I won't disagree with your comments, but FWIW Sony products don't suck anywhere near as much in Europe and Japan as they do in the U.S. Different factories, and very much different product lines, even if the boxes look similar. In general the European and Japanese Sony DVD players and TVs are loaded with features that you don't see in the U.S. because (no offense, I assure you) the AVERAGE american consumer doesn't give a shit about quality and features and so Sony can get away with competing mostly on price and gimmicks and living large from an undeservedly inflated brand reputation.
Example : I bought a Sony VHS while in the U.S. - it reeked to high heaven of cheapo plastic, and the firmware was buggy as fuck. You couldn't select channel 11 without the machine powering itself down. The OSD menus were white block letters on blue background looking like Atari 2600 graphics.
In Europe and Japan at the same time (late 90s) the cheapest Sony VHS videos on the market all had multicolor OSD menus, better mechanics and much better design in general.
...when we start to see images on the net that was calibrated to look nice within the silly intense gamut of a OLED screen: it'll prolly look like washed out puke on all ordinary screens.:)
It is in extremely poor taste to speculate about terror having anything to do with the accident. Everyone who knows anything about space travel, knows that re-entry is extremely hazardous and we've only been very lucky so far in more than forty years of manned space flight.
Friend, I have a healthy mind, a good perception of how things work, and I know enough about the follies of human nature to understand quite well where you are coming from. I'm very sorry that you're deluded, but I hope that you get better eventually.
You also really should relax a bit in any case. Shrill arguments worded like yours carry no weight even if they had merit, which yours do not! Are you very young? You sound not a day over 15. You'll grow out of this eventually, I know it's awkward.
As for your challenge, I refuse to prove a negative, YOU prove a positive. I'm quite willing to "take that chance" !
If the best you can do is pop links like the ones you've already provided, leading to such gems as, I quote out of context, "....Coupled with some of the RF anomalies I've been detecting over the years, I believe that whatever creates the crop circles is creating a temporary vortex in the localized space/time continuum in the vicinity of the crop circle."
I mean, for real. Come on now. TEMPORARY VORTEX IN THE LOCALIZED SPACE/TIME CONTINUUM... shit, I heard more credible psychobabble blackspeak from scamsters selling Perpetual Free Energy Devices and Purple Plates or Homeopathic Medicines or even Religion.
So far all you've provided other than insults have been indigestible hogwash and claptrap. If you really want to state a convincing argument, try and use your own words, find a persuasive instead of scornful tone, and provide some hard data that will stand up to scientific validation and verification.
If your data indicates other-worldly cropcircle origins, would they hold up to double-blind testing?
There isn't any such thing as a 'genuine' crop circle, any more than there are 'power' crystals, magic pendants, dowsing, fairies, 'earth vibrations', Free Energy Devices, psychic 'healers', psychics, UFOs, active ingredients in homeopathic medicines, God, Jesus OR Santa Claus.
Crop circle believers happily carry on with claims of strange or supernatural properties of the flattened corn, or false circular logic arriving at supernatural conclusions when they cannot conceive of the methods employed for the design and execution of any given formation.
Rope and boards certainly aren't the only used methods, and the art of circlemaking has certainly advanced in recent years, aided by GPS and lasers and custom built devices to hitherto unseen levels of complexity. However, you'd be a fool if you think that any of these are the works of supernatural forces! Marvel instead at the creativity and craftmanship of the guys in the fields.
Popular 'science' rags have regrettably lent some undeserved credibility to the supernatural crop circle theories. I remember a story in such a magazine wherein the author claimed that the flattened crop of a crop circle continued to grow, hence, according to his logic, it is a phenomena of the supernatural order.
In reality, none of these claims have been tested and found to have any bearing. The precise same neat and tidy patterns and crop growth non-interruption can be achieved with sufficient skill by the rope-and-plankers, so please cease with this mindless drivel about "Genuine cropcircles".
You 'shall' say whatever you like, any number of times you like, even in all CAPS it doesn't make what you're saying any more true.
My jaw dropped when I saw the alien face and disc. Remarkable! Very clever technology must have been employed in order to pull this off with such precision. The execution is flawless! I'm very impressed.
Certainly this is no ordinary rope-and-plank job, One wonders if the thing was perhaps a clandestine practical execution of a tech student's exam project?
The site of the artwork may be close enough for the DGPS beacon at the Bristol Channel to have helped the punters get the edges of the rectangle aligned so precisely, but presumably a laser sighting device similar to the ones used by land surveyors could have been sufficiently accurate.
Once the rectangle corners had been defined and the circle perimeter traced, it may have been fairly trivial for two operators, or teams, to traverse the sides of the rectangle in parallel with the Device running a straight line from side to side and flattening the crop row with variable force (or width) according a predetermined bitmap courtesy of photoshop and some clever artistry. I'd love to see the original bitmap and compare with the finished formation.
You can see a thin groove at the center of each scanline in the closeup ground photos, which seems to be a wheel track. The device design is unknown, so we don't know if it had 1,2 or even 4 wheels. A rope could have been its suspension from above, though you'd think that would have caused variations in pattern density with the rope at the edges being more taut.
It would need to be somewhat heavy in order to flatten the crop and have enough mechanical force to gradually engage and disengage the crop flattening part of the mechanism during the course of each row. Perhaps the device was guided on twin taut ropes from either side of the formation, or perhaps guided optically by lasers.
From the closeup pictures the pattern looks like it was applied in one direction alone, so perhaps returning the cart to the other side was a waste cycle instead of using bidirectional 'printing'.:)
Interestingly, the wheel groove of the spiral is between the spiral pattern bands, as opposed to centered in the middle, so a different machine may have been used here, perhaps operating concurrently with the alien portrait scanline 'printer'.
The question remains how the row alignment came to be so spot on both in terms of row spacing and 'horizontal hold' from row to row : The vertical details are quite precisely in sync from row to row, so the tech and methodology used is indisputably excellent.
