Nothing personal, dude, it's part of a massive research project I'm working on involving the Slashdot community. It's amazing the trends you can discover just by posting various things around here.
Not only do I think that the USA should adopt English as it's national language and force its use in all affairs, foreign and domestic, but I think that the rest of the world should give up the silly notion that they're equal to or more powerful than us and just start speaking English as well. Conformity is the secret to world peace. Conformity under American morals and laws, that is.
Is anyone else annoyed by the "^_^" emoticon? I mean, it's not even a smiley face: it looks like someone who's died. The mouth is taut and the eyes are looking upward.
No one actually turns their head to look at the "classic" smileys, we all recognize them as they are printed. Orienting an emoticon so that it is readable along with the text is unnecessary, especially if it doesn't show the range of emotions previously available.
For some reason, I find that the people who do the ^_^ face tend to be anime zealots. Is there a story behind this that I missed while watching live action movies?
Humans just need a third arm, maybe more. Or a prehensile tail. If you could operate your keyboard with 10 digits distributed evenly across two hands and control a mouse with a tail (or a new kind of pointer device which is manipulated in 3D by direct use of the tail), we'd be all set. Then we wouldn't need to worry about all these complications of human-computer interface design -- from the input side, anyway.
If only more neuroscientists were working on *useful* projects like bionic prehensile tails...:)
aka. Billy Tauzin may be trying to convert the phone companies back to how they were in the 1970s, but the U.S. Government isn't THAT stupid. The bill mentioned above (2420) has been passed along to a judiciary committee so the Constitutionality of it can be contested.
And what if it wasn't simply a "hose your system" kind of breach... someone could always trojan the install so that they had r00t access to your system, so they can do all those typical nefarious (and more clandestine) activities like DOS attacks, warez/pr0n servers and IRC bots.
Get a cheap shell account with an ISP and telnet/ssh in to a news reader for use during the day. Or, get an account with a beefier subscription-based news service with a web interface like newsfeeds.com.
(Or you can go total geek like some people out there and colocate a unix box for all your non-work related activities which you connect to in the morning and logout from before you leave work...)
Combine this with some motion tracking hardware and when you're sleeping with your ugly girlfriend, she'll LOOK like Latetia Casta or Cindy Crawford (yes, or even Natalie Portman...)
> Now that's what I'd like: cheap transceivers on
> every card and device, and short lengths of
> fiber connecting them up. Bye bye to SCSI, IDE,
> USB, Firewire.
Here the posting is about replacing the high-bandwidth (formerly local) bus in PC architechture, and he thinks the suggestion regarding an optical bus is to be used for the (relatively) slow I/O busses of IDE, SCSI, Firewire and USB?
I think there should be Metaeditors to handle the editors who talk before their brain starts working. Either that or Timothy should be disallowed from adding "his two cents" to a news posting.
Some PC video capture devices (notably Matrox' Rainbow Runner series) have "macrovision detection" circuitry. This simply looks for a video signal with a faulty time base and will report it to the drivers, which theoretically cease recording and notify the user via a dialog box. However, some users experience problems when attempting to record material from their camcorder source tapes. It is a "false positive" to the macrovision detection, usually at points where the original recording was stopped and started again (and thus the fields on the video casette weren't spaced perfectly).
You can tell when a time base changes on a source video signal by a distinctive picture rolling for a moment that looks like your video resolution changing -- but since NTSC (e.g. televisions) only have one resolution, the resolution can't be changing.
I bet if you tried to record a Playstation 2 game, a macrovision-detection enabled video capture device would bitch about the flicker between the PS2 boot up screen and the video game boot up screen.
Macrovision works by messing with the time base on the outputted video signal. Normal NTSC video consists of 60 fields/second (well, 59.xxxxx) regularly spaced through that interval. Macrovision increases the timing between the fields slightly. This doesn't affect viewing, but when you record, the tightly-synced 60 fields are go in and out of phase (anyone remember "beats" from your high school physics class on sound waves?).
