I've got two choices: repeat one year, repair all my bad grades and graduate with better grades but with a mark that I repeated one school year; or graduate with lower grades but with no repeated year. If you're a moron, your resume will look like one of these two:
Graduated with a 3.2 GPA after repeating a year to get my grades back up.
Graduated with a 2.7 GPA
If you have half a brain, your resume will look like the first of these two options:
Graduated with a 3.2 GPA
Graduated with a 2.7 GPA
You write your resume, your college doesn't. Why the hell would you even mention that you repeated a year? Sure, there'll be a note on your transcript but here's a little secret: most companies fail to do their due dilligence background checks and those that do will likely confirm the GPA from the college without asking if there're marks about repeating years.
If they notice the degree taking longer - which is a huge clue in England where almost everyone studies full time but a total non issue in America where a lot of people take longer while working - simply tell them, "I took my degree a little slower while I worked on an open source project. Then distract them with more information about that.
You'll get fired down the line if you lie. If you selectively tell the truth, it's an embarrassing discovery if it comes up but almost certainly won't get you fired.
In my own career, I had a job that listed maybe a dozen skills. I had eleven of them, missing JSP which they'd made to sound pretty critical. I wrote them a response, listing how I'd used each of those eleven in my previous employment and was the perfect person for them. Sure, there was a missing twelfth paragraph but they never noticed it in the mass of positive responses. In the interview, whenever JSP came up, I talked all about my Java experience and delighted them. They gave me the job with a non-negotiable offer that turned out to be more than I was going to ask for anyway. A speed read of the O'Reilly JSP book and they ended up making me the team lead. I never once lied, there was never anything they could subsequently fire me for, but I certainly avoided any areas I didn't want to discuss.
So, for you, if you think the GPA will hold you back and you're happy to repeat, go do it. There's absolutely no reason to list the repeat on your resume. Sure, it's on your transcripts but you'll likely never have an employer scrutinize them in that much detail and, if you're any good as a salesman for yourself, you can always spin it as showing you're willing to go the extra mile to do the right thing.
Proposals by the UK Government to criminalize possession of 'extreme' porn.
From the article: 'Labour MP Martin Salter, who has worked closely... in pushing the legislation, rejected the BDSM community's claims their civil liberties were being undermined. He said: "No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other but they would be strongly advised not to put it on the internet. At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind." Except it's not just whether you give it to potentially unbalanced people or not, is it. It's simply a crime to posess such images on your own hard drive, even if you made them yourself, of yourself, with no exposure to anyone else involved.
By that definition, British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo would be put on the sex offenders register if he had pictures from the parties he attended (depicted in the movie Scandal as involving placing bees in cups on sensitive places).
Mind you, this is the same country that's famous for Operation Spanner which found, "A person does not have the legal ability to consent to receive an act which will seriously harm them, such as branding or other intense activities of a sadomasochistic nature." Fantastically, upon finding they were wrong in their assumption the "victims" must have been murdered, the police gave the submissives a choice, "Testify against the people you consented to 'assaulting' you - or we'll charge you as accessories in your own assault."
This, however, is arguably worse. Now the definition is broadened to the point of ridiculousness. Say you're a totally balanced individual, completely capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, fantasy from reality. You have a kink - the idea of mutilation, even if you would never act on it turns you on. You put fake blood on a realistic sex toy and take a picture for private use only. Absolutely no one is, in any way, harmed by this act. No one else has seen it, you're not escalating towards a crime, no harm whatsoever. If the police discover this image - say a pissed off ex snoops around your system and finds it then reports it - you're now looking at a life of ostracism on the sex offenders register, access to your kids denied. For what exactly? A private picture with props that in no way led to any harm to anyone?
Of course, as Martin Salter so reassuringly puts it, "No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other." Sure they aren't Martin, sure they aren't.
The graphs are from a several months old marketing promo. Suddenly there's really no story.
Claim: AMD listed a product they don't intend to release. Truth: AMD listed a product they intended to release at the time but subsequently withdrew.
Claim: AMD deliberately used out of date Intel scores. Truth: AMD used the most current Intel scores available at the time. Improved scores came from an improved compiler - which may well change AMD's scores too. Either way, it wasn't available at the time of writing.
Claim: AMD ignored the most recent Intel processor releases. Truth: Those Intel processors weren't released at the time of writing and no benchmarks existed.
Journalistically, this is about on a par with finding footage from the 50's saying we'd all be driving flying cars by the year 2000 and boldly asserting there's clearly a government conspiracy to hide the technology from the people to protect big oil.
Bold claims are one thing. Making them on the back of badly researching where the information came from is a great way to look like an idiot.
In other news: if you care about your daughter, get her vaccinated for HPV.
If you care about other people's daughters, get your son vaccinated for HPV too. I even care about internet pornstars, I'm vaccinating my dog, horse, goat and pig for HPV.
