The Wall Street Journal referred to him yesterday as the "mastermind" behind the "notorious" Pirate Bay, which was an amusing use of language. Or alarming.
Virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century (and the present century) can be traced in a straight line back to Picasso in some phase. His importance has far less to do with whether or not you "like" him than it does with the incredible fecundity of his ideas and his perceptual acuity -- and what they gave birth to. Not to engage in artspeak, but it's true.
It's strange to be on a site where so many discussions take place at a satisfying level of understanding and yet find opinions about art that I would expect from the mouth of my 83-year-old aunt, sitting in her room full of doggie pictures and sunset seascapes.
Sorry to tell you Jane Q. Public, but you're full of shit. Anyone who has lived in both Europe and the United States for extended periods of time (I've lived 20 years in each) will tell you that the US crime problem is IMMENSE compared to Europe. Violent crime in America is not restricted to the big city. I lived in US cities from Podunk, Nebraska to several large cities in the East. Americans feel threatened by crime in each and every one of them. In Europe, when crimes do occur, they really are almost exclusively between various breeds of mafiosi. There are no serial rapists haunting the suburbs, ordinary people do not feel compelled to pack a firearm in self-defense (something you'll find is the case in virtually every small American city in the West, justified or not), there is no danger in any city – even the large ones – walking home from a theater or bar at three in the morning or getting on the Metro. University professors do not shoot fellow faculty members in the head at faculty meetings. School shootings have occurred in two countries, Finland and Germany, the first of which is unusual in Europe in that its gun laws pretty much mirror America's. But the scope of these phenomena is extremely restricted compared to the copycatting that has gone on in America. So don't be so quick to pat yourself on the back. You don't deserve it. America is a culture of violence, plain and simple.
Absolutely right. I'm a translator. Google Translate can now be set to feed into memoQ, SDL Trados and probably other CAT software automatically. I don't know what the terms of service are on Google Translate but perhaps the 'abuse' they're talking about is partially related to the several hundred times per day that I and many other Trados and memoQ users hit the site via the API for a translation. The irony is, I blow the Google translation out without even reading it about 90% of the time. But since Trados grabs it automatically for every translation unit (read: every sentence), it adds up to a lot of hits.
It might have behooved SDL Trados and the others to make getting a Google translation optional for every unit -- i.e., no translation from Google if you don't press a key. That way, you'd only make use of Google when you really needed to, instead of using it en masse for the entire document.
In any event, I think this'll have a real impact for translators who've gotten used to using it. Trusting a (free) external source for the tools you need to work probably isn't wise.
...that one day, all God's androids will join hands and sing, in the words of the old Nokia spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"
Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We’ll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress...
I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.
If the number of particles available to create structure is constrained over given volumes of space (and it is), an infinite universe would indeed contain copies, since the same combinations would necessarily reoccur. In fact, there would be an infinite number of copies. Even a very large universe (one whose size exhausts the number of possible combinations of the building blocks) would contain some copies. No experimental proof needed in this case: it's provable mathematically.
Sorry, but in this particular instance, rightly or wrongly, I think "you're judged by the company you keep." Obama is too close to the entertainment industry.
With regard to a lawyer's job being to vigorously defend his or her client -- lawyers take this almost on the level of the doctors' Hippocratic Oath, don't they? While I grant you that every client has the right for their case to be put forth with vigor, there's still a grey area here -- a danger that the lawyer's willingness to work for any client will wind him up in the same ethical boat as a "have gun, will travel" marketing fuck.
Re:The "Comic Code" never had any "teeth".
on
Comics Code Dead
·
· Score: 1
He means: "The fact that publishers electing not to take part in the voluntary controls remained unknown to the comic-buying public probably indicates the controls had some effect, i.e., that publishers not taking part weren't able to achieve commercial viability."
My connection must be coming through your territory, then:-) Youtube started getting throttled in this country (CZ) in mid-November. My ISP is a three-man show and they swear they know nothing about it. I believe them. Therefore it must be upstream somewhere. I used to get 400, now youtube maxes at around 50.
