I'd normally say that the UK has a pretty individualistic, selfish culture (thank you very much, Mrs. T!) but I've _never_ heard a cellphone go off in a cinema. Haven't been to the theatre in years so can't say about that:-) Certainly haven't noticed an epidemic of the things in restaurants, either, and I've _never_ heard one go off during a church service. People do drive and talk, yes, but it's a quick way to get a big fine and people know that so, erm, hide the phone when they see cops:-)
Seriously, though, is the USA cellphone culture that much more selfish than UK? And, if so, why?
Bugzilla ref? Just that QL is what makes Moz a suitable work replacement for IE as I can launch and kill windows at liberty without having to leave one alive.
At home (with multiple profiles...) it's not a problem because the mail client's always open but at work I need QL working or Moz gets painful.
I know this is massively less likely, but what's the chance of something similar being done with TIE Fighter?
Problem is, I _love_ that game but it's seriously unstable on current hardware and utterly incompatible with my Cyborg 3D - grabs the wrong axes so I'm left trying to fly on the throttle and rudder...
Anyone?
Re:What should I make next?
on
Lego Trebuchet
·
· Score: 2
OK, a challenge that was issued a while ago to some friends. We're trying in Meccano, Erector if you're American.
Build a vehicle powered my nothing more than a 1lb falling weight. You can't just build a tower and pull a line in, everything involved has to move along the ground. See how far you can get it in a straight line.
Unless they've recently changed the rules, they most definitely do _NOT_ give them their litre of fuel and tell them to keep going until they get bored. 8000 MPG, average speed of 20 MPH (say), that's over 2 weeks of continuous driving.
Last I heard they took the cars, ran them over an agreed course of a few miles maximum, excluded those who ran too slowly then measured the amount of fuel left in all the cars VERY CAREFULLY:-) and computed the MPG from that.
Re:Brazil & Jeesus - one fan less
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1
When their religion suggests:
* Certain lifestyle choices * Regular fellowship with other believers
and they don't really do either, then I'm inclined to regard them as nominal christians at best and, realistically, agnostics.
Re:Brazil & Jeesus - one fan less
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 2
There's an awful lot of nominal believers in those categories. People who are brought up in a religion and stay in out of intertia rather than personal conviction.
I would suggest that most of the world has a general concept of spirituality as long as it doesn't impact too much on their day-to-day life. For example, look at the percentage of the UK population who consider themselves Christian against church attendance figures - they're nowhere near matching.
Re:Brazil & Jeesus - one fan less
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 2
Not sure. They saw their heroes win the trophy in those shirts, there'll still be a lot of photos of the team in them in tomorrow's papers. Not because there's a conspiracy against the Christian shirts but that they simply require too much explanation if they're what's in the sports pages.
Thinking back to the England-Denmark game, a lot of players swopped shirts afterwards, so half the England team left the pitch in Danish colours. Didn't see any complaint against that and I've seen them do TV interviews still wearing opposition shirts. Or, going back a few years, when Ian Wright broke Arsenal's club goalscoring record, he instantly ripped off his shirt and ran around parading a shirt with a Nike logo and his new record total. That's really blatant placement by Nike, but it was also the image all over the press. Ian was a hero to Arsenal fans, though, so no-one really cared as I recall.
Some might be annoyed but I can't see many being too sad.
Re:Brazil & Jeesus - one fan less
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
(Disclaimer - Christian)
Sir, why? Would you be personally offended if one took off his shirt and revealed a Tux vest?
Fact is, they think Jesus is important. They chose to reveal that, and in a world where the assumption seems to be that most people are agnostic and afraid to be different, I admire them for that. I wouldn't admire them any less if they were wearing a star of david, a crescent, a picture of Buddha, anything like that. They've got fame thanks to their talents and they're now using that to give them a small mouthpiece. Not unusual, just that when it's religious people tend to get shirty.
Really, I'm not one of these 'the whole world is in a conspiracy to bury the Bible!' Christians. That's patently untrue. It's rather irritating, though, to see this sort of senseless bashing.
Hey! Someone else likes Snowblind! Stunning song but most of the world seems to focus on Paranoid, bit of a dirge IMO.
