I really can't disagree too much with that. For anybody who doesn't agree with either party (and can't get the "Rah, rah, yay team!" blind follower thing going), it's a difficult thing to chose. Attempting to keep the power out of one party isn't a bad idea.
How about a coffeehouse modern folk musician, works in the newspaper industry, a fan who hosted a Science Fiction radio show, a member of a Wiccan coven (but primarily Discordian), a former BBS operator, marched for gay rights, worked security at an abortion clinic, a director of a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast, *and* I live in Davis, CA, likely the most liberal town in America.
And I voted for Bush in 2000 - in Palm Beach County, FL. And likely will in 2004.
It's simple: I hate the neocons as much as anybody else, but I think the Republicans, when they are inevitably stripped of the neocon religious right (see Arnold's speech at the RNC for what the party will be in 10 years), is where the country should be. I think Bush is thouroughly mediocre, and Ashcroft is downright bad. But I dislike the Socialistic and racist/separatist tendencies of the Democrats.
The Republicans seem to be moving in the right direction, and since I believe issues such as gay marriage will inevitably come to pass, I will try to keep them in power and let society mature socially.
Basically, people with a Libertarian or socially liberal, fiscally conservative bent can either wish that there was a Libertarian party with a chance of getting elected, or they can hammer on one of the other parties. As far as I can tell, the one that is salvageable is the Republican party. A good chunk of the religious right has left already. Pull the neocons out of there, and it's 90% there.
It's pretty much semantics. People who work with samples are artists (so are in studio producers, sound engineers, and all people who work to produce "art"). The question is, are they musicians? I consider the end result to be music - a new song. Thus, I consider them to be artists who create and/or perform songs, which fits my definition of musician. Strictly speaking, they would be composers/songwriters but not performers in some cases and in many other cases (but not all) strictly vocal performers.
There are many places where somebody can make a different judgment than I have and come to a different conclusion. Personally, I think that a good song constructed out of samples is a good, new piece of art. I think it is significantly better than a 'carbon copy' cover of a song like Aerosmith's cover of the Beatles' _Come Together_. Covers in novel new forms reveal more about and explore the original composition.
--
Evan "Using popular works here for reference sake"
Because the work and the performed work are two different things. Anybody is allowed to cover any song. There are mechanical royalties in effect that standardize the repayment for the work. Nobody is allowed to copy any performance of any song without permission.
Me? I've spent many many years getting the proper texture and tone out of my fingers and guitars. The subtle click of using my left hand fingernails versus the softer tip pull, the slowly muted resonating strings when I play an open chord and cup the edge of my palm against the open strings... all of this is a unique work.
People are talking about using this to copyright "silence" or a "c note". That's not what this is about. All too often the things sampled are trumpet bits or riffs that the musicians spent their entire lives to get to. For each song I write, I spend hours looking for a good melody, then more hours to find just the right way to play it (listen to the early takes of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever), and then throw away 9 out of 10 songs. The few I keep, I work at until they are "in" my fingers.
To directly address your question, I can pull a popular theme (I have, working a Zappa riff into a song about a guy stuck in the 70s), but that's entirely different than sampling a Zappa song and using it.
I'm not saying that people who work with samples are not musicians and that they do not create unique works. But, just as I'm allowed to perform a cover song but I can't take a song and perform it with different lyrics (unless it is protected parody or satire) without permission by the original author, the court has determined that you can't sample works without permission.
That's fine. Dolly Parton had to get permission to change the lyrics of her version of Stairway to Heaven and now a person wishing to use the crunchy intro note to Aqualung as a sample has to get permission.
Unfortunatly, I don't think that's it. Unless there are very different, minimalist screens free of any area to stand on that you fell though, trying to nab gold as you fall vertically though several screens.
I've been trying to figure out a certain game I played back when the Atari was king. It involved some sort of adventurer motif, along the lines of Indiana Jones, and, IIRC, was an early platformer (move from screen to screen, not scrolling like later ones).
I remember at one point you fell through several screens and could somewhat steer. You tried to pick up gold bars or treasure chests, which were liberally scattered throughout the levels.
