To those people who say "we need to protect our kids", I say from what? I don't understand how watching the most natural act possible, sex, could be harmful to anybody.
What is the basis for saying the FCC can censor from 6am to 10pm but not after? What's the basis for them being able to censor period? Other than the usual restrictions on free speech (threats, public endangerment, etc.) I don't see how they have any right to censor anything on the airwaves. The FCC should be limited to dealing with transmitting power levels and assigning frequencies.
It sounds more like Brave New World to me, which IMHO described a very good and stable society. I wouldn't be able to live in it, but if you are looking at it from the viewpoint of survival, it performs rather well.
The wardialer wasn't invented by that movie. John Draper (a.k.a Cap'n Crunch) had a program with the same functionality when he worked for Apple. Although the card he designed for use with the program was never sold by Apple (the card could produce any tone, not just the phone number tones, and they were afraid of selling something that looked like a phreaking utility, esp considering Draper's background), there were some made. There was even a story of Draper getting passwords of a local bbs through a brute forcer.
P.S. The wardialer featured in WarGames couldn't have worked, because acoustic modems can't hang up, and most can't dial.
Um, Apple at that time also published the entire code to the Apple II ROM. It was in the manual for all the original Apple IIs, but stopped with the II+. I believe that you could still get a copy of it from Apple all the way through the IIc, although I'm not sure.
Making something idiot proof implies that it was too complex for normal people to use in the first place. Neither cars or toasters were. All toasters have an "expert mode", thats all they have. Bad examples.
Also, Berkeley has a history of making things free, you do remember what the B in BSD stands for don't you? Oxford doesn't really have that history.
It's kind of a parallel with the whole anti-corporations bias on slashdot. Berkeley is a very liberal state college, while Oxford is a very conservative, Ivy League private school.
Contrary to what most people think, the bulges don't point towards and away from the moon, instead, if you drew a circle
with the moon at its center and a radius equal to the distance between the sun and the moon, then the line between the two bulges
would be almost tangent to the circle.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, how can a line that crosses a point inside the circle (the Earth) be tangent to the circle. The Earth will always be inside the circle, because the Earth will always be closer to the moon than the sun is.
Another big question wrt this has to do with the two different copyrights on music. There is the Performer's Copyright and the Writer's Copyright. Who has to give permission to Napster to allow their music to be shared? Do they both have to give permission? What if one wants to give permission, but the other one doesn't? Again, the RIAA would probably respond by saying "We give the permission, fuck the artists." as they have so many times before.
Many people here on slashdot seem to be confused about what fair use means. The fair use clause does NOT make manufacturing media and devices specifically designed to inhibit time-shifting, space-shifting, or backup copying illegal. However, what it does do is make ensure that you have the right to attempt to circumvent those devices in order to do those things mentioned above. In other words, manufacturing these "Burn-Proof CDs" is NOT illegal. However, it also is not illegal to publish programs to get around these protections.
In summary, Burn-Proof CDs do not violate fair use. The DMCA making it illegal to play them anyway does.
I'm with you on this one. I was under the impression that playing an audio CD in a CD-ROM drive consists of telling the CD-ROM drive to behave like a CD-Audio drive and output the sound through a wire directly to the speaker. I've played CDs that have scratches and shit in my computer CD player before and it certainly seemed to ignore the faulty data just as well as a home audio system does.
But what you are forgetting is that in 1983, the music industry still had enormous R&D and new hardware (CD pressers didn't come from thin air) costs that they had to recoup by subsidizing them through CD costs. Now, even though the costs have long been recovered, they still hang on to the outdated pricing scheme just to scam money out of us.
It was shown that napster users bought more CDs because they heard them on Napster
It has never been shown that Napster increased CD sales. Neither has it been shown that Napster decrease CD sales. The fact of the matter is, even though CD sales did increase while Napster was around, there is no way to tell what they would have done had Napster not been around. Therefore, all claims that Napster caused any effect are invalid and unbased.
