I can't imagine that little bit of lost
heat was the difference between life and
death for anyone
Let's say you don't have the option of going
somewhere warm (ie, inside to a nice toasty
fire)... Which do you have a more critical
(ie, life-preserving) need for - To keep using
your large muscles (legs, upper arms), which
serves both the purpose of generating heat and
might eventually move you to somewhere warmer;
or, manual dexterity, which would only really
help if you needed to operate a book of matches
(something that didn't exist for 99.99999% of
human history)?
Our bodies decrease blood flow to the extremities
for precisely that reason. Additionally, assuming
the worst, we can live without a few fingers or
toes or even an earlobe; Sacrificing them to keep
our core body temperature high enough seems like a
viable tradeoff under extreme circumstances. The
fact that we now have thinsulate and heat-packs
and almost always a warm place to go nearby, so having
our fingers nice and toasty seems more useful than
preventing the small heat loss from them, had no effect
on how we evolved.
But, the fact that we have evolved the
feature suggests it was.
Although this may seem in direct contradiction
to my point above, I mention it only for
clarity... Not all inherited traits "evolved"
in the natural-selection sense. One of the
fundamental ideas behind evolution says that
mutations occur essentially at random, and those
that increase our odds of reproducing (which
dying young does not) get passed on. However,
those traits that have no effect whatsoever
on our chances of reproducing can also
get passed on, just by blind chance. For a
trivial example, Alzheimer's disease - It
doesn't affect people until they've passed
their reproductive prime, so as debilitating as
it seems in later life, it doesn't reduce its own
chances of remaining in the population.
They spend billions on mediocre products
on the hopes that just ONE of them will be
sucessful?
On the surface, I agree that looks absurd.
However, for the most part, the shittiest of
the lot tend to make the most money. The
movies that actually have some inkling of
artistic merit tend to flop badly.
So, although I certainly wouldn't ascribe
such noble aspirations to Hollywood, you
could look at the situation and notice
that they effectively subsidize the "good"
movies with the profits from the
popular-but-really-bad ones.;-)
according to every ISP EULA to date, that person
is legally responsible for any and all traffic through
that pipe
IANAL, but the extent to which you can accept,
even voluntarily, criminal liability via a contract
has some limits to it...
If I loan you a shotgun, with a very clear contract
saying that you accept legal responsibility for all
uses of it, and your roomate then uses it to shoot
his ex, then your roomate, not you, goes to prison.
However, I've even tried to release the
IP from my router
Check the expiration date - 3 days occurs commonly,
and some ISPs actually do set it to never expire
(effectively the same as a "real" static IP). Also,
if no one else needs an IP in the time that passes,
you will usually get first-dibs on your old address
(so if you have either a very lightly populated segment,
or a segment with almost all people who never turn
their PCs off, you'll probably get the same IP no
matter how long you stay offline).
Instead of messaging combined with clear product value
propositions and additional rewards for buying more product,
we get lawsuits
Except, the MPAA can actually justify its costs, to some
degree. They really do lose huge sums of money on
most movies and only make up for the rest on a few huge
hits per year. Not to say I consider their attitude toward
consumers' rights as anything but offensive, but economically,
they make a good case.
Now look at the RIAA... They sell 10-cent plastic discs for
$15, force their own artists to sue them to get the royalties
actually owed, engage in practices that in any other business
count as very illegal (payola, price fixing)... Even if you
argue that the artists have a right to make a living (with
which I fully agree), that has very little to do with the cost
of a CD. Quite literally, artists who burn their own CDs and
sell them on their website for $5 per CD make a hell of a lot
more per CD than any RIAA-member-signed big name band.
DHCP seems to hand off the IP you
previously had by default. At least
with TimeWarner.
Although they can give you DHCP based
on a list of effectively static addresses,
for the most part, if you don't renew your
DHCP lease beyond its expiration, you won't
get that same address next time. So those of
us who leave our boxes up 24/7 will have the
same IP for months at at time, while those
who turn their PCs on once a week will
almost always have a different address.
It's almost the same arch. as a Compaq iPaq
or Jornada, for gods sake. It's like 1/6th
clock speed though, to preserve battery.
Not entirely untrue, but I think you took me
entirely too literally and missed the bigger
point...
The GBA has an ARM-7 chip clocked at 16Mhz. For
comparison, the original SNES had a 16-bit
65c816 at 3.58Mhz. Better than 4x as fast,
you might say, and that doesn't even consider
the far superior chip architecture involved.
Fair enough.
Now, for a quick glance at the PS2... It has
a 36.864 R3000 CPU just for handling its
I/O... Already, it whomps the GBA, and
that only considers its least powerful
subsystem.
they'll look at this thing, see they need a
whole gameplay design, along with significant
code re-work to support that design, and
they'll really have to wonder whether it's
worth the effort.
True, but I think you over-trivialize the
entire idea of a port from the GC or PS2 to
any handheld - Sure, they can possibly
used similarly-themed games, but keep in
mind that while the PS2 performs comparably
to a mid-range PC with high-end graphics, the
GBA has only slightly more powerful hardware
than the original SNES, a 13-year old console
with a 16-bit CPU.
Nothing that runs on the PS2 or GC
will directly port to the GBA (or
this new 2-screen model), other than
cheezy puzzle games (and even them only
with 99% of the special effects cut out).
The GBA has carved out a niche for
itself in classic-style RPG games for a
reason - They don't take too much CPU power
to have a great storyline, and they don't
require 90% of the development costs go
toward eye-candy. That wouldn't work on
the PS2, nor would FFX2 work on the GBA.
For that specific market, those who really
enjoy console RPGs, a second screen for
things like zoomed-out maps or party status,
a second screen sounds like an amazingly
good idea. Even for numerous other games,
I can think of endless uses... I don't care
for sports games, but imagine having each
screen show one side of the field/court/rink/whatever.
