"Conclusions and recommendations"
on
MilSpec Biotech
·
· Score: 4
I realize almost no one is going to even look at all those pdf documents, but here's a sentence I liked from the final pages of the report:
In keeping with national policy, the study did not consider offensive biological weapons; however, the committee believes that all biotechnology development should be undertaken with defenses against such weapons in mind.
It says it's ignoring them, but the top few "hits" typically do include the exact page. I just tried, for instance, "All your base are belong to us".
It claims to ignore "are" and "to" but the top few hits contain the exact phrase. (The same happens with your example "Hail to the chief", though it
says it's ignoring "to the".)
You're such an f'ing troll, I was about to say anonymously, but then how can you have such a low ID? Sigh. Here goes my rant.
"I tried, for instance, 'All your base are belong to us'." Yeah. Uh-huh. That phrase is so frequent that if I hear "base belong" I think of that
phrase. Hell: here's the word belong on google. Four of the top ten searches, including the top
two, highlight "belong" in the full phrase "all your base are belong to us" visible in the summary. What were you smoking? Man.
My point, dear rsidd, just so I'm not being flamebait, is that if you want to see how Google treats your phrases, pick a random phrase out of a book
you know is an etext, not too common, and see if you can find that etext based on that short word. Let's say you remember the phrase "but that the
dread" of something after death, but you're only sure of the first part. What's this from? (Hamlet's soliloquy. "Who would fardels bear...but that
the dread of something after death...puzzles [paralyzes] the will [to end the bad things] and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to
others we know not of....")
In other words, after I make sure that Hamlet's quotation was not just lurking on another page past the first ten that I looked at, I saw how many
pages of the 3,410 could possibly have to do with the quotation I was looking for. Only 930 (subtract above).
Now let's look at a full-fledged full-text search engine, Altavista. (no affiliation, but I use altavista whenever I need a phrase and don't care how
popular or "valued" the site is that it appears on--do you know that Google adjusts importance based on how much linkage a site gets on other sites? This doesn't mesh with phrase-based searching.)
Anyway, "but that the dread" on altavista returns, not
surprisingly, a top ten pages that EACH (every one of the ten) reference Hamlet's soliloquy. (Althoguh one is a satire including the phrase and being about a cat. It begins
"To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:" and includes the phrase I searched on).
Total number of search results returned with the above search?
"We found 434 results:"
Now bear in mind that Google couldn't even come up with the phrase, however much I +'d it to death, on its top ten list. If I only have that one
phrase in memory on Google, I can't find it. Period. But what if I want more power than just that. What if I wasn't just looking for it (because if
I had been, I might include words like "play" or "shakespeare", which I could reasonably guess is where I got the phrase stuck in my mind from), but
rather, for instance, wanted to know how many times anyone on the Internet (that a search engine indexes) has used the words "but that the dread",
except in quoting Shakespeare.
Therefore, the following progression. (After each one, I looked at the top ten pages and added a phrase to eliminate one or more of them). "but that the dread"
We found 434 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare
(lowercase this time, because Altavista treates uppercase as forced-uppercase and lowercase as either.)
We found 48 results:
From http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Clare. html:
"
The sound seemed taken out of her voice; it was husky as the notes on an old harpsichord when the strings have ceased to vibrate. She read her answer
in my face, I suppose, for I could not speak. Her look was one of intense fear, but that died away into an aspect of most humble patience. At length
she seemed to force herself to face behind and around her: she saw the purple moors, the blue distant hills, quivering in the sunlight, but nothing
else.
'Will you take me home?' she said meekly.
I took her by the hand, and led her silently through the budding heather - we dared not speak; for we could not tell but that the dread
creature was listening, although unseen - but that IT might appear and push us asunder. I never loved her more fondly than now when - and that
was the unspeakable misery - the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT. She seemed to understand what I
must be feeling. She let go my hand, which she had kept clasped until then, when we reached the garden gate, and went forwards to meet her anxious
friend, who was standing by the window looking for her. I could not enter the house: I needed silence, society, leisure, change - I knew not what -
to shake off the sensation of that creature's presence. Yet I lingered about the garden - I hardly know why; partly, I suppose, because I feared to
encounter the resemblance again on the solitary common, where it had vanished, and partly from a feeling of inexpressible compassion for Lucy. In a
few minutes Mistress Clarke came forth and joined me. We walked some paces in silence.
"
From http://www.clareweb.com/eolas/coclare/history/dutt on_su
rvey/dutton_survey_chapter5.5.htm:
"
Mr. Ledwich, in his Epitome of the Antiquities of Ireland, says, that in the reign of King John the clergy did not receive any tithes; the veneration
for the church at that time was so great, that regulations were unnecessary; they were supported by oblations. The piety of modern times, I fear,
would influence but very small collections. The whole ecclesiastical revenue to a late period was divided into four parts, one to the Bishop, one to
the clergy, one to the poor, and one to support the church and other uses, and he says this mode exists at this day in the diocese of Clonfert.
To throw as much light on this subject as possible, I shall make a few extracts from Mr. Rawson's admirable Survey of Kildare, lately published. In
page 27 he mentions one tithe-dealer having exacted thirty shillings per acre for wheat;** "the dread of citation, and the loss of his straw, made
the timorous ploughman yield to any terms." Again, page 31, "It must appear evident to every man, that the entire weight of the church establishment
falls on the sweat from the brow of industry, whilst the feeder of one thousand bullocks does not pay as much as the herdsman for his garden. Can it
be denied, but that the dread of tithe keeps much land in pasture, which would otherwise give bread to thousands, encrease population
twenty-fold, do away all necessity of emigration, and make little Ireland not only a granary to England, but to the whole world." In page 33, and
which deserves peculiar attention, "The assertors, that the titles to tithes and to estates are of equal strength, should consider that, if estates
were to be let at undefined rents from year to year, and the landlord at each harvest to view the crops and exact some proportion in lieu of rent,
would any occupier in such case be anxious to till or improve? Would not the kingdom soon become a dreary uninhabited waste? Yet exactly such is the
conduct towards the tenth of the produce, the tithe. Let the land-holder be ascertained at what yearly rent he is to pay for one and the other, and
all complaint is at an end.[...]
