Q: What was in the bundle of sticks? A: Looked like a molar to me.
Q: Was that Mike standing in the corner and how did he get there? A: The ghost did it. If you want physics, I can't tell you how it happened, but it *had* to happen that way because that's the way the old man offed the kids.
Q: What was the deal with the stick figures in the trees? A: I don't know. But wouldn't you find it just a bit strange if you were lost in the woods and came upon a clearing with a lot of stick figures hanging from trees? There's something about the effort needed to make the figures (not much for one or two, but there were *many* in the clearing) that says to me, "Hey, there's some psycho out here who's either really bored or really obsessed. I don't want to find out which it is."
Re:Wouldn't it be better...
on
Bionic Rats
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· Score: 1
Re: "reconnecting the severed 'wires'"
This is already being done. Recent experiments have shown the following (no, I don't remember the citations, but this has all been within the past 3 months or so): --It is possible to reconnect damaged nerve tissues (experiment involved severing mouse spines and reattaching them). --Embryonic stem cells can be used to stimulate neural growth in the brain (done on an experimental basis with some Parkinson's patients. At least 1/3rd have shown significant improvement).
As I recall, there was some work 10-15 years ago on using low-powered radio transmitters to bridge gaps in the spinal column, but there was some sort of problem with the procedure.
--ISA devices/slots: slow. The only things I have using ISA slots on my box now are a modem and my sound card; anything that I expect to be fast (video card, etc.) is running on PCI.
--Gameport/MIDI: I won't miss it, but that stuff's built into my sound card anyway.
--PS/2, serial and parallel: you can afford to ditch these if you're going to go to USB only. But I'm a traditionalist, and nothing that I hang off any of these ports (with the possible exception of my JAZ drive) really *needs* the speed or flexibility that USB offers.
--IDE: way, way slow. UDMA is much better.
On the other hand, some of these worry me a *lot*:
--Floppy: what am I supposed to use for a boot disk? What if I don't want to bother with mailing myself a file so I can transfer it between machines that aren't on a common network?
--User-accessible slots: This is another one of those things that makes me want to say, "Sounds like another damn' Communist plot!" Screw that noise. If I had to work on a PC that didn't have accessible slots, I'd get a pair of steel snips and *make* them accessible. While annoying, non-accessible slots are a lot like prohibition-style laws: an irritant, but something that can be gotten around if you're willing to take the chances.
> We could send a few dozen people to the moon, > but what good is that going to do us? No, we're > better off waiting till we have something > worthwhile, like at least go to Mars.
We have to learn to walk before we can fly, so to speak. The moon offers us a number of ways to test the technologies that we would use in getting to and staying on Mars for extended periods.
Re:( off topic ) China doesn't have "free speech"
on
Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
Now that we've got a generation of kids who are used to having 'net access, trying to censor it will be problematic. Sure, it's possible to restrict content in such a way that none of the users in a particular country knows what they're missing, but it isn't really feasible.
Look at it this way: Net censorship is something like Prohibition. Once the demand for a thing exists, removing all access to it isn't likely to decrease demand. If anything, demand will increase.
Even if the MS Audio format produced better-than-CD quality sound with twenty times the compression of MP3 and was absolutely bugless, I wouldn't get it. Now that my bias is out of the way....
MS may very well win against Real Audio. I'm not rooting for one side or the other in this case, mainly since I'm not a network music junkie. MP3 will remain a viable format for some time to come because it's entrenched. There's loads of support for it from many different vendors, and plenty of tools for you to enhance your listening or make your own MP3s, all for about the same as you'd pay for a popular CD (or less, if you hang out in warez rooms). In other words, Microsoft has been beaten to the punch. The only way for them to make any sort of inroads against the MP3 market is to force Windows users to use their format--the same way that they did as well as they did against Netscape.
what would you think if all of a sudden you had some new sensory organ that was totally unfamiliar to you? it would be harder than learning a foreign language.
At first. But the brain is hardwired to deal with vision; most of a regular human's sensory input comes from vision. I have no doubt that there would be a transitional period during which the user of bionic eyes would be disoriented and generally uncomfortable (headaches and whatnot)--even assuming that the brain didn't do any rewiring to devote resources normally allocated to vision to other things.
second of all there exist techonlogies to help blind people already but they are not integrated into society because society frankly doesnt give a rats ass about people who are not considered 'the best'.