For platform games, the zoomed-out map idea
still works well. Same for action (FPS?)
games, with the addition of status and weapons
not taking up the main view. Really, this
seems like a great, innovative idea that makes
me wonder why no one thought of it before (So
it would take two TVs - A 19" tv costs under
$100 (easily $25 used), about the same as two
games). And imagine the boost to two-player
games, each having their own screen!
So, regarding ports, it wouldn't surprise me
to see ports go the other way, with the
next gen of non-handheld consoles supporting
more than one TV (or at the very least,
a standardized split-screen mode for 16:9
TVs).
Well posting this late in the game
nobody will read this except maybe you,
but anyway...
Well, at least one other person
did...;-)
I do this a lot, at least with
GIF-based ads that I can open in a
new browser tab.
Same here, although I'd really
like another tab option, something like
"open link in a hidden tab, then close
the tab as soon as it finishes loading".
That way, I can support sites I like,
with one click rather than three.
Hmm, now that I think about it, I wonder
if I could do something functionally comparable
with a bit of CSS... Even just loading all
offsite links but not displaying them would
probably work well enough for what I want.
SCO can now go to the court and say "we
can't answer number 12, because the code in
question is being contested under another
suit." My guess is that SCO will show up on
Friday and ask for the case to be put on hold
until their suit against Novell is settled.
Wow... Brilliant - I didn't consider it from
that particular angle. Not too shabby - Those
guys might embody evil itself, but that does
indeed seem like a clever diversion, where I had
only seen them shooting their own feet.
However, I have to question whether even that
will suffice - As I understand it, they also
failed to adequately address several other points,
not just #12. Would that excuse cover all
their omissions, or would they just try to
use that as the major excuse and hope to hide
the rest under that extra-large cloak-of-concealment?
I think this explains why they didn't
have time to correctly respond to the
Judge's request that the produce evidence
in the IBM case. The were apparently
already working on their next frivolous
lawsuit.
You know, although you got modded "funny", I
would say you speak far more truly than you
might have intended...
On Friday, SCO has to stand before a Utah
court and justify their pathetic little
60-some page document as complying with a
court order to come up with some real evidence.
Unless the judge just laughs them out of the
room immediately (or has them escorted out
in handcuffs for violating a court order),
you can bet that IBM's lawyers will
mention this new suit - That, while SCO
couldn't satisfy the court's request due to
holiday vacations, they had plenty of time
and resources to prepare for an entirely
different suit against Novell.
I haven't thought much of SCO's tactics so
far, beyond the obvious pump-n'-dump scheme
(which they seem to have pulled off VERY well),
but this one just seems absurd - It may well
turn around to bite them in just a few more
days, and they don't really seem to have a
whole lot to gain by it even if they win.
As many people have pointed out, in every
Slashdot FP on this topic, the detection
algorithm works by finding a pattern of
five small circles in a particular
configuration (which looks vaguely like
the Cingular logo, without the head-dot).
This same pattern occurs on US, Canadian,
EU, and presumeably many other forms of
world currency, so the same algorithm can
detect all of them, without
modification (and more usefully, without
a huge library of bill designs that needs
constant updating as various countries
change the pictures on their money).
To make a new bill design fit the detection
algorithm, the government needs only include
that pattern of five circles somewhere in
the design.
I included a link to a PDF of the pattern
in a
Slashdot post from a few days ago, if you
want to see it.
Perhaps a series set even further into the
future with a focus that included the temporal
time directive would have been better
Yeah, with Scott Bakula as captain, that
wouldn't have caused people to draw any
comparisons to a certain older popular sci-fi
series of his...;-)
Of course, personally, I just keep waiting
the episode where Archer blurts out "Ziggy,
why the hell haven't I leapt into a real
show yet?".
Sad to say, and I have loved most Trek series
so far, but they started losing it during
Voyager (with that annoying virago who, every
third episode, cost them all a trip home via
strange technology X by either pissing off the
owners of tech-X or putting her personal
interests ahead of her crew's lives). And
Enterprise? Sorry, I realize that ST:ToS
had a lot of cheese to it, but modern Trek
viewers want space opera, not "Baywatch in
Space".
Not willing to risk my car by lying to
the customs agents for a few bucks.
I've visited Canada at least a few dozen times,
and not once have they asked me "did you
buy any blank CDs during your trip?".
Oddly enough, last time I visited they did
ask me, dead seriously, if I bought any Canadian
beef (the hot issue of the week, I guess), but
nope, no CDs.
And, for those who don't already realize this,
getting "normal" things across the border takes
very little work - Just remove all its packaging,
scuff it up a little (with a spool of CDs,
perhaps burn a few and label them "vacation
pictures" or something like that", and throw
the item haphazardly in the trunk. That
wouldn't work for most consumable things (sorry,
my old-enough-to-die-in-a-war-but-not-drink
younger friends, no alcohol), but for things
like electronics (where the exchange rate
makes a HUGE difference in price), well worth
the little effort involved.
Poof, not a "new" high-end DVD player, just "that one
I bought to take on vacations a couple years ago".
Not a "new" gigantic spool of CDs, just "the one I
take with me to download pics when my digital
camera gets full".
Care to backup that information of Apple losing
money on the iPod and or the iTunes service?
This claim comes directly from a Jobs quote... From
The Register, a quote of him saying: "We would like
to break even/make a little bit of money but it's not a
money maker".
For a more detailed breakdown,
CDFreaks claims the recording industry gets a raw 65% cut
(of which, despite a total lack of promotional or manufacturing
costs, the artists only get 10% of that, so 6.5%). That leaves
Apple with roughly 35 cents per song... Does the bandwidth,
staff, and long-term equipment amortization cost that
much per song? I doubt it, but we can safely say Apple
doesn't really make killing at it.
