Except the Tivo is a general purpose computer. It's just they they've made it boot into software you can't exit from, and provided no way to access that general purpose computer's features. There's nothing new about that. Most cash machines in the last 10-15 years have been general purpose computers too. Before that, I remember Siemens' ISDN protocol tester (costing 100000 quid) was deep down just a general purpose computer with an ISDN card, and some fancy software running on it.
You clearly don't understand the scientific method. The scientific method is to find tests which would show a theory to be false were it in fact to be false. Then to perform those tests. And to see your theory survive unscathed. When all imaginable tests fail to disprove a theory, then it is considered proved. However, the invitation to attempt to disprove it always remains open.
In the fluffy terms that the general public understand, evolution is clearly true and proved. In the precise details that evolutionary researchers toil over, there are still uncertainties and unanswered questions. But a bikeshed with a red roof and a bikeshed with a blue roof are both still bikesheds.
Occasionally the central pole judders due to lateral forces on it. If so, the demo is full of failures.
And I think you'll find every monopod robot ever built has utilised air time in order to maintain balance and change position. Cue mentions of MIT back in the 90s...
Indeed, the "boom for lateral stabilisation" was very subtle, wasn't it?
A lot of people in the robotics field will almost certainly have just sighed "oh, god, not *another* bipedal forward-backward-only walker/runner". There are already too many of those in the world (and I'm sure several that run a lot quicker than MABEL, but can't back that up with real data).
No disagreement there. I don't know enough about them to have a particularly strong opinion about them. I still think I rate them as "preferable to paypal", as I don't like the fact that paypal does bank-like things, yet isn't (regulated like) a bank.
Absolutely. I like the historical chart (e.g. wikipedia - "gold standard")- it makes the stock markets' peaks look quite tame. How high can this one go?
Whilst your comment does show some insight, I personally think that there would be an anti-correlation between the two communities (2nd life vs. bitcoin). Not sure I can back that up with anything apart from gut feel.
Gold isn't backed by anything either. It merely has a wide range of markets, ranging from jewellers to electronics manufacturers, that want to get hold of it for its intrinsic physical properties.
Gold certificates are backed - by gold, obviously. Unless they're part-backed...
> it really is accepted on the basis of "just because we want it to be".
One day some geeks said "I want a new currency"... "Make it so!" Or as they'd say in Latin -/fiat/.
Now look up "fiat currency".
The phrase "backed by fiat" is pure sophistry. It means "not backed by anything real". Charitably, it means "backed by the reputation of the issuer", which of course is illusory. You only trust them because you *have* to trust them, as they're the people who will throw you in their jails if you do things like countermanding their monopoly over taxing the exchange of goods and services (such as not paying your income tax).
So the real value of "conventional units" to Russians is what? They can't pay their taxes in it. So by your *emphatic* assertion above, it has no real value. Yet remarkably is seems to have a tangible value to so many - I was able to buy food and drinks from shops, meals from restaurants, CDs, clothes, and most things I needed to live with it while I was there. (Known further west as the "US dollar", in case you've not encountered them before.)
I was chatting to the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England (you know, the guy who puts his signature on the banknotes) over a meal a while back, and I asked him precisely what the "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of..." above his name implied - what format would the payment take? He replied that I'd just be given the note back. There is nothing backing the UK currency, it is textbook fiat currency. You appear to be using "backed" in a different way from others.
You seem to be conflating the stated criticism of "illegally generat(ed|ing) bitcoins" with a concept that only you seem to want to talk about, namely "generating illegal bitcoins".
These two have as much in common as building slow sportscars does to slowly building sportscars. I.e. nothing.
"""
Microsoft selected NSS Labs, as a supplement to our own internal research, for its integrity and expertise in providing accurate third-party benchmarks. This service has been instrumental in providing us with reliable metrics.
John Scarrow General Manager Online Safety Technologies Microsoft Corporation """
Then again the idea that "web 1.0" was the "read-only" web are bollocks too, but far more widely held. I remember coding my first CGI perl script for a guestbook in the mid 90s. In fact in the original HTTP 1.0 RFC it explicitly mentions bulletin boards as a use for POST. The web's always been read-write, it's just that the early adopters weren't so keen to have their jibberings on other people's websites.
> > Businesses need to have a unique way to identify their clients.
A better counter to the intended claim would be to support the above claim. Businesses should have a unique way to identify their clients, it should not be a copy of someone else's (the govt's) way.
But 20 years ago, we just alt-tabbed between windows, and they just drew themselves as quickly as possible. Nowadays, we (not me, it's a complete abomination, IMHO) want high resolution alphablended 3D wibbly-wobbly animations in order to switch between programs. Pulling a figure out of my arse, that must be about 100x as much work. (The folk interpretation of Moore's Law supports a 57x increase in that period.)
Likewise, some browsers are now doing web searches in the background with every character you type in the search box - that's way more than 100x work than just rendering 1 more character and waiting for you to click 'search'.
