When I saw the summary I actually HOPED it would be misleading, because it makes it sound like nobody had thought of liquid mirror telescopes before. Now it's possible that they were just copying a similarly misleading article, but no... even has a nice photo of the Large Zenith Telescope to spice things up. Space Fellowship 1 - Slashdot 0.
Ahh, then you agree with the MPAA and their tactics of doing whatever it takes to get the people in court, right?
First of all, I haven't said I agreed with him in the first place. I couldn't lie to spammers like that, but it's definitely closer to this side of the gray area than the dark side.
Next, let's eliminate the identity you're describing. The RIAA lies on legal documents to coerce people into court. He didn't use the telephone conversation to get them into court, he used the spam to get them into court. He brought up the telephone conversation in the court itself.
He also told the truth about how he had gathered that evidence when he was before the court. The court didn't buy it, because it didn't consider that evidence met their standards.
If the MPAA and RIAA followed the same course, they wouldn't get anywhere. The only way they have achieved as much success as they have is lying under oath in court, and on legal documents that have coercive power. Just like the spammers.
You're looking at a gray area a mile wide, pointing out that he's got a smudge on his nose, and arguing that makes him just like the folks living in the muck.
i've felt for a while that it's time to physically throw our leaders out of the capital building, white house, etc. [...] does that mean i'm a terrorist?
"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," [Hutchins] said.
I'm boggled.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That means, you get to watch them and make sure they're not storming the prison. That doesn't mean you get to disrupt their activities by putting them on terrorist watch lists because you're part of the grievances they're protesting about.
If they have this kind of geolocation information about where Wifi access points are, they probably have the ability to track you down to at least a neighborhood just knowing your IP address for an awful lot of WAPs in their database.
So even without this plugin, if you use public Wifi you're giving a fair amount of information about your location to the sites you visit.
If you ask a computer what its favorite food is, the program, if it's well designed, well put out a database of common foods and randomly choose 1 and say something generic like "yes, I've always enjoyed delicious pizza."
Would it? If it's a program designed to beat the Turing test?
The Turing Test is basically a benchmark that has nothing to do with how useful the program is for (for example) helping visitors to the city find a good restaurant, and it's more likely to have a bunch of synthetic likes and dislikes than a bunch of restaurant reviews. Like a video card is more likely to get high marks in standard shader tests than run a parallel raytracing program well.
Though even there, a bunch of restaurant reviews would still give it better material than you're implying.
Gigantic lines will begin on that machine and people will start to complain and scream.
I just went through a hurricane, so my idea of "hell on earth" is probably calibrated a bit higher than yours.:)
Anyway, that's why the best solution is a machine to print the ballot for you, and if the machine can't print it you go back to filling out paper ballots. This is not as efficient as having the machine do it all, because when you fall back to paper you have to go back to hand counting, but it's a lot safer.
Games in general aren't all that interactive. You can't make any permanent changes in the scenery, except where it advances the plot to do so, even for the duration of the game. You can't cut a branch, throw a stone, or even walk off the track or into a building except where the game needs you to do so. The non-player characters rarely respond to you except as part of the plot, save for a few games where you can put random bystanders through a short canned conversation. The music is about as interactive as the rest of the game, in pretty much every game, changing when the scene changes, playing themes for monsters and events, and in some cases cuing the player before an event happens. That's all you expect of anything else that's part of the background material. In a few games (like the Zelda game I mentioned previously) the music is part of the plot... but unless the story is actually ABOUT music, there's not a lot I can see you effectively doing with it.
Trying to go further than that is really hard. Algorithmic music generation is *hard*, and the result is rarely memorable. I suspect that half the major composers from Johann Sebastian Bach onwards have tried it, even before the advent of computers, and it's little more than a toy. As you say "Look at C&C3 - it has "Dynamic" music and nobody cared for the soundtrack, whereas many/.ers here can probably name or hum a bunch of tracks from previous C&C games because it was simply good music". If the result isn't good music, is that really an advantage?
I can't see replacing Yasunori Mitsuda or Nobuo Uematsu with a program, can you?
