Larabie and the Erik Spiekermanns of this world are in different leagues.
Most of Larabie's fonts are display fonts, rather than text fonts (i.e., ones that would be used for setting headings or signs, rather than paragraphs of text), and many of them are of a quirky novelty nature. Making a fun-looking display font is one thing; making a typeface that can be used to set large swathes of text, in such a way that the text is readable for long periods of time, is more difficult. Entire books have been written on the art of typography, on serifs and optical weights, the perceptual psychology of reading text and the tricks of the great typefaces of the past. As such, it takes far more accomplishment and mastery of typography to make one good display font that gets accepted for use in print than it does to make three hundred nifty-looking display fonts.
Isn't Toronto to Vancouver a scenic tourist route, with the markup that follows, though?
The fact that there's little demand for non-tourist long-distance rail travel would make it scarce and expensive. Once you have business people catching trains (either sleeping overnight or telecommuting from WiFi-enabled seats), and people travelling when they would have flown, you see more trains being laid on and the costs drop (and prices drop to remain competitive). The prices will have to drop if the rail company sees higher profits brought by more passengers bringing a smaller profit per head rather than a small number of big-spending tourists.
I predict people will drive long distances now in silly little cars or motorcycles.
Or will catch trains. America has a comprehensive railroad network, which is currently mostly used for freight though has comprehensive passenger routes. The trains are relatively infrequent (most people fly), and slower than the state of the art in Europe and Asia (though some legs are faster than others), though high enough oil prices and passenger demand could spur investment in an upgrade program.
A reminder to get around to turning off my old ICQ account.
Given that virtually everybody I know has moved to XMPP (typically Google Talk), most of the ICQ traffic I have received recently was automated porn/worm spam, presumably sent by a bot sequentially to all ICQ numbers. The spam wasn't quite frequent enough for me to kill my otherwise redundant ICQ account, though.
The lack of proper calendar formats on MySpace is a deliberate feature, much like the way that notification emails from MySpace omit the actual details (i.e., the message someone sent you, whose birthday you're being reminded of), to oblige you to log in, click through an interstitial ad and view some more ads.
If MySpace allowed you to see your data through any means other than their ugly ad-plastered web pages, they'd lose ad impressions.
They could try the Australian approach. Have a whitelisted subset of the internet that anyone can access, which includes municipal services and trusted websites suitable for all ages and bound by licensing contracts, and require registration and age verification to access anything more. Of course, access would be a privilege, which could be suspended or revoked for a range of offenses (copyright violation, non-payment of fines, "anti-social behaviour", &c.)
It's not so much the photos as the metadata. You may have all your photos sitting at home, but chances are, the fact that they've been selected for posting to Flickr and the tags you have given them were created in the process of posting them, and do not exist outside of Flickr. Were Flickr to turn into a proprietary, Windows Vista-only service, all you'd be left with is a big pile of JPEGs, some of which you had selected for exhibition.
As long as Yahoo gets to keep its open technologies (the Flickr API, Pipes, &c.), that's fine with me. Let Microsoft spend their cash reserves on a second-tier search engine.
Having said that, it's probably still prudent to back up your Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, especially if you don't use Windows.
IIRC, Macromedia's original rationale for keeping the formats secret was to prevent a certain unnamed competitor from embracing and extending them. Presumably they're counting on Microsoft being so committed to Silverlight that they're not going to turn on a dime, ditch their system (which their people believe, with some justification, to be technically superior) and replace it with a bastardisation of Flash.
If prison is just a comfortable place one cannot freely leave, it will be a punishment for the first few weeks it takes to adjust to it, and then become rather agreeable. (Especially for someone like Hans Reiser; think of all the coding he could do there.) So essentially it's a fortnight of punishment followed by a 24-year taxpayer-funded holiday. Not a bad deal.
For prison to be a deterrent, punishment must be integrated into the regime. Which means restrictions on movement, behaviour, activities and possessions which serve no practical purpose except to punish. This is not in itself "cruel and unusual".
Given recent news reports that UK prisons are so comfortable and pleasant that inmates have stopped trying to escape (or, indeed, stay out), perhaps that's not the best example to cite?
