1> Don't support caller ID call waiting 2> Rarely have caller ID displays at all 3> Aren't widely available with multi-handset base stations 4> Don't have useful phone book modes
Which is what stopped me from downgrading to 900mhz and made me upgrade to 5.8ghz instead.
However, as a number of people have pointed out, there's absolutely zero evidence that this is due to human activity.
This is true --- to an extent. But nobody who's made this argument to me has ever been able to list for me things that would be hard evidence that global warming is due to human activity.
Without a list of kinds of evidence that would qualify, the 'global-warming-is-natural' crowd has to fall back on the same set of arguments as the 'global-warming-is-due-to-carbon-output' crowd: "We have a model."
When all either side has is a model, one has to look at the quallity and consistency of the arguments. I'm not sure that the carbon-output people don't have better arguments that explain more, more simply.
Occam's razor is admittedly just a rule of thumb, but it leads me to believe in carbon emissions as a culprit for global warming over some sort of vague logical positivist argument that since we don't have enough evidence, it's probably a natural process.
It took him five years to write three books --- well, that's the time since Cryptonomicon was released. So, even with a year for book touring and preliminaries, it was four years.
The reason that the trilogy is being published as three separate books rather than one long one: page counts. The first volume is 900 pages, the second is 800, and the third is somewhere about the same length, I've heard.
Now, my process isn't finished yet, but supposedly it'll be done in the next 24-36 hours.
My problem wasn't that T-Mobile couldn't port my number from Sprint, but that they wouldn't sell me a subsidized phone if they did. I could pay $200 for the "free" Nokia phone, and prices for other phones went up from there. Because of the way their commissions work, they only got commissions on local phone numbers.
So I bought a SIM chip from T-Mobile, ordered a phone from elsewhere, and we'll see what happens when the phone is delivered on Saturday.
I have a projector with a native 800x600 resolution; at its distance from the screen, I've got a 16:9 (ie, widescreen) picture that's got a 52" diagonal.
At that size, DVD resolution (720x480) seems entirely adequate. I get some jaggies on poorly-done title screens, but I use those to help me focus the projector.:-) I don't have stairstep problems or jaggies in the films themselves; I can't remember the last time I saw that.
No, wait, I can: it was when I had the DVD player do letterboxing with the projector set in 4:3 mode. Apparently the DVD player does a better job with that than my expensive Philips SACD/DVD player.
I can't imagine repurchasing films that I own in a new format; I'd likely get a player that was backwards-compatible, and just make new purchases in the new format. Of course, exception for films where the transfer is substantially better --- I bought the original Kubrick box set, when it first came out, back before they remastered them. But I've been considering rebuying that regardless, since the transfers are so awful.
Really, the best thing I could do to improve my picture would be to get a brighter projector; that has far more impact on my movie-watching experience than resolution does. I don't have room in my apartment to have a larger picture, and without that, upping the resolution would be not pointless but not a huge deal either.
There is no way that a Harry Potter novel should ever have won the Hugo, just because its popular doesn't mean its good writing, or had anything profound to say abotu the world. Put it along side something like "Fire Upon the Deep" or "Ender's Game" and it pales in comparison.
To preface this, I'll admit that I'm only somewhat of a science fiction fan, but I've been reading the stuff since I was a little tyke. I haven't read any Vinge, so I can't comment on Fire Upon the Deep, either.
On the other hand, I'll note that just because something is popular doesn't mean it's crap, and just because something is science fiction, that doesn't mean it has anything profound to say about the world.
To my mind, the fourth Harry Potter volume (and probably the third and fifth volumes, as well) have at least as much to say about the world as does Ender's Game. The latter is effectively a political novel, and does indeed have great stuff to say about the organization of society, the power of electronic information networks, and the value or lack thereof of coercive strategies for raising children, among other issues. I enjoyed reading it immensely.
In fact, the novel is a great companion to Harry Potter: they're both about kids who are effectively orphaned and subsequently raised by adults to take sides in a war about which they haven't had a chance to form their own opinions.
In the early novels, it's simplistic, but in the last couple of volumes, I believe that Harry Potter has become a profound meditiation on good and evil, and what lies between them. I believe that, as a novel about morality rather than politics, Rowling is every bit as profound a thinker as Card, if not more so.
"Tolkien had very anti-technology undertones. He constantly refered to the dark clouds of Mordor, the decimation of the forests in Eisengard."
IIRC, that wasn't about industry so much as pointless destruction. The forests were being destroyed not even for the sake of creating lumber, but only to make waste and mess.
No, actually, Tolkien was anti-technology. Much of LOTR is really about how his beloved English countryside was ruined by automobiles, etc. The secondary literature is full of clear explanations of this and other issues.
