Curiosity is doing more science per second ON ANOTHER PLANET just sitting there checking its systems than the entire human race has achieved to date. Decades from now, scientists will still be pulling interesting information out of the data that was missed on the first pass. This is a genuine GOOD for the human race as a whole - don't screw it up to do the equivalent of spray-painting "l33tme w0z ere" on the side. Unless you're willing to pay the cost to send up a replacement robot, find something else to amuse yourself with.
Even if we were to assume that cell phones put out sufficient radiation to heat up the water molecules in the brain enough to be noticeable, it still pales into insignificance compared to the heating your brain receives when you have a hot shower and wash your hair. Or walk around without a hat on a summers day. If low-level heat from everyday sources caused cancer then the human race would have gone extinct in 50,000BCE when we invented fire.
Porn problem? What about Wikipedia's bomb problem? Enough information about chemistry and physics to build your own homemade bomb. Depending upon your budget, everything from firecrackers and pipe bombs to nuclear weapons. What about Wikipedia's computer security problem? Blow by blow descriptions of common computer vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited.
And so on.
We've been down this road before with the debates over the Anarchist's Cookbook and hacking manuals. Banning, or labelling, or whatever serves no purpose except to enable government censors to make up excuses to block other information. And look - you gave them a nice little filtering system to help them do exactly that!
Of course Wikipedia needs to tread softly - they are the repository of the world's knowledge and anything that reduces access to knowledge is against its charter. Make the descriptions of various porn acts more clinical and less explicit, perhaps. But that won't stop the "think of the children!" crowd.
A new law was passed today by both houses of Congress making it illegal for pharmacies to sell over the counter HIV tests. The author of the bill, congressman John Q. Religinut, Jr (R) welcomed the passage of the law saying "Today we have taken a stand against promiscuity and the homosexual agenda".
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
And then come back and find the damn disk is still waiting at the "Select English or 40 Languages You Don't Speak" screen waiting for you to hit the OK button. Seriously, is it really so hard to detect the language I've already set on my Blu-Ray player and use that by default?
In any case, if "insert disk, go do something else, then watch movie" becomes a problem, I'm sure the studios will "fix" that by adding a EULA click to the Copyright warning screens.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
The contents of any business person's carry-on bag looks like that on an X-ray scanner. Phone, MP3 layer, USB cables, laptop and power brick, bent paper clip to reset dodgy devices, RSA security key for remote VPN access, prototype PCB for the embedded device my company is working on, etc. By the time that tangle of wires gets to the airport, it WILL look like a horrid science experiment that is a pound of C4 away from blowing up. Yet such tangles regularly pass through security with a brief 2 second eyeball from a bored TSA grunt. The only difference here is that the tangle was left behind on the plane.
But I would guess that young people are just not used to paying for music.
Heck, OLD people are not used to paying for music. I've had access to thousands of songs for near zero cost my entire life. It's called a radio. And I've probably spent a few hundred dollars total my entire life on products advertised on the radio, of which only a tiny fraction in the millicents range made it to the artists that created all that music. I have a few CD's, but nothing close to the amount I've consumed via radio over the years while paying peanuts. Music has always been cheap, and the record industry has always tried to invent ways to pretend that it isn't. There may be a future in creating custom listening mixes and radio-like streams. But $0.99 per song? Get real. It would be a rip-off at $0.01 per song.
Re:And showing every bit of its age too, apparentl
on
GCC Turns 25
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· Score: 1
If you need a compiler with special optimization options to make your code run fast, then either your algorithm or your data structure is wrong. Implicitly-parallel SIMD problems are a notable exception - same operation on massive amount of data. Everything else is PEBKAC.
Happy birthday gcc - making me think more carefully and write better code for 25 years!
