Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now.
Precisely, and I would argue that this is a perfect example of hypocrisy in our supposedly "free market above all" western societies. Our goverments have always (wisely, I might add) kept vital infrastructure development as far away from the market as possible. Sure, they let corporations fight for the contracts, but this is mainly one way to steer the economy, among others like central bank loan rates and taxation policy.
In a truly free "urbanist market", a city would grow organically, and we have perfect examples of that, witness Lima/Peru, Sao Paolo/Brazil, Mexico City. But note that all of these cities are in "second world" countries and the organic part is mainly in the suburbs where the poor live and are generally viewed as examples of how not to do it.
Conversely, I'm trying to resist the urge to mention Nazi Germany and the first highways (Godwins law and all that).
Basically my point was only tangentially related to SimCity proper. I was trying to point out an example where central planning is not only beneficial but a necessity. I guess this counts as a troll around here, oh well.
As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there.
NO! They admit to being a social democracy with a relatively strong "social" ingredient, like most of Europe except for thatcherist GB. There is a very important distinction here which most americans never fail to miss. Socialism, communism and capitalism in there purest form are theoretical recipes for different ways to achieve totally deshumanized utopias. Luckily, none of them have ever been made reality.
It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts.
Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state. You're main task is to eliminate the effects of random events such as monster attacks (Godzilla), earthquakes, chaotic traffic and urban development to maximize the efficiency of your carefully established development plans.
This is definitively not how western cities have been evolving in the last century. Sure, there is some larval attempt at central planning (witness for example Paris/France and Mitterands "Great Works: the Defense district, the Louvre etc. -- but then again most americans would consider France a socialist state), but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.
Games such as Quake 3 have been under heavy attack by conservatives as direct causes for violent youths, but I have yet to see a rant about the "five-year-plan" mindset SimCity and it's clones or similar works (Populous, Theme Park et al.) instill onto the gamer.
Face it, the concepts of central planning, authority and legal power is very analogous to the basic premises of engineering and software architecture. Every professional in these fileds (myself included) needs to have some sensibility for these propositions in order to manage his projects efficiently...
In short:
There is a repressed communist in every one of us!
Speaking of which, I spent some time at the usual places (IRC, warez newsgroups, etc.) watching curiously if something would show up, but didn't spot anything...
To anyones knowledge, has a more or less complete archive of the source code actually been put on the internet somewhere? (not that I'm interested in the stuff per se, I haven't done any programming lately so it wouldn't be very interesting to me)
I recently underwent corrective eye surgery and I call it a miracle. I have worn glasses since 3rd grade, and contact lenses since 1978. Over 35 years since I've seen sharply without correction. Before surgery, my sight was at best 20/400. Now, I'm a little better than 20/15. It felt like having "bionic eyes". My wife catches me gazing at the clouds, trees, even the brush on the hillside a mile or so away. I'm seeing so much I've overlooked before. I didn't expect this absolute sharpness. I simply wanted to be free of the confines of glasses and contacts. I even expected to perhaps need reading glasses for close work, but I can still read the smallest print on a dollar bill at 6 inches, so I guess that's good too. Another thing I guess I'm lucky about is that I've had no dry eye problem or irritation at all since I awoke Thursday afternoon. I use the drops anyway, just because, but I could probably do without them.
Anyway, at the post-op, they said it would not be unexpected to have the vision get a little fuzzier and then improve even more over the next week a the corneal swelling maxes out and recedes. I can't imagine it getting any better than this...
It says a lot about the laughable MPAA ratings system that a couple making love can be grounds for an NC-17 rating, while the stuff above only draws an R. The theater where I saw the movie was crammed with little kids. Friends, we live in a loopy country.
Recently, when a fuss erupted over the US MPAA ratings board giving the British feelgood family film, Billy Elliot, an R rating, the head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, said of his job that he gets way more letters about bad language than he gets about people getting shot in the face. Ergo, a film like Billy Elliot will be rated R because someone says the word 'fuck', while a film like Nutty Professor 2, complete with a grandmother giving implied oral sex (with teeth out) gets away with a PG-13. It's why Lost World, complete with people being ripped apart by dinosaurs for our amusement, is rated PG-13, while a film like Requiem For A Dream, with it's important message, is sent to unscreenable land when it gets an NC-17.
See, the real problem with censorship isn't that some board says 'this is bad', it's that a lot of decisions come from what that board says. A rating should be a guide, given so we don't accidentally stumble with mom into a porno film, but these days a rating dictates whether a film can be seen by the largest slice of the audience (kids, teens and by extension, families), which dictates how many screens it goes on (suburban cinemas don't want to have eight R rated films showing at once) and, in these days of video store monopolies, whether you can even rent one of these films in your local Blockbuster. It's not a question of seeing that one cut second of a guy getting a knife in the throat, it's a question of even seeing the movie.