I disagree. Yes, the technologies exist. But they're expensive and not integrated into what you broadly refer to as society because most of the participants in the society simply don't think about handicapped people all that much. It isn't malice or willful ignorance--it's the fact that most of us aren't impaired in such a manner that makes us ignorant. The technology is expensive and uncommon because it necessarily caters to a small section of the populace. In other words, there's no money in it. If most people were blind or deaf, you can bet your last dollar that the technology to assist blind and deaf people would be widespread, well-integrated and cheap.
but the standards are not in place nor are they considered worthy of the time of 'true high tech' types, who only care about monster 3d cards, javascript, clickable glowing images, etc.
See the previous point. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by simple ignorance.
A couple of days ago, I offhandedly mentioned to a friend of mine that I'd started snagging MP3s from the net. He asked, "If you could get the MP3 for 99 cents, would you do it?" Without hesitation, I answered that I would.
Imagine this: walk into a music store with your favorite MP3 player. Go to a kiosk, preview some music, and create a download list of the MP3s you want at $1 each. Dump them onto your player, and download them from the player to your PC when you get home. Given such a scenario, I could easily spend $20-30 on 20-30 songs that I like instead of buying two CDs that are mostly songs I'm not thrilled about. Furthermore, I'd like to see the record companies get out of it entirely. If I like someone's work, I want the bulk of the money that I pay for it to go to them, not to a record company exec who's made itself an unnecessary evil.
Nothing about this idea prevents music piracy--MP3s will always be on the net and if you can send them from your player to your PC (or someone else's player or PC, etc.), there's nothing to stop you from giving the song to someone for nothing. But the same argument was made against the integrated CD/tape stereo systems that are now common fare. In other words, the situation now facing the RIAA is no different than the situation when someone figured out that you could copy a CD to tape with reasonable quality.
Okay. The article tags say there are already two comments here. But I didn't see any comments and I set my threshold to -1000. What's wrong with this picture?
We know that. Most of us object to it being used to describe malicious activities, though. See the following statements.
When you hack a system you break into it.
Not necessarily. Strictly speaking, a hack is any feat of technological prowess. Breaking into systems is a subset of the activities that can be lumped under the category "hack."
Man.. hacking was already used for breaking in when none of you could even afford computers, so cut the "cracker" bullshit!
I guess that I'm supposed to be quaking in the face of your obviously superior knowledge. What you may be referring to is one of the original (ca. late 1950s) uses of the word "hack"--describing lockpicking (e.g. "hacking a lock" or "lock hacking").
Times have changed a bit. There are people who break into systems simply to satisfy curiosity or because they like the challenge; those who do so and do no damage (or who point out holes in security to the sysadmins) are generally thought of as hackers.
People who break into systems for malicious purposes (a category that describes probably 99.44% of the "hackers" that J. Random Citizen has heard about) are usually referred to as "crackers" to distinguish them from people who break into systems for non-malicious reasons.
In order to be FCC compliant, a PC has to be EM shielded. This works both ways: it keeps external devices from (theoretically) interfering with the PC's operation and it keeps the PC (which generates quite a bit of EM radiation itself) from interfering with other things.
There's nothing wrong with building your case out of wood, but wood by itself has no shielding capabilities. Better line the inside of the case with light gauge sheet metal.
Of course it's fair. That's why the techosnobs who thought they could skip out on paying sales taxes while the poor and people who don't have internet acesss would still have to pay sales taxes are so bent out of shape over this.
Are you defining the word "fair" to mean "everyone gets screwed equally"?
I mean, the government has to collect as much money as it needs anyway[...]
Rubbish. The government collects as much revenue as it can without resorting to armed robbery and still winds up spending more than it takes in.
So, yes to Internet taxes, if it means that other taxes will go down, because it is a fair tax.
This will not happen. I'd be very surprised if taxes ever went down--our government is already used to getting a fair chunk of our incomes and has grown to need that chunk plus a little extra. Like any other animal that doesn't have to compete to survive, it's gotten fat, stupid and happy.
As for taxes being fair...I disagree. Taxes aren't fair; I'm forced to pay for things that I don't want to buy and don't need, and some of what's taken doesn't even get sent to its nominal purpose. I as a citizen would pay for public education, police and roads--maybe some vaccinations. Why must I also pay Social Security (that I'll never see, BTW) and welfare?
MP3 won't die just because some other audio format comes out. It will only die if another audio format comes out that is free, significantly smaller, and the same or better level of quality.