"
From http://www.victorybaptist.org/books/johnbunyan/fea rofgod/part1.htm:
"
3. Add to this the revelation of God's goodness, and it must needs make his presence dreadful to us; for when a poor defiled creature shall see that
this great God hath, notwithstanding his greatness, goodness in his heart, and mercy to bestow upon him: this makes his presence yet the more
dreadful. They "shall fear the Lord and his goodness" (Hosea 3:5). The goodness as well as the greatness of God doth beget in the heart of his elect
an awful reverence of his majesty. "Fear ye not me? saith the Lord; will ye not tremble at my presence?" And then, to engage us in our soul to the
duty, he adds one of his wonderful mercies to the world, for a motive, "Fear ye not me?" Why, who are thou? He answers, Even I, "which have" set, or
"placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they
not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?" (Jer 5:22). Also, when Job had God present with him, making manifest the goodness of
his great heart to him, what doth he say? how doth he behave himself in his presence? "I have heard of thee," says he, "by the hearing of the ear,
but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:5,6).
And what mean the tremblings, the tears, those breakings and shakings of heart that attend the people of God, when in an eminent manner they receive
the pronunciation of the forgiveness of sins at his mouth, but that the dread of the majesty of God is in their sight mixed therewith? God
must appear like himself, speak to the soul like himself; nor can the sinner, when under these glorious discoveries of his Lord and Saviour, keep out
the beams of his majesty from the eyes of his understanding. "I will cleanse them," saith he, "from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned
against me, and I will pardon all their iniquities whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against me." And what then? "And they
shall fear and tremble for all the goodness, and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it" (Jer 33:8,9). Alas! there is a company of poor,
light, frothy professors in the world, that carry it under that which they call the presence of God, more like to antics, than sober sensible
Christians; yea, more like to a fool of a play, than those that have the presence of God. They would not carry it so in the presence of a king, nor
yet of the lord of their land, were they but receivers of mercy at his hand. They carry it even in their most eminent seasons, as if the sense and
sight of God, and his blessed grace to their souls in Christ, had a tendency in them to make men wanton: but indeed it is the most humbling and
heart-breaking sight in the world; it is fearful.
"
From http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~turing/T/003397. html:
" But that the dread of someone else could win that game, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have. Thus conscience does
make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and
moment. With this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.
"
(This last attempts to quote the original, except the phrase "could win the game".)
So now, we see that only THREE documents out of the entire indexed online world have the words "but that the dread" appearing outside of a work that
relates directly to Shakespeare. (Possibly we have a false negative on very long documents that include the words "but that the dread" and,
independantly, some other phrase I negated, such as "that is the question" or "whether 'tis". I don't think it's likely though.)
This startling conclusion is one that you could not find with Google, which could not even be bothered to find for you where the phrase "but that the
dread" comes from. Apparently each of Altavista's 434 original results, except these latter three, are correct positives. (In the sense that the phrase is from the context in which I heard it, as a part of a soliloquy in Hamlet.)
I used to use Altavista and was sad to hear at a conference held by some technology head at it here in Boston, that lots of people only use Altavista
as a "backup" in case Google can't find what they're looking for. He was very proud of the idea that Altavista didn't have what he called "stop
words" (Google's "the" "a", etc), but rather full-text indexing. (He did mention that only the first 378K of a text were indexed or something, but I think any document that long is also avaialable for download somewhere in chapters...). Anyway at that time I was saddened that Altavista wasn't doing too well, it was what I used, since it seemed like it had an expert, powerful system. (With such conveniences as a NEAR keyword to show that two phrases mustn't just occur within the same document but within several words of each other. The back-end, but not the user interface, he told some of us afterward over refreshments, was fully Regular Expression, and an expert user could combine things like boolean operators with NEAR and a few other keywords (up to an impressive depth) to get basically any query she wanted.
Today I use Google because, chances are, the site that I'm interested in is the one other people are interested in who know about that subject. (From Google's site:
"
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
")
Which of course is usually exactly what I want. Unless I have a phrase stuck in my mind like "but that the dread". In that case, like those upon whom I frowned a year or two upon, I head over to Altavista "as a last resort after Google fails" (sigh) and use it's all-but RegEx features.
Robert Viragh. ~
look, troll, when something is G rated it's not being prissy to expect it to not grind prejudices into our children. I don't care what adults watch. I have a sense of humor. ~
Bellings,
This is perhaps one of the most right-on posts I have ever read. The negation of what you espouse (because you do it satirically) is exactly my view about violence in movies (explicit or otherwise), and in fact I don't watch any movie that has violence as a plot-device (yes, I look at the rating labels) so that I might not support it. (I did not like the action scenes in Atlantis even, which I had been told erroneously was g-rated, although I did not feel I could mention it in my review and be taken seriously by Slashdot.). I have never been able to phrase my reasoning for doing so in any way that was satisfactory for me, and certainly not in any way that would convince anyone to adopt my view, but your phrasing is perhaps the most perfect I could possibly imagine.
Ah, yes, that makes sense. I haven't seen "bad" anime that does 3d rendering together with 2d hand-drawn stuff, but now that you mention it, the effect certainly WAS there a little. You don't notice though, because the film is engrossing. I don't think you often see large characters together with large views of the environment. More so it'll do either close-ups or huge pannings. ~
That's what I get for doing third-hand knowledge-spreading. (Someone told me my original "information" from an essay/she/ said she had read about The Lion King:).) If anyone can dig up these types of essays on Disney movies, I always find them very interesting.... ~
I love the fact that this movie is politically correct. Yes, you have a german person (heavy accent, too) who looks basically like hitler and who loves blowing things up. But he's a florist.
Yes the african american (Note: this is the first african american human character drawn by disney, according to the society of disney haters ) is a hulking, large african who lifts the main character effortlessly up in his brawny arms and cracks his head to the side in chiropracty. But he's a doctor with a degree from a prestigious university.
The mechanic is a very young girl who was accepted into the role her father had wanted for a brother but was willing to give her when he got no son.