I hope eventually the artists and hoaxers come forth and reimburse the farmer for his losses, and reveal their clever technology. I think that would make for an interesting read.
There are so many new Slashdot stories featuring case mod kits and the like. These are filed under the 'hardware' subject which sometimes contains actual legitimate, interesting stories about hardware, as opposed to stories about glowing things which crack babies attach to their hardware in order to make it glow.
Apple introduces a somewhat practical keyboard which illuminates when dark, so that the symbols on the keys are readily visible. This is nice, and seems like a useful feature.
The case mod subject/response here is a type of glow strands to be routed between the keyboard keys so that the spaces between them light up, which is useful if you have no tactile sensation of touch in your fingers and therefore don't know where the keys are. If you do know where the keys are, but are just looking for the key symbols, you're out of luck because PC keyboard keys are opague and don't benefit in any practical, functional manner from this mode of illumination.
Therefore, IT IS A WASTE OF TIME, equivalent in absurdity to cargo cults fabricating mock stick and canvas airplanes. "Almost like a Macintosh!" - when you were a kid, did you also fasten cardboard cards with clothespins to the spokes of your bicycle in order to make it sound like a moped?
Couldn't there be a separate subject for case mods? That way I could filter this stuff right out. I propose the icon representing the subject should be a baboon's bright red arse, the color of which also serves no functional purpose but nevertheless appears to attract other baboons.
Yes, but the vast majority of demos were PAL, not NTSC. The US Amiga scene was TINY compared to the European one.
Keep an eye on alt.binaries.emulation.misc for Amiga demos and download WinUAE : The newer versions run the old demos in full speed 99% perfect on my 1GHz PIII... at the most I sometime have to set it to skip every other frame, otherwise it's perfect.:)
Google works. Google is good. Their page ranking system quite effectively filters out junk. A lowly scamster like the Search King moron don't deserve all this attention he's getting and no doubt wanted.
Remember those wacky Scienos? A while back they tried to inflate search engine page ranks for 'official' sites, by fabricating thousands of nearly-identical fake 'personal homepages' for their members, with alike-sounding 'success stories'. These were hosted on a bunch of camouflaged Scientology domains like www.our-home.org and many others. The pages were stuffed with official links, and it was quite clear that the primary purpose was to trick Google and other search engines into pushing all anti-Scientology sites out of the first page of returned hits.
At first, they nearly succeeded. There was other mischief about. You may recall that Google for a while didn't cache Operation Clambake (www.clambake.org) due to legal action by Scieno lawyer scum. Anyway, now Clambake is ranked a solid #2 hit on "Scientology" searches, clearly evidence of intelligent filtering going on at Google, for which we should be thankful.
Bollocks, how retarded it feels to accidentally click the submit button before you're done writing. Now I'm just not bothered to write the rest of my dumb and irrelevant little piece. I'll just go away and play with WinUAE now.:)
The PC demos are really nice looking, and kudos to everyone involved with the production of this DVD. PC demos just don't interest me near as much as that which came before them.
To me, the real Scene flourished in Northern Europe back in the 8 and 16 bit days, and it peaked sometime in the early 1990s, just before the PC demos started to trickle in with chunky imitations of yesteryear's cool.
The "real" Scene hardware in those days were anemic, RAM cramped microcomputers with CPU clocks in the single-digit MHz range. The PC was still Dad's chunky, sensible spreadsheet processor, and the God Machines were the immortal C64 and the (for its day) multi-media rich Amiga.
Coders, musicians and pixel artists all had their share of the old school Scene glory;
The coders, because they had
The musicians, because they had to program their tunes and work miracles with 3 or 4 channels and make their own 8-bit samples with amazingly primitive technology and software.
Thought : When are "they" going to come out with monitors for imaging professionals, with 4 primary colors? Oh, I'm not a tetrachromat, few people are - but the green part of the spectrum is represented very poorly on most normal monitors, and could be improved quite a bit by using equipment capable of recording, processing and displaying two different wavelengths of green.
Try flipping through the bluish-green section of a Pantone swatch book and attempt to scan or photograph some of the pages. Then try and get the colors on the screen to get exactly right. Many colors cannot be represented accurately on a RGB monitor, though the wavelengths of those colors CAN be represented using combinations of LEDs emitting different wavelengths than the phosphors or LCD pigments used on today's monitors.
So much like Pantone introduced their Hexachrome six-color printing system to get more accurate color printing on paper, I should like to see an image processing system with 4 or more wavelengths.
At the very least we should get rid of sRGB (which sucks) and switch to something with a nicer gamut like Adobe RGB.
The Foveon X3 chip is interesting, but the hype in this popular-science article does not give justice to neither the X3, nor the astonishing results attained with "traditional" CCD sensor technology. If you want real insight in digital photography, tune to pro photographer trade press, and also look here to see for yourself.
The Foveon is smart, takes pretty photos, The Sigma X3 based camera is nice, but so far it is also not very light sensitive and so many conventional CCDs can easily outperform it in practical use. Besides, it still only measures light in three wavelengths like regular CCDs, so the net results are nearly indistinguishable.
Anyway, back to the Discovery article : The featured sample picture with the butterfly is plain ridiculous : The 'magnified detail' views purports to show how a segment of an image would look like as photographed by different cameras, but as any professional [digital] photographer would tell you, the Nikon Coolpix 2500 sample is as ludicrously fake as the "Nikon F5" picture below.
First off, the CP2500 "sample" looks more like a photoshop pixelated version of the image above it. The sample certainly looks nothing like the interpolated pixels digital photographers are used to seeing in close-up due to the nature of Bayer matrix CCDs used in nearly all digital cameras, including the Coolpix 2500.
