I kind of have to laugh at all the replies I got to this.
The sort of funny part is how everyone is tripping over themselves to point out that someone else had a similar idea earlier. I never once said otherwise, it was just an example.
You implied otherwise when you said that Ellison "came up with mass drivers". That's probably what got you all the "but X was earlier" replies.
And before that in 1966 there was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" during the war between Luna and Earth. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there were even earlier examples.
Throwing inert mass at your enemy is just about as old as it gets.
The most interesting deviation, to me, is 'aluminum.' If I recall correctly, the British term 'aluminium' IS actually correct, and 'Aluminum' used to be a brand OF aluminium, and won out in America due to popular usage.
Almost. But I imagine almost isn't good enough for Pedantic-Man.
It should be "unfiltered and unverified" news. A quick look @ the website, even scrolling down, shows no disclaimer that this unverified. Breaking news is fine, so I understand not wanting to take the time to verify, but there should be a disclaimer that it's unverified. And until this story on here, I never heard of it. So I may have taken something on there for fact had I stumbled on it by accident or via google search.
So if you stumbled on some random "news" site on the net you'd automatically assume it was verified news? That sounds pretty naive to me. Do you assume everything you read on Slashdot is verified by the editors? iReport.com makes no claim that the stories are verified and the connection to CNN is fairly subtle (a small faint "powered by CNN" logo at the bottom and an ad stating that iReport stories had been used on CNN). I don't see any reason to assume that the stories on that site are verified. The "about" page, which seems the obvious place to go to find out what verification is done clearly states up front that it is unverified:
The views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com!
I use a commercial mailing and web hosting package from 2 vendors. I have never used any form of ISP mail.
Someone provides connectivity between you and the net. It doesn't matter whether they are running the mail server or you are, if your email is not encrypted then it is readable by them. And as I said, you generally won't even know who your correspondents are using and they can also easily read your email. If you are not encrypting your email then you have no expectation of privacy and are no better off than if you were using Gmail.
There is a very good excuse for me. My mails are private and I don't give anyone right to retain them forever or analyse them for ads.
Privacy has nothing to do with data security, which was what I was talking about. But if you want to talk privacy, fine. Do you encrypt all your emails? Because if you don't then you don't have any privacy anyway. Your ISP can already retain your email forever or analyse it for ads, as can the ISPs of your correspondents. So then you're already trusting companies you don't even know. But you won't trust Google?
Why not just use a POP3 or IMAP account that isn't spying on you then?
Because I can access it from any computer with a net connection. I don't have to have any software installed other than a web browser.
The poster's point was that GMail is great because it takes care of all the backing up and stuff for you. Your suggestion to avoid losing your data if GMail gets disconnected is to... back up your data. See the circle?
What? Here's the post I replied to:
True. But riddle me this: when you get up tomorrow and go to sign in to GMail and all you get is a single page saying "Due to financial constraints and an inability to derive revenue from GMail to pay our bills, we have regretfully been forced to terminate the service.", where are your game serial numbers now and how do you plan on getting at them? I know it seems unlikely Google would just drop a service like that. Except that, well, they already have [blogspot.com].
Where do they say that Gmail is great because it takes care of all the backing up? What they say is that you might lose all your data. But there are several ways to backup your data so that's FUD.
True. But riddle me this: when you get up tomorrow and go to sign in to GMail and all you get is a single page saying "Due to financial constraints and an inability to derive revenue from GMail to pay our bills, we have regretfully been forced to terminate the service.", where are your game serial numbers now and how do you plan on getting at them? I know it seems unlikely Google would just drop a service like that. Except that, well, they already have.
Gmail allows you to download your email via pop3 and imap. You can also set it to automatically all email to another account. There is no excuse not to have a backup of all your Gmail mail. This "it might suddenly vanish" argument is a strawman.
It seems to me they are missing a golden opportunity. Instead of policing and preventing use of copyrighted material, why not link to an online music store so you can BUY the songs to use with the charts?
Am I missing something here?
The GH3 site has links to iTunes to buy the original tracks, but that's not what you need to distribute cover versions - you need permission from the songwriters.
"It is likely that methane emissions off Svalbard have been continuous for about 15,000 years - since the last ice age - but as yet no one knows whether recent climactic shifts in the Arctic have begun to accelerate them to a point where they could in themselves exacerbate climate change, he said."