Oh, come on. Every time Liv Tyler opens her mouth, I want to rip my ears off. Not in the film itself, but every time she chooses to explain herself or submits to an interview about it.
The first one was to get fanboys to spend extra cash to have it early and give something to Blockbuster and idiots who don't know any better or don't care.
Or, perhaps, for people who found the discipline of a three-hour theatrical release superior to the wandering three-and-a-half-hour monstrosity of the extended edition.
I liked all of the scenes that were cut from the extended FoTR, especially the pub scene, but it's in most respects a better movie without those scenes. That's what I'd prefer to see. Not surprisingly, that's the edition I chose to buy.
Now the fullscreen edition, that's for idiots who don't know any better or don't care.
Yes, it is interesting. But it can also be explained easily:
First, Linus sometimes reverses himself. That is, he says, "I was wrong about XXXXX, and it's going into the kernel now." This happens a lot.
Second, Linus has a sense of humor about himself. He knows that he's good at what he does, but he never thinks he's the best or only.
Third, just because somebody disagrees with him, that doesn't mean that Linus calles that person an idiot. Or insult them. Or threaten to sue them, as Bernstein in particular does pretty frequently.
Linus didn't go off and found his own project because he made himself too unpleasant to the people with whom he previously worked... he did it because the work was interesting to him, and he didn't know that anybody else was doing it. (Though in fact the *BSDers were at the time.)
Hey I can write an article that claims I made a version of Linux that runs windows binaries natively and has every driver on the planet, can I get that posted on slashdot??
I suppose it lets one feel superior to belittle standard beer when obviously any small brew (which is probably brewed at a large brewery anyway) with an obscure/odd name is far superior.
It's not the size of the brewery, it's the quality of the beer. There are some very large English and German breweries that make some excellent beer.
Out one side of their mouth they'll talk about the sancity of the German purity law, then turn around and rant and rave about how good the chocolate malts and cranberry winter wheat brews are.
Actually, chocolate malts (the kind used in brewing, not the kind from the soda shop) are in fact just malted barley, roasted in a particular way. So many (though not all) chocolate stouts are Rhineheitsgebot compatible. Though of course the Germans don't brew stouts.
The Germans do brew wheat beers, though. Even though they're not rhgbt-compatible, technically. But the Germans don't put cranberries in.;-)
And the Rhgbt is BS anyway: the Belgians totally ignore it, and even their big breweries put out some of the world's most incredible beers.
If you think that Guinness is the gold standard for narrow-minded beer snobs, you don't know any real beer snobs.
Most REAL snobs don't like Guinness --- they may say, "It's the definitive dry Irish stout," but that's meant to damn it with faint praise.
Real beer snobs will say, "Guinness isn't bad, but Dogfish Head's World Wide Stout is REALLY something," or "Young's double chocolate stout is really much tastier," or "Pyramid's Obsidian Stout is much hoppier, and much tastier."
Moreover (replying to the parent comment, not this one) I'll note that Guinness in cans is worse than Guinness in bottles or on draft: in order for the draught widget to work right, the beer has to be waaaay too cold to properly enjoy.
Re:Now that everyone has a camcorder
on
Starcraft
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· Score: 2
They want to learn about the human emotion known as love.
I haven't read it, but based on this review, the guy obviously believes (probably on a subconscious level) that sex is icky and bad, not pleasurable and good. Or at the very least he's playing off of peoples' fears in that regard.
What you need is not a PDA, or planning software, but Thoreau's doctrine: "Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, Simplify."
That was easy for him to say: he sat in his cabin and wrote all day, and had Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife make cookies for him, feed him, and in general do all those day-to-day chores for which he had no interest.
Batman a fraud? Hardly... spend the time training, find a way to get the money, and get a strong enough drive to want to do so and you can be Batman [ . . . ] he's just an above-average person who pushes himself and has a bit of a problem with street crime.
He's just an above-average fortune who inherited a large fortune, so that he didn't have to "find a way to get the money" --- a point the referenced article makes. He's not a fraud, but he's not exactly a self-made man, either.
Minsky may have ripped perceptrons to peices [sic], but that has no bearing on the elegance or correctness of Braitenberg's exposition. Perceptrons were toys.
Um, his point was that from the 1960s, when Minsky trashed Perceptrons, until 1989, when AI research 'rediscovered' the neural net, all neural nets were looked down upon as perceptrons or their equivalents, hence toys. Therefore, although this book includes descriptions of Neural nets, it was 1985 and he wanted to cloak the description, so as not to offend the AI priesthood, book reviewers, etc.
