Copyright is an exception to the law. Fair use is an exception to the exception, that ensures the rights of the author guaranteed by copyright don't trample the rights of the public, guaranteed by the constitution.
At least, that was the idea. Don't know what it means now. Seems to be guaranteeing the rights of distribution companies.
Just listen to the drive when a disk is in vs when its just spinning the motor.
You can't be serious? That sound is not the lens scraping the disc. That's the motor working harder because the disc give it a higher moment of inertia -- more weight to accelerate and keep at speed.
If it was, so would all the scripting that allows the publisher to show clips from chapters on a chapter selection screen, or any kind of interactive menus at all. You'd have to select chapters, audio channels, subtitle channels, any special feature tracks, everything by number solely through your player's functions.
Besides, you could have saved four or five steps...
I could have, and to a certain extent, I did save some of those steps. I didn't actually go through all the work I described; mostly I was covering bases in my little guide for inexperienced internet stalkers. Note that I meant it for the inexperienced -- thinking about it now I realize that most people here likely know how to use whois. Early morning caused me to forget my audience.
How did the spammer get his e-mail address?
At first I thought, "What a silly question. The spammer clearly sent him mail in the first place, how would they not have his address?" But then I realized that they shouldn't have any way to realize who had reported them, and they therefore wouldn't know which of their spammees was responsible. Is good point.
Number 1, the issue of notifying the party you report is up in the air. If it's a genuine spammer, you have the risk that you've just provided a confirmed, premium address. But if it was an honest mistake, it seems to me that the party deserves the courtesy of knowing you didn't like it. Then again, honest mistake cases would be isolated incidents, and the ISP wouldn't take any action. But note that Neil CCed to Bernie, and he is theoretically a well-known anti-spam figure.
Number 2, perhaps the marketing company in question had control of the abuse@ address for their domain, and the spamcop report was sent to that address as well as the abuse address of the ISP. e.g. if www.ozspamco.com mapped to www.aussiehost.net/~ozspamco, spamcop or vandan may have sent the notification to both abuse@ozspamco.com and abuse@aussiehost.net. I believe that admins have the ability to get more information from the reporter when they receive a spamcop report, unless the headers have been munged.
Number 3, I will now admit that I don't know enough about the situation to defend it. Therefore, I should stop doing so.
Let's have a rundown of the 'zealots' that received this email, since as of yet I've seen no one comprehensively cover the list. Then I call for a recount on your decision whether Shifman's mail was spam or targetted.
Neil Schwartzman @alcor.concordia.ca
From a search on google, this email address is used exclusively in Neil's capacity as a employee of the IITS department at Concordia University (Montreal). As has been said, there is no indication anywhere that he has anything to do with human resources or the hiring process. The only contact person listed for Concordia's HR is a Sylvie Dubuc. Neil is not even listed as a member of the staff (leading me to believe he's doing contract work).
A second copy to Neil Schwartzman, a month and a half after the lawsuit threats. I grant that Schwartzman never told Shifman to stop sending emails, but (just personally) if I had threatened someone with a lawsuit, I wouldn't send them my resume a month later.
I don't believe that Joe Greco or Bill Carton received copies of Shifman's resume. So their participation in the matter could be genuinely considered suspect.
Laura Atkins c/o steve@blighty.com. This address is available as a security/abuse contact for samspade.org and blighty.com, but only on the samspade.org contact information. There is no indication that this address is a good lead for hiring, especially since laura's address is listed as a hiring contact on blighty.com. This would be forgivable since there is no hr information on samspade, but Stilfman replies to Laura as if he had never sent a resume to anyone. This would lead me to believe that his resume is being sent to anti-spammers without his knowledge, but this is inconsistent with the rest of his messages.