Nielson ratings require an extra piece of equipment hooked into your TV. But Digital Cable has a transmitter built right in to the cable box. That is how it requests listings for certain times. The cable company could be using that for info collecting purposes.
1) It used cartridges, greatly limiting what you could put in a game. Doesn't matter what the console can do if you can't fit it in the
game. Cartridges were also more expensive. This isn't really relevant to the PS2, but I suspect if I hadn't mentioned it, somebody
would have jumped down my throat.
Everyone seems to think that the fact that Nintendo used carts was a problem. But what people don't remember was that with the PSX, most of the big games came on more than one CD. Why did this never happen with N64? I don't see how switching carts could be any more inconvienient than switching CDs, which you had to do for FF7, FF8, Metal Gear Solid, and many other sucessful games.
Computer ports are generally very bad for offline multiplayer - split screen FPSs
suck, IMO.
I've never seen a split screen FPS for a computer, but I've seen many of them for consoles, and they do suck ass. I would say PCs are much better for offline multiplayer, just get a couple PCs, and a hub. No need to get on the internet to play multiplayer Quake 3 or Unreal.
Formulas are different than algorithims. With Fractal Designer you could concievably make a faster algorithm for a formula it already had. Besides, its got a better interface.
Kind of, they are determined by the number of iterations that it takes to get past the radius 2 circle. You can consider that a rate of a kind. But, as I said, that isn't part of the Mandelbrot set.
I think you should read up a little more on the history of fractals before you post things like
The guy lucked out in my opinion. He had an interest in something already known and other people developed the technology for him to take the credit. The sad thing is that this is worse than patent law since Mandelbrot will always get way more credit than he deserves.
Gaston Julia did not discover the Mandelbrot set. He discovered the Julia sets. These are related to the Mandelbrot set, but are not the same. For every point in the Mandelbrot set, there is a corresponding Julia set.
Both sets use the formula z:= z^2 + c, but they differ in what z0 and c are. In the Julia Sets, z0 is the point on the plane and c is a constant that defines which Julia set it is. For the Mandelbrot set however, z0 is always 0, and c is the point on the plane. In this way, the Mandelbrot set is a table of contents for the Julia sets. Each point on the plane that is in the Mandelbrot set corresponds to a Julia with that point's coordinates as its c that is connected. All the points not in the Mandelbrot set correspond to Julia sets that are not connected. This was the work that Mandelbrot did, and that is why the fractal is rightfully named after him, just as the Julia fractals are named after Gaston Julia.
Lorentz was not working on either the Mandelbrot or Julia fractals. He was working on simplified differential equations for modeling weather. This led to his discovery of the Lorentz attractor. Basically, his work showed that fractals and chaos were abundant in nature. The fact that we will never be albe to accurately predict the weather more than a month in advance also stems from his work. This is commonly known as the Butterfly effect, i.e. a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park and a 3 months later, a hurricane doesn't hit Japan.
To the best of my knowledge he never acknowledged the work done by the meterologists. When I saw him he also claimed the results of the conjectures as his own and went out of his way to disparage the people who did the real work.
I've never heard Mandelbrot try to disparage anyone in anyway. In fact, its mostly the other way around. People disparaged him because he would write papers in many different journals in widely varying fields, although really they were all in the field of non-deterministic systems, or whatever they are calling it now. People viewed him as an outsider, and therefore dismissed his work without considering it.
the mandelbrot set is a plot on the real/imaginary axes of the "rate" at which the function approaches infinity for each coordinate.
Actually, the mandelbrot set itself doesn't take into account the rate. The mandelbrot set is just the set of all points that don't escape to infinity ever. You cannot actually have a picture of this, without computing for an infinite amount of time (at least with current methods). All the computer pictures of the Mandelbrot set are just approximations. Anyway, in a normal Mandelbrot fractal picture, the actual Mandelbrot set is everything in black.
Essentially, anything that is a New-World mac should run OS X without problems. It is possible to run OS X on non-New World machines, even on some non G3 machines, but it takes a bit of work.