Spoiler (this subpoint only): The antagonist among them is a white, somewhat elderly, solid, dignified decorated general type Capitalist ("Don't call me a heartless fiend just because the only reason I braved all this difficult mission into the beautiful atlantis with you all was to loot it of its precious resources. Call me an adventure capitalist."), which is one of those lines I refer to in a later subpoint at which I expect some of the audience to laugh but none did. Anyway this characterization is:end spoiler
as opposed to such classics as The Lion king, where (think about this now...) the antagonist had patently homosexual mannerisms (watch the movie if you can't picture this now -- imagine the part where he's absently looking at his paw while issuing orders) and ALL of the hyenas were not only dark-skinned, but voiced by black voice talents (Whoopi Goldberg).
I agree with Taco that the mole character was hardly compelling. Most of the characterization in fact was pretty shallow. This is not one of those Disney movies where the script writers sneak in very Simpsons-esq subtle, funny humor. In the few places that they tried, it seemed out of place and the audience did not laugh, although it was large-part adult.
There is a larger amount of suspension of disbelief than the movie initially makes you aware of needing. If the movie had started out establishing a somewhat more fantastic atmosphere than it did, perhaps many of the later scenes would have been more enjoyable.
SHOULD YOU SEE IT? Definitely. It'll get a little childish places, after the first half of the movie I kind of fell back a step behind actively anticipating "what now, what'll happen", which is a terrible thing in this kind of eye-candy movie because if you're not paying attention actively you feel more like "yeah, okay. what happens now", but instead just get a slow panning for a long time. There was very little dialog throughout. And around the time where they cut out all subtitles, the dialog takes a steep dive toward the lowest common denominator (children). BUT the plot, no more the conceit in the circumstance generally that you must believe, is definitely rich enough to keep you thinking about it throughout the movie, and afterward also. The one thing missing was three minutes of silence as a character takes in the profundity of her new environment, or his. Rather, there is always very phantasmagoric 2001: type Awe-Inspiring music to go with the eye-candy, which of course doesn't help to get you into the character's shoes. See it. Enjoy it. Remember the plot and conceit. Forget the experience. For those of you who LOVED Castaway (as I did), and got to see it before the spoiler trailers were released, this movie will be somewhat of a disappointment. For those of you who like the dialog in a cartoon show like the old Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, or in the Simpsons, this movie will be somewhat of a disappointment. For those of you who want to veg. out and follow a not-too-deep passage of eye-candy with awe-inspiring music, quirky, shallow characters, and a cute protagonist who doesn't quite happen to do anything, you will love this. It's easy to call this movie "dumb", though, so if there's no child in you (I'm looking at you General Slashdot Troll), don't go see it or pretend to have gone to see it just so you can tell us how dumb it was. It's pretty engrossing, but not wholly engrossing, and it does get a little..."nouveau cliche", let's say, or just uninspiring because it's mundane. There is eyecandy near the end that will make every grown man go "coooool".
Some questions about Taco's review:
"And even more scary is the amazing shots where the backgrounds are actually more or less fully 3D sets, but look convincingly 2D even as we rotate around them. The guys responsible for those shots deserve pats on the back. "
Does he mean "more or less 2d but manage to LOOK convinciginly 3d?" Why would anyone want something to look convincingly 2d?
And secondly,
I found the characters weak for my tastes (but nothing compared to Suck Raider which I saw only hours before and simply wanted every character to die a painful death just as soon as possible).
I agree with you that the characters are weak, but how on Earth did you manage to come up with an off-topic phrase like "Suck Raider" just so you can include it in the sentence?? C'mon Taco. And "wanted every character to die a painful death just as soon as possible" is so unoriginal that the last time I laughed at that I fell off my stegosaurus.
And last, but not least, Taco, pal, I value your opinion, however evil you may be and dear god however much this website sucks now. C'mere you big lug. ~
Do you know what always gets me? If you look at your microwave clock at a random time, as a mathematician you expect the minute field to change after 30 seconds. ~
I can still read paper written on 2000 years ago
Yeah, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which were lost forever before archaeologists realized they couldn't touch them to unwind them because they instantly crumbled.
OTOH, if the defense department's policies are any indication, hard drive information can be read for "practically infinity time" (their words)... AND THAT'S JUST TALKING ABOUT AFTER SEVEN LAYERS OF OVERWRITE BY RANDOM BITS! Imagine the bits' lifetimes within specifications:)
I hope this clears up any confusion.
and therefore classified ones must be destroyed so that they won't fall into enemy hands and be unencrypted 175 years from now when some whiz kid gets a bright idea about how to factor primes. ~
I'm not terribly up on my av solutions, but considering that 95+ percent of what's on a college student's machine is either a) from a trusted binary (os and 'productivity suite' binaries don't need virus scans) or b) downloaded unencrypted through the u.'s network, wouldn't you think there would be a server-side solution that scans any files being downloaded through it, and which the university could install on a large server (cluster) essentially right before the raw-net connection hits the university network? It's not as good as client-side solutions, esp. with college students compiling downloaded source these days, but it's a helluvalot better than nothing, no? Or am I way off-base? ~
NASA (news - web sites) cameras aboard two F-18 chase planes showed the
Pegasus rocket careening off course and tumbling out of the sky
before controllers triggered on-board explosives to destroy it
over the Pacific Ocean. (Bold added.)
Given that it was destroyed over the ocean, dooes anyone know why NASA couldn't just have waited for the rocket to hit the water and "go out"? Then at least
More of it might have been salvageable.
More information might be gleaned from the rocket itself once it was retrieved.
Does anyone who's close to such launches know whether it would it have been close enough to land that there was a risk it would veer back and "fall on someone", to put it mildly? I know solid-fuel rockets usually can't be turned off once activated, is this the case with this one also? If they could have just deactivated, it wouldn't have been better to just turn it off and let it fall into the ocean?
Oh, new thought: environmental damage from all that fuel,, vs. if you blow it up it doesn't fall into the ocean. (These things burn fairly efficiently, no?) Am I way off-base?
Second new thought:
A prototype of an aircraft intended to make aviation history and shatter speed records was destroyed during its maiden flight on Saturday after a booster rocket carrying it aloft veered out of control.
(Bold added.)
If it's just the BOOSTER ROCKET carrying it aloft, couldn't they have forced separation, waited a few moments for the prototype of the aircraft itself to fall a little out of danger, and THEN exploded the "booster rocket"? Eventually there would be separation anyway, so obviously it's within design specs...and if you CAN'T separate prematurely, isn't that stupid design? If they put explosives on it for self-destruction, it means they were thinking of worst-case scenarios already...why not salvage some of that few dozen million dollars while you're at it?
