Damn, I was just going to mention this. Oh well. Look, I got the quote all ready and everything:
"Tony Jebara, mastermind behind the Stochasticks, is an assistant professor at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science who got the idea from watching an old science fiction flick.
'I don't remember the name; I saw it ages ago,' he said. 'It had a guy playing billiards and the angle of the shots were overlaid on the table and I thought, I can build that.' "
I couldn't find a picture of the effect on Quantum Leap, but I found this picture from the episodes... Pool Hall Blues, second season.
Ok, I'm in the Northeast, I've got a cable modem, I've got AT&T.
How do I get the coupon? It wasn't in the story, does anyone know?
Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just because something has artistic merit, doesn't mean that distributing someone else's musical creations (albeit in an altered form) without permission is not theft. It's still theft. It's just artistic theft.
Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?
Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):
Picture of Marco Carbone: here. Picture of Jon Favreau: here.
There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.
PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.
When I saw this two or three weeks ago at first I was kind of excited about it... the last link I followed implied that it was a finished language. I thought that was hysterical, a programming language written in Klingon! How nerdy can you get.
But it's not. I found it rather dull, it's just a little mini-essay about what such a programming language might be like, and what it might be called. I found the whole thing very thin at the time. Of course, the guy might have done some work on it since I last saw it, I haven't followed the link yet.
Microsoft does not control "the last piece of food in the world", they control an operating system (one of many) and a few programs. If you don't like their operating system, go use Linux (hell, it's what this whole webpage is about) or MacOs, or any of the other OS options... or don't use a computer.
You're not obligated to use an Operating System (unlike food), so if the cost for Microsoft software upsets you unduly, simply don't purchase it. Find an alternative or choose not to use computer software at all. They haven't mandated you give them money, all they've done is offered a product/service for a price... you make the decision if their price is worth your money or not.
"But there is such a thing as making something for a buck and selling it for 10, and every reasonable moral person knows that something is wrong with this axiom."
No, there's absolutely nothing wrong with making something for $1 and then selling it for $10... if people are willing to pay $10 for it. I also have nothing against making something for $1 and selling it for $10,000. Mainly because, you don't have to buy it. If you don't think the product in question is worth $10, then don't pay for it... but don't bemoan the fact that someone else is trying to make a living.
If their product is worth 10 dollars, than people with pay 10 dollars for it, regardless of how much it cost to produce. Cost of production is irrelevant, all that matters, in terms of pricing, is how much it's worth to consumers.
I went to look up a few older stories on slashdot which, as I recalled, were the same story as this one. But I recall reading the other one's months ago. I was curious if this was merely a repeat so I scrolled to the bottom of the Slashdot main page and used the SEARCH option.
Great, I thought, I'll just search for +Boeing +Student +Satelite or something of that sort.
I tried this.
And I was once again reminded, when I reviewed the results, that Slashdot, for some reason, doesn't have boolean searches. Now, for a site which champions Google "the home of the AND search".com, I'm confused as to why this functionality would not have been added to slashdot by now. It makes it next to impossible to find older stories, because instead of stories about Boeing AND students AND satelites, I find stories about Boring OR students OR satelites.
This, as you can imagine, is not terribly helpful. It turns out that there are an awful lot of stories about Boeing or students or satlelites.
So, to recap, I'm pretty sure this story is a repeat (I'm sure someone else will go to the trouble of posting the exact references), but I'm damned positive that the Slashdot/Slash search feature is only marginally useful at its best, and outright useless at its worse.
"Question:
Are you violating copyright laws?
About the Internet Archive
No. Like your local library's collections, our collections consist of publicly available documents. Furthermore, our Web collection (the Wayback Machine) includes only pages that were available at no cost and without passwords or special privileges. And if they wish, the authors of Internet documents can remove their documents from the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/internet/remove.html."
I don't really think that they're neccesarily right about this. I'm glad they've got the archive up, and I think it's dandy, but it seems like the copying and reposting of other's materials is a suspect practice. This will end up in court as soon as something that someone removed from their own webspace re-appears historically accurate here. I'd guess some liable suits will be the first...