Now filmmakers know this. And in fact, many filmmakers have to sign a contract guaranteeing that they'll deliver a cut of the film to receive a certain rating, before even a scene is shot. I know from experience, having worked on a film where scenes were changed on the day to avoid an NC-17 rating, that what is supposed to be a guide for the viewer is becoming a guide for the filmmaker.
And the worst thing is, these changes are completely arbitrary. We all know the stories of Orgazmo being hit with an NC-17 even though there was less frontal nudity than in Boogie Nights. We've heard the tales of the South Park movie being told to remove the word 'motherfucker', replacing it with 'unclefucker' and having no further problems. And then there's American Psycho, which after submitting a film full of chainsaw and sledgehammer murders was told to remove one shot from a sex scene.
It's ridiculous. And it doesn't save anyone from anything.
Censorship is bad. It doesn't work. Nobody shot up Columbine High School because Leonardo DiCaprio wore a trenchcoat once, they did it because they could drive downtown and pick up a small sack of heavy weapons for $29.95. Sure, Leo dictated their fashion choice, but he didn't load the cartridges for them.
In the opening credits you see security tape being fast-forwarded and then rewound, and played forward, and stuff. I think it is a clever reference to the fact that when the universe stops expanding and contracts, that, Hannibal wants Clarice to take his sister's place in the universe. That was never said in the movie, and in the book there were a lot of flashback sequences to why hannibal is like he is, and about his sister. Also, Mason Verger was much less evil in the movie. In the book he makes a child cry, by telling him lies about his foster parents, then has cordell wipe his tears away with a tissue, and mix the tears into a cocktail. Also, i don't like the fact that they didn't use the original headline from the book, they used something else instead, in the book they said DEATH ANGEL!, CLARICE STARLING. Also, they dropped her roomate out of the movie too. I like the movie, but the book is waaay better.
Say what you will about the ethical justification of copying other peoples music, but at least Napster has sparked off an impressive amount of innovative projects. Here is something I came across recently: Docster.
For the goatsex paranoid, here's a short abstract:
Imagine all the researchers you know, with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Instead of just citations, docster also stores the files themselves and retains a connection between the citation metadata and each corresponding file. Somewhere in the ether is a docster server to which those researchers connect. They're reading one of their articles, and they find a new reference they want to pull up. What to do? Just query docster for it. Docster will figure out who else among those connected has a copy of that article, and if it's found, requests and saves a copy for our friendly researcher.
Of course, we cannot do this. Libraries depend too much on copyright to attack the system so directly. But what if we focused instead on altering the napster model enough to make it explicitly copyright-compliant? After all, many cases of one researcher giving another a copy of an article are a fair use of that article. Fair use provides us with this possibility and it's not a giant leap to argue that perhaps coordinated copying through such a centralized server could constitute fair use, especially if docster didn't compete with commercial interests.
Well, it's still a big leap, but think of the benefits. Say there's an article from 1973 that's suddenly all the rage. It doesn't exist online yet, so a patron request comes to you from some other library, and you've got the journal, so you fill the request. But forty-eight other researchers want that article too. If that first patron uses docster, any of those other folks also using docster can just grab the file from the first requestor. If others don't use docster, they can request a copy from their local libraries, who -- I hope -- do use docster. Nobody has to go scan that article again, and suddenly there is redundant digital storage.
Speaking of the moon, I thought I'd revive a legendary/. troll classic from the immortal streetlawyer, Have fun!
The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt.45 and a.38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...
Spider Robinson writes a column, Past Imperfect, Future Tense, for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Some time ago, his column was titled "Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle". In it, Spider relates a conversation he had with Buzz Aldrin at a science fiction convention where they were co-Guests Of Honour. Buzz Aldrin related a fairly hushed up incident in the Apollo 11 mission.
The lunar landing module was very tight for space. The story is that, at the end of the exploration phase of the mission, as our heroes get ready to return to Earth, they need to remove their backpacks (dead weight) and switch back to the LEM air supply. In removing his backpack in the tight constraints of the LEM, Neil Armstrong breaks the ignition switch for the ascent engine. They are stranded on the moon with no tools to fix the problem and a finite reserve of air.
As Spider puts it:
``It dawns on Armstrong and Aldrin that they are now dead men walking, a long way from home.
``And then, God be thanked, Armstrong remembers what Senator Jocksfire called the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle. That egregious taxpayer-ripoff frippery: his zero-gravity pen. He retrieves it, roots around in the ruins of the switch...and becomes the first man ever to hot-wire a vehicle on another planet."
In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.