Thoughts, as always, are welcome. ~
Thanks, that's useful!
As long as you're submitting a bugreport, could you get them to embed some information so that threads can be reconstructed at a later date? It wouldn't be a lot, just "id of parent", even in an HTML comment if they like, but it would be very useful -- whenever someone develops a client-side parser, it'll make surfing old articles so much more interesting. We're losing a wealth of old discussion by ignoring parentage. (You can recover some of this today with re: samesubject rules, but people change subjects when replying....)
Peace. ~
"Lionel Jospin, France's prime minister, said this week that the country will allow use of 128-bit encryption technology instead of the 40-bit encryption permitted so far. The 128-bit technology makes it safer to send documents via the Internet." [Jan. 1999]
So, before then, strong encryption was illegal.
We still do not allow export of strong encryption except to specific countries. We don't care if this infringes on their citizens' rights to free speech, and if we felt we had something to gain from it, we wouldn't care if we infringed on our citizens' rights to free speech. But we don't have enough to gain to allow this to be instituted, especially if the "oh it's only so that people in totalitarian regimes" argument manages to win a large userbase to begin with. At that point, your two scenarios are worth looking at.
1. Allow corporations to block high-speed, high-volume data over their networks.
This would work beautifully. If we lived under communism. As it stands, another ISP will simply say: WE don't block it. Use us! And how about intranets? No ISP reigns over that... Allowing ISPs to block large-volume traffic means that people won't pay the ISPs for large pipes. If they only block encrypted info, that will work for awhile, but not forever. We are moving toward an era where an ISP won't have the computing power to even tell whether what you're pushing over port 80 is mime or english. especially not when you judiciously mangle the headers, heh. If they say: "No, we don't like that you're surfing such large files...." then we'll say "Screw you. Why am I paying for DSL through YOU then?"
Your second point is actually what I mentioned the France thing in relation to. It's possible, but don't hold your breath. As a practical note, however, even if they do outlaw strong encryption, 40 bit encryption is enough over a distributed network to allow most people to safely do whatever they please, until they are specifically targetted in a MASSIVE dragnet (to reconstruct the distributed info from all the nodes you communicate with and pinpoint you as the source of the information, or its requestor or whatever).
Also, remember, an ISP is just a commercial version of what I could set up myself if I wanted to get the government licenses. Once a solid wireless standard comes out, you know, my whole city will be a LAN whether an ISP is involved or not. (Less nerdy cities than Boston might not be so fast:) ). Either way, give it seven years and we'll be using high-bandwidth strong encryption on a too regular basis to be within Government control, or targettable to a few large companies (like napster)... ~
[Ballmer] calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
As usual, The Simpsons prophesied this long ago:
Chief Wiggum: Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city. He is the cancer and I am the...uh...what cures cancer?
What's the significance? Does this mean Tux is an underground mafioso? Is Ballmer really a bumbling (and vain) enforcer of the old-world politics? Will Government eventually "triumph" in the face of Good Innovation (TM) [most horrible!], in a Fahrenheit 451 way, just as we will inevitably find a cure for cancer? Draw your own conclusions.
Mod only after you've thought about it.
Peace.
PS.
Note: Neither tea-leaves, the Qur'an, nor The Simpsons have been conclusively shown to predict the future in any prescient way, although frequently "predictions" are discovered after the fact in all three.
All time Simpson's quote: (From an episode):
Homer: These candidates make me want to vomit in terror!
And:
___: It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed... DOOMED!
Brockman: [brightly] Well, a refreshingly frank response there, from Senator ___. ~
How would you feel if you had to LIVE IN HEAVEN ETERNALLY WEARING A FOOT BRACE??? If you use this device you'll have to!! Because if you live forever wearing this thing, THISIS your heaven!!!
And even if you DO die, Scientology is inconclusive about whether your heavenly body will REFLECT whatever you were wearing when you died, as the Pharoas of Egypt were told by the Aliens. And even if it turns out we live in the Matrix, after you've worn it for years the brace would become part of your residual self-image. Either way you're screwed. Don't do it people!!!!
This is a joke. It makes fun of zealotry. Don't find it funny? Move on. ~
Well I went to order one of these things, and was met at the top with the cheerful request to agree:
Yes, I would like to try the Eternal Life Device(s). I understand that the inventor, Alex Chiu, guarantees me that if I am not satisfied with the Eternal Life Device for any reason, I am allowed to get a full refund within 90 days.[boldness added]
Now given that the only reason I can imagine for someone not being satisfied with their package of Eternal Life is if it doesn't work (ie. they still die), your guarantee beckons the questions:
Would I be correct in assuming that you allow third-parties (spouses/families) to ask for a refund within 90 days of the deceased person's order?
And if you do, what percent of your orders result in a refund within 90 days for the specific reason of death? (ie. not including other "not satisfied for any reason" s).
Does this figure include refunds for causes of death unrelated to mortality?
Which immortality device (Immortality Rings or Immortality Foot Braces) has proved more effective? How do you judge their effectiveness, given that most people probably use both? How do you know that one of them doesn't in fact not contribute at all? Some statistics would be appreciated. ~
They just needed to go to South Africa and take a look at the "theft deterrent devices" many clever motorists have installed, like the flamethrowers along the bottom of both sides of the car activated with a foot pedal.
The aim, according to Blokman co-founder and chief executive Vadim V Veshchezerov, is to "transform [the] Sony PlayStation and Sony PlayStation2 into a full-featured, low-priced desktop computer".
(previous version of this post submitted too soon. mod this one if at all.)
Article says:
And while alternatives exist, they "may eventually succumb to the might of the RIAA, which is already making noises about targeting software developers, ISPs and individual users of the network with lawsuits."
"The BBC is reporting that cDc is releasing a new Peekabooty software in July which will defeat totalitarian governments and law enforcement from their current monitoring efforts. The article states: 'A group of hackers are developing a web browser that it claims will make it easier for people to circumvent censorship and avoid the attentions of law enforcers. The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'"
It's static HTML now, so I can't link it, but here's my post on that: (the gist of it is that "this P2P appears legitimate, and by its nature supports filesharing, so the RIAA can't complain unless they're admitting to trying to stifle freedom of speech)
The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."