BlueYonder cable in London is £33 a month (about $50). A little steep, but not outrageous.
Re:Actor hopes to do DVD commentary track
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 2
in all fairness, this isn't the sad out-of-work-actor joke, this is an entirely new dvd-related commentary joke... not neccessarily related to being out of work.
Ok, I just went back and read the article about the passenger's names... his basic complaint (a fair one, I'll admit) is that none of the passenger lists for the airplains contained the names of the men accused of the hijackings, nor do they contain a single Arabic name. In addition to this, the passenger lists and the death tolls according to CNN do not add up, there always appear to be people missing... including the hijackers.
I propose a solution to this dillemma, airlines and the US Govermnet simply didn't release any names of on the passenger lists of Arabic descent as part of the initial investigation. The Arabic men in question boarded the plains with ordinary tickets, passing through security in an ordinary manner (not, as the author suggests, by sneaking onto the plain possibly as food preparers). Just because CNN published an incomplete listing of names, does not mean the US government piloted the plains into the Trade Centers itself.
And you know why this argument fails for me? Because American's wouldn't care much about a targetted mission in Afghanistan or elsewhere. If this was all a big scam to allow military action, I ask to what end? There's no oil in Afghanstan, there's nothing we want from there. It's a big rock, not a juicy target.
Ok, I'm sitting here thinking "Ok, this could be kind of neat. A way to actually challenge Microsoft... someone puts out a Microsoft Clone that runs all Microsoft software for free. We'll all slowly switch because, well, what's the point of paying for something when it's easily available for free." Great, I like things that are free... and this would allow some playing with Linux, which I've never bothered to do before (because everything I've needed for Windows I've gotten for free and didn't care how much more it cost).
But, ok, here it costs $99 and will only run some Windows applications, isn't open sourced, and most likely vapor.
Well, uh, what's the point? What does legit Windows cost? Not terribly much more than $99, and you know what... if it comes down to it I'm not paying $99 or $199, for either product, it'll find it's way onto the computer without the cost... so I might as well go for the original as opposed to the rip-off, if I'm already waltzing down that track to begin wtih.
Any why do mom-and-pop shops deserve anything better than the major stores? They're both owned by somebody. Just because the guy who owns Virgin is quite a few steps removed from the actual brick and mortar stores, doesn't mean that in the end, he doesn't lose whatever profit is to be made from the sale of that cd. It does get to the end of the chain eventually. When you return cds to the store, you're hurting the owner. I don't really see why it matters if they're far removed from the store, or directly in charge.
Anyway, if the mom-and-pop stores really cared about their customers, and were really worthy of the support taht you people always want to throw at them, they'd save themselves the trouble and NOT STOCK THE CDS YOU'RE GOING TO RETURN. By selling those cds they are just as guilty as any store, if you're going ot be mad at HMV for selling defective disks and helping the record industry, you've got to angry towards the mom-and-pops as well.
You're either for the copy protection, or you're against it.
Custer's Last Stand deserves to be banned. That game was AWFUL. I mean, I know atari games were all pretty repetitive with silly graphics and even sillier plotlines, but this thing made no sense.
You played a naked Custer, and there was a naked woman on the other side of the screen. Also, there were things which I can only assume were arrows falling diagonally towards you. If they hit you, you had to go back to your side of the screen.
Eventually you would dance your way across to the lady, and have sex with her (it wasn't clear to me that it was rape, I always thought she approving the whole transaction... I mean seriously, why was she naked to begin with?).
Anyway, that was it. The longer you could have sex with the woman before getting show with the arrow, the higher your score.
As I recall.
Man, that was a stupid game. I hope nobody actually paid for that.
No, but do you get charged more if you go to a movie and you're a business person as opposed to a student? Students pay less at movies then someone who works... even though you're both going to see the same movie.