...the first Controlled-NOT quantum gate... a quantum computer would achieve new levels of power by turning bits into fuzzy quantum things called qubits (pronounced cue-bits) that are 0 and 1 simultaneously. 0 and 1 simultaneously, through a NOT gate... becomes 1 and 0 simultaneously? Sounds useful.;)
Unexplained affluence, - Do many student jobs pay anything other than cash in hand?
failing to report overseas travel, - Fortunately, ending up in New Zealand, Russia, The Cannaries, etc. wasn't something that needed to be reported when I was a student.
showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, Given how little interest I paid inside the scope of my course, the moment I showed interest in anything, it was unusual. Plus it was pretty common for us to randomly sit in on other lectures that looked interesting.
keeping unusual work hours, CS major + jolt + projects + MUDs
unreported contacts with foreign nationals, I married a foreign national I didn't report meeting while at university.
unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, Should we ignore the university housing me with a guy from the Singapore military?
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, If I had only learned what I'd needed to know, I'd be a lousy employee now. The fact that I learned to do a whole bunch of things outside my course's scope is part of why my career's been vastly more successful than it would otherwise have been.
and unexplained absences In my day, we called these "lectures." I don't know anyone who a) didn't have plenty of absences and b) explained any of them.
Clearly, I must have been a terrorist... Or an absolutely normal CS major.
Mind you, I'm also the grandson of a man who tried to enlist in the British Army during World War II - already being a marksmanship champion - and was told to piss off. He was only allowed to enlist once he had his medical degree and was promptly sent to Kenya. Unable to figure out why, he had a friend in intelligence check his record. It turned out that, back in the 30s, with Communism being the cool new politics with the kids, he and some friends came across Franco's envoy to London and relieved him of both ceremonial sword and pants. Though no charges were ever pressed, it ended up on his file and hence Kenya was the furthest place they could find from the Russians.
Which all goes to show how utterly silly such indicators tend to be.
a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Government funding for these kinds of projects always tends to be easier to come by in California. Of course, it may have something to do with agreeing to add code to help the governor track down Sarah Conner.
Apple's own stated target is 1% of cell phone users.
Given relatively few sites take their time to optimize for Safari on the Mac (which has 5% of the desktop market), what are the odds they'd optimize for Safari on an iPhone that has 1% of it?
Even Opera has 1.5% of the web market and, other than its robustness saving it, most web developers don't even bother to check if sites work in it.
Next question: What percentage of users are partially sighted? That dwarfs the 1% of the iPhone. What percentage of sites actually worry that much about genuine scalable text/high contrast/alt/title etc.?
In short, most companies won't pay to develop their websites for the just greater percentages that have Opera or Safari. Until the legal threat of the Target lawsuit, most wouldn't even pay to support the much larger percentage who needed accessible websites - and many still won't.
If they won't pay for that, when the necessary changes are relatively minor, do you really think they'll pay for radically greater changes just to woo the targeted 1% of cell phone users who'll still go home and use Safari on their Macs or PCs that don't have multi touch interfaces?
God bless Steve Jobs for managing to make the entire world think his latest thing is all critical. The truth is, it's a damn cool gimmick that even Apple aren't hoping for more than 1% adoption from.
Now, in two years to five years... When Microsoft's table is all the rage and has filtered in to home PCs, laptops, etc., when your $250 iPod can jump on to your wifi network and you can surf from the couch... Then, yes, multi touch, non-focused interfaces will be something we'll all be building for. Though the smart devs will be learning the tricks now so they can demand the high salaries when it reaches the point that everyone suddenly realizes they need it, 1% of cellphones right now just isn't enough to move the industry.
So first we've got the BBFC and now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo who have decided that adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo didn't decide adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game...
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo decided that they didn't want to get sued, win, but still pay a hell of a lot of money and take a hell of a lot of bad press for that win, when Jack Thompson or similar sued over the next publicised murders.
Their view isn't that you can't play the game - it's simply that they're not going to do anything that'll get them sued for aiding you in playing the game.
Does that suck? Absolutely. But you've got to question where the blame lies for that? With the companies for recognizing the system they live in or the system itself?
When it comes down to the system itself, who's responsible for the massively abusive legal system where getting sued in the first place is often the real loss? That'd be the politicians who wrote the abusable laws and the ones that followed who failed to tighten them. Why haven't they addressed it? Because their voters haven't told them they'll kick out anyone who doesn't address it. And who are the voters? Oh, yeah, you.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are corporations. They're not moral police, they're not immoral police. If anything they're amoral - they don't give a shit about morals either way except for where pretending to either makes or loses them money. If they could profit (and profit overall, so factor in lawsuits, bad press, etc.), they'd sell crack to babies and more than happily let the babies choose for themselves.
The problem is, they exist in a system where they can't sell crack to babies without hurting overall and they can't realease Adult Only titles for the same reason. That's not their judgment of you... That's yours, your parents, your friends, your neighbors faults for letting that world happen. Good work on stopping them selling crack to babies though.
Sure, it's easier to blame people who respond to a system rather than look at who created the system that makes it an inevitability in the first place. Still, until you address real causes, you'll never change anything. And the reason AO titles don't get launched by console companies is they know the system people like you, me, and everyone else have created will punish them for it overall.
I say that because the patent system, good, bad or otherwise, has been around long enough that if there was genuine smothering of genius going on, it would have been a major topic long since Except the world changes...
Communication is now essentially instantaneous. Bob in New York patents a better belt buckle in 1850, Jim in San Francisco designs something similar. It'll be a minumum of a few months before someone who's seen one happens to see the other and he almost certainly won't care about whether it is or isn't patented and Bob isn't going to go to the expense of sending his lawyer across country for several months to find out. Even if there is a clash, the markets are so separate, it's not worth pursuing getting both sides in a single courtroom.
