In 15 years of Net use, I have had my machine broken into once. But then, logging into my machine over a telnet connection on a university network and then su'ing to root may not have been among my more brilliant ideas . ..
It's a genius idea frankly. something Unique is needed to be part of the the next spec...RFID is the simplest thing to use. mold it right into the disc and the content could be keyed to accept only those numbers of RFID tags as keys. Nobody but certified people could have the RFID discs.
(1) I want to take a home video from my HD-DV camera and put it on an HD disc to give to family and friends. Are you saying I can't do that?
(2A) If you make an exception for (1), what stops me from doing the same with a movie rip?
(2B) If you don't make an exception, just how do you intend to get people to accept the format?
I don't like the "phone home" requirements though, that could be a real turn off for most people.
(3) Have you ever heard of DIVX (not the video codec, but the DRM scheme Circuit City came up with about 10 years ago)? More importantly, have these researchers ever heard of it? It would seem not . ..
Why are movies expensive to make? Or rather, why should they be expensive to make? Solve that problem, and Hollywood won't need to worry about pirates either.
We now have the technology to implement a true direct democracy. It's time to do so.
Only if you scale the federal government's powers way, way back--otherwise you'll end up with people on the east and west coasts declaring the central states a nuclear waste dump site . . .
Direct democracy only works within reasonably small, relatively homogeneous groups. There's a good reason why the Senate is two senators per state regardless of population.
I'm still not convinced that we even need a next-generation format. HDTV is insanely scarce outside of the US
Not here in Japan. I'm not sure whether I want to say "mainstream" quite yet, but the vast majority of TVs being sold these days are HD, and all the major networks have HD channels up and running. In fact, analog signals are scheduled to be phased out by 2010 (or 2011, don't recall which).
Whether that will translate into a desire for HDTV videos remains to be seen, but given the Japanese fascination with new stuff, I expect a fair-sized market to form whenever the content companies see fit to start using the new media. Whether people will go along with the DRM is another question entirely . . .
as per this comment below (just bringing it up to make it more obvious). chmod a-x/home keeps you from doing anything in/home or any subdirectory, but will let you list/home; chmod a-r/home keeps you from listing/home but will let you do stuff in/home/bob.
One of the less desirable ones that comes to mind is SORBS, where if they list you in one category you've got to donate $50 to charity, per message, to be delisted. You're an ISP providing smtp to your customers, and you're listed again? Tough.
If they even bother to respond at all. I've tried multiple times to get my static-IP server off the "dynamic" list, both by requesting directly and by having my ISP (which owns the IP space) contact them, and they have done absolutely nothing. I've ended up having to block ISPs that use the list (hi, Earthlink, Netcom) just to avoid people sending me mail I won't be able to respond to.
I had a similar problem when I moved to a new apartment a while back. After a long and tiring weekend getting stuff in order, I knew I wouldn't be able to wake up easily on Monday, so I wrote a short shell script that alternated a standard alarm-like sound (beep-beep-beep) with the first couple seconds of/proc/kcore, and also disabled SIGINT/SIGQUIT so the only way to kill it was to log in on a different virtual console and give a "kill" command. I then climbed up to the loft and went to sleep.
Well, when I woke up the next morning it was a lot brighter than it should have been for 6:30. I groggily climbed down the ladder, and saw that (1) it was almost noon and (2) there was one failed login and about three misspellings of "killall alarm" on the screen. My boss was not amused.
I also recall having a dream where I was listening to a radio, when all of a sudden a phone started ringing somewhere--and oddly enough, in between the phone rings the radio gave off bursts of static . . .
Yes, that's the long answer.;) I didn't write it out because it wasn't relevant to the point at hand, but that's how I (and presumably most people) deal with them. But while it's a reasonably close rendition, it still doesn't get across exactly the same nuance--because the concept simply doesn't exist in English--and thus you can't use it as a reliable substitute if you don't understand the connotations of the Japanese words themselves. Hence my short answer, "you can't", not in the sense that you can translate "ringo" to "apple" and back to "ringo" again.
In short, there's no magic to learning a language. It is a grotty, tedious, intense and rather lonely project involving memorization, dictionaries and lots of time.
To be blunt, if your only tools are memorization and dictionaries, then you'll never reach real fluency. Languages are living things, and the only way to comprehend them is to talk with living people who use it.