Because of the complexity, I am almost certain it was a 7800 game. I have spent hours going through Atari game lists online looking for this game. Anybody recognize it or know of a good venue to post this question?
--
Evan "Many hours spent at someone else's house"
My SO (a grad student) and I were watching a show about Stonehenge. They had two professors, each surrounded by a flock of grad students, trying out their pet theories on how the huge stones were dragged across the land from the quarry to the eventual site.
The first one was highlighted, and went on and on about how he was going to use ropes, wind them around the stone and unwind it. They went into pretty good detail, interviewing the professor and students.
The view switched to the other team, all staring at a giant rock, and the narrarator chimed in with "Professor Soandso's method, on the other hand, involves..." and I cut in with "...rolling the huge stone over the screaming bodies of grad students".
Which pretty much sums up how science works these days.
I've seen screenings of many many movies in unfinished states. In some cases (like the Italian Job screeners), they were heavily edited afterwards and had a totally different soundtrack (they had to get the rights to the songs that eventually went into the movie - in the version I saw, the director put whatever he wanted in). In the case of Beauty and the Beast, several scenes cut to black and white sketches, "motion storyboard" to give the idea of the scenes. All the voices and foley were there, but the animation wasn't done.
I, Robot, for instance, wasn't finished until a scant couple weeks before it appeared in wide release. All the effects were still being finished up until then, and the animators were pulling late nights. That's pretty typical.
Eh... I can't use Windows, as in I can't figure out how to use it. I last used WinNT 4, and when I got my new laptop it had XP on it. The trackpad kept randomly moving things around and I had to call someone to figure out how to burn a CD (there was a app with a ton of clip art, so I wanted to keep the clip art). I poked around, and every app seemed to have a different UI. Media Player, in particular, seems to have some odd, confusing interface that does way too much and looks like no other program.
Installed SUSE 9.1, and everything works smoothly now. The trackpad works fine, and k3b burns CDs just fine. All the applications look and feel much more integrated and behave the same.
Basically, a better desktop. Sorry to say it, but it's true.
RTM's worm was an accident, not a violation of trust, and certainly not a indicative of the population of the internet in general. If anything, it shows how open the internet was at the time. Vulnerable in the same way doors in a small town are left unlocked because you know and trust your neighbors.
My commentary was more on the social aspect of the assumption that a known exploit will be used. That's not the case in many face to face games, and has not always been the case with video games.
--
Evan "Of course, lots of tabletop gamers 'leech' pizza..."
Nope. Been using networks that later became the internet since around 1981. The demise of being able to trust a random stranger on the net happened around 1993.
New to the net yourself?
--
Evan "Still maintaining that the whole World Wide Web is a teenage phase".
I'm not sure I understand, but this appears to be a bug that you have to intentionally take advantage of (by changing the offensive choice over and over). Couldn't this be easily solved... by not playing with people who cheat?
--
Evan "I trust people across the table when they say they rolled a nat 20"
Realistically, this should operate similar to text filters in less. I.e., a set of filters that convert files to text for grep'ing.
A more generic solution would be to have less stop using those filters and instead use strings, which would identify the file type and then subcall strings.text.plain or strings.text.html or otherwise the strings.mime.type. The fallback would be the normal strings behaviour. That way, anything that expected text (a la grep, less, etc) can have a flag to filter through strings to get the 'clean' feed:
grep -riw --strings "gold" *
Or just pipe it through:
strings mytext.html |grep -iw "gold"
That latter case could be handled by a strings.text.html that consists of a simple script calling lynx --dump.
Most publications have their own style guide, which does not necessarily coincide with the OED.
Actually, that's where I've seen it used the most. I work in the publication industry, specifically digital archiving and indexing, and I have seen dozens of style guides, several of which specify the OED.
Bollocks. The OED includes both slang (e.g. "bollocks") and technical language (e.g. "cyanacobalamin").
Yes, and if it is not in the OED, it is considered far enough outside common usage to require a definition within the article. In fact, several style guides specify this.
