BabelFish is just stupid. Better to use SysTranNet. I sell guitar effect pedals on eBay and use SysTranNet to translate any questions received from a non-English speaking country (including Quebec) into the native language of the originator. Results appear to be excellent.
I rate machine language translation on a scale of one to five. One is word-to-word translation. Two is phrase translation with correct spelling and grammar in both languages. Three is paragraphs for magazines and college student reports. Four is film, newspaper, and conversational level quality. Five is literature and diplomatic level. BabelFish is between one and two: Systran is about level four (as far as I can tell, as I'm not a linguist, much less a cunning one).
Anyway, After extensive tours of the coffeeshops of the Netherlands, I've been told repeatedly to leave Dutch language to the Dutch people. Everyone not Dutch doing anything in the Netherlands is politely requested to use English. People in the Netherlands claim to have the ability to understand your bad English much better than they can understand your bad Dutch. Something about the very complex structure of the vowel sounds, I've been told. Then again, maybe it was the coffee.
So, yes, avoid Babelfish except as a joke. Demand quality machine language translation. It is likely to be the next 'killer application' of 64-bit processors.
Are these people out of their minds? Producing a super mouse?! As if regular mice aren't enough of a problem. So make a mouse that runs super fast and can't be caught by cats. And eats 2.6 times as much as normal mice that already munch through a significant percentage of harvested grain in India and other places. And reproduces long after normal mice have finished their reproductive cycles.
INSANE!
So what are these guys going to do or say if or when these super-mice escape into the wild and start causing serious ecological problems? "Ah jeez, we're sorry! we didn't think something like this could happen!"
Ecologically responsible scientists DON'T create super-versions of problem animals in their labs and then act proud of it. What schmucks!
So what's next from these bozos? Super rats? Super mosquitos? Super gophers? Super moles? Beavers that can run like tigers and can bite a child's leg off?
Just because you CAN create a super version of a problem animal doesn't mean that you SHOULD do such a stupid thing. Don't these guys ever read sci-fi? Or do they believe that their doctorates make them incapable of doing stupid things?
Will they be arrested for conspiracy to commit piracy? Let's see 30,000 MP3 songs at $250,000 each time 1,000,000 chips. A lot of zeros means a lot of money! Everyone knows that if you sell a memory device that can hold 20000 MP3 songs that all but a handful will be 'pirated', that is to say copied without permission of their so-called owners. No one except loud-mouth fuckhead billionaire Steven Jobs is actually paying $30000 for 30,000 iTune songs. So if you make a device that facilitates file copying, aren't you guilty of conspiracy to commit intellectual property fraud?
And don't tell me that there are alternative legal uses for hard drives and memory chips. After all, isn't the scope of the intellectual property crisis dire enough to overrule such petty and superficial uses of these devices? Isn't that what the entertainment industry is telling us? Aren't they the most important 'industry' in the USA and the world?
In my town any teenager can have his life ruined by being arrested for having a little piece of blank paper in his pocket. The pigs (excuse me, I meant to say 'the Republicans') here call it 'conspiracy to possess marijuana paraphernalia', and it means just a cigarette rolling paper. And it's a serious crime with serious time.
But every consumer electronics store in the city sells drives and media that are specifically used to commit so-called 'intellectual property theft'. Listening to music, having a little scrap of paper in your pocket, even suggesting that this is all nothing but corrupt,racist, selective law enforcement, it's enough to get you arrested and thrown into the vast American rape-torture gulag.
But if the MPAA/RIAA is so smart and so bad, then why aren't they actually going up face-to-face, lawyer-to-lawyer against the manufacturers that make the hard drives and memory chips? Sure they'll go after single mothers making $8/hr and win $250,000 with their $300,000/yr lawyers and hand-written laws. But will they go after the Fry's, Walmarts, and BestBuys for selling the drives, PCs, and modems that make it possible for ordinary people to 'steal' their 'intellectual property'? Why not? They have the money, they have the lawyers, they have the testicles! So where's the beef?
If they won't do this, then the entire music and entertainment global industry (it's what now, four giant companies?) should be taken over by the government as a RICO enterprise. We should make them do it. After all, it's us that are the most embarrassed by this corrupt extortion. Why aren't we doing anything about these assholes? Of course, they will self-destruct on their own, but they will do a lot of damage on the way down. We should put our collective heads together and deliver a coup-de-grace to these pathetic losers. Consider it a mercy killing. Which is legal here, but carrying a little piece of rice paper is not.
A flaw in this argument's basic assumption is that people know what specific musical recording that they want. This assumes that they have heard the musical recording and know of its title and band. Which in turn assumes that the musical recording is played in a wide public forum (such as radio) closely followed by its information (band and title) so people know what specific recording to buy from the thousands available.
When people tune out commercial radio stations because of over-commercialization and homogenized playlists, or stop going to clubs that play new musical recordings, they break this connection to new music industry product. And the whole business model falls apart. It doesn't make any difference if a recording has DRM if a potential customer isn't buying anything because they have no idea what the CD package sounds like.
In this model people will buy what they have before or try new stuff only if it has ties to what they have liked before and is very cheap. By business definition, no recording with DRM is going to be cheap. The entire purpose of the DRM is to preserve the price point of the product. But how can you do this if people don't know the product? DRM basically kills the 'long tail' by limiting a product's exposure to the media corporation's captive audience, i.e. the people who listen to the media corporation's public outlets for religious, political, or marginal entertainment reasons. This is a major flaw in the DRM business model in the era of 'long tail' marketing of cultural products.
Allow me to recommend some great free music sites:
- Your local public library. The URL depends on your location. You can get a search for the type of music that you like and get a list of titles that can be put on reserve. When the CDs are returned, they are shipped to your local library branch and an e-mail notice is sent to you. You go over and pick them up, rip them into any format and bitrate that you want, and transfer them to your digital music player. Take the CDs back to the library and just slip them into the night slot as you would a rental video.
- eBay.com Search for the CDs that you are interested in by quote artist unquote or genre. Significantly cheaper than loudmouth billionaire Steve Jobs' store. Also try the other musical areas of eBay.
- eBay.com The musical instruments section. Ever wonder what it would be like to actually play your own Strat, sitar, or synthesizer? They're all for sale at a better price than you could find anywhere. Every type and every price range. And here's a secret. Because instruments sold on eBay are at their lowest price level already, you can always resell them for what you paid for them. So you can have a Strat, sitar, or synthesizer for a few months or years and then resell it on eBay. It's in effect a nearly-free instrument rental service. The only charge is the eBay listing, PayPal, and shipping charge from the previous owner. Save the packing that it arrived in for reshipping. Or sell it locally on CraigsList or the free listings in the Wacko Weekly newspaper of your city.
- Guitar tab and MIDI websites. While at the library picking up your free CDs, pick up a book or two on beginning music theory and sheet music reading. With all the cutbacks in public schools, music and art programs are often the first to go. Many people don't get a chance to learn to read music. They have no clue of how to get the sounds that the quote artists unquote are playing on the CD out of the instruments that they bought on eBay. Tab and MIDI websites are the answer. Google your favorite song with the word tab or MIDI after it. Tabs (short for tablature, which is a form of writing guitar music, not the study of Indian drums) show you how to play guitar. MIDIs show you the sheet music, that is what notes to play. But you have to have a MIDI notation program and you have to know how to read music or at least know which notes arrange themselves into what chords, and how to play them. All available on the web.
- Jam sites. These are websites where you plug your MIDI instrument into your PC, go to the site, find a channel where someone else who is playing their MIDI instrument to the website, and join into the groove. A musician's Napster. Actually I don't know if these even exist. Please let me know if they do. If not, please code it as your senior project.