Okay, maybe that's overstating it a little. But speaking with natives will help you much, much more than any amount of staring at dead trees or computer monitors. I spent my first year of Japanese study taking university classes and playing Japanese RPGs (with a dictionary at the ready, of course). Then, in my second year, my teacher introduced me to a native Japanese living in the area, with whom I practiced Japanese conversation once a week--later expanded to more people and more days. I don't think it's a coincidence that my Japanese skills skyrocketed during that second year.
One other thing I might point out is that you can't become fluent in a language as long as you're mentally translating back into English; you have to comprehend the language as-is. (How do you translate the distinction between the first-person pronouns "watakushi", "watashi", "boku", and "ore"? Short answer: you can't.) As long as you stick with reading materials, you'll always have the leeway to stop and think, so unless you have pretty strong willpower, you'll always be thinking in English. With conversation, however, you don't have that opportunity; you have to be able to think in the language to hold your own in a conversation--which in turn means that as your conversation skills improve, so does your overall fluency.
Of course MS could get away with it. All it takes is a low random probability of failure to access Google (say, 5% or so):
And with hundreds of Really Smart people at Google and millions of anti-Microsoft people around the globe watching Microsoft's every move, just how long do you think something like this could escape detection?
I actually went looking for a printer recently; I was leaning toward laser, even if black-and-white, until I saw the size of those things. There's no way I could have fit one of those into this Japanese cubicle-sized apartment . . .
Okay, so "more than half" of 30% makes it a little over 15%. So thats around 210+ scientists. Technically, the summary is right in saying "hundreds", but it sounds a whole lot more sensational than it really is.
And how is 210+ out of 420 scientists not "sensational"?
I hate to say it, but this really is a minimal event for the overall market-- no one I know has used Ichitaro for years.
Maybe you should get around more. I use it myself for some tasks (neither MSWord nor OpenOffice can get vertical writing correct) and I have a number of friends and acquaintances that use it as well. Ichitaro is a minor player, yes, but a significant minor player.
As far as I know, in all human recorded history, someone has been at war with someone else on this planet. We've never seen true peace. [emphasis added]
There's actually an interesting theory out there that writing--more specifically, alphabetic writing--is a primary cause of all the wars and unrest in "recorded" history: alphabetic writing, which uses no images and requires logical, orderly thought to interpret, emphasizes the left brain (which also controls the male hunter/killer instinct) at the expense of the right brain (female gatherer/nurturer instinct), and the resulting imbalance essentially drove newly literate cultures mad. Go read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Lenoard Shlain; it goes overboard sometimes, but lays out a really fascinating hypothesis.
I just saw Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki's latest work, and I just have this to say: It's excellent!
To each their own, I suppose. I saw it on opening day (here in Japan), and to be frank I was disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, by any means--it's just less than I expected for a Miyazaki work, and it didn't have quite the same touch his better films have had. If you haven't already been indoctrinated with Nausicaa and the like, then you'll probably find it very enjoyable.
How the hell can you take 139 days out of your life and still have a house? Or insurance? Or a job?
Well, the house isn't going to wander off anywhere, the insurance doesn't care, and if you're self-employed you can give yourself vacations whenever and however long you like. Those are just the first answers that come to mind.
Let me tell you, when you start recoring video and storing your DVD's on disk for easy access, not even multiterabyte disks will seem enough.
Add to that storage for backups which doubles or triples your needed space
Pardon the naive question, but (setting aside self-recorded stuff for a moment) why do you need to make a backup copy of copies of video on your hard disk? Don't the original DVDs--or your hard disk copies, one or the other--already qualify as backups? If your hard disk fails you can always restore from the DVDs, and if the DVDs go bad you can always burn new ones from the hard disk.
I personally keep my video archive in DVD-R spindles; my hard disk only has self-recorded stuff (serving as a backup to the DVDs) and anything I may have cached there for watching. DVDs are far more likely than hard disks to last 10 or 15 years, at which point they'll have been replaced by a new media with even more storage space and you can shift everything over then.
programming languages are tools of the devil. Look at all these illegal purposes they can be used for! We'd better ban them now before those thieving pirates do worse. Arrr.
Crispness is one of the few aspects where LCDs do best CRTs, because LCDs have precisely defined pixels whereas CRTs just have an electron beam that sweeps across the screen. The CRT wins in other areas, like blackness (compare a CRT and LCD "black" screen, there's no contest), resolution flexibility, and color response.
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In 15 years of Net use, I have had my machine broken into once. But then, logging into my machine over a telnet connection on a university network and then su'ing to root may not have been among my more brilliant ideas . . .
It's a genius idea frankly. something Unique is needed to be part of the the next spec...RFID is the simplest thing to use. mold it right into the disc and the content could be keyed to accept only those numbers of RFID tags as keys. Nobody but certified people could have the RFID discs.