"I never asked to work for your company." (Except for when he did)
Mr Man, the bass player for The Culprits in Chicago. Now Mr Man is indeed a player in the corporate game, so perhaps there is some connection that Shifman found back in October. But Shifman threatens a slander suit for Mr Man's audacity at posting 'learn to spell Cisco right' on a small band's weblog. (Seriously, that is as slanderous as Mr Man got)
So here's Shifman's MO:
Send resume to some off the wall address
Get response: 'Don't send me unsolicited resumes'
Respond: "Fuck you! I'll sue."
First, I clicked the link in your slashdot profile: http://www.xensei.com/users/ktakki/vcr.html
That page wasn't useful for my purpose (by the way, the blink tag is deprecated and nonfunctional on most newer browsers), so I backtracked up the directory tree until I found a useful page http://www.xensei.com/user/ktakki
Looking up xensei.com itself wasn't likely to work, since yours is a user page at a web hosting provider. If other avenues failed, I would have tried it as a semi-last resort.
From your user page's copyright notification, I knew your name, which corresponded to your slashdot uid, so I knew it was a pretty good lead. I also explored your site a little more and noted your email address(es) on K. Takki Media Services and your personal home page.
Armed with this information, I headed over to http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois to see what I could find. A search on your name revealed you as the Administrative and Billing Contact for artcrime.com, also the domain of your email address.
Voila! I have your phone number.
Now, the parent post is a little harder since he doesn't list a website or email address in his slashdot account. 'Vandan' is apparently a common Indian nickname, so searching on that didn't turn up anything either. However, the spammer had access to his email address, which would make things much easier.
A couple other points:
Reputable professionals often have their email program configured with their full name.
There is a semi-strong correlation between people likely to report spam and people that administer domains.
These two things make it likely that you'll be able to pull a phone number from whois. If you can't, I'm sure there are other means (that require more work.)
> Why should childeren be "lucky" to have 2 parents?
Is that some kind of a joke?
He's saying: How can you say it's lucky to have two parents? That should be the norm. Kids shouldn't be lucky to have two parents, they should be normal to have two parents. It's a commentary on how sad it is that the norm is a single parent, and only 'lucky' kids get to have two. Two parents should be the norm and kids with only one should be 'unlucky.'
> If you let media teach your kids, then you deserve what they become.
As if it's actually possible to keep a nine-year-old away from media.
The point is not to keep your kids away from media as if it were the enemy. The point is, you teach your kids, teach them right from wrong, teach them that media is generally not real and cannot reliably be learned from. Isolating your kids from media is as bad as allowing them free reign with it. Every kid I knew growing up whose parents were more oppressive than mine, who led a more sheltered childhood, ended up way more fucked up than me. They got in more trouble, started drinking more and sooner, tried more kinds of drugs sooner, had crappier relationships and less respect for the opposite sex.
My parents showed me an excellent example, but allowed me to make my own mistakes. That, as far as I'm concerned, is the best way to raise a child.
Sauron is an unshown omnipotent power in the movie, as well. At least, the images of him are no more detailed than they were in the book Fellowship: a lidless eye of fire. The man-shaped suit of armor shown in the prologue comes from the Silmarillion, and as has been said, at that time he was man-shaped. It was later that he rose to power as an omnipotent disembodied force.
This dissonance was covered in the movie, when Gandalf and Frodo are discussing the ring. Sauron was killed, but his spirit was bound to the ring. Sauron's spirit lives on as the nebulous scary entity that you love so well. I have faith in Jackson, and presume Sauron will remain nebulous in the trilogy's timeline.
From another angle, you still don't know what Sauron looked liked even when he was walking around during the prologue: he was invariably covered head to toe in scary scary armor. Who knows what sort of matter was filling the space inside the armor?
> Between 40% and 60%, the bill is worth half face value. Using your formula I could cut a dollar bill into two pieces (half-and-half) and turn it in for $2.
So 1/2 + 1/2 = 2?
I did say half face value, which for a dollar bill is of course $0.50. And then if you have two of them, you get.5 +.5 = a dollar.
