Moderated Off topic? This was a straight reply to the first message and topical to the whole thread as well. Are the moderators on crack?
What you guys don't seem to understand is that slashdot is a DISCUSSION forum. Moderating like this squelches legitimate discussion starters and makes people afraid to post using their logins! I suppose I will just get moderated down for this. But I wish it were a little less formal and people could just post what they wanted. If it wasn't brilliant it wouldn't get modded up but at least they would get to have their say without being censored. This post definately wasn't brilliant but it wasn't even close to deserving an offtopic -1 rating.
This year's competition had a pretty pathetic group of entrys. Nothing like last year's competition. It seems like most of the reviewers would only recommend you play one five or six of these games. However If you are a first time player or looking for something with an amazing story check out this winner from the '99 xyzzy awards.
Instead of forcing everyone to included a rating, or be assumed to be a child safe rating. It think that the content of the internet at this time warrents that all content be assumed to be non-child safe.
Then if a site has verified that it is child safe it should be given a rating accordingly. This of course woul change the litigation was handled since it would be impossible to litigate for accidently stumbling across adult content. This would have to be changed, because as we all know America DEMANDS litigation.
So we would change the proposal to allow people who were searching for adult content to sue if they stumbled across pages without tits that were not properly down rated from the default XXX rating.
This model seems to suit the internet audience much better than the safesurf act. It would require far less change to the existing structure as everyone knows most sites are porn sites and most people just use the internet to browse porn.
I saw everything you just said on FoxNews this afternoon. You probably wrote it verbatim from what you heard on the TV. How does this constitute a conspiracy to keep from admitting these facts? The only conspiracy is that you are using this readily available information and twisting it to karma whore.
> Well, not quite. Cable has the same load both at local loop >AND the same load at the peering point. DSL has the load only at the >peering point.
Not Quite! The local loop is typically the fastest. Most isps will use a group of t1s divided among the customers. A t1 is rather slow compared to the speed of the local loop. Which means that the bottleneck is still at the same place with DSL and Cable.
One of Roger Zelaznys greatest works.
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 2
I was originally pointed to this book by a friend of mine who is interested in eastern religions. Although I am more of a sci-fi guy I took it up. And it turned out to be one of the most amazing science fiction books i ever read.
Not only is this a great science book it manages to be religious deep without sounding pretentious or overblown. Mahasamatman (sam) is a pacifist and bhuddist in a culture that is primarily fire and brimstone hinduist. He attempts to change the way the word works, spiritually as well as politically by assuming the role of the budda. Along the way he attracts many people who seem to him to be a lot more suited to the role of the budda, and eventually lives up to his own creation.
This story is truly epic, it spans thousands of years and is a fast and lively read. I would recommend it to everyoneone.
But on to the original reason for my post. If you have not read Zelazny before you should also read some of his other works. Most notibly the Amber series. If you can find 'The Great book of Amber' (a compilation of 10 of his books) you will be very lucky. I beleive that this is the best dimension-hopping sci-fi book ever created. Zelazny is a master of creating new and realistic worlds. And unlike some authors, like niven who I love but can recognize faults in, he can write excellent emotional characterizations as well.
Amber is a series about a family of immortals who have the ability to move from dimension to dimension and modify reality around themselves. But mostly its about the tyranical machinations of the heroes immortal brothers who attempt to take over their homeland after their father disappears and eventually the entire universe. Just read it.
While you are technically correct in that some types of steno can decrease the size of a file. You have to take into account the the fact that you can not represent more information than there are bits to represent it with.
What this means is this: If you decrease the file size after added stenoed information you have also decreased the quality of your carrier signal. Which is just as noticable as increasing the file size.
Even with systems where the total length of the file is unchanged. (data is stored by shifting 1 byte up or down in a pattern) there is a noticable decrease in quality. To store information in an image you must loose some of the quality of the image if you wish it to stay the same size.
What about noise sent over a frequqncy high (or low) enough that we can't hear it but that still is available through your stereo speakers? Could a watermark be encoded in barely-out-of-range (for human hearing) frequencies?
This is true it could be encoded out of the range of hearing of the human ear. However if it was encoded out of range of the human ear then it is easily removed. In fact it would probably be simply removed by just compressing it as an mp3, since mp3 files do not store any information that is out of range of human hearing. A watermark like this could be removed with a simple filter. Most music editing programs available now could remove it in minutes no hacking necessary.