What the heck are you gibbering about? I have in my hands a device (well, three different ones actually, but I can only hold one at a time) running linux, with only solid state storage, and I'm happily running swap on it. And it's been running happily for several years. You're clearly doing it wrong, there's nothing intrinsically bad about running swap on solid state storage.
"Perhaps this explains why non Africans have... higher average IQs"
The difference in IQ between someone who has had a decent education and someone who has had none is incomparably vaster than the relatively insignificant differences reported in those results. Therefore all you are measuring is the education system, everything else is lost in the noise. So the results in that link only tell me that the US education system isn't very good at educating the majority of those who are identified as black.
Very much agreed on all points. Did the open brewing tour too - was given the tour by Jean-Pierre himself - he's a wonderful character. If you're ever back in Brussels again, the two Chez Moeder Lambic bars are the bars for you.
As said elsewhere, their Cuvee Renees are very good. Everything else is too sweet (but such easy drinkers). I'm cellaring a few of those bottles until well past their best-before date in order to see whether any of the sugars will be broken down. However, they just fall short of Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Boon, and a few other brewers of the traditional styles.
Here are my fruit lambic, and geuze lambic ratings: http://www.ratebeer.com/user/51287/styleratings/14/ http://www.ratebeer.com/user/51287/styleratings/73/ Make of that what you will. I'm a sucker for the style, so even the non-traditional (overly sweet) ones tend to get good ratings.
Weird. The T (a dialect of Scheme) we used as we worked our way through Abelson & Sussman had a compiler. However, learning to use the compiler was nothing more than learning what it's name was - there's really nothing else to learn. (This was in the UK, not MIT).
A little information is a dangerous thing. Brettanomyces is not a bacterium, and brettanomyces is the largest contributor to sour tastes in lambics. (Not necessarily the contributor of the largest tastes, acetobacteria will give a monstrously strong taste, but that taste is generally called a brewing flaw.) In fact, many of the deliberately sour beers I've had (I've had at least 150 just of the lambic styles, but have had many other sours that are not lambics) have been soured purely with brettanomyces, and not any bacteria, as they've not been spontaniously fermented, the pure lab-bred brett culture has been specifically added by the brewer.
I'm particularly pleased that the release of the AKDL1 is worthy of mention on the Denon Wikipedia page: <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denon> It's not quite as snarky as I'd like, but I guess it has to remain vaguely encyclopaedic.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the Tivo is a general purpose computer. It's just they they've made it boot into software you can't exit from, and provided no way to access that general purpose computer's features. There's nothing new about that. Most cash machines in the last 10-15 years have been general purpose computers too. Before that, I remember Siemens' ISDN protocol tester (costing 100000 quid) was deep down just a general purpose computer with an ISDN card, and some fancy software running on it.
You clearly don't understand the scientific method. The scientific method is to find tests which would show a theory to be false were it in fact to be false. Then to perform those tests. And to see your theory survive unscathed. When all imaginable tests fail to disprove a theory, then it is considered proved. However, the invitation to attempt to disprove it always remains open.
In the fluffy terms that the general public understand, evolution is clearly true and proved. In the precise details that evolutionary researchers toil over, there are still uncertainties and unanswered questions. But a bikeshed with a red roof and a bikeshed with a blue roof are both still bikesheds.
Occasionally the central pole judders due to lateral forces on it. If so, the demo is full of failures.
And I think you'll find every monopod robot ever built has utilised air time in order to maintain balance and change position. Cue mentions of MIT back in the 90s...
Indeed, the "boom for lateral stabilisation" was very subtle, wasn't it?
A lot of people in the robotics field will almost certainly have just sighed "oh, god, not *another* bipedal forward-backward-only walker/runner". There are already too many of those in the world (and I'm sure several that run a lot quicker than MABEL, but can't back that up with real data).
No disagreement there. I don't know enough about them to have a particularly strong opinion about them. I still think I rate them as "preferable to paypal", as I don't like the fact that paypal does bank-like things, yet isn't (regulated like) a bank.
Absolutely. I like the historical chart (e.g. wikipedia - "gold standard")- it makes the stock markets' peaks look quite tame. How high can this one go?
Whilst your comment does show some insight, I personally think that there would be an anti-correlation between the two communities (2nd life vs. bitcoin). Not sure I can back that up with anything apart from gut feel.
Gold isn't backed by anything either. It merely has a wide range of markets, ranging from jewellers to electronics manufacturers, that want to get hold of it for its intrinsic physical properties.
Gold certificates are backed - by gold, obviously. Unless they're part-backed...
> it really is accepted on the basis of "just because we want it to be".
/fiat/.
One day some geeks said "I want a new currency"...
"Make it so!" Or as they'd say in Latin -
Now look up "fiat currency".
The phrase "backed by fiat" is pure sophistry. It means "not backed by anything real". Charitably, it means "backed by the reputation of the issuer", which of course is illusory. You only trust them because you *have* to trust them, as they're the people who will throw you in their jails if you do things like countermanding their monopoly over taxing the exchange of goods and services (such as not paying your income tax).
