CDs have never been difficult to copy. In fact, being able to copy individual songs easily from a CD to tape (and thereby making custom mix tapes) was a big selling point in the early days of CDs and helped lead to their widespread adoption.
As far as quality issues go, taped copies of CDs wasn't much worse than a store-bought prerecorded tape. Third and fourth generation recordings of course were significantly degraded, but that problem had to do with tapes, not CDs.
American Pie did have an R rating. And I didn't think it had a "completely irresponsible attitude towards teenage sex". The whole pretext of the movie (four guys tryig to get laid and dealing with their insecurities about it) is a fairly accurate portrayal of real high school.
Microsoft has a free Powerpoint viewer available for Windows. It isn't quite small enough to fit on a floppy, but then again, neither are most of the Powerpoint presentations you're likely to come across nowadays. And it does require an install, which is pretty lame. But the point is, you don't NEED to purchase MS Office to view/print Powerpoint presentations. I use it because I don't own office and sometimes I find stuff on the web that I want to read that are only available in Powerpoint. (Google's "View as HTML" link leaves a lot to be desired.)
Re:open source/academic projects?
on
The Face Detector
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· Score: 2, Informative
Most of this research falls into two categories: Government-funded work at universities, and private research by companies looking to sell a commercial product. While it is near impossible to get developers on commercial systems to disclose their algorithm details, the publicly funded stuff is usually available for anyone who wants to take the time to leaf through PAMI or any number of other technical journals. Universities study this stuff with publication as a primary goal, so it's just a matter of knowing where to look. MIT's CBCL and CMU's Face Group are two of the better-known groups working on this kind of stuff, but there are others. Even if the researchers do not make their code available (and many do), it isn't too hard to put together an implementation and open source it yourself, as the algorithms themselves are publicly available in journals. I know because I implemented such an algorithm in a course last semester.
The hard part is figuring out the little details that often get inexplicably omitted from journal papers. What are the particulars of the dataset? How are the training images preprocessed? What is the arbitration strategy for overlapping detections? These are the types of details that seperate the output quality of systems that use identical algorithms. In many cases, the researchers are happy to answer questions via email, unless they have plans to spin the research off into a private company.
The Big Dig is NOT just the new Ted Williams tunnel under Boston Harbor. A majority of the cost was spent putting a 10 lane highway that passes underneath the city, building a 14 lane bridge over the Charles, as well as a lot of other work. And those huge cost overruns were due more to poor management and corruption than legitimate unforseen expenses.
It's fair to say that the Big Dig was too expensive, but I don't think that it could be considered "easy" relative to anything.
I think your point would've been better made comparing this project to the Chunnel. That 30 mile link cost about $13 billion (U.S.). So, yeah, 30 million seems a bit on the low side.
I think you're wrong. Most of the people working on this kind of stuff are looking primarily at applications to help the disabled. That is not only where the funding is, but some people are actually interested in improving the quality of life for others.
Personally, I think the technique of reading EEGs off the scalp is going to be more popular, at least in the short term. It isn't invasive and it is much less expensive. Disclaimer: My masters thesis is on EEG classification for BCI, so I might be biased:)
(I hope those links are OK...Preview isn't working for some reason.)
if a story was rejected, I'd be more likely to just throw the baby out with the bathwater tho.
How about still posting "rejected" stories, just not on the main page. Stuff regularly gets posted to the science slashbox (for instance) that is never on the main page. People who are interested in the topic will still find the article and read the posts.
Of course, dupes is a different can of worms. But if you had something +5 insightful to say about a duped story, maybe you should have said it the first time around:)
The client can turn it off if he/she really doesn't trust me
If I didn't trust you, why would I believe the option to turn off the backdoor actually works?
Anyway, I used to do support for a small company (3 other people when I started), and we would use backdoors all the time. Clients would call and ask us to use our god login to fix whatever problem they were having. Backdoors for support reasons are really useful, especially when the people you are supporting aren't that computer savy (i.e. when you are talking to the on the phone and tell them to click something, you can't be sure that they actually did).
Because it was such a small shop and the clients all knew the developers and support staff, trust wasn't an issue.
I'm sure there are some bored crackers out there who'd tackle this for a chance at some cash.
[In Chris Rock voice:] Crazy cracker-ass-crackers. They always tryin' to beat the lotto and steal the cash from non-internet havin' brothas. Cracka-ass-crackers! [End Chris Rock voice]
Re:Negative review, but not (intentional) flamebai
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Thank you for the great post, jdbo. I was considering a point-by-point rebuttle but yours did the trick nicely. I personally liked the elves showing up at Helm's Deep, and the bit with Aragorn "dying" didn't detract from the story in the least.