... but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs,
OpenGL has become a joke under Khronos. More and more of the work needed to render scenes is pushed back onto the application developer. Once upon a time you could specify the material, texture, and light parameters and IT WOULD JUST FIGURE IT OUT! The responsibility for making it run fast was up to the OpenGL implementer, not the application writer. Now you cannot draw a single triangle without a month's worth of effort to implement matrix math, texture uploading, and material lighting from first principles. And then do it all over again on the next device because the stupid chipset vendor decided that they couldn't be bothered making simple color interpolation work fast (I'm looking at you ImgTech).
The problem is not handset fragmentation. The problem is that the OpenGL API provides no guarantees about what will actually work and work well. It's all thrown back onto the application and the chipset vendors can then brush off bugs in their design with "our examples work great - obviously you don't know how to write shaders".
It's time the application (not chipset) developer community smacked Khronos upside the head and made them specify a USEFUL rendering API that guarantees good performance for application-level tasks, and decertify chipset vendors who are too lazy to do their damn jobs.
"Of course, nobody really LIVES in most of those huge data voids,..."
Yes, because farmers don't need to call 911 for help in an emergency, call the local food co-op to check this week's prices, order new seed from a supplier's web site, or e-mail the mechanic to get an ETA as to when the tractor will be fixed. And we certainly don't want the farmer's kids getting a decent education via distance learning web sites, or talking to their friends in nearby cities.
Putting cell towers in those areas is not profitable, but it is necessary. I say this as an Australian - for over a decade the commercial carriers did squat to wire up the country-side. The Australian government had to create its own carrier from scratch because the free market just didn't care about the 95% of the country where "nobody really lives there". Oh, except for the people who do.
And this is why universities like UC should be forbidden by law to apply for patents and required to put all discoveries in the public domain. It makes them or their former faculty pull stupid stunts like this where protecting revenue from commercial spin-offs is more important than doing science and research.
The theft is MOTIVE. Assault with a deadly weapon or threatened assault can have many motives: robbery, jealously, bigotry, random act of cruelty, etc. The motive helps determine the type of sentence handed out. If reassigning game objects under threat isn't a theft-related motive, then what is it? Which sentencing rules should the court apply? The court in this case chose to be conservative and stick with ordinary theft - it would be up to the Dutch government to create a wholly new "virtual theft" sentencing category if there was some reason to do so. Frankly I don't see how forcible transfer of game objects differs from someone threatening me if I don't electronically transfer the contents of my bank account - that's also a virtual number in a computer somewhere. So I think that this is the correct approach for courts to take.
I'm guessing the researcher's definition of "normal social tendencies" is:
Grows up a little princess, sheltered from the big bad world, only goes on dates at chaperoned events in clear sight of her father, until some presentable young man with good prospects asks her father for permission to put a ring on her finger.
And this from the article is just WTF:
A few years ago, Nass worked on a study about how multitasking affects adults. He found that heavy multitaskers experience cognitive issues, such as difficulty focusing and remembering things. They were actually worse at juggling various activities, a skill crucial to many people's work lives, than those who spent less time multitasking, Nass said.
So someone who is good at multitasking is worse at juggling various activities? What does multitasking even mean if not juggling?
I have experienced older relatives getting upset when I'm just reading to myself, sending e-mails, or surfing the net, instead of talking to them. Social does not mean I HAVE to socialize with YOU.
And where exactly is it going to end? Files can be "shared" via github, savannah, and sourceforge too. In fact, that's the primary purpose of those sites - legal sharing of files containing open source code. Setting up an account on those sites to share things the user doesn't own is just as easy and could go unnoticed for quite a while before some RIAA/MPAA/etc lawyer decides to nuke an open source hub off the net for the actions of a handful of users. First they came for megaupload...
... which may be a lot but still it seems pretty useless at this point.
There was a time when people struggled to put 10 transistors on a chip. Valve-based computers of that era ran rings around the puny and useless transistorized systems. You have to start somewhere...
"What does it offer over Linux?"