You can select which encoder to use (Lame
or Blade), the bitrate (VBR,CBR) even
--alt-preset-insane! Wow!
And this from the country we spent
40 years in a cold-war with over
communism-vs-capitalism?
Jeezus. These guys understand "give the
consumers what they want and they'll throw
money at you" better than any hard-core
US company in existance (Go Enron! Go
WorldCom! Go Haliburton! Yeah, baby,
make a few more bucks exploiting the
proletariat so Dubya and Uncle Dick can
buy that new winning baseball team
they always wanted!).
I give up. Just give me my state job
digging ditches, and my RFID tag to
prove I show up for work on time, and
will someone please wake me when this
bad dream ends.
We're getting ripped off in Canada, too.
There's an extra levy on the purchase of
blank CDs.
A US-run for a few spools of CDs per
year - mildly inconvenient.
A Canada-run three times a week to buy
new music to save a US quarter each
time - Really REALLY impractical (and
I live not all that far from the border).
Now, if they start selling music for
99 Pesos, I'll save up for a yearly
trip to Mexico. But for a quarter? I
don't think so.:-)
You can tell its wind-based by the similar
bottom-left to top-right streaks all over the
landscape.
Very cool, but definitely not organic. You would
see this kind of thing at the beach if we have
hurricane force winds all the time.
Ah, many thanks, and I mean that sincerely.
You've just provided the single most informative
response to a Slashdot comment I've seen this
month.
Alas, having already posted in this thread,
I can't mod you up, but, have a token +1
anyway.:-)
You can't just combine grayscale images
from the L2, L3 and L5 filters to get a
color in between ("true" red).
For dealing with an emission spectra for
a homogenous substance, true, you can't
just average 670 and 600 to get 635. True
enough.
For most "real world" reflectively-illuminated
objects, composed of a wide variety of different
substances, yes, you can. Granted, you'll
have gaussian rather than linearly-tapering
peaks, but you can get "close enough".
The filter response for L1-8 are NOT notch
filters people, they have defined curves. Two
of the filters are specifically wide band
responses as well. And the human visual
response curves are equally important.
Yes, they effectively are. Check out
Jim Bell's own (you know, the guy who's
email appears at the link in this thread's parent)
report on the Spirit Rover's panoramic camera
(warning, PDF), specifically, figure 6 (page
82)... A nice graph of the pancam's sensitivity
to various frequencies through each filter
shows very good bandpass transmittance
(the project explicitly spec'd 85% in-band, IIRC),
with incredibly sharp tapering (less than one
bandwidth away) for all except L1, R1, L7, and R7.
And of those four, only L1 (no filter) has what you
could call a wideband response, the other three
just favor an ultra-sharp cutoff at their target
frequency, at the expense of a slightly more broad
tail in the opposite direction.
No, what he SHOULD have done is essentially
what Nasa did, which is to solve a minimization
problem matching up weighted averages response
curves from the available filters to the
red/green/blue response of the human eye, and
taking the combination with least squared error.
You know, I agree with you, and have spent the past
two days producing a program to do exactly that.
However, NASA also should have done that,
yet did not (despite your assertion) - They simply
mixed L2 (or sometimes L4, yet oddly not L3, the
obvious closest match to 650nm), L5, and L6. And,
from my preliminary results, I'd say that Laney's
results look pretty damned good... I can't tell
them from what I get from a full 7-onto-3 channel
convolution (though my SO can... I'll admit I don't
have the best color vision in the world, but I can
certainly tell green from brownish-orange).
And also that NASA saturated all of their
pictures on tranmission to reduce error (and
the exposure settings are nowhere to be found),
so you have even less information to go on.
True - With one exception. Any image showing the
calibration target has a peak norm equal to white,
as well as 4+ independant channel verifications of
those values. Thus, my accusation of scientific
dishonesty for NASA cropping out that very target.
Why should the websites that these people
are seeing the ads on be forced to develop
and support a website free of charge?
Forced? Sorry, do we live in different countries,
where your government holds a gun to peoples' heads
and tells them "update your website or we kill you
and your family"?
No one "forces" websites to do anything. They
don't "need" to work for nothing - They simply
don't need to work at all.
Those sites with an actual product, which at
the moment appears limited to storefronts,
some news outlets, and porn sites, deserve to
stay solvent because they actually provide a
service people will pay for. Every other site
can go pound sand, or stay up because its owners
love doing it (ie, most personal sites, blogs,
and certain hobby-oriented informational sites).
Naturally, the obvious followup question involves
Slashdot's status under this idea. Personally,
I think it falls into a "hobby site that trades
bandwidth and hosting costs for massive amounts
of good karma for OSDN. That might not have a
direct dollar value, but in terms of effective
advertising, it means more than all the half-time
SuperBowl commercials put together.
To address the parent article, I for one will
not EVER visit a site that shows any advertising
that I can't either ignore or circumvent. I
said that long ago about popups, and well before
popup blocking became incorporated into the
major browsers, I wrote a crude local proxy
server for myself and a few friends to do
nothing but filter them out. I'll attempt
to do similarly for these new ads, but if the
hype holds true and they really do prevent me
from visiting the site without watching it,
I can guarantee them the permanent loss of
one visitor. And I doubt I'll act alone in
that regard. People avoid ad-heavy sites
already - Having to watch a full 30-second
spot will turn off even the most computer
illiterate grannies out there.
Oops, our bad. Mars is apparently
inhabited by giant sandworms several
kilometers long.
I did not say that. I only said
"organic-looking", not the same
as "giant sandworms".
I don't really think we would have
missed something as obvious as very
large critters living on the surface
of Mars. But, as I asked, do you
have any suggestions of what natural,
non-biogenic processes would cause
such unusual structures?
Skepticism usually benefits science,
and I credit you with that. But sarcasm
and does not, so you "only" break even.