One thing always confuses me seeing this sort of list, though: why do Deep Purple NEVER get mentioned? Has Smoke On The Water hit their credibility _that_ badly? (Hint - as with most bands' famous songs, it's nothing like their best)
I could bang on for hours about Deep Purple, more great songs than I can be bothered to list, amazing variety and they could _really_ play live. Listen to Made in Japan for proof there. Not like they were unknown in the US either, being seriously big in 73-74ish. Watch 'Almost Famous' - the party where Russell Hammond almost kills himself, there's some music playing quite loudly:-) That's Burn, by Deep Purple. Not released until '74 and the film's set in '73 but I'll forgive them that because it's cool:-)
Go out there, listen to some Deep Purple. Particularly In Rock, Machine Head, Made in Japan, Burn or Purpendicular. They're cool.
Re:Spielberg annoys to the end
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 1
Right up to the last 20 minutes, I liked it:-)
Another film which springs to mind as creating this sort of split amongst the viewers - Starship Troopers. Found it very interesting looking at the reviews and splitting it into the bunch who thought it was a gung-ho war movie and those who took it as political commentary.
The joys of art:-)
Re:Spielberg annoys to the end
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
OK, I've seen AI precisely once around 8 months ago so my memory of precise details is hazy.
But that ending plain didn't fit, IMO.
David was created as an experiment in artificial consciousness, in whether such a being could be made to experience this basic human emotion that they hadn't been able to make them do before. To me, the film is a story of watching the basic assumptions in David's programming fall down. His love is so instant that it freaks his family out when they first experience it. You then watch as he's trying to be this perfect kid but the environment, after inital adjustment, slowly degrades so that he falls apart. Ultimately you end up with a scenario where this kid who's clearly very mature in many ways is basing his whole life goal around something that his peers would recognise as fallacy, meeting the Blue Fairy and her making him into a proper boy. He's incapable of recognising the difference between fable and reality.
So he ends up under the sea, staring at this amusement park model, convinced that she can help him get what he wants. He's so convinced of this basic truth that he stays there while the ocean freezes around him, endlessly repeatuing himself, while the natural child would recognise the futility and get bored quickly. This basic failure in his programming which caused the slow degradation in his behaviour and adaptation to his environment has, to all intents and purposes, killed him. Mankind's efforts to play god and create artificial life, so vividly illustrated as the discussion inherent in the film in the introduction scene in the tutorial, have failed. This attempt at artificial love on those terms has failed. IMO, at least partially because he'd been programmed to never age, which seemed to create some interesting problems / paradoxes in his personality.
And he's then resurrected by these aliens who clone his mother for one day of love for him, and he finally goes to sleep despite having been unable to sleep throughout the film. He gets the product of his ultimate wish (if not the wish itself). Aside from missing the tone, it undermines the message to me.
If we wish to view it from a viewpoint of rights for intelligent beings, there are many more elegant ways to show David being redeemed after humanity has failed him than that. But, if it was that, then it was a particularly poor bit of preparation, considering that so much of the audience utterly missed that point. If you wish to build to a grand final point you need to make sure that your audience are carried on the way to it, not just dumped at it. Considering that a decent percentage of the audience considered themselves adequately carried to an alternative ending, an alternative conclusion to the discussion and 20 minutes before the film ended, I would suggest that that part of the storytelling wasn't quite what it could have been.
But hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinion on art. It just happens that ours differ:-)
Amen to that. I take notes during lectures on mine. _Good_ notes, much better than I ever managed with a Palm;-) Course, this stuffs up integration with a phone somewhat, but a Psion makes the computer bit so much better.
A while ago I was wondering about possibilities with proper keyboards in a Palmish form factor. Daft idea occurred to me - what about the keyboard from the Revo but rotated through 90 degrees anticlockwise? Hinge on the end, fix it to the screen. You could then hold it at the hinge and look at the screen while typing or using your finger as the stylus for input. Course, typing will be slower but I'd be willing to bet it'd be faster & more accurate than Graffiti.
We have just massively bumped up the moving parts count, though, and the manufacturing cost with it.
We _were_, we did all sorts of strange things. I remember carpetting the tops of the two fridges in the kitchen so we had somewhere else to sit, the bar parasol perched over an indoor staircase or making an emergency washing line in the lounge using estate agent signs.