Where exactly does the dividing line between "spends millions on lobbying and campaign contributions" and "bribes politicians outright" get drawn? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. It seems to me there's something broken in the system, something which will never get fixed because it underwrites the ambitions of the people in power.
Unfortunately, "equal time for nutjobs" has been a basic element of mainstream journalistic practice for decades and has distorted virtually every news story ever written.
Chomsky noted twenty years ago that discussion of the alleged dangers of unrestricted free speech was already occurring openly back in the mid-1970s:
"...the issue debated is whether the media have not exceeded proper bounds... even threatening the existence of democratic institutions in their contentious and irresponsible defiance of authority. A 1975 study on "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission concluded that the media have become a "notable new source of national power," one aspect of an "excess of democracy" that contributes to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a consequent "decline in the influence of democracy abroad." This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly." [Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, South End Press, 1989, available online at chomsky.info]
The Jesus Christ of the bible is a fictional character in a historical play about truth and meaning. There is no body of evidence in any science which would compel one to believe otherwise. The "new covenant" is just a bunch of silly bullshit Christians spout to apologize for the undeniable, unforgivable ugliness present in the Old Testament.
Jesus' "old man" wasn't God. He was, presumably, Joseph. And Joseph is long since dead, not in control of anything
I've had sex for pleasure for almost 40 years now. I don't recall it being the source of "painful and distracting situations". Did you get your dick stuck in a hole, or what? Why "painful"? C'mon.
If there is a god, God is not a "he". The bible is not "his" book. Jesus was not "his" son. And no, if your son is disobedient, you should not drag him down to the gates of the town and have him stoned to death by the other believers (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).
The universe is a very big place. Jesus and his Dad don't have enough magic to contain it anymore.
Interesting perspective. I guess it does differ by occupation quite a bit. I've lived in Europe twenty years. In my own former field, tv news, I remember being blown away by the fact that the most popular TV meteorologist when I arrived had a ponytail halfway down to his waist. Maybe that would fly in the US now, too, but it wouldn't have at any station where I ever worked.
Oops, I guess this is sort of a new low in not reading TFA. In this case, even the fucking headline. Dress codes are a hot-button issue with me. I do think they're a much bigger deal back in the US than they are here. And even the Swiss -- at least the ones not working for that particular bank -- are less "uniformed" than you'd think. But the post was a bit odd. Mea culpa.
dress codes are bullshit. Total bullshit. Go to a bank in Italy on a summer's day, for instance. You'll find the clerks are dressed way down from what you'd see in the US. No tie, open shirt collar. And you know what? You won't have any sense that they're "unprofessional". Whatever that means. Ride the train through Switzerland. A conductor with an earring may well greet you. He did me. And he did his work efficiently.
What I'm saying is that the whole "dress code" is largely US-centric. That's not to say there are no rules of dress -- I've had the pleasure of getting thrown out of a store right off the beach in the South of France for not wearing a shirt. But just as hard-working Europeans still feel justified in demanding 5 weeks of holiday and are less inclined to put in 60-hour weeks, they show up for work dressed neatly but not in the uniform that's demanded of their American counterparts. The thing that's amazing to me is that most people posting here clearly feel the uniform is justified. What do you care if the guy in the bank has a tie on or not? Why should any employer have that kind of power over you?
I spent ten years of my life as a "real" journalist in several major US media markets. The primary difference between the news "we" presented and what's being presented via Wikileaks is precisely that Wikileaks allows more or less unfiltered access to the source material. Ask yourself: do you really want someone else selecting what's fit for you to read? Trust me, having unfettered access to original sources, so that you can independently develop your own take on what's happening, is infinitely better for you -- and better for society -- than having the news dished out to you by a "professional" like me in my former incarnation.