The space pen had a bigger side effect than having any notes written by American astronauts more easily preserved for posterity. The failure of Apollo 11 could have crippled the American space program and provided the Russians with breathing room for their moon landing efforts. Kennedy's goal, after all, was ``to land a man on the moon and return him safely"
Jerry Pournelle argues the point that the fall of the Soviet Union is in large part due to the fact that the Russians bankrupted themselves trying to match the American SDI ("Star Wars") effort. Their belief that the Americans might succeed at Star Wars was, Pournelle believes, founded in the USA's success on seemingly impossible projects like Apollo. Would we still be living with the Cold War had we not had the space pen?
The cool part about Freenet is that it's SECURE. It's anonymous, and it's crypto-tastic. This means that Freenet is not subject to the kind of witch hunts that we've seen with systems like Napster, where individuals with certain IP addresses were booted for distributing Metallica MP3s. They physically cannot tell where you are, if you're running Freenet. It's also decentralized, meaning there's NO SINGLE POINT of FAILURE that can be brought down by technical or legal means. No Bertelsmann deals, in other words.
Freenet is also very well architected, unlike bogus Gnutella. It's designed to scale up, so that popular stuff gets cached all over the place. Like, more people downloading means that your connections go FASTER. This is cool.
Wow, I'm impressed. Thank you very much for this reply.
I just wanted to add that I very much look forward to checking out your product as soon as it hits the shelves. Rest assured that I will evaluate it with an open mind, despite my (obvious) bias towards traditional books.
I'm a lifelong technologist who's been on the Internet since the late 1980s. I make my living designing and promulgating services that run on the World Wide Web. I should know better than most that print is dead, the book is obsolete, the future belongs entirely to digital transmission, and the screen's the place for reading.
But books continue to matter, now and for any plausible future. Not as the only means to transmit information, entertainment, and knowledge--that hasn't been true for more than a century. Not as the dominant force among media--that hasn't been true for decades. But as a vibrant, healthy medium--one that serves a variety of needs better than any alternative and that makes good economic, ecological, and technological sense for the new millennium--the book just isn't going away.
One absolute article of faith in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s was that the DynaBook, or its equivalent, was just around the corner. This device offers better readability than a book and easier navigation. It is light enough in weight and has a high enough battery life so that it is as portable as a book; with rapid replacement of contents, it functions as a universal book. Every projection I've seen had such a device on the market long before now, at an extremely modest price.
It hasn't happened, and there's every reason to believe that it won't. Reading from digital devices, whether portable or desktop, suffers in several areas--among them light, resolution, speed, and impact on the reader--and there has been essentially no improvement in any of these areas in the last five years.
Many futurists have conceded this point. They now admit that people will print out anything longer than 500 words or so. It's just too hard to read from a computer, and it doesn't seem likely to get a lot easier. If every long text is printed out each time it is used, there are enormous economic and ecological disadvantages to the all-digital library: briefly, a typical public library would spend much more on printing and licenses than its current total budget and would use at least 50 times as much paper as at present.
What ever happened to Sony's BookMan, their portable digital book? Why didn't the DynaBook ever emerge as a real device? Why aren't we all using Personal Digital Assistants for most of our reading? The answers are complex, but the overall situation is clear. The PDAs being produced today and designed for tomorrow aren't intended to function as book replacements: the screens are small, hard to read, and awkward to navigate for lengthy text. It's increasingly clear that the public as a whole has no need for--or interest in-- digital book equivalents.
Two-thirds of adult Americans, and a higher percentage of children, use their public libraries. Roughly two-thirds of adult Americans purchased books last year. I'd guess that an even higher percentage reads magazines or newspapers. Is it possible that electronic tablets could achieve such ubiquity in the next few years--or even the next couple of decades? I doubt it.
I've read the opinions of a few people who insist that cyber-sex is pure fantasy. They don't see the interaction as being real since there is no physical contact. Each new "adventure" is usually with a different person, rarely the same person twice. The two do not develop a friendship prior to engaging in the act. It's much akin to a real time "one night stand." Neither party is interested in maintaining contact beyond the time they spent in a private room online. This sounds like harmless entertainment. I suppose this would depend on whether or not the people involved are in committed relationships, and if so, whether or not the significant others know, and/or approve, of the activity. Frequency might also be an issue. If cyber-sex is happening once a month it may be acceptable to a partner, but if happening three or four times a week, may not.
If I view cyber-sex, taking a religious stance (which is endlessly amusing), and understand the Bible correctly, its states that adultery begins in the heart, without ever having to physically perform the deed. If a married person is exchanging words describing sexual actions they're performing on someone else, even if it's all in the imagination, my guess is they're guilty of adultery. Likewise, if I were unattached and engaging in this behavior with a person who is married, it would be a wrongful act. If both parties are unmarried, I suppose it would fall under the category of fornication. I agree, if looking at cyber-sex from this perspective, it's wrong. These acts hurt, and go against, not only the scripture, but also the covenant of marriage.