Is the problem that the music sounds like a film score? I don't see the point of complaining about this, if you prefer beeps and boops instead of violins and pianos, that's legitimate, but it seems to have little to do with the fact that it's a game... those beeps and boops weren't about it being a game, they were about the limitations in the hardware. Different games have different music, just as different films have different music.
Is the problem that the music doesn't react to the actions in the game? But it does! Characters have themes, and the background music tends to reflect the most important character, it changes as you progress in the game, it changes as you enter different modes and areas.
Is the problem that the music isn't controlled somehow by the player? OK, I can see things that could be done. you select a theme for your character, and have the game generate some kind of algorithmic background music depending on the characters themes. You could have the player use musical cues to make actions happen (I had hoped that Ocarina of Time would do this, rather than have the music simply be a gimmick that you didn't actually have to learn). But you can do all these things without losing the lush orchestral scores.
Welly welly welly, usually I'm the first and only one to mention Brin and The Transparent Society.
I'm not entirely convinced, but since I obviously gave up on keeping myself off the Internet long before it even had that name... I don't buy into the contrary argument either.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hope you mean the headphones and not the USB cable.
Oh yes, definitely.
A removable battery would add a good 2mm of thickness, which may not sound like much, but thats a good 30% increase in thickness.
I agree, it would be worth it, it wouldn't be a bad 30% increase in thickness.
Jobs is not Wozniak. They don't even look alike.
When I saw the summary I actually HOPED it would be misleading, because it makes it sound like nobody had thought of liquid mirror telescopes before. Now it's possible that they were just copying a similarly misleading article, but no... even has a nice photo of the Large Zenith Telescope to spice things up. Space Fellowship 1 - Slashdot 0.
Ahh, then you agree with the MPAA and their tactics of doing whatever it takes to get the people in court, right?
First of all, I haven't said I agreed with him in the first place. I couldn't lie to spammers like that, but it's definitely closer to this side of the gray area than the dark side.
Next, let's eliminate the identity you're describing. The RIAA lies on legal documents to coerce people into court. He didn't use the telephone conversation to get them into court, he used the spam to get them into court. He brought up the telephone conversation in the court itself.
He also told the truth about how he had gathered that evidence when he was before the court. The court didn't buy it, because it didn't consider that evidence met their standards.
If the MPAA and RIAA followed the same course, they wouldn't get anywhere. The only way they have achieved as much success as they have is lying under oath in court, and on legal documents that have coercive power. Just like the spammers.
You're looking at a gray area a mile wide, pointing out that he's got a smudge on his nose, and arguing that makes him just like the folks living in the muck.
iPods won't die as long as Apple keeps pumping out incremental improvements, and as long as the competition doesn't catch on to the accessory effect.
Like, say... iPod Touch with a hard disk, or with >40G of flash.
Or iPod Bluetooth, to get rid of the tether.
Or an iPod Shuffle headset.
Or ...
They've got plenty of room on the upgrade treadmill.
i've felt for a while that it's time to physically throw our leaders out of the capital building, white house, etc. [...] does that mean i'm a terrorist?
According to Hutchins, apparently so.
"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," [Hutchins] said.
I'm boggled.
That means, you get to watch them and make sure they're not storming the prison. That doesn't mean you get to disrupt their activities by putting them on terrorist watch lists because you're part of the grievances they're protesting about.
Maybe they didn't have a category for "not guilty" in their database?
Imagine that Google (or some other nefarious agency)
Would that be the Department of Google? Or the Federal Google Administration?
If they have this kind of geolocation information about where Wifi access points are, they probably have the ability to track you down to at least a neighborhood just knowing your IP address for an awful lot of WAPs in their database.
So even without this plugin, if you use public Wifi you're giving a fair amount of information about your location to the sites you visit.
What, am I worried about this? No. Should I be?
And you, getting all your information under false pretenses (doesn't matter where you live, you got the info by lying, admittedly), are no better.
"Everyone urinates, but if you do it in court..."
If you ask a computer what its favorite food is, the program, if it's well designed, well put out a database of common foods and randomly choose 1 and say something generic like "yes, I've always enjoyed delicious pizza."