Most of the great discoveries in science
resulted from people noticing something
that didn't quite seem right, so they
looked deeper into the issue. Just
flippantly tossing a beanie at a strawman
Herbert reference effectively says "I see
nuh-thing, NUH-thING!".
So, pretend you have a good explanation,
and go away happy. And someday, even
in blissful ignorance, you might
benefit from the curiousity of others
who bothered to ask "what the hell
made that?"
OK, the new client toggles a bit that won't
cause any visual or audio degradation of the
file. Oops.
You've looked at this too naively... Take around
a hundred MD5s of nonoverlapping chunks of the
file. If 90% of these match, you have near
certainty that the files match except for exactly
such tampering as you suggest.
For some files, you could get away with that.
For others, particularly the highly compressed
audio and video files that dominate P2P, breaking
such a detection algorithm would, over time,
introduce intolerable errors in the file
(by the third or fourth copy, I'd say), since
such changes would need to occur randomly or
risk filtering by the detection algorithm V2.
Not to say we couldn't still get around such
attempts to prevent downloading - Until they
ban them, simply putting everything in a
password-protected zip file (with the password
included in a non-passworded file) would
suffice for generating effectively random
files (to a hash checker, anyway).
My point? Overall, this will just turn into
yet another war of escalating circumventions and
countermeasures, benefitting neither the content
producers nor consumers.
My favourites are the 'pictures of alien moon
bases'. Many of these prove to be blowups of
astronomical JPG files. The compression algorithm
used in the JPG format introduces artificial
distortions in the details of images
By all means, explain what compression artifact
in the JPEG algorithm, or natural process occuring
on Mars, accounts for the top two images (in the
left column, not the Viking contexts) at
this page, containing raw images from the Mars
Global Surveyor dataset.
Keep in mind that each pixel corresponds to 4.47
meters, and you can download the raw file as they
have it, rather than a grainy and blown-up JPEG.
That makes the interesting feature in the top
image roughly 120 meters in diameter, and the
curiously organic-looking features in the rest
of the set around 50m wide by several kilometers
long.
All CCDs are particularly sensitive in the IR
range.
True, and the one on the Spirit Rover goes up to
appoximately 1100nm.
However, that does NOT excuse the so-called
"color" photos from NASA, nor does the excuse
presented in the linked text. Why?
Simple reason - As the link mentions, the
Spirit Rover sees the world through two
identical cameras, with a set of 14 (16
with 2 pairs overlapping) narrow bandpass
(around 20nm wide) color filters.
Now, it may well hold true, as per the link,
that the blue paint chip looks bright at 750nm.
However, WHY would they use L2 (750nm)
to simulate human red vision (650nm), when
they have a much closer match at L3 (670nm)?
Even excusing them from doing a full spectral
distribution between the seven (#8 only helps
for the sun) left filters mapped onto the human
visual response, they could get FAR better
results just by not using L2.
And remember, despite appearances to the contrary,
we do deal with "rocket scientists" here.
People who should know that 670 lies closer to
650 than 750 does.
So for those who consider this a frivolous
complaint by the foil-beanie-wearers, consider
the utter simplicity of this so-called "problem",
as well as the ease of an imperfect-but-damn-close
fix (ie, use L3 rather than L2)... And suddenly it
all looks a lot more strange, that a huge team of
engineers failed what amounts to a 2nd-grade math
test, yet successfully put a lander on a distant
planet.
Furthermore, the color problem only counts as one
of three major questionable points on NASA's image
manipulation... If you compare the first released
panorama from NASA with the version at the link
below, you'll notice not only the color as wrong,
but that NASA has deliberately blurred the
image. Yes, deliberately - Using the wrong color
channel for red doesn't account for the drastic
reduction in effective resolution seen between
NASA's version and the same thing generated by
others from using L2, L5, and L6 (the SAME
filters, still with the bad choice of L2, that
NASA said they used). NASA officially claimed
the haze and low visibility resulted from dust
hanging in the air, yet the same image produced
externally to them shows a beautiful clear sky
with great visibility and no "dusty" effect.
And, I mentioned three problems, not two - The last,
I consider worse than any number of failures, up to
and including completely losing a mission. To cover
up the "bad" colors, they CROPPED OUT THE COLOR
CALIBRATION TARGET in all subsequent image releases.
Yes, you read that right - Check out their web page...
Early pictures they released include it (showing the
wrong colors for blue and green), while the version
currently on the JPL website have it strangely cut
out of the picture. Sorry, but hiding the flaws in
an experiment doesn't fly well in the scientific
community. If they screwed up initially, they had
every chance to fix it and say "oops", with no one
making more than an amused comment. But instead,
they chose to cover something up - Whether
they did so to hide their initial error, or to
hide something larger (such as water, see below),
I'll leave to the beanie crowd to debate.
For those who want to see the "correct" colors,
check out
Keith Laney's page, which includes quite a
few stunningly nice pictures.
And for those who wonder about that strange
substance the Rover landed it - In full,
correct color, it looks glaringly obvious
that it landed in mud (yes, mud, a mixture of
dirt and water).
Why? An ever increasing back catalogue
of existing games that don't have such
restrictions
I agree completely. I all but stopped playing
new PC games when making a simple backup CD
started requiring a nontrivial hack (AoE2, I
think, which you could still backup without
too much hassle, but far more than it
should have taken), and every game
started needing a no-CD key to play while
listening to an actual audio CD at the same
time (hey, even the best game background
music gets tiring after a few weeks).
For consoles, I enjoy the current round of
machines, but won't spend $50+ for a single
game. Call me cheap, but you can find
original SNES games for a buck each, and
PS1 games for under $5 now. And they
provide just as much "fun" as any new
game (if not the same eye-candy value).