To overcome macrovision "protection," you need some form of a time base corrector. Most TBCs sell for a couple grand -- they're used by video editors for making sure the source and record decks are synced perfectly. Some consumer VCRs, however, do time base correcting internally (I have a Sharp VCR that I use between my DVD player (with composite out) and my TV (with coax in)). It overcomes macrovision, and could probably be used to tape macrovision-enabled video sources, but I haven't tried.
Since I hate his stand on merchandising, but I definately think that the overwhelming wave of *crap* being put out for Episode I has destroyed (as if the movie didn't do it alone) my faith in Star Wars.
I used to be a theforce.net junkie, I used to get all the action figures (you know, when you had to fight other kids at Toys R Us to get your hands into the first shipment of Boba Fett and Lando Calrissian), and I used to watch at least one of the videos roughly weekly. Yeah, I'd just put it on in the background while I wrote reports, played Quake or brushed the dog.
But ever since the flood of sub-par Episode 1 merchandise (I mean, Lucas used to only allow COOL stuff that was fun to have and looked nice both on the shelf and on the battle scene in the middle of the floor), my interest has waned.
While I did join a team of people to take turns camping out for Phantom Menace tickets, I wasn't one of the folks who was expecting it to be a life changing event -- I wanted to be pleasantly surprised when I got there instead of disappointed. But I guess I had a bad experience or something, because when I saw this list of quickies I thought "Oh great, stuff about that next star wars movie. Where's the technology news?" And then I thought, "what the hell? This used to be a religious thing for me, why don't I care." And then I realized it. And then I realized I could post about it for lots of karma.:)
Anyway, here's to hoping that Episode II delights more than I did. Maybe I'll see it in the first week. Probably not.
> I wonder if Panasonic (maker of my VCR) and the
> makers of my no-name VCR tapes send cheques to
> NBC and FOX?
Panasonic doesn't, but several cents on the dollar of every blank video tape you buy go to the movie industry and (presumably) broadcasters. It's the same way with blank audio casettes: a small percentage goes to the music industry.
This is part of the reason "content providers" are pissed about the wave of digital recording devices coming out (video and audio). They're used to getting paid for the inevitable "fair use" copying, but they aren't being paid based on the amount of blank digital media in circulation.
As long as you send from a legitimate address and actually RESPOND to remove requests, keep it up. Good luck, more power to you. But as soon as anyone sends me their marketing stuff from abc981723897@yahoo.com, they go on my shit list.:)
the fact that asteroids aren't perfect spheres. In fact, they're pretty far from being ANY perfect shape. They're probably not of uniform density, either. Add to that the fact that it's probably rotating unevenly, and you have one hell of an unpredictable rock floating through the cosmos.
Finding the center of mass in an arbitrary asteroid and then finding a way to nuke the precise point on it's surface isn't going to be something you can calculate easily with a computer program; you're gonna need to go to the asteroid you pick, study it for a while and THEN experiment a little with changing it's trajectory. All this before you're ready to aim it at Earth and *maybe* hit your target.
I suspect the article linked to is meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek, just like the one a few weeks ago on using asteroids to change Earth's orbit when the sun starts expanding.
How can you have a list of movies with hackers and not list The Manhattan Project? I mean, there's *real* hacking... building a nuclear bomb out of everyday household items (and some stolen plutonium).
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing personal, dude, it's part of a massive research project I'm working on involving the Slashdot community. It's amazing the trends you can discover just by posting various things around here.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Not only do I think that the USA should adopt English as it's national language and force its use in all affairs, foreign and domestic, but I think that the rest of the world should give up the silly notion that they're equal to or more powerful than us and just start speaking English as well. Conformity is the secret to world peace. Conformity under American morals and laws, that is.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
> suffice to say it rocks ^_^
Is anyone else annoyed by the "^_^" emoticon? I mean, it's not even a smiley face: it looks like someone who's died. The mouth is taut and the eyes are looking upward.