Music is free. There is no musician out there, rich or poor, who didn't learn the craft from listening and copying exactly from someone else and then changing it to fit his needs as a quote artist unquote. Music is like air. The fact that it goes into your body, gets mixed with your chemicals, comes out, and goes into someone else's body doesn't mean that you can claim to own it. The fact that a few giant global corporations can use media, lawyers, and police to attempt to convince people that they 'own' music means little in the long run. They are wrong. We are right. Music is free. Always has been, always will be.
My real opinion is that space travel is cool; in Hollywood movies. In the real world, there are far too many more important things that need our brain cycles.
Space travel is as close as most Slashdotters come to having a real religion. A lot of them seriously believe in it. They believe in it as a way to a truly utopian world. They love the smallest details of the most minute technologies involved. The love the grandure of the quest.
It's all so childish. It's the nerd equalivent of a 3-year-old's belief in Santa Claus. (or whatever imaginary figure that children believe in your country). It's not real. There's nothing in space, it's empty. There's no reason to go to other planets: there's nothing there on them.
Maybe in a thousand years or so, but not now. The 20th century is over. It was an aberation, a freak. It happened because of enormous amounts of cheap oil was burned to make it happen.
The cheap and easy oil is disappearing. The magic and promise of the 20th century will disappear with it. A new dark ages approaches. There is a 'die-off' coming: a perfect storm of climate change, energy shortages, and 'Mad-Max' anarchy. There is no silver bullet technology on the horizon to save us. The super-technology of the 1960-2030 era will save only the 500,000 super-rich. Maybe you will be one of them. I hope so.
There will be no space station islands floating above the earth like Irish monastaries in the next Dark Age. There is no technology that can sustain human life in space and there is unlikely to ever be one. Not even in a thousand years or more.
And the Slashdotters, who should know better, refuse to give up their doomed religion of salvation through space travel.
And it pisses me off.
It's the only topic in all the areas that Slashdot covers where I have serious disagreements with the majority of good people here.
And it pisses me off that every time the topic comes up here, I always write that space travel is a dangerous delusional fantasy, a techno-nerd religion. And no matter how well or poorly I write, I always get modded down to -100 hell.
This obsession with modding down people you disagree with is a weakness in the techno-nerd mind. It's a crypto-fascist cancer that affects a lot of good people here. It makes me believe that deep deep in my gut, I can't trust the Slashdot community because under all this beautiful technology, there lies a Nazi ubermenschen uglyness of the soul that should have been discarded after the Shoah holocast showed what this mentality will lead to if not treated.
The above message was clearing written by some loser with a serious attitude problem who clearly doesn't understand the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel. How could anyone be so dense? Must not have had cool science books with cool pictures as a kid. Tough. But, this being Slashdot, where space travel has the same status as Jesus in Oklahoma, it would be easy to just blast this fool back to slime by mod-ing him (her? it? shit!) down to -100. A deep and endless black hole that Slashdot reserves for losers who interrupt our beautiful discussion of really cool methane sparklers.
But we shouldn't!
Because there are millions of people out there who think exactly like this pathetic fool loser. And all these pathetic fool losers just like this guy actually control the money that we need to bring the absolute necessity of space travel into reality. If any of this cool shit is going to happen, we have to convince these pathetic fool losers to give us the money. And to do this we have to blow their arguments away in order that they too can come to see the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel, just like we do.
So let them speak! We will listen. We will study the ravings of these pathetic fool losers and turn their own words and twisted logic into arguments that are crystal brilliant diamonds of logic that clearly demonstate the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel!
So, no, don't mod them down. Have pity and patronize them. They will eventually come over to our side. Hell, if they're on Slashdot, they're already most of the way there.
Looking for water? We got water here. Two thirds of the surface of this planet is covered with water, several miles deep in places. We got all the water that you'll ever need or want right here. For free.
Looking for life? We got life here. Lots of it. In fact there's so much life here that our main global industry is the creation of machines that are used to kill life here. Guns, munitions, bombs, atomic bombs, death planes, death satellites, endless first-person-shooter video games to prepare our young for killing. You want life? We've got plenty! Help yourself!
The point is that spending millions of dollars to look for life and water on other planets is insane. We already have plenty of it (it being whatever you're looking for) right here, right now.
What the people who are spending millions (hundreds of millions actually) of dollars on space travel are looking for is an easy paycheck that comes with a science-fiction fantasy attached. They should admit this to themselves and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
Then they should go become Hollywood screenwriters and contribute something useful to our society.
In English, the word 'fuck' is a general purpose accentuator. It's used to increase the emotional intensity of the words surrounding it. It gets its power to do this through its being proscribed in normal and polite conversation and its legal prohibition from general public media.
The ability to construct coherent sentences using only variations of this word results from the ability of the English language to have any word become any part of speech often unchanged according to its placement in the sentence. English is unique in this regard among the world's common languages.
The word 'fuck' in English is one of the few words in that language that shares with Chinese the ability to completely change its meaning according to its accent. The word has different subtle connotations depending on whether it is spoken with a rising, falling, flat, or modulated tone.
A note of caution here; this word, since it has no clear meaning, can and does invoke strong emotional states in its use. Its use among violent people often serves as an signal to initiate violence, especially around Americans.
Further study of this linguistic curiosity can be done by viewing Hollywood films of the late 1990's. Recommended are films staring Samuel Jackson (except the second Star Wars trilogy) and Quentin Tarentino.
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language.
One way to pick up French or Spanish is to use the alternate audio and subtitles found on nearly all Hollywood DVD movies. Often there is both audio and subtitles in both French (for the Quebec audiences) and Spanish along with English second subtitles for the deaf.
When paying close attention to the spoken dialog you will notice that it doesn't match the subtitles. That's because the films are actually translated twice by different teams. Once for the audio dubbed dialog and again for the subtitles.
For French try and find modern French movies that have made it to the USA. The dialog and titles (for deaf French speakers) usually match exactly.
For Spanish try paying close attention to the spoken language that is often used for public announcements. Our streetcars repeat every announcement like station stops and cross connections in Spanish. Also try using the auto checkout in grocery stores and ATMs in Spanish.
You could actually try talking to people who are speaking the language that you are trying to learn. This has mixed results in real world contacts. Also try using the web translators like Systran or even the excreteable BabbleFish. Libraries have foreign language sections. Often popular titles are available translated into Spanish and sometimes French. Harry Potter and Steven King novels are often available in both English and Spanish, but in different sections of the library. There used to be books with French (and German) written on the left page and the parallel English text on the right page.
The library may have language DVDs or CDs that can be ripped and copied quickly. If you can rip an entire CD of language dialog in a minute or less, then why not just grab five or six of them. Polish, Portugese, Thai, Japanese, Urdu... Why not?
If you take public transportation, try the game of evesdropping (very discretely) on people speaking foreign languages and trying to determine what language they are actually speaking. I've quietly listened to people from Mexico and realized that they weren't speaking any language that remotely resembled Spanish. When I asked my Hispanic friend (soy estan gringo) about this, she said that they probably were speaking Mayan or some pre-Columbian Indian language that survived in the distant rural villages of Central Mexico. You will eventually be able to tell Spanish from Brazilian, Japanese from Chinese, Polish from Russian, and even if you become a bus-language master, the differences between the various SouthEast Asian languages like Lao and Vietnamese.
Anyway, I'm rambling... ironically... lots of language..so little to say.
I believe in fairness. Everyone needs to work productively. So yes, give this guy a job.
But only after he has spent MANY years in jail, and has reimbursed all the people who lost work and data directly resulting from the virus being on all the computers affected by this crime.