Would it? If it's a program designed to beat the Turing test?
The Turing Test is basically a benchmark that has nothing to do with how useful the program is for (for example) helping visitors to the city find a good restaurant, and it's more likely to have a bunch of synthetic likes and dislikes than a bunch of restaurant reviews. Like a video card is more likely to get high marks in standard shader tests than run a parallel raytracing program well.
Though even there, a bunch of restaurant reviews would still give it better material than you're implying.
Gigantic lines will begin on that machine and people will start to complain and scream.
I just went through a hurricane, so my idea of "hell on earth" is probably calibrated a bit higher than yours. :)
Anyway, that's why the best solution is a machine to print the ballot for you, and if the machine can't print it you go back to filling out paper ballots. This is not as efficient as having the machine do it all, because when you fall back to paper you have to go back to hand counting, but it's a lot safer.
Games in general aren't all that interactive. You can't make any permanent changes in the scenery, except where it advances the plot to do so, even for the duration of the game. You can't cut a branch, throw a stone, or even walk off the track or into a building except where the game needs you to do so. The non-player characters rarely respond to you except as part of the plot, save for a few games where you can put random bystanders through a short canned conversation. The music is about as interactive as the rest of the game, in pretty much every game, changing when the scene changes, playing themes for monsters and events, and in some cases cuing the player before an event happens. That's all you expect of anything else that's part of the background material. In a few games (like the Zelda game I mentioned previously) the music is part of the plot... but unless the story is actually ABOUT music, there's not a lot I can see you effectively doing with it.
Trying to go further than that is really hard. Algorithmic music generation is *hard*, and the result is rarely memorable. I suspect that half the major composers from Johann Sebastian Bach onwards have tried it, even before the advent of computers, and it's little more than a toy. As you say "Look at C&C3 - it has "Dynamic" music and nobody cared for the soundtrack, whereas many /.ers here can probably name or hum a bunch of tracks from previous C&C games because it was simply good music". If the result isn't good music, is that really an advantage?
I can't see replacing Yasunori Mitsuda or Nobuo Uematsu with a program, can you?
Well, yes, Steve Jobs (ever heard of him?) introduced the Dock at NeXT almost 20 years ago.
This patent is for the annoying magnification effect that was added in OS X only 10 years ago.
Did you RTFP? It references those things itself.
The patent is for the magnification effect.
This *is* the NeXTstep Dock. The current release of the NeXT OS is known as Mac OS X.
Are you saying they're their own prior art?
Is the problem that the music sounds like a film score? I don't see the point of complaining about this, if you prefer beeps and boops instead of violins and pianos, that's legitimate, but it seems to have little to do with the fact that it's a game... those beeps and boops weren't about it being a game, they were about the limitations in the hardware. Different games have different music, just as different films have different music.
Is the problem that the music doesn't react to the actions in the game? But it does! Characters have themes, and the background music tends to reflect the most important character, it changes as you progress in the game, it changes as you enter different modes and areas.
Is the problem that the music isn't controlled somehow by the player? OK, I can see things that could be done. you select a theme for your character, and have the game generate some kind of algorithmic background music depending on the characters themes. You could have the player use musical cues to make actions happen (I had hoped that Ocarina of Time would do this, rather than have the music simply be a gimmick that you didn't actually have to learn). But you can do all these things without losing the lush orchestral scores.
So what exactly is the complaint?
... I forget what happened next.
Welly welly welly, usually I'm the first and only one to mention Brin and The Transparent Society.
I'm not entirely convinced, but since I obviously gave up on keeping myself off the Internet long before it even had that name... I don't buy into the contrary argument either.
Mister... Smith. It seems you are living ... two lives...
Only one of these... has a future...
If the voting process needs the printer during all day long and it stops working, we will have hell on earth.
What? Cats and dogs living together?
That makes sense, though I generally have the adapter and the laptop both in my backpack when I hibernate it.
They specifically referred to "suspend to disk", and drew a clear distinction between that and the "sleep" mode you're talking about.