Some say that engaging in cyber-sex has helped their relationship. Of this group, I've found that usually both partners are knowingly engaging in cyber-sex, usually in private, but sometimes together, often later sharing bits and pieces of their verbal exchange. They've allowed each other to explore their sexuality online. Sometimes one or the other will learn a new or different sexual technique and bring it to the bedroom, eager to experiment. If two people agree this behavior is acceptable, then who am I to disagree?
notabene: I'm unmarried but have a strong relationship since over 4 years (and yes, it's woman, you goatse pigs)...
Creative's ugly corporate obstinateness is not the only problem with the Nomad. I bought one some time ago and was thourougly disapointed. Here are my main beefs with this thing:
1. The manual which comes with this product is very poor and does not go into detail about ANYTHING.. It is a small booklet and leaves you with a billion questions.
2. Battery problems. Just like the manual said, you must charge your batteries for 12 full hours before using them. I charged mine for over 12 hours the first time (did it over night while I was sleeping), and then in the morning I took my jukebox out for a walk with me. The batteries died in a half hour. Lovely. I decided to check out the support newsgroups on this product and apparently I am not the only one who had this problem. It was suggested that I try the 2nd set of batteries that comes with this jukebox. So I did. However, there is no indication on this product as to the status of your batteries charging, you just have to GUESS and ASSUME that they are in fact charging! There is no "meter" which shows you the progress. After 12 hours of charging my 2nd set of batteries, I turned on my jukebox and it read 85% charged... I guess I'll have to accept it. The support group tells me that even though it says 85%, that it really means 100 %. How lovely. How much did this thing cost again? ANd why are so many other people in the support newsgroup experiencing battery/charging problems?
3. Sometimes there are huge pauses between tracks, while the jukebox loads up the track into memory. (very annoying.. it's like a 10 second wait until your next track; mind you not all the tracks experienced this delay, just the pre-loaded music that came with the jukebox)
4. No fast forward or rewind, you can only skip to the next track, or go back to the previous one.
5. Some of my tracks just completely stop playing in the middle, and it moves on to the next track. Yet, the same file will play fine on my pc. And no matter how many times I reboot the jukebox, it will stop playing this file after a minute, as though it got corrupted.
6. The carrying case that comes with it is really not a convenient way to carry it around for walking or listening on the bus, because you cannot access any controls on the jukebox without taking it out of its case - not even the volume! And why I should go out to a store and buy a special case for this jukebox is beyond me, considering how much this thing already costs!
The support group tells me that my 1st set of batteries may be defective, and that I should try charging them in an external charger. Why should I go out and buy one?! My bottom line is that for the money they are asking for this product, it better come with EVERYTHING i need!
In conclusion, the only thing amazing about this product is the fact that it holds 6 GB worth of mp3s. That's all. There is nothing else out of the ordinary, and in fact, everything else about this product is ordinary. Even the EQ settings and spatialization is nothing special.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a similar product without all those shortcommings?
"because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on."
So should genes be patented?
I believe this question has been at least partially answered by the Patent Office. You can patent a gene based medicine or treatment if it is applicable to a particular illness, or disease, or gene based disability. You cannot just patent genes willy nilly because you know they exist. The Patent Office and people in gene research from the NIH and Celera, the two main players in gene research, pretty much agree that it is beneficial to the public if gene based
medicines can be patented for specific treatments. A more detailed discussion on patenting is at:
The very existence of RAMBUS is the consequence of the particular set of rather arbitrary intellectual "property" laws we have now. RAMBUS need to be taken down hard, and my bet is it's going to happen, sooner or later.
I fully agree with the first sentence, but how you get from there to "RAMBUS need to be taken down hard" is beyond me. The logical consequence to me is that the laws must be changed, but you can't punish a player which arguably was playing by the rules. Those patents were granted to them, wether they deserve them or not. There's nothing wrong with them trying to enforce them fully.
However the point of my (lengthy, but certainly not inflammatory, you moderator jackass) post was to point out that, patents or no patents, RAMBUS technology has intrinsically more potential than SDRAM, despite the fact that, in the near future, SDRAM may continue outperforming it. There is simply no way around it.
Slashdot Mirror
Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now.
Precisely, and I would argue that this is a perfect example of hypocrisy in our supposedly "free market above all" western societies. Our goverments have always (wisely, I might add) kept vital infrastructure development as far away from the market as possible. Sure, they let corporations fight for the contracts, but this is mainly one way to steer the economy, among others like central bank loan rates and taxation policy.
