There is a strong case to be made for conformance of systems.
Using a "standard" tool, even if its not the absolute best for the job, often saves money in the long run, simply by its conformance.
If the gov't had created a policy requiring the department to settle on the most widely used and standardized systems available, that would have acheived the desired end.
As I understand this policy (and I really don't, because all of the links are dead), I'm required to purchase a Microsoft product even if it a) doesn't integrate well with other Microsoft products, b) is completely non-standard, and c) is not the package generally used for that purpose.
One policy is at least vaguely justifiable. The one they've chosen is just a blank check to Microsoft.
This is also not a matter of "doing." It is just the opposite: Dr. Phlox did not actively attempt to interfere with the natural evolution in action on the planet.
What's amusing is that the end result of all this moralizing is the Prime Directive. Under that philosophy, the Federation is allowed to help a race provided that their civilization has crossed the arbitrary line of developing warp technology. If the race hasn't quite made it there, then it's just too damn bad for them. Post-warp civilizations' destiny is apparently impervious to interference.
It reminds me of the strict ethical codes that medical researchers must obey with respect to research animals. When performing experiments on a mouse, for instance, there are strict guidelines one must follow to insure that the animal is treated humanely. If that same mouse jumps off the table and runs out of the room, it immediately becomes "vermin", and you could pluck its legs off one at a time with impunity.
That's the type of "rule-book" ethics that Star Trek loves. It always irritates me the way Trek episodes always justify their characters actions and make them seem heroic-- there's a token amount of reget, but not enough to get them down. It always struck me that a lot of these episodes should really end with the main characters lying around in a drunken stupor and contemplating suicide.
but they did ditch Dalton, even if it isn't his fault that movie stunk to high heaven
Licensed to Kill was a piece of crap. But I'd take it or The Living Daylights over just about any of the unfinished, product-placement-ridden pieces of crap that's come out since he left.
and very easy to laugh at people who use "fair use" as a blanket guard against "I can't rip my Britney CD any more and it's not fair "
But that actually is fair use, as long as they don't intend to redistribute that Britney CD. At least, it's just as much fair use as your dancing club shifting music onto pre-mixed CDs. It seems ridiculous that you'd complain about other people doing the exactly the same legal thing you are. Just because somebody else has crappy taste doesn't make their position any less legitimate.
And this stoic "I'll be upset when I lose that right, but I'll take it in stride because the record companies are just protecting themselves" attitude is another way of saying "my rights are not important and can be trampled." Whether you're a Britney fan or a professional musicologist doing serious academic research, laws like the DMCA hurt us by taking away rights and extending copyright far beyond what is was meant to cover.
MP3 player quality also seems to vary considerably. The best player I've heard on Win32 is one called Nad (seriously, that's the name).
Now help me out here. I thought that MP3 players were generally designed to be bitstream compliant, meaning that they always produced the same output from a given MP3 file. (different MP3 encoders, on the other hand, will produce output of all different quality levels.)
Are the players you're talking about non-compliant? And if so, are you sure they're not just tweaking the EQ in a way you find pleasing?
Thanks for being the only respondent to actually post some numbers. Unfortunately, the only statistics on that site involve Altamont Pass, with its small, fast windmills and large bird population.
It's nice to see that somebody is looking closely at this problem. At the treacle-ish rate we're rolling out windmills, we'll have some pretty conclusive evidence by the time wind becomes a major power source in the US.
The Tivo was not recording anything, and I verified that it was not doing anything by telnetting in and observing that the load average was 0.00. Does it really require 1.6 amps just to spin a hard drive and wait for a 10mW infrared signal??
When you say that the Tivo wasn't recording anything, do you mean you went in and shut down its normal operation?
Otherwise, the Tivo is always recording, whether you want it to or not. That's why you can rewind up to 30 minutes anytime you want. But considering you're familiar enough with your Tivo to telnet into it, you probably know that.
Wind power generators have also been known to disrupt and kill birds. For example, in the early 1990s, a significant number of golden eagles were killed by turbines at California's Altamont pass.
Modern windmills have a wingspan the size of a 747. They turn only a few times per minute. The windmills at Altamont pass are mostly older technology and spin much more rapidly. So far I haven't heard anyone claiming that the modern type of windmills are very bad in this way, though it's certainly possible for a bird to run into one.
Also, Altamont is a particularly sensitive area for a number of endangered species. Any stories you've heard out of there wouldn't necessarily apply to the rest of the country.