I'm not sure, personally, that I buy this as an explanation: after all, the book's whole approach was so unorthodox, I'm not sure that that mollifying the academics was even on the radar screen.
I know this was said on the last thread we had on the subject, but it's worth repeating. The guy was in no way prevented from buying tickets or flying. If the website was too difficult to navigate, he could simply call Southwest on the phone.
Of course, the Web site offers low fares that you can't get when calling Southwest on the phone. So it's OK to take money from blind people, just so long as you take more money from them than you do from others.
Yeah, but for Red Hat to blame the customer (as they'd be doing: "Your scripts are the problem, not our distribution!") would be suicidal in the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
But 900Mhz phones:
1> Don't support caller ID call waiting
2> Rarely have caller ID displays at all
3> Aren't widely available with multi-handset base stations
4> Don't have useful phone book modes
Which is what stopped me from downgrading to 900mhz and made me upgrade to 5.8ghz instead.
That's excellent! How well does the data restore work when you lose your pda, er pad?
This is true --- to an extent. But nobody who's made this argument to me has ever been able to list for me things that would be hard evidence that global warming is due to human activity.
Without a list of kinds of evidence that would qualify, the 'global-warming-is-natural' crowd has to fall back on the same set of arguments as the 'global-warming-is-due-to-carbon-output' crowd: "We have a model."
When all either side has is a model, one has to look at the quallity and consistency of the arguments. I'm not sure that the carbon-output people don't have better arguments that explain more, more simply.
Occam's razor is admittedly just a rule of thumb, but it leads me to believe in carbon emissions as a culprit for global warming over some sort of vague logical positivist argument that since we don't have enough evidence, it's probably a natural process.
"Where would you put it?"
Everywhere.In The Confusion, Newton's homosexuality becomes a plot point.
It took him five years to write three books --- well, that's the time since Cryptonomicon was released. So, even with a year for book touring and preliminaries, it was four years. The reason that the trilogy is being published as three separate books rather than one long one: page counts. The first volume is 900 pages, the second is 800, and the third is somewhere about the same length, I've heard.
Now, my process isn't finished yet, but supposedly it'll be done in the next 24-36 hours.
My problem wasn't that T-Mobile couldn't port my number from Sprint, but that they wouldn't sell me a subsidized phone if they did. I could pay $200 for the "free" Nokia phone, and prices for other phones went up from there. Because of the way their commissions work, they only got commissions on local phone numbers.
So I bought a SIM chip from T-Mobile, ordered a phone from elsewhere, and we'll see what happens when the phone is delivered on Saturday.
It's a fun game, takes ten minutes to learn, and goes *great* with alcohol. It's endless fun, really.
Indeed!
:-) I don't have stairstep problems or jaggies in the films themselves; I can't remember the last time I saw that.
I have a projector with a native 800x600 resolution; at its distance from the screen, I've got a 16:9 (ie, widescreen) picture that's got a 52" diagonal.
At that size, DVD resolution (720x480) seems entirely adequate. I get some jaggies on poorly-done title screens, but I use those to help me focus the projector.
No, wait, I can: it was when I had the DVD player do letterboxing with the projector set in 4:3 mode. Apparently the DVD player does a better job with that than my expensive Philips SACD/DVD player.
I can't imagine repurchasing films that I own in a new format; I'd likely get a player that was backwards-compatible, and just make new purchases in the new format. Of course, exception for films where the transfer is substantially better --- I bought the original Kubrick box set, when it first came out, back before they remastered them. But I've been considering rebuying that regardless, since the transfers are so awful.
Really, the best thing I could do to improve my picture would be to get a brighter projector; that has far more impact on my movie-watching experience than resolution does. I don't have room in my apartment to have a larger picture, and without that, upping the resolution would be not pointless but not a huge deal either.
To preface this, I'll admit that I'm only somewhat of a science fiction fan, but I've been reading the stuff since I was a little tyke. I haven't read any Vinge, so I can't comment on Fire Upon the Deep, either.
On the other hand, I'll note that just because something is popular doesn't mean it's crap, and just because something is science fiction, that doesn't mean it has anything profound to say about the world.
To my mind, the fourth Harry Potter volume (and probably the third and fifth volumes, as well) have at least as much to say about the world as does Ender's Game. The latter is effectively a political novel, and does indeed have great stuff to say about the organization of society, the power of electronic information networks, and the value or lack thereof of coercive strategies for raising children, among other issues. I enjoyed reading it immensely.
In fact, the novel is a great companion to Harry Potter: they're both about kids who are effectively orphaned and subsequently raised by adults to take sides in a war about which they haven't had a chance to form their own opinions.