Am I the only one who remembers when USENET (no Slashdot back then) was all full of: What does Linux offer over Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, BSD,...? Those old beards weren't laughing 5 years later when Linux was stealing their user bases one at a time. Hurd may not do the same, but it is always a mistake to underestimate the tenacity of the underdog. Maybe Hurd doesn't have to be better than Linux at all things - there are a zillion gadgets like routers and embedded controllers that may benefit from something specialized. Let the Hurd guys have their fun and support them in their happy endeavours, if only moral support.
Whomever is even remotely considering using a weapon of that sort against this country must be absolutely, unconditionally assured that we are willing to blow his (or his sponsors') ass back to the beggining of time when there was no toilet paper or tamagotchi. This (I hope) has been the basic unspoken doctrine after 9/11.
What many people who giggle at the idea of the 'giant being killed by a thousand mosquito bites' forget is that asymmetric warfare [wikipedia.org] works both ways.
Unfortunately, it is you who don't understand asymmetric warfare. It doesn't work both ways. Hitting the other guy harder does not work. It creates martyrs. Which is a really stupid thing to do when the target culture (Islam) glorifies martyrdom.
Some right-wing nuts have proposed that we nuke Mecca should there be another terrorist strike on US soil. That would go down in the history books as the stupidiest decision of all time.
You think the Islamic world is pissed at us now? Nuke the centre of their religion and every moderate Muslim in the world who previously had stayed neutral will pick up a gun, strap on a suicide belt, and go kill as many Westerners as they can find.
Only a complete moron would propose "Nuke 'em all" as a viable way to solve this problem.
Re:So is this movie actually good?
on
How the Batsuit Works
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· Score: 2, Informative
cuz nobody else does them at all!
Japanese - manga anyone?
Russian - who do you think first made Solaris into a movie? And I recall an aquaman-type movie from the Soviet era (wish I could remember the name) that was amazing.
British - How many times has Robin Hood been made into a movie? Not to mention Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, etc, etc, etc.
China - The Hong Kong film industry was built on the back of martial arts superheroes from Chinese history. And don't get me started on Bollywood!
The list goes on and on. Other cultures have superheroes/supervillians and which have been made into big budget film versions in their native countries, and then remade for Hollywood several years later when Hollywood runs out of ideas. Just because you've never seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Steak isn't hunted. It is farmed, and the methods of slaughtering the animals is carefully regulated to ensure that it is as humane as possible - a bolt to the brain for a quick death usually.
Not pretty, but hardly equivalent to stalking one's meat in the forest with a gun, with the animal slowly bleeding to death in pain because of a misplaced shot.
My memories of history only go back so far -- I'm 33 years old. I don't remember any book burnings but I remember lots of talk about them.When were the book burnings you didn't imagine? What year?
on "The Right" - when we didn't like what the Dixie Chicks had to say, we didn't send Janet Reno out to get them to lay siege to their house longer than it took to take over Baghdad and then light it on fire... we simply stopped listening to the Dixie Chicks and buying their CDs.
I guess I must have imagined all of those book burnings, removal of the teaching of evolution in schools in favour of creationism, fines against TV networks over Janet Jackson's breast, etc, etc, etc,...
The idea that the Right doesn't do this is fanciful in the extreme. The Right is the primary practioner of censorship in the world right now, based on "moral values" that don't hold up to even minimal scrutiny.
The Left is not blameless, but it has come to terms with its extremist tendancies by putting checks and balances in place to prevent the worst abuses from recurring. The Right doesn't care one whit about checks and balances (witness the recent Shiavo mess).
"NASA scientists were red-faced today when their nanotech swarms crashed and refused to move anywhere. One scientist was heard to mutter something about 'Damn 32-bit time_t'".
"What that the one where people would get out of a spaceship and onto a horse? No great mystery as to why people didn't buy into THAT."
Because they're stupid, that's why. Colony farming planets, somewhat off the beaten track, have a lot more use for horses and cows than fancy gadgets. There are plenty of sci-fi novels that feature such societies, living side by side with technically advanced worlds. Whedon understood this. His audience didn't.