Using your formula, if I cut a dollar bill into two pieces of equal area, I get nothing, since 50% means $0.00. (Unless I tape it back together, but I choose to ignore that scenario here.)
On the other hand, using either of our formulas, if I cut a bill in equal thirds, I get nothing. Obviously there's no law of conservation of currency.
60% makes sense historically, as well, since by the original constitution a slave counted as 3/5 of a person. This comment is most likely irrelevant, but since reading Illuminatus! again I find myself noticing the significance of numbers, repetition, and synchronicity.
The value and beauty of the English language is that it affords the possibility of bending it in so many ways. This is its true advantage over other stricter languages.
Honestly, how many languages do you know of with which you can verb a noun? Perhaps it's culture rather than an inherent property of the language, but what other language so speedily incorporates the vernacular into the language proper?
Don't restrict yourself to some arbitrary 'correct' usage. That's double-plus-ungood.
Regardless of all that, possession or containment is a perfectly acceptable use of the transitive verb 'boast.' To mere possession it adds a sense of pride by the subject for the object. I learned in fourth grade that one step on the road of good writing is to replace common, boring, limp words like 'have' or 'say' with uncommon, more powerful, specific or exciting words like 'boast' or 'blab.'
So don't harp on this journalist for trying to be a better writer.
I can't find a reference for it online at the moment, but I recall watching a documentary on the US Mints in which mutilated currency was discussed.
They showed a simple grid that is used to determine the surviving percentage of a bill. I remember them saying that a bill with over 60% of its material remaining could be redeemed for face value. Between 40% and 60%, the bill is worth half face value. Bills with less than 40% of their material remaining are considered worthless.
However, like I said, I can't verify this claim at the moment.
"healthy, active lifestyle" ... "lap dances... or buying that cute chick at the end of the bar a drink"
Yeah... watching naked chicks (that you can't touch) dance, or drinking away the night in a bar hoping to take some chick home with you are excellent examples of a healty active lifestyle. Add an apple everyday and you have the pinnacle of human existence! Spending all your spare time in bars is just as bad as spending every evening and weekend playing Counterstrike or Dark Age of Camelot.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it a lot more healthy and enjoyable to hang out with my friends and play games, watch movies, or just talk about shit. I have a lot of close friends that happen to live far from me. My relationships with them, chatting on the computer, are much healthier than one I would have with a hot chick at a bar.
Get your priorities in order. There's a lot more to life and to relationships than raw animal sex. Sex is much more rewarding when it's with someone I know well than it is with someone I just met.
This summer while my friends and I were hiking on the dunes at the beach, my car was broken into and my CD collection, among many other things, was stolen. My homeowner's insurance covered most of the things that were stolen: the backpacks, the computer and board games that I'd forgotten to take out of the back before we left, the CD binders, my Discman and its cassette adapter. However, the car stereo and the CDs were considered to be part of the car, and since I didn't have theft coverage on the car, I could not claim them.
(Don't ask me why the Discman, which was actually being used as part of the stereo system, was covered while the CDs were not.)
With ~100 CDs @ ~$15 each, I found myself out $1500. Somewhat luckily, I rip all my albums to MP3, so I was able to make inferior quality replacements. But I don't want to face this dilemma in the future.
My solution: now when I buy an album, in addition to encoding it to MP3, I burn an exact copy. Now I can carry the copies with me, and keep the originals at home for security. If the copies get stolen, I can claim the $.20 or so per CD-R, and make new copies. If the originals are stolen from my home, they're covered on my homeowner's (Although I should look at my policy and make sure of that...).
Insurance should not be the only way to protect myself from theft. I am not breaking copyright laws by making a personal copy, but the burglars are breaking the law by stealing. I refuse to be punished for someone else's crime. Copy-protected CDs prevent me from protecting my own interests in a law-abiding fashion. Thus I refuse to buy.