In other words, no, anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to have a real link to this.
Um, what? That's not what he said at all. He said they don't yet know. That is a radically different position from the "anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to be linked" that you concluded.
Performances are allowed under copyright. So how is this copyright infringement?
Published performances of cover songs require licenses. See e.g. this article, or consult Google, which knows all.
This is really no different than writing out sheet music for someone else's song and then trying to distribute that. Definitely copyright infringement if you don't have a license.
I would love this kind of solution if IR blasters were 100% reliable. But they occasionally fail to change channels properly, resulting in missed shows.
The one I'm using with MythTV hasn't failed to change channels correctly in the 3.5 years I've had it. It's recorded over 3500 programs in that time. Of course YMMV, but for me it's been 100% reliable so far.
I replied to the person above, but my reply works well for you, too. How did you get it to run on your crap hardware without XVMC support enabled in the precompiled Ubuntu binary? If the hardware you were using really was crap you should have needed that for glitch-free playback, right?
Only if you're doing HD. For SD you can get away with really low end hardware if you have a capture card that does encoding. I've had a frontend working with a 1GHz PIII without XVMC.
Let's say it takes 4 hours to build a reasonable MythTV box, install and configure it. $200 for this thing. $200/4 hours = $50/hour. For me personally, my time is worth way more per hour than that -- it makes more sense to go the prepackaged route.
You know you can buy prebuilt MythTV boxes. With support if you want. It'll cost you more than the Nero/Tivo thing but it'll do more too.
Second, Isn't this fundamentally a software problem. A bar code is a defined form with a known and rigid structure. Even with a blurry/fuzzy photograph, it should be possible to clean up the bars. For that matter, why are we even dealing with bars. The numbers are there under the bars. Why not use those?
I thought the same thing. Try to OCR the numbers and then regenerate the barcode and compare it to the picture for verification. But I doubt that all the barcode scanner app programmers have missed something that you and I thought of in a matter of minutes so I can only assume that either they already do this or that it doesn't work well for one reason or another (e.g. computational cost, or maybe if the barcode is too blurry to figure out then the numbers are useless too).
I only looked at the first few locations on the list, but several of them were obviously blurred or pixelated -- the Naval Observatory in DC is a perfect blurry circle amid high-res imagery, and the Air Force Base listed as #4 looks like someone inserted a mosaic art piece over the image.
Did this guy really not look at these locations? Those were in the top five, and there are links to the Google Maps locations in question, for crying out loud.
One of the points of TFA (which I've finally been able to read now that it's no longer Slashdotted) is that while there is degraded imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth (he shows the US Naval Observatory image in the article) there is no evidence that Google is responsible for the degradation in any example except the Basra, Iraq one. This is fairly apparent from the wide range of techniques used to censor the images - if it was done by Google you'd expect a consistent technique to be used.
Still even if only the 6 Boston locations are wrong, 6 false claims out of 51 is pretty poor. The IT Security article deserves criticism.
If the initial odds are estimated at 1 in 100, and there is a failure, the appearance of the failure does not affect the odds of another one just like it failing. It's still a 1 in 100 event.
You're missing the point. You think the initial odds are 1 in 100. You don't actually know that they are. The occurrence of the event may indicate that your original estimate of the odds was wrong and that the true odds were higher.
If I'm shooting craps, and I know my odds of getting a seven is say, 1 in 4, and I shoot a seven, and then another, and then a third one, what are my odds of getting another seven on my fourth roll? Better than 1 in 4 now would you say? no. Still in 1 in 4 same as it always was. Changing the dice won't make any difference either.
You don't know that the dice are fair. You think that the odds are 1 in 4. But then you roll 3 sevens in a row. Maybe the dice are fair and odds of getting another seven are 1 in 4. Or maybe the dice are loaded and the odds of getting another seven are much higher. The fact that you rolled 3 sevens in a row might indicate that the dice are loaded.
Incidentally the odds of rolling a seven on two fair dice are 1 in 6.
If the odds of a specific problem with a shuttle occurring are 1 in 100, the odds of it the same problem occurring on TWO shuttles at the same time is 1 in 10,000, not 1 in 100.