Style guides are horribly anal; I've sat in (and wandered out of) meetings that lasted for hours regarding the date at which the "to" in infinitives in titles should switch to the current style guide. Editors seem to really love butting heads over stuff like this. The OED is a common reference to agree upon, and is the closest thing to a standard out there.
As I said before, many institutions consider it the canon definition of the English language. You can deny it all you want, but I've spent the last six years flying around America and the Caribbean islands working with newspapers specifically on this kind of thing. The OED is a commonly (but not totally) accepted standard for the language.
You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further.
And you need to crank yours up even more. The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language. Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language. While you are correct that there is no royally or federally defined definitive language, the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language.
Ah, but the key thing is we are discussing WTC 7, which was not hit directly by the planes, but was evacuated and left to burn most of the day. It collapsed later that day, something some people here are saying was impossible without a secret plan to demolish it (presumably set up by the American government prior to 9-11).
The statement has been made that there has never, in all of history, been a steel structure building that collapsed due to fire. I pointed out several post earthquake.
The fire in WTC 7 was started shortly after the collision. The building was evacuated and left to burn (as firefighters fought to save people in the towers, and then to pull people out of the rubble). Later, it collapsed. This was after the diesel fuel tanks in the base levels had ignited (thus my statement about minimum temperature). There was no direct hit by the airplanes, although the two towers (each weighing 500,000 tons) collapsed right next to it.
So, given those parameters, is it impossible (as some have said) that the building collapsed due to the shock of the collapsing towers in conjunction with an ignored building wide fire that ignited the diesal tanks? Or is it, as I propose, a fairly straightforward event?
Well, the diesel tanks ignited, so it was at minimum 410 degrees Fahrenheit (autoignition temp for diesel). It burned "all day", according to reports, so call it 5 hours (the fire would have been smaller at start).
So, five hours at 410 degrees (210C)... I'd imagine that would strip the insulation. No idea if it would affect the steel, but that's a minimum temperature. I'll kick this back to Engineer Andy.
--
Evan
Re:Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But it was only WTC 7, none of the other buildings spontainiously collapsed.
I can think of two.
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
A couple did a few hours before.
And in 1923 in Tokyo, leading to Raymond Moss predicting that "steel structures would no longer be built following the 1923 disaster. This was quite a remarkable statement, considering that he was then the vice-president of a steel company. He noted that, while many steel buildings survived the earthquake intact, they were so damaged by the subsequent fire that they had to be razed."
Also more recently in Kobe on January 17th 1995, when the post earthquake fires caused steel buildings to collapse oddly: "Office blocks built in the 1960's of steel and concrete frequently collapsed in the middle so that a whole floor was crushed but the rooms above and below remained intact". Sound like something that would resemble WTC 7?
A shock to the structure followed by unrestrained fire seems to make steel buildings collapse nicely.
Look, I understand that it is more fun to think that everything has great machinations behind them. Fiction is full of great conspiracies and world (or even galaxy) wide cabals that secretly run everything. It is easy to see faces on Mars and shadow people behind the scenes, but it is also easy to ascribe the sun to a chariot of flaming horses driven by gods through the sky. I have friends who work in Congress. The congress-critters have enough problems trying to figure out how to do their jobs without adding sinister plots. Hell, Nixon tried to be sneaky by taping conversations, and not only was that found out, disclosed, led to a resignation, but now the equipment is in a museum.
Or, applying common sense - if politicians were doing all this secret stuff, don't you think they would use their skills at secrets and coverups to hide all the sex scandals with young interns and male employees?
--
Evan
Re:Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Why did WTC 7 collapse?
Because one million tons, dropping in two half a million ton blasts, has enough kinetic energy to devistate the surrounding area, making the surrounding buildings structurally unstable? Because they were on fire for the entire day, ignored in the greater tragedy? Because they stored large tanks of diesal which caught fire shortly before the buildings collapsed?
I seem to remember them mentioning that the building had been cleared of people after the collapse, and rescue workers were ignoring the fire to search the rubble. Makes sense to me.