In fact, to make a point, I think I will buy a number of Universal CDs and immediately return them as defective without leaving the store.
Exactly. All the experts I've heard interviewed have said something along the line of: "Our technology is just fine. Our weakness is a lack of human support."
I simply do not understand why politicians, the media, or the pollsters don't listen to the experts but instead jump on issues of security, encryption, and the like.
Star Wars Episode II: Natalie Portman's Boat Payment
Star Wars II: In Which We Make Fun Of Several More Ethnic Groups
Star Wars Episode II: We're So Very Very Sorry
Star Wars Episode II: You Know It's Crap, But Still You Gave Us $8.
Star Wars Episode II: Electric Boogaloo
Star Wars Episode II: Samuel L. Jackson Gets Some Screen Time
Star Wars Episode II: And Now For Something Completely Derivative
Star Wars Episode II: They Shoot Stormtroopers, Don't They?
Star Wars Episode II: Senator Palpatine is Elected Emperor by Just a Few Hundred Votes in an Irregularity-Filled Contest on the Distant Backwater Planet of Florida
Yes. Defective -- probably. I'm not familiar enough with gcc's departure from the standard to say for sure. If it encapsulates ANSI, but adds some other options for syntax, etc., it is enhanced. If there are things in ANSI that gcc cannot do, then it is defective. Netscape's and IE's html renderers are both defective and enhanced, for example.
Unless there were several chunks, or maybe a ring of metal. A symmetric placement will change the moment of the spinning disc, causing the motor to work a little harder, but would cancel out any wobble.
Main Entry: whinge
Pronunciation: 'hwinj, 'winj
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): whinged; whingingorwhingeing
Etymology: from (assumed) Middle English, from Old English hwinsian; akin to Old High German winsOn to moan
Date: 12th century British: to complain fretfully : WHINE
So... how exactly is it not an alternate form (spelling+pronunciation) of 'whine?'
How is shrinking the image/a bad scan going to make it look less realistic?
Well, let's see...
If anything, it should make it MORE realistic by obscuring any flaws.
As was mentioned in another reply, the realism is in the flaws. The scan looks unnatural because it is too perfect.
Certainly the unnatural skin tone is going to look better the more and more you shrink the image.
Most assuredly, it will get better and better as the image approaches 1x1px. "Yeah... I guess that's skin tone; it's almost shaped like a person." This image was probably not a render production, but instead a scan of the actual physical poster. In any case, the color balance is way off. This is apparent because the highlights are too bright and the shadows too dark. The actual skin color/tone looks fine to me, in fact, my skin is about that color. The problem is in the shadows, where it looks too orange -- a problem either with contrast against the purple or with not picking up the blue correctly in the dark sections, and in the highlights, which make the image too glossy.
And who cares if you can see "individual freckles and hairs"...most people are going to be looking at the poster at distance where such details would be invisble.
From personal experience, the first thing I did when presented with the poster was bring it right up to my face: "Oh my god, you can see the individual goosebumps!" This poster is small, and will be hanging in geek bedrooms, where people can walk right up and marvel at the detail -- not behind movie theater counters, inaccessible high on the wall.
I forgot, this is Slashdot, and a lot of people here are going to be looking at it real close up, most probably with tissues in hand.
I prefer nudity and sound in my porn. (and director's commentary! Hurrah for DVD!)
I don't know about the picture of Gray, but Aki's swimsuit picture, as linked there, is a terribly bad scan. My cousin gave me a poster with that picture on the front and (sparse) details about the rendering process on the back. In real life, the picture of Aki is very realistic. You can pick out individual freckles and hairs. Her pores are even slightly whitened and raised -- as if she was slightly cold and goose-pimply during the photoshoot.
As further evidence of the bad scan claim, look at the Maxim logo in the upper left. The background has really bad jpeg artifacts. But what can you expect scaling a 3' or so poster into a 26K jpeg?