(1) I want to take a home video from my HD-DV camera and put it on an HD disc to give to family and friends. Are you saying I can't do that?
(2A) If you make an exception for (1), what stops me from doing the same with a movie rip?
(2B) If you don't make an exception, just how do you intend to get people to accept the format?
I don't like the "phone home" requirements though, that could be a real turn off for most people.
(3) Have you ever heard of DIVX (not the video codec, but the DRM scheme Circuit City came up with about 10 years ago)? More importantly, have these researchers ever heard of it? It would seem not . . .
Why are movies expensive to make? Or rather, why should they be expensive to make? Solve that problem, and Hollywood won't need to worry about pirates either.
(Yes, this is a rhetorical question.)
We now have the technology to implement a true direct democracy. It's time to do so.
Only if you scale the federal government's powers way, way back--otherwise you'll end up with people on the east and west coasts declaring the central states a nuclear waste dump site . . .
Direct democracy only works within reasonably small, relatively homogeneous groups. There's a good reason why the Senate is two senators per state regardless of population.
I'm still not convinced that we even need a next-generation format. HDTV is insanely scarce outside of the US
Not here in Japan. I'm not sure whether I want to say "mainstream" quite yet, but the vast majority of TVs being sold these days are HD, and all the major networks have HD channels up and running. In fact, analog signals are scheduled to be phased out by 2010 (or 2011, don't recall which).
Whether that will translate into a desire for HDTV videos remains to be seen, but given the Japanese fascination with new stuff, I expect a fair-sized market to form whenever the content companies see fit to start using the new media. Whether people will go along with the DRM is another question entirely . . .
as per this comment below (just bringing it up to make it more obvious). chmod a-x /home keeps you from doing anything in /home or any subdirectory, but will let you list /home; chmod a-r /home keeps you from listing /home but will let you do stuff in /home/bob.
One of the less desirable ones that comes to mind is SORBS, where if they list you in one category you've got to donate $50 to charity, per message, to be delisted. You're an ISP providing smtp to your customers, and you're listed again? Tough.
If they even bother to respond at all. I've tried multiple times to get my static-IP server off the "dynamic" list, both by requesting directly and by having my ISP (which owns the IP space) contact them, and they have done absolutely nothing. I've ended up having to block ISPs that use the list (hi, Earthlink, Netcom) just to avoid people sending me mail I won't be able to respond to.
I had a similar problem when I moved to a new apartment a while back. After a long and tiring weekend getting stuff in order, I knew I wouldn't be able to wake up easily on Monday, so I wrote a short shell script that alternated a standard alarm-like sound (beep-beep-beep) with the first couple seconds of /proc/kcore, and also disabled SIGINT/SIGQUIT so the only way to kill it was to log in on a different virtual console and give a "kill" command. I then climbed up to the loft and went to sleep.
Well, when I woke up the next morning it was a lot brighter than it should have been for 6:30. I groggily climbed down the ladder, and saw that (1) it was almost noon and (2) there was one failed login and about three misspellings of "killall alarm" on the screen. My boss was not amused.
I also recall having a dream where I was listening to a radio, when all of a sudden a phone started ringing somewhere--and oddly enough, in between the phone rings the radio gave off bursts of static . . .
Yes, that's the long answer. ;) I didn't write it out because it wasn't relevant to the point at hand, but that's how I (and presumably most people) deal with them. But while it's a reasonably close rendition, it still doesn't get across exactly the same nuance--because the concept simply doesn't exist in English--and thus you can't use it as a reliable substitute if you don't understand the connotations of the Japanese words themselves. Hence my short answer, "you can't", not in the sense that you can translate "ringo" to "apple" and back to "ringo" again.
In short, there's no magic to learning a language. It is a grotty, tedious, intense and rather lonely project involving memorization, dictionaries and lots of time.
To be blunt, if your only tools are memorization and dictionaries, then you'll never reach real fluency. Languages are living things, and the only way to comprehend them is to talk with living people who use it.
Okay, maybe that's overstating it a little. But speaking with natives will help you much, much more than any amount of staring at dead trees or computer monitors. I spent my first year of Japanese study taking university classes and playing Japanese RPGs (with a dictionary at the ready, of course). Then, in my second year, my teacher introduced me to a native Japanese living in the area, with whom I practiced Japanese conversation once a week--later expanded to more people and more days. I don't think it's a coincidence that my Japanese skills skyrocketed during that second year.