I really enjoyed the movie, especially the second half of it. Gollum was great, Gimli's humor was surprisingly enjoyable, and the Ents were just as I imagined them (although using John Rhees Davie's voice for Treebeard was distracting--it sounded too much like Gimli). My biggest complaint, like most people, was about Faramir. But like the parent poster, I agree that it is difficult to convey such a deep character in the context of the film. With all that was done right, this is forgivable.
Sadly, I think it will become fasionable to bash this film. The first one exceeded everyone's expectations by so much that it is impossible to please the fans the second time around. In some posts, people actually seem personally insulted that Frodo ends up in Gondor. "My wife was literally left in tears"? Why? Because her romantic dream of TTT is forever shattered because Elves helped out at Helm's Deep? I'm not trolling...I just don't understand what is so god-freakin-awful about this. Jackson carefully evaluated all possibilities and concluded that this would result in the most entertaining retelling of Tolkien's work. After the masterpiece that was FOTR, I decided to trust his vision, and I don't think TTT violates that trust at all. It's his vision of Tolkien's world...we're just watching it. (And I'm loving it.)
This "review" is essentially only two paragraphs long. While I know most people don't want to see spoilers, I'd rather see something a bit more meaty. Beyond mentioning that it is in the first person, there is absolutely no discussion of the style or flow of the book. Is there action? How is the character development? Most Amazon reader reviews go into more depth.
That being said, I have read this book and it is quite good. Also, I found it refreshingly short: Average readers will finish it in just a few sittings. Wilson manages to tell a complete and satisfying SF story in a few hundred pages, which is occurring less and less often.
Anyway, if your curiosity is piqued, check out a more complete review here: http://www.sfsite.com/10b/cl114.htm
I used to play adventure games exclusively. First it was Infocom stuff, and then eventually Sierra's [King's Hero Space] Quest games. Right around the time when Sierra ditched their text parser is when I quit playing, because the games just devolved into a mindless clickfest where you just whack everything with the mouse until you find what you're looking for.
Recently I picked up The Longest Journey. It the first enjoyable adventure game that I'd played in years, and the story is fantastic. (Although it also suffers from the click-everywhere-when-you're-stuck syndrome.) If you were a fan of the old Sierra games, you'll really like it. Hopefully game companies will see that there can be a market for adventure games again, so long as they are done well.
A note about the article: Enchanter has always been my favorite of all the Infocom games, and I probably got "into" computers because of it. I think it is overlooked in discussions of text adventure games (more people seem to think of Zork or HHGTHG as the best-of-genre), so it was cool to read that Lebling also thought it was one of the better games.
A better analogy would be if I left my tractor in the shed with a key in it and the shed door open, and you walked into the shed, took my tractor and ran somebody over with it.
Or you just used the stolen tractor to deliver unsolicited mail. That's a better analogy.
No one was killed, people! Please stop comparing spam to murder.
Does that mean that there are an infinite amount of colors, because a pentachromat (some animals have five color receptors) would see even more colors.
A better question might be "Can living beings perceive an infinite amount of colors?" Color is just a function of wavelength, and there is obviously an infinite number of discreet wavelengths within the visible color spectrum.
Scientists have come up with some finite number of colors that can be percieved by humans. (I can't remember the exact count off the top of my head - check any perception textbook.) However, a machine with high quality photon sensors can distinguish between a much higher number of wavelengths, even though it doesn't have the perception of color. If we wanted it to describe that color for us as a perceptual experience, it would simply map that wavelength to a human-defined color table.
It is fair to say that there are an infinite number of colors out there, just that we can't see them all.
IIRC from my Sensation & Perception courses, birds are tetrachromats. The more vivid perception of colors makes it easier for them to fly through leafy branches and find their nests.
This is really cool that it has been found in humans, although we trichromats aren't missing out too much. Anything outside of nature that would take advantage of this ability would have to be specially manufactured. TV's, CRT's, photographs, color printers, etc. are not designed to produce colors that would be visible to a tetrachromat but not a trichromat. Instead of RGB color schemes you'd need something with 4 primaries.
No, it doesn't. But that same equiptment that is recording your routine traffic stop may also provide important evidence needed to catch a murderer or drug dealer who tears away from the scene.
Well, I guess it is just an inherent problem with law enforcement...the more tools you give them to do their jobs better, the more they will exploit and abuse those tools beyond how they were intended. If the FBI didn't have a such a rich history of bending survellance laws, then people wouldn't be as concerned about systems like Carnivore being abused. They've brought the critisms on themselves, I suppose.
Thanks for answering with specific reasons for concern, instead of just spouting generic "a bored FBI dude might want to blackmail me" rhetoric. News for hiryuu: If they want to find stuff out about you (for legit reasons or otherwise), they don't need Carnivore. They've got other stuff to watch you with already. As I said, the potential for abuse is pretty much the same as with wiretapping, if I'm not mistaken.