Since each pixel in such cameras, as the article actually points out, can see either red, green or blue, neighboring pixels in the finished picture cannot be entirely different, because the hue of each pixel is determined from the brightness of the neighboring red, green and blue monochrome CCD pixels. Therefore a magnified image is always a little "soft" and true distinguished color detail are only possible over spans of two or more pixels. In the sample, however, the neighboring pixels shown are clearly completely unrelated, and as such the magnified sample is FAKE.
As for the third sample : For those who might not know, the Nikon F5 is a box like many others, onto which can be attached a lens, any lens of hundreds to choose from, through which light may be projected onto a piece of film. The camera's computer will most competently help the photographer focus the lens and decide proper aperture and exposure settings, but a film camera is just a BOX. One SLR does not take better pictures than the next, if both use the same film stock and correctly focused lens. This means, that it is patently ridiculous to point out that the sample is alleged to come from a F5. If they had aimed for anything resembling credibility, the sample would have been identified in terms of film stock and lens type.
FURTHER, film is not neatly arranged in square PIXELS as the alleged sample shows to contain, sprinkled with yet smaller red noise pixels. This is nothing like what film grain looks like - film under intense magnification shows a clouded and decidedly irregular mass of particles.
FURTHER YET, different film stock have different qualities! A Fujichrome Velvia 50 slidefilm will take longer or more light to expose correctly, but you'll be hard pressed to find more beautiful colors or spectacular detail on a color photograph. A 800 ISO supermarket brand on the other hand, will produce comparatively less remarkable results. So which was the sample shot with?
ALSO, what was used to scan it? How on earth did the scanning program fuck the image up like so? It must have been an insanely low resolution, grainy imager to produce such pixelation. Any garden variety hobbyist negative/slide scanner can scan film so you can nearly see the grain of the film. Here, we just see chunky pixels, with smaller red pixel grain on top : why? Who was the retarded clown operating photoshop?
Very clever, but check this out : ELECTRICLERK is a functional prop obviously inspired by the terminals used in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, - complete with fresnel lens magnifyer and tiny b/w monitor. The guts of the thing is only a dinky old mac, but it's still a cool and flawlessly executed hack.:)
Why stop with RF-oozing cabinet craters and run-off-the-mill totally original cold cathode lights. ("look, you can see this PC has PC components inside!")
Let's just go stupid and cover every square inch of surface on our machines with programmable matrix displays utilizing any substance and technology capable of emitting modulated streams of photons. Laptops could have two screens - both sides of the lid, obviously, to lure actul females from across Starbucks with your carefully tuned mood biased visualizations of Eminem mp3s. PC cases would similarly resemble the bastard offspring from disco floors and slot machines.
Take it a step further! Why make a distinction between a monitor and a case? PCs could be made with tiny hard cores surrounded by a shapeless shell of soft glowing polymer, the surface shape of which is determined by a mesh of artificial muscle fibers contracting and expanding with modulated current. The active desktop layout and mapping would be determined by the topology of the user-customizable shape of the PC "thing". You would download new case shapes over the internet to really express your true nerd self, and a virus could turn your PC into T1000.
I was four - my earliest memory is swimming in the toddlers' wading pool at a cheap vacation hotel on the tacky tourist island of Mallorca with my mom and grandmom. I believe the reason the memory is so strong is that a chewed-off end of a carrot was bopping in the water. Ewww.:)
Mickysoft's XP designers did a mediocre job surely not worth cloning. In designing their newest public interpretation of the consumer desktop, they've resorted to garish colors, plastic-y widgets and even more silly and time-wasting animations. Do you like the little Duplo people representing users? The rest of the iconography is equally retarded.
There's really no worthwhile innovation in XP's UI, it looks more like it came out of Willy Wonka's Lego Factory.
While OSX Aqua looks cute, it also fails to innovate - same old tired metaphors, reduced consistency, candy gimmicks over functionality, resource hogging shading tricks and severely reduced accessibility. The weird thing is, Apple recently had the most sensible, consistent and universally accessible implementation of the traditional (albeit tired) Xerox folders-and-documents metaphor with MacOS 9. Why all this candy fluff?
Innovation is what is needed to get ahead; candy is for kids. Mimicking the dead ends of evolution and soon-to-be desktop dinosaurs is futility.
Spheres are dumb. Tech parts are box shaped
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PC in a.... Sphere?
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Lame. Spheres are useless unless you're making spherical tanks to contain gas or liquid, in which case you've got a practical enclosure with the smallest possible surface and probably least amounts of materials required.
PC parts aren't liquid. They're boxes. Harddisks, PSUs, plugin cards, CPU encasings, it's all just goddamn boxes. A PC cabinet is generally shaped like a box because it's the most efficient container for smaller box shaped things. Even if you get a cheap-looking green ugly hollow polymer monstrosity like this, the stuff you have to put inside are still box shaped, so it's geometrically impossible to make efficient use of the space inside. You'll have to build little angular platforms inside on top of which to attach and stack your box shaped PC components. A round shape will give you nothing but grief and wasted space.
Remember those "futuristic" spherical terminals from classic Star Trek episodes? I believe I saw a television from the 1960s designed that way. It was fantastic: It was the opposite of anti-reflex coating - its glossy shiny surface reflected any lightsource in the room brilliantly - obscuring all but the brightest parts of the image it was trying to display.:)
Re:Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, You've Invented.
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Interesting.
I quite like public transportation too; the daily commute to town on the double-decker trains here is a joy - affordable, cozy and spacious, safe to snooze thru and if you like, you can surf the web from your laptop (power plug provided underneath the cafe-style small tables between the seat groups).
Rural residents obviously don't have [easy] access to such, and for this reason a personal motor vehicle is required to get anywhere. Some people equate this with freedom and I can certainly see that POV.
However, car ownership and operation is freedom under responsibility, and the congestion and frequent crashes and accidents clotting up the super expensive highway systems and interchanges, are all imo pretty good indicators that human beings on the whole are imperfect motorists.