Also, in line with Trepidity's comment, the main problem with wind power from what I've heard is that it just requires too many turbines to get the neccesary amount of power. You have to have truly giant wind farms to get a pitiful amount of power...
Wind power is competitive with coal and (certainly) nuclear (nuclear is really expensive when you look at the per kw/h prices.) And the technology is improving rapidly. It's worth pointing out that many of the companies building wind farms in the US are doing it to make money-- if wind really doubled their costs, they'd hardly be doing that. Wind does get a very minor gov't subsidy, but no more than the other power industries.
as well as shred birds and insects by the hundredweight.
Sure. Tell me more. You have some information or statistics that involve modern windmill technology?
You're familiar with modern wind technology, correct? Large blades, turning slowly. Certainly some birds might smack into them (the same way they do to buildings and cars), but we're not talking about the little, fast-moving windmills of the 1970s and 80s.
I'm tired of hearing this one trotted out every time somebody talks about wind. Show me the numbers, dammit!
They're certainly going to pollute the visual enviroment
Maybe we can disguise them as trees. Or put Budwiser advertising on them. Then they'll fit right in with the rest of the country:)
The only problem is: what if there's a storm (requiring that most windmill blades be secured), or a lull in the wind? Denmark's a small country, and therefore most sites are likely to be getting roughly the same weather.
Now, the US, with it's vast spaces and enormous power grids. That'd be a great place to use wind...
So China is pushing a non GPL Fork of Linux that we will NEVER see the benifit from except as a retail product from IBM.
1. China may be able to ignore the GPL within their own country, but if IBM or any other company ever offers it as a retail product in a country that enforces copyright treaties, they'll still have to release source under the GPL.
2. Lack of copyright protection cuts both ways. The Chinese may be able to ignore the GPL and not release their source code, but all it takes is one disgruntled coder smuggling their source to a public place. Any such code would be free for the taking; and it'd be completely legal to do so.
3. The Chinese would be foolish to fork their Linux project too far away from the rest of the world. As long as it remains closely related to our Linux, they can take advantage of all of the work being done internationally. Make it too different and they begin to lose those resources. See (2) for why this eventually benefits us.
having particles that easily move and change their relative position without a separation of the mass and that easily yield to pressure : capable of flowing b : subject to change or movement
The gist of the article is that glass doesn't flow. Even if it is classified as a liquid. Note that liquid != fluid in all senses of the word.
Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.
Sure, that's possible. I highly doubt that the book contains real working spells that allow the reader to open the gates of hell or turn lead into gold.
What makes it interesting is that we haven't been able to decode it, despite all indications that it really does contain some sort of language.
I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
If it was an elaborate con, then it was a terribly elaborate con. Analysis of the text indicates that it isn't just random gibberish, but has grammatical structure and linguistic frequency characteristics. Even if somebody knew how to write gibberish in those patterns at the time, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.
That doesn't mean that there's any useful information in there. It could have been written by a madman. But any unbroken code will interest people, if there's evidence that there really is some sort of language underneath.
My guess is that since the manuscript was sold to the Emperor Rudolph who was very interested in weird wacky stuff that it probably was made to be sold to him. In other words, it probably is a bunch of gibberish meant to look interesting.
And that would probably be the conclusion of most scholars, if frequency and grammatical analysis didn't show it to have characteristics amazingly similar to actual language. That would be easy enough to fake today, but it's not so clear that it could have been done at the time. (Or, at least, that it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish.)
There's a whole set of pages that feature naked women lounging around in bathtubs (that seem to be connected with either plant tubes or very funky plumbing).
Unfortunately, the industry-standard trick is to use various branches of mathematics (Statistics and Calculus, mostly) to determine the maximum point of the function of numCustomers * price. As price increases, the number of customers decreases, but this may be made up for in profits. As price decreases, more people buy the product, but profits diminish. In the end, there should be a mathematical sweet spot at which enough people part with enough money to buy a new pair of silicone breasts (or, to be fair, buttocks) for whichever star's popularity is in a state of decline.
It's seems obvious to a non-marketing-mathematician like me that the record industry's pricing equations produce results that are no more accurate than the data put into them. Since the industry rarely conducts nationwide-scale, long-term studies of demand at different pricing levels, it's hard to be sure how accurate their data is, and therefore their conclusions are questionable.