The pace of invention has continued to dramatically increase. Modern machinery turned up with the industrial revolution. Electricity only became a common power source in the last century. Computers are 60 or so years old. Home computers are less than 30 years old and only common in the last 15. The internet has only really spread in the last 10. And, right now, 3D prototyping tools are becoming available for the first time. Combine those increases in the power of tools for realizing ideas with the increase in population and you're comparing a patent system designed for one level of patenting with one that's being asked to handle exponentially more.
What can be patented has changed. The criteria of "That a reasonable person couldn't come up with on their own" sure as hell doesn't apply to One Click shopping (Wow, really, people would prefer less hassle? Rocket science!) nor does it apply to, Creative's "I have a large collection of music, I'd like to divide it up somehow, perhaps some kind of a folder analogy." which Apple got sued over for daring to copy from the desktop where it was common to MP3 players where somehow Creative were the only people who could ever think of it. Add in being able to patent everything from genes to ways of doing business and you've got a system that is in no way representative of the past.
In the scheme of things, 25 years isn't that long to wait. In a world where computing of 10 years ago is utterly different to the computing of today, a 25 year patent means "a means for using a casette player to store data" would just be coming out of patent protection. So, yes, in terms of digital technology and gene research where 25 years is the entire lifetime of the field, it absolutely stifles things and makes a great case for those mediums to have a 10, or ideally 5 year patent term limit - enough to benefit from your invention, not enough to stifle the whole industry for as long as it's been around again.
That "moment for posterity" ends up being viewed by humans, with that very set of evolved vision characteristics you went out of your way to describe, not by some penta-chromatic alien race.
That's not correct:
The moment of posterity is recorded as a two dimensional static moment in time.
The features of our eyes that detect movement to the side will have nothing to detect. Even if we could create some kind of sharp centered image with a hazy sense of something moving towards the edges, our eyes would quickly track to the edge and the single direction/single instant shot, were it to mirror human vision, would be completely incapable of shifting its focus that way.
Certainly, a modern photograph has somewhat similar limitations in that we can't pan our vision beyond the edge of it and keep getting more information. It exceeds a human vision duplicate however in that it retains [almost - fish eye effects, vignetting, etc. aside] as much detail if we look at an edge as it does if we look at the center - thus giving us a fair degree of panning type ability.
You reference the potential benefits of this new approach. I don't dispute that the approach has potential (just like Foveon has staggering potential albeit with really poor implementation).
I similarly don't dispute the value of both IR and UV filters (though I'd rather be able to turn both off, too, when I want to - part of the reason digital black and white photography looks off is because there's no subtle IR response that we're used to seeing in film).
However, its benefits come from only taking those parts of human evolution that benefit a two dimensional captured moment in time and, just as importantly, ditching the aspects of human vision that don't benefit it.
I just don't think moving to a 100% match of evolution is a good thing given that photographs have different goals to matching one view in one direction. A cheetah's body has evolved to run on land better than any other mammal - but most human sprinters would still rather maintain human form for the other benefits it gives. Sure, luma is more important than color resolving - so mimic that - but panning ability in a photo is more important than a more perfect shot that you can't look to either side on.
There's a physical limit to how insensitive you can make a sensor, of course, which is what you're really asking for when you want lower ISO. At a certain point, you're just artificially crippling the technology to get a lower ISO, without any real benefit in terms of noise control. Sounds good to me.;)
Seriously... I've never understood why that's not an option that can be carried out on the processing chip. If someone wants an equivalent film speed of say 12 and your sensor can only go to 100, why can't the chip take 12 back to back shots and simply average them?
I realize that's not giving true light sensitivity... But I'd still much rather have the option to make my camera WAY less sensitive to light than have to deal with a 2x, 4x, 8x, etc. set of neutral densitiy filters every time I want to be able to shoot water trails in bright sunlight.
I'm sure I must be missing something. It always seems like a remarkably simple, near free, addition for the camera companies to add. Sure, it'd be of limited use to most people but, if you can add it for near-free and add a cool new bullet point on your feature list, why wouldn't you add it? What am I missing?
You need about 90% of the pixels responding to luminosity and just 10% to color. My camera doesn't care about avoiding being eaten by a lion. Nor does it care about sensing smaller prey running through the edges of its field of vision so it can turn its sensor to focus the sharper resolution on it.
The human eye is awesome for what it's evolved to do. Photography, however, is a different task. The human eye is good at resolving things infront of it while catching movement to the sides and only turning if it's interested. A camera with a well resolved center section but lousy edge resolution except for movement is one of the last things we want.
So, yes, the human eye is the result of millions of years of evolution and is a very efficient means of achieving its task. Just don't confuse the task of a human eye that's trying to ensure our survival with that of a camera that's trying to capture all of the detail of a moment for posterity.
If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded It tends to depend both on location and who made the recording...
An illegally procured recording by the police will get excluded in most places.
An illegally procured recording by a private citizen that was then given to the police is less likely to get excluded.