No one actually turns their head to look at the "classic" smileys, we all recognize them as they are printed. Orienting an emoticon so that it is readable along with the text is unnecessary, especially if it doesn't show the range of emotions previously available.
For some reason, I find that the people who do the ^_^ face tend to be anime zealots. Is there a story behind this that I missed while watching live action movies?
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
That's the same description DNA uses of Arthur.
:)
-Chris
(err... s/uses/used/...)
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Humans just need a third arm, maybe more. Or a prehensile tail. If you could operate your keyboard with 10 digits distributed evenly across two hands and control a mouse with a tail (or a new kind of pointer device which is manipulated in 3D by direct use of the tail), we'd be all set. Then we wouldn't need to worry about all these complications of human-computer interface design -- from the input side, anyway.
:)
If only more neuroscientists were working on *useful* projects like bionic prehensile tails...
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
aka. Billy Tauzin may be trying to convert the phone companies back to how they were in the 1970s, but the U.S. Government isn't THAT stupid. The bill mentioned above (2420) has been passed along to a judiciary committee so the Constitutionality of it can be contested.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
one word: parachute.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
What other Ford model should stock cars be based on? It's their main sedan, and that's what nascar's used forever.
:)
If rusty drives one, it's good enough for me.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
In order to keep your feng shui aligned properly, you SHOULD be concerned about views and climate.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
While the latency would be pretty bad, at least you're guaranteed in-order receipt of messages.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
:) )
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." - Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
(Once again, slashdot discussions come back to fortune(1) quotes... Or is it "recycling"?
-Chris
(What's with this lameness filter bullshit?)
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
How much is your time worth?
And what if it wasn't simply a "hose your system" kind of breach... someone could always trojan the install so that they had r00t access to your system, so they can do all those typical nefarious (and more clandestine) activities like DOS attacks, warez/pr0n servers and IRC bots.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Get a cheap shell account with an ISP and telnet/ssh in to a news reader for use during the day. Or, get an account with a beefier subscription-based news service with a web interface like newsfeeds.com.
(Or you can go total geek like some people out there and colocate a unix box for all your non-work related activities which you connect to in the morning and logout from before you leave work...)
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Combine this with some motion tracking hardware and when you're sleeping with your ugly girlfriend, she'll LOOK like Latetia Casta or Cindy Crawford (yes, or even Natalie Portman...)
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Yeah, it's called "Macromedia Flash" and for some reasons websites love to use it...
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
...what he's talking about?
> Now that's what I'd like: cheap transceivers on
> every card and device, and short lengths of
> fiber connecting them up. Bye bye to SCSI, IDE,
> USB, Firewire.
Here the posting is about replacing the high-bandwidth (formerly local) bus in PC architechture, and he thinks the suggestion regarding an optical bus is to be used for the (relatively) slow I/O busses of IDE, SCSI, Firewire and USB?
I think there should be Metaeditors to handle the editors who talk before their brain starts working. Either that or Timothy should be disallowed from adding "his two cents" to a news posting.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Some PC video capture devices (notably Matrox' Rainbow Runner series) have "macrovision detection" circuitry. This simply looks for a video signal with a faulty time base and will report it to the drivers, which theoretically cease recording and notify the user via a dialog box. However, some users experience problems when attempting to record material from their camcorder source tapes. It is a "false positive" to the macrovision detection, usually at points where the original recording was stopped and started again (and thus the fields on the video casette weren't spaced perfectly).
You can tell when a time base changes on a source video signal by a distinctive picture rolling for a moment that looks like your video resolution changing -- but since NTSC (e.g. televisions) only have one resolution, the resolution can't be changing.