It's not entirely inappropriate to note that while the majority of VHS movies are marketed to the rental market at high prices ($80), nearly all DVDs are marketed toward home consumers at a much lower price... And that, just maybe, some portion of the impressive sales revenue is due to a surge of consumer purchasing. Was this surge predicted by the industry's mathematical models? I don't have any evidence that it was or wasn't, beyond the fact that they never bothered to try it before. It's possible that this program created a new enthusiasm for purchased videos that was never reflected in previous price/demand estimates.
Would enormous price-cuts improve CD sales revenue? I don't know, and until the record industry tries it, they have no idea what sort response they'll get from the public. It could create a golden-age of CD purchasing. Or people could react the way the industry's crude equations say they will.
Re:but what about non-verbal Deaf people?
on
Speech For The Deaf
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· Score: 1
Most deaf people can read. I imagine that they'll be able to recognize the difference between a properly articulated conversation and mis-translated gibberish (assuming they have some sort of textual feedback.) The computer will do some of the work, and the "speaker" will do the rest.
It'll take some time to learn how to manipulate the thing into spitting out proper English sentences, but I'm sure lots of people will find the rewards great enough.
HDTV hasn't widely penetrated yet, so that potential use for the extra space isn't there.
HDTV hasn't penetrated, in part, because there's a lack of high-def source material. The release of HDTV discs would neatly solve that problem, especially if it coincided with the availability of under-$1000 HDTV sets.
However, I imagine that the industry will wait a few years, if only so that they can force everybody to re-buy their movie collection once again...
(In 2001, $10.3 billion was spent on movies, 52% of this on DVD's, now compare this to 2002, $12.4 billion total revenue with 65%, going for DVD's) . Funny considering that DVD's are only in about a third of American homes (about 30 million households, and consider that a quarter of these homes have more than one player
DVDs are marketed differently than VHS. The prices are so low right now that there's an enormous incentive to buy rather than rent.
One interpretation of these numbers is that lower prices == higher revenue. Betcha the RIAA doesn't catch on to it.
The end result of what these people did is an almost guaranteed improvement in Army security. And that's really the bottom line.
We create laws like trespassing (and its online equivalent) for various reasons; in the case of the military it's to keep sensitive information secure. When those laws are working against their stated purpose, we need to be flexible enough so that we don't wind up cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I might feel differently if this was a private citizen being hacked. A private citizen might have any number of complex reasons for not wanting their stuff examined, and it's not up to a court or public body to judge them and determine whether the benefits outweigh the harm. The military should have only one reason: security. And if the final result is not a loss of security, but hopefully an improvement... then it's illogical to nail people to the wall just because the book says you can.
Anyone who's spent any time around those who speak ASL or any other sign language as their primary language know that there's a hell of a lot more to sign language than the hands. It's also body posture, relative positions of the hands, and especially facial expressions... Bottom line: it may have some limited utility in some very special conditions, but it will not simply allow a deaf person to put on a pair of gloves and have an instant voice.
Sure. "Computer" sign language will wind up being a "dialect" of traditional sign language-- sort of like a pidgin English. It may even become a full language unto itself. (Think of the version sign language that deaf and blind people rely on, but with even more flexibility.)
And people take it upon themselves to learn the new dialect and even contribute to its evolution it because it will allow them to communicate to a much larger audience-- namely, all of the folks in the world who don't understand sign language. A little inconvenience never stopped anyone who really wanted to make his opinions known.
There are a number of supposed benefits to recording using Direct Stream Digital, but it's difficult to edit without converting first to PCM
I didn't know that.
Incidentally, are there fast algorithms for converting PWM data to and from the frequency domain, without first going to PCM (I'm thinking of an FFT equivalent)? I ask because I'm curious how difficult it would be to encode and decode perceptually-compressed audio to a PWM DAC.
Re:Ignorance is beaming
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 1
This is Slashdot, fool
Stories posted thoughtlessly
Proofreads for the weak.
Stupid Geeyzus Flame
Missed the point of the writeup
Why'd he get Score: 5?
Slashdot Mirror
If the gov't had created a policy requiring the department to settle on the most widely used and standardized systems available, that would have acheived the desired end.
As I understand this policy (and I really don't, because all of the links are dead), I'm required to purchase a Microsoft product even if it a) doesn't integrate well with other Microsoft products, b) is completely non-standard, and c) is not the package generally used for that purpose.
One policy is at least vaguely justifiable. The one they've chosen is just a blank check to Microsoft.