Don't forget the marketing angle. Look at how long MS has hung on with a crappy GUI. It doesn't actually have to be better if you can make people think that it's better.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: What was in the bundle of sticks?
A: Looked like a molar to me.
Q: Was that Mike standing in the corner and how did he get there?
A: The ghost did it. If you want physics, I can't tell you how it happened, but it *had* to happen that way because that's the way the old man offed the kids.
Q: What was the deal with the stick figures in the trees?
A: I don't know. But wouldn't you find it just a bit strange if you were lost in the woods and came upon a clearing with a lot of stick figures hanging from trees? There's something about the effort needed to make the figures (not much for one or two, but there were *many* in the clearing) that says to me, "Hey, there's some psycho out here who's either really bored or really obsessed. I don't want to find out which it is."
Re: "reconnecting the severed 'wires'"
This is already being done. Recent experiments have shown the following (no, I don't remember the citations, but this has all been within the past 3 months or so):
--It is possible to reconnect damaged nerve tissues (experiment involved severing mouse spines and reattaching them).
--Embryonic stem cells can be used to stimulate neural growth in the brain (done on an experimental basis with some Parkinson's patients. At least 1/3rd have shown significant improvement).
As I recall, there was some work 10-15 years ago on using low-powered radio transmitters to bridge gaps in the spinal column, but there was some sort of problem with the procedure.
This is an interesting time to live in.
Some of this is not so bad:
--ISA devices/slots: slow. The only things I have using ISA slots on my box now are a modem and my sound card; anything that I expect to be fast (video card, etc.) is running on PCI.
--Gameport/MIDI: I won't miss it, but that stuff's built into my sound card anyway.
--PS/2, serial and parallel: you can afford to ditch these if you're going to go to USB only. But I'm a traditionalist, and nothing that I hang off any of these ports (with the possible exception of my JAZ drive) really *needs* the speed or flexibility that USB offers.
--IDE: way, way slow. UDMA is much better.
On the other hand, some of these worry me a *lot*:
--Floppy: what am I supposed to use for a boot disk? What if I don't want to bother with mailing myself a file so I can transfer it between machines that aren't on a common network?
--User-accessible slots: This is another one of those things that makes me want to say, "Sounds like another damn' Communist plot!" Screw that noise. If I had to work on a PC that didn't have accessible slots, I'd get a pair of steel snips and *make* them accessible. While annoying, non-accessible slots are a lot like prohibition-style laws: an irritant, but something that can be gotten around if you're willing to take the chances.
> We could send a few dozen people to the moon,
> but what good is that going to do us? No, we're > better off waiting till we have something
> worthwhile, like at least go to Mars.
We have to learn to walk before we can fly, so to speak. The moon offers us a number of ways to test the technologies that we would use in getting to and staying on Mars for extended periods.
Now that we've got a generation of kids who are used to having 'net access, trying to censor it will be problematic. Sure, it's possible to restrict content in such a way that none of the users in a particular country knows what they're missing, but it isn't really feasible.
Look at it this way: Net censorship is something like Prohibition. Once the demand for a thing exists, removing all access to it isn't likely to decrease demand. If anything, demand will increase.
Even if the MS Audio format produced better-than-CD quality sound with twenty times the compression of MP3 and was absolutely bugless, I wouldn't get it. Now that my bias is out of the way....
MS may very well win against Real Audio. I'm not rooting for one side or the other in this case, mainly since I'm not a network music junkie. MP3 will remain a viable format for some time to come because it's entrenched. There's loads of support for it from many different vendors, and plenty of tools for you to enhance your listening or make your own MP3s, all for about the same as you'd pay for a popular CD (or less, if you hang out in warez rooms). In other words, Microsoft has been beaten to the punch. The only way for them to make any sort of inroads against the MP3 market is to force Windows users to use their format--the same way that they did as well as they did against Netscape.
At first. But the brain is hardwired to deal with vision; most of a regular human's sensory input comes from vision. I have no doubt that there would be a transitional period during which the user of bionic eyes would be disoriented and generally uncomfortable (headaches and whatnot)--even assuming that the brain didn't do any rewiring to devote resources normally allocated to vision to other things.
second of all there exist techonlogies to help blind people already but they are not integrated into society because society frankly doesnt give a rats ass about people who are not considered 'the best'.