And that's "per trial" - every time the rapist gets a retrial/appeal, he stands a chance of getting the tape thrown out again. If the remainder of the evidence would convict anyway, ditching the tape will make no difference. If the tape being excluded is enough to win a trial, it only has to happen once.
and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court. He won't get damages relative to the scope of punishment he received for his crime (financial compensation for five years of lost liberty, etc.).
He would however have little, if any, problem suing for "emotional damages" from discovering he was filmed by a hidden camera. If his lawyer was worth anything, the first thing he'd do would be ensure any mention of "rape" never came before the jury. All they'd get to hear would be how a poor man had his reasonable expectation of privacy violated by a pervert with a hidden camera - sure, a crime may have been committed that he got caught for but they'd be left guessing whether it was murder or simply smoking a joint and so societal prejudice against rapists would be blocked.
So, no "Five years of lost earnings plus punative damages" - but several thousand dollars would be entirely conceivable.
She moved to the U.S. at 16, started dating her producer's son at 17. She then proudly went around telling everyone how great the sex was - afterall, it's legal in England from 16. In California where the californicating was happening, the age of consent is 18. Everyone sat around wondering how long it was before he got arrested as a child molester because of her pride in her relationship.
Places where oral sex is illegal: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C.
In Georgia those charged and convicted for either oral or anal sex can be sentenced to no less than one year and no more than 20 years imprisonment.
In Nevada it is illegal to have sex without a condom.
In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.
In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).
In Fairbanks, Alaska it is illegal for mooses to have sex on the city sidewalks.
It has nothing to do with handing over physical ram. It's about whether you have a piece of information in memory but deliberately fail to ever write it to a log - and whether you can be compelled to add that to your logs.
The more worrying demonstration of ignorance for me is:
"To imagine my information being disseminated without my written or verbal consent is unnerving," she said. "Then again, if I'm doing something I know is illegal, can I protest?"
If you smoke dope in your own home, can you protest if the police break in without any kind of a warrant?
If you like oral sex in any of the states that ban it, can you protest that your landlord installed a hidden video camera to catch it?
If you had depression and were hospitalized for being potentially suicidal, can you protest if the hospital gives the information to a former spouse who's trying to get child custody?
Of course you can damn well protest. Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.
It's especially not acceptable if you're not even necessarily committing a crime (seizing all server logs of all people using a torrent when only some of them are sharing copyrighted information over it). "Many people in group X are criminals, thus we're pulling all information on group X" is absolutely not acceptable. Imagine if the argument was "Many people in this housing project are involved with drugs. So we're demanding complete phone taps for everyone that lives there and we'll decide who's a criminal once we have that."
Killing and torturing people displeases the moral majority so it's also bad.
However, killing and torturing people in the name of religion however was good when the moral majority were for it (Spanish inquisition, crusades, etc.)
But it's bad again now the moral majority has moved on and doesn't support it anymore. Hence we look at the inquisition as a bad thing. We see it even worse when Muslims kill and torture the current moral majority. They're really against being on the receiving end of their views... Though the Iranian moral majority is in support of it - which just makes it confusing for everyone.
Even though killing and torturing people int he name of religion is now bad again, it's still good if the government does it (death sentences, a country that's allowed its politicians to keep Guantanamo open through numerous elections). However, moral majorities in other countries - almost all of whom used to kill and torture - now see it as bad and frown upon the U.S. moral majority.
Drugs are definitely bad. Except for when they were legal and England fought moral majority wars to force the Chinese to buy opium. They were also acceptable for sportsmen at one point but even baseball's moral majority has moved on from that.
Black people used to be bad when it suited the moral majority of the time. Then they turned around and the people who kept them as slaves were seen as bad. Then the KKK decided they were the moral majority and they were bad again. Then the 60s came and we decided the KKK were bad. Then "Cops" came along again and shirtless black people running from the cops were much better TV than shirtless white accountants so they're sort of bad again.
Guns were bad when they could be used by individuals to overthrow the moral majority. Then the American moral majority needed to overthrow the British one and so they became good in the U.S. Everyone else kind of liked them but then decided they didn't over time.
Ankles were very, very bad back in Victorian times. Then they became good as the moral majority's views changed. Unless you're a hardline Muslim in which case that moral majority says they go back under a burkha or you're bad. Unless you're a westerner, in which case burkhas tend to displease the moral majority and are thought to be bad.
Pornography was very, very bad because it encouraged all kinds of things the moral majority tried to clamp down on to maintain its control. Then the 60s came and everyone got very liberated and the moral majority quietened down. Then the 70s came and it was bad to women and thus the moral majority said it was very very bad again. Then the 80s came and it was empowering to women who could take money from stupid men and the moral majority stopped bitching so loudly. Then the internet came along and people made lots of money without any of it going to the moral majority and it was very bad. Then the moral majority realized that most of its members were surfing it or hanging out in webcam chatrooms of their own and thus it wasn't such an issue.
Confused yet?
In short: The moral majority casts hatred upon anyone and anything that's different. In decades and centuries to come, people tend to laugh at how closed minded, petit and scared that moral majority used to be in the past while supporting the bigotry of the moral majority of the present.
Ridiculous? Absolutely. But that's people for you.
I've got 3 macintosh computers sitting in front of me. They represent more than 4 thousand dollars total of hardware that I use for income. When I put Doom 3 into them - the game is wholly unplayable. I've got 3 PCs sitting in front of me. They represent more than 4 thousand dollars total of hardware that I use for income. When I put Doom 3 into them - the income is wholly unviable.