In the early novels, it's simplistic, but in the last couple of volumes, I believe that Harry Potter has become a profound meditiation on good and evil, and what lies between them. I believe that, as a novel about morality rather than politics, Rowling is every bit as profound a thinker as Card, if not more so.
No, actually, Tolkien was anti-technology. Much of LOTR is really about how his beloved English countryside was ruined by automobiles, etc. The secondary literature is full of clear explanations of this and other issues.
Oh, come on. Every time Liv Tyler opens her mouth, I want to rip my ears off. Not in the film itself, but every time she chooses to explain herself or submits to an interview about it.
Or, perhaps, for people who found the discipline of a three-hour theatrical release superior to the wandering three-and-a-half-hour monstrosity of the extended edition.
I liked all of the scenes that were cut from the extended FoTR, especially the pub scene, but it's in most respects a better movie without those scenes. That's what I'd prefer to see. Not surprisingly, that's the edition I chose to buy.
Now the fullscreen edition, that's for idiots who don't know any better or don't care.
Yes, it is interesting. But it can also be explained easily:
First, Linus sometimes reverses himself. That is, he says, "I was wrong about XXXXX, and it's going into the kernel now." This happens a lot.
Second, Linus has a sense of humor about himself. He knows that he's good at what he does, but he never thinks he's the best or only.
Third, just because somebody disagrees with him, that doesn't mean that Linus calles that person an idiot. Or insult them. Or threaten to sue them, as Bernstein in particular does pretty frequently.
Linus didn't go off and found his own project because he made himself too unpleasant to the people with whom he previously worked... he did it because the work was interesting to him, and he didn't know that anybody else was doing it. (Though in fact the *BSDers were at the time.)
Why not?
It's not the size of the brewery, it's the quality of the beer. There are some very large English and German breweries that make some excellent beer.
Actually, chocolate malts (the kind used in brewing, not the kind from the soda shop) are in fact just malted barley, roasted in a particular way. So many (though not all) chocolate stouts are Rhineheitsgebot compatible. Though of course the Germans don't brew stouts.
The Germans do brew wheat beers, though. Even though they're not rhgbt-compatible, technically. But the Germans don't put cranberries in. ;-)
And the Rhgbt is BS anyway: the Belgians totally ignore it, and even their big breweries put out some of the world's most incredible beers.
If you think that Guinness is the gold standard for narrow-minded beer snobs, you don't know any real beer snobs.
Most REAL snobs don't like Guinness --- they may say, "It's the definitive dry Irish stout," but that's meant to damn it with faint praise.
Real beer snobs will say, "Guinness isn't bad, but Dogfish Head's World Wide Stout is REALLY something," or "Young's double chocolate stout is really much tastier," or "Pyramid's Obsidian Stout is much hoppier, and much tastier."
Moreover (replying to the parent comment, not this one) I'll note that Guinness in cans is worse than Guinness in bottles or on draft: in order for the draught widget to work right, the beer has to be waaaay too cold to properly enjoy.
But for that you need a camcorder...
What do you expect in a sex-negative culture?
I haven't read it, but based on this review, the guy obviously believes (probably on a subconscious level) that sex is icky and bad, not pleasurable and good. Or at the very least he's playing off of peoples' fears in that regard.
Repeat after me: Sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.
Which isn't to say be careful in real life. But there's a huge difference between being careful and being sex-negative.
No, but they could patent that: "A technique for indicating the relative value of Internet e-mail through subject line modification."
That was easy for him to say: he sat in his cabin and wrote all day, and had Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife make cookies for him, feed him, and in general do all those day-to-day chores for which he had no interest.
(Really, I'm not making this up...)
He's just an above-average fortune who inherited a large fortune, so that he didn't have to "find a way to get the money" --- a point the referenced article makes. He's not a fraud, but he's not exactly a self-made man, either.
Um, his point was that from the 1960s, when Minsky trashed Perceptrons, until 1989, when AI research 'rediscovered' the neural net, all neural nets were looked down upon as perceptrons or their equivalents, hence toys. Therefore, although this book includes descriptions of Neural nets, it was 1985 and he wanted to cloak the description, so as not to offend the AI priesthood, book reviewers, etc.
I'm not sure, personally, that I buy this as an explanation: after all, the book's whole approach was so unorthodox, I'm not sure that that mollifying the academics was even on the radar screen.
Of course, the Web site offers low fares that you can't get when calling Southwest on the phone. So it's OK to take money from blind people, just so long as you take more money from them than you do from others.
Yeah, but for Red Hat to blame the customer (as they'd be doing: "Your scripts are the problem, not our distribution!") would be suicidal in the marketplace.