So if this criminal has written and released a bit of secret code that wipes out data a hard drive, then he (always a he) should be required to compensate for the cost of collecting and entering this data. He must also be responsible for loss of income and profit in all the companies infected by his virus code.
If he is still interested in coding after all the effort and expense that he must do to correct the bad effects of his deliberate action of writing and releasing a destructive virus, then he should be allowed to do so.
But not until all the compensation has been made. It doesn't matter if this criminal is a coding genius, we can always get the same results from having more ordinary people working on the same coding problem as a lone genius.
What I'm saying is that regardless of any individual's coding skills, if this individual causes millions of dollars of damage, he should not be allowed to work in this industry.
Yes, I too believed the endless Apple hype. Even twenty years ago before knowing anything about computers and electronics (they are the same thing, in reality).
Then when I was an electronics student, the original Mac came out. What a media shitstorm! You would have thought that the sun danced in front of Dan Rather and cast of thousands in a sleepy little Portuguese village. Then people started exiting the Jobs reality-distortion field and real reports started circulating (but not being published as most computer magazines were dependent on computer company ad purchases and wouldn't report anything dispiriting about anybody's computer. Plus,there was no WWW then).
Well this little box was an earth shattering copy of a Xerox Star and somewhat cheaper, but it had one problem. It couldn't, well,..uh.. do..anything actually. I mean after you wiggled the mouse around and clicked on some menu bars, well that was about it. That's what you got for your $2000. It even took five swaps to copy a floppy disk.
The problem was that the machine had no memory. It had two banks of 64K chips to run the whole show. But there were holes and traces on the circuit board to hold the new 256K RAM chips. It wasn't long before hardware hackers (and there were many then) realized that by carefully removing the 64K chips and replacing them with 256K chips, the new Mac could perform almost as well as a CPM machine or even a RadioShack Trash-80. Apple would upgrade your new machine, but they charged two to three times as much as the cost of the 256K RAM chips themselves. And basically all they did was pop the top, unscrew the main circuit board from the box, pull some easy-on,easy-off connectors, put in the new board with the 256K RAM chips and slap everything back together. It took about 15 minutes, maybe, if the store was busy. But Apple charged many hundreds of dollars for this, uh, service.
So lots of people, (first customers, the ones who took a chance and paid the big bucks for Apple's new machine) simply did this procedure themselves. Word filtered back to this asshole Steve Jobs that about this and he decided that: "Anyone who did a non-Apple upgrade of the Mac RAM could NOT be allowed to purchase upgrade ROMs that fixed all the little bugs in version 1.0". This was a big thing: ROM chip swap was the only way to upgrade the Mac OS and, back then, almost everybody was a hardware hacker. Popular computer magazines published schematics and code to home-build copies of the latest equipment and peripherals that were being reviewed and sold.
Not long after that Jobs was thrown out of the company for being a greedy megalomaniac and pissing off the entire Apple community. But he never lost the uncanny ability to take people's money, give them second-rate equipment, and convince them that they were part of some 'insanely great' movement of which he was the guru through which the divine light of technology and coolness passed.
So it comes as no surprise that one by one, millions of people come to learn what a greedy vicious little fraud this guy is. Do yourself a favor; don't buy stuff from this guy. You can always get the same functionality in better and much cheaper equipment elsewhere.
The user's computer exposure to web criminals was not due to the user's lack of attention to minute details of the program, but by the criminal negligence on the part of the programmer to shield the user's data from his program's access.
In other words, the programmer of the P2P software is at fault for allowing his program to default into a dangerous state! The P2P program should be forcing the user to create a new and specific folder on the hard disk for files that will be shared. Then the shared files must be specifically moved to this folder in order to be accessed by other users of the P2P program.
The days when a programmer can claim that a user was at fault for the consequences of poorly-designed software are gone. To claim otherwise is a throwback to the 1970s when it could be expected that computer users were tech professionals and therefore could be expected to plow through hundreds of pages of manuals to become aware of these 'gotcha' defects in a program's structure.
Also it is important that the computer professional community supercede the legal authorities in punishing criminals who use the web for identity theft and other computer crimes. We need to hunt these bozos down and punish them. Not by killing them, maiming them, or imprisoning them, but by ensuring that they don't have access to computer networks again for long periods of time. Or by deleting their bank account records and the computer profiles that all people need in advanced societies. Our punishment should exceed the legal system. The criminals who use the web that we created for crimes against the people that we serve should fear us more that any legal authority. Tracking down complex computer criminal cases takes a lot of work and resources from the law enforcement structures and these resources can be better used on other crimes that we are not able to solve.
And we should stop releasing junk software through open source and delude ourselves into believing that we are doing someone a favor.
This fool is guilty. He's guilty of not trusting his instinct. He's obviously a reasonable and intelligent man. His spidey sense should have started tingling when he stepped into the store in the first place. It's a certain je ne sais quoi feeling that Slashdotters and other intelligent people get when they go into places like Best Buy and McDonalds. The feeling of 'get out of here. This place is run by crypto-fascist morons and managed by people who have proven that they are good at doing all that crypto-fascist morons do.'
Sure you can spend your money there, and sometimes get a good deal if you're sharp. But as a reasonable, civilized and intelligent person, you're never going to feel welcome there. And frankly, they don't want you there. They want to harass people like you. It's just the way that the brains work inside these little semi-retards. You're just one more obstacle in their way as they climb their way up the bell curve.
Being in Best Buy is like being in prison or the old 20th century Army: you don't belong there and everybody knows it. Going there just to prove the point like this fool did is like sticking your hand in the tiger cage to see if it really is true that the tigers can tear it off. They can, they will. You lose. So don't be like the people who stop their SUVs by the side of the road in Yellowstone and send their kids over to feed the bears so that they can get a cute photograph.
If you have instincts, you got to learn to trust them.
Hello,
You have the misfortune of being a high school teacher. You are probably very limited in what you can actually teach because the course work must be all rigidly defined, especially now in the era on 'No Child Left Behind' and the federally enforced overemphasis on testing.
You have the additional misfortune of being a teacher of a subject that all students must master to get their HS diploma but less than 1% will ever use in their future lives. I work on the margin of the tech industry and I've used high school algebra only once in thirty years. Had to sit through hundreds of hours of classes in it and hundreds of hours of homework which for me was like carving concrete with a teaspoon.
For algebra (assuming for the sake of argument that it is worth learning), the best tool would be any program that allows the students to move the terms around the equation by clicking, highlighting, and dragging. Then the software should let them know if the resulting equation is equal to the original one. And if not, why not. Also, software that puts simple values into the x and y variables and quickly lets them know whether the equation balances or not. Plus an animated tutor program that shows the steps for solving complex equations. A program with hundreds of solved examples, not just two or three solved examples.
For calculus, I recommend bringing a dog, a thermometer, and a gun to class. Shoot the dog and put the thermometer into it. Take readings over the next few hours to show how the heat loss of a recent corpse follows a specific natural log curve and how forensic pathologists use these formulas to determine time of death.
For logarhythms, measure the distances between the frets of an electric guitar to show how each distance is 2 raised to the 1/12 power from the previous fret and how this formula makes possible tuned scales.
If any of these things work, then consider getting a television show to teach math through iPod instead of in a public school.
I see young kids even today..wearing AC/DC and Zeppelin shirts....I mean, I'm very happy to see the music I grew up with has lasted...but, really, these bands should have been replace with quality groups today.
I too see young people 15-20 years old in T-shirts bearing the names and images of 60's and 70's rock stars and albums. I don't quite understand it. I'm too old (late 50's) to just start a conversation with them about it.