Environmental factors aside, I think we'll be stuck with the personal motor vehicle for a while yet. At some point cars will be entirely computerized 'drive-by-wire' systems with servos making the turns of the car telegraphed by the steering wheel which would be nothing more than a sophisticated version of the wheels you use for toy console racing games, no mechanical linking anymore. There may be safety hazards, but they can no doubt be overcome with redundancy planning.
When / if we ever get to this point, a new application will come up - special high speed lanes reserved for vehicles using this technology. The lanes will have magnets embedded in the road to help guide the automatic driving systems in the cars, so drivers only have to get into this lane and let go of the wheel and put it in automatic coast mode.
Then the computer in the car will drive the car along this virtual track and select a speed which will allow traffic in this lane to run smoothly and compress as many cars as are safe to operate, in the lane, by letting them run nearly bumper to bumper.
This could be safe, because the cars in the lane would all be computer controlled, and a 'column' of cars in these 90mph bumper-to-bumper convoys would have their acceleration and braking linked so that if any one vehicle is braking, all other vehicles behind it begins to brake in the same split second, with the same force.
When you wanna break out of this column, you just press a 'breakout button' and vehicles in front and behind will push away to allow you to merge out. With regular intervals there will be breakout lanes, also with magnets, which the car will come to automatically, and here the driver will be required to grab controls and merge into ordinary traffic, which may all one day be flowing according to computerized control for greatest possible safety.
One imagines the steering wheel could be entirely obsolete in time, replaced with pushbuttons to merge left or right. In-vehicle computers would negotiate merge slots and you'd get in lane when safe to do so. Traffic flow would be much more efficient than today.
Perhaps you select at tbe beginning of your trip where you're going, and computers will schedule slots in the traffic streams, and your entire cruise from end to end will be factored into the overall traffic flow before you even get on the road. You'd know to the second exactly when you'd arrive. Unmanned delivery vehicles and supersized 'freight trains' on the road could safely ride side by side with ordinary passenger vehicles.
Imagine that emergency vehicles could push through traffic automatically pushing away to make room, like waters parting from a speeding boat.
(We pray that Microsoft will be providing neither the software to run the autonomous, in-vehicle computers, nor the traffic management systems organizing the traffic patterns. )
Related - Aqua Teens "Interfection" episode
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One of the funniest ATHF episodes EVAR. http://www.yzzerdd.com/
I had a very similar experience about a year ago with someone calling around 6pm identifying himself as 'affiliated' with the local police - Fairfax, VA - you tend to focus your attention when the police calls you at home... Well, his pitch was, he wanted me to donate twenty dollars to buy teddy bears for kids or something. I said no. Then he said, how about 10 dollars? I said no. Five?... so pushy!
I coulda spared twenty bucks sure, but as a matter of policy I flat out refuse unsolicited pitches over the phone. I'm really deep down a very nice person so I'm sometimes not good at cutting the pesky telemarkters off and going through the whole "put me on your do-not-call list" routine.
I happened to have read about the teddybears scheme in a local area newsgroup, and some posters claimed that the 'charity' in fact collected funds that went primarily to the police retirement fund and only part of the cash went to the teddybears program, so I flat out asked the caller if 100% of the funds collected went to buy teddy bears.
He said no, there was some administration overhead and some of the monies went to the local police. I asked why this information was not part of the pitch and he apparently became annoyed. He was wasting time and probably not making quota.
I asked him to put me on his do not call, and only asking him at this point after he was already annoyed, was probably a tactical error. The call was terminated, and (predictably?) I was put on the CALL THIS FUCKER FROM NOW UNTIL CHRISTMAS list.
In the next four days I received the same pitch twice a day from different male voices. Finally I put my minidisc recorder on the headset and captured a myself asking to be put on the the do not call list and got the caller's annoyed response, and explained that I had such a recording, and that I was going to pursue legal action and local news coverage if these calls did not cease immediately. The caller said fine, you're off the list, and hung up. And I didn't receive any more such pitches.
Thugs.
Where I live now, there are laws protecting the sanctitity of one's home, and telemarketing, for charities or not, is strictly forbidden. I'm very pleased with this liberty, which also extends to postal carriers by law respecting a sticker on my mailbox which excempts me from receiving junkmail.
The scumware installer appearing when you insert the CD is located on the first partition of the disc, which contains CD-rom data with win32 code. This partition has an autorun.inf file with a link to the installer.
So far I've not encountered any installers actually installing anything without first prompting for permission to do so (legal mumbo jumbo as mentioned in the discussed scheme nothing more than chaff to confuse and dissuade sheeple from clicking the 'No - I disagree with these terms. Do not install' button, which should be the preferred choice.)
However, following trends from the ever more aggressive piranha feeding frenzy world of ruthless cyber marketeers, it's a matter of certainty that we shall soon see automatically running installers delivering their nasty payloads with cunning stealth, pausing neither to seek permission or to announce that such an installation actually took place. Perhaps this has already happened. How would you know?
Stealth deployment of viral spyware is commonplace with the parasitic ridealong schemes seen infecting the installers of "free" ad-supported software such as KaZaa, and many others. This is the crack in the floorboards from where things like the Bonzi Buddy creep out at night.
To prevent exposing yourself to the risk of CD-deployed malware installation, either hold down the shift key each time you insert such a potentially infected hybrid music CD, or simply disable the autorun feature entirely - much safer, easy to do and fully reversible:
Locate this key in your windows Registry - use regedit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Serv ic es\CDRom
Set value of Autorun parameter to zero. Then reboot. In the future when you insert software installer CDs you will then have to hunt down and manually execute the installer yourself; if the location and name of the installer is not obvious, examine the now disregarded autorun.inf file at the CD-Rom drive root.