What about countries with even harsher prison regimes? I hear Japan has a particularly severe one, and the crime rate there is low. On the other hand, Russia has a rather harsh one as well and a lot of crime.
The Scandinavian model with little if any imprisonment is probably an anomaly which works only in societies where the Jante Law is deeply ingrained in the culture.
Sky are also doing a remake of The Prisoner. It's believed to do away with all the weird politics and stuff and have more naked female breasts instead.
On a tangent: are HDMI cables just cables with HDMI connectors, or do they have to contain licensed cryptographic DRM processors to account to the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player for where all those electrons have gone or somesuch? I thought that the increase in cost was due to heavy-handed Hollywood-mandated DRM requirements, and the patent-licensing feast on top of that.
That is assuming that (a) there are no (as yet unknown to you) security holes in your web browser, media plugins, &c., which could be used to execute arbitrary code, (b) there are no (as yet unknown to you) security holes in OSX or any of its components that could be used for privilege escalation, and (c) crackers haven't discovered these and used them or traded them on "zero-day" forums. Which is a pretty big assumption.
Using a Mac is safer than using Windows, though using something like NoScript to disable JavaScript, Flash, &c., for untrusted sites makes it even safer.
Computer security is like wearing porous armour: the more layers you have on, the less likely it is that something will make it through the holes.
I think the use case is to have it administered to all school-aged children so that they do not become addicted to cocaine. This would effectively render cocaine worthless in a generation, driving the cocaine cartels out of business. In theory.
Yes, compulsory administration of a drug that forever blocks off the experience of a cocaine high is a violation of cognitive liberty, but on the other hand, nobody (in theory) has the right to a cocaine high, so no rights are violated.
If you're an Islamist fundamentalist (as Ahmadinejad is), the "no winners" argument might not apply. Losing a few million of your citizens to Israeli nukes whilst striking a lethal blow against the despised Zionist Crusader state could be a very efficient way of buying martyrdom in bulk.
The key problem with the statement that Iran has the right to a nuclear defensive arsenal is that an Iranian nuclear arsenal may not be purely defensive. Iran is, constitutionally, a theocracy, and is run by a religious zealot who may be immune to the idea of nuclear deterrence. It is not unlikely that Ahmadinejad would consider that the massive retaliation that would follow a nuclear strike on an enemy would only get his virtuous citizens into Paradise as martyrs.
Iran has vowed to annihilate Israel, which is an (undeclared) nuclear power. It would be impossible for Iran to have anything resembling a chance of doing so without effective nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them, and impossible to get a nuke working reliably without testing it. (Imagine if you're Ahmadine-Jihad and your nuke misfires, showering undetonated uranium over downtown Tel Aviv; not only has your glorious jihad failed before it ever began, but you are, to all intents and purposes, screwed.)
Were Iran to test a nuclear weapon in real life, they would get noticed pretty quickly (the seismic readings would see to that), and a preemptive strike would soon follow. (Once there is no doubt that the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, there'd be little resistance to ensure that they don't succeed; it's not only the US, Europe and Israel who are worried, but their Sunni Islamic neighbours, regarded by them as apostates, are none too comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. Add to that Ahmadine-Jihad's support of the concept of martyrdom (the Iranian government actually recruits suicide bombers for jihadist attacks against US/Jewish/Sunni interests), and you've got the sort of nuclear power that can't be trusted to do the sensible thing and sit on its nukes as a defensive weapon of last resort.
As such, supercomputing power of this sort would be vitally important in running nuclear simulations and perfecting a bomb.
Given that the target audience would consit of lonely, sexually frustrated men who have little experience of how a real woman behaves, that's probably not a problem. It could be grotesquely caricatured and still bring in a good harvest of suckers; and perhaps even leaving them thinking that they just got lucky.
I read that, even now, a majority of Americans would not be willing to accept an atheist holding public office. Would they be willing to name a street after an outspoken atheist?
Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen, who renounced his Australian citizenship to legally increase his US media holdings, and as of a few years ago, News Corp.'s headquarters is US-based.