From the Excite article: "The problem with Carnivore is that it gives the FBI access to the communications of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Internet users," he said. "It's not sufficient for the bureau to say, 'Trust us, we won't do anything wrong.' Most users want more of an assurance than that."
Is this really any worse than the FBI's ability to tap phones? The use of Carnivore must be allowed by a judge for it to be legal. Sure, the potential for abuse exists, but if the FBI gathers evidence through illegal means it isn't admissible in court anyway. Not that I'm necessarily for Carnivore (or any other measure that gives the government the ability to invade my privacy) but I don't think there is anything too terrible about wiretaps, and from what I can tell Carnivore has similar a similar benefit/abuse potential ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
CDs have never been difficult to copy. In fact, being able to copy individual songs easily from a CD to tape (and thereby making custom mix tapes) was a big selling point in the early days of CDs and helped lead to their widespread adoption.
As far as quality issues go, taped copies of CDs wasn't much worse than a store-bought prerecorded tape. Third and fourth generation recordings of course were significantly degraded, but that problem had to do with tapes, not CDs.
American Pie did have an R rating. And I didn't think it had a "completely irresponsible attitude towards teenage sex". The whole pretext of the movie (four guys tryig to get laid and dealing with their insecurities about it) is a fairly accurate portrayal of real high school.
Microsoft has a free Powerpoint viewer available for Windows. It isn't quite small enough to fit on a floppy, but then again, neither are most of the Powerpoint presentations you're likely to come across nowadays. And it does require an install, which is pretty lame. But the point is, you don't NEED to purchase MS Office to view/print Powerpoint presentations. I use it because I don't own office and sometimes I find stuff on the web that I want to read that are only available in Powerpoint. (Google's "View as HTML" link leaves a lot to be desired.)
The hard part is figuring out the little details that often get inexplicably omitted from journal papers. What are the particulars of the dataset? How are the training images preprocessed? What is the arbitration strategy for overlapping detections? These are the types of details that seperate the output quality of systems that use identical algorithms. In many cases, the researchers are happy to answer questions via email, unless they have plans to spin the research off into a private company.
It's fair to say that the Big Dig was too expensive, but I don't think that it could be considered "easy" relative to anything.
I think your point would've been better made comparing this project to the Chunnel. That 30 mile link cost about $13 billion (U.S.). So, yeah, 30 million seems a bit on the low side.
Some semi-recent articles in Psychology Today and Wired.
Personally, I think the technique of reading EEGs off the scalp is going to be more popular, at least in the short term. It isn't invasive and it is much less expensive. Disclaimer: My masters thesis is on EEG classification for BCI, so I might be biased :)
(I hope those links are OK...Preview isn't working for some reason.)
To paraphrase from my favorite Simpsons episode:
Parent: These fines are going to be paid out of your allowance.
Student: Then you'll have to raise my allowance to $40.78 per second.
Parent: Then that's what I'll do, smart guy.
if a story was rejected, I'd be more likely to just throw the baby out with the bathwater tho.
:)
How about still posting "rejected" stories, just not on the main page. Stuff regularly gets posted to the science slashbox (for instance) that is never on the main page. People who are interested in the topic will still find the article and read the posts.
Of course, dupes is a different can of worms. But if you had something +5 insightful to say about a duped story, maybe you should have said it the first time around
The client can turn it off if he/she really doesn't trust me
If I didn't trust you, why would I believe the option to turn off the backdoor actually works?
Anyway, I used to do support for a small company (3 other people when I started), and we would use backdoors all the time. Clients would call and ask us to use our god login to fix whatever problem they were having. Backdoors for support reasons are really useful, especially when the people you are supporting aren't that computer savy (i.e. when you are talking to the on the phone and tell them to click something, you can't be sure that they actually did).
Because it was such a small shop and the clients all knew the developers and support staff, trust wasn't an issue.
I'm sure there are some bored crackers out there who'd tackle this for a chance at some cash.
[In Chris Rock voice:]
Crazy cracker-ass-crackers. They always tryin' to beat the lotto and steal the cash from non-internet havin' brothas. Cracka-ass-crackers!
[End Chris Rock voice]
Thank you for the great post, jdbo. I was considering a point-by-point rebuttle but yours did the trick nicely. I personally liked the elves showing up at Helm's Deep, and the bit with Aragorn "dying" didn't detract from the story in the least.
I really enjoyed the movie, especially the second half of it. Gollum was great, Gimli's humor was surprisingly enjoyable, and the Ents were just as I imagined them (although using John Rhees Davie's voice for Treebeard was distracting--it sounded too much like Gimli). My biggest complaint, like most people, was about Faramir. But like the parent poster, I agree that it is difficult to convey such a deep character in the context of the film. With all that was done right, this is forgivable.