I'm inclined to believe that these young men (always young men) in these classic rock T shirts actually have no interest in the actual bands or music whose logos they are wearing. I suspect that this is a totally ironic gesture, a mocking of the baby-boomers over-identification with rock stars and individual pop music recordings.
Possibly, they are wearing band and album T shirts in the same manner of detachment that the Beatles wore Victorian Military uniforms in the Sgt. Pepper era [between 1966 and 1968]. It would have been a misunderstanding of the older people to assume that the Beatles had taken an interest in the values and history of the British Army in early part of the 20th century because they appeared in these old uniforms. But that would have been a logical thing to assume on their part. The Beatles were using the old military uniforms to emphasize their 'apartness' for the mainstream of the society that evolved from the actions of the men who had worn those uniforms without irony.
Same with the young people who wear the classic rock T shirts. It is probably a means of punctuating (among themselves) the differences between themselves and the baby-boomers who worshipped these classic rock artists without irony generations ago.
I may be wrong, but I think that it is too easy to assume that the young people wearing the classic rock T shirts actually know and like the bands and albums on the T shirts. There's something more complex happening.
Pay attention to the missiles, not the propeller. Each missile has the ability to burn to death millions of people within minutes. This is more important that any propeller. Don't lose focus on what's really important.
I realize that I put myself at a risk for saying this, but here it is. These submarines exist for one reason: They exist to kill every human being on earth. That's what they do, that's all they do.
Allow me to create a word. omnicide: the act of the murder of every human being and all civilization.
This is omnicide technology. It's the legacy of the so-called cold war and the mentality of preventing the use of nuclear weapons on a massive scale by creating the military framework that ensures the destruction of any country who would use nuclear weapons in a first-strike sneak attack.
I'm not here to say that this is good or bad. Omnicide technology transcends its own evil. Having been created, it exists outside the concepts and arguments of ordinary legality and morality. But it's here, and it isn't going away.
In the long run of time, omnicide technology eclipses the governments, religions, and corporations that created it. For that reason, the people who control and oversee omnicide technology have a higher responsibility than to the governments, religions, and corporations who may believe that having funded the creation of this technology, they then can decide to use it.
They can not. Because this technology can never be used. To do so would kill everyone or nearly everyone on earth and destroy civilization. It is important that the people who oversee this technology understand this. Since it is possible that you will someday be an overseer of omnicide technology, it's important that you understand this.
In light of this reality, who gives a fuck about a picture of a propeller?
Indeed! In fact, just use a 40 cent microcontroller like the Atmel Tiny11 or the PIC 12C905.
The ham radio community has some of the best people for coming up with cheap and innovative ways to make use of old but functional technological machinery.
We're libertarians because we're surrounded by fascists. Ask any 20 yr old who has been systematically denied federal student loans because they were arrested for possession of cigarette rolling papers or a plexiglass tube. Ask any 30 year old who can't get health care for their two year old infant because their company demands $500 a month for 'coverage of dependents' on a $11 hr salary. Ask any forty year old who was thrown out of the military or good job that they did well because they were a sexual minority (or wouldn't fuck the boss or commanding officer). Ask any fifty year old who was raped by a football player, forced to bear an unwanted child 'out-of-wedlock', and had the child taken out of her arms at birth to never be seen again. Ask any sixty year old who was beaten half to death in the back of the police station for drinking from a white-only water fountain, or just 'having a bad attitude'. Ask any seventy year old who couldn't get into a good school because they were Jewish, or Asian, or Mexican, or Indian, or even one/tenth of anything.
Just talk to anybody and you'll soon know why we're libertarians. Because the libertarians are the only people who consistently, uncompromising, and publicly affirm that having all this kind of vicious bullshit written into the legal code is cruel, stupid, and wrong.
Really, the only question you should ask yourself is 'Why aren't I a libertarian?'
No I mean 'Minneapolis' and especially the section of the public works department that allocates the funds to build the bridges. There is no excuse for the bridge falling into the river except for substandard construction and pay-offs. This is an example of a failure of the local Minnesota "sistema del potere", what Sicilians call the The system of power, which must always remain hidden if it is going to continue to be effective in places like Minneapolis and Portland where it is not supposed to exist.
It's Chicago. What do you expect? Don't get hung up on all the details. It all comes down to greed and payoffs. Big Chicago he-man payoffs.
At least with a wi-fi public rip-off project no civilians are going to end up getting killed, like what happened with the big Mafia payoff 'Big Dig' project in Boston, or the 'look the other way, shut up, and be happy' corruption of the Minneapolis. And wi-fi isn't going to be an ultra-high-tech masturbatory death machine for greedy military psychopaths like most American military weapons contracts. Our wi-fi fuck-ups aren't going to make the rest of the world hate us for the next hundred years.
There is another issue that makes the inability to arbitrate the pay-off structure a positive thing. That is the fact that public wi-fi is technically simply not ready for prime time yet. The systems don't work or just barely work.
Here in Portland, Oregon, where the graft gets allocated more smoothly that other third-world American colonies, the local new wi-fi simply doesn't work reliably with Windows. Which is the OS used by 90% of the people who would be using the metro wi-fi. No one notices because the execs and 'first users' all use Macs and all the tech support people use Linux. Both these work OK with the local wi-fi. But they give the impression that the system is actually functioning as it should. But it's not and the execs and the techs don't get feedback from the masses of would-be users on the massive problems. So a long period of several years will go by before anyone realizes the extent of the underutilization, if they ever notice it at all.
This creates a massive opportunity cost for the metro wi-fi system. If they had waited for five years then they would have become aware of the Windows problem from the examples of other cities. Now the other cities that aren't installing wi-fi will be able to avoid Portland's mistakes, and we get stuck with a total turkey wi-fi system.
So yes, waiting, not installing, and delaying implementation of any public wi-fi is probably the best course of action until the huge numbers of bugs in these systems get addressed (and solved). Preferably with other people picking up the expense.
This isn't about Islam, it's about the timidity of American newspapers. American newspapers exist mostly now to deliver advertisements to the people who still subscribe. And to provide a warm, old-fashioned 'newspaper reading experience' to their subscribers. They no longer are the primary news source or political support medium that they were 100-50 years ago. Most newspapers are owned by a handful of corporate chains who what the ad revenue flowing in from the local supermarkets and the columns filled with 'kittens stuck in trees' type of stories. The last thing that they want is biting social commentary in their comics sections.
As you can imagine, newspaper readership is falling. Decades of boring trivia has decimated the numbers of intelligent readers. Plus the endlessly dumbed down writing style which makes every article read as if it were written for middle-school audiences (USA education level for 12-14 year olds). Bland, stupid, boring, and late with the breaking news, newspapers tend to focus on serving the needs of 'the upside of the bell curve' where few Slashdaughters are to be found.
It's interesting to see that the local heavy advertisers are also developing web sites to showcase their newspaper ads so people with broadband can simply bookmark and download whatever ads that they used to watch in the newspapers. Plus Craig's List and eBay are removing the need for classified ads (along with the tendency of newspapers to put these ads up on their own websites... I don't understand this).
So basically newspapers are becoming the prime information source for those people who can't handle going on-line. And those people are fewer every year.
Again, banning these comics has nothing to do with concern over offending Islam. It has everything to do with ensuring that the newspaper product will be as boring, sanitized, and removed from controversy as humanly possible.
Where are the numbers? As in how many microFarads per cubic centimeter does this material hold? As in how many milliAmp/hours? Without any numbers this is just science fiction, or a slow day at journalism school.
Slashdot Mirror
BabelFish is just stupid. Better to use SysTranNet. I sell guitar effect pedals on eBay and use SysTranNet to translate any questions received from a non-English speaking country (including Quebec) into the native language of the originator. Results appear to be excellent.