But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
And while alternatives exist, they "may eventually succumb to the might of the RIAA, which is already making noises about targeting software developers, ISPs and individual users of the network with lawsuits."
"The BBC is reporting that cDc is releasing a new Peekabooty software in July which will defeat totalitarian governments and law enforcement from their current monitoring efforts. The article states: 'A group of hackers are developing a web browser that it claims will make it easier for people to circumvent censorship and avoid the attentions of law enforcers. The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'"
It's static HTML now, so I can't link it, but here's my post on that:
The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."
But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
(This is slightly off-topic, but please read at least the end or else pass by.)
When I was reading Tuesday's/. article on the New Yorker article about Ultima Online, I was struck by the sententence:
Nearly a quarter of a million people subscribe, and each player logs an average of thirteen hours a week, meaning that in the course of a year Ultima absorbs more than a hundred and sixty million man-hours.
Now considering that one assumes a player is actively engaged in the world for all of that hour, I thought: "I bet Sprite would pay a few cents for every hour that I was engaged in looking at a fountainhead that said in Old English letters: "Cool Refreshing Springwater from the Land of the Sprite" (I don't play the game -- I know me, I would become way addicted; MUDs all but destroyed me back in the day -- so I can't speak definitively, part of the reason I didn't post to the original article) -- but wouldn't you think that
If the player is looking at several "things" during every second of his/her online experience and
viewing all the items in your field of vision is worth 50 cents an hour from combined advertising, while
"Ultima absorbs more than a hundred and sixty million man-hours."
Then, logically,
Ultima wastes $80,000,000 dollars a year by not advertising.
(To give this perspective, consider "Lord British is the handle of Richard Garriott, Origin's founder. Garriott sold the company to Electronic Arts, the computer-games giant, in 1992, for thirty million dollars". [From the same article].)
Further off-topic, mea culpa, I was piqued by the article's saying:
Under the resource system, players could gather raw materials, like ore, and make them into finished goods, like armor, which, once used, would begin to break down and reënter the pool as raw materials. Players, it turned out, liked to make things--they were turning out hundreds, and even thousands, of swords and shields and gauntlets--but instead of using them, or throwing them out, which would have had the same effect, they hoarded them. One player reportedly had a collection of ten thousand identical shirts. The result was that there were hardly any materials available to replenish the pool, which deepened the environmental crisis. [Bold emphasis mine.]
Now I don't know about you -- but it seems to me that this means that people are willing to work for real-life free to spend time online making swords and stuff (in fact, they're actually paying to do so -- $10/month). Since the mininum wage is $5?/hour, don't you think Ultima could get this HUGE source of income if it had people doing information processing online, like proof-reading, or some medievally acceptable version of programming, and paying them nothing but items? Beats the hell out of making chairs, doesn't it? Just a thought.
Oh, and to prove I read the current article, I do know that it only refers to things on television:
Viewers of reruns of the crime drama "Law and Order,"[...]could see sponsored imagery interpolated where it had not been before as a result of an agreement in principle to allow the insertion of computer-generated make-believe items like cans, bottles, signs and logos into scenes.
I say: why not into Ultima? Just give them Medieval looks. (Actually it was the word "computer-generated" in the part I just quoted which led me to thinking back to U.O.).
--
Slashdot update suggestion: have moderators rate "funny" and "to the topic" separately from Overall Worth, and be able to sort by them separately -- sometimes you want to see funny stuff, sometimes you don't. Same for "generally interesting" stuff, vs. "related to the article" stuff. ~
Slashdot Mirror
(a little explanation)
~
"I tried, for instance, 'All your base are belong to us'." Yeah. Uh-huh. That phrase is so frequent that if I hear "base belong" I think of that phrase. Hell: here's the word belong on google. Four of the top ten searches, including the top two, highlight "belong" in the full phrase "all your base are belong to us" visible in the summary. What were you smoking? Man.
My point, dear rsidd, just so I'm not being flamebait, is that if you want to see how Google treats your phrases, pick a random phrase out of a book you know is an etext, not too common, and see if you can find that etext based on that short word. Let's say you remember the phrase "but that the dread" of something after death, but you're only sure of the first part. What's this from? (Hamlet's soliloquy. "Who would fardels bear...but that the dread of something after death...puzzles [paralyzes] the will [to end the bad things] and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of....")
Now look here:
+"+but +that +the +dread"
Returns:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 3,410"
(none of these includes the phrase I searched on.)
Now this:
+"+but +that +the +dread" -Hamlet -Shakespeare
Returns:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 2,480"
In other words, after I make sure that Hamlet's quotation was not just lurking on another page past the first ten that I looked at, I saw how many pages of the 3,410 could possibly have to do with the quotation I was looking for. Only 930 (subtract above).
Now let's look at a full-fledged full-text search engine, Altavista. (no affiliation, but I use altavista whenever I need a phrase and don't care how popular or "valued" the site is that it appears on--do you know that Google adjusts importance based on how much linkage a site gets on other sites? This doesn't mesh with phrase-based searching.)
Anyway,
"but that the dread"
on altavista returns, not surprisingly, a top ten pages that EACH (every one of the ten) reference Hamlet's soliloquy. (Althoguh one is a satire including the phrase and being about a cat. It begins
"To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:" and includes the phrase I searched on).
Total number of search results returned with the above search?
"We found 434 results:"
Now bear in mind that Google couldn't even come up with the phrase, however much I +'d it to death, on its top ten list. If I only have that one phrase in memory on Google, I can't find it. Period. But what if I want more power than just that. What if I wasn't just looking for it (because if I had been, I might include words like "play" or "shakespeare", which I could reasonably guess is where I got the phrase stuck in my mind from), but rather, for instance, wanted to know how many times anyone on the Internet (that a search engine indexes) has used the words "but that the dread", except in quoting Shakespeare. Therefore, the following progression. (After each one, I looked at the top ten pages and added a phrase to eliminate one or more of them).
"but that the dread"
We found 434 results:
"but that the dread" -Hamlet -Shakespeare
We found 65 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare (lowercase this time, because Altavista treates uppercase as forced-uppercase and lowercase as either.)
We found 48 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare -"that is the question" (Still fairly clearly an allusion to Shakespeare.)