By the way, if you have one such infected CD in your collection, and you have already ripped the tracks and burned them to a 'clean' CD for listening to sans spyware and data partitions, why not mail the original disc to Mr. Ralsky at 6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
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I won't disagree with your comments, but FWIW Sony products don't suck anywhere near as much in Europe and Japan as they do in the U.S. Different factories, and very much different product lines, even if the boxes look similar. In general the European and Japanese Sony DVD players and TVs are loaded with features that you don't see in the U.S. because (no offense, I assure you) the AVERAGE american consumer doesn't give a shit about quality and features and so Sony can get away with competing mostly on price and gimmicks and living large from an undeservedly inflated brand reputation.
Example : I bought a Sony VHS while in the U.S. - it reeked to high heaven of cheapo plastic, and the firmware was buggy as fuck. You couldn't select channel 11 without the machine powering itself down. The OSD menus were white block letters on blue background looking like Atari 2600 graphics.
In Europe and Japan at the same time (late 90s) the cheapest Sony VHS videos on the market all had multicolor OSD menus, better mechanics and much better design in general.
...when we start to see images on the net that was calibrated to look nice within the silly intense gamut of a OLED screen: it'll prolly look like washed out puke on all ordinary screens. :)
You're an idiot.
It is in extremely poor taste to speculate about terror having anything to do with the accident. Everyone who knows anything about space travel, knows that re-entry is extremely hazardous and we've only been very lucky so far in more than forty years of manned space flight.
Friend, I have a healthy mind, a good perception of how things work, and I know enough about the follies of human nature to understand quite well where you are coming from. I'm very sorry that you're deluded, but I hope that you get better eventually.
... shit, I heard more credible psychobabble blackspeak from scamsters selling Perpetual Free Energy Devices and Purple Plates or Homeopathic Medicines or even Religion.
You also really should relax a bit in any case. Shrill arguments worded like yours carry no weight even if they had merit, which yours do not! Are you very young? You sound not a day over 15. You'll grow out of this eventually, I know it's awkward.
As for your challenge, I refuse to prove a negative, YOU prove a positive. I'm quite willing to "take that chance" !
If the best you can do is pop links like the ones you've already provided, leading to such gems as, I quote out of context, "....Coupled with some of the RF anomalies I've been detecting over the years, I believe that whatever creates the crop circles is creating a temporary vortex in the localized space/time continuum in the vicinity of the crop circle."
I mean, for real. Come on now. TEMPORARY VORTEX IN THE LOCALIZED SPACE/TIME CONTINUUM
So far all you've provided other than insults have been indigestible hogwash and claptrap. If you really want to state a convincing argument, try and use your own words, find a persuasive instead of scornful tone, and provide some hard data that will stand up to scientific validation and verification.
If your data indicates other-worldly cropcircle origins, would they hold up to double-blind testing?
There isn't any such thing as a 'genuine' crop circle, any more than there are 'power' crystals, magic pendants, dowsing, fairies, 'earth vibrations', Free Energy Devices, psychic 'healers', psychics, UFOs, active ingredients in homeopathic medicines, God, Jesus OR Santa Claus.
Crop circle believers happily carry on with claims of strange or supernatural properties of the flattened corn, or false circular logic arriving at supernatural conclusions when they cannot conceive of the methods employed for the design and execution of any given formation.
Rope and boards certainly aren't the only used methods, and the art of circlemaking has certainly advanced in recent years, aided by GPS and lasers and custom built devices to hitherto unseen levels of complexity. However, you'd be a fool if you think that any of these are the works of supernatural forces! Marvel instead at the creativity and craftmanship of the guys in the fields.
Popular 'science' rags have regrettably lent some undeserved credibility to the supernatural crop circle theories. I remember a story in such a magazine wherein the author claimed that the flattened crop of a crop circle continued to grow, hence, according to his logic, it is a phenomena of the supernatural order.
In reality, none of these claims have been tested and found to have any bearing. The precise same neat and tidy patterns and crop growth non-interruption can be achieved with sufficient skill by the rope-and-plankers, so please cease with this mindless drivel about "Genuine cropcircles".
You 'shall' say whatever you like, any number of times you like, even in all CAPS it doesn't make what you're saying any more true.
My jaw dropped when I saw the alien face and disc. Remarkable! Very clever technology must have been employed in order to pull this off with such precision. The execution is flawless! I'm very impressed.
Certainly this is no ordinary rope-and-plank job, One wonders if the thing was perhaps a clandestine practical execution of a tech student's exam project?
The site of the artwork may be close enough for the DGPS beacon at the Bristol Channel to have helped the punters get the edges of the rectangle aligned so precisely, but presumably a laser sighting device similar to the ones used by land surveyors could have been sufficiently accurate.
Once the rectangle corners had been defined and the circle perimeter traced, it may have been fairly trivial for two operators, or teams, to traverse the sides of the rectangle in parallel with the Device running a straight line from side to side and flattening the crop row with variable force (or width) according a predetermined bitmap courtesy of photoshop and some clever artistry. I'd love to see the original bitmap and compare with the finished formation.
You can see a thin groove at the center of each scanline in the closeup ground photos, which seems to be a wheel track. The device design is unknown, so we don't know if it had 1,2 or even 4 wheels. A rope could have been its suspension from above, though you'd think that would have caused variations in pattern density with the rope at the edges being more taut.
It would need to be somewhat heavy in order to flatten the crop and have enough mechanical force to gradually engage and disengage the crop flattening part of the mechanism during the course of each row. Perhaps the device was guided on twin taut ropes from either side of the formation, or perhaps guided optically by lasers.
From the closeup pictures the pattern looks like it was applied in one direction alone, so perhaps returning the cart to the other side was a waste cycle instead of using bidirectional 'printing'.
Interestingly, the wheel groove of the spiral is between the spiral pattern bands, as opposed to centered in the middle, so a different machine may have been used here, perhaps operating concurrently with the alien portrait scanline 'printer'.