You're taking for granted that once a problem occurs, the odds that "it could occur" are no longer 1 in 100, they are 1:1 because it HAS occurred. In other words, the odds of a double failure pre-launch is 1:10,000. The odds of a double failure, once you HAVE a single failure, is 1:100. Until the single failure occurs, the odds remain at 1:10,000.
The point the parent is making is that if a particular problem occurs then it might mean that the design has a previously unknown flaw that makes that problem more likely than original estimates. So pre-launch the chance is 1 in 100 for each shuttle, which makes 1 in 10,000 for both. But if the first shuttle develops the problem then it might mean that the 1 in 100 was wrong - maybe it's actually 1 in 20. Now you're looking at launching a rescue mission with a vehicle that might have a 1 in 20 chance of failing, and you've got no time to properly assess the risk.
His company however WAS named nissan looong before the car company. And he got the domain name 1st....
Nissan Computer Corp was incorporated in 1991. Uzi's Nissan's first business in the US was Nissan Foreign Car founded in 1980. Nissan Motors (the car manufacturer) was founded in Japan 1934 and their US subsidiary Nissan Motor Corporation USA was founded in 1959. I don't see any way you can claim that Uzi Nissan was using the name for a company before the Japanese company.
However, the case was ruled in the favour of Nissan Computer: Nissan Motor's trademarks are related to cars and Nissan Computer was found to not infringe those trademarks.
a refresh rate of 120Hz still means you have an effective refresh rate of 60Hz for each eye.
Personally, I'm a little sensitive to low refresh rates; anything below 75Hz will give me a headache, and I prefer 85Hz or more. Some monitors can show 170 frames per second, but those are very rare.
My wife's the same, but it doesn't bother me at all. I can see the difference and so prefer the higher rates but low rates don't give me any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I kind of have to laugh at all the replies I got to this.
The sort of funny part is how everyone is tripping over themselves to point out that someone else had a similar idea earlier. I never once said otherwise, it was just an example.
You implied otherwise when you said that Ellison "came up with mass drivers". That's probably what got you all the "but X was earlier" replies.
And before that in 1966 there was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" during the war between Luna and Earth. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there were even earlier examples.
Throwing inert mass at your enemy is just about as old as it gets.
/. had for long been one of the last holdouts against this type of "journalistic" garbage.
Umm, what?
The most interesting deviation, to me, is 'aluminum.' If I recall correctly, the British term 'aluminium' IS actually correct, and 'Aluminum' used to be a brand OF aluminium, and won out in America due to popular usage.
Almost. But I imagine almost isn't good enough for Pedantic-Man.
Personally, I see and use the iPhone as an appliance, not as a platform, which is what a real Smartphone is. iPhone is not in the same league...
Interesting opinion. Care to elaborate?
It should be "unfiltered and unverified" news. A quick look @ the website, even scrolling down, shows no disclaimer that this unverified. Breaking news is fine, so I understand not wanting to take the time to verify, but there should be a disclaimer that it's unverified. And until this story on here, I never heard of it. So I may have taken something on there for fact had I stumbled on it by accident or via google search.
So if you stumbled on some random "news" site on the net you'd automatically assume it was verified news? That sounds pretty naive to me. Do you assume everything you read on Slashdot is verified by the editors? iReport.com makes no claim that the stories are verified and the connection to CNN is fairly subtle (a small faint "powered by CNN" logo at the bottom and an ad stating that iReport stories had been used on CNN). I don't see any reason to assume that the stories on that site are verified. The "about" page, which seems the obvious place to go to find out what verification is done clearly states up front that it is unverified:
The views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com!
I use a commercial mailing and web hosting package from 2 vendors. I have never used any form of ISP mail.
Someone provides connectivity between you and the net. It doesn't matter whether they are running the mail server or you are, if your email is not encrypted then it is readable by them. And as I said, you generally won't even know who your correspondents are using and they can also easily read your email. If you are not encrypting your email then you have no expectation of privacy and are no better off than if you were using Gmail.
There is a very good excuse for me. My mails are private and I don't give anyone right to retain them forever or analyse them for ads.
Privacy has nothing to do with data security, which was what I was talking about. But if you want to talk privacy, fine. Do you encrypt all your emails? Because if you don't then you don't have any privacy anyway. Your ISP can already retain your email forever or analyse it for ads, as can the ISPs of your correspondents. So then you're already trusting companies you don't even know. But you won't trust Google?