"German engineers have designed the first... Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'" Bell Labs aand Samsung used a time machine. It clearly says the German engineers have just done it first. The only possible explanation for Bell Labs doing it two years ago and Samsung having already built it in to cell phones is that they went forward in time in some kind of a time machine, possibly involving a flux capacitor of some sort, and brought the technology back with them to before it was first implemented.
That, or it's a badly phrased article.
In related news, German scientists have designed the first "circular device for the conveying of people and objects" and the first "source for the creation of heat and light by combustion of a 'fuel'." We may mock but the USPTO will still grant them a patent on the lot of it.
The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand. Hmm. Anyone else remember this post only 9 days ago?
To our subjects' ears, there wasn't a tremendous distinction between the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. None of them were absolutely sure about their choices with either set of earphones, even after an average of five back-to-back A/B listening tests. That tells us the value in the Apple's and EMI's more expensive tracks lies solely in the fact that they're free of DRM restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
- Graduated with a 3.2 GPA after repeating a year to get my grades back up.
- Graduated with a 2.7 GPA
If you have half a brain, your resume will look like the first of these two options:You write your resume, your college doesn't. Why the hell would you even mention that you repeated a year? Sure, there'll be a note on your transcript but here's a little secret: most companies fail to do their due dilligence background checks and those that do will likely confirm the GPA from the college without asking if there're marks about repeating years.
If they notice the degree taking longer - which is a huge clue in England where almost everyone studies full time but a total non issue in America where a lot of people take longer while working - simply tell them, "I took my degree a little slower while I worked on an open source project. Then distract them with more information about that.
You'll get fired down the line if you lie. If you selectively tell the truth, it's an embarrassing discovery if it comes up but almost certainly won't get you fired.
In my own career, I had a job that listed maybe a dozen skills. I had eleven of them, missing JSP which they'd made to sound pretty critical. I wrote them a response, listing how I'd used each of those eleven in my previous employment and was the perfect person for them. Sure, there was a missing twelfth paragraph but they never noticed it in the mass of positive responses. In the interview, whenever JSP came up, I talked all about my Java experience and delighted them. They gave me the job with a non-negotiable offer that turned out to be more than I was going to ask for anyway. A speed read of the O'Reilly JSP book and they ended up making me the team lead. I never once lied, there was never anything they could subsequently fire me for, but I certainly avoided any areas I didn't want to discuss.
So, for you, if you think the GPA will hold you back and you're happy to repeat, go do it. There's absolutely no reason to list the repeat on your resume. Sure, it's on your transcripts but you'll likely never have an employer scrutinize them in that much detail and, if you're any good as a salesman for yourself, you can always spin it as showing you're willing to go the extra mile to do the right thing.
From the article: 'Labour MP Martin Salter, who has worked closely
By that definition, British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo would be put on the sex offenders register if he had pictures from the parties he attended (depicted in the movie Scandal as involving placing bees in cups on sensitive places).
Mind you, this is the same country that's famous for Operation Spanner which found, "A person does not have the legal ability to consent to receive an act which will seriously harm them, such as branding or other intense activities of a sadomasochistic nature." Fantastically, upon finding they were wrong in their assumption the "victims" must have been murdered, the police gave the submissives a choice, "Testify against the people you consented to 'assaulting' you - or we'll charge you as accessories in your own assault."
This, however, is arguably worse. Now the definition is broadened to the point of ridiculousness. Say you're a totally balanced individual, completely capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, fantasy from reality. You have a kink - the idea of mutilation, even if you would never act on it turns you on. You put fake blood on a realistic sex toy and take a picture for private use only. Absolutely no one is, in any way, harmed by this act. No one else has seen it, you're not escalating towards a crime, no harm whatsoever. If the police discover this image - say a pissed off ex snoops around your system and finds it then reports it - you're now looking at a life of ostracism on the sex offenders register, access to your kids denied. For what exactly? A private picture with props that in no way led to any harm to anyone?
Of course, as Martin Salter so reassuringly puts it, "No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other." Sure they aren't Martin, sure they aren't.
From the comments on the original article:
The graphs are from a several months old marketing promo. Suddenly there's really no story.
Claim: AMD listed a product they don't intend to release.
Truth: AMD listed a product they intended to release at the time but subsequently withdrew.
Claim: AMD deliberately used out of date Intel scores.
Truth: AMD used the most current Intel scores available at the time. Improved scores came from an improved compiler - which may well change AMD's scores too. Either way, it wasn't available at the time of writing.
Claim: AMD ignored the most recent Intel processor releases.
Truth: Those Intel processors weren't released at the time of writing and no benchmarks existed.
Journalistically, this is about on a par with finding footage from the 50's saying we'd all be driving flying cars by the year 2000 and boldly asserting there's clearly a government conspiracy to hide the technology from the people to protect big oil.
Bold claims are one thing. Making them on the back of badly researching where the information came from is a great way to look like an idiot.
I think they got in to enough trouble for GTA3:San Andreas' Starbucks mod.
If you care about other people's daughters, get your son vaccinated for HPV too. I even care about internet pornstars, I'm vaccinating my dog, horse, goat and pig for HPV.