I have not seen any good evidence to convince me that melting icecaps will lead to major increases in sea level. It is a common science experiment for kiddies to put ice in a glass of water, mark the water level, and wait for it to melt. Even though part of the ice was above the water level, the sum level remains unchanged after the melt, because frozen water traps air. The volume of air in the ice was equal to the volume of ice above the water level, and the volume of water in the ice was equal to the volume of ice below the water level. Thus, no net change.
As far as I know, the Arctic ice caps are free-floating, and are therefore subject to the same effect as the ice cube in the glass -- when (if) they melt, there will be virtually no change in aggregate sea level. The Antarctic ice caps are a different story, resting as they are on a big chunk of land. In the case of the Antarctic ice melting, the sea level will rise with a volume of however much ice is being displaced by the land.
Here's the unfortunate part -- no one knows or agrees on an estimate of how much ice is displaced by the Antarctic land shelf, and consequently how much water volume and height would be added to Earth's oceans if they melt. I've heard estimates ranging from 6 inches to 220 feet of sea level change. (I've only heard of Waterworld type sea elevation changes in, you guessed it, Waterworld) Does anyone have real figures or calculations of this sort?
Another factor is that it is unlikely that the entire ice cap will melt. And nigh impossible that it will happen all at once, as doomsayers picture, with massive sudden flooding of coastal cities. If the melting reaches critical point, people will notice that they're splashing in salt water in the street in plenty of time to move.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is an exception to the law. Fair use is an exception to the exception, that ensures the rights of the author guaranteed by copyright don't trample the rights of the public, guaranteed by the constitution.
At least, that was the idea. Don't know what it means now. Seems to be guaranteeing the rights of distribution companies.
Just listen to the drive when a disk is in vs when its just spinning the motor.
You can't be serious? That sound is not the lens scraping the disc. That's the motor working harder because the disc give it a higher moment of inertia -- more weight to accelerate and keep at speed.
If it was, so would all the scripting that allows the publisher to show clips from chapters on a chapter selection screen, or any kind of interactive menus at all. You'd have to select chapters, audio channels, subtitle channels, any special feature tracks, everything by number solely through your player's functions.
Besides, you could have saved four or five steps...
I could have, and to a certain extent, I did save some of those steps. I didn't actually go through all the work I described; mostly I was covering bases in my little guide for inexperienced internet stalkers. Note that I meant it for the inexperienced -- thinking about it now I realize that most people here likely know how to use whois. Early morning caused me to forget my audience.
How did the spammer get his e-mail address?
At first I thought, "What a silly question. The spammer clearly sent him mail in the first place, how would they not have his address?" But then I realized that they shouldn't have any way to realize who had reported them, and they therefore wouldn't know which of their spammees was responsible. Is good point.
Number 1, the issue of notifying the party you report is up in the air. If it's a genuine spammer, you have the risk that you've just provided a confirmed, premium address. But if it was an honest mistake, it seems to me that the party deserves the courtesy of knowing you didn't like it. Then again, honest mistake cases would be isolated incidents, and the ISP wouldn't take any action. But note that Neil CCed to Bernie, and he is theoretically a well-known anti-spam figure.
Number 2, perhaps the marketing company in question had control of the abuse@ address for their domain, and the spamcop report was sent to that address as well as the abuse address of the ISP. e.g. if www.ozspamco.com mapped to www.aussiehost.net/~ozspamco, spamcop or vandan may have sent the notification to both abuse@ozspamco.com and abuse@aussiehost.net. I believe that admins have the ability to get more information from the reporter when they receive a spamcop report, unless the headers have been munged.
Number 3, I will now admit that I don't know enough about the situation to defend it. Therefore, I should stop doing so.
No, it's not spam if your list is all HR contacts.
But it's clear that Shifman's list was not only HR.