When the next gen comes out, I'll probably
pick up a PS2 and a GC (I don't really care
for the XBox, I might buy one or two
games to play via emulator on PC, but don't
really care for the majority). And at that
time, I'll get just as much enjoyment out
of it as people do today, while paying a
tenth the current price for games.
So, when companies get rid of the obnoxious
DRM, and go back to charging reasonable
prices for games (Anyone else remember
feeling stunned that the Space Shuttle
simulator for the Atari 2600 went for a
whopping $20, more than twice the price
of the average game? And then it sucked, to
add insult to injury?), they can consider
me a "good" customer again. Until then,
I fall into one of their most-hated
demographics (since even when I buy, I
provide them with effectively no income),
and will remain there.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine that little bit of lost heat was the difference between life and death for anyone
Let's say you don't have the option of going somewhere warm (ie, inside to a nice toasty fire)... Which do you have a more critical (ie, life-preserving) need for - To keep using your large muscles (legs, upper arms), which serves both the purpose of generating heat and might eventually move you to somewhere warmer; or, manual dexterity, which would only really help if you needed to operate a book of matches (something that didn't exist for 99.99999% of human history)?
Our bodies decrease blood flow to the extremities for precisely that reason. Additionally, assuming the worst, we can live without a few fingers or toes or even an earlobe; Sacrificing them to keep our core body temperature high enough seems like a viable tradeoff under extreme circumstances. The fact that we now have thinsulate and heat-packs and almost always a warm place to go nearby, so having our fingers nice and toasty seems more useful than preventing the small heat loss from them, had no effect on how we evolved.
But, the fact that we have evolved the feature suggests it was.
Although this may seem in direct contradiction to my point above, I mention it only for clarity... Not all inherited traits "evolved" in the natural-selection sense. One of the fundamental ideas behind evolution says that mutations occur essentially at random, and those that increase our odds of reproducing (which dying young does not) get passed on. However, those traits that have no effect whatsoever on our chances of reproducing can also get passed on, just by blind chance. For a trivial example, Alzheimer's disease - It doesn't affect people until they've passed their reproductive prime, so as debilitating as it seems in later life, it doesn't reduce its own chances of remaining in the population.
They spend billions on mediocre products on the hopes that just ONE of them will be sucessful?
;-)
On the surface, I agree that looks absurd.
However, for the most part, the shittiest of the lot tend to make the most money. The movies that actually have some inkling of artistic merit tend to flop badly.
So, although I certainly wouldn't ascribe such noble aspirations to Hollywood, you could look at the situation and notice that they effectively subsidize the "good" movies with the profits from the popular-but-really-bad ones.
according to every ISP EULA to date, that person is legally responsible for any and all traffic through that pipe
IANAL, but the extent to which you can accept, even voluntarily, criminal liability via a contract has some limits to it...
If I loan you a shotgun, with a very clear contract saying that you accept legal responsibility for all uses of it, and your roomate then uses it to shoot his ex, then your roomate, not you, goes to prison.
However, I've even tried to release the IP from my router
Check the expiration date - 3 days occurs commonly, and some ISPs actually do set it to never expire (effectively the same as a "real" static IP). Also, if no one else needs an IP in the time that passes, you will usually get first-dibs on your old address (so if you have either a very lightly populated segment, or a segment with almost all people who never turn their PCs off, you'll probably get the same IP no matter how long you stay offline).
Instead of messaging combined with clear product value propositions and additional rewards for buying more product, we get lawsuits
Except, the MPAA can actually justify its costs, to some degree. They really do lose huge sums of money on most movies and only make up for the rest on a few huge hits per year. Not to say I consider their attitude toward consumers' rights as anything but offensive, but economically, they make a good case.
Now look at the RIAA... They sell 10-cent plastic discs for $15, force their own artists to sue them to get the royalties actually owed, engage in practices that in any other business count as very illegal (payola, price fixing)... Even if you argue that the artists have a right to make a living (with which I fully agree), that has very little to do with the cost of a CD. Quite literally, artists who burn their own CDs and sell them on their website for $5 per CD make a hell of a lot more per CD than any RIAA-member-signed big name band.
DHCP seems to hand off the IP you previously had by default. At least with TimeWarner.
Although they can give you DHCP based on a list of effectively static addresses, for the most part, if you don't renew your DHCP lease beyond its expiration, you won't get that same address next time. So those of us who leave our boxes up 24/7 will have the same IP for months at at time, while those who turn their PCs on once a week will almost always have a different address.
It's almost the same arch. as a Compaq iPaq or Jornada, for gods sake. It's like 1/6th clock speed though, to preserve battery.
Not entirely untrue, but I think you took me entirely too literally and missed the bigger point...
The GBA has an ARM-7 chip clocked at 16Mhz. For comparison, the original SNES had a 16-bit 65c816 at 3.58Mhz. Better than 4x as fast, you might say, and that doesn't even consider the far superior chip architecture involved. Fair enough.
Now, for a quick glance at the PS2... It has a 36.864 R3000 CPU just for handling its I/O... Already, it whomps the GBA, and that only considers its least powerful subsystem.
they'll look at this thing, see they need a whole gameplay design, along with significant code re-work to support that design, and they'll really have to wonder whether it's worth the effort.
True, but I think you over-trivialize the entire idea of a port from the GC or PS2 to any handheld - Sure, they can possibly used similarly-themed games, but keep in mind that while the PS2 performs comparably to a mid-range PC with high-end graphics, the GBA has only slightly more powerful hardware than the original SNES, a 13-year old console with a 16-bit CPU.
Nothing that runs on the PS2 or GC will directly port to the GBA (or this new 2-screen model), other than cheezy puzzle games (and even them only with 99% of the special effects cut out). The GBA has carved out a niche for itself in classic-style RPG games for a reason - They don't take too much CPU power to have a great storyline, and they don't require 90% of the development costs go toward eye-candy. That wouldn't work on the PS2, nor would FFX2 work on the GBA.