Where do you think your daily food comes from? A farm. Some farms use tractors, but many in the world today still use horses. When you're miles away from the nearest gas station, a horse pays for itself in a way that a tractor can't.
And the award for burying their head in the sand and hoping that reality goes away goes to... MEAA.
Seriously, if the actors know going into this what will be done, and are being paid a fair wage to appear, where's the beef? Name actors appear in indie films all the time in Australia, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes for no pay at all. How is this different?
If they had made something original, it probably would never had gotten mentioned on Slashdot or anywhere else. It would have been just another student project, lost in the film archives for all time.
By using an established genre, they get more media coverage and potential viewers. This increases the chance that the director, special effects guy, or one of the actors will be noticed by a big name to work on something more substantial. And then they will be able to do their own thing.
I believe that in university-level art classes, you need to turn in paintings in realistic, impressionist, post-modern styles, etc, to pass the course, to show that you have more depth than just one artistic style. Even if you never paint another da Vinci in your life, you still have to prove that you can.
Consider this movie the answer to a film student's exam question: "Create a film in the style of Lucas".
Slashdot Mirror
Curiosity is doing more science per second ON ANOTHER PLANET just sitting there checking its systems than the entire human race has achieved to date. Decades from now, scientists will still be pulling interesting information out of the data that was missed on the first pass. This is a genuine GOOD for the human race as a whole - don't screw it up to do the equivalent of spray-painting "l33tme w0z ere" on the side. Unless you're willing to pay the cost to send up a replacement robot, find something else to amuse yourself with.
Even if we were to assume that cell phones put out sufficient radiation to heat up the water molecules in the brain enough to be noticeable, it still pales into insignificance compared to the heating your brain receives when you have a hot shower and wash your hair. Or walk around without a hat on a summers day. If low-level heat from everyday sources caused cancer then the human race would have gone extinct in 50,000BCE when we invented fire.
And so on.
We've been down this road before with the debates over the Anarchist's Cookbook and hacking manuals. Banning, or labelling, or whatever serves no purpose except to enable government censors to make up excuses to block other information. And look - you gave them a nice little filtering system to help them do exactly that!
Of course Wikipedia needs to tread softly - they are the repository of the world's knowledge and anything that reduces access to knowledge is against its charter. Make the descriptions of various porn acts more clinical and less explicit, perhaps. But that won't stop the "think of the children!" crowd.
A new law was passed today by both houses of Congress making it illegal for pharmacies to sell over the counter HIV tests. The author of the bill, congressman John Q. Religinut, Jr (R) welcomed the passage of the law saying "Today we have taken a stand against promiscuity and the homosexual agenda".
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
And then come back and find the damn disk is still waiting at the "Select English or 40 Languages You Don't Speak" screen waiting for you to hit the OK button. Seriously, is it really so hard to detect the language I've already set on my Blu-Ray player and use that by default?
In any case, if "insert disk, go do something else, then watch movie" becomes a problem, I'm sure the studios will "fix" that by adding a EULA click to the Copyright warning screens.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
The contents of any business person's carry-on bag looks like that on an X-ray scanner. Phone, MP3 layer, USB cables, laptop and power brick, bent paper clip to reset dodgy devices, RSA security key for remote VPN access, prototype PCB for the embedded device my company is working on, etc. By the time that tangle of wires gets to the airport, it WILL look like a horrid science experiment that is a pound of C4 away from blowing up. Yet such tangles regularly pass through security with a brief 2 second eyeball from a bored TSA grunt. The only difference here is that the tangle was left behind on the plane.
But I would guess that young people are just not used to paying for music.
Heck, OLD people are not used to paying for music. I've had access to thousands of songs for near zero cost my entire life. It's called a radio. And I've probably spent a few hundred dollars total my entire life on products advertised on the radio, of which only a tiny fraction in the millicents range made it to the artists that created all that music. I have a few CD's, but nothing close to the amount I've consumed via radio over the years while paying peanuts. Music has always been cheap, and the record industry has always tried to invent ways to pretend that it isn't. There may be a future in creating custom listening mixes and radio-like streams. But $0.99 per song? Get real. It would be a rip-off at $0.01 per song.