I rate machine language translation on a scale of one to five. One is word-to-word translation. Two is phrase translation with correct spelling and grammar in both languages. Three is paragraphs for magazines and college student reports. Four is film, newspaper, and conversational level quality. Five is literature and diplomatic level. BabelFish is between one and two: Systran is about level four (as far as I can tell, as I'm not a linguist, much less a cunning one).
Anyway, After extensive tours of the coffeeshops of the Netherlands, I've been told repeatedly to leave Dutch language to the Dutch people. Everyone not Dutch doing anything in the Netherlands is politely requested to use English. People in the Netherlands claim to have the ability to understand your bad English much better than they can understand your bad Dutch. Something about the very complex structure of the vowel sounds, I've been told. Then again, maybe it was the coffee.
So, yes, avoid Babelfish except as a joke. Demand quality machine language translation. It is likely to be the next 'killer application' of 64-bit processors.
Are these people out of their minds? Producing a super mouse?! As if regular mice aren't enough of a problem. So make a mouse that runs super fast and can't be caught by cats. And eats 2.6 times as much as normal mice that already munch through a significant percentage of harvested grain in India and other places. And reproduces long after normal mice have finished their reproductive cycles.
INSANE!
So what are these guys going to do or say if or when these super-mice escape into the wild and start causing serious ecological problems? "Ah jeez, we're sorry! we didn't think something like this could happen!"
Ecologically responsible scientists DON'T create super-versions of problem animals in their labs and then act proud of it. What schmucks!
So what's next from these bozos? Super rats? Super mosquitos? Super gophers? Super moles? Beavers that can run like tigers and can bite a child's leg off?
Just because you CAN create a super version of a problem animal doesn't mean that you SHOULD do such a stupid thing. Don't these guys ever read sci-fi? Or do they believe that their doctorates make them incapable of doing stupid things?
Will they be arrested for conspiracy to commit piracy? Let's see 30,000 MP3 songs at $250,000 each time 1,000,000 chips. A lot of zeros means a lot of money! Everyone knows that if you sell a memory device that can hold 20000 MP3 songs that all but a handful will be 'pirated', that is to say copied without permission of their so-called owners. No one except loud-mouth fuckhead billionaire Steven Jobs is actually paying $30000 for 30,000 iTune songs. So if you make a device that facilitates file copying, aren't you guilty of conspiracy to commit intellectual property fraud?
And don't tell me that there are alternative legal uses for hard drives and memory chips. After all, isn't the scope of the intellectual property crisis dire enough to overrule such petty and superficial uses of these devices? Isn't that what the entertainment industry is telling us? Aren't they the most important 'industry' in the USA and the world?
In my town any teenager can have his life ruined by being arrested for having a little piece of blank paper in his pocket. The pigs (excuse me, I meant to say 'the Republicans') here call it 'conspiracy to possess marijuana paraphernalia', and it means just a cigarette rolling paper. And it's a serious crime with serious time.
But every consumer electronics store in the city sells drives and media that are specifically used to commit so-called 'intellectual property theft'. Listening to music, having a little scrap of paper in your pocket, even suggesting that this is all nothing but corrupt,racist, selective law enforcement, it's enough to get you arrested and thrown into the vast American rape-torture gulag.
But if the MPAA/RIAA is so smart and so bad, then why aren't they actually going up face-to-face, lawyer-to-lawyer against the manufacturers that make the hard drives and memory chips? Sure they'll go after single mothers making $8/hr and win $250,000 with their $300,000/yr lawyers and hand-written laws. But will they go after the Fry's, Walmarts, and BestBuys for selling the drives, PCs, and modems that make it possible for ordinary people to 'steal' their 'intellectual property'? Why not? They have the money, they have the lawyers, they have the testicles! So where's the beef?
If they won't do this, then the entire music and entertainment global industry (it's what now, four giant companies?) should be taken over by the government as a RICO enterprise. We should make them do it. After all, it's us that are the most embarrassed by this corrupt extortion. Why aren't we doing anything about these assholes? Of course, they will self-destruct on their own, but they will do a lot of damage on the way down. We should put our collective heads together and deliver a coup-de-grace to these pathetic losers. Consider it a mercy killing. Which is legal here, but carrying a little piece of rice paper is not.
A flaw in this argument's basic assumption is that people know what specific musical recording that they want. This assumes that they have heard the musical recording and know of its title and band. Which in turn assumes that the musical recording is played in a wide public forum (such as radio) closely followed by its information (band and title) so people know what specific recording to buy from the thousands available.
When people tune out commercial radio stations because of over-commercialization and homogenized playlists, or stop going to clubs that play new musical recordings, they break this connection to new music industry product. And the whole business model falls apart. It doesn't make any difference if a recording has DRM if a potential customer isn't buying anything because they have no idea what the CD package sounds like.
In this model people will buy what they have before or try new stuff only if it has ties to what they have liked before and is very cheap. By business definition, no recording with DRM is going to be cheap. The entire purpose of the DRM is to preserve the price point of the product. But how can you do this if people don't know the product? DRM basically kills the 'long tail' by limiting a product's exposure to the media corporation's captive audience, i.e. the people who listen to the media corporation's public outlets for religious, political, or marginal entertainment reasons. This is a major flaw in the DRM business model in the era of 'long tail' marketing of cultural products.
Allow me to recommend some great free music sites:
- Your local public library. The URL depends on your location. You can get a search for the type of music that you like and get a list of titles that can be put on reserve. When the CDs are returned, they are shipped to your local library branch and an e-mail notice is sent to you. You go over and pick them up, rip them into any format and bitrate that you want, and transfer them to your digital music player. Take the CDs back to the library and just slip them into the night slot as you would a rental video.
- eBay.com Search for the CDs that you are interested in by quote artist unquote or genre. Significantly cheaper than loudmouth billionaire Steve Jobs' store. Also try the other musical areas of eBay.
- eBay.com The musical instruments section. Ever wonder what it would be like to actually play your own Strat, sitar, or synthesizer? They're all for sale at a better price than you could find anywhere. Every type and every price range. And here's a secret. Because instruments sold on eBay are at their lowest price level already, you can always resell them for what you paid for them. So you can have a Strat, sitar, or synthesizer for a few months or years and then resell it on eBay. It's in effect a nearly-free instrument rental service. The only charge is the eBay listing, PayPal, and shipping charge from the previous owner. Save the packing that it arrived in for reshipping. Or sell it locally on CraigsList or the free listings in the Wacko Weekly newspaper of your city.
- Guitar tab and MIDI websites. While at the library picking up your free CDs, pick up a book or two on beginning music theory and sheet music reading. With all the cutbacks in public schools, music and art programs are often the first to go. Many people don't get a chance to learn to read music. They have no clue of how to get the sounds that the quote artists unquote are playing on the CD out of the instruments that they bought on eBay. Tab and MIDI websites are the answer. Google your favorite song with the word tab or MIDI after it. Tabs (short for tablature, which is a form of writing guitar music, not the study of Indian drums) show you how to play guitar.
MIDIs show you the sheet music, that is what notes to play. But you have to have a MIDI notation program and you have to know how to read music or at least know which notes arrange themselves into what chords, and how to play them. All available on the web.
- Jam sites. These are websites where you plug your MIDI instrument into your PC, go to the site, find a channel where someone else who is playing their MIDI instrument to the website, and join into the groove. A musician's Napster. Actually I don't know if these even exist. Please let me know if they do. If not, please code it as your senior project.