For that specific market, those who really enjoy console RPGs, a second screen for things like zoomed-out maps or party status, a second screen sounds like an amazingly good idea. Even for numerous other games, I can think of endless uses... I don't care for sports games, but imagine having each screen show one side of the field/court/rink/whatever. For platform games, the zoomed-out map idea still works well. Same for action (FPS?) games, with the addition of status and weapons not taking up the main view. Really, this seems like a great, innovative idea that makes me wonder why no one thought of it before (So it would take two TVs - A 19" tv costs under $100 (easily $25 used), about the same as two games). And imagine the boost to two-player games, each having their own screen!
So, regarding ports, it wouldn't surprise me to see ports go the other way, with the next gen of non-handheld consoles supporting more than one TV (or at the very least, a standardized split-screen mode for 16:9 TVs).
Well posting this late in the game nobody will read this except maybe you, but anyway...
;-)
Well, at least one other person did...
I do this a lot, at least with GIF-based ads that I can open in a new browser tab.
Same here, although I'd really like another tab option, something like "open link in a hidden tab, then close the tab as soon as it finishes loading". That way, I can support sites I like, with one click rather than three.
Hmm, now that I think about it, I wonder if I could do something functionally comparable with a bit of CSS... Even just loading all offsite links but not displaying them would probably work well enough for what I want.
SCO can now go to the court and say "we can't answer number 12, because the code in question is being contested under another suit." My guess is that SCO will show up on Friday and ask for the case to be put on hold until their suit against Novell is settled.
Wow... Brilliant - I didn't consider it from that particular angle. Not too shabby - Those guys might embody evil itself, but that does indeed seem like a clever diversion, where I had only seen them shooting their own feet.
However, I have to question whether even that will suffice - As I understand it, they also failed to adequately address several other points, not just #12. Would that excuse cover all their omissions, or would they just try to use that as the major excuse and hope to hide the rest under that extra-large cloak-of-concealment?
I think this explains why they didn't have time to correctly respond to the Judge's request that the produce evidence in the IBM case. The were apparently already working on their next frivolous lawsuit.
You know, although you got modded "funny", I would say you speak far more truly than you might have intended...
On Friday, SCO has to stand before a Utah court and justify their pathetic little 60-some page document as complying with a court order to come up with some real evidence. Unless the judge just laughs them out of the room immediately (or has them escorted out in handcuffs for violating a court order), you can bet that IBM's lawyers will mention this new suit - That, while SCO couldn't satisfy the court's request due to holiday vacations, they had plenty of time and resources to prepare for an entirely different suit against Novell.
I haven't thought much of SCO's tactics so far, beyond the obvious pump-n'-dump scheme (which they seem to have pulled off VERY well), but this one just seems absurd - It may well turn around to bite them in just a few more days, and they don't really seem to have a whole lot to gain by it even if they win.
what happens when the note design changes?
As many people have pointed out, in every Slashdot FP on this topic, the detection algorithm works by finding a pattern of five small circles in a particular configuration (which looks vaguely like the Cingular logo, without the head-dot).
This same pattern occurs on US, Canadian, EU, and presumeably many other forms of world currency, so the same algorithm can detect all of them, without modification (and more usefully, without a huge library of bill designs that needs constant updating as various countries change the pictures on their money).
To make a new bill design fit the detection algorithm, the government needs only include that pattern of five circles somewhere in the design.
I included a link to a PDF of the pattern in a Slashdot post from a few days ago, if you want to see it.
Perhaps a series set even further into the future with a focus that included the temporal time directive would have been better
;-)
Yeah, with Scott Bakula as captain, that wouldn't have caused people to draw any comparisons to a certain older popular sci-fi series of his...
Of course, personally, I just keep waiting the episode where Archer blurts out "Ziggy, why the hell haven't I leapt into a real show yet?".
Sad to say, and I have loved most Trek series so far, but they started losing it during Voyager (with that annoying virago who, every third episode, cost them all a trip home via strange technology X by either pissing off the owners of tech-X or putting her personal interests ahead of her crew's lives). And Enterprise? Sorry, I realize that ST:ToS had a lot of cheese to it, but modern Trek viewers want space opera, not "Baywatch in Space".
Not willing to risk my car by lying to the customs agents for a few bucks.
I've visited Canada at least a few dozen times, and not once have they asked me "did you buy any blank CDs during your trip?".
Oddly enough, last time I visited they did ask me, dead seriously, if I bought any Canadian beef (the hot issue of the week, I guess), but nope, no CDs.
And, for those who don't already realize this, getting "normal" things across the border takes very little work - Just remove all its packaging, scuff it up a little (with a spool of CDs, perhaps burn a few and label them "vacation pictures" or something like that", and throw the item haphazardly in the trunk. That wouldn't work for most consumable things (sorry, my old-enough-to-die-in-a-war-but-not-drink younger friends, no alcohol), but for things like electronics (where the exchange rate makes a HUGE difference in price), well worth the little effort involved.
Poof, not a "new" high-end DVD player, just "that one I bought to take on vacations a couple years ago". Not a "new" gigantic spool of CDs, just "the one I take with me to download pics when my digital camera gets full".
Care to backup that information of Apple losing money on the iPod and or the iTunes service?
This claim comes directly from a Jobs quote... From The Register, a quote of him saying: "We would like to break even/make a little bit of money but it's not a money maker".
For a more detailed breakdown, CDFreaks claims the recording industry gets a raw 65% cut (of which, despite a total lack of promotional or manufacturing costs, the artists only get 10% of that, so 6.5%). That leaves Apple with roughly 35 cents per song... Does the bandwidth, staff, and long-term equipment amortization cost that much per song? I doubt it, but we can safely say Apple doesn't really make killing at it.