When Linux is fully plug and play and hardware autodetecting, then you can complain. It would be absolutely stupid for Apple to release an OS that has "hardware support" in the form of kernel recompiles or modules that you have to be a semi-guru to do easily. Apple is, and has always been, the company that stood for ultimate ease of use, and kernel recompiles, text conf file munges, and nearly incomprensible HOW-TOs don't fall into that catagory.
The engineers who care about user-friendliness probably aren't evil. The management probably are. Apple as a company definitely is.
Their management isn't evil, just stupid. As a long time mac fan, that has been by number one complaint. No one at Apple knows how to run a company well. Steve Jobs knows how to market, but only by bringing drastic changes to their entire line every other quarter, and often screwing over their most loyal customers in the process.
To put it bluntly, making money has never really been Apple's top concern. Really all the management people just want to make the coolest toy on the market, at almost any cost.
Slashdot Mirror
To those people who say "we need to protect our kids", I say from what? I don't understand how watching the most natural act possible, sex, could be harmful to anybody.
What is the basis for saying the FCC can censor from 6am to 10pm but not after? What's the basis for them being able to censor period? Other than the usual restrictions on free speech (threats, public endangerment, etc.) I don't see how they have any right to censor anything on the airwaves. The FCC should be limited to dealing with transmitting power levels and assigning frequencies.
It sounds more like Brave New World to me, which IMHO described a very good and stable society. I wouldn't be able to live in it, but if you are looking at it from the viewpoint of survival, it performs rather well.
P.S. The wardialer featured in WarGames couldn't have worked, because acoustic modems can't hang up, and most can't dial.
Um, Apple at that time also published the entire code to the Apple II ROM. It was in the manual for all the original Apple IIs, but stopped with the II+. I believe that you could still get a copy of it from Apple all the way through the IIc, although I'm not sure.
Making something idiot proof implies that it was too complex for normal people to use in the first place. Neither cars or toasters were. All toasters have an "expert mode", thats all they have. Bad examples.
It's kind of a parallel with the whole anti-corporations bias on slashdot. Berkeley is a very liberal state college, while Oxford is a very conservative, Ivy League private school.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, how can a line that crosses a point inside the circle (the Earth) be tangent to the circle. The Earth will always be inside the circle, because the Earth will always be closer to the moon than the sun is.
Another big question wrt this has to do with the two different copyrights on music. There is the Performer's Copyright and the Writer's Copyright. Who has to give permission to Napster to allow their music to be shared? Do they both have to give permission? What if one wants to give permission, but the other one doesn't? Again, the RIAA would probably respond by saying "We give the permission, fuck the artists." as they have so many times before.
In summary, Burn-Proof CDs do not violate fair use. The DMCA making it illegal to play them anyway does.
I'm with you on this one. I was under the impression that playing an audio CD in a CD-ROM drive consists of telling the CD-ROM drive to behave like a CD-Audio drive and output the sound through a wire directly to the speaker. I've played CDs that have scratches and shit in my computer CD player before and it certainly seemed to ignore the faulty data just as well as a home audio system does.
But what you are forgetting is that in 1983, the music industry still had enormous R&D and new hardware (CD pressers didn't come from thin air) costs that they had to recoup by subsidizing them through CD costs. Now, even though the costs have long been recovered, they still hang on to the outdated pricing scheme just to scam money out of us.
It has never been shown that Napster increased CD sales. Neither has it been shown that Napster decrease CD sales. The fact of the matter is, even though CD sales did increase while Napster was around, there is no way to tell what they would have done had Napster not been around. Therefore, all claims that Napster caused any effect are invalid and unbased.
Nielson ratings require an extra piece of equipment hooked into your TV. But Digital Cable has a transmitter built right in to the cable box. That is how it requests listings for certain times. The cable company could be using that for info collecting purposes.
Everyone seems to think that the fact that Nintendo used carts was a problem. But what people don't remember was that with the PSX, most of the big games came on more than one CD. Why did this never happen with N64? I don't see how switching carts could be any more inconvienient than switching CDs, which you had to do for FF7, FF8, Metal Gear Solid, and many other sucessful games.