Having said that, he does like to spread his bets. On one hand, he has FOXNews and the Sun, and on the other hand, he dropped the BBC from his Chinese satellite operation as to appease the Chinese Communist Party. His wife, who is Chinese, is also said to have senior connections in the Party elite.
I have a PSP and a DS. I find these days that the PSP largely sits gathering dust, while the DS lives in my pocket and gets a fair amount of use whilst commuting.
There are two problems with the PSP:
Firstly, it's too large to comfortably fit in a pocket; you're not going to just casually take it with you along with your wallet, phone and keys, but have to explicitly decide to take it.
Secondly, while it may have a more powerful processor, better graphics and a better-looking screen, Nintendo have stolen a march on Sony in terms of innovation. The DS has a touchscreen and a microphone, and titles which use these in innovative ways. Nintendo have also courted non-traditional gamers more successfully; the DS has titles like Brain Training/Brain Age, Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Animal Crossing, the Mario and Zelda franchises, and numerous simulation games. In contrast, the vast bulk of PSP titles look like the same macho adolescent-male wasteland of sports games, shooting games, thuglife games, all differing from their predecessors only in graphics and marketing tie-ins. (There are a few exceptions, like Loco Roco, though they're in the minority.)
The PSP's nice screen makes it a good PMP, though using it as one involves either (a) repurchasing your movies on UMD (probably the most egregiously misnamed media format ever, as it is not usable with anything but the PSP), or (b) spending time and hassle recoding video to work with the PSP's idiosyncratic formatting requirements. If the video is on an encrypted DVD (i.e., any commercial movie), you'll also need to crack the encryption, which is not the sort of thing the average Joe Sixpack knows how to do.
A few years ago, a US anti-war activist named Scott Parkin was seized in the streets of Melbourne, Australia, on his way to a seminar on "non-violent resistance", detained for a week and deported as a "threat to national security", on the basis of intelligence which has still not been made public. Could this database have been the intelligence in question?
Slashdot Mirror
Larabie and the Erik Spiekermanns of this world are in different leagues.
Most of Larabie's fonts are display fonts, rather than text fonts (i.e., ones that would be used for setting headings or signs, rather than paragraphs of text), and many of them are of a quirky novelty nature. Making a fun-looking display font is one thing; making a typeface that can be used to set large swathes of text, in such a way that the text is readable for long periods of time, is more difficult. Entire books have been written on the art of typography, on serifs and optical weights, the perceptual psychology of reading text and the tricks of the great typefaces of the past. As such, it takes far more accomplishment and mastery of typography to make one good display font that gets accepted for use in print than it does to make three hundred nifty-looking display fonts.
Isn't Toronto to Vancouver a scenic tourist route, with the markup that follows, though?
The fact that there's little demand for non-tourist long-distance rail travel would make it scarce and expensive. Once you have business people catching trains (either sleeping overnight or telecommuting from WiFi-enabled seats), and people travelling when they would have flown, you see more trains being laid on and the costs drop (and prices drop to remain competitive). The prices will have to drop if the rail company sees higher profits brought by more passengers bringing a smaller profit per head rather than a small number of big-spending tourists.
I predict people will drive long distances now in silly little cars or motorcycles.
Or will catch trains. America has a comprehensive railroad network, which is currently mostly used for freight though has comprehensive passenger routes. The trains are relatively infrequent (most people fly), and slower than the state of the art in Europe and Asia (though some legs are faster than others), though high enough oil prices and passenger demand could spur investment in an upgrade program.
A reminder to get around to turning off my old ICQ account.
Given that virtually everybody I know has moved to XMPP (typically Google Talk), most of the ICQ traffic I have received recently was automated porn/worm spam, presumably sent by a bot sequentially to all ICQ numbers. The spam wasn't quite frequent enough for me to kill my otherwise redundant ICQ account, though.
for now, let's see when JS2 comes out and will be implemented by all major browsers
And then wait five years until big corporations with centrally-managed desktops finally move on from IE6.
The lack of proper calendar formats on MySpace is a deliberate feature, much like the way that notification emails from MySpace omit the actual details (i.e., the message someone sent you, whose birthday you're being reminded of), to oblige you to log in, click through an interstitial ad and view some more ads.