You can select which encoder to use (Lame or Blade), the bitrate (VBR,CBR) even --alt-preset-insane! Wow!
And this from the country we spent 40 years in a cold-war with over communism-vs-capitalism?
Jeezus. These guys understand "give the consumers what they want and they'll throw money at you" better than any hard-core US company in existance (Go Enron! Go WorldCom! Go Haliburton! Yeah, baby, make a few more bucks exploiting the proletariat so Dubya and Uncle Dick can buy that new winning baseball team they always wanted!).
I give up. Just give me my state job digging ditches, and my RFID tag to prove I show up for work on time, and will someone please wake me when this bad dream ends.
We're getting ripped off in Canada, too. There's an extra levy on the purchase of blank CDs.
:-)
A US-run for a few spools of CDs per year - mildly inconvenient.
A Canada-run three times a week to buy new music to save a US quarter each time - Really REALLY impractical (and I live not all that far from the border).
Now, if they start selling music for 99 Pesos, I'll save up for a yearly trip to Mexico. But for a quarter? I don't think so.
You can tell its wind-based by the similar bottom-left to top-right streaks all over the landscape.
:-)
Very cool, but definitely not organic. You would see this kind of thing at the beach if we have hurricane force winds all the time.
Ah, many thanks, and I mean that sincerely. You've just provided the single most informative response to a Slashdot comment I've seen this month.
Alas, having already posted in this thread, I can't mod you up, but, have a token +1 anyway.
You can't just combine grayscale images from the L2, L3 and L5 filters to get a color in between ("true" red).
For dealing with an emission spectra for a homogenous substance, true, you can't just average 670 and 600 to get 635. True enough.
For most "real world" reflectively-illuminated objects, composed of a wide variety of different substances, yes, you can. Granted, you'll have gaussian rather than linearly-tapering peaks, but you can get "close enough".
The filter response for L1-8 are NOT notch filters people, they have defined curves. Two of the filters are specifically wide band responses as well. And the human visual response curves are equally important.
Yes, they effectively are. Check out Jim Bell's own (you know, the guy who's email appears at the link in this thread's parent) report on the Spirit Rover's panoramic camera (warning, PDF), specifically, figure 6 (page 82)... A nice graph of the pancam's sensitivity to various frequencies through each filter shows very good bandpass transmittance (the project explicitly spec'd 85% in-band, IIRC), with incredibly sharp tapering (less than one bandwidth away) for all except L1, R1, L7, and R7. And of those four, only L1 (no filter) has what you could call a wideband response, the other three just favor an ultra-sharp cutoff at their target frequency, at the expense of a slightly more broad tail in the opposite direction.
No, what he SHOULD have done is essentially what Nasa did, which is to solve a minimization problem matching up weighted averages response curves from the available filters to the red/green/blue response of the human eye, and taking the combination with least squared error.
You know, I agree with you, and have spent the past two days producing a program to do exactly that. However, NASA also should have done that, yet did not (despite your assertion) - They simply mixed L2 (or sometimes L4, yet oddly not L3, the obvious closest match to 650nm), L5, and L6. And, from my preliminary results, I'd say that Laney's results look pretty damned good... I can't tell them from what I get from a full 7-onto-3 channel convolution (though my SO can... I'll admit I don't have the best color vision in the world, but I can certainly tell green from brownish-orange).
And also that NASA saturated all of their pictures on tranmission to reduce error (and the exposure settings are nowhere to be found), so you have even less information to go on.
True - With one exception. Any image showing the calibration target has a peak norm equal to white, as well as 4+ independant channel verifications of those values. Thus, my accusation of scientific dishonesty for NASA cropping out that very target.
Why should the websites that these people are seeing the ads on be forced to develop and support a website free of charge?
Forced? Sorry, do we live in different countries, where your government holds a gun to peoples' heads and tells them "update your website or we kill you and your family"?
No one "forces" websites to do anything. They don't "need" to work for nothing - They simply don't need to work at all.
Those sites with an actual product, which at the moment appears limited to storefronts, some news outlets, and porn sites, deserve to stay solvent because they actually provide a service people will pay for. Every other site can go pound sand, or stay up because its owners love doing it (ie, most personal sites, blogs, and certain hobby-oriented informational sites).
Naturally, the obvious followup question involves Slashdot's status under this idea. Personally, I think it falls into a "hobby site that trades bandwidth and hosting costs for massive amounts of good karma for OSDN. That might not have a direct dollar value, but in terms of effective advertising, it means more than all the half-time SuperBowl commercials put together.
To address the parent article, I for one will not EVER visit a site that shows any advertising that I can't either ignore or circumvent. I said that long ago about popups, and well before popup blocking became incorporated into the major browsers, I wrote a crude local proxy server for myself and a few friends to do nothing but filter them out. I'll attempt to do similarly for these new ads, but if the hype holds true and they really do prevent me from visiting the site without watching it, I can guarantee them the permanent loss of one visitor. And I doubt I'll act alone in that regard. People avoid ad-heavy sites already - Having to watch a full 30-second spot will turn off even the most computer illiterate grannies out there.
Oops, our bad. Mars is apparently inhabited by giant sandworms several kilometers long.
I did not say that. I only said "organic-looking", not the same as "giant sandworms".
I don't really think we would have missed something as obvious as very large critters living on the surface of Mars. But, as I asked, do you have any suggestions of what natural, non-biogenic processes would cause such unusual structures?
Skepticism usually benefits science, and I credit you with that. But sarcasm and does not, so you "only" break even. Most of the great discoveries in science resulted from people noticing something that didn't quite seem right, so they looked deeper into the issue. Just flippantly tossing a beanie at a strawman Herbert reference effectively says "I see nuh-thing, NUH-thING!".