The Risc OS fonts are blurry and wouldn't really be useful for day to day computer use. Looking at them gave me a headache in anticipation.
Risc OS's antialiasing scheme was a cheap dirty hack, its just a square pixel routine for supersampling. This is exactly what true-type was built to avoid. (and why risc'os brags that it was faster than true-type.)
The reason Microsoft font antialiasing looks better is that it is not true super-sample antialiasing. Square subpixel antialiasing creates blurryness where there should be none, such as in straight vertical and horizontal lines. Microsoft's engine only does anti-aliasing on curves and diagonal lines that exceed some threshhold of pixel jumpiness. And BTW: this is the true-type recommended way of dealing with fonts.
I wish there was a Moderation option of STUPID (attempt at humor). or MORONIC IDEA. or even just CLUELESS. This would give moderators many more options when dealing with posts like this, not funny or interesting, just kind of embarassing.
Warning: this post is flamebait, but for a good cause.
ps: another great moderator option would be WRONG: GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT BEFORE POSTING. but thats not related to this particular reply.
Actually Iron in large enough amounts will kill you. (and i'm not talking about an anvil being dropped on your head either).
Earlier this year i saw an item in a newspaper that said of all the poison deaths in the united states. (for children) iron overdose was the most common. The method of overdose was from swallowing their parents vitamen tablets. It takes a couple days for a child to die from iron overdose, i have heard it isn't very pretty, the body just starts shutting down. There is no way to remove it from the system once its there.
Anyway I wouldn't go drinking water that is brown/red from iron content. Adults can overdose too, just takes more of it.
I believe the pants cam was originally meant to be live, but it never turned out that way, for now it is just looping through 2400 saved jpgs that were made during the first run of the camera.
You can read more about it at http://diddl.firehead.org/pantscam/ This is a sort of informal faq, (not by the same person wearing the pants)
Re:You know your a MUD addict when...
on
MUD Shell
·
· Score: 1
I once became so addicted to muds that i woke up in the morning and my fingers instinctively typed. Wake Stand
And whenever i saw a heidi wall post i typed 'Attack Troll'
Ok i know this is an obvious troll but I will respond anyway. This guy has some sick idea of american humour, but he completely forgets that the worlds most wacked out humour always comes from britain.
case in point Monty Python, a naked man playing a piano. The second point of course is that most of the american tv he sees is SUPPOSED to be funny, (but rarely is the way british tv can be at times, God i love the wacky accents)
This is the only comic that I read a few strips and had to go back to the very beginning. The best web-based comic I have ever seen.
It should have been included in the list in the article but unfortinutely it does not qualify as a serious strip because it is so bizarre. Or so the author was told bvy the syndicates, but you must check it out. If you like monty-pythonish weird humor
>Silly boy, if you're in orbit you don't need a railgun. Just drop things on 'em. Never heard of gravity?
More Info for you non-niven fans
Niven Described 6 foot bars of steal (very skinny) with small guidance fins to hold them upright. drop a couple thousand from orbit over a battlefield and they would decimate everything on the field. dropped from orbit they could go straight through a tank like butter.
You also fail to mention the weight of the ammo itself which is a huge component of stopping power
These military rifles have bullets with incredibly small profiles which are very light. Some of the heaviest bullets (on hand held weapons) never score above 200 grain. I believe this is 0.4 oz., where it looks like the rail-gun could loft a quarter pound (very conservative).
At 200 vs 2000 fps the rail gun would still have 4 times the kinetic energy and a much larger profile.
My father died suddenly and the majority of the estate was lost because inheritance tax forced us to liquidate all of his assets. Mostly because the assest were valued at far more than we could actually sell for. So with a snap of the governments fingers my intended future home disappeared.
Also Inheritance tax is not the only thing that forces rich people to donate to charities. Rich people can be taxed on income from investments at upwards of 60-70 percent. Especially wind-falls. Donating to charities reduces their tax bracket. Also a non-profit organization makes a great tax shelter since money can be moved tax free as long as the organization does not return dividends.
Slashdot Mirror
Moderated Off topic?
This was a straight reply to the first message and topical to the whole thread as well. Are the moderators on crack?