From a search on google, this email address is used exclusively in Neil's capacity as a employee of the IITS department at Concordia University (Montreal). As has been said, there is no indication anywhere that he has anything to do with human resources or the hiring process. The only contact person listed for Concordia's HR is a Sylvie Dubuc. Neil is not even listed as a member of the staff (leading me to believe he's doing contract work).
"I never asked to work for your company." (Except for when he did)
So here's Shifman's MO:
Send resume to some off the wall address
Get response: 'Don't send me unsolicited resumes'
Respond: "Fuck you! I'll sue."
A couple other points:
These two things make it likely that you'll be able to pull a phone number from whois. If you can't, I'm sure there are other means (that require more work.)
> Why should childeren be "lucky" to have 2 parents?
Is that some kind of a joke?
He's saying: How can you say it's lucky to have two parents? That should be the norm. Kids shouldn't be lucky to have two parents, they should be normal to have two parents. It's a commentary on how sad it is that the norm is a single parent, and only 'lucky' kids get to have two. Two parents should be the norm and kids with only one should be 'unlucky.'
> If you let media teach your kids, then you deserve what they become.
As if it's actually possible to keep a nine-year-old away from media.
The point is not to keep your kids away from media as if it were the enemy. The point is, you teach your kids, teach them right from wrong, teach them that media is generally not real and cannot reliably be learned from. Isolating your kids from media is as bad as allowing them free reign with it. Every kid I knew growing up whose parents were more oppressive than mine, who led a more sheltered childhood, ended up way more fucked up than me. They got in more trouble, started drinking more and sooner, tried more kinds of drugs sooner, had crappier relationships and less respect for the opposite sex.
My parents showed me an excellent example, but allowed me to make my own mistakes. That, as far as I'm concerned, is the best way to raise a child.
Sauron is an unshown omnipotent power in the movie, as well. At least, the images of him are no more detailed than they were in the book Fellowship: a lidless eye of fire. The man-shaped suit of armor shown in the prologue comes from the Silmarillion, and as has been said, at that time he was man-shaped. It was later that he rose to power as an omnipotent disembodied force.
This dissonance was covered in the movie, when Gandalf and Frodo are discussing the ring. Sauron was killed, but his spirit was bound to the ring. Sauron's spirit lives on as the nebulous scary entity that you love so well. I have faith in Jackson, and presume Sauron will remain nebulous in the trilogy's timeline.
From another angle, you still don't know what Sauron looked liked even when he was walking around during the prologue: he was invariably covered head to toe in scary scary armor. Who knows what sort of matter was filling the space inside the armor?
Using your formula I could cut a dollar bill into two pieces (half-and-half) and turn it in for $2.
So 1/2 + 1/2 = 2?
I did say half face value, which for a dollar bill is of course $0.50. And then if you have two of them, you get .5 + .5 = a dollar.
Using your formula, if I cut a dollar bill into two pieces of equal area, I get nothing, since 50% means $0.00. (Unless I tape it back together, but I choose to ignore that scenario here.)
On the other hand, using either of our formulas, if I cut a bill in equal thirds, I get nothing. Obviously there's no law of conservation of currency.
60% makes sense historically, as well, since by the original constitution a slave counted as 3/5 of a person. This comment is most likely irrelevant, but since reading Illuminatus! again I find myself noticing the significance of numbers, repetition, and synchronicity.
The value and beauty of the English language is that it affords the possibility of bending it in so many ways. This is its true advantage over other stricter languages.
Honestly, how many languages do you know of with which you can verb a noun? Perhaps it's culture rather than an inherent property of the language, but what other language so speedily incorporates the vernacular into the language proper?
Don't restrict yourself to some arbitrary 'correct' usage. That's double-plus-ungood.
Regardless of all that, possession or containment is a perfectly acceptable use of the transitive verb 'boast.' To mere possession it adds a sense of pride by the subject for the object. I learned in fourth grade that one step on the road of good writing is to replace common, boring, limp words like 'have' or 'say' with uncommon, more powerful, specific or exciting words like 'boast' or 'blab.'