The situation is the same. Residential people are less willing to spend money on internet connectivity and they are charged a lower price to entice thier usage of the system. business are willing to pay more and are charged accordingly.
god, i forget what the term is, but there's an economics word for this. old people and students get discounts in the real world, non-workers get discounts in the virtual one. annoying, but fair.
Well, considering our current situation in Afganistan and the number of cities in the United States, I would switch the government of the US to Communism first (accepting the 5 or so years of anarchy since we're not a very religious people). This would allow us to better handle corruption and place us in a very strong military position. You won't need to to put the social slider to 100 if you can obtain through trade or conquest more luxury items. I hear Afghanistan is chock full of dies and gems. We'll be set.
Wanna trade world maps?
Re:How cool is this guy?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yeah, I live across the Long Island Sound from his island, I can see it out my window. He secceeded from the United States over building a wind turbine as I recall. The state of New York had a law against, and he said screw it and built it anyway. So he's got this island with a big house, a big wind turbine thing on top of it, a duck (one of those cars that drives on water as well as land), and a few other oddities. I honestly don't know that I've ever seen anyone actually ON the island, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.
Kwaanza was a holidy invented in 1966 by a professor somewhere out in California. I'm not entirely clear what the point is, it has something to do with agriculture as I recall. Basically it's a holiday custom created for African-Americans to celebrate in December (because we didn't have enough with Christmas and Hanakkah?).
That's not true. I never slapped the pad with my hands. The best approach to cheating in games with the gamepad was to play the olypics game and then choose "long jump." I'm not entirely clear what was so fun about running really hard to get your guy fast enough so he was able to launch a tremendous jump, and then simply stepping off the pad and watching him fly through the air as if you yourself were simply the most talented leap frogger around.
I spent hours standing next to my gamepad long jumping. Hours. Unfortunately the game would catch on if your jumps were too heroic and you'd need to step back onto the pad at some point the make your guy land.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I was just going to mention this. Oh well. Look, I got the quote all ready and everything:
"Tony Jebara, mastermind behind the Stochasticks, is an assistant professor at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science who got the idea from watching an old science fiction flick.
'I don't remember the name; I saw it ages ago,' he said. 'It had a guy playing billiards and the angle of the shots were overlaid on the table and I thought, I can build that.' "
I couldn't find a picture of the effect on Quantum Leap, but I found this picture from the episodes... Pool Hall Blues, second season.
Bastard.
Ok, I'm in the Northeast, I've got a cable modem, I've got AT&T.
How do I get the coupon? It wasn't in the story, does anyone know?
Just because something has artistic merit, doesn't mean that distributing someone else's musical creations (albeit in an altered form) without permission is not theft. It's still theft. It's just artistic theft.
It's about $10.00 / hour...
considerably above minimum wage.
Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?
Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):
Picture of Marco Carbone: here.
Picture of Jon Favreau: here.
There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.
PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.
When I saw this two or three weeks ago at first I was kind of excited about it... the last link I followed implied that it was a finished language. I thought that was hysterical, a programming language written in Klingon! How nerdy can you get.
But it's not. I found it rather dull, it's just a little mini-essay about what such a programming language might be like, and what it might be called. I found the whole thing very thin at the time. Of course, the guy might have done some work on it since I last saw it, I haven't followed the link yet.
Microsoft does not control "the last piece of food in the world", they control an operating system (one of many) and a few programs. If you don't like their operating system, go use Linux (hell, it's what this whole webpage is about) or MacOs, or any of the other OS options... or don't use a computer.
You're not obligated to use an Operating System (unlike food), so if the cost for Microsoft software upsets you unduly, simply don't purchase it. Find an alternative or choose not to use computer software at all. They haven't mandated you give them money, all they've done is offered a product/service for a price... you make the decision if their price is worth your money or not.
"But there is such a thing as making something for a buck and selling it for 10, and every reasonable moral person knows that something is wrong with this axiom."
No, there's absolutely nothing wrong with making something for $1 and then selling it for $10... if people are willing to pay $10 for it. I also have nothing against making something for $1 and selling it for $10,000. Mainly because, you don't have to buy it. If you don't think the product in question is worth $10, then don't pay for it... but don't bemoan the fact that someone else is trying to make a living.