Music is free. There is no musician out there, rich or poor, who didn't learn the craft from listening and copying exactly from someone else and then changing it to fit his needs as a quote artist unquote. Music is like air. The fact that it goes into your body, gets mixed with your chemicals, comes out, and goes into someone else's body doesn't mean that you can claim to own it. The fact that a few giant global corporations can use media, lawyers, and police to attempt to convince people that they 'own' music means little in the long run. They are wrong. We are right. Music is free. Always has been, always will be.
My real opinion is that space travel is cool; in Hollywood movies. In the real world, there are far too many more important things that need our brain cycles.
Space travel is as close as most Slashdotters come to having a real religion. A lot of them seriously believe in it. They believe in it as a way to a truly utopian world. They love the smallest details of the most minute technologies involved. The love the grandure of the quest.
It's all so childish. It's the nerd equalivent of a 3-year-old's belief in Santa Claus. (or whatever imaginary figure that children believe in your country). It's not real. There's nothing in space, it's empty. There's no reason to go to other planets: there's nothing there on them.
Maybe in a thousand years or so, but not now. The 20th century is over. It was an aberation, a freak. It happened because of enormous amounts of cheap oil was burned to make it happen.
The cheap and easy oil is disappearing. The magic and promise of the 20th century will disappear with it. A new dark ages approaches. There is a 'die-off' coming: a perfect storm of climate change, energy shortages, and 'Mad-Max' anarchy. There is no silver bullet technology on the horizon to save us. The super-technology of the 1960-2030 era will save only the 500,000 super-rich. Maybe you will be one of them. I hope so.
There will be no space station islands floating above the earth like Irish monastaries in the next Dark Age. There is no technology that can sustain human life in space and there is unlikely to ever be one. Not even in a thousand years or more.
And the Slashdotters, who should know better, refuse to give up their doomed religion of salvation through space travel.
And it pisses me off.
It's the only topic in all the areas that Slashdot covers where I have serious disagreements with the majority of good people here.
And it pisses me off that every time the topic comes up here, I always write that space travel is a dangerous delusional fantasy, a techno-nerd religion. And no matter how well or poorly I write, I always get modded down to -100 hell.
This obsession with modding down people you disagree with is a weakness in the techno-nerd mind. It's a crypto-fascist cancer that affects a lot of good people here. It makes me believe that deep deep in my gut, I can't trust the Slashdot community because under all this beautiful technology, there lies a Nazi ubermenschen uglyness of the soul that should have been discarded after the Shoah holocast showed what this mentality will lead to if not treated.
The above message was clearing written by some loser with a serious attitude problem who clearly doesn't understand the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel. How could anyone be so dense? Must not have had cool science books with cool pictures as a kid. Tough. But, this being Slashdot, where space travel has the same status as Jesus in Oklahoma, it would be easy to just blast this fool back to slime by mod-ing him (her? it? shit!) down to -100. A deep and endless black hole that Slashdot reserves for losers who interrupt our beautiful discussion of really cool methane sparklers.
But we shouldn't!
Because there are millions of people out there who think exactly like this pathetic fool loser. And all these pathetic fool losers just like this guy actually control the money that we need to bring the absolute necessity of space travel into reality. If any of this cool shit is going to happen, we have to convince these pathetic fool losers to give us the money. And to do this we have to blow their arguments away in order that they too can come to see the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel, just like we do.
So let them speak! We will listen. We will study the ravings of these pathetic fool losers and turn their own words and twisted logic into arguments that are crystal brilliant diamonds of logic that clearly demonstate the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel!
So, no, don't mod them down. Have pity and patronize them. They will eventually come over to our side. Hell, if they're on Slashdot, they're already most of the way there.
Looking for water? We got water here. Two thirds of the surface of this planet is covered with water, several miles deep in places. We got all the water that you'll ever need or want right here. For free.
...and grow up.
Looking for life? We got life here. Lots of it. In fact there's so much life here that our main global industry is the creation of machines that are used to kill life here. Guns, munitions, bombs, atomic bombs, death planes, death satellites, endless first-person-shooter video games to prepare our young for killing. You want life? We've got plenty! Help yourself!
The point is that spending millions of dollars to look for life and water on other planets is insane. We already have plenty of it (it being whatever you're looking for) right here, right now.
What the people who are spending millions (hundreds of millions actually) of dollars on space travel are looking for is an easy paycheck that comes with a science-fiction fantasy attached. They should admit this to themselves and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
Then they should go become Hollywood screenwriters and contribute something useful to our society.
Am I pushing your buttons? Am I pissing you off?
Get real.
U's right about those unnecessary u's.
Write like Prince.
Sing like Prince.
Fuck like Prince.
Disappear like Prince.
Au revoir, Prince.
In English, the word 'fuck' is a general purpose accentuator. It's used to increase the emotional intensity of the words surrounding it. It gets its power to do this through its being proscribed in normal and polite conversation and its legal prohibition from general public media.
The ability to construct coherent sentences using only variations of this word results from the ability of the English language to have any word become any part of speech often unchanged according to its placement in the sentence. English is unique in this regard among the world's common languages.
The word 'fuck' in English is one of the few words in that language that shares with Chinese the ability to completely change its meaning according to its accent. The word has different subtle connotations depending on whether it is spoken with a rising, falling, flat, or modulated tone.
A note of caution here; this word, since it has no clear meaning, can and does invoke strong emotional states in its use. Its use among violent people often serves as an signal to initiate violence, especially around Americans.
Further study of this linguistic curiosity can be done by viewing Hollywood films of the late 1990's. Recommended are films staring Samuel Jackson (except the second Star Wars trilogy) and Quentin Tarentino.
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language.
One way to pick up French or Spanish is to use the alternate audio and subtitles found on nearly all Hollywood DVD movies. Often there is both audio and subtitles in both French (for the Quebec audiences) and Spanish along with English second subtitles for the deaf.
When paying close attention to the spoken dialog you will notice that it doesn't match the subtitles. That's because the films are actually translated twice by different teams. Once for the audio dubbed dialog and again for the subtitles.
For French try and find modern French movies that have made it to the USA. The dialog and titles (for deaf French speakers) usually match exactly.
For Spanish try paying close attention to the spoken language that is often used for public announcements. Our streetcars repeat every announcement like station stops and cross connections in Spanish. Also try using the auto checkout in grocery stores and ATMs in Spanish.
You could actually try talking to people who are speaking the language that you are trying to learn. This has mixed results in real world contacts. Also try using the web translators like Systran or even the excreteable BabbleFish. Libraries have foreign language sections. Often popular titles are available translated into Spanish and sometimes French. Harry Potter and Steven King novels are often available in both English and Spanish, but in different sections of the library. There used to be books with French (and German) written on the left page and the parallel English text on the right page.
The library may have language DVDs or CDs that can be ripped and copied quickly. If you can rip an entire CD of language dialog in a minute or less, then why not just grab five or six of them. Polish, Portugese, Thai, Japanese, Urdu... Why not?
If you take public transportation, try the game of evesdropping (very discretely) on people speaking foreign languages and trying to determine what language they are actually speaking. I've quietly listened to people from Mexico and realized that they weren't speaking any language that remotely resembled Spanish. When I asked my Hispanic friend (soy estan gringo) about this, she said that they probably were speaking Mayan or some pre-Columbian Indian language that survived in the distant rural villages of Central Mexico. You will eventually be able to tell Spanish from Brazilian, Japanese from Chinese, Polish from Russian, and even if you become a bus-language master, the differences between the various SouthEast Asian languages like Lao and Vietnamese.
Anyway, I'm rambling... ironically... lots of language..so little to say.
I believe in fairness. Everyone needs to work productively. So yes, give this guy a job.