So don't harp on this journalist for trying to be a better writer.
I can't find a reference for it online at the moment, but I recall watching a documentary on the US Mints in which mutilated currency was discussed.
They showed a simple grid that is used to determine the surviving percentage of a bill. I remember them saying that a bill with over 60% of its material remaining could be redeemed for face value. Between 40% and 60%, the bill is worth half face value. Bills with less than 40% of their material remaining are considered worthless.
However, like I said, I can't verify this claim at the moment.
"healthy, active lifestyle"
...
"lap dances... or buying that cute chick at the end of the bar a drink"
Yeah... watching naked chicks (that you can't touch) dance, or drinking away the night in a bar hoping to take some chick home with you are excellent examples of a healty active lifestyle. Add an apple everyday and you have the pinnacle of human existence! Spending all your spare time in bars is just as bad as spending every evening and weekend playing Counterstrike or Dark Age of Camelot.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it a lot more healthy and enjoyable to hang out with my friends and play games, watch movies, or just talk about shit. I have a lot of close friends that happen to live far from me. My relationships with them, chatting on the computer, are much healthier than one I would have with a hot chick at a bar.
Get your priorities in order. There's a lot more to life and to relationships than raw animal sex. Sex is much more rewarding when it's with someone I know well than it is with someone I just met.
This summer while my friends and I were hiking on the dunes at the beach, my car was broken into and my CD collection, among many other things, was stolen. My homeowner's insurance covered most of the things that were stolen: the backpacks, the computer and board games that I'd forgotten to take out of the back before we left, the CD binders, my Discman and its cassette adapter. However, the car stereo and the CDs were considered to be part of the car, and since I didn't have theft coverage on the car, I could not claim them.
(Don't ask me why the Discman, which was actually being used as part of the stereo system, was covered while the CDs were not.)
With ~100 CDs @ ~$15 each, I found myself out $1500. Somewhat luckily, I rip all my albums to MP3, so I was able to make inferior quality replacements. But I don't want to face this dilemma in the future.
My solution: now when I buy an album, in addition to encoding it to MP3, I burn an exact copy. Now I can carry the copies with me, and keep the originals at home for security. If the copies get stolen, I can claim the $.20 or so per CD-R, and make new copies. If the originals are stolen from my home, they're covered on my homeowner's (Although I should look at my policy and make sure of that...).
Insurance should not be the only way to protect myself from theft. I am not breaking copyright laws by making a personal copy, but the burglars are breaking the law by stealing. I refuse to be punished for someone else's crime. Copy-protected CDs prevent me from protecting my own interests in a law-abiding fashion. Thus I refuse to buy.
In fact, to make a point, I think I will buy a number of Universal CDs and immediately return them as defective without leaving the store.
Exactly. All the experts I've heard interviewed have said something along the line of: "Our technology is just fine. Our weakness is a lack of human support."
I simply do not understand why politicians, the media, or the pollsters don't listen to the experts but instead jump on issues of security, encryption, and the like.
Some of my favorites from Enweirdment:
Yes. Defective -- probably. I'm not familiar enough with gcc's departure from the standard to say for sure. If it encapsulates ANSI, but adds some other options for syntax, etc., it is enhanced. If there are things in ANSI that gcc cannot do, then it is defective. Netscape's and IE's html renderers are both defective and enhanced, for example.
Unless there were several chunks, or maybe a ring of metal. A symmetric placement will change the moment of the spinning disc, causing the motor to work a little harder, but would cancel out any wobble.
From Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: whinge : to complain fretfully : WHINE
Pronunciation: 'hwinj, 'winj
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): whinged; whinging or whingeing
Etymology: from (assumed) Middle English, from Old English hwinsian; akin to Old High German winsOn to moan
Date: 12th century
British
So... how exactly is it not an alternate form (spelling+pronunciation) of 'whine?'