In a truly free "urbanist market", a city would grow organically, and we have perfect examples of that, witness Lima/Peru, Sao Paolo/Brazil, Mexico City. But note that all of these cities are in "second world" countries and the organic part is mainly in the suburbs where the poor live and are generally viewed as examples of how not to do it.
Conversely, I'm trying to resist the urge to mention Nazi Germany and the first highways (Godwins law and all that).
Basically my point was only tangentially related to SimCity proper. I was trying to point out an example where central planning is not only beneficial but a necessity. I guess this counts as a troll around here, oh well.
As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there.
NO! They admit to being a social democracy with a relatively strong "social" ingredient, like most of Europe except for thatcherist GB. There is a very important distinction here which most americans never fail to miss. Socialism, communism and capitalism in there purest form are theoretical recipes for different ways to achieve totally deshumanized utopias. Luckily, none of them have ever been made reality.
What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.
Fair enough, but you did respond, didn't you?
It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts.
Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state. You're main task is to eliminate the effects of random events such as monster attacks (Godzilla), earthquakes, chaotic traffic and urban development to maximize the efficiency of your carefully established development plans.
This is definitively not how western cities have been evolving in the last century. Sure, there is some larval attempt at central planning (witness for example Paris/France and Mitterands "Great Works: the Defense district, the Louvre etc. -- but then again most americans would consider France a socialist state), but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.
Games such as Quake 3 have been under heavy attack by conservatives as direct causes for violent youths, but I have yet to see a rant about the "five-year-plan" mindset SimCity and it's clones or similar works (Populous, Theme Park et al.) instill onto the gamer.
Face it, the concepts of central planning, authority and legal power is very analogous to the basic premises of engineering and software architecture. Every professional in these fileds (myself included) needs to have some sensibility for these propositions in order to manage his projects efficiently...
In short:
There is a repressed communist in every one of us!
Speaking of which, I spent some time at the usual places (IRC, warez newsgroups, etc.) watching curiously if something would show up, but didn't spot anything...
To anyones knowledge, has a more or less complete archive of the source code actually been put on the internet somewhere? (not that I'm interested in the stuff per se, I haven't done any programming lately so it wouldn't be very interesting to me)
... just curious, really.
I recently underwent corrective eye surgery and I call it a miracle. I have worn glasses since 3rd grade, and contact lenses since 1978. Over 35 years since I've seen sharply without correction. Before surgery, my sight was at best 20/400. Now, I'm a little better than 20/15. It felt like having "bionic eyes". My wife catches me gazing at the clouds, trees, even the brush on the hillside a mile or so away. I'm seeing so much I've overlooked before. I didn't expect this absolute sharpness. I simply wanted to be free of the confines of glasses and contacts. I even expected to perhaps need reading glasses for close work, but I can still read the smallest print on a dollar bill at 6 inches, so I guess that's good too. Another thing I guess I'm lucky about is that I've had no dry eye problem or irritation at all since I awoke Thursday afternoon. I use the drops anyway, just because, but I could probably do without them.
Anyway, at the post-op, they said it would not be unexpected to have the vision get a little fuzzier and then improve even more over the next week a the corneal swelling maxes out and recedes. I can't imagine it getting any better than this...
It says a lot about the laughable MPAA ratings system that a couple making love can be grounds for an NC-17 rating, while the stuff above only draws an R. The theater where I saw the movie was crammed with little kids. Friends, we live in a loopy country.
Recently, when a fuss erupted over the US MPAA ratings board giving the British feelgood family film, Billy Elliot, an R rating, the head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, said of his job that he gets way more letters about bad language than he gets about people getting shot in the face. Ergo, a film like Billy Elliot will be rated R because someone says the word 'fuck', while a film like Nutty Professor 2, complete with a grandmother giving implied oral sex (with teeth out) gets away with a PG-13. It's why Lost World, complete with people being ripped apart by dinosaurs for our amusement, is rated PG-13, while a film like Requiem For A Dream, with it's important message, is sent to unscreenable land when it gets an NC-17.
See, the real problem with censorship isn't that some board says 'this is bad', it's that a lot of decisions come from what that board says. A rating should be a guide, given so we don't accidentally stumble with mom into a porno film, but these days a rating dictates whether a film can be seen by the largest slice of the audience (kids, teens and by extension, families), which dictates how many screens it goes on (suburban cinemas don't want to have eight R rated films showing at once) and, in these days of video store monopolies, whether you can even rent one of these films in your local Blockbuster. It's not a question of seeing that one cut second of a guy getting a knife in the throat, it's a question of even seeing the movie.