The question remains how the row alignment came to be so spot on both in terms of row spacing and 'horizontal hold' from row to row : The vertical details are quite precisely in sync from row to row, so the tech and methodology used is indisputably excellent.
I hope eventually the artists and hoaxers come forth and reimburse the farmer for his losses, and reveal their clever technology. I think that would make for an interesting read.
Actually, the KiSS player handles OGG just fine.
There are so many new Slashdot stories featuring case mod kits and the like. These are filed under the 'hardware' subject which sometimes contains actual legitimate, interesting stories about hardware, as opposed to stories about glowing things which crack babies attach to their hardware in order to make it glow.
Apple introduces a somewhat practical keyboard which illuminates when dark, so that the symbols on the keys are readily visible. This is nice, and seems like a useful feature.
The case mod subject/response here is a type of glow strands to be routed between the keyboard keys so that the spaces between them light up, which is useful if you have no tactile sensation of touch in your fingers and therefore don't know where the keys are. If you do know where the keys are, but are just looking for the key symbols, you're out of luck because PC keyboard keys are opague and don't benefit in any practical, functional manner from this mode of illumination.
Therefore, IT IS A WASTE OF TIME, equivalent in absurdity to cargo cults fabricating mock stick and canvas airplanes. "Almost like a Macintosh!" - when you were a kid, did you also fasten cardboard cards with clothespins to the spokes of your bicycle in order to make it sound like a moped?
Couldn't there be a separate subject for case mods? That way I could filter this stuff right out. I propose the icon representing the subject should be a baboon's bright red arse, the color of which also serves no functional purpose but nevertheless appears to attract other baboons.
Yes, but the vast majority of demos were PAL, not NTSC. The US Amiga scene was TINY compared to the European one.
:)
Keep an eye on alt.binaries.emulation.misc for Amiga demos and download WinUAE : The newer versions run the old demos in full speed 99% perfect on my 1GHz PIII... at the most I sometime have to set it to skip every other frame, otherwise it's perfect.
Google works. Google is good. Their page ranking system quite effectively filters out junk. A lowly scamster like the Search King moron don't deserve all this attention he's getting and no doubt wanted.
Remember those wacky Scienos? A while back they tried to inflate search engine page ranks for 'official' sites, by fabricating thousands of nearly-identical fake 'personal homepages' for their members, with alike-sounding 'success stories'. These were hosted on a bunch of camouflaged Scientology domains like www.our-home.org and many others. The pages were stuffed with official links, and it was quite clear that the primary purpose was to trick Google and other search engines into pushing all anti-Scientology sites out of the first page of returned hits.
At first, they nearly succeeded. There was other mischief about. You may recall that Google for a while didn't cache Operation Clambake (www.clambake.org) due to legal action by Scieno lawyer scum. Anyway, now Clambake is ranked a solid #2 hit on "Scientology" searches, clearly evidence of intelligent filtering going on at Google, for which we should be thankful.
Bollocks, how retarded it feels to accidentally click the submit button before you're done writing. Now I'm just not bothered to write the rest of my dumb and irrelevant little piece. I'll just go away and play with WinUAE now. :)
The PC demos are really nice looking, and kudos to everyone involved with the production of this DVD. PC demos just don't interest me near as much as that which came before them.
To me, the real Scene flourished in Northern Europe back in the 8 and 16 bit days, and it peaked sometime in the early 1990s, just before the PC demos started to trickle in with chunky imitations of yesteryear's cool.
The "real" Scene hardware in those days were anemic, RAM cramped microcomputers with CPU clocks in the single-digit MHz range. The PC was still Dad's chunky, sensible spreadsheet processor, and the God Machines were the immortal C64 and the (for its day) multi-media rich Amiga.
Coders, musicians and pixel artists all had their share of the old school Scene glory;
The coders, because they had
The musicians, because they had to program their tunes and work miracles with 3 or 4 channels and make their own 8-bit samples with amazingly primitive technology and software.
Try flipping through the bluish-green section of a Pantone swatch book and attempt to scan or photograph some of the pages. Then try and get the colors on the screen to get exactly right. Many colors cannot be represented accurately on a RGB monitor, though the wavelengths of those colors CAN be represented using combinations of LEDs emitting different wavelengths than the phosphors or LCD pigments used on today's monitors.
So much like Pantone introduced their Hexachrome six-color printing system to get more accurate color printing on paper, I should like to see an image processing system with 4 or more wavelengths.
At the very least we should get rid of sRGB (which sucks) and switch to something with a nicer gamut like Adobe RGB.
The Foveon is smart, takes pretty photos, The Sigma X3 based camera is nice, but so far it is also not very light sensitive and so many conventional CCDs can easily outperform it in practical use. Besides, it still only measures light in three wavelengths like regular CCDs, so the net results are nearly indistinguishable.
Anyway, back to the Discovery article : The featured sample picture with the butterfly is plain ridiculous : The 'magnified detail' views purports to show how a segment of an image would look like as photographed by different cameras, but as any professional [digital] photographer would tell you, the Nikon Coolpix 2500 sample is as ludicrously fake as the "Nikon F5" picture below. First off, the CP2500 "sample" looks more like a photoshop pixelated version of the image above it. The sample certainly looks nothing like the interpolated pixels digital photographers are used to seeing in close-up due to the nature of Bayer matrix CCDs used in nearly all digital cameras, including the Coolpix 2500.
Since each pixel in such cameras, as the article actually points out, can see either red, green or blue, neighboring pixels in the finished picture cannot be entirely different, because the hue of each pixel is determined from the brightness of the neighboring red, green and blue monochrome CCD pixels. Therefore a magnified image is always a little "soft" and true distinguished color detail are only possible over spans of two or more pixels. In the sample, however, the neighboring pixels shown are clearly completely unrelated, and as such the magnified sample is FAKE.