We found 13 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare -"that is the question" -"whether 'tis"
We found 8 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare -"that is the question" -"whether 'tis" -"undiscover'd country"
We found 7 results:
"but that the dread" -hamlet -shakespeare -"that is the question" -"whether 'tis" -"undiscover'd country" -"undiscovered country"
We found 4 results:
The four results?
- From http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-Clare
. html:
- From http://www.clareweb.com/eolas/coclare/history/dut
t on_su
rvey/dutton_survey_chapter5.5.htm:
- From http://www.victorybaptist.org/books/johnbunyan/fe
a rofgod/part1.htm:
- From http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~turing/T/003397
. html:
So now, we see that only THREE documents out of the entire indexed online world have the words "but that the dread" appearing outside of a work that relates directly to Shakespeare. (Possibly we have a false negative on very long documents that include the words "but that the dread" and, independantly, some other phrase I negated, such as "that is the question" or "whether 'tis". I don't think it's likely though.)"
The sound seemed taken out of her voice; it was husky as the notes on an old harpsichord when the strings have ceased to vibrate. She read her answer in my face, I suppose, for I could not speak. Her look was one of intense fear, but that died away into an aspect of most humble patience. At length she seemed to force herself to face behind and around her: she saw the purple moors, the blue distant hills, quivering in the sunlight, but nothing else.
'Will you take me home?' she said meekly.
I took her by the hand, and led her silently through the budding heather - we dared not speak; for we could not tell but that the dread creature was listening, although unseen - but that IT might appear and push us asunder. I never loved her more fondly than now when - and that was the unspeakable misery - the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of IT. She seemed to understand what I must be feeling. She let go my hand, which she had kept clasped until then, when we reached the garden gate, and went forwards to meet her anxious friend, who was standing by the window looking for her. I could not enter the house: I needed silence, society, leisure, change - I knew not what - to shake off the sensation of that creature's presence. Yet I lingered about the garden - I hardly know why; partly, I suppose, because I feared to encounter the resemblance again on the solitary common, where it had vanished, and partly from a feeling of inexpressible compassion for Lucy. In a few minutes Mistress Clarke came forth and joined me. We walked some paces in silence.
"
"
Mr. Ledwich, in his Epitome of the Antiquities of Ireland, says, that in the reign of King John the clergy did not receive any tithes; the veneration for the church at that time was so great, that regulations were unnecessary; they were supported by oblations. The piety of modern times, I fear, would influence but very small collections. The whole ecclesiastical revenue to a late period was divided into four parts, one to the Bishop, one to the clergy, one to the poor, and one to support the church and other uses, and he says this mode exists at this day in the diocese of Clonfert.
To throw as much light on this subject as possible, I shall make a few extracts from Mr. Rawson's admirable Survey of Kildare, lately published. In page 27 he mentions one tithe-dealer having exacted thirty shillings per acre for wheat;** "the dread of citation, and the loss of his straw, made the timorous ploughman yield to any terms." Again, page 31, "It must appear evident to every man, that the entire weight of the church establishment falls on the sweat from the brow of industry, whilst the feeder of one thousand bullocks does not pay as much as the herdsman for his garden. Can it be denied, but that the dread of tithe keeps much land in pasture, which would otherwise give bread to thousands, encrease population twenty-fold, do away all necessity of emigration, and make little Ireland not only a granary to England, but to the whole world." In page 33, and which deserves peculiar attention, "The assertors, that the titles to tithes and to estates are of equal strength, should consider that, if estates were to be let at undefined rents from year to year, and the landlord at each harvest to view the crops and exact some proportion in lieu of rent, would any occupier in such case be anxious to till or improve? Would not the kingdom soon become a dreary uninhabited waste? Yet exactly such is the conduct towards the tenth of the produce, the tithe. Let the land-holder be ascertained at what yearly rent he is to pay for one and the other, and all complaint is at an end.[...]
"
"
3. Add to this the revelation of God's goodness, and it must needs make his presence dreadful to us; for when a poor defiled creature shall see that this great God hath, notwithstanding his greatness, goodness in his heart, and mercy to bestow upon him: this makes his presence yet the more dreadful. They "shall fear the Lord and his goodness" (Hosea 3:5). The goodness as well as the greatness of God doth beget in the heart of his elect an awful reverence of his majesty. "Fear ye not me? saith the Lord; will ye not tremble at my presence?" And then, to engage us in our soul to the duty, he adds one of his wonderful mercies to the world, for a motive, "Fear ye not me?" Why, who are thou? He answers, Even I, "which have" set, or "placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?" (Jer 5:22). Also, when Job had God present with him, making manifest the goodness of his great heart to him, what doth he say? how doth he behave himself in his presence? "I have heard of thee," says he, "by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:5,6).
And what mean the tremblings, the tears, those breakings and shakings of heart that attend the people of God, when in an eminent manner they receive the pronunciation of the forgiveness of sins at his mouth, but that the dread of the majesty of God is in their sight mixed therewith? God must appear like himself, speak to the soul like himself; nor can the sinner, when under these glorious discoveries of his Lord and Saviour, keep out the beams of his majesty from the eyes of his understanding. "I will cleanse them," saith he, "from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me, and I will pardon all their iniquities whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against me." And what then? "And they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness, and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it" (Jer 33:8,9). Alas! there is a company of poor, light, frothy professors in the world, that carry it under that which they call the presence of God, more like to antics, than sober sensible Christians; yea, more like to a fool of a play, than those that have the presence of God. They would not carry it so in the presence of a king, nor yet of the lord of their land, were they but receivers of mercy at his hand. They carry it even in their most eminent seasons, as if the sense and sight of God, and his blessed grace to their souls in Christ, had a tendency in them to make men wanton: but indeed it is the most humbling and heart-breaking sight in the world; it is fearful.
"
"
But that the dread of someone else could win that game, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment. With this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.
"
(This last attempts to quote the original, except the phrase "could win the game".)
This startling conclusion is one that you could not find with Google, which could not even be bothered to find for you where the phrase "but that the dread" comes from. Apparently each of Altavista's 434 original results, except these latter three, are correct positives. (In the sense that the phrase is from the context in which I heard it, as a part of a soliloquy in Hamlet.)