Now filmmakers know this. And in fact, many filmmakers have to sign a contract guaranteeing that they'll deliver a cut of the film to receive a certain rating, before even a scene is shot. I know from experience, having worked on a film where scenes were changed on the day to avoid an NC-17 rating, that what is supposed to be a guide for the viewer is becoming a guide for the filmmaker.
And the worst thing is, these changes are completely arbitrary. We all know the stories of Orgazmo being hit with an NC-17 even though there was less frontal nudity than in Boogie Nights. We've heard the tales of the South Park movie being told to remove the word 'motherfucker', replacing it with 'unclefucker' and having no further problems. And then there's American Psycho, which after submitting a film full of chainsaw and sledgehammer murders was told to remove one shot from a sex scene.
It's ridiculous. And it doesn't save anyone from anything.
Censorship is bad. It doesn't work. Nobody shot up Columbine High School because Leonardo DiCaprio wore a trenchcoat once, they did it because they could drive downtown and pick up a small sack of heavy weapons for $29.95. Sure, Leo dictated their fashion choice, but he didn't load the cartridges for them.
In the opening credits you see security tape being fast-forwarded and then rewound, and played forward, and stuff. I think it is a clever reference to the fact that when the universe stops expanding and contracts, that, Hannibal wants Clarice to take his sister's place in the universe. That was never said in the movie, and in the book there were a lot of flashback sequences to why hannibal is like he is, and about his sister. Also, Mason Verger was much less evil in the movie. In the book he makes a child cry, by telling him lies about his foster parents, then has cordell wipe his tears away with a tissue, and mix the tears into a cocktail. Also, i don't like the fact that they didn't use the original headline from the book, they used something else instead, in the book they said DEATH ANGEL!, CLARICE STARLING. Also, they dropped her roomate out of the movie too. I like the movie, but the book is waaay better.
Say what you will about the ethical justification of copying other peoples music, but at least Napster has sparked off an impressive amount of innovative projects. Here is something I came across recently: Docster.
For the goatsex paranoid, here's a short abstract:
Imagine all the researchers you know, with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Instead of just citations, docster also stores the files themselves and retains a connection between the citation metadata and each corresponding file. Somewhere in the ether is a docster server to which those researchers connect. They're reading one of their articles, and they find a new reference they want to pull up. What to do? Just query docster for it. Docster will figure out who else among those connected has a copy of that article, and if it's found, requests and saves a copy for our friendly researcher.
Of course, we cannot do this. Libraries depend too much on copyright to attack the system so directly. But what if we focused instead on altering the napster model enough to make it explicitly copyright-compliant? After all, many cases of one researcher giving another a copy of an article are a fair use of that article. Fair use provides us with this possibility and it's not a giant leap to argue that perhaps coordinated copying through such a centralized server could constitute fair use, especially if docster didn't compete with commercial interests.
Well, it's still a big leap, but think of the benefits. Say there's an article from 1973 that's suddenly all the rage. It doesn't exist online yet, so a patron request comes to you from some other library, and you've got the journal, so you fill the request. But forty-eight other researchers want that article too. If that first patron uses docster, any of those other folks also using docster can just grab the file from the first requestor. If others don't use docster, they can request a copy from their local libraries, who -- I hope -- do use docster. Nobody has to go scan that article again, and suddenly there is redundant digital storage.
Sounds good, no?
No, I'm only suggesting that trough extraordinary circumstance that space pen may have been worth the money it costs, that's all.
:)
I was shooting for an informative rating as well, looks like it worked
Speaking of the moon, I thought I'd revive a legendary /. troll classic from the immortal streetlawyer, Have fun!
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...
Spider Robinson writes a column, Past Imperfect, Future Tense, for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Some time ago, his column was titled "Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle". In it, Spider relates a conversation he had with Buzz Aldrin at a science fiction convention where they were co-Guests Of Honour. Buzz Aldrin related a fairly hushed up incident in the Apollo 11 mission.
The lunar landing module was very tight for space. The story is that, at the end of the exploration phase of the mission, as our heroes get ready to return to Earth, they need to remove their backpacks (dead weight) and switch back to the LEM air supply. In removing his backpack in the tight constraints of the LEM, Neil Armstrong breaks the ignition switch for the ascent engine. They are stranded on the moon with no tools to fix the problem and a finite reserve of air.
As Spider puts it:
``It dawns on Armstrong and Aldrin that they are now dead men walking, a long way from home.
``And then, God be thanked, Armstrong remembers what Senator Jocksfire called the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle. That egregious taxpayer-ripoff frippery: his zero-gravity pen. He retrieves it, roots around in the ruins of the switch...and becomes the first man ever to hot-wire a vehicle on another planet."
In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.