Sadly, I think it will become fasionable to bash this film. The first one exceeded everyone's expectations by so much that it is impossible to please the fans the second time around. In some posts, people actually seem personally insulted that Frodo ends up in Gondor. "My wife was literally left in tears"? Why? Because her romantic dream of TTT is forever shattered because Elves helped out at Helm's Deep? I'm not trolling...I just don't understand what is so god-freakin-awful about this. Jackson carefully evaluated all possibilities and concluded that this would result in the most entertaining retelling of Tolkien's work. After the masterpiece that was FOTR, I decided to trust his vision, and I don't think TTT violates that trust at all. It's his vision of Tolkien's world...we're just watching it. (And I'm loving it.)
Bring on Return of the King!
That being said, I have read this book and it is quite good. Also, I found it refreshingly short: Average readers will finish it in just a few sittings. Wilson manages to tell a complete and satisfying SF story in a few hundred pages, which is occurring less and less often.
Anyway, if your curiosity is piqued, check out a more complete review here: http://www.sfsite.com/10b/cl114.htm
Recently I picked up The Longest Journey. It the first enjoyable adventure game that I'd played in years, and the story is fantastic. (Although it also suffers from the click-everywhere-when-you're-stuck syndrome.) If you were a fan of the old Sierra games, you'll really like it. Hopefully game companies will see that there can be a market for adventure games again, so long as they are done well.
A note about the article: Enchanter has always been my favorite of all the Infocom games, and I probably got "into" computers because of it. I think it is overlooked in discussions of text adventure games (more people seem to think of Zork or HHGTHG as the best-of-genre), so it was cool to read that Lebling also thought it was one of the better games.
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Too bad it screwed up the rest of the company.
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>Open PDF
I don't know how to 'Open' PDF.
>Get PDF
I don't know how to 'Get' PDF.
>Look at PDF
I don't know how to 'Look at' PDF.
>Download PDF
What is 'PDF'?
>Quit
Sound familiar?
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Damn right they don't!
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Or you just used the stolen tractor to deliver unsolicited mail. That's a better analogy.
No one was killed, people! Please stop comparing spam to murder.
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Suit #2: Hey! If we have zero users, our costs are down to nothing! Then we'll be all profit, baby!
Suit #1: Excellent! I'll fire all of our marketing staff. If nobody knows about us, nobody will sign up, and then we'll be rich as kings!
Sorry for all the exclaimation points. Remember, suits are easily excited by lame-brain ideas.
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A better question might be "Can living beings perceive an infinite amount of colors?" Color is just a function of wavelength, and there is obviously an infinite number of discreet wavelengths within the visible color spectrum.
Scientists have come up with some finite number of colors that can be percieved by humans. (I can't remember the exact count off the top of my head - check any perception textbook.) However, a machine with high quality photon sensors can distinguish between a much higher number of wavelengths, even though it doesn't have the perception of color. If we wanted it to describe that color for us as a perceptual experience, it would simply map that wavelength to a human-defined color table.
It is fair to say that there are an infinite number of colors out there, just that we can't see them all.
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This is really cool that it has been found in humans, although we trichromats aren't missing out too much. Anything outside of nature that would take advantage of this ability would have to be specially manufactured. TV's, CRT's, photographs, color printers, etc. are not designed to produce colors that would be visible to a tetrachromat but not a trichromat. Instead of RGB color schemes you'd need something with 4 primaries.
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No, it doesn't. But that same equiptment that is recording your routine traffic stop may also provide important evidence needed to catch a murderer or drug dealer who tears away from the scene.
Well, I guess it is just an inherent problem with law enforcement...the more tools you give them to do their jobs better, the more they will exploit and abuse those tools beyond how they were intended. If the FBI didn't have a such a rich history of bending survellance laws, then people wouldn't be as concerned about systems like Carnivore being abused. They've brought the critisms on themselves, I suppose.
Thanks for answering with specific reasons for concern, instead of just spouting generic "a bored FBI dude might want to blackmail me" rhetoric. News for hiryuu: If they want to find stuff out about you (for legit reasons or otherwise), they don't need Carnivore. They've got other stuff to watch you with already. As I said, the potential for abuse is pretty much the same as with wiretapping, if I'm not mistaken.
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"The problem with Carnivore is that it gives the FBI access to the communications of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Internet users," he said. "It's not sufficient for the bureau to say, 'Trust us, we won't do anything wrong.' Most users want more of an assurance than that."
Is this really any worse than the FBI's ability to tap phones? The use of Carnivore must be allowed by a judge for it to be legal. Sure, the potential for abuse exists, but if the FBI gathers evidence through illegal means it isn't admissible in court anyway. Not that I'm necessarily for Carnivore (or any other measure that gives the government the ability to invade my privacy) but I don't think there is anything too terrible about wiretaps, and from what I can tell Carnivore has similar a similar benefit/abuse potential ratio.
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