As for the third sample : For those who might not know, the Nikon F5 is a box like many others, onto which can be attached a lens, any lens of hundreds to choose from, through which light may be projected onto a piece of film. The camera's computer will most competently help the photographer focus the lens and decide proper aperture and exposure settings, but a film camera is just a BOX. One SLR does not take better pictures than the next, if both use the same film stock and correctly focused lens. This means, that it is patently ridiculous to point out that the sample is alleged to come from a F5. If they had aimed for anything resembling credibility, the sample would have been identified in terms of film stock and lens type.
FURTHER, film is not neatly arranged in square PIXELS as the alleged sample shows to contain, sprinkled with yet smaller red noise pixels. This is nothing like what film grain looks like - film under intense magnification shows a clouded and decidedly irregular mass of particles.
FURTHER YET, different film stock have different qualities! A Fujichrome Velvia 50 slidefilm will take longer or more light to expose correctly, but you'll be hard pressed to find more beautiful colors or spectacular detail on a color photograph. A 800 ISO supermarket brand on the other hand, will produce comparatively less remarkable results. So which was the sample shot with?
ALSO, what was used to scan it? How on earth did the scanning program fuck the image up like so? It must have been an insanely low resolution, grainy imager to produce such pixelation. Any garden variety hobbyist negative/slide scanner can scan film so you can nearly see the grain of the film. Here, we just see chunky pixels, with smaller red pixel grain on top : why? Who was the retarded clown operating photoshop?
GRRR.
Funny, how internal microsoft strategy letters, with their abbreviations and paramilitary jargon and posturing, resemble internal Scientology memos.
http://www.xenu.net/
Very clever, but check this out : ELECTRICLERK is a functional prop obviously inspired by the terminals used in Terry Gilliam's Brazil , - complete with fresnel lens magnifyer and tiny b/w monitor. The guts of the thing is only a dinky old mac, but it's still a cool and flawlessly executed hack. :)
Fake illness? RSI "all in your head" ? I never heard such a claim outside the realm of righty AM talk radio...
Why stop with RF-oozing cabinet craters and run-off-the-mill totally original cold cathode lights. ("look, you can see this PC has PC components inside!")
Let's just go stupid and cover every square inch of surface on our machines with programmable matrix displays utilizing any substance and technology capable of emitting modulated streams of photons. Laptops could have two screens - both sides of the lid, obviously, to lure actul females from across Starbucks with your carefully tuned mood biased visualizations of Eminem mp3s. PC cases would similarly resemble the bastard offspring from disco floors and slot machines.
Take it a step further! Why make a distinction between a monitor and a case? PCs could be made with tiny hard cores surrounded by a shapeless shell of soft glowing polymer, the surface shape of which is determined by a mesh of artificial muscle fibers contracting and expanding with modulated current. The active desktop layout and mapping would be determined by the topology of the user-customizable shape of the PC "thing". You would download new case shapes over the internet to really express your true nerd self, and a virus could turn your PC into T1000.
I was four - my earliest memory is swimming in the toddlers' wading pool at a cheap vacation hotel on the tacky tourist island of Mallorca with my mom and grandmom. I believe the reason the memory is so strong is that a chewed-off end of a carrot was bopping in the water. Ewww. :)
Mickysoft's XP designers did a mediocre job surely not worth cloning. In designing their newest public interpretation of the consumer desktop, they've resorted to garish colors, plastic-y widgets and even more silly and time-wasting animations. Do you like the little Duplo people representing users? The rest of the iconography is equally retarded.
There's really no worthwhile innovation in XP's UI, it looks more like it came out of Willy Wonka's Lego Factory.
While OSX Aqua looks cute, it also fails to innovate - same old tired metaphors, reduced consistency, candy gimmicks over functionality, resource hogging shading tricks and severely reduced accessibility. The weird thing is, Apple recently had the most sensible, consistent and universally accessible implementation of the traditional (albeit tired) Xerox folders-and-documents metaphor with MacOS 9. Why all this candy fluff?
Innovation is what is needed to get ahead; candy is for kids. Mimicking the dead ends of evolution and soon-to-be desktop dinosaurs is futility.
Lame. Spheres are useless unless you're making spherical tanks to contain gas or liquid, in which case you've got a practical enclosure with the smallest possible surface and probably least amounts of materials required.
:)
PC parts aren't liquid. They're boxes. Harddisks, PSUs, plugin cards, CPU encasings, it's all just goddamn boxes. A PC cabinet is generally shaped like a box because it's the most efficient container for smaller box shaped things. Even if you get a cheap-looking green ugly hollow polymer monstrosity like this, the stuff you have to put inside are still box shaped, so it's geometrically impossible to make efficient use of the space inside. You'll have to build little angular platforms inside on top of which to attach and stack your box shaped PC components. A round shape will give you nothing but grief and wasted space.
Remember those "futuristic" spherical terminals from classic Star Trek episodes? I believe I saw a television from the 1960s designed that way. It was fantastic: It was the opposite of anti-reflex coating - its glossy shiny surface reflected any lightsource in the room brilliantly - obscuring all but the brightest parts of the image it was trying to display.
Interesting.
I quite like public transportation too; the daily commute to town on the double-decker trains here is a joy - affordable, cozy and spacious, safe to snooze thru and if you like, you can surf the web from your laptop (power plug provided underneath the cafe-style small tables between the seat groups).
Rural residents obviously don't have [easy] access to such, and for this reason a personal motor vehicle is required to get anywhere. Some people equate this with freedom and I can certainly see that POV.
However, car ownership and operation is freedom under responsibility, and the congestion and frequent crashes and accidents clotting up the super expensive highway systems and interchanges, are all imo pretty good indicators that human beings on the whole are imperfect motorists.