The space pen had a bigger side effect than having any notes written by American astronauts more easily preserved for posterity. The failure of Apollo 11 could have crippled the American space program and provided the Russians with breathing room for their moon landing efforts. Kennedy's goal, after all, was ``to land a man on the moon and return him safely"
Jerry Pournelle argues the point that the fall of the Soviet Union is in large part due to the fact that the Russians bankrupted themselves trying to match the American SDI ("Star Wars") effort. Their belief that the Americans might succeed at Star Wars was, Pournelle believes, founded in the USA's success on seemingly impossible projects like Apollo. Would we still be living with the Cold War had we not had the space pen?
then the RIAA could easily make the case that you were storing illegal content on your machine
No, reread the parent. You cannot know where the information is actually stored.
A freenet node is basically a caching router, and AFAIK even the RIAA hasn't yet been able to repeal the common carrier status, so you should be ok.
Freenet is also very well architected, unlike bogus Gnutella. It's designed to scale up, so that popular stuff gets cached all over the place. Like, more people downloading means that your connections go FASTER. This is cool.
Wow, I'm impressed. Thank you very much for this reply.
I just wanted to add that I very much look forward to checking out your product as soon as it hits the shelves. Rest assured that I will evaluate it with an open mind, despite my (obvious) bias towards traditional books.
Best regards
(face it, your average bourgeois motherfucker has a shelf full of leather-bound, unopened "classics")
As a matter of fact, I do.
I'm a lifelong technologist who's been on the Internet since the late 1980s. I make my living designing and promulgating services that run on the World Wide Web. I should know better than most that print is dead, the book is obsolete, the future belongs entirely to digital transmission, and the screen's the place for reading.
But books continue to matter, now and for any plausible future. Not as the only means to transmit information, entertainment, and knowledge--that hasn't been true for more than a century. Not as the dominant force among media--that hasn't been true for decades. But as a vibrant, healthy medium--one that serves a variety of needs better than any alternative and that makes good economic, ecological, and technological sense for the new millennium--the book just isn't going away.
One absolute article of faith in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s was that the DynaBook, or its equivalent, was just around the corner. This device offers better readability than a book and easier navigation. It is light enough in weight and has a high enough battery life so that it is as portable as a book; with rapid replacement of contents, it functions as a universal book. Every projection I've seen had such a device on the market long before now, at an extremely modest price.
It hasn't happened, and there's every reason to believe that it won't. Reading from digital devices, whether portable or desktop, suffers in several areas--among them light, resolution, speed, and impact on the reader--and there has been essentially no improvement in any of these areas in the last five years.
Many futurists have conceded this point. They now admit that people will print out anything longer than 500 words or so. It's just too hard to read from a computer, and it doesn't seem likely to get a lot easier. If every long text is printed out each time it is used, there are enormous economic and ecological disadvantages to the all-digital library: briefly, a typical public library would spend much more on printing and licenses than its current total budget and would use at least 50 times as much paper as at present.
What ever happened to Sony's BookMan, their portable digital book? Why didn't the DynaBook ever emerge as a real device? Why aren't we all using Personal Digital Assistants for most of our reading? The answers are complex, but the overall situation is clear. The PDAs being produced today and designed for tomorrow aren't intended to function as book replacements: the screens are small, hard to read, and awkward to navigate for lengthy text. It's increasingly clear that the public as a whole has no need for--or interest in-- digital book equivalents.
Two-thirds of adult Americans, and a higher percentage of children, use their public libraries. Roughly two-thirds of adult Americans purchased books last year. I'd guess that an even higher percentage reads magazines or newspapers. Is it possible that electronic tablets could achieve such ubiquity in the next few years--or even the next couple of decades? I doubt it.
I've read the opinions of a few people who insist that cyber-sex is pure fantasy. They don't see the interaction as being real since there is no physical contact. Each new "adventure" is usually with a different person, rarely the same person twice. The two do not develop a friendship prior to engaging in the act. It's much akin to a real time "one night stand." Neither party is interested in maintaining contact beyond the time they spent in a private room online. This sounds like harmless entertainment. I suppose this would depend on whether or not the people involved are in committed relationships, and if so, whether or not the significant others know, and/or approve, of the activity. Frequency might also be an issue. If cyber-sex is happening once a month it may be acceptable to a partner, but if happening three or four times a week, may not.
If I view cyber-sex, taking a religious stance (which is endlessly amusing), and understand the Bible correctly, its states that adultery begins in the heart, without ever having to physically perform the deed. If a married person is exchanging words describing sexual actions they're performing on someone else, even if it's all in the imagination, my guess is they're guilty of adultery. Likewise, if I were unattached and engaging in this behavior with a person who is married, it would be a wrongful act. If both parties are unmarried, I suppose it would fall under the category of fornication. I agree, if looking at cyber-sex from this perspective, it's wrong. These acts hurt, and go against, not only the scripture, but also the covenant of marriage.