--
Evan "Stayed at the WTC hotel for awhile in mid-2001"
I agreed up until I read (over the course of many years) what some of his investors - both true believers and embittered ex-investors - had to say. There seems to be quite a bit of intentional spin to his sales pitch, skirting the edges of lies.
On the other hand, the non-malicious reason is his being "insanely optimistic", as you say. I'll buy that as a possible reason, but I'll also say that calling it a scam isn't *way* too far. Perhaps a bit less certainty is called for, so I'll retract calling it a scam and call it 'either a scam or misleadingly optimistic project'.
--
Evan "If it goes production, I'll want one, fer damn sure"
I've always been interested in this, and followed the subject for the past couple decades. A friend has done the same since the 50s (and did classified work for the USAF with something I'm pretty sure involving planes).
To date there are basically two classes of "flying cars" - light aircraft that look like cars and fold up to drive (similar to the Aquacar and other novelity cars), and scams like anything Moller puts out under his Skycar company.
Moller is actually "making" real commuter flight vehicles, 400 mph, mpg roughly equal to a car, park in a garage, take off from the driveway (or helipad if the FAA never allows driveway flight). The only problem is, his test flights have been happening for decades, commercial models for sale have always been a "year or two away", and all test flights (until a couple recent ones) have all been tethered and a dozen feet above the ground.
Unlike fusion, which is always a decade away because there needs to be a breakthough, Moller says he has it working and ready. But he's been saying that for a long, long time.
The "planes that convert to cars" (and their cousins, one of which is mentioned in the article, "helicopters that convert to cars") have been around commercially since the 1950s, and they generally work fairly well. They aren't very efficient, but they fly, drive and a new model comes out from somebody every five years or so (until the chilling effect from lawsuits slowed small aircraft production recently).
No reference intended. The "last four years" was a generic "recent history" amount of time. I forgot that all comments are viewed in a political light these days. There are been other bills, some proposed, some passed, that affect your property rights dating back way before that and continuing up to today.
Slashdot Mirror
--
Evan
And I voted for Bush in 2000 - in Palm Beach County, FL. And likely will in 2004.
It's simple: I hate the neocons as much as anybody else, but I think the Republicans, when they are inevitably stripped of the neocon religious right (see Arnold's speech at the RNC for what the party will be in 10 years), is where the country should be. I think Bush is thouroughly mediocre, and Ashcroft is downright bad. But I dislike the Socialistic and racist/separatist tendencies of the Democrats.
The Republicans seem to be moving in the right direction, and since I believe issues such as gay marriage will inevitably come to pass, I will try to keep them in power and let society mature socially.
Basically, people with a Libertarian or socially liberal, fiscally conservative bent can either wish that there was a Libertarian party with a chance of getting elected, or they can hammer on one of the other parties. As far as I can tell, the one that is salvageable is the Republican party. A good chunk of the religious right has left already. Pull the neocons out of there, and it's 90% there.
--
Evan
There are many places where somebody can make a different judgment than I have and come to a different conclusion. Personally, I think that a good song constructed out of samples is a good, new piece of art. I think it is significantly better than a 'carbon copy' cover of a song like Aerosmith's cover of the Beatles' _Come Together_. Covers in novel new forms reveal more about and explore the original composition.
--
Evan "Using popular works here for reference sake"
Me? I've spent many many years getting the proper texture and tone out of my fingers and guitars. The subtle click of using my left hand fingernails versus the softer tip pull, the slowly muted resonating strings when I play an open chord and cup the edge of my palm against the open strings... all of this is a unique work.
People are talking about using this to copyright "silence" or a "c note". That's not what this is about. All too often the things sampled are trumpet bits or riffs that the musicians spent their entire lives to get to. For each song I write, I spend hours looking for a good melody, then more hours to find just the right way to play it (listen to the early takes of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever), and then throw away 9 out of 10 songs. The few I keep, I work at until they are "in" my fingers.
To directly address your question, I can pull a popular theme (I have, working a Zappa riff into a song about a guy stuck in the 70s), but that's entirely different than sampling a Zappa song and using it.