If MySpace allowed you to see your data through any means other than their ugly ad-plastered web pages, they'd lose ad impressions.
They could try the Australian approach. Have a whitelisted subset of the internet that anyone can access, which includes municipal services and trusted websites suitable for all ages and bound by licensing contracts, and require registration and age verification to access anything more. Of course, access would be a privilege, which could be suspended or revoked for a range of offenses (copyright violation, non-payment of fines, "anti-social behaviour", &c.)
It's not so much the photos as the metadata. You may have all your photos sitting at home, but chances are, the fact that they've been selected for posting to Flickr and the tags you have given them were created in the process of posting them, and do not exist outside of Flickr. Were Flickr to turn into a proprietary, Windows Vista-only service, all you'd be left with is a big pile of JPEGs, some of which you had selected for exhibition.
As long as Yahoo gets to keep its open technologies (the Flickr API, Pipes, &c.), that's fine with me. Let Microsoft spend their cash reserves on a second-tier search engine.
Having said that, it's probably still prudent to back up your Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, especially if you don't use Windows.
IIRC, Macromedia's original rationale for keeping the formats secret was to prevent a certain unnamed competitor from embracing and extending them. Presumably they're counting on Microsoft being so committed to Silverlight that they're not going to turn on a dime, ditch their system (which their people believe, with some justification, to be technically superior) and replace it with a bastardisation of Flash.
If you can see Hans Reiser, he can see you. If you can't see Hans Reiser, you may be moments away from death.
If prison is just a comfortable place one cannot freely leave, it will be a punishment for the first few weeks it takes to adjust to it, and then become rather agreeable. (Especially for someone like Hans Reiser; think of all the coding he could do there.) So essentially it's a fortnight of punishment followed by a 24-year taxpayer-funded holiday. Not a bad deal.
For prison to be a deterrent, punishment must be integrated into the regime. Which means restrictions on movement, behaviour, activities and possessions which serve no practical purpose except to punish. This is not in itself "cruel and unusual".
Given recent news reports that UK prisons are so comfortable and pleasant that inmates have stopped trying to escape (or, indeed, stay out), perhaps that's not the best example to cite?
What about countries with even harsher prison regimes? I hear Japan has a particularly severe one, and the crime rate there is low. On the other hand, Russia has a rather harsh one as well and a lot of crime.
The Scandinavian model with little if any imprisonment is probably an anomaly which works only in societies where the Jante Law is deeply ingrained in the culture.
Sky are also doing a remake of The Prisoner. It's believed to do away with all the weird politics and stuff and have more naked female breasts instead.
On a tangent: are HDMI cables just cables with HDMI connectors, or do they have to contain licensed cryptographic DRM processors to account to the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player for where all those electrons have gone or somesuch? I thought that the increase in cost was due to heavy-handed Hollywood-mandated DRM requirements, and the patent-licensing feast on top of that.
That is assuming that (a) there are no (as yet unknown to you) security holes in your web browser, media plugins, &c., which could be used to execute arbitrary code, (b) there are no (as yet unknown to you) security holes in OSX or any of its components that could be used for privilege escalation, and (c) crackers haven't discovered these and used them or traded them on "zero-day" forums. Which is a pretty big assumption.
Using a Mac is safer than using Windows, though using something like NoScript to disable JavaScript, Flash, &c., for untrusted sites makes it even safer.
Computer security is like wearing porous armour: the more layers you have on, the less likely it is that something will make it through the holes.
I think the use case is to have it administered to all school-aged children so that they do not become addicted to cocaine. This would effectively render cocaine worthless in a generation, driving the cocaine cartels out of business. In theory.
Yes, compulsory administration of a drug that forever blocks off the experience of a cocaine high is a violation of cognitive liberty, but on the other hand, nobody (in theory) has the right to a cocaine high, so no rights are violated.
If you're an Islamist fundamentalist (as Ahmadinejad is), the "no winners" argument might not apply. Losing a few million of your citizens to Israeli nukes whilst striking a lethal blow against the despised Zionist Crusader state could be a very efficient way of buying martyrdom in bulk.