I've never seen a split screen FPS for a computer, but I've seen many of them for consoles, and they do suck ass. I would say PCs are much better for offline multiplayer, just get a couple PCs, and a hub. No need to get on the internet to play multiplayer Quake 3 or Unreal.
Formulas are different than algorithims. With Fractal Designer you could concievably make a faster algorithm for a formula it already had. Besides, its got a better interface.
Kind of, they are determined by the number of iterations that it takes to get past the radius 2 circle. You can consider that a rate of a kind. But, as I said, that isn't part of the Mandelbrot set.
Plug and Play means zero click not one click.
The guy lucked out in my opinion. He had an interest in something already known and other people developed the technology for him to take the credit. The sad thing is that this is worse than patent law since Mandelbrot will always get way more credit than he deserves.
Gaston Julia did not discover the Mandelbrot set. He discovered the Julia sets. These are related to the Mandelbrot set, but are not the same. For every point in the Mandelbrot set, there is a corresponding Julia set.
Both sets use the formula z := z^2 + c, but they differ in what z0 and c are. In the Julia Sets, z0 is the point on the plane and c is a constant that defines which Julia set it is. For the Mandelbrot set however, z0 is always 0, and c is the point on the plane. In this way, the Mandelbrot set is a table of contents for the Julia sets. Each point on the plane that is in the Mandelbrot set corresponds to a Julia with that point's coordinates as its c that is connected. All the points not in the Mandelbrot set correspond to Julia sets that are not connected. This was the work that Mandelbrot did, and that is why the fractal is rightfully named after him, just as the Julia fractals are named after Gaston Julia.
Lorentz was not working on either the Mandelbrot or Julia fractals. He was working on simplified differential equations for modeling weather. This led to his discovery of the Lorentz attractor. Basically, his work showed that fractals and chaos were abundant in nature. The fact that we will never be albe to accurately predict the weather more than a month in advance also stems from his work. This is commonly known as the Butterfly effect, i.e. a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park and a 3 months later, a hurricane doesn't hit Japan.
To the best of my knowledge he never acknowledged the work done by the meterologists. When I saw him he also claimed the results of the conjectures as his own and went out of his way to disparage the people who did the real work.
I've never heard Mandelbrot try to disparage anyone in anyway. In fact, its mostly the other way around. People disparaged him because he would write papers in many different journals in widely varying fields, although really they were all in the field of non-deterministic systems, or whatever they are calling it now. People viewed him as an outsider, and therefore dismissed his work without considering it.
Another good one that even lets you compile your own fractal algorithms into it. For Mac only though. Fractal Designer
Actually, the mandelbrot set itself doesn't take into account the rate. The mandelbrot set is just the set of all points that don't escape to infinity ever. You cannot actually have a picture of this, without computing for an infinite amount of time (at least with current methods). All the computer pictures of the Mandelbrot set are just approximations. Anyway, in a normal Mandelbrot fractal picture, the actual Mandelbrot set is everything in black.
Essentially, anything that is a New-World mac should run OS X without problems. It is possible to run OS X on non-New World machines, even on some non G3 machines, but it takes a bit of work.
When Linux is fully plug and play and hardware autodetecting, then you can complain. It would be absolutely stupid for Apple to release an OS that has "hardware support" in the form of kernel recompiles or modules that you have to be a semi-guru to do easily. Apple is, and has always been, the company that stood for ultimate ease of use, and kernel recompiles, text conf file munges, and nearly incomprensible HOW-TOs don't fall into that catagory.
Their management isn't evil, just stupid. As a long time mac fan, that has been by number one complaint. No one at Apple knows how to run a company well. Steve Jobs knows how to market, but only by bringing drastic changes to their entire line every other quarter, and often screwing over their most loyal customers in the process.
To put it bluntly, making money has never really been Apple's top concern. Really all the management people just want to make the coolest toy on the market, at almost any cost.