The one that springs to mind in particular, though, was Mike's. Lovely guy but sadly into the dance music;-) So, he had various cool gadgets, such as a then-rare plasma ball and a smoke machine.
One time he was just sitting in his room, filling it with smoke, chilling out to some music. This room's at the back of the house so no-one can really see it.
Except that the front bedroom is opposite this room and has an open door and window. Now, this smoke's pretty thin and clear, so not a problem. Until someone comes up the stairs, because there was a comedy red light bulb halfway up the stairs. So, as they turned this on, a faint red glow was visible and people started to notice this thin smoke coming out of the window...
Speaking from experience, I can and do regularly take comprehensive and comprehensible notes on a Psion 5mx, which can then be filed, sorted, printed, e-mailed, combined into larger documents... Real pity they don't sell them any more.
What they're saying there is that if I want to view the sections as they are then I must log back in. I don't, though, I'm interested in certain sections as part of Slashdot and others when they reach the front page. I'm _never_ going to the sectional front pages but regularly being taken to the sectional story pages and having to manipulate URLs. Irritating.
Mozilla 0.9.9 over here does it - but this discussion misses the point.
The point is that we now have at least two users experiencing this problem. I certainly haven't done anything funny with the config to break it, either.
The point is that slashdot insists on linking to section.slashdot.org when there are reports of this throwing away logins, while the same url at slashdot.org does not break logins and produces identical content. IOW, the section.slashdot is breaking something for no good reason, even if not for everyone.
Yes, but the point is that this is something I shouldn't have to do because it's getting round a feature which isn't any use anyway and isn't something newbies will think of.
Just because I can get round a problem doesn't mean the problem ceases to be.
Why, why, why do all sectional stories now have to appear as section.slashdot.org in the front page link? It's annoying!
Yes, I know that if I only want to see the Science stories I can go to science.slashdot.org, or if I want to see a horrific colourscheme I can go to apache.slashdot.org. However, I _didn't_, I went to main slashdot.org and clicked on a link. This story, for no good reason, took me into the subsection. This gains me nothing (same story is available at the same URL minus the section. at the beginning) and means it ignores my login cookie. So, I either have to log back in (waste of time, irritating) or manually change the URL and redownload the story. On 56k and a larger story, that's not much fun.
PLEASE, can this stop? It doesn't help anyone, it just wastes time and bandwidth, mine and yours.
Last I heard, the spiral on the DVD ran the other way so no, you couldn't.
I have to say I can't see what the problem with this would be but MS seem not to want it. S'pose it could provide a support headache and damage the image, but can't be _that_ bad...
The interest to me lies in the Pledge of Allegiance. Having a country who've been brought up pledgeing allegiance to a flag enact a law making that flag illegal would be amusing.
However, due to the nature of the thing, I have to think that text is a better tool. Also a plausible one.
Instinct says I could construct a hypothetical tool which decrypted DVDs (for example) using the constitution as a key. It would be a trivial modification from an existing program, I'd just XOR the current key against the constitution and store that. Combine the two and I have a valid key... and a legal stunt which would get laughed out of court because there would be no way I could state that the constitution would be an integral part of this whole. Any judge worth their salt would instantly point out that I could have replaced the constitution with any text at the initial stage and made _that_ the critical factor, at which point the fact that I user the constition makes it a legal stunt and nothing more.
However, I'm sure we can beat this. There's enough access controls that need keys out there to provide a large pool of possible targets. Remember the fun a while ago with the 'illegal prime number'? Someone had found a large prime which happened to also be a vaild GZIP file of DeCSS IIRC.
Let's imagine that someone takes a large pile of keys and Project Gutenberg. Searches for byte equivalents of these keys within various texts. Sooner or later we'll hit one somewhere. Maybe the constitution won't unzip that eBook, but what if lines 2-7 of a Shakespearean sonnet cracks WPA? Or 3 verses from Collosians as translated in the NASB crack Warner DVDs?
Remember the fun with various strings connected with Microsoft, carefully arranged, whose ASCII sums totalled 666? This may well be possible...