If their product is worth 10 dollars, than people with pay 10 dollars for it, regardless of how much it cost to produce. Cost of production is irrelevant, all that matters, in terms of pricing, is how much it's worth to consumers.
Communist.
I went to look up a few older stories on slashdot which, as I recalled, were the same story as this one. But I recall reading the other one's months ago. I was curious if this was merely a repeat so I scrolled to the bottom of the Slashdot main page and used the SEARCH option.
.com, I'm confused as to why this functionality would not have been added to slashdot by now. It makes it next to impossible to find older stories, because instead of stories about Boeing AND students AND satelites, I find stories about Boring OR students OR satelites.
Great, I thought, I'll just search for +Boeing +Student +Satelite or something of that sort.
I tried this.
And I was once again reminded, when I reviewed the results, that Slashdot, for some reason, doesn't have boolean searches. Now, for a site which champions Google "the home of the AND search"
This, as you can imagine, is not terribly helpful. It turns out that there are an awful lot of stories about Boeing or students or satlelites.
So, to recap, I'm pretty sure this story is a repeat (I'm sure someone else will go to the trouble of posting the exact references), but I'm damned positive that the Slashdot/Slash search feature is only marginally useful at its best, and outright useless at its worse.
Begin the down-modding if you must.
Are you violating copyright laws?
About the Internet Archive
No. Like your local library's collections, our collections consist of publicly available documents. Furthermore, our Web collection (the Wayback Machine) includes only pages that were available at no cost and without passwords or special privileges. And if they wish, the authors of Internet documents can remove their documents from the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/internet/remove.html."
I don't really think that they're neccesarily right about this. I'm glad they've got the archive up, and I think it's dandy, but it seems like the copying and reposting of other's materials is a suspect practice. This will end up in court as soon as something that someone removed from their own webspace re-appears historically accurate here. I'd guess some liable suits will be the first...
BlueYonder cable in London is £33 a month (about $50). A little steep, but not outrageous.
in all fairness, this isn't the sad out-of-work-actor joke, this is an entirely new dvd-related commentary joke... not neccessarily related to being out of work.
i'll give him credit, it was pretty funny.
Ok, I just went back and read the article about the passenger's names... his basic complaint (a fair one, I'll admit) is that none of the passenger lists for the airplains contained the names of the men accused of the hijackings, nor do they contain a single Arabic name. In addition to this, the passenger lists and the death tolls according to CNN do not add up, there always appear to be people missing... including the hijackers.
I propose a solution to this dillemma, airlines and the US Govermnet simply didn't release any names of on the passenger lists of Arabic descent as part of the initial investigation. The Arabic men in question boarded the plains with ordinary tickets, passing through security in an ordinary manner (not, as the author suggests, by sneaking onto the plain possibly as food preparers). Just because CNN published an incomplete listing of names, does not mean the US government piloted the plains into the Trade Centers itself.
And you know why this argument fails for me? Because American's wouldn't care much about a targetted mission in Afghanistan or elsewhere. If this was all a big scam to allow military action, I ask to what end? There's no oil in Afghanstan, there's nothing we want from there. It's a big rock, not a juicy target.
If the whole thing was faked, why?
Uhm, ok, excuse me... by whom was 9/11 manufactured? Before someone really starts to argue with you, I'm just curious what exactly that meant.
Ok, I'm sitting here thinking "Ok, this could be kind of neat. A way to actually challenge Microsoft... someone puts out a Microsoft Clone that runs all Microsoft software for free. We'll all slowly switch because, well, what's the point of paying for something when it's easily available for free." Great, I like things that are free... and this would allow some playing with Linux, which I've never bothered to do before (because everything I've needed for Windows I've gotten for free and didn't care how much more it cost).
But, ok, here it costs $99 and will only run some Windows applications, isn't open sourced, and most likely vapor.