What's happening to Wikileaks is astounding and should be scaring the living shit out of each and every one of you. They have been transformed into a "criminal" organization in the eyes of many members of the public and many members of the mainstream media inside of a week. From the beside-the-point rape case involving Julian Assange to the loss of hosting, DNS services and, now, the possibility to gain funding. That's how easy it was to get the job done.
I've been an observer of political life, professional and otherwise, for more than forty years. Never have I seen an assault on free speech like this one. It doesn't matter what your personal view is on the wisdom of exposing the day-to-day minutiae of realpolitik. Free speech -- and your right as citizens to live under an open government -- are under attack. I can only hope people will speak up to defend them.
We got our 5-year-old daughter a computer last Christmas. She was always pretty facile with other people's computers -- at age 3, she was already capable of hooking multiple parties up on a Skype call, leaving them to wonder why the hell they were all having this conversation -- so when her fifth Christmas came, we figured it was time.
I second the people who've said not to worry about porn -- it basically has no meaning to her and she's never once gotten to a porn page by mistake anyway. If she does, well, you just say "they're having sex" and that'll pretty much be the end of it (provided it's not double self-penetration with a two-headed dildo or something, then you might have a little more explaining to do). The real danger is letting the netbook turn into a youtube cartoon factory. We don't have a TV, so the temptation is great.
But the netbook's been very good in a lot of ways. She knows how to do a search for stuff she wants to find out about -- even if she usually needs help to read results that are over her level. She definitely learns a lot from using the 'image' option on google. The computer's helped her reading, helped her math (there are a jillion sites for kids). She's been drawing using computers (other people's:-) for a long time, using Artweaver, among other programs. And lately, I'm beginning to teach her to do some very simple programming herself using Processing, which lets her create simple animations in literally two or three lines of code.
So don't be afraid to give a kid a computer. It's what they do with it that counts and with a little involvement from you, there are lots of good things that can be done, even at that age.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone mark the parent 'Flamebait'? He's certainly making a valid point.
The Wall Street Journal referred to him yesterday as the "mastermind" behind the "notorious" Pirate Bay, which was an amusing use of language. Or alarming.
Virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century (and the present century) can be traced in a straight line back to Picasso in some phase. His importance has far less to do with whether or not you "like" him than it does with the incredible fecundity of his ideas and his perceptual acuity -- and what they gave birth to. Not to engage in artspeak, but it's true.
It's strange to be on a site where so many discussions take place at a satisfying level of understanding and yet find opinions about art that I would expect from the mouth of my 83-year-old aunt, sitting in her room full of doggie pictures and sunset seascapes.
Sorry to tell you Jane Q. Public, but you're full of shit. Anyone who has lived in both Europe and the United States for extended periods of time (I've lived 20 years in each) will tell you that the US crime problem is IMMENSE compared to Europe. Violent crime in America is not restricted to the big city. I lived in US cities from Podunk, Nebraska to several large cities in the East. Americans feel threatened by crime in each and every one of them. In Europe, when crimes do occur, they really are almost exclusively between various breeds of mafiosi. There are no serial rapists haunting the suburbs, ordinary people do not feel compelled to pack a firearm in self-defense (something you'll find is the case in virtually every small American city in the West, justified or not), there is no danger in any city – even the large ones – walking home from a theater or bar at three in the morning or getting on the Metro. University professors do not shoot fellow faculty members in the head at faculty meetings. School shootings have occurred in two countries, Finland and Germany, the first of which is unusual in Europe in that its gun laws pretty much mirror America's. But the scope of these phenomena is extremely restricted compared to the copycatting that has gone on in America. So don't be so quick to pat yourself on the back. You don't deserve it. America is a culture of violence, plain and simple.
Absolutely right. I'm a translator. Google Translate can now be set to feed into memoQ, SDL Trados and probably other CAT software automatically. I don't know what the terms of service are on Google Translate but perhaps the 'abuse' they're talking about is partially related to the several hundred times per day that I and many other Trados and memoQ users hit the site via the API for a translation. The irony is, I blow the Google translation out without even reading it about 90% of the time. But since Trados grabs it automatically for every translation unit (read: every sentence), it adds up to a lot of hits.
