugged by pedestrians.
Really.
These fit on a single CD.
It takes a couple hours to download them (at cable modem speeds).
The only drawback? Movies (especially new releases) tend to be misnamed, so you end up getting (for example) Swedish porn or older movies when looking for, for instance, Xmen2 or Matrix Reloaded.
These are kids offering their movies, renamed, in order to "look cool" -- if it was the MPAA doing it, they'd be offering 700MB of /dev/random instead of an actual movie.
The future is now.
A response said "your grandmother" can't get a movie on her 120 MHz Pentium -- but she's not the target audience. Kids and young adults have the most dispensable income of all age groups; that's their target market. And that market has the highest percentage of newer computers and faster connections.
I am completely opposed to the death penalty. The most glaring reason is because sometimes, justice is inaccurate. If we lock a guy up for 10 years and find out we did wrong, we can't give him his 10 years back, but we can set him free and clear his record.
If we kill a guy, and find out we did wrong, he stays dead.
A supporting reason is the statistic that it costs more to kill a prisoner than to feed him for the rest of his life (court costs and attorneys). So it's less economically viable to kill prisoners. See here:
Or here:Ayn Rand said it far better than I could, here:
OT but true story: I had an old car on which the idiot light blew out. So I didn't know I was running low on oil, and BLAM -- $2,000 engine rebuild job. Ahhh, high school memories.
It's encryption. Used to have a co-worker who would constantly type shifted over either left or right, he wrote the funniest code. ;-)