But only after he has spent MANY years in jail, and has reimbursed all the people who lost work and data directly resulting from the virus being on all the computers affected by this crime.
So if this criminal has written and released a bit of secret code that wipes out data a hard drive, then he (always a he) should be required to compensate for the cost of collecting and entering this data. He must also be responsible for loss of income and profit in all the companies infected by his virus code.
If he is still interested in coding after all the effort and expense that he must do to correct the bad effects of his deliberate action of writing and releasing a destructive virus, then he should be allowed to do so.
But not until all the compensation has been made. It doesn't matter if this criminal is a coding genius, we can always get the same results from having more ordinary people working on the same coding problem as a lone genius.
What I'm saying is that regardless of any individual's coding skills, if this individual causes millions of dollars of damage, he should not be allowed to work in this industry.
Yes, I too believed the endless Apple hype. Even twenty years ago before knowing anything about computers and electronics (they are the same thing, in reality).
Then when I was an electronics student, the original Mac came out. What a media shitstorm! You would have thought that the sun danced in front of Dan Rather and cast of thousands in a sleepy little Portuguese village. Then people started exiting the Jobs reality-distortion field and real reports started circulating (but not being published as most computer magazines were dependent on computer company ad purchases and wouldn't report anything dispiriting about anybody's computer. Plus,there was no WWW then).
Well this little box was an earth shattering copy of a Xerox Star and somewhat cheaper, but it had one problem. It couldn't, well,..uh.. do..anything actually. I mean after you wiggled the mouse around and clicked on some menu bars, well that was about it. That's what you got for your $2000. It even took five swaps to copy a floppy disk.
The problem was that the machine had no memory. It had two banks of 64K chips to run the whole show. But there were holes and traces on the circuit board to hold the new 256K RAM chips. It wasn't long before hardware hackers (and there were many then) realized that by carefully removing the 64K chips and replacing them with 256K chips, the new Mac could perform almost as well as a CPM machine or even a RadioShack Trash-80. Apple would upgrade your new machine, but they charged two to three times as much as the cost of the 256K RAM chips themselves. And basically all they did was pop the top, unscrew the main circuit board from the box, pull some easy-on,easy-off connectors, put in the new board with the 256K RAM chips and slap everything back together. It took about 15 minutes, maybe, if the store was busy. But Apple charged many hundreds of dollars for this, uh, service.
So lots of people, (first customers, the ones who took a chance and paid the big bucks for Apple's new machine) simply did this procedure themselves. Word filtered back to this asshole Steve Jobs that about this and he decided that: "Anyone who did a non-Apple upgrade of the Mac RAM could NOT be allowed to purchase upgrade ROMs that fixed all the little bugs in version 1.0". This was a big thing: ROM chip swap was the only way to upgrade the Mac OS and, back then, almost everybody was a hardware hacker. Popular computer magazines published schematics and code to home-build copies of the latest equipment and peripherals that were being reviewed and sold.
Not long after that Jobs was thrown out of the company for being a greedy megalomaniac and pissing off the entire Apple community. But he never lost the uncanny ability to take people's money, give them second-rate equipment, and convince them that they were part of some 'insanely great' movement of which he was the guru through which the divine light of technology and coolness passed.
So it comes as no surprise that one by one, millions of people come to learn what a greedy vicious little fraud this guy is. Do yourself a favor; don't buy stuff from this guy. You can always get the same functionality in better and much cheaper equipment elsewhere.
The user's computer exposure to web criminals was not due to the user's lack of attention to minute details of the program, but by the criminal negligence on the part of the programmer to shield the user's data from his program's access.
In other words, the programmer of the P2P software is at fault for allowing his program to default into a dangerous state! The P2P program should be forcing the user to create a new and specific folder on the hard disk for files that will be shared. Then the shared files must be specifically moved to this folder in order to be accessed by other users of the P2P program.
The days when a programmer can claim that a user was at fault for the consequences of poorly-designed software are gone. To claim otherwise is a throwback to the 1970s when it could be expected that computer users were tech professionals and therefore could be expected to plow through hundreds of pages of manuals to become aware of these 'gotcha' defects in a program's structure.
Also it is important that the computer professional community supercede the legal authorities in punishing criminals who use the web for identity theft and other computer crimes. We need to hunt these bozos down and punish them. Not by killing them, maiming them, or imprisoning them, but by ensuring that they don't have access to computer networks again for long periods of time. Or by deleting their bank account records and the computer profiles that all people need in advanced societies. Our punishment should exceed the legal system. The criminals who use the web that we created for crimes against the people that we serve should fear us more that any legal authority. Tracking down complex computer criminal cases takes a lot of work and resources from the law enforcement structures and these resources can be better used on other crimes that we are not able to solve.
And we should stop releasing junk software through open source and delude ourselves into believing that we are doing someone a favor.
This fool is guilty. He's guilty of not trusting his instinct. He's obviously a reasonable and intelligent man. His spidey sense should have started tingling when he stepped into the store in the first place. It's a certain je ne sais quoi feeling that Slashdotters and other intelligent people get when they go into places like Best Buy and McDonalds. The feeling of 'get out of here. This place is run by crypto-fascist morons and managed by people who have proven that they are good at doing all that crypto-fascist morons do.'
Sure you can spend your money there, and sometimes get a good deal if you're sharp. But as a reasonable, civilized and intelligent person, you're never going to feel welcome there. And frankly, they don't want you there. They want to harass people like you. It's just the way that the brains work inside these little semi-retards. You're just one more obstacle in their way as they climb their way up the bell curve.
Being in Best Buy is like being in prison or the old 20th century Army: you don't belong there and everybody knows it. Going there just to prove the point like this fool did is like sticking your hand in the tiger cage to see if it really is true that the tigers can tear it off. They can, they will. You lose. So don't be like the people who stop their SUVs by the side of the road in Yellowstone and send their kids over to feed the bears so that they can get a cute photograph.
If you have instincts, you got to learn to trust them.
Hello,
You have the misfortune of being a high school teacher. You are probably very limited in what you can actually teach because the course work must be all rigidly defined, especially now in the era on 'No Child Left Behind' and the federally enforced overemphasis on testing.
You have the additional misfortune of being a teacher of a subject that all students must master to get their HS diploma but less than 1% will ever use in their future lives. I work on the margin of the tech industry and I've used high school algebra only once in thirty years. Had to sit through hundreds of hours of classes in it and hundreds of hours of homework which for me was like carving concrete with a teaspoon.
For algebra (assuming for the sake of argument that it is worth learning), the best tool would be any program that allows the students to move the terms around the equation by clicking, highlighting, and dragging. Then the software should let them know if the resulting equation is equal to the original one. And if not, why not. Also, software that puts simple values into the x and y variables and quickly lets them know whether the equation balances or not. Plus an animated tutor program that shows the steps for solving complex equations. A program with hundreds of solved examples, not just two or three solved examples.
For calculus, I recommend bringing a dog, a thermometer, and a gun to class. Shoot the dog and put the thermometer into it. Take readings over the next few hours to show how the heat loss of a recent corpse follows a specific natural log curve and how forensic pathologists use these formulas to determine time of death.
For logarhythms, measure the distances between the frets of an electric guitar to show how each distance is 2 raised to the 1/12 power from the previous fret and how this formula makes possible tuned scales.
If any of these things work, then consider getting a television show to teach math through iPod instead of in a public school.
I see young kids even today..wearing AC/DC and Zeppelin shirts....I mean, I'm very happy to see the music I grew up with has lasted...but, really, these bands should have been replace with quality groups today.
I too see young people 15-20 years old in T-shirts bearing the names and images of 60's and 70's rock stars and albums. I don't quite understand it. I'm too old (late 50's) to just start a conversation with them about it.