Why not just use a POP3 or IMAP account that isn't spying on you then?
Because I can access it from any computer with a net connection. I don't have to have any software installed other than a web browser.
The poster's point was that GMail is great because it takes care of all the backing up and stuff for you. Your suggestion to avoid losing your data if GMail gets disconnected is to... back up your data. See the circle?
What? Here's the post I replied to:
True. But riddle me this: when you get up tomorrow and go to sign in to GMail and all you get is a single page saying "Due to financial constraints and an inability to derive revenue from GMail to pay our bills, we have regretfully been forced to terminate the service.", where are your game serial numbers now and how do you plan on getting at them? I know it seems unlikely Google would just drop a service like that. Except that, well, they already have [blogspot.com].
Where do they say that Gmail is great because it takes care of all the backing up? What they say is that you might lose all your data. But there are several ways to backup your data so that's FUD.
Gmail allows you to download your email via pop3 and imap. You can also set it to automatically all email to another account.
automatically your WHOLE gmail?!?
Yeah, typo. You can also set it to automatically forward all email to another account.
True. But riddle me this: when you get up tomorrow and go to sign in to GMail and all you get is a single page saying "Due to financial constraints and an inability to derive revenue from GMail to pay our bills, we have regretfully been forced to terminate the service.", where are your game serial numbers now and how do you plan on getting at them? I know it seems unlikely Google would just drop a service like that. Except that, well, they already have.
Gmail allows you to download your email via pop3 and imap. You can also set it to automatically all email to another account. There is no excuse not to have a backup of all your Gmail mail. This "it might suddenly vanish" argument is a strawman.
It seems to me they are missing a golden opportunity. Instead of policing and preventing use of copyrighted material, why not link to an online music store so you can BUY the songs to use with the charts?
Am I missing something here?
The GH3 site has links to iTunes to buy the original tracks, but that's not what you need to distribute cover versions - you need permission from the songwriters.
From the article:
"It is likely that methane emissions off Svalbard have been continuous for about 15,000 years - since the last ice age - but as yet no one knows whether recent climactic shifts in the Arctic have begun to accelerate them to a point where they could in themselves exacerbate climate change, he said."
In other words, no, anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to have a real link to this.
Um, what? That's not what he said at all. He said they don't yet know. That is a radically different position from the "anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to be linked" that you concluded.
Eh. While it isn't good, remember this is one of the cooler portions of Earth's history, and we are technically still in an iceage.
Care to back that up? Looking at this, it's pretty clear that we are not in an iceage.
So it can get quite a bit hotter and life will still be sound.
Sure our civilization might not like it but life will go on.
Sure, I don't see many people denying it. But what will it do to our economy?
Performances are allowed under copyright. So how is this copyright infringement?
Published performances of cover songs require licenses. See e.g. this article, or consult Google, which knows all.
This is really no different than writing out sheet music for someone else's song and then trying to distribute that. Definitely copyright infringement if you don't have a license.
I would love this kind of solution if IR blasters were 100% reliable. But they occasionally fail to change channels properly, resulting in missed shows.
The one I'm using with MythTV hasn't failed to change channels correctly in the 3.5 years I've had it. It's recorded over 3500 programs in that time. Of course YMMV, but for me it's been 100% reliable so far.
I replied to the person above, but my reply works well for you, too. How did you get it to run on your crap hardware without XVMC support enabled in the precompiled Ubuntu binary? If the hardware you were using really was crap you should have needed that for glitch-free playback, right?
Only if you're doing HD. For SD you can get away with really low end hardware if you have a capture card that does encoding. I've had a frontend working with a 1GHz PIII without XVMC.
Let's say it takes 4 hours to build a reasonable MythTV box, install and configure it. $200 for this thing. $200/4 hours = $50/hour. For me personally, my time is worth way more per hour than that -- it makes more sense to go the prepackaged route.
You know you can buy prebuilt MythTV boxes. With support if you want. It'll cost you more than the Nero/Tivo thing but it'll do more too.
Second, Isn't this fundamentally a software problem. A bar code is a defined form with a known and rigid structure. Even with a blurry/fuzzy photograph, it should be possible to clean up the bars. For that matter, why are we even dealing with bars. The numbers are there under the bars. Why not use those?