One other thing I might point out is that you can't become fluent in a language as long as you're mentally translating back into English; you have to comprehend the language as-is. (How do you translate the distinction between the first-person pronouns "watakushi", "watashi", "boku", and "ore"? Short answer: you can't.) As long as you stick with reading materials, you'll always have the leeway to stop and think, so unless you have pretty strong willpower, you'll always be thinking in English. With conversation, however, you don't have that opportunity; you have to be able to think in the language to hold your own in a conversation--which in turn means that as your conversation skills improve, so does your overall fluency.
Of course MS could get away with it. All it takes is a low random probability of failure to access Google (say, 5% or so):
And with hundreds of Really Smart people at Google and millions of anti-Microsoft people around the globe watching Microsoft's every move, just how long do you think something like this could escape detection?
I actually went looking for a printer recently; I was leaning toward laser, even if black-and-white, until I saw the size of those things. There's no way I could have fit one of those into this Japanese cubicle-sized apartment . . .
. . . are those British trillions or American trillions? ;)
Okay, so "more than half" of 30% makes it a little over 15%. So thats around 210+ scientists. Technically, the summary is right in saying "hundreds", but it sounds a whole lot more sensational than it really is.
And how is 210+ out of 420 scientists not "sensational"?
I hate to say it, but this really is a minimal event for the overall market-- no one I know has used Ichitaro for years.
Maybe you should get around more. I use it myself for some tasks (neither MSWord nor OpenOffice can get vertical writing correct) and I have a number of friends and acquaintances that use it as well. Ichitaro is a minor player, yes, but a significant minor player.
As far as I know, in all human recorded history, someone has been at war with someone else on this planet. We've never seen true peace. [emphasis added]
There's actually an interesting theory out there that writing--more specifically, alphabetic writing--is a primary cause of all the wars and unrest in "recorded" history: alphabetic writing, which uses no images and requires logical, orderly thought to interpret, emphasizes the left brain (which also controls the male hunter/killer instinct) at the expense of the right brain (female gatherer/nurturer instinct), and the resulting imbalance essentially drove newly literate cultures mad. Go read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess , by Lenoard Shlain; it goes overboard sometimes, but lays out a really fascinating hypothesis.
I just saw Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki's latest work, and I just have this to say: It's excellent!
To each their own, I suppose. I saw it on opening day (here in Japan), and to be frank I was disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, by any means--it's just less than I expected for a Miyazaki work, and it didn't have quite the same touch his better films have had. If you haven't already been indoctrinated with Nausicaa and the like, then you'll probably find it very enjoyable.
How the hell can you take 139 days out of your life and still have a house? Or insurance? Or a job?
Well, the house isn't going to wander off anywhere, the insurance doesn't care, and if you're self-employed you can give yourself vacations whenever and however long you like. Those are just the first answers that come to mind.
Let me tell you, when you start recoring video and storing your DVD's on disk for easy access, not even multiterabyte disks will seem enough.
Add to that storage for backups which doubles or triples your needed space
Pardon the naive question, but (setting aside self-recorded stuff for a moment) why do you need to make a backup copy of copies of video on your hard disk? Don't the original DVDs--or your hard disk copies, one or the other--already qualify as backups? If your hard disk fails you can always restore from the DVDs, and if the DVDs go bad you can always burn new ones from the hard disk.
I personally keep my video archive in DVD-R spindles; my hard disk only has self-recorded stuff (serving as a backup to the DVDs) and anything I may have cached there for watching. DVDs are far more likely than hard disks to last 10 or 15 years, at which point they'll have been replaced by a new media with even more storage space and you can shift everything over then.
programming languages are tools of the devil. Look at all these illegal purposes they can be used for! We'd better ban them now before those thieving pirates do worse. Arrr.
Crispness is one of the few aspects where LCDs do best CRTs, because LCDs have precisely defined pixels whereas CRTs just have an electron beam that sweeps across the screen. The CRT wins in other areas, like blackness (compare a CRT and LCD "black" screen, there's no contest), resolution flexibility, and color response.
How about setting a good example and voluteering to witness the asteriod impact zone from ground 0.
Right back atcha.
Maybe I should start adding those <humor> tags again . . .
(In case you're still unclear: I do think we need to consider population control over the long run. I don't think an asteroid is the optimal method.)
people tend to ignore major threats like, oh I don't know, human near-extinction in several decades.
That's a threat? I'd say that a massive reduction in human population would be pretty beneficial in the long run . . .
What did I find? I'll leave that for you to discover . . .
Anyone got an idea as to how to start this?
I do Not recommend actually doing this.