What you guys don't seem to understand is that slashdot is a DISCUSSION forum. Moderating like this squelches legitimate discussion starters and makes people afraid to post using their logins!
I suppose I will just get moderated down for this. But I wish it were a little less formal and people could just post what they wanted. If it wasn't brilliant it wouldn't get modded up but at least they would get to have their say without being censored. This post definately wasn't brilliant but it wasn't even close to deserving an offtopic -1 rating.
Regards,
This year's competition had a pretty pathetic group of entrys. Nothing like last year's competition. It seems like most of the reviewers would only recommend you play one five or six of these games.
However If you are a first time player or looking for something with an amazing story check out this winner from the '99 xyzzy awards.
Worlds Apart
Instead of forcing everyone to included a rating, or be assumed to be a child safe rating. It think that the content of the internet at this time warrents that all content be assumed to be non-child safe.
Then if a site has verified that it is child safe it should be given a rating accordingly. This of course woul change the litigation was handled since it would be impossible to litigate for accidently stumbling across adult content. This would have to be changed, because as we all know America DEMANDS litigation.
So we would change the proposal to allow people who were searching for adult content to sue if they stumbled across pages without tits that were not properly down rated from the default XXX rating.
This model seems to suit the internet audience much better than the safesurf act. It would require far less change to the existing structure as everyone knows most sites are porn sites and most people just use the internet to browse porn.
Do you think this is some sort of secret?
I saw everything you just said on FoxNews this afternoon. You probably wrote it verbatim from what you heard on the TV. How does this constitute a conspiracy to keep from admitting these facts? The only conspiracy is that you are using this readily available information and twisting it to karma whore.
Its nice to see a well thought out, insightful, and explanatory rather than agressive reply on slashdot.
We all know how rare this is. Thanks.
> Well, not quite. Cable has the same load both at local loop
>AND the same load at the peering point. DSL has the load only at the
>peering point.
Not Quite! The local loop is typically the fastest. Most isps will use a group of t1s divided among the customers. A t1 is rather slow compared to the speed of the local loop.
Which means that the bottleneck is still at the same place with DSL and Cable.
I was originally pointed to this book by a friend of mine who is interested in eastern religions. Although I am more of a sci-fi guy I took it up. And it turned out to be one of the most amazing science fiction books i ever read.
Not only is this a great science book it manages to be religious deep without sounding pretentious or overblown. Mahasamatman (sam) is a pacifist and bhuddist in a culture that is primarily fire and brimstone hinduist. He attempts to change the way the word works, spiritually as well as politically by assuming the role of the budda. Along the way he attracts many people who seem to him to be a lot more suited to the role of the budda, and eventually lives up to his own creation.
This story is truly epic, it spans thousands of years and is a fast and lively read. I would recommend it to everyoneone.
But on to the original reason for my post. If you have not read Zelazny before you should also read some of his other works. Most notibly the Amber series. If you can find 'The Great book of Amber' (a compilation of 10 of his books) you will be very lucky. I beleive that this is the best dimension-hopping sci-fi book ever created. Zelazny is a master of creating new and realistic worlds. And unlike some authors, like niven who I love but can recognize faults in, he can write excellent emotional characterizations as well.
Amber is a series about a family of immortals who have the ability to move from dimension to dimension and modify reality around themselves. But mostly its about the tyranical machinations of the heroes immortal brothers who attempt to take over their homeland after their father disappears and eventually the entire universe. Just read it.
Regards,
R. George Davison
Eww Good Idea, we only need a couple million more goats and we can get into space! GOATS are for the future, for space!
Seriously though, do you think we could make a space elevator out of a fiber that stretches 300% of its own length?
While you are technically correct in that some types of steno can decrease the size of a file. You have to take into account the the fact that you can not represent more information than there are bits to represent it with.
What this means is this:
If you decrease the file size after added stenoed information you have also decreased the quality of your carrier signal. Which is just as noticable as increasing the file size.
Even with systems where the total length of the file is unchanged. (data is stored by shifting 1 byte up or down in a pattern) there is a noticable decrease in quality. To store information in an image you must loose some of the quality of the image if you wish it to stay the same size.
What about noise sent over a frequqncy high (or low) enough that we can't hear it but that still is available through your stereo speakers? Could a watermark be encoded in barely-out-of-range (for human hearing) frequencies?