I thought the same thing. Try to OCR the numbers and then regenerate the barcode and compare it to the picture for verification. But I doubt that all the barcode scanner app programmers have missed something that you and I thought of in a matter of minutes so I can only assume that either they already do this or that it doesn't work well for one reason or another (e.g. computational cost, or maybe if the barcode is too blurry to figure out then the numbers are useless too).
I only looked at the first few locations on the list, but several of them were obviously blurred or pixelated -- the Naval Observatory in DC is a perfect blurry circle amid high-res imagery, and the Air Force Base listed as #4 looks like someone inserted a mosaic art piece over the image.
Did this guy really not look at these locations? Those were in the top five, and there are links to the Google Maps locations in question, for crying out loud.
One of the points of TFA (which I've finally been able to read now that it's no longer Slashdotted) is that while there is degraded imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth (he shows the US Naval Observatory image in the article) there is no evidence that Google is responsible for the degradation in any example except the Basra, Iraq one. This is fairly apparent from the wide range of techniques used to censor the images - if it was done by Google you'd expect a consistent technique to be used.
Still even if only the 6 Boston locations are wrong, 6 false claims out of 51 is pretty poor. The IT Security article deserves criticism.
If the initial odds are estimated at 1 in 100, and there is a failure, the appearance of the failure does not affect the odds of another one just like it failing. It's still a 1 in 100 event.
You're missing the point. You think the initial odds are 1 in 100. You don't actually know that they are. The occurrence of the event may indicate that your original estimate of the odds was wrong and that the true odds were higher.
If I'm shooting craps, and I know my odds of getting a seven is say, 1 in 4, and I shoot a seven, and then another, and then a third one, what are my odds of getting another seven on my fourth roll? Better than 1 in 4 now would you say? no. Still in 1 in 4 same as it always was. Changing the dice won't make any difference either.
You don't know that the dice are fair. You think that the odds are 1 in 4. But then you roll 3 sevens in a row. Maybe the dice are fair and odds of getting another seven are 1 in 4. Or maybe the dice are loaded and the odds of getting another seven are much higher. The fact that you rolled 3 sevens in a row might indicate that the dice are loaded.
Incidentally the odds of rolling a seven on two fair dice are 1 in 6.
If the odds of a specific problem with a shuttle occurring are 1 in 100, the odds of it the same problem occurring on TWO shuttles at the same time is 1 in 10,000, not 1 in 100.
You're taking for granted that once a problem occurs, the odds that "it could occur" are no longer 1 in 100, they are 1:1 because it HAS occurred. In other words, the odds of a double failure pre-launch is 1:10,000. The odds of a double failure, once you HAVE a single failure, is 1:100. Until the single failure occurs, the odds remain at 1:10,000.
The point the parent is making is that if a particular problem occurs then it might mean that the design has a previously unknown flaw that makes that problem more likely than original estimates. So pre-launch the chance is 1 in 100 for each shuttle, which makes 1 in 10,000 for both. But if the first shuttle develops the problem then it might mean that the 1 in 100 was wrong - maybe it's actually 1 in 20. Now you're looking at launching a rescue mission with a vehicle that might have a 1 in 20 chance of failing, and you've got no time to properly assess the risk.
TL;DR
Don't worry, that's normal for Slashdot.
His company however WAS named nissan looong before the car company. And he got the domain name 1st....
Nissan Computer Corp was incorporated in 1991. Uzi's Nissan's first business in the US was Nissan Foreign Car founded in 1980. Nissan Motors (the car manufacturer) was founded in Japan 1934 and their US subsidiary Nissan Motor Corporation USA was founded in 1959. I don't see any way you can claim that Uzi Nissan was using the name for a company before the Japanese company.
However, the case was ruled in the favour of Nissan Computer: Nissan Motor's trademarks are related to cars and Nissan Computer was found to not infringe those trademarks.
a refresh rate of 120Hz still means you have an effective refresh rate of 60Hz for each eye.
Personally, I'm a little sensitive to low refresh rates; anything below 75Hz will give me a headache, and I prefer 85Hz or more. Some monitors can show 170 frames per second, but those are very rare.
My wife's the same, but it doesn't bother me at all. I can see the difference and so prefer the higher rates but low rates don't give me any problems.