The key problem with the statement that Iran has the right to a nuclear defensive arsenal is that an Iranian nuclear arsenal may not be purely defensive. Iran is, constitutionally, a theocracy, and is run by a religious zealot who may be immune to the idea of nuclear deterrence. It is not unlikely that Ahmadinejad would consider that the massive retaliation that would follow a nuclear strike on an enemy would only get his virtuous citizens into Paradise as martyrs.
Iran has vowed to annihilate Israel, which is an (undeclared) nuclear power. It would be impossible for Iran to have anything resembling a chance of doing so without effective nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them, and impossible to get a nuke working reliably without testing it. (Imagine if you're Ahmadine-Jihad and your nuke misfires, showering undetonated uranium over downtown Tel Aviv; not only has your glorious jihad failed before it ever began, but you are, to all intents and purposes, screwed.)
Were Iran to test a nuclear weapon in real life, they would get noticed pretty quickly (the seismic readings would see to that), and a preemptive strike would soon follow. (Once there is no doubt that the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, there'd be little resistance to ensure that they don't succeed; it's not only the US, Europe and Israel who are worried, but their Sunni Islamic neighbours, regarded by them as apostates, are none too comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. Add to that Ahmadine-Jihad's support of the concept of martyrdom (the Iranian government actually recruits suicide bombers for jihadist attacks against US/Jewish/Sunni interests), and you've got the sort of nuclear power that can't be trusted to do the sensible thing and sit on its nukes as a defensive weapon of last resort.
As such, supercomputing power of this sort would be vitally important in running nuclear simulations and perfecting a bomb.
Given that the target audience would consit of lonely, sexually frustrated men who have little experience of how a real woman behaves, that's probably not a problem. It could be grotesquely caricatured and still bring in a good harvest of suckers; and perhaps even leaving them thinking that they just got lucky.
I read that, even now, a majority of Americans would not be willing to accept an atheist holding public office. Would they be willing to name a street after an outspoken atheist?
Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen, who renounced his Australian citizenship to legally increase his US media holdings, and as of a few years ago, News Corp.'s headquarters is US-based.
Having said that, he does like to spread his bets. On one hand, he has FOXNews and the Sun, and on the other hand, he dropped the BBC from his Chinese satellite operation as to appease the Chinese Communist Party. His wife, who is Chinese, is also said to have senior connections in the Party elite.
I have a PSP and a DS. I find these days that the PSP largely sits gathering dust, while the DS lives in my pocket and gets a fair amount of use whilst commuting.
There are two problems with the PSP:
Firstly, it's too large to comfortably fit in a pocket; you're not going to just casually take it with you along with your wallet, phone and keys, but have to explicitly decide to take it.
Secondly, while it may have a more powerful processor, better graphics and a better-looking screen, Nintendo have stolen a march on Sony in terms of innovation. The DS has a touchscreen and a microphone, and titles which use these in innovative ways. Nintendo have also courted non-traditional gamers more successfully; the DS has titles like Brain Training/Brain Age, Nintendogs, Electroplankton, Animal Crossing, the Mario and Zelda franchises, and numerous simulation games. In contrast, the vast bulk of PSP titles look like the same macho adolescent-male wasteland of sports games, shooting games, thuglife games, all differing from their predecessors only in graphics and marketing tie-ins. (There are a few exceptions, like Loco Roco, though they're in the minority.)
The PSP's nice screen makes it a good PMP, though using it as one involves either (a) repurchasing your movies on UMD (probably the most egregiously misnamed media format ever, as it is not usable with anything but the PSP), or (b) spending time and hassle recoding video to work with the PSP's idiosyncratic formatting requirements. If the video is on an encrypted DVD (i.e., any commercial movie), you'll also need to crack the encryption, which is not the sort of thing the average Joe Sixpack knows how to do.
A few years ago, a US anti-war activist named Scott Parkin was seized in the streets of Melbourne, Australia, on his way to a seminar on "non-violent resistance", detained for a week and deported as a "threat to national security", on the basis of intelligence which has still not been made public. Could this database have been the intelligence in question?