If you need a compiler with special optimization options to make your code run fast, then either your algorithm or your data structure is wrong. Implicitly-parallel SIMD problems are a notable exception - same operation on massive amount of data. Everything else is PEBKAC.
Happy birthday gcc - making me think more carefully and write better code for 25 years!
OpenGL has become a joke under Khronos. More and more of the work needed to render scenes is pushed back onto the application developer. Once upon a time you could specify the material, texture, and light parameters and IT WOULD JUST FIGURE IT OUT! The responsibility for making it run fast was up to the OpenGL implementer, not the application writer. Now you cannot draw a single triangle without a month's worth of effort to implement matrix math, texture uploading, and material lighting from first principles. And then do it all over again on the next device because the stupid chipset vendor decided that they couldn't be bothered making simple color interpolation work fast (I'm looking at you ImgTech).
The problem is not handset fragmentation. The problem is that the OpenGL API provides no guarantees about what will actually work and work well. It's all thrown back onto the application and the chipset vendors can then brush off bugs in their design with "our examples work great - obviously you don't know how to write shaders".
It's time the application (not chipset) developer community smacked Khronos upside the head and made them specify a USEFUL rendering API that guarantees good performance for application-level tasks, and decertify chipset vendors who are too lazy to do their damn jobs.
"Of course, nobody really LIVES in most of those huge data voids, ..."
Yes, because farmers don't need to call 911 for help in an emergency, call the local food co-op to check this week's prices, order new seed from a supplier's web site, or e-mail the mechanic to get an ETA as to when the tractor will be fixed. And we certainly don't want the farmer's kids getting a decent education via distance learning web sites, or talking to their friends in nearby cities.
Putting cell towers in those areas is not profitable, but it is necessary. I say this as an Australian - for over a decade the commercial carriers did squat to wire up the country-side. The Australian government had to create its own carrier from scratch because the free market just didn't care about the 95% of the country where "nobody really lives there". Oh, except for the people who do.
And this is why universities like UC should be forbidden by law to apply for patents and required to put all discoveries in the public domain. It makes them or their former faculty pull stupid stunts like this where protecting revenue from commercial spin-offs is more important than doing science and research.
The theft is MOTIVE. Assault with a deadly weapon or threatened assault can have many motives: robbery, jealously, bigotry, random act of cruelty, etc. The motive helps determine the type of sentence handed out. If reassigning game objects under threat isn't a theft-related motive, then what is it? Which sentencing rules should the court apply? The court in this case chose to be conservative and stick with ordinary theft - it would be up to the Dutch government to create a wholly new "virtual theft" sentencing category if there was some reason to do so. Frankly I don't see how forcible transfer of game objects differs from someone threatening me if I don't electronically transfer the contents of my bank account - that's also a virtual number in a computer somewhere. So I think that this is the correct approach for courts to take.
And this from the article is just WTF:
So someone who is good at multitasking is worse at juggling various activities? What does multitasking even mean if not juggling?
I have experienced older relatives getting upset when I'm just reading to myself, sending e-mails, or surfing the net, instead of talking to them. Social does not mean I HAVE to socialize with YOU.
And where exactly is it going to end? Files can be "shared" via github, savannah, and sourceforge too. In fact, that's the primary purpose of those sites - legal sharing of files containing open source code. Setting up an account on those sites to share things the user doesn't own is just as easy and could go unnoticed for quite a while before some RIAA/MPAA/etc lawyer decides to nuke an open source hub off the net for the actions of a handful of users. First they came for megaupload ...
... which may be a lot but still it seems pretty useless at this point.
There was a time when people struggled to put 10 transistors on a chip. Valve-based computers of that era ran rings around the puny and useless transistorized systems. You have to start somewhere ...
