What you want is a TiVo. Since I got that a few months ago, I'm watching more tv than ever.
Pause, fast forward, rewind, check
Still ads, but you can fast foward through them or use 30-second skip
Can't really help you there, all I can say is don't watch the crap you don't want to watch.
Same as above
Check. If you just thumbs-up and thumbs-down shows you like and dislike, it'll get pretty good at recording suggestions for you. If you want more control you can do some really nice things with wishlists.
Seriously, the TiVo is exactly what you're begging for. It lets you watch exactly what you want on your schedule, instead of when some executive somewhere thinks would get the best ratings.
As annoying as telemarketing calls are, they do serve a function. Just because 50 million people believe that they shouldn't have to be bothered saying "I'm not interested." doesn't necessarily mean Congress can shut the industry down. Clearly, somebody is interested otherwise the calls wouldn't keep coming.
Congress isn't shutting down the industry. They're only saying that you can't call the people who have officially declared they don't want to be called. If the DMA had any integrity, they'd be fighting hard for this bill to pass, since it prevents them from wasting their time on people who have already declared they don't want what's being offered. But since the DMA companies make money from the people who are too timid to hang up on marketers, they need to be stopped by something stronger than self-policing.
Klingon is a full language, and Quenya and Sindarin (Tolkien's main Elvish languages) are too, but Tengwar is just a writing system that can be adapted to many different languages. However, depending on the language it's often more than just a simple substitution cipher (it's written phonetically, so there are many different Tengwar modes for English, all slightly different).
It's a problem of numbers, though. Yes, you'll always need a few people to monitor, upgrade, repair, etc, but you'll never need anywhere near as many. So a huge factory full of employees gets reduced to maybe five guys taking turns with the pager, getting paged to go in if anything goes wrong. You'll never eliminate people entirely, but you'll come way too close enough. The heart of the problem is that although there are tasks that can never be done as well by machines, there are also people who cannot do anything (profitable) cheaper/faster/better than machines. Right now the uneducated or just plain not-too-bright can work in McDonald's, but what happens when anything easy/simple enough for them to handle can be done cheaper by an automated system? Unemployment rises not when there are no jobs at all for humans, but when there are fewer jobs than there are people seeking them.
Ok, so it's a bit harder than that, but I'm not convinced it's much harder. Randomly check and don't check boxes, a little logic based on "Please" or "Please don't", if there's a required field you don't have information for put in 12345, else leave it blank. There will always be a few that slip through the cracks, but the idea is the spammer approach, that if you can only get half of them to work you've still launched a bewildering attack. It might take more than ten minutes, but I bet it wouldn't take a good hacker more than a day or two to get one that could successfully work for more than half of the forms out there. The lesson of script kiddies is it only takes one person with the knowledge to write it and the perverse nature to make it widely available before anyone with a grudge starts using it. Really, the hardest part of the whole thing is getting the information.
Obviously you didn't read the article. The whole point is that instead of being limited by the free time of the people you piss off, the attack can be automated. That is, I could (were I that sort of person) whip up a quick perl script, search google, and sign the target up for literally thousands of different mailings all by myself. So where the attack on Ralsky came from a cadre of attack geeks, the attack against YOU could come from that one script kiddie who has nothing better to do with those ten minutes.
If you'd read the Apocalypse, you'd know that that line was taken directly from it (although it was an example of a possible implementation of a bit of the internals of perl).
While they probably should have a voice acting category, that isn't what this is. Because of all the motion capture stuff, he WAS doing actually expression with the body and face, and it was those expressions we saw on screen. Granted, they were run through a computer so that we never actually saw him, but fundamentally it was his acting that made gollum who he was. Put another way, if the actor had been shown in makeup, he would have done just as good a job, and if a less talented actor had been behind the cgi, we would have ended up with Jar-Jar.
For a while I've been using the following bookmarklet, which does a pretty good job. Suggestions are definitely welcome. Basically, it first tries to follow the "Next" LINK if there is one. If that fails, it searches for a link with the text "Next", and if that fails it tries to increment the last number in the url (so if you're on image001.jpg it'll go to image002.jpg). I appologize that it's not well formatted and pretty hard to follow; it was cobbled together from a few different bookmarklets.
javascript:( function(){ var z,i,e,s; z = document.getElementsByTagName('LINK'); for (i = 0; i < z.length; ++i) {
if (z[i].rel.toLowerCase().indexOf('next') != -1){
document.location=z[i].href;
return;
} }; z = document.links; for (i = 0; i < z.length; ++i) {
if ((z[i].innerHTML && z[i].innerHTML.toLowerCase().indexOf('next') != -1)){
document.location=z[i].href;
return;
} } IB=1; function isDigit(c) {
return ("0" <= c && c <= "9") } L = location.href; LL = L.length; for (e=LL-1; e>=0; --e)
if (isDigit(L.charAt(e))) {
for(s=e-1; s>=0; --s)
if (!isDigit(L.charAt(s)))
break;
break;
} ++s; if (e<0) return; oldNum = L.substring(s,e+1); newNum = "" + (parseInt(oldNum,10) + IB); while (newNum.length < oldNum.length)
newNum = "0" + newNum; location.href = L.substring(0,s) + newNum + L.slice(e+1); })();
Btw, if you have middle click set to open in a new tab, you don't even have to right click and choose from the menu. You can middle click on the item in the history menu and open in a new tab. You can pretty much middle click ANYWHERE and open in a new tab.