So, pretend you have a good explanation, and go away happy. And someday, even in blissful ignorance, you might benefit from the curiousity of others who bothered to ask "what the hell made that?"
OK, the new client toggles a bit that won't cause any visual or audio degradation of the file. Oops.
You've looked at this too naively... Take around a hundred MD5s of nonoverlapping chunks of the file. If 90% of these match, you have near certainty that the files match except for exactly such tampering as you suggest.
For some files, you could get away with that. For others, particularly the highly compressed audio and video files that dominate P2P, breaking such a detection algorithm would, over time, introduce intolerable errors in the file (by the third or fourth copy, I'd say), since such changes would need to occur randomly or risk filtering by the detection algorithm V2.
Not to say we couldn't still get around such attempts to prevent downloading - Until they ban them, simply putting everything in a password-protected zip file (with the password included in a non-passworded file) would suffice for generating effectively random files (to a hash checker, anyway).
My point? Overall, this will just turn into yet another war of escalating circumventions and countermeasures, benefitting neither the content producers nor consumers.
My favourites are the 'pictures of alien moon bases'. Many of these prove to be blowups of astronomical JPG files. The compression algorithm used in the JPG format introduces artificial distortions in the details of images
By all means, explain what compression artifact in the JPEG algorithm, or natural process occuring on Mars, accounts for the top two images (in the left column, not the Viking contexts) at this page, containing raw images from the Mars Global Surveyor dataset.
Keep in mind that each pixel corresponds to 4.47 meters, and you can download the raw file as they have it, rather than a grainy and blown-up JPEG. That makes the interesting feature in the top image roughly 120 meters in diameter, and the curiously organic-looking features in the rest of the set around 50m wide by several kilometers long.
All CCDs are particularly sensitive in the IR range.
True, and the one on the Spirit Rover goes up to appoximately 1100nm.
However, that does NOT excuse the so-called "color" photos from NASA, nor does the excuse presented in the linked text. Why?
Simple reason - As the link mentions, the Spirit Rover sees the world through two identical cameras, with a set of 14 (16 with 2 pairs overlapping) narrow bandpass (around 20nm wide) color filters.
Now, it may well hold true, as per the link, that the blue paint chip looks bright at 750nm. However, WHY would they use L2 (750nm) to simulate human red vision (650nm), when they have a much closer match at L3 (670nm)? Even excusing them from doing a full spectral distribution between the seven (#8 only helps for the sun) left filters mapped onto the human visual response, they could get FAR better results just by not using L2.
And remember, despite appearances to the contrary, we do deal with "rocket scientists" here. People who should know that 670 lies closer to 650 than 750 does.
So for those who consider this a frivolous complaint by the foil-beanie-wearers, consider the utter simplicity of this so-called "problem", as well as the ease of an imperfect-but-damn-close fix (ie, use L3 rather than L2)... And suddenly it all looks a lot more strange, that a huge team of engineers failed what amounts to a 2nd-grade math test, yet successfully put a lander on a distant planet.
Furthermore, the color problem only counts as one of three major questionable points on NASA's image manipulation... If you compare the first released panorama from NASA with the version at the link below, you'll notice not only the color as wrong, but that NASA has deliberately blurred the image. Yes, deliberately - Using the wrong color channel for red doesn't account for the drastic reduction in effective resolution seen between NASA's version and the same thing generated by others from using L2, L5, and L6 (the SAME filters, still with the bad choice of L2, that NASA said they used). NASA officially claimed the haze and low visibility resulted from dust hanging in the air, yet the same image produced externally to them shows a beautiful clear sky with great visibility and no "dusty" effect.
And, I mentioned three problems, not two - The last, I consider worse than any number of failures, up to and including completely losing a mission. To cover up the "bad" colors, they CROPPED OUT THE COLOR CALIBRATION TARGET in all subsequent image releases. Yes, you read that right - Check out their web page... Early pictures they released include it (showing the wrong colors for blue and green), while the version currently on the JPL website have it strangely cut out of the picture. Sorry, but hiding the flaws in an experiment doesn't fly well in the scientific community. If they screwed up initially, they had every chance to fix it and say "oops", with no one making more than an amused comment. But instead, they chose to cover something up - Whether they did so to hide their initial error, or to hide something larger (such as water, see below), I'll leave to the beanie crowd to debate.
For those who want to see the "correct" colors, check out Keith Laney's page, which includes quite a few stunningly nice pictures.
And for those who wonder about that strange substance the Rover landed it - In full, correct color, it looks glaringly obvious that it landed in mud (yes, mud, a mixture of dirt and water).
Why? An ever increasing back catalogue of existing games that don't have such restrictions
I agree completely. I all but stopped playing new PC games when making a simple backup CD started requiring a nontrivial hack (AoE2, I think, which you could still backup without too much hassle, but far more than it should have taken), and every game started needing a no-CD key to play while listening to an actual audio CD at the same time (hey, even the best game background music gets tiring after a few weeks).
For consoles, I enjoy the current round of machines, but won't spend $50+ for a single game. Call me cheap, but you can find original SNES games for a buck each, and PS1 games for under $5 now. And they provide just as much "fun" as any new game (if not the same eye-candy value). When the next gen comes out, I'll probably pick up a PS2 and a GC (I don't really care for the XBox, I might buy one or two games to play via emulator on PC, but don't really care for the majority). And at that time, I'll get just as much enjoyment out of it as people do today, while paying a tenth the current price for games.
So, when companies get rid of the obnoxious DRM, and go back to charging reasonable prices for games (Anyone else remember feeling stunned that the Space Shuttle simulator for the Atari 2600 went for a whopping $20, more than twice the price of the average game? And then it sucked, to add insult to injury?), they can consider me a "good" customer again. Until then, I fall into one of their most-hated demographics (since even when I buy, I provide them with effectively no income), and will remain there.