Slashdot Mirror
I'd normally say that the UK has a pretty individualistic, selfish culture (thank you very much, Mrs. T!) but I've _never_ heard a cellphone go off in a cinema. Haven't been to the theatre in years so can't say about that :-) Certainly haven't noticed an epidemic of the things in restaurants, either, and I've _never_ heard one go off during a church service. People do drive and talk, yes, but it's a quick way to get a big fine and people know that so, erm, hide the phone when they see cops :-)
Seriously, though, is the USA cellphone culture that much more selfish than UK? And, if so, why?
Could be, I agree, but I'd read that as 'full disclosure unless you'd hired us to perform a private audit', which is rather more reasonable.
IFF ILBM graphics were run length encoded, yes. IFF was developed by EA, though.
ANIM5 and AMIN7 were a Delta-based format - storing differences only.
Bugzilla ref? Just that QL is what makes Moz a suitable work replacement for IE as I can launch and kill windows at liberty without having to leave one alive.
At home (with multiple profiles...) it's not a problem because the mail client's always open but at work I need QL working or Moz gets painful.
I know this is massively less likely, but what's the chance of something similar being done with TIE Fighter?
Problem is, I _love_ that game but it's seriously unstable on current hardware and utterly incompatible with my Cyborg 3D - grabs the wrong axes so I'm left trying to fly on the throttle and rudder...
Anyone?
OK, a challenge that was issued a while ago to some friends. We're trying in Meccano, Erector if you're American.
;-)
Build a vehicle powered my nothing more than a 1lb falling weight. You can't just build a tower and pull a line in, everything involved has to move along the ground. See how far you can get it in a straight line.
Or see if you break your Lego
Unless they've recently changed the rules, they most definitely do _NOT_ give them their litre of fuel and tell them to keep going until they get bored. 8000 MPG, average speed of 20 MPH (say), that's over 2 weeks of continuous driving.
:-) and computed the MPG from that.
Last I heard they took the cars, ran them over an agreed course of a few miles maximum, excluded those who ran too slowly then measured the amount of fuel left in all the cars VERY CAREFULLY
When their religion suggests:
* Certain lifestyle choices
* Regular fellowship with other believers
and they don't really do either, then I'm inclined to regard them as nominal christians at best and, realistically, agnostics.
There's an awful lot of nominal believers in those categories. People who are brought up in a religion and stay in out of intertia rather than personal conviction.
I would suggest that most of the world has a general concept of spirituality as long as it doesn't impact too much on their day-to-day life. For example, look at the percentage of the UK population who consider themselves Christian against church attendance figures - they're nowhere near matching.
Not sure. They saw their heroes win the trophy in those shirts, there'll still be a lot of photos of the team in them in tomorrow's papers. Not because there's a conspiracy against the Christian shirts but that they simply require too much explanation if they're what's in the sports pages.
Thinking back to the England-Denmark game, a lot of players swopped shirts afterwards, so half the England team left the pitch in Danish colours. Didn't see any complaint against that and I've seen them do TV interviews still wearing opposition shirts. Or, going back a few years, when Ian Wright broke Arsenal's club goalscoring record, he instantly ripped off his shirt and ran around parading a shirt with a Nike logo and his new record total. That's really blatant placement by Nike, but it was also the image all over the press. Ian was a hero to Arsenal fans, though, so no-one really cared as I recall.
Some might be annoyed but I can't see many being too sad.
(Disclaimer - Christian)
Sir, why? Would you be personally offended if one took off his shirt and revealed a Tux vest?
Fact is, they think Jesus is important. They chose to reveal that, and in a world where the assumption seems to be that most people are agnostic and afraid to be different, I admire them for that. I wouldn't admire them any less if they were wearing a star of david, a crescent, a picture of Buddha, anything like that. They've got fame thanks to their talents and they're now using that to give them a small mouthpiece. Not unusual, just that when it's religious people tend to get shirty.
Really, I'm not one of these 'the whole world is in a conspiracy to bury the Bible!' Christians. That's patently untrue. It's rather irritating, though, to see this sort of senseless bashing.
So irritating...
I mean, who considers Yellow Submarine or Help to be the Beatles' artistic peak? My Generation for the Who? And so on...
People, they're a much better band than the Dan Dan Song (its studio name, seriously...) makes them sound.
Hey! Someone else likes Snowblind! Stunning song but most of the world seems to focus on Paranoid, bit of a dirge IMO.