It might have behooved SDL Trados and the others to make getting a Google translation optional for every unit -- i.e., no translation from Google if you don't press a key. That way, you'd only make use of Google when you really needed to, instead of using it en masse for the entire document.
In any event, I think this'll have a real impact for translators who've gotten used to using it. Trusting a (free) external source for the tools you need to work probably isn't wise.
...that one day, all God's androids will join hands and sing, in the words of the old Nokia spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"
Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We’ll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress...
I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.
If the number of particles available to create structure is constrained over given volumes of space (and it is), an infinite universe would indeed contain copies, since the same combinations would necessarily reoccur. In fact, there would be an infinite number of copies. Even a very large universe (one whose size exhausts the number of possible combinations of the building blocks) would contain some copies. No experimental proof needed in this case: it's provable mathematically.
Sorry, but in this particular instance, rightly or wrongly, I think "you're judged by the company you keep." Obama is too close to the entertainment industry.
With regard to a lawyer's job being to vigorously defend his or her client -- lawyers take this almost on the level of the doctors' Hippocratic Oath, don't they? While I grant you that every client has the right for their case to be put forth with vigor, there's still a grey area here -- a danger that the lawyer's willingness to work for any client will wind him up in the same ethical boat as a "have gun, will travel" marketing fuck.
He means: "The fact that publishers electing not to take part in the voluntary controls remained unknown to the comic-buying public probably indicates the controls had some effect, i.e., that publishers not taking part weren't able to achieve commercial viability."
My connection must be coming through your territory, then :-) Youtube started getting throttled in this country (CZ) in mid-November. My ISP is a three-man show and they swear they know nothing about it. I believe them. Therefore it must be upstream somewhere. I used to get 400, now youtube maxes at around 50.
+5 Insightful. Mod parent up!
Where exactly does the dividing line between "spends millions on lobbying and campaign contributions" and "bribes politicians outright" get drawn? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. It seems to me there's something broken in the system, something which will never get fixed because it underwrites the ambitions of the people in power.
Unfortunately, "equal time for nutjobs" has been a basic element of mainstream journalistic practice for decades and has distorted virtually every news story ever written.
[Quote from Noam Chomsky removed by the editor for unknown reason.]
Chomsky noted twenty years ago that discussion of the alleged dangers of unrestricted free speech was already occurring openly back in the mid-1970s:
"...the issue debated is whether the media have not exceeded proper bounds... even threatening the existence of democratic institutions in their contentious and irresponsible defiance of authority. A 1975 study on "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission concluded that the media have become a "notable new source of national power," one aspect of an "excess of democracy" that contributes to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a consequent "decline in the influence of democracy abroad." This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly." [Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, South End Press, 1989, available online at chomsky.info]
The Jesus Christ of the bible is a fictional character in a historical play about truth and meaning. There is no body of evidence in any science which would compel one to believe otherwise. The "new covenant" is just a bunch of silly bullshit Christians spout to apologize for the undeniable, unforgivable ugliness present in the Old Testament.
Jesus' "old man" wasn't God. He was, presumably, Joseph. And Joseph is long since dead, not in control of anything
Not by any measure.
I've had sex for pleasure for almost 40 years now. I don't recall it being the source of "painful and distracting situations". Did you get your dick stuck in a hole, or what? Why "painful"? C'mon.
If there is a god, God is not a "he". The bible is not "his" book. Jesus was not "his" son. And no, if your son is disobedient, you should not drag him down to the gates of the town and have him stoned to death by the other believers (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).
The universe is a very big place. Jesus and his Dad don't have enough magic to contain it anymore.