So the real value of "conventional units" to Russians is what? They can't pay their taxes in it. So by your *emphatic* assertion above, it has no real value. Yet remarkably is seems to have a tangible value to so many - I was able to buy food and drinks from shops, meals from restaurants, CDs, clothes, and most things I needed to live with it while I was there. (Known further west as the "US dollar", in case you've not encountered them before.)
I was chatting to the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England (you know, the guy who puts his signature on the banknotes) over a meal a while back, and I asked him precisely what the "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ..." above his name implied - what format would the payment take? He replied that I'd just be given the note back. There is nothing backing the UK currency, it is textbook fiat currency. You appear to be using "backed" in a different way from others.
You seem to be conflating the stated criticism of
"illegally generat(ed|ing) bitcoins"
with a concept that only you seem to want to talk about, namely
"generating illegal bitcoins".
These two have as much in common as building slow sportscars does to slowly building sportscars. I.e. nothing.
"""
Microsoft selected NSS Labs, as a supplement to our own internal research, for its integrity and expertise in providing accurate third-party benchmarks. This service has been instrumental in providing us with reliable metrics.
John Scarrow
General Manager Online Safety Technologies
Microsoft Corporation
"""
where 'selected' = 'paid'
Very much agreed.
Then again the idea that "web 1.0" was the "read-only" web are bollocks too, but far more widely held. I remember coding my first CGI perl script for a guestbook in the mid 90s. In fact in the original HTTP 1.0 RFC it explicitly mentions bulletin boards as a use for POST. The web's always been read-write, it's just that the early adopters weren't so keen to have their jibberings on other people's websites.
> > Businesses need to have a unique way to identify their clients.
A better counter to the intended claim would be to support the above claim. Businesses should have a unique way to identify their clients, it should not be a copy of someone else's (the govt's) way.
But 20 years ago, we just alt-tabbed between windows, and they just drew themselves as quickly as possible. Nowadays, we (not me, it's a complete abomination, IMHO) want high resolution alphablended 3D wibbly-wobbly animations in order to switch between programs. Pulling a figure out of my arse, that must be about 100x as much work. (The folk interpretation of Moore's Law supports a 57x increase in that period.)
Likewise, some browsers are now doing web searches in the background with every character you type in the search box - that's way more than 100x work than just rendering 1 more character and waiting for you to click 'search'.
What the heck are you gibbering about? I have in my hands a device (well, three different ones actually, but I can only hold one at a time) running linux, with only solid state storage, and I'm happily running swap on it. And it's been running happily for several years. You're clearly doing it wrong, there's nothing intrinsically bad about running swap on solid state storage.
"Perhaps this explains why non Africans have ... higher average IQs"
The difference in IQ between someone who has had a decent education and someone who has had none is incomparably vaster than the relatively insignificant differences reported in those results. Therefore all you are measuring is the education system, everything else is lost in the noise. So the results in that link only tell me that the US education system isn't very good at educating the majority of those who are identified as black.
Very much agreed on all points. Did the open brewing tour too - was given the tour by Jean-Pierre himself - he's a wonderful character. If you're ever back in Brussels again, the two Chez Moeder Lambic bars are the bars for you.
As said elsewhere, their Cuvee Renees are very good. Everything else is too sweet (but such easy drinkers). I'm cellaring a few of those bottles until well past their best-before date in order to see whether any of the sugars will be broken down. However, they just fall short of Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Boon, and a few other brewers of the traditional styles.
Here are my fruit lambic, and geuze lambic ratings:
http://www.ratebeer.com/user/51287/styleratings/14/
http://www.ratebeer.com/user/51287/styleratings/73/
Make of that what you will. I'm a sucker for the style, so even the non-traditional (overly sweet) ones tend to get good ratings.
Weird. The T (a dialect of Scheme) we used as we worked our way through Abelson & Sussman had a compiler. However, learning to use the compiler was nothing more than learning what it's name was - there's really nothing else to learn. (This was in the UK, not MIT).
A little information is a dangerous thing. Brettanomyces is not a bacterium, and brettanomyces is the largest contributor to sour tastes in lambics. (Not necessarily the contributor of the largest tastes, acetobacteria will give a monstrously strong taste, but that taste is generally called a brewing flaw.) In fact, many of the deliberately sour beers I've had (I've had at least 150 just of the lambic styles, but have had many other sours that are not lambics) have been soured purely with brettanomyces, and not any bacteria, as they've not been spontaniously fermented, the pure lab-bred brett culture has been specifically added by the brewer.
I think you'll find it's ASCII that doesn't like code 253, or any code over 127.
No need to just be "pretty sure", when you're actually "correct to the dotted t and crossed i":
http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/trademark_logo_pub.aspx
I'm particularly pleased that the release of the AKDL1 is worthy of mention on the Denon Wikipedia page:
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denon>
It's not quite as snarky as I'd like, but I guess it has to remain vaguely encyclopaedic.