I used to use Altavista and was sad to hear at a conference held by some technology head at it here in Boston, that lots of people only use Altavista as a "backup" in case Google can't find what they're looking for. He was very proud of the idea that Altavista didn't have what he called "stop words" (Google's "the" "a", etc), but rather full-text indexing. (He did mention that only the first 378K of a text were indexed or something, but I think any document that long is also avaialable for download somewhere in chapters...). Anyway at that time I was saddened that Altavista wasn't doing too well, it was what I used, since it seemed like it had an expert, powerful system. (With such conveniences as a NEAR keyword to show that two phrases mustn't just occur within the same document but within several words of each other. The back-end, but not the user interface, he told some of us afterward over refreshments, was fully Regular Expression, and an expert user could combine things like boolean operators with NEAR and a few other keywords (up to an impressive depth) to get basically any query she wanted.
Today I use Google because, chances are, the site that I'm interested in is the one other people are interested in who know about that subject. (From Google's site:
"
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
")
Which of course is usually exactly what I want. Unless I have a phrase stuck in my mind like "but that the dread". In that case, like those upon whom I frowned a year or two upon, I head over to Altavista "as a last resort after Google fails" (sigh) and use it's all-but RegEx features.
Robert Viragh.
~
look, troll, when something is G rated it's not being prissy to expect it to not grind prejudices into our children. I don't care what adults watch. I have a sense of humor.
~
Bellings,
2 36&cid=134) you really did surprise me with your http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/06/12/22222 07&cid=228. laugh. Nice to see Oxford hasn't over-refined all our brilliant orators :))))
This is perhaps one of the most right-on posts I have ever read. The negation of what you espouse (because you do it satirically) is exactly my view about violence in movies (explicit or otherwise), and in fact I don't watch any movie that has violence as a plot-device (yes, I look at the rating labels) so that I might not support it. (I did not like the action scenes in Atlantis even, which I had been told erroneously was g-rated, although I did not feel I could mention it in my review and be taken seriously by Slashdot.). I have never been able to phrase my reasoning for doing so in any way that was satisfactory for me, and certainly not in any way that would convince anyone to adopt my view, but your phrasing is perhaps the most perfect I could possibly imagine.
For such an eloquent being, though, (eg the next thing I read, after clicking your slashdot id to see what else brilliance you offer, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/06/16/0018
~
made me laugh!
~
Ah, yes, that makes sense. I haven't seen "bad" anime that does 3d rendering together with 2d hand-drawn stuff, but now that you mention it, the effect certainly WAS there a little. You don't notice though, because the film is engrossing. I don't think you often see large characters together with large views of the environment. More so it'll do either close-ups or huge pannings.
~
touche'
/she/ said she had read about The Lion King :).) If anyone can dig up these types of essays on Disney movies, I always find them very interesting....
That's what I get for doing third-hand knowledge-spreading. (Someone told me my original "information" from an essay
~
Some questions about Taco's review: "And even more scary is the amazing shots where the backgrounds are actually more or less fully 3D sets, but look convincingly 2D even as we rotate around them. The guys responsible for those shots deserve pats on the back. "
Does he mean "more or less 2d but manage to LOOK convinciginly 3d?" Why would anyone want something to look convincingly 2d?
And secondly,
I found the characters weak for my tastes (but nothing compared to Suck Raider which I saw only hours before and simply wanted every character to die a painful death just as soon as possible).
I agree with you that the characters are weak, but how on Earth did you manage to come up with an off-topic phrase like "Suck Raider" just so you can include it in the sentence?? C'mon Taco. And "wanted every character to die a painful death just as soon as possible" is so unoriginal that the last time I laughed at that I fell off my stegosaurus.
And last, but not least, Taco, pal, I value your opinion, however evil you may be and dear god however much this website sucks now. C'mere you big lug.
~
Do you know what always gets me? If you look at your microwave clock at a random time, as a mathematician you expect the minute field to change after 30 seconds.
~
I can still read paper written on 2000 years ago
... AND THAT'S JUST TALKING ABOUT AFTER SEVEN LAYERS OF OVERWRITE BY RANDOM BITS! :)
Yeah, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which were lost forever before archaeologists realized they couldn't touch them to unwind them because they instantly crumbled.
OTOH, if the defense department's policies are any indication, hard drive information can be read for "practically infinity time" (their words)
Imagine the bits' lifetimes within specifications
I hope this clears up any confusion.
and therefore classified ones must be destroyed so that they won't fall into enemy hands and be unencrypted 175 years from now when some whiz kid gets a bright idea about how to factor primes.
~
I'm not terribly up on my av solutions, but considering that 95+ percent of what's on a college student's machine is either a) from a trusted binary (os and 'productivity suite' binaries don't need virus scans) or b) downloaded unencrypted through the u.'s network, wouldn't you think there would be a server-side solution that scans any files being downloaded through it, and which the university could install on a large server (cluster) essentially right before the raw-net connection hits the university network? It's not as good as client-side solutions, esp. with college students compiling downloaded source these days, but it's a helluvalot better than nothing, no? Or am I way off-base?
~
thanks, it does. that first point is particularly insightful. agree completely.
~
- More of it might have been salvageable.
- More information might be gleaned from the rocket itself once it was retrieved.
Does anyone who's close to such launches know whether it would it have been close enough to land that there was a risk it would veer back and "fall on someone", to put it mildly? I know solid-fuel rockets usually can't be turned off once activated, is this the case with this one also? If they could have just deactivated, it wouldn't have been better to just turn it off and let it fall into the ocean?Oh, new thought: environmental damage from all that fuel,, vs. if you blow it up it doesn't fall into the ocean. (These things burn fairly efficiently, no?) Am I way off-base?
Second new thought: If it's just the BOOSTER ROCKET carrying it aloft, couldn't they have forced separation, waited a few moments for the prototype of the aircraft itself to fall a little out of danger, and THEN exploded the "booster rocket"? Eventually there would be separation anyway, so obviously it's within design specs...and if you CAN'T separate prematurely, isn't that stupid design? If they put explosives on it for self-destruction, it means they were thinking of worst-case scenarios already...why not salvage some of that few dozen million dollars while you're at it?
Thoughts, as always, are welcome.
~
And the chances that the government will give the RIAA access to the info gleaned from this clipper-like thing? <Broad grin>. Upshot: we win.
~
Thanks, that's useful!