What's amusing is that the end result of all this moralizing is the Prime Directive. Under that philosophy, the Federation is allowed to help a race provided that their civilization has crossed the arbitrary line of developing warp technology. If the race hasn't quite made it there, then it's just too damn bad for them. Post-warp civilizations' destiny is apparently impervious to interference.
It reminds me of the strict ethical codes that medical researchers must obey with respect to research animals. When performing experiments on a mouse, for instance, there are strict guidelines one must follow to insure that the animal is treated humanely. If that same mouse jumps off the table and runs out of the room, it immediately becomes "vermin", and you could pluck its legs off one at a time with impunity.
That's the type of "rule-book" ethics that Star Trek loves. It always irritates me the way Trek episodes always justify their characters actions and make them seem heroic-- there's a token amount of reget, but not enough to get them down. It always struck me that a lot of these episodes should really end with the main characters lying around in a drunken stupor and contemplating suicide.
No, we need civil crimes with stiff judgements for people whose only crime is depriving another person of some theoretical income.
In the end, this is probably better for taxpayers, copyright holders and defendants alike.
Licensed to Kill was a piece of crap. But I'd take it or The Living Daylights over just about any of the unfinished, product-placement-ridden pieces of crap that's come out since he left.
But that actually is fair use, as long as they don't intend to redistribute that Britney CD. At least, it's just as much fair use as your dancing club shifting music onto pre-mixed CDs. It seems ridiculous that you'd complain about other people doing the exactly the same legal thing you are. Just because somebody else has crappy taste doesn't make their position any less legitimate.
And this stoic "I'll be upset when I lose that right, but I'll take it in stride because the record companies are just protecting themselves" attitude is another way of saying "my rights are not important and can be trampled." Whether you're a Britney fan or a professional musicologist doing serious academic research, laws like the DMCA hurt us by taking away rights and extending copyright far beyond what is was meant to cover.
Now help me out here. I thought that MP3 players were generally designed to be bitstream compliant, meaning that they always produced the same output from a given MP3 file. (different MP3 encoders, on the other hand, will produce output of all different quality levels.)
Are the players you're talking about non-compliant? And if so, are you sure they're not just tweaking the EQ in a way you find pleasing?
It's nice to see that somebody is looking closely at this problem. At the treacle-ish rate we're rolling out windmills, we'll have some pretty conclusive evidence by the time wind becomes a major power source in the US.
When you say that the Tivo wasn't recording anything, do you mean you went in and shut down its normal operation?
Otherwise, the Tivo is always recording, whether you want it to or not. That's why you can rewind up to 30 minutes anytime you want. But considering you're familiar enough with your Tivo to telnet into it, you probably know that.
Modern windmills have a wingspan the size of a 747. They turn only a few times per minute. The windmills at Altamont pass are mostly older technology and spin much more rapidly. So far I haven't heard anyone claiming that the modern type of windmills are very bad in this way, though it's certainly possible for a bird to run into one.
Also, Altamont is a particularly sensitive area for a number of endangered species. Any stories you've heard out of there wouldn't necessarily apply to the rest of the country.
Also, in line with Trepidity's comment, the main problem with wind power from what I've heard is that it just requires too many turbines to get the neccesary amount of power. You have to have truly giant wind farms to get a pitiful amount of power...
Wind power is competitive with coal and (certainly) nuclear (nuclear is really expensive when you look at the per kw/h prices.) And the technology is improving rapidly. It's worth pointing out that many of the companies building wind farms in the US are doing it to make money-- if wind really doubled their costs, they'd hardly be doing that. Wind does get a very minor gov't subsidy, but no more than the other power industries.
Sure. Tell me more. You have some information or statistics that involve modern windmill technology?
You're familiar with modern wind technology, correct? Large blades, turning slowly. Certainly some birds might smack into them (the same way they do to buildings and cars), but we're not talking about the little, fast-moving windmills of the 1970s and 80s.
I'm tired of hearing this one trotted out every time somebody talks about wind. Show me the numbers, dammit!
They're certainly going to pollute the visual enviroment
Maybe we can disguise them as trees. Or put Budwiser advertising on them. Then they'll fit right in with the rest of the country :)
Now, the US, with it's vast spaces and enormous power grids. That'd be a great place to use wind...
1. China may be able to ignore the GPL within their own country, but if IBM or any other company ever offers it as a retail product in a country that enforces copyright treaties, they'll still have to release source under the GPL.