...the first Controlled-NOT quantum gate... a quantum computer would achieve new levels of power by turning bits into fuzzy quantum things called qubits (pronounced cue-bits) that are 0 and 1 simultaneously. 0 and 1 simultaneously, through a NOT gate... becomes 1 and 0 simultaneously? Sounds useful.Unexplained affluence, - Do many student jobs pay anything other than cash in hand?
failing to report overseas travel, - Fortunately, ending up in New Zealand, Russia, The Cannaries, etc. wasn't something that needed to be reported when I was a student.
showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, Given how little interest I paid inside the scope of my course, the moment I showed interest in anything, it was unusual. Plus it was pretty common for us to randomly sit in on other lectures that looked interesting.
keeping unusual work hours, CS major + jolt + projects + MUDs
unreported contacts with foreign nationals, I married a foreign national I didn't report meeting while at university.
unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, Should we ignore the university housing me with a guy from the Singapore military?
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, If I had only learned what I'd needed to know, I'd be a lousy employee now. The fact that I learned to do a whole bunch of things outside my course's scope is part of why my career's been vastly more successful than it would otherwise have been.
and unexplained absences In my day, we called these "lectures." I don't know anyone who a) didn't have plenty of absences and b) explained any of them.
Clearly, I must have been a terrorist... Or an absolutely normal CS major.
Mind you, I'm also the grandson of a man who tried to enlist in the British Army during World War II - already being a marksmanship champion - and was told to piss off. He was only allowed to enlist once he had his medical degree and was promptly sent to Kenya. Unable to figure out why, he had a friend in intelligence check his record. It turned out that, back in the 30s, with Communism being the cool new politics with the kids, he and some friends came across Franco's envoy to London and relieved him of both ceremonial sword and pants. Though no charges were ever pressed, it ended up on his file and hence Kenya was the furthest place they could find from the Russians.
Which all goes to show how utterly silly such indicators tend to be.
Apple's own stated target is 1% of cell phone users.
Given relatively few sites take their time to optimize for Safari on the Mac (which has 5% of the desktop market), what are the odds they'd optimize for Safari on an iPhone that has 1% of it?
Even Opera has 1.5% of the web market and, other than its robustness saving it, most web developers don't even bother to check if sites work in it.
Next question: What percentage of users are partially sighted? That dwarfs the 1% of the iPhone. What percentage of sites actually worry that much about genuine scalable text/high contrast/alt/title etc.?
In short, most companies won't pay to develop their websites for the just greater percentages that have Opera or Safari. Until the legal threat of the Target lawsuit, most wouldn't even pay to support the much larger percentage who needed accessible websites - and many still won't.
If they won't pay for that, when the necessary changes are relatively minor, do you really think they'll pay for radically greater changes just to woo the targeted 1% of cell phone users who'll still go home and use Safari on their Macs or PCs that don't have multi touch interfaces?
God bless Steve Jobs for managing to make the entire world think his latest thing is all critical. The truth is, it's a damn cool gimmick that even Apple aren't hoping for more than 1% adoption from.
Now, in two years to five years... When Microsoft's table is all the rage and has filtered in to home PCs, laptops, etc., when your $250 iPod can jump on to your wifi network and you can surf from the couch... Then, yes, multi touch, non-focused interfaces will be something we'll all be building for. Though the smart devs will be learning the tricks now so they can demand the high salaries when it reaches the point that everyone suddenly realizes they need it, 1% of cellphones right now just isn't enough to move the industry.
So first we've got the BBFC and now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo who have decided that adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo didn't decide adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game...
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo decided that they didn't want to get sued, win, but still pay a hell of a lot of money and take a hell of a lot of bad press for that win, when Jack Thompson or similar sued over the next publicised murders.
Their view isn't that you can't play the game - it's simply that they're not going to do anything that'll get them sued for aiding you in playing the game.
Does that suck? Absolutely. But you've got to question where the blame lies for that? With the companies for recognizing the system they live in or the system itself?
When it comes down to the system itself, who's responsible for the massively abusive legal system where getting sued in the first place is often the real loss? That'd be the politicians who wrote the abusable laws and the ones that followed who failed to tighten them. Why haven't they addressed it? Because their voters haven't told them they'll kick out anyone who doesn't address it. And who are the voters? Oh, yeah, you.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are corporations. They're not moral police, they're not immoral police. If anything they're amoral - they don't give a shit about morals either way except for where pretending to either makes or loses them money. If they could profit (and profit overall, so factor in lawsuits, bad press, etc.), they'd sell crack to babies and more than happily let the babies choose for themselves.
The problem is, they exist in a system where they can't sell crack to babies without hurting overall and they can't realease Adult Only titles for the same reason. That's not their judgment of you... That's yours, your parents, your friends, your neighbors faults for letting that world happen. Good work on stopping them selling crack to babies though.
Sure, it's easier to blame people who respond to a system rather than look at who created the system that makes it an inevitability in the first place. Still, until you address real causes, you'll never change anything. And the reason AO titles don't get launched by console companies is they know the system people like you, me, and everyone else have created will punish them for it overall.