I'm not saying that people who work with samples are not musicians and that they do not create unique works. But, just as I'm allowed to perform a cover song but I can't take a song and perform it with different lyrics (unless it is protected parody or satire) without permission by the original author, the court has determined that you can't sample works without permission.
That's fine. Dolly Parton had to get permission to change the lyrics of her version of Stairway to Heaven and now a person wishing to use the crunchy intro note to Aqualung as a sample has to get permission.
--
Evan
Thanks, though.
--
Evan
I remember at one point you fell through several screens and could somewhat steer. You tried to pick up gold bars or treasure chests, which were liberally scattered throughout the levels.
Because of the complexity, I am almost certain it was a 7800 game. I have spent hours going through Atari game lists online looking for this game. Anybody recognize it or know of a good venue to post this question?
--
Evan "Many hours spent at someone else's house"
The first one was highlighted, and went on and on about how he was going to use ropes, wind them around the stone and unwind it. They went into pretty good detail, interviewing the professor and students.
The view switched to the other team, all staring at a giant rock, and the narrarator chimed in with "Professor Soandso's method, on the other hand, involves..." and I cut in with "...rolling the huge stone over the screaming bodies of grad students".
Which pretty much sums up how science works these days.
--
Evan "+1 Funny for those who have been there"
I, Robot, for instance, wasn't finished until a scant couple weeks before it appeared in wide release. All the effects were still being finished up until then, and the animators were pulling late nights. That's pretty typical.
--
Evan
Installed SUSE 9.1, and everything works smoothly now. The trackpad works fine, and k3b burns CDs just fine. All the applications look and feel much more integrated and behave the same.
Basically, a better desktop. Sorry to say it, but it's true.
--
Evan
--
Evan
Now is the greater problem the bug or the fact that you are playing a recreational game with "friends" you can't trust?
--
Evan
--
Evan "Of course, lots of tabletop gamers 'leech' pizza..."
New to the net yourself?
--
Evan "Still maintaining that the whole World Wide Web is a teenage phase".
--
Evan "I trust people across the table when they say they rolled a nat 20"
A more generic solution would be to have less stop using those filters and instead use strings, which would identify the file type and then subcall strings.text.plain or strings.text.html or otherwise the strings.mime.type. The fallback would be the normal strings behaviour. That way, anything that expected text (a la grep, less, etc) can have a flag to filter through strings to get the 'clean' feed:
grep -riw --strings "gold" *
Or just pipe it through:
strings mytext.html |grep -iw "gold"
That latter case could be handled by a strings.text.html that consists of a simple script calling lynx --dump.
--
Evan
Actually, that's where I've seen it used the most. I work in the publication industry, specifically digital archiving and indexing, and I have seen dozens of style guides, several of which specify the OED.
Bollocks. The OED includes both slang (e.g. "bollocks") and technical language (e.g. "cyanacobalamin").
Yes, and if it is not in the OED, it is considered far enough outside common usage to require a definition within the article. In fact, several style guides specify this.
Style guides are horribly anal; I've sat in (and wandered out of) meetings that lasted for hours regarding the date at which the "to" in infinitives in titles should switch to the current style guide. Editors seem to really love butting heads over stuff like this. The OED is a common reference to agree upon, and is the closest thing to a standard out there.
As I said before, many institutions consider it the canon definition of the English language. You can deny it all you want, but I've spent the last six years flying around America and the Caribbean islands working with newspapers specifically on this kind of thing. The OED is a commonly (but not totally) accepted standard for the language.
--
Evan
And you need to crank yours up even more. The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language. Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language. While you are correct that there is no royally or federally defined definitive language, the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language.
--
Evan
The statement has been made that there has never, in all of history, been a steel structure building that collapsed due to fire. I pointed out several post earthquake.
The fire in WTC 7 was started shortly after the collision. The building was evacuated and left to burn (as firefighters fought to save people in the towers, and then to pull people out of the rubble). Later, it collapsed. This was after the diesel fuel tanks in the base levels had ignited (thus my statement about minimum temperature). There was no direct hit by the airplanes, although the two towers (each weighing 500,000 tons) collapsed right next to it.