I'm inclined to believe that these young men (always young men) in these classic rock T shirts actually have no interest in the actual bands or music whose logos they are wearing. I suspect that this is a totally ironic gesture, a mocking of the baby-boomers over-identification with rock stars and individual pop music recordings.
Possibly, they are wearing band and album T shirts in the same manner of detachment that the Beatles wore Victorian Military uniforms in the Sgt. Pepper era [between 1966 and 1968]. It would have been a misunderstanding of the older people to assume that the Beatles had taken an interest in the values and history of the British Army in early part of the 20th century because they appeared in these old uniforms. But that would have been a logical thing to assume on their part. The Beatles were using the old military uniforms to emphasize their 'apartness' for the mainstream of the society that evolved from the actions of the men who had worn those uniforms without irony.
Same with the young people who wear the classic rock T shirts. It is probably a means of punctuating (among themselves) the differences between themselves and the baby-boomers who worshipped these classic rock artists without irony generations ago.
I may be wrong, but I think that it is too easy to assume that the young people wearing the classic rock T shirts actually know and like the bands and albums on the T shirts. There's something more complex happening.
Pay attention to the missiles, not the propeller. Each missile has the ability to burn to death millions of people within minutes. This is more important that any propeller. Don't lose focus on what's really important.
I realize that I put myself at a risk for saying this, but here it is. These submarines exist for one reason: They exist to kill every human being on earth. That's what they do, that's all they do.
Allow me to create a word. omnicide: the act of the murder of every human being and all civilization.
This is omnicide technology. It's the legacy of the so-called cold war and the mentality of preventing the use of nuclear weapons on a massive scale by creating the military framework that ensures the destruction of any country who would use nuclear weapons in a first-strike sneak attack.
I'm not here to say that this is good or bad. Omnicide technology transcends its own evil. Having been created, it exists outside the concepts and arguments of ordinary legality and morality. But it's here, and it isn't going away.
In the long run of time, omnicide technology eclipses the governments, religions, and corporations that created it. For that reason, the people who control and oversee omnicide technology have a higher responsibility than to the governments, religions, and corporations who may believe that having funded the creation of this technology, they then can decide to use it.
They can not. Because this technology can never be used. To do so would kill everyone or nearly everyone on earth and destroy civilization. It is important that the people who oversee this technology understand this. Since it is possible that you will someday be an overseer of omnicide technology, it's important that you understand this.
In light of this reality, who gives a fuck about a picture of a propeller?
Indeed! In fact, just use a 40 cent microcontroller like the Atmel Tiny11 or the PIC 12C905.
The ham radio community has some of the best people for coming up with cheap and innovative ways to make use of old but functional technological machinery.
We're libertarians because we're surrounded by fascists. Ask any 20 yr old who has been systematically denied federal student loans because they were arrested for possession of cigarette rolling papers or a plexiglass tube. Ask any 30 year old who can't get health care for their two year old infant because their company demands $500 a month for 'coverage of dependents' on a $11 hr salary. Ask any forty year old who was thrown out of the military or good job that they did well because they were a sexual minority (or wouldn't fuck the boss or commanding officer). Ask any fifty year old who was raped by a football player, forced to bear an unwanted child 'out-of-wedlock', and had the child taken out of her arms at birth to never be seen again. Ask any sixty year old who was beaten half to death in the back of the police station for drinking from a white-only water fountain, or just 'having a bad attitude'. Ask any seventy year old who couldn't get into a good school because they were Jewish, or Asian, or Mexican, or Indian, or even one/tenth of anything.
Just talk to anybody and you'll soon know why we're libertarians. Because the libertarians are the only people who consistently, uncompromising, and publicly affirm that having all this kind of vicious bullshit written into the legal code is cruel, stupid, and wrong.
Really, the only question you should ask yourself is 'Why aren't I a libertarian?'
No I mean 'Minneapolis' and especially the section of the public works department that allocates the funds to build the bridges. There is no excuse for the bridge falling into the river except for substandard construction and pay-offs. This is an example of a failure of the local Minnesota "sistema del potere", what Sicilians call the The system of power, which must always remain hidden if it is going to continue to be effective in places like Minneapolis and Portland where it is not supposed to exist.
It's Chicago. What do you expect? Don't get hung up on all the details. It all comes down to greed and payoffs. Big Chicago he-man payoffs.
At least with a wi-fi public rip-off project no civilians are going to end up getting killed, like what happened with the big Mafia payoff 'Big Dig' project in Boston, or the 'look the other way, shut up, and be happy' corruption of the Minneapolis. And wi-fi isn't going to be an ultra-high-tech masturbatory death machine for greedy military psychopaths like most American military weapons contracts. Our wi-fi fuck-ups aren't going to make the rest of the world hate us for the next hundred years.
There is another issue that makes the inability to arbitrate the pay-off structure a positive thing. That is the fact that public wi-fi is technically simply not ready for prime time yet. The systems don't work or just barely work.
Here in Portland, Oregon, where the graft gets allocated more smoothly that other third-world American colonies, the local new wi-fi simply doesn't work reliably with Windows. Which is the OS used by 90% of the people who would be using the metro wi-fi. No one notices because the execs and 'first users' all use Macs and all the tech support people use Linux. Both these work OK with the local wi-fi. But they give the impression that the system is actually functioning as it should. But it's not and the execs and the techs don't get feedback from the masses of would-be users on the massive problems. So a long period of several years will go by before anyone realizes the extent of the underutilization, if they ever notice it at all.
This creates a massive opportunity cost for the metro wi-fi system. If they had waited for five years then they would have become aware of the Windows problem from the examples of other cities. Now the other cities that aren't installing wi-fi will be able to avoid Portland's mistakes, and we get stuck with a total turkey wi-fi system.
So yes, waiting, not installing, and delaying implementation of any public wi-fi is probably the best course of action until the huge numbers of bugs in these systems get addressed (and solved). Preferably with other people picking up the expense.
This isn't about Islam, it's about the timidity of American newspapers. American newspapers exist mostly now to deliver advertisements to the people who still subscribe. And to provide a warm, old-fashioned 'newspaper reading experience' to their subscribers. They no longer are the primary news source or political support medium that they were 100-50 years ago. Most newspapers are owned by a handful of corporate chains who what the ad revenue flowing in from the local supermarkets and the columns filled with 'kittens stuck in trees' type of stories. The last thing that they want is biting social commentary in their comics sections.
... I don't understand this).
As you can imagine, newspaper readership is falling. Decades of boring trivia has decimated the numbers of intelligent readers. Plus the endlessly dumbed down writing style which makes every article read as if it were written for middle-school audiences (USA education level for 12-14 year olds). Bland, stupid, boring, and late with the breaking news, newspapers tend to focus on serving the needs of 'the upside of the bell curve' where few Slashdaughters are to be found.
It's interesting to see that the local heavy advertisers are also developing web sites to showcase their newspaper ads so people with broadband can simply bookmark and download whatever ads that they used to watch in the newspapers. Plus Craig's List and eBay are removing the need for classified ads (along with the tendency of newspapers to put these ads up on their own websites
So basically newspapers are becoming the prime information source for those people who can't handle going on-line. And those people are fewer every year.
Again, banning these comics has nothing to do with concern over offending Islam. It has everything to do with ensuring that the newspaper product will be as boring, sanitized, and removed from controversy as humanly possible.
Someone get this girl a prune before she explodes!
Where are the numbers? As in how many microFarads per cubic centimeter does this material hold? As in how many milliAmp/hours? Without any numbers this is just science fiction, or a slow day at journalism school.