2. Lack of copyright protection cuts both ways. The Chinese may be able to ignore the GPL and not release their source code, but all it takes is one disgruntled coder smuggling their source to a public place. Any such code would be free for the taking; and it'd be completely legal to do so.
3. The Chinese would be foolish to fork their Linux project too far away from the rest of the world. As long as it remains closely related to our Linux, they can take advantage of all of the work being done internationally. Make it too different and they begin to lose those resources. See (2) for why this eventually benefits us.
Sure, that's possible. I highly doubt that the book contains real working spells that allow the reader to open the gates of hell or turn lead into gold.
What makes it interesting is that we haven't been able to decode it, despite all indications that it really does contain some sort of language.
If it was an elaborate con, then it was a terribly elaborate con. Analysis of the text indicates that it isn't just random gibberish, but has grammatical structure and linguistic frequency characteristics. Even if somebody knew how to write gibberish in those patterns at the time, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.
That doesn't mean that there's any useful information in there. It could have been written by a madman. But any unbroken code will interest people, if there's evidence that there really is some sort of language underneath.
And that would probably be the conclusion of most scholars, if frequency and grammatical analysis didn't show it to have characteristics amazingly similar to actual language. That would be easy enough to fake today, but it's not so clear that it could have been done at the time. (Or, at least, that it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish.)
Here's one example.
It's seems obvious to a non-marketing-mathematician like me that the record industry's pricing equations produce results that are no more accurate than the data put into them. Since the industry rarely conducts nationwide-scale, long-term studies of demand at different pricing levels, it's hard to be sure how accurate their data is, and therefore their conclusions are questionable.
It's not entirely inappropriate to note that while the majority of VHS movies are marketed to the rental market at high prices ($80), nearly all DVDs are marketed toward home consumers at a much lower price... And that, just maybe, some portion of the impressive sales revenue is due to a surge of consumer purchasing. Was this surge predicted by the industry's mathematical models? I don't have any evidence that it was or wasn't, beyond the fact that they never bothered to try it before. It's possible that this program created a new enthusiasm for purchased videos that was never reflected in previous price/demand estimates.
Would enormous price-cuts improve CD sales revenue? I don't know, and until the record industry tries it, they have no idea what sort response they'll get from the public. It could create a golden-age of CD purchasing. Or people could react the way the industry's crude equations say they will.
It'll take some time to learn how to manipulate the thing into spitting out proper English sentences, but I'm sure lots of people will find the rewards great enough.
HDTV hasn't penetrated, in part, because there's a lack of high-def source material. The release of HDTV discs would neatly solve that problem, especially if it coincided with the availability of under-$1000 HDTV sets.
However, I imagine that the industry will wait a few years, if only so that they can force everybody to re-buy their movie collection once again...
DVDs are marketed differently than VHS. The prices are so low right now that there's an enormous incentive to buy rather than rent.
One interpretation of these numbers is that lower prices == higher revenue. Betcha the RIAA doesn't catch on to it.
We create laws like trespassing (and its online equivalent) for various reasons; in the case of the military it's to keep sensitive information secure. When those laws are working against their stated purpose, we need to be flexible enough so that we don't wind up cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I might feel differently if this was a private citizen being hacked. A private citizen might have any number of complex reasons for not wanting their stuff examined, and it's not up to a court or public body to judge them and determine whether the benefits outweigh the harm. The military should have only one reason: security. And if the final result is not a loss of security, but hopefully an improvement... then it's illogical to nail people to the wall just because the book says you can.
Sure. "Computer" sign language will wind up being a "dialect" of traditional sign language-- sort of like a pidgin English. It may even become a full language unto itself. (Think of the version sign language that deaf and blind people rely on, but with even more flexibility.)
And people take it upon themselves to learn the new dialect and even contribute to its evolution it because it will allow them to communicate to a much larger audience-- namely, all of the folks in the world who don't understand sign language. A little inconvenience never stopped anyone who really wanted to make his opinions known.
I didn't know that.
Incidentally, are there fast algorithms for converting PWM data to and from the frequency domain, without first going to PCM (I'm thinking of an FFT equivalent)? I ask because I'm curious how difficult it would be to encode and decode perceptually-compressed audio to a PWM DAC.
Stupid Geeyzus Flame
Missed the point of the writeup
Why'd he get Score: 5?