How can you be smart if you haven't figured out how to make money?
You can be smart enough to have realized that money isn't really all that important.
A $3 Frisbee is much more rewarding than a $3000 sofa.
My uncle and I theorize that Bowser is a plant. He's been on the show and lost both times...
Except for the first time he was one (tug-of-war dragsters) where his team won.
How is shrinking the image/a bad scan going to make it look less realistic?
Well, let's see...
If anything, it should make it MORE realistic by obscuring any flaws.
As was mentioned in another reply, the realism is in the flaws. The scan looks unnatural because it is too perfect.Certainly the unnatural skin tone is going to look better the more and more you shrink the image.
Most assuredly, it will get better and better as the image approaches 1x1px. "Yeah... I guess that's skin tone; it's almost shaped like a person."
This image was probably not a render production, but instead a scan of the actual physical poster. In any case, the color balance is way off. This is apparent because the highlights are too bright and the shadows too dark. The actual skin color/tone looks fine to me, in fact, my skin is about that color. The problem is in the shadows, where it looks too orange -- a problem either with contrast against the purple or with not picking up the blue correctly in the dark sections, and in the highlights, which make the image too glossy.
And who cares if you can see "individual freckles and hairs"...most people are going to be looking at the poster at distance where such details would be invisble.
From personal experience, the first thing I did when presented with the poster was bring it right up to my face: "Oh my god, you can see the individual goosebumps!" This poster is small, and will be hanging in geek bedrooms, where people can walk right up and marvel at the detail -- not behind movie theater counters, inaccessible high on the wall.
I forgot, this is Slashdot, and a lot of people here are going to be looking at it real close up, most probably with tissues in hand.
I prefer nudity and sound in my porn. (and director's commentary! Hurrah for DVD!)
Dunno.
Like I said, it was a gift. My cousin got it at the sneak preview; I know not how.
I don't know about the picture of Gray, but Aki's swimsuit picture, as linked there, is a terribly bad scan. My cousin gave me a poster with that picture on the front and (sparse) details about the rendering process on the back. In real life, the picture of Aki is very realistic. You can pick out individual freckles and hairs. Her pores are even slightly whitened and raised -- as if she was slightly cold and goose-pimply during the photoshoot.
As further evidence of the bad scan claim, look at the Maxim logo in the upper left. The background has really bad jpeg artifacts. But what can you expect scaling a 3' or so poster into a 26K jpeg?
I have not seen any good evidence to convince me that melting icecaps will lead to major increases in sea level. It is a common science experiment for kiddies to put ice in a glass of water, mark the water level, and wait for it to melt. Even though part of the ice was above the water level, the sum level remains unchanged after the melt, because frozen water traps air. The volume of air in the ice was equal to the volume of ice above the water level, and the volume of water in the ice was equal to the volume of ice below the water level. Thus, no net change.
As far as I know, the Arctic ice caps are free-floating, and are therefore subject to the same effect as the ice cube in the glass -- when (if) they melt, there will be virtually no change in aggregate sea level. The Antarctic ice caps are a different story, resting as they are on a big chunk of land. In the case of the Antarctic ice melting, the sea level will rise with a volume of however much ice is being displaced by the land.
Here's the unfortunate part -- no one knows or agrees on an estimate of how much ice is displaced by the Antarctic land shelf, and consequently how much water volume and height would be added to Earth's oceans if they melt. I've heard estimates ranging from 6 inches to 220 feet of sea level change. (I've only heard of Waterworld type sea elevation changes in, you guessed it, Waterworld) Does anyone have real figures or calculations of this sort?
Another factor is that it is unlikely that the entire ice cap will melt. And nigh impossible that it will happen all at once, as doomsayers picture, with massive sudden flooding of coastal cities. If the melting reaches critical point, people will notice that they're splashing in salt water in the street in plenty of time to move.