Environmental factors aside, I think we'll be stuck with the personal motor vehicle for a while yet. At some point cars will be entirely computerized 'drive-by-wire' systems with servos making the turns of the car telegraphed by the steering wheel which would be nothing more than a sophisticated version of the wheels you use for toy console racing games, no mechanical linking anymore. There may be safety hazards, but they can no doubt be overcome with redundancy planning.
When / if we ever get to this point, a new application will come up - special high speed lanes reserved for vehicles using this technology. The lanes will have magnets embedded in the road to help guide the automatic driving systems in the cars, so drivers only have to get into this lane and let go of the wheel and put it in automatic coast mode.
Then the computer in the car will drive the car along this virtual track and select a speed which will allow traffic in this lane to run smoothly and compress as many cars as are safe to operate, in the lane, by letting them run nearly bumper to bumper.
This could be safe, because the cars in the lane would all be computer controlled, and a 'column' of cars in these 90mph bumper-to-bumper convoys would have their acceleration and braking linked so that if any one vehicle is braking, all other vehicles behind it begins to brake in the same split second, with the same force.
When you wanna break out of this column, you just press a 'breakout button' and vehicles in front and behind will push away to allow you to merge out. With regular intervals there will be breakout lanes, also with magnets, which the car will come to automatically, and here the driver will be required to grab controls and merge into ordinary traffic, which may all one day be flowing according to computerized control for greatest possible safety.
One imagines the steering wheel could be entirely obsolete in time, replaced with pushbuttons to merge left or right. In-vehicle computers would negotiate merge slots and you'd get in lane when safe to do so. Traffic flow would be much more efficient than today.
Perhaps you select at tbe beginning of your trip where you're going, and computers will schedule slots in the traffic streams, and your entire cruise from end to end will be factored into the overall traffic flow before you even get on the road. You'd know to the second exactly when you'd arrive. Unmanned delivery vehicles and supersized 'freight trains' on the road could safely ride side by side with ordinary passenger vehicles.
Imagine that emergency vehicles could push through traffic automatically pushing away to make room, like waters parting from a speeding boat.
(We pray that Microsoft will be providing neither the software to run the autonomous, in-vehicle computers, nor the traffic management systems organizing the traffic patterns. )
One of the funniest ATHF episodes EVAR.
http://www.yzzerdd.com/
I had a very similar experience about a year ago with someone calling around 6pm identifying himself as 'affiliated' with the local police - Fairfax, VA - you tend to focus your attention when the police calls you at home... Well, his pitch was, he wanted me to donate twenty dollars to buy teddy bears for kids or something. I said no. Then he said, how about 10 dollars? I said no. Five? ... so pushy!
I coulda spared twenty bucks sure, but as a matter of policy I flat out refuse unsolicited pitches over the phone. I'm really deep down a very nice person so I'm sometimes not good at cutting the pesky telemarkters off and going through the whole "put me on your do-not-call list" routine.
I happened to have read about the teddybears scheme in a local area newsgroup, and some posters claimed that the 'charity' in fact collected funds that went primarily to the police retirement fund and only part of the cash went to the teddybears program, so I flat out asked the caller if 100% of the funds collected went to buy teddy bears.
He said no, there was some administration overhead and some of the monies went to the local police. I asked why this information was not part of the pitch and he apparently became annoyed. He was wasting time and probably not making quota.
I asked him to put me on his do not call, and only asking him at this point after he was already annoyed, was probably a tactical error. The call was terminated, and (predictably?) I was put on the CALL THIS FUCKER FROM NOW UNTIL CHRISTMAS list.
In the next four days I received the same pitch twice a day from different male voices. Finally I put my minidisc recorder on the headset and captured a myself asking to be put on the the do not call list and got the caller's annoyed response, and explained that I had such a recording, and that I was going to pursue legal action and local news coverage if these calls did not cease immediately. The caller said fine, you're off the list, and hung up. And I didn't receive any more such pitches.
Thugs.
Where I live now, there are laws protecting the sanctitity of one's home, and telemarketing, for charities or not, is strictly forbidden. I'm very pleased with this liberty, which also extends to postal carriers by law respecting a sticker on my mailbox which excempts me from receiving junkmail.
(Applies only to windows users)
:
:
v ic es\CDRom
The scumware installer appearing when you insert the CD is located on the first partition of the disc, which contains CD-rom data with win32 code. This partition has an autorun.inf file with a link to the installer.
So far I've not encountered any installers actually installing anything without first prompting for permission to do so (legal mumbo jumbo as mentioned in the discussed scheme nothing more than chaff to confuse and dissuade sheeple from clicking the 'No - I disagree with these terms. Do not install' button, which should be the preferred choice.)
However, following trends from the ever more aggressive piranha feeding frenzy world of ruthless cyber marketeers, it's a matter of certainty that we shall soon see automatically running installers delivering their nasty payloads with cunning stealth, pausing neither to seek permission or to announce that such an installation actually took place. Perhaps this has already happened. How would you know?
Stealth deployment of viral spyware is commonplace with the parasitic ridealong schemes seen infecting the installers of "free" ad-supported software such as KaZaa, and many others. This is the crack in the floorboards from where things like the Bonzi Buddy creep out at night.
To prevent exposing yourself to the risk of CD-deployed malware installation, either hold down the shift key each time you insert such a potentially infected hybrid music CD, or simply disable the autorun feature entirely - much safer, easy to do and fully reversible
Locate this key in your windows Registry - use regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Ser
Set value of Autorun parameter to zero. Then reboot. In the future when you insert software installer CDs you will then have to hunt down and manually execute the installer yourself; if the location and name of the installer is not obvious, examine the now disregarded autorun.inf file at the CD-Rom drive root.
By the way, if you have one such infected CD in your collection, and you have already ripped the tracks and burned them to a 'clean' CD for listening to sans spyware and data partitions, why not mail the original disc to Mr. Ralsky at 6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322