As long as you're submitting a bugreport, could you get them to embed some information so that threads can be reconstructed at a later date? It wouldn't be a lot, just "id of parent", even in an HTML comment if they like, but it would be very useful -- whenever someone develops a client-side parser, it'll make surfing old articles so much more interesting. We're losing a wealth of old discussion by ignoring parentage. (You can recover some of this today with re: samesubject rules, but people change subjects when replying....)
Peace.
~
So, before then, strong encryption was illegal.
We still do not allow export of strong encryption except to specific countries. We don't care if this infringes on their citizens' rights to free speech, and if we felt we had something to gain from it, we wouldn't care if we infringed on our citizens' rights to free speech. But we don't have enough to gain to allow this to be instituted, especially if the "oh it's only so that people in totalitarian regimes" argument manages to win a large userbase to begin with. At that point, your two scenarios are worth looking at.
1. Allow corporations to block high-speed, high-volume data over their networks.
This would work beautifully. If we lived under communism. As it stands, another ISP will simply say: WE don't block it. Use us! And how about intranets? No ISP reigns over that... Allowing ISPs to block large-volume traffic means that people won't pay the ISPs for large pipes. If they only block encrypted info, that will work for awhile, but not forever. We are moving toward an era where an ISP won't have the computing power to even tell whether what you're pushing over port 80 is mime or english. especially not when you judiciously mangle the headers, heh. If they say: "No, we don't like that you're surfing such large files...." then we'll say "Screw you. Why am I paying for DSL through YOU then?"
Your second point is actually what I mentioned the France thing in relation to. It's possible, but don't hold your breath. As a practical note, however, even if they do outlaw strong encryption, 40 bit encryption is enough over a distributed network to allow most people to safely do whatever they please, until they are specifically targetted in a MASSIVE dragnet (to reconstruct the distributed info from all the nodes you communicate with and pinpoint you as the source of the information, or its requestor or whatever).
Also, remember, an ISP is just a commercial version of what I could set up myself if I wanted to get the government licenses. Once a solid wireless standard comes out, you know, my whole city will be a LAN whether an ISP is involved or not. (Less nerdy cities than Boston might not be so fast
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[Ballmer] calls Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
As usual, The Simpsons prophesied this long ago:
Chief Wiggum: Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city. He is the cancer and I am the...uh...what cures cancer?
What's the significance? Does this mean Tux is an underground mafioso? Is Ballmer really a bumbling (and vain) enforcer of the old-world politics? Will Government eventually "triumph" in the face of Good Innovation (TM) [most horrible!], in a Fahrenheit 451 way, just as we will inevitably find a cure for cancer? Draw your own conclusions.
Mod only after you've thought about it.
Peace.
PS.
Note: Neither tea-leaves, the Qur'an, nor The Simpsons have been conclusively shown to predict the future in any prescient way, although frequently "predictions" are discovered after the fact in all three.
All time Simpson's quote: (From an episode):
Homer: These candidates make me want to vomit in terror!
And:
___: It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed... DOOMED!
Brockman: [brightly] Well, a refreshingly frank response there, from Senator ___.
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How would you feel if you had to LIVE IN HEAVEN ETERNALLY WEARING A FOOT BRACE??? If you use this device you'll have to!! Because if you live forever wearing this thing, THIS IS your heaven!!!
And even if you DO die, Scientology is inconclusive about whether your heavenly body will REFLECT whatever you were wearing when you died, as the Pharoas of Egypt were told by the Aliens. And even if it turns out we live in the Matrix, after you've worn it for years the brace would become part of your residual self-image. Either way you're screwed. Don't do it people!!!!
This is a joke. It makes fun of zealotry. Don't find it funny? Move on.
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- Would I be correct in assuming that you allow third-parties (spouses/families) to ask for a refund within 90 days of the deceased person's order?
- And if you do, what percent of your orders result in a refund within 90 days for the specific reason of death? (ie. not including other "not satisfied for any reason" s).
- Does this figure include refunds for causes of death unrelated to mortality?
Your answers and statistics are appreciated.~
Which immortality device (Immortality Rings or Immortality Foot Braces) has proved more effective? How do you judge their effectiveness, given that most people probably use both? How do you know that one of them doesn't in fact not contribute at all? Some statistics would be appreciated.
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(By which I mean, I saw it on slashdot)
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The aim, according to Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs, is to "transform [the] Apple G4 and G4 Cube into a full-featured, high-priced gaming console".
This is a joke. Don't find it funny? move on.
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Article says: Which is why I can't wait for the "Cult of the Dead Cow to go P2P" (previous slashdot article). Snippet: It's static HTML now, so I can't link it, but here's my post on that: (the gist of it is that "this P2P appears legitimate, and by its nature supports filesharing, so the RIAA can't complain unless they're admitting to trying to stifle freedom of speech)
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
- an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
- so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
- Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
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I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
- an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
- so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
- Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
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When I was reading Tuesday's
- If the player is looking at several "things" during every second of his/her online experience and
- viewing all the items in your field of vision is worth 50 cents an hour from combined advertising, while
- "Ultima absorbs more than a hundred and sixty million man-hours."
- Ultima wastes $80,000,000 dollars a year by not advertising.
(To give this perspective, consider "Lord British is the handle of Richard Garriott, Origin's founder. Garriott sold the company to Electronic Arts, the computer-games giant, in 1992, for thirty million dollars". [From the same article].)Then, logically,
Further off-topic, mea culpa, I was piqued by the article's saying: Now I don't know about you -- but it seems to me that this means that people are willing to work for real-life free to spend time online making swords and stuff (in fact, they're actually paying to do so -- $10/month). Since the mininum wage is $5?/hour, don't you think Ultima could get this HUGE source of income if it had people doing information processing online, like proof-reading, or some medievally acceptable version of programming, and paying them nothing but items? Beats the hell out of making chairs, doesn't it? Just a thought.
Oh, and to prove I read the current article, I do know that it only refers to things on television:
I say: why not into Ultima? Just give them Medieval looks. (Actually it was the word "computer-generated" in the part I just quoted which led me to thinking back to U.O.).
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Slashdot update suggestion: have moderators rate "funny" and "to the topic" separately from Overall Worth, and be able to sort by them separately -- sometimes you want to see funny stuff, sometimes you don't. Same for "generally interesting" stuff, vs. "related to the article" stuff.
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