So, given those parameters, is it impossible (as some have said) that the building collapsed due to the shock of the collapsing towers in conjunction with an ignored building wide fire that ignited the diesal tanks? Or is it, as I propose, a fairly straightforward event?
--
Evan
So, five hours at 410 degrees (210C)... I'd imagine that would strip the insulation. No idea if it would affect the steel, but that's a minimum temperature. I'll kick this back to Engineer Andy.
--
Evan
I can think of two.
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
A couple did a few hours before.
And in 1923 in Tokyo, leading to Raymond Moss predicting that "steel structures would no longer be built following the 1923 disaster. This was quite a remarkable statement, considering that he was then the vice-president of a steel company. He noted that, while many steel buildings survived the earthquake intact, they were so damaged by the subsequent fire that they had to be razed."
Also more recently in Kobe on January 17th 1995, when the post earthquake fires caused steel buildings to collapse oddly: "Office blocks built in the 1960's of steel and concrete frequently collapsed in the middle so that a whole floor was crushed but the rooms above and below remained intact". Sound like something that would resemble WTC 7?
A shock to the structure followed by unrestrained fire seems to make steel buildings collapse nicely.
Look, I understand that it is more fun to think that everything has great machinations behind them. Fiction is full of great conspiracies and world (or even galaxy) wide cabals that secretly run everything. It is easy to see faces on Mars and shadow people behind the scenes, but it is also easy to ascribe the sun to a chariot of flaming horses driven by gods through the sky. I have friends who work in Congress. The congress-critters have enough problems trying to figure out how to do their jobs without adding sinister plots. Hell, Nixon tried to be sneaky by taping conversations, and not only was that found out, disclosed, led to a resignation, but now the equipment is in a museum.
Or, applying common sense - if politicians were doing all this secret stuff, don't you think they would use their skills at secrets and coverups to hide all the sex scandals with young interns and male employees?
--
Evan
Because one million tons, dropping in two half a million ton blasts, has enough kinetic energy to devistate the surrounding area, making the surrounding buildings structurally unstable? Because they were on fire for the entire day, ignored in the greater tragedy? Because they stored large tanks of diesal which caught fire shortly before the buildings collapsed?
I seem to remember them mentioning that the building had been cleared of people after the collapse, and rescue workers were ignoring the fire to search the rubble. Makes sense to me.
--
Evan "Stayed at the WTC hotel for awhile in mid-2001"
On the other hand, the non-malicious reason is his being "insanely optimistic", as you say. I'll buy that as a possible reason, but I'll also say that calling it a scam isn't *way* too far. Perhaps a bit less certainty is called for, so I'll retract calling it a scam and call it 'either a scam or misleadingly optimistic project'.
--
Evan "If it goes production, I'll want one, fer damn sure"
To date there are basically two classes of "flying cars" - light aircraft that look like cars and fold up to drive (similar to the Aquacar and other novelity cars), and scams like anything Moller puts out under his Skycar company.
Moller is actually "making" real commuter flight vehicles, 400 mph, mpg roughly equal to a car, park in a garage, take off from the driveway (or helipad if the FAA never allows driveway flight). The only problem is, his test flights have been happening for decades, commercial models for sale have always been a "year or two away", and all test flights (until a couple recent ones) have all been tethered and a dozen feet above the ground.
Unlike fusion, which is always a decade away because there needs to be a breakthough, Moller says he has it working and ready. But he's been saying that for a long, long time.
The "planes that convert to cars" (and their cousins, one of which is mentioned in the article, "helicopters that convert to cars") have been around commercially since the 1950s, and they generally work fairly well. They aren't very efficient, but they fly, drive and a new model comes out from somebody every five years or so (until the chilling effect from lawsuits slowed small aircraft production recently).
--
Evan
--
Evan "Haven't found one, don't need it enough to shell out money"
And damn... it's been six years. Time flies.
--
Evan