Interesting perspective. I guess it does differ by occupation quite a bit. I've lived in Europe twenty years. In my own former field, tv news, I remember being blown away by the fact that the most popular TV meteorologist when I arrived had a ponytail halfway down to his waist. Maybe that would fly in the US now, too, but it wouldn't have at any station where I ever worked.
Oops, I guess this is sort of a new low in not reading TFA. In this case, even the fucking headline. Dress codes are a hot-button issue with me. I do think they're a much bigger deal back in the US than they are here. And even the Swiss -- at least the ones not working for that particular bank -- are less "uniformed" than you'd think. But the post was a bit odd. Mea culpa.
dress codes are bullshit. Total bullshit. Go to a bank in Italy on a summer's day, for instance. You'll find the clerks are dressed way down from what you'd see in the US. No tie, open shirt collar. And you know what? You won't have any sense that they're "unprofessional". Whatever that means. Ride the train through Switzerland. A conductor with an earring may well greet you. He did me. And he did his work efficiently.
What I'm saying is that the whole "dress code" is largely US-centric. That's not to say there are no rules of dress -- I've had the pleasure of getting thrown out of a store right off the beach in the South of France for not wearing a shirt. But just as hard-working Europeans still feel justified in demanding 5 weeks of holiday and are less inclined to put in 60-hour weeks, they show up for work dressed neatly but not in the uniform that's demanded of their American counterparts. The thing that's amazing to me is that most people posting here clearly feel the uniform is justified. What do you care if the guy in the bank has a tie on or not? Why should any employer have that kind of power over you?
I spent ten years of my life as a "real" journalist in several major US media markets. The primary difference between the news "we" presented and what's being presented via Wikileaks is precisely that Wikileaks allows more or less unfiltered access to the source material. Ask yourself: do you really want someone else selecting what's fit for you to read? Trust me, having unfettered access to original sources, so that you can independently develop your own take on what's happening, is infinitely better for you -- and better for society -- than having the news dished out to you by a "professional" like me in my former incarnation.
What's happening to Wikileaks is astounding and should be scaring the living shit out of each and every one of you. They have been transformed into a "criminal" organization in the eyes of many members of the public and many members of the mainstream media inside of a week. From the beside-the-point rape case involving Julian Assange to the loss of hosting, DNS services and, now, the possibility to gain funding. That's how easy it was to get the job done.
I've been an observer of political life, professional and otherwise, for more than forty years. Never have I seen an assault on free speech like this one. It doesn't matter what your personal view is on the wisdom of exposing the day-to-day minutiae of realpolitik. Free speech -- and your right as citizens to live under an open government -- are under attack. I can only hope people will speak up to defend them.
Why would anyone mod the parent 'troll'? Are your religious beliefs that easily offended?
...and it can be quite a good tool.
We got our 5-year-old daughter a computer last Christmas. She was always pretty facile with other people's computers -- at age 3, she was already capable of hooking multiple parties up on a Skype call, leaving them to wonder why the hell they were all having this conversation -- so when her fifth Christmas came, we figured it was time.
I second the people who've said not to worry about porn -- it basically has no meaning to her and she's never once gotten to a porn page by mistake anyway. If she does, well, you just say "they're having sex" and that'll pretty much be the end of it (provided it's not double self-penetration with a two-headed dildo or something, then you might have a little more explaining to do). The real danger is letting the netbook turn into a youtube cartoon factory. We don't have a TV, so the temptation is great.
But the netbook's been very good in a lot of ways. She knows how to do a search for stuff she wants to find out about -- even if she usually needs help to read results that are over her level. She definitely learns a lot from using the 'image' option on google. The computer's helped her reading, helped her math (there are a jillion sites for kids). She's been drawing using computers (other people's :-) for a long time, using Artweaver, among other programs. And lately, I'm beginning to teach her to do some very simple programming herself using Processing, which lets her create simple animations in literally two or three lines of code.
So don't be afraid to give a kid a computer. It's what they do with it that counts and with a little involvement from you, there are lots of good things that can be done, even at that age.