Some say that engaging in cyber-sex has helped their relationship. Of this group, I've found that usually both partners are knowingly engaging in cyber-sex, usually in private, but sometimes together, often later sharing bits and pieces of their verbal exchange. They've allowed each other to explore their sexuality online. Sometimes one or the other will learn a new or different sexual technique and bring it to the bedroom, eager to experiment. If two people agree this behavior is acceptable, then who am I to disagree?
notabene: I'm unmarried but have a strong relationship since over 4 years (and yes, it's woman, you goatse pigs)...
Dear google, please explain antialiasaing...
Thank you !
As in the TET offensive during vietnam. Whoops. I forgot who won that thing.
So? Problem?
If you weren't one of the few people who bought this the first day it came out
Yeah, it's probably too much to ask for a mostly bug-free hardware product on first release.
I have since sold it so I didn't bother to follow up on the problems.
As someone mentioned to me, I got one of the very early models which did indeed have numeous bugs. Most problems seem to have been fixed by now.
Anyway I'm happy to hear that Creative got their act together. I have sold mine however.
1. The manual which comes with this product is very poor and does not go into detail about ANYTHING.. It is a small booklet and leaves you with a billion questions.
2. Battery problems. Just like the manual said, you must charge your batteries for 12 full hours before using them. I charged mine for over 12 hours the first time (did it over night while I was sleeping), and then in the morning I took my jukebox out for a walk with me. The batteries died in a half hour. Lovely. I decided to check out the support newsgroups on this product and apparently I am not the only one who had this problem. It was suggested that I try the 2nd set of batteries that comes with this jukebox. So I did. However, there is no indication on this product as to the status of your batteries charging, you just have to GUESS and ASSUME that they are in fact charging! There is no "meter" which shows you the progress. After 12 hours of charging my 2nd set of batteries, I turned on my jukebox and it read 85% charged... I guess I'll have to accept it. The support group tells me that even though it says 85%, that it really means 100 %. How lovely. How much did this thing cost again? ANd why are so many other people in the support newsgroup experiencing battery/charging problems?
3. Sometimes there are huge pauses between tracks, while the jukebox loads up the track into memory. (very annoying.. it's like a 10 second wait until your next track; mind you not all the tracks experienced this delay, just the pre-loaded music that came with the jukebox)
4. No fast forward or rewind, you can only skip to the next track, or go back to the previous one.
5. Some of my tracks just completely stop playing in the middle, and it moves on to the next track. Yet, the same file will play fine on my pc. And no matter how many times I reboot the jukebox, it will stop playing this file after a minute, as though it got corrupted.
6. The carrying case that comes with it is really not a convenient way to carry it around for walking or listening on the bus, because you cannot access any controls on the jukebox without taking it out of its case - not even the volume! And why I should go out to a store and buy a special case for this jukebox is beyond me, considering how much this thing already costs!
The support group tells me that my 1st set of batteries may be defective, and that I should try charging them in an external charger. Why should I go out and buy one?! My bottom line is that for the money they are asking for this product, it better come with EVERYTHING i need!
In conclusion, the only thing amazing about this product is the fact that it holds 6 GB worth of mp3s. That's all. There is nothing else out of the ordinary, and in fact, everything else about this product is ordinary. Even the EQ settings and spatialization is nothing special.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a similar product without all those shortcommings?
"because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on."
So should genes be patented?
I believe this question has been at least partially answered by the Patent Office. You can patent a gene based medicine or treatment if it is applicable to a particular illness, or disease, or gene based disability. You cannot just patent genes willy nilly because you know they exist. The Patent Office and people in gene research from the NIH and Celera, the two main players in gene research, pretty much agree that it is beneficial to the public if gene based
medicines can be patented for specific treatments. A more detailed discussion on patenting is at:
http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/patents.html
Yeah that sounds about right. Must have made a mistake when converting to USD, since I'm not american...
The very existence of RAMBUS is the consequence of the particular set of rather arbitrary intellectual "property" laws we have now. RAMBUS need to be taken down hard, and my bet is it's going to happen, sooner or later.
I fully agree with the first sentence, but how you get from there to "RAMBUS need to be taken down hard" is beyond me. The logical consequence to me is that the laws must be changed, but you can't punish a player which arguably was playing by the rules. Those patents were granted to them, wether they deserve them or not. There's nothing wrong with them trying to enforce them fully.
However the point of my (lengthy, but certainly not inflammatory, you moderator jackass) post was to point out that, patents or no patents, RAMBUS technology has intrinsically more potential than SDRAM, despite the fact that, in the near future, SDRAM may continue outperforming it. There is simply no way around it.