This is true it could be encoded out of the range of hearing of the human ear. However if it was encoded out of range of the human ear then it is easily removed. In fact it would probably be simply removed by just compressing it as an mp3, since mp3 files do not store any information that is out of range of human hearing.
A watermark like this could be removed with a simple filter. Most music editing programs available now could remove it in minutes no hacking necessary.
The Risc OS fonts are blurry and wouldn't really be useful for day to day computer use. Looking at them gave me a headache in anticipation.
Risc OS's antialiasing scheme was a cheap dirty hack, its just a square pixel routine for supersampling. This is exactly what true-type was built to avoid. (and why risc'os brags that it was faster than true-type.)
The reason Microsoft font antialiasing looks better is that it is not true super-sample antialiasing. Square subpixel antialiasing creates blurryness where there should be none, such as in straight vertical and horizontal lines. Microsoft's engine only does anti-aliasing on curves and diagonal lines that exceed some threshhold of pixel jumpiness.
And BTW: this is the true-type recommended way of dealing with fonts.
I wish there was a Moderation option of STUPID (attempt at humor). or MORONIC IDEA. or even just CLUELESS. This would give moderators many more options when dealing with posts like this, not funny or interesting, just kind of embarassing.
Warning: this post is flamebait, but for a good cause.
ps: another great moderator option would be WRONG: GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT BEFORE POSTING. but thats not related to this particular reply.
Actually Iron in large enough amounts will kill you. (and i'm not talking about an anvil being dropped on your head either).
Earlier this year i saw an item in a newspaper that said of all the poison deaths in the united states. (for children) iron overdose was the most common. The method of overdose was from swallowing their parents vitamen tablets. It takes a couple days for a child to die from iron overdose, i have heard it isn't very pretty, the body just starts shutting down. There is no way to remove it from the system once its there.
Anyway I wouldn't go drinking water that is brown/red from iron content. Adults can overdose too, just takes more of it.
I believe the pants cam was originally meant to be live, but it never turned out that way, for now it is just looping through 2400 saved jpgs that were made during the first run of the camera.
You can read more about it at http://diddl.firehead.org/pantscam/ This is a sort of informal faq, (not by the same person wearing the pants)
I once became so addicted to muds that i woke up in the morning and my fingers instinctively typed.
Wake
Stand
And whenever i saw a heidi wall post i typed 'Attack Troll'
Ok i know this is an obvious troll but I will respond anyway. This guy has some sick idea of american humour, but he completely forgets that the worlds most wacked out humour always comes from britain.
case in point Monty Python, a naked man playing a piano.
The second point of course is that most of the american tv he sees is SUPPOSED to be funny, (but rarely is the way british tv can be at times, God i love the wacky accents)
This is the only comic that I read a few strips and had to go back to the very beginning. The best web-based comic I have ever seen.
It should have been included in the list in the article but unfortinutely it does not qualify as a serious strip because it is so bizarre. Or so the author was told bvy the syndicates, but you must check it out. If you like monty-pythonish weird humor
I think this might be the wrong audience for this type of article or even this type of show.
More Info for you non-niven fans
Niven Described 6 foot bars of steal (very skinny) with small guidance fins to hold them upright. drop a couple thousand from orbit over a battlefield and they would decimate everything on the field. dropped from orbit they could go straight through a tank like butter.
You also fail to mention the weight of the ammo itself which is a huge component of stopping power
These military rifles have bullets with incredibly small profiles which are very light. Some of the heaviest bullets (on hand held weapons) never score above 200 grain. I believe this is 0.4 oz., where it looks like the rail-gun could loft a quarter pound (very conservative).
At 200 vs 2000 fps the rail gun would still have 4 times the kinetic energy and a much larger profile.
My father died suddenly and the majority of the estate was lost because inheritance tax forced us to liquidate all of his assets. Mostly because the assest were valued at far more than we could actually sell for. So with a snap of the governments fingers my intended future home disappeared. Also Inheritance tax is not the only thing that forces rich people to donate to charities. Rich people can be taxed on income from investments at upwards of 60-70 percent. Especially wind-falls. Donating to charities reduces their tax bracket. Also a non-profit organization makes a great tax shelter since money can be moved tax free as long as the organization does not return dividends.