Communication is now essentially instantaneous. Bob in New York patents a better belt buckle in 1850, Jim in San Francisco designs something similar. It'll be a minumum of a few months before someone who's seen one happens to see the other and he almost certainly won't care about whether it is or isn't patented and Bob isn't going to go to the expense of sending his lawyer across country for several months to find out. Even if there is a clash, the markets are so separate, it's not worth pursuing getting both sides in a single courtroom.
The pace of invention has continued to dramatically increase. Modern machinery turned up with the industrial revolution. Electricity only became a common power source in the last century. Computers are 60 or so years old. Home computers are less than 30 years old and only common in the last 15. The internet has only really spread in the last 10. And, right now, 3D prototyping tools are becoming available for the first time. Combine those increases in the power of tools for realizing ideas with the increase in population and you're comparing a patent system designed for one level of patenting with one that's being asked to handle exponentially more.
What can be patented has changed. The criteria of "That a reasonable person couldn't come up with on their own" sure as hell doesn't apply to One Click shopping (Wow, really, people would prefer less hassle? Rocket science!) nor does it apply to, Creative's "I have a large collection of music, I'd like to divide it up somehow, perhaps some kind of a folder analogy." which Apple got sued over for daring to copy from the desktop where it was common to MP3 players where somehow Creative were the only people who could ever think of it. Add in being able to patent everything from genes to ways of doing business and you've got a system that is in no way representative of the past.
In the scheme of things, 25 years isn't that long to wait. In a world where computing of 10 years ago is utterly different to the computing of today, a 25 year patent means "a means for using a casette player to store data" would just be coming out of patent protection. So, yes, in terms of digital technology and gene research where 25 years is the entire lifetime of the field, it absolutely stifles things and makes a great case for those mediums to have a 10, or ideally 5 year patent term limit - enough to benefit from your invention, not enough to stifle the whole industry for as long as it's been around again.
99% penetration is just another way of saying, "Baby, I promise I'll pull out before I cum!"
Sure, you've got to factor in the numbers that don't live up to their word. But subtracting those who do, does the actual figure go up or down?
That "moment for posterity" ends up being viewed by humans, with that very set of evolved vision characteristics you went out of your way to describe, not by some penta-chromatic alien race.
That's not correct:
The moment of posterity is recorded as a two dimensional static moment in time.
The features of our eyes that detect movement to the side will have nothing to detect. Even if we could create some kind of sharp centered image with a hazy sense of something moving towards the edges, our eyes would quickly track to the edge and the single direction/single instant shot, were it to mirror human vision, would be completely incapable of shifting its focus that way.
Certainly, a modern photograph has somewhat similar limitations in that we can't pan our vision beyond the edge of it and keep getting more information. It exceeds a human vision duplicate however in that it retains [almost - fish eye effects, vignetting, etc. aside] as much detail if we look at an edge as it does if we look at the center - thus giving us a fair degree of panning type ability.
You reference the potential benefits of this new approach. I don't dispute that the approach has potential (just like Foveon has staggering potential albeit with really poor implementation).
I similarly don't dispute the value of both IR and UV filters (though I'd rather be able to turn both off, too, when I want to - part of the reason digital black and white photography looks off is because there's no subtle IR response that we're used to seeing in film).
However, its benefits come from only taking those parts of human evolution that benefit a two dimensional captured moment in time and, just as importantly, ditching the aspects of human vision that don't benefit it.
I just don't think moving to a 100% match of evolution is a good thing given that photographs have different goals to matching one view in one direction. A cheetah's body has evolved to run on land better than any other mammal - but most human sprinters would still rather maintain human form for the other benefits it gives. Sure, luma is more important than color resolving - so mimic that - but panning ability in a photo is more important than a more perfect shot that you can't look to either side on.
Don't believe me?
Who's ever heard of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Whale, huh?
Seriously... I've never understood why that's not an option that can be carried out on the processing chip. If someone wants an equivalent film speed of say 12 and your sensor can only go to 100, why can't the chip take 12 back to back shots and simply average them?
I realize that's not giving true light sensitivity... But I'd still much rather have the option to make my camera WAY less sensitive to light than have to deal with a 2x, 4x, 8x, etc. set of neutral densitiy filters every time I want to be able to shoot water trails in bright sunlight.
I'm sure I must be missing something. It always seems like a remarkably simple, near free, addition for the camera companies to add. Sure, it'd be of limited use to most people but, if you can add it for near-free and add a cool new bullet point on your feature list, why wouldn't you add it? What am I missing?
The human eye is awesome for what it's evolved to do. Photography, however, is a different task. The human eye is good at resolving things infront of it while catching movement to the sides and only turning if it's interested. A camera with a well resolved center section but lousy edge resolution except for movement is one of the last things we want.
So, yes, the human eye is the result of millions of years of evolution and is a very efficient means of achieving its task. Just don't confuse the task of a human eye that's trying to ensure our survival with that of a camera that's trying to capture all of the detail of a moment for posterity.
An illegally procured recording by the police will get excluded in most places.
An illegally procured recording by a private citizen that was then given to the police is less likely to get excluded.
And that's "per trial" - every time the rapist gets a retrial/appeal, he stands a chance of getting the tape thrown out again. If the remainder of the evidence would convict anyway, ditching the tape will make no difference. If the tape being excluded is enough to win a trial, it only has to happen once. and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court. He won't get damages relative to the scope of punishment he received for his crime (financial compensation for five years of lost liberty, etc.).