:-) That's Burn, by Deep Purple. Not released until '74 and the film's set in '73 but I'll forgive them that because it's cool :-)
One thing always confuses me seeing this sort of list, though: why do Deep Purple NEVER get mentioned? Has Smoke On The Water hit their credibility _that_ badly? (Hint - as with most bands' famous songs, it's nothing like their best)
I could bang on for hours about Deep Purple, more great songs than I can be bothered to list, amazing variety and they could _really_ play live. Listen to Made in Japan for proof there. Not like they were unknown in the US either, being seriously big in 73-74ish. Watch 'Almost Famous' - the party where Russell Hammond almost kills himself, there's some music playing quite loudly
Go out there, listen to some Deep Purple. Particularly In Rock, Machine Head, Made in Japan, Burn or Purpendicular. They're cool.
Right up to the last 20 minutes, I liked it :-)
:-)
Another film which springs to mind as creating this sort of split amongst the viewers - Starship Troopers. Found it very interesting looking at the reviews and splitting it into the bunch who thought it was a gung-ho war movie and those who took it as political commentary.
The joys of art
OK, I've seen AI precisely once around 8 months ago so my memory of precise details is hazy.
:-)
But that ending plain didn't fit, IMO.
David was created as an experiment in artificial consciousness, in whether such a being could be made to experience this basic human emotion that they hadn't been able to make them do before. To me, the film is a story of watching the basic assumptions in David's programming fall down. His love is so instant that it freaks his family out when they first experience it. You then watch as he's trying to be this perfect kid but the environment, after inital adjustment, slowly degrades so that he falls apart. Ultimately you end up with a scenario where this kid who's clearly very mature in many ways is basing his whole life goal around something that his peers would recognise as fallacy, meeting the Blue Fairy and her making him into a proper boy. He's incapable of recognising the difference between fable and reality.
So he ends up under the sea, staring at this amusement park model, convinced that she can help him get what he wants. He's so convinced of this basic truth that he stays there while the ocean freezes around him, endlessly repeatuing himself, while the natural child would recognise the futility and get bored quickly. This basic failure in his programming which caused the slow degradation in his behaviour and adaptation to his environment has, to all intents and purposes, killed him. Mankind's efforts to play god and create artificial life, so vividly illustrated as the discussion inherent in the film in the introduction scene in the tutorial, have failed. This attempt at artificial love on those terms has failed. IMO, at least partially because he'd been programmed to never age, which seemed to create some interesting problems / paradoxes in his personality.
And he's then resurrected by these aliens who clone his mother for one day of love for him, and he finally goes to sleep despite having been unable to sleep throughout the film. He gets the product of his ultimate wish (if not the wish itself). Aside from missing the tone, it undermines the message to me.
If we wish to view it from a viewpoint of rights for intelligent beings, there are many more elegant ways to show David being redeemed after humanity has failed him than that. But, if it was that, then it was a particularly poor bit of preparation, considering that so much of the audience utterly missed that point. If you wish to build to a grand final point you need to make sure that your audience are carried on the way to it, not just dumped at it. Considering that a decent percentage of the audience considered themselves adequately carried to an alternative ending, an alternative conclusion to the discussion and 20 minutes before the film ended, I would suggest that that part of the storytelling wasn't quite what it could have been.
But hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinion on art. It just happens that ours differ
Amen to that. I take notes during lectures on mine. _Good_ notes, much better than I ever managed with a Palm ;-) Course, this stuffs up integration with a phone somewhat, but a Psion makes the computer bit so much better.
A while ago I was wondering about possibilities with proper keyboards in a Palmish form factor. Daft idea occurred to me - what about the keyboard from the Revo but rotated through 90 degrees anticlockwise? Hinge on the end, fix it to the screen. You could then hold it at the hinge and look at the screen while typing or using your finger as the stylus for input. Course, typing will be slower but I'd be willing to bet it'd be faster & more accurate than Graffiti.
We have just massively bumped up the moving parts count, though, and the manufacturing cost with it.
We _were_, we did all sorts of strange things. I remember carpetting the tops of the two fridges in the kitchen so we had somewhere else to sit, the bar parasol perched over an indoor staircase or making an emergency washing line in the lounge using estate agent signs.