I disagree. Yes, the technologies exist. But they're expensive and not integrated into what you broadly refer to as society because most of the participants in the society simply don't think about handicapped people all that much. It isn't malice or willful ignorance--it's the fact that most of us aren't impaired in such a manner that makes us ignorant. The technology is expensive and uncommon because it necessarily caters to a small section of the populace. In other words, there's no money in it. If most people were blind or deaf, you can bet your last dollar that the technology to assist blind and deaf people would be widespread, well-integrated and cheap.
but the standards are not in place nor are they considered worthy of the time of 'true high tech' types, who only care about monster 3d cards, javascript, clickable glowing images, etc.
See the previous point. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by simple ignorance.
A couple of days ago, I offhandedly mentioned to a friend of mine that I'd started snagging MP3s from the net. He asked, "If you could get the MP3 for 99 cents, would you do it?" Without hesitation, I answered that I would.
Imagine this: walk into a music store with your favorite MP3 player. Go to a kiosk, preview some music, and create a download list of the MP3s you want at $1 each. Dump them onto your player, and download them from the player to your PC when you get home. Given such a scenario, I could easily spend $20-30 on 20-30 songs that I like instead of buying two CDs that are mostly songs I'm not thrilled about. Furthermore, I'd like to see the record companies get out of it entirely. If I like someone's work, I want the bulk of the money that I pay for it to go to them, not to a record company exec who's made itself an unnecessary evil.
Nothing about this idea prevents music piracy--MP3s will always be on the net and if you can send them from your player to your PC (or someone else's player or PC, etc.), there's nothing to stop you from giving the song to someone for nothing. But the same argument was made against the integrated CD/tape stereo systems that are now common fare. In other words, the situation now facing the RIAA is no different than the situation when someone figured out that you could copy a CD to tape with reasonable quality.
Okay. The article tags say there are already two comments here. But I didn't see any comments and I set my threshold to -1000. What's wrong with this picture?
We know that. Most of us object to it being used to describe malicious activities, though. See the following statements.
When you hack a system you break into it.
Not necessarily. Strictly speaking, a hack is any feat of technological prowess. Breaking into systems is a subset of the activities that can be lumped under the category "hack."
Man.. hacking was already used for breaking in when none of you could even afford computers, so cut the "cracker" bullshit!
I guess that I'm supposed to be quaking in the face of your obviously superior knowledge. What you may be referring to is one of the original (ca. late 1950s) uses of the word "hack"--describing lockpicking (e.g. "hacking a lock" or "lock hacking").
Times have changed a bit. There are people who break into systems simply to satisfy curiosity or because they like the challenge; those who do so and do no damage (or who point out holes in security to the sysadmins) are generally thought of as hackers.
People who break into systems for malicious purposes (a category that describes probably 99.44% of the "hackers" that J. Random Citizen has heard about) are usually referred to as "crackers" to distinguish them from people who break into systems for non-malicious reasons.
In order to be FCC compliant, a PC has to be EM shielded. This works both ways: it keeps external devices from (theoretically) interfering with the PC's operation and it keeps the PC (which generates quite a bit of EM radiation itself) from interfering with other things.
There's nothing wrong with building your case out of wood, but wood by itself has no shielding capabilities. Better line the inside of the case with light gauge sheet metal.
Are you defining the word "fair" to mean "everyone gets screwed equally"?
Rubbish. The government collects as much revenue as it can without resorting to armed robbery and still winds up spending more than it takes in.
So, yes to Internet taxes, if it means that other taxes will go down, because it is a fair tax.
This will not happen. I'd be very surprised if taxes ever went down--our government is already used to getting a fair chunk of our incomes and has grown to need that chunk plus a little extra. Like any other animal that doesn't have to compete to survive, it's gotten fat, stupid and happy.
As for taxes being fair...I disagree. Taxes aren't fair; I'm forced to pay for things that I don't want to buy and don't need, and some of what's taken doesn't even get sent to its nominal purpose. I as a citizen would pay for public education, police and roads--maybe some vaccinations. Why must I also pay Social Security (that I'll never see, BTW) and welfare?
MP3 won't die just because some other audio format comes out. It will only die if another audio format comes out that is free, significantly smaller, and the same or better level of quality.
Don't forget the marketing angle. Look at how long MS has hung on with a crappy GUI. It doesn't actually have to be better if you can make people think that it's better.
Put your monitor in a Faraday cage or some other grounded metal enclosure if you're really worried about this.