I bet if you tried to record a Playstation 2 game, a macrovision-detection enabled video capture device would bitch about the flicker between the PS2 boot up screen and the video game boot up screen.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Macrovision works by messing with the time base on the outputted video signal. Normal NTSC video consists of 60 fields/second (well, 59.xxxxx) regularly spaced through that interval. Macrovision increases the timing between the fields slightly. This doesn't affect viewing, but when you record, the tightly-synced 60 fields are go in and out of phase (anyone remember "beats" from your high school physics class on sound waves?).
To overcome macrovision "protection," you need some form of a time base corrector. Most TBCs sell for a couple grand -- they're used by video editors for making sure the source and record decks are synced perfectly. Some consumer VCRs, however, do time base correcting internally (I have a Sharp VCR that I use between my DVD player (with composite out) and my TV (with coax in)). It overcomes macrovision, and could probably be used to tape macrovision-enabled video sources, but I haven't tried.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Since I hate his stand on merchandising, but I definately think that the overwhelming wave of *crap* being put out for Episode I has destroyed (as if the movie didn't do it alone) my faith in Star Wars.
:)
I used to be a theforce.net junkie, I used to get all the action figures (you know, when you had to fight other kids at Toys R Us to get your hands into the first shipment of Boba Fett and Lando Calrissian), and I used to watch at least one of the videos roughly weekly. Yeah, I'd just put it on in the background while I wrote reports, played Quake or brushed the dog.
But ever since the flood of sub-par Episode 1 merchandise (I mean, Lucas used to only allow COOL stuff that was fun to have and looked nice both on the shelf and on the battle scene in the middle of the floor), my interest has waned.
While I did join a team of people to take turns camping out for Phantom Menace tickets, I wasn't one of the folks who was expecting it to be a life changing event -- I wanted to be pleasantly surprised when I got there instead of disappointed. But I guess I had a bad experience or something, because when I saw this list of quickies I thought "Oh great, stuff about that next star wars movie. Where's the technology news?" And then I thought, "what the hell? This used to be a religious thing for me, why don't I care." And then I realized it. And then I realized I could post about it for lots of karma.
Anyway, here's to hoping that Episode II delights more than I did. Maybe I'll see it in the first week. Probably not.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
> I wonder if Panasonic (maker of my VCR) and the
> makers of my no-name VCR tapes send cheques to
> NBC and FOX?
Panasonic doesn't, but several cents on the dollar of every blank video tape you buy go to the movie industry and (presumably) broadcasters. It's the same way with blank audio casettes: a small percentage goes to the music industry.
This is part of the reason "content providers" are pissed about the wave of digital recording devices coming out (video and audio). They're used to getting paid for the inevitable "fair use" copying, but they aren't being paid based on the amount of blank digital media in circulation.
I'd be pissed, too.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
As long as you send from a legitimate address and actually RESPOND to remove requests, keep it up. Good luck, more power to you. But as soon as anyone sends me their marketing stuff from abc981723897@yahoo.com, they go on my shit list. :)
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
the fact that asteroids aren't perfect spheres. In fact, they're pretty far from being ANY perfect shape. They're probably not of uniform density, either. Add to that the fact that it's probably rotating unevenly, and you have one hell of an unpredictable rock floating through the cosmos.
Finding the center of mass in an arbitrary asteroid and then finding a way to nuke the precise point on it's surface isn't going to be something you can calculate easily with a computer program; you're gonna need to go to the asteroid you pick, study it for a while and THEN experiment a little with changing it's trajectory. All this before you're ready to aim it at Earth and *maybe* hit your target.
I suspect the article linked to is meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek, just like the one a few weeks ago on using asteroids to change Earth's orbit when the sun starts expanding.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Soybean Harley is made from PEOPLE!
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
How can you have a list of movies with hackers and not list The Manhattan Project? I mean, there's *real* hacking... building a nuclear bomb out of everyday household items (and some stolen plutonium).
Oh, you meant "cracker." I understand. Nevermind.
Shame on you, CNN.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Cartel? Embargo? Geeze, guys, let's not be too paranoid.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...