He would however have little, if any, problem suing for "emotional damages" from discovering he was filmed by a hidden camera. If his lawyer was worth anything, the first thing he'd do would be ensure any mention of "rape" never came before the jury. All they'd get to hear would be how a poor man had his reasonable expectation of privacy violated by a pervert with a hidden camera - sure, a crime may have been committed that he got caught for but they'd be left guessing whether it was murder or simply smoking a joint and so societal prejudice against rapists would be blocked.
So, no "Five years of lost earnings plus punative damages" - but several thousand dollars would be entirely conceivable.
Joss Stone had a similar problem:
h tml
She moved to the U.S. at 16, started dating her producer's son at 17. She then proudly went around telling everyone how great the sex was - afterall, it's legal in England from 16. In California where the californicating was happening, the age of consent is 18. Everyone sat around wondering how long it was before he got arrested as a child molester because of her pride in her relationship.
Places where oral sex is illegal: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C.
In Georgia those charged and convicted for either oral or anal sex can be sentenced to no less than one year and no more than 20 years imprisonment.
In Nevada it is illegal to have sex without a condom.
In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.
In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).
In Fairbanks, Alaska it is illegal for mooses to have sex on the city sidewalks.
http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/flux/gSpot/sexLaw.
It has nothing to do with handing over physical ram. It's about whether you have a piece of information in memory but deliberately fail to ever write it to a log - and whether you can be compelled to add that to your logs.
The more worrying demonstration of ignorance for me is:
"To imagine my information being disseminated without my written or verbal consent is unnerving," she said. "Then again, if I'm doing something I know is illegal, can I protest?"
If you smoke dope in your own home, can you protest if the police break in without any kind of a warrant?
If you like oral sex in any of the states that ban it, can you protest that your landlord installed a hidden video camera to catch it?
If you had depression and were hospitalized for being potentially suicidal, can you protest if the hospital gives the information to a former spouse who's trying to get child custody?
Of course you can damn well protest. Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.
It's especially not acceptable if you're not even necessarily committing a crime (seizing all server logs of all people using a torrent when only some of them are sharing copyrighted information over it). "Many people in group X are criminals, thus we're pulling all information on group X" is absolutely not acceptable. Imagine if the argument was "Many people in this housing project are involved with drugs. So we're demanding complete phone taps for everyone that lives there and we'll decide who's a criminal once we have that."
OK, let me see if I can help:
Porn displeases the moral majority so it's bad.
Killing and torturing people displeases the moral majority so it's also bad.
However, killing and torturing people in the name of religion however was good when the moral majority were for it (Spanish inquisition, crusades, etc.)
But it's bad again now the moral majority has moved on and doesn't support it anymore. Hence we look at the inquisition as a bad thing. We see it even worse when Muslims kill and torture the current moral majority. They're really against being on the receiving end of their views... Though the Iranian moral majority is in support of it - which just makes it confusing for everyone.
Even though killing and torturing people int he name of religion is now bad again, it's still good if the government does it (death sentences, a country that's allowed its politicians to keep Guantanamo open through numerous elections). However, moral majorities in other countries - almost all of whom used to kill and torture - now see it as bad and frown upon the U.S. moral majority.
Drugs are definitely bad. Except for when they were legal and England fought moral majority wars to force the Chinese to buy opium. They were also acceptable for sportsmen at one point but even baseball's moral majority has moved on from that.
Black people used to be bad when it suited the moral majority of the time. Then they turned around and the people who kept them as slaves were seen as bad. Then the KKK decided they were the moral majority and they were bad again. Then the 60s came and we decided the KKK were bad. Then "Cops" came along again and shirtless black people running from the cops were much better TV than shirtless white accountants so they're sort of bad again.
Guns were bad when they could be used by individuals to overthrow the moral majority. Then the American moral majority needed to overthrow the British one and so they became good in the U.S. Everyone else kind of liked them but then decided they didn't over time.
Ankles were very, very bad back in Victorian times. Then they became good as the moral majority's views changed. Unless you're a hardline Muslim in which case that moral majority says they go back under a burkha or you're bad. Unless you're a westerner, in which case burkhas tend to displease the moral majority and are thought to be bad.
Pornography was very, very bad because it encouraged all kinds of things the moral majority tried to clamp down on to maintain its control. Then the 60s came and everyone got very liberated and the moral majority quietened down. Then the 70s came and it was bad to women and thus the moral majority said it was very very bad again. Then the 80s came and it was empowering to women who could take money from stupid men and the moral majority stopped bitching so loudly. Then the internet came along and people made lots of money without any of it going to the moral majority and it was very bad. Then the moral majority realized that most of its members were surfing it or hanging out in webcam chatrooms of their own and thus it wasn't such an issue.
Confused yet?
In short: The moral majority casts hatred upon anyone and anything that's different. In decades and centuries to come, people tend to laugh at how closed minded, petit and scared that moral majority used to be in the past while supporting the bigotry of the moral majority of the present.
Ridiculous? Absolutely. But that's people for you.
They as SO off my friends list.
That, or it's a badly phrased article.
In related news, German scientists have designed the first "circular device for the conveying of people and objects" and the first "source for the creation of heat and light by combustion of a 'fuel'." We may mock but the USPTO will still grant them a patent on the lot of it.