Re:5th Amendment
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I hate to be pedantic (actually that's a lie, I love to be pedantic), but if you were only defending himself you still did kill her. If that's the case then don't try to pretend you didn't, but instead claim self defence. In which case the machine would be of no use, since what happened wouldn't really be in question, merely the motives and intentions and details. There are plenty of strong arguments against brain fingerprinting, but that's the stupidest one I've heard yet.
Re:The brain thinks only what the tounge can say
on
Kishotenketsu Programming?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What you're refering to is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the statement that human thought is limited by the language of the thinker. I think it's mostly discredited anymore, though I could be mistaken. Some interesting stuff, though.
Reminds me of the movie Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the verge of a nervous Breakdown). The one woman is in a detergent commercial where her son is a serial killer. "No blood! No guts either!"
I have to agree with most of what you said, especially Gimli being reduced to comic relief. But my penantry is bugging me to mention that Tinúviel is Sindarin for "nightingale", not "morning star". Which makes sense when you realize that the morning star is the evenstar, and is the light of Eärendil the Mariner, who wasn't even born when Lúthien died.
I can see a good use for it, and that's taking notes. Imagine carrying around a microphone with you 24/7 and recording everything you hear. We've got the space to store it all, after all. Then you can go back and check "When did he say that meeting was?" or whatever. And those with significant others know how often you'll end up arguing over who said what.
Of course, the concept of maximum can only be definited with respect to some partial ordering function. I was using the partial ordering function <, which in Perl orders numbers numerically and orders strings as being equal with 0. If you have some other partial ordering function you'd like to to define, I can easily replace the calls to < with calls to some user defined less_than function that does whatever you want, and the code will always return a maximal element (x such that for all y, it is not the case that less_than(y,x)). Of course, you'd rather just say I'm wrong than properly define Maximum or notions of well-defined orderings, so just go ahead and call me wrong because my code didn't do whatever it was you had in mind.
Incidentally, the difference between $_ and @_ is a matter of syntax, and every programming language, even your beloved XL, has syntax that has to be learned.
Why can't I just "forget XL for the moment"? Because for some simple examples, XL is the only language where I can express the concept at all. Maximum is a good example. I know of no language which lets you define it "perfectly". Give me any language (and I know a few at least superficially) and write Maximum in that language, and I can probably point out why it doesn't behave enough like the mathematician's concept called "Maximum".
How about Perl?
sub Maximum { my $max = shift; for (@_){ $max = $_ if $_ > $max; } return $max; }
or we could just translate your own Maximum version
sub Maximum { my $N = shift; return $N unless @_; my $result = Maximum(@_); if ($result < $N) { $result = $N } return $result; }
The Tripwire Manager is most certainly not Windows only; I know because I run it daily on a Linux box monitoring two Linux boxen and over 30 Solaris machines. I don't know about Irix, but I don't see why it would possibly be changing all those files. And you can turn off checking of attributes like inode and timestamp but leave on important attributes like checksums (we have a few files that get overwritten every night as part of a centralized configuration system, but have it set up not to notify us unless the contents change).
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it great that those hundreds of drivers are inconvenienced daily so that you can jaywalk safely? What a great win for society!
- Pause, fast forward, rewind, check
- Still ads, but you can fast foward through them or use 30-second skip
- Can't really help you there, all I can say is don't watch the crap you don't want to watch.
- Same as above
- Check. If you just thumbs-up and thumbs-down shows you like and dislike, it'll get pretty good at recording suggestions for you. If you want more control you can do some really nice things with wishlists.
Seriously, the TiVo is exactly what you're begging for. It lets you watch exactly what you want on your schedule, instead of when some executive somewhere thinks would get the best ratings.Couldn't an electric wheelchair be reconfigured with a larger joystick/control thing positioned to be moved with his right leg?
Congress isn't shutting down the industry. They're only saying that you can't call the people who have officially declared they don't want to be called. If the DMA had any integrity, they'd be fighting hard for this bill to pass, since it prevents them from wasting their time on people who have already declared they don't want what's being offered. But since the DMA companies make money from the people who are too timid to hang up on marketers, they need to be stopped by something stronger than self-policing.