;-) So, he had various cool gadgets, such as a then-rare plasma ball and a smoke machine.
:-)
The one that springs to mind in particular, though, was Mike's. Lovely guy but sadly into the dance music
One time he was just sitting in his room, filling it with smoke, chilling out to some music. This room's at the back of the house so no-one can really see it.
Except that the front bedroom is opposite this room and has an open door and window. Now, this smoke's pretty thin and clear, so not a problem. Until someone comes up the stairs, because there was a comedy red light bulb halfway up the stairs. So, as they turned this on, a faint red glow was visible and people started to notice this thin smoke coming out of the window...
Neigbours called round
Speaking from experience, I can and do regularly take comprehensive and comprehensible notes on a Psion 5mx, which can then be filed, sorted, printed, e-mailed, combined into larger documents... Real pity they don't sell them any more.
Sort of...
:-)
What they're saying there is that if I want to view the sections as they are then I must log back in. I don't, though, I'm interested in certain sections as part of Slashdot and others when they reach the front page. I'm _never_ going to the sectional front pages but regularly being taken to the sectional story pages and having to manipulate URLs. Irritating.
Oh well, maybe this is time for a mail
Mozilla 0.9.9 over here does it - but this discussion misses the point.
The point is that we now have at least two users experiencing this problem. I certainly haven't done anything funny with the config to break it, either.
The point is that slashdot insists on linking to section.slashdot.org when there are reports of this throwing away logins, while the same url at slashdot.org does not break logins and produces identical content. IOW, the section.slashdot is breaking something for no good reason, even if not for everyone.
So, why's it done?
Yes, but the point is that this is something I shouldn't have to do because it's getting round a feature which isn't any use anyway and isn't something newbies will think of.
Just because I can get round a problem doesn't mean the problem ceases to be.
Why, why, why do all sectional stories now have to appear as section.slashdot.org in the front page link? It's annoying!
Yes, I know that if I only want to see the Science stories I can go to science.slashdot.org, or if I want to see a horrific colourscheme I can go to apache.slashdot.org. However, I _didn't_, I went to main slashdot.org and clicked on a link. This story, for no good reason, took me into the subsection. This gains me nothing (same story is available at the same URL minus the section. at the beginning) and means it ignores my login cookie. So, I either have to log back in (waste of time, irritating) or manually change the URL and redownload the story. On 56k and a larger story, that's not much fun.
PLEASE, can this stop? It doesn't help anyone, it just wastes time and bandwidth, mine and yours.
Last I heard, the spiral on the DVD ran the other way so no, you couldn't.
I have to say I can't see what the problem with this would be but MS seem not to want it. S'pose it could provide a support headache and damage the image, but can't be _that_ bad...
I can't remember the Trumpton theme but isn't that Roobarb and Custard?
(Speaking as a Brit)
The interest to me lies in the Pledge of Allegiance. Having a country who've been brought up pledgeing allegiance to a flag enact a law making that flag illegal would be amusing.
However, due to the nature of the thing, I have to think that text is a better tool. Also a plausible one.
Instinct says I could construct a hypothetical tool which decrypted DVDs (for example) using the constitution as a key. It would be a trivial modification from an existing program, I'd just XOR the current key against the constitution and store that. Combine the two and I have a valid key... and a legal stunt which would get laughed out of court because there would be no way I could state that the constitution would be an integral part of this whole. Any judge worth their salt would instantly point out that I could have replaced the constitution with any text at the initial stage and made _that_ the critical factor, at which point the fact that I user the constition makes it a legal stunt and nothing more.
However, I'm sure we can beat this. There's enough access controls that need keys out there to provide a large pool of possible targets. Remember the fun a while ago with the 'illegal prime number'? Someone had found a large prime which happened to also be a vaild GZIP file of DeCSS IIRC.
Let's imagine that someone takes a large pile of keys and Project Gutenberg. Searches for byte equivalents of these keys within various texts. Sooner or later we'll hit one somewhere. Maybe the constitution won't unzip that eBook, but what if lines 2-7 of a Shakespearean sonnet cracks WPA? Or 3 verses from Collosians as translated in the NASB crack Warner DVDs?
Remember the fun with various strings connected with Microsoft, carefully arranged, whose ASCII sums totalled 666? This may well be possible...