Well, uh, what's the point? What does legit Windows cost? Not terribly much more than $99, and you know what... if it comes down to it I'm not paying $99 or $199, for either product, it'll find it's way onto the computer without the cost... so I might as well go for the original as opposed to the rip-off, if I'm already waltzing down that track to begin wtih.
Too bad, seemed neat.
palestinians, really?
sigh.
Any why do mom-and-pop shops deserve anything better than the major stores? They're both owned by somebody. Just because the guy who owns Virgin is quite a few steps removed from the actual brick and mortar stores, doesn't mean that in the end, he doesn't lose whatever profit is to be made from the sale of that cd. It does get to the end of the chain eventually. When you return cds to the store, you're hurting the owner. I don't really see why it matters if they're far removed from the store, or directly in charge.
Anyway, if the mom-and-pop stores really cared about their customers, and were really worthy of the support taht you people always want to throw at them, they'd save themselves the trouble and NOT STOCK THE CDS YOU'RE GOING TO RETURN. By selling those cds they are just as guilty as any store, if you're going ot be mad at HMV for selling defective disks and helping the record industry, you've got to angry towards the mom-and-pops as well.
You're either for the copy protection, or you're against it.
Custer's Last Stand deserves to be banned. That game was AWFUL. I mean, I know atari games were all pretty repetitive with silly graphics and even sillier plotlines, but this thing made no sense.
You played a naked Custer, and there was a naked woman on the other side of the screen. Also, there were things which I can only assume were arrows falling diagonally towards you. If they hit you, you had to go back to your side of the screen.
Eventually you would dance your way across to the lady, and have sex with her (it wasn't clear to me that it was rape, I always thought she approving the whole transaction... I mean seriously, why was she naked to begin with?).
Anyway, that was it. The longer you could have sex with the woman before getting show with the arrow, the higher your score.
As I recall.
Man, that was a stupid game. I hope nobody actually paid for that.
No, but do you get charged more if you go to a movie and you're a business person as opposed to a student? Students pay less at movies then someone who works... even though you're both going to see the same movie.
The situation is the same. Residential people are less willing to spend money on internet connectivity and they are charged a lower price to entice thier usage of the system. business are willing to pay more and are charged accordingly.
god, i forget what the term is, but there's an economics word for this. old people and students get discounts in the real world, non-workers get discounts in the virtual one. annoying, but fair.
Well, considering our current situation in Afganistan and the number of cities in the United States, I would switch the government of the US to Communism first (accepting the 5 or so years of anarchy since we're not a very religious people). This would allow us to better handle corruption and place us in a very strong military position. You won't need to to put the social slider to 100 if you can obtain through trade or conquest more luxury items. I hear Afghanistan is chock full of dies and gems. We'll be set.
Wanna trade world maps?
Yeah, I live across the Long Island Sound from his island, I can see it out my window. He secceeded from the United States over building a wind turbine as I recall. The state of New York had a law against, and he said screw it and built it anyway. So he's got this island with a big house, a big wind turbine thing on top of it, a duck (one of those cars that drives on water as well as land), and a few other oddities. I honestly don't know that I've ever seen anyone actually ON the island, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.
Kwaanza was a holidy invented in 1966 by a professor somewhere out in California. I'm not entirely clear what the point is, it has something to do with agriculture as I recall. Basically it's a holiday custom created for African-Americans to celebrate in December (because we didn't have enough with Christmas and Hanakkah?).
goatse.cx, not .sx.
important distinction.
That's not true. I never slapped the pad with my hands. The best approach to cheating in games with the gamepad was to play the olypics game and then choose "long jump." I'm not entirely clear what was so fun about running really hard to get your guy fast enough so he was able to launch a tremendous jump, and then simply stepping off the pad and watching him fly through the air as if you yourself were simply the most talented leap frogger around.
I spent hours standing next to my gamepad long jumping. Hours. Unfortunately the game would catch on if your jumps were too heroic and you'd need to step back onto the pad at some point the make your guy land.
What a game.
har har har
bork bork bork