"What does it offer over Linux?" Am I the only one who remembers when USENET (no Slashdot back then) was all full of: What does Linux offer over Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, BSD, ...? Those old beards weren't laughing 5 years later when Linux was stealing their user bases one at a time. Hurd may not do the same, but it is always a mistake to underestimate the tenacity of the underdog. Maybe Hurd doesn't have to be better than Linux at all things - there are a zillion gadgets like routers and embedded controllers that may benefit from something specialized. Let the Hurd guys have their fun and support them in their happy endeavours, if only moral support.
Some right-wing nuts have proposed that we nuke Mecca should there be another terrorist strike on US soil. That would go down in the history books as the stupidiest decision of all time.
You think the Islamic world is pissed at us now? Nuke the centre of their religion and every moderate Muslim in the world who previously had stayed neutral will pick up a gun, strap on a suicide belt, and go kill as many Westerners as they can find.
Only a complete moron would propose "Nuke 'em all" as a viable way to solve this problem.
Japanese - manga anyone?
Russian - who do you think first made Solaris into a movie? And I recall an aquaman-type movie from the Soviet era (wish I could remember the name) that was amazing.
British - How many times has Robin Hood been made into a movie? Not to mention Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, etc, etc, etc.
China - The Hong Kong film industry was built on the back of martial arts superheroes from Chinese history. And don't get me started on Bollywood!
The list goes on and on. Other cultures have superheroes/supervillians and which have been made into big budget film versions in their native countries, and then remade for Hollywood several years later when Hollywood runs out of ideas. Just because you've never seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Steak isn't hunted. It is farmed, and the methods of slaughtering the animals is carefully regulated to ensure that it is as humane as possible - a bolt to the brain for a quick death usually. Not pretty, but hardly equivalent to stalking one's meat in the forest with a gun, with the animal slowly bleeding to death in pain because of a misplaced shot.
Start with the American Library Association, here
What branch of government was buring the books?
Office of Foreign Assets Control according to this news story.
I guess Google is just too hard to use these days.
I guess I must have imagined all of those book burnings, removal of the teaching of evolution in schools in favour of creationism, fines against TV networks over Janet Jackson's breast, etc, etc, etc, ...
The idea that the Right doesn't do this is fanciful in the extreme. The Right is the primary practioner of censorship in the world right now, based on "moral values" that don't hold up to even minimal scrutiny.
The Left is not blameless, but it has come to terms with its extremist tendancies by putting checks and balances in place to prevent the worst abuses from recurring. The Right doesn't care one whit about checks and balances (witness the recent Shiavo mess).
"NASA scientists were red-faced today when their nanotech swarms crashed and refused to move anywhere. One scientist was heard to mutter something about 'Damn 32-bit time_t'".
Because they're stupid, that's why. Colony farming planets, somewhat off the beaten track, have a lot more use for horses and cows than fancy gadgets. There are plenty of sci-fi novels that feature such societies, living side by side with technically advanced worlds. Whedon understood this. His audience didn't.
Where do you think your daily food comes from? A farm. Some farms use tractors, but many in the world today still use horses. When you're miles away from the nearest gas station, a horse pays for itself in a way that a tractor can't.
Seriously, if the actors know going into this what will be done, and are being paid a fair wage to appear, where's the beef? Name actors appear in indie films all the time in Australia, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes for no pay at all. How is this different?
By using an established genre, they get more media coverage and potential viewers. This increases the chance that the director, special effects guy, or one of the actors will be noticed by a big name to work on something more substantial. And then they will be able to do their own thing.
I believe that in university-level art classes, you need to turn in paintings in realistic, impressionist, post-modern styles, etc, to pass the course, to show that you have more depth than just one artistic style. Even if you never paint another da Vinci in your life, you still have to prove that you can.
Consider this movie the answer to a film student's exam question: "Create a film in the style of Lucas".