Klingon is a full language, and Quenya and Sindarin (Tolkien's main Elvish languages) are too, but Tengwar is just a writing system that can be adapted to many different languages. However, depending on the language it's often more than just a simple substitution cipher (it's written phonetically, so there are many different Tengwar modes for English, all slightly different).
It's a problem of numbers, though. Yes, you'll always need a few people to monitor, upgrade, repair, etc, but you'll never need anywhere near as many. So a huge factory full of employees gets reduced to maybe five guys taking turns with the pager, getting paged to go in if anything goes wrong. You'll never eliminate people entirely, but you'll come way too close enough. The heart of the problem is that although there are tasks that can never be done as well by machines, there are also people who cannot do anything (profitable) cheaper/faster/better than machines. Right now the uneducated or just plain not-too-bright can work in McDonald's, but what happens when anything easy/simple enough for them to handle can be done cheaper by an automated system? Unemployment rises not when there are no jobs at all for humans, but when there are fewer jobs than there are people seeking them.
Ok, so it's a bit harder than that, but I'm not convinced it's much harder. Randomly check and don't check boxes, a little logic based on "Please" or "Please don't", if there's a required field you don't have information for put in 12345, else leave it blank. There will always be a few that slip through the cracks, but the idea is the spammer approach, that if you can only get half of them to work you've still launched a bewildering attack. It might take more than ten minutes, but I bet it wouldn't take a good hacker more than a day or two to get one that could successfully work for more than half of the forms out there. The lesson of script kiddies is it only takes one person with the knowledge to write it and the perverse nature to make it widely available before anyone with a grudge starts using it. Really, the hardest part of the whole thing is getting the information.
Obviously you didn't read the article. The whole point is that instead of being limited by the free time of the people you piss off, the attack can be automated. That is, I could (were I that sort of person) whip up a quick perl script, search google, and sign the target up for literally thousands of different mailings all by myself. So where the attack on Ralsky came from a cadre of attack geeks, the attack against YOU could come from that one script kiddie who has nothing better to do with those ten minutes.
You're referring to the Uncanny Valley. Really interesting idea.
If you'd read the Apocalypse, you'd know that that line was taken directly from it (although it was an example of a possible implementation of a bit of the internals of perl).
While they probably should have a voice acting category, that isn't what this is. Because of all the motion capture stuff, he WAS doing actually expression with the body and face, and it was those expressions we saw on screen. Granted, they were run through a computer so that we never actually saw him, but fundamentally it was his acting that made gollum who he was. Put another way, if the actor had been shown in makeup, he would have done just as good a job, and if a less talented actor had been behind the cgi, we would have ended up with Jar-Jar.
Btw, if you have middle click set to open in a new tab, you don't even have to right click and choose from the menu. You can middle click on the item in the history menu and open in a new tab. You can pretty much middle click ANYWHERE and open in a new tab.
I hate to be pedantic (actually that's a lie, I love to be pedantic), but if you were only defending himself you still did kill her. If that's the case then don't try to pretend you didn't, but instead claim self defence. In which case the machine would be of no use, since what happened wouldn't really be in question, merely the motives and intentions and details. There are plenty of strong arguments against brain fingerprinting, but that's the stupidest one I've heard yet.
What you're refering to is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the statement that human thought is limited by the language of the thinker. I think it's mostly discredited anymore, though I could be mistaken. Some interesting stuff, though.
And here I thought it was "like I like my women...black!"
I guess you could also use "...wet!", but never, ever "...Profit!"
6) 1% (50) of the people SmegCo called report them to the Attorney General
7) $500/incident * 50 callers = $25,000 in damages
(note the lack of "Profit!" at the end)
Reminds me of the movie Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the verge of a nervous Breakdown). The one woman is in a detergent commercial where her son is a serial killer. "No blood! No guts either!"
I have to agree with most of what you said, especially Gimli being reduced to comic relief. But my penantry is bugging me to mention that Tinúviel is Sindarin for "nightingale", not "morning star". Which makes sense when you realize that the morning star is the evenstar, and is the light of Eärendil the Mariner, who wasn't even born when Lúthien died.
I can see a good use for it, and that's taking notes. Imagine carrying around a microphone with you 24/7 and recording everything you hear. We've got the space to store it all, after all. Then you can go back and check "When did he say that meeting was?" or whatever. And those with significant others know how often you'll end up arguing over who said what.
Incidentally, the difference between $_ and @_ is a matter of syntax, and every programming language, even your beloved XL, has syntax that has to be learned.
The Tripwire Manager is most certainly not Windows only; I know because I run it daily on a Linux box monitoring two Linux boxen and over 30 Solaris machines. I don't know about Irix, but I don't see why it would possibly be changing all those files. And you can turn off checking of attributes like inode and timestamp but leave on important attributes like checksums (we have a few files that get overwritten every night as part of a centralized configuration system, but have it set up not to notify us unless the contents change).