Because, you know, back when I was a little lad, new discoveries were peer reviewed and independently verified before being announced as fact. Especially so when a single data source is quoted, and especially especially so when they're based on incestuous reasoning: if we're right about what gravitational wobble should look like for bodies X and Y at distance Z, then we've just found bodies X and Y, therefore the theory is right! Tenure for everyone!
Until we get Hubble II up there to take independent readings which can be independently analysed, this is a theory awaiting review. An exciting theory, but a theory. If you want to believe it, go ahead and believe it, but I'm in no hurry to pencil it in to my Big Book of the Universe.
The intent of this law is to stop kiddies getting their hands on CopHunter Xtreme, right? It's not to allow parents to decide, because the State has already a priori decided that CopHunter Xtreme is bad. So, put your legislative balls where your preaching mouth is. Ban all traffic to minors in these games.
Yes, you heard me. Make it illegal to give a copy to, or allow a minor to play, CopHunter Xtreme. Ban it in the stores, ban it in the home. Give the SWAT teams a break from saving stoners from themselves, and have them kick down doors and drag Susie Homemaker screaming into the street for all to see. Bad Susie! Little Johnnie was sneaking into the basement to play his daddy's copy of CopHunter Xtreme, and you didn't stop him. Bad Susie!
Remember how we sneered at the Soviet Union for making its citizens spy on and denounce each other? How we scoffed at their culture of denying personal freedom, personal choice, and even the opportunity to accept personal responsibility.
Now we have retailers who are responsible for their customers going nutso after playing games. Tobacco companies are held accountable for the health effects of a product that the government still refuses to ban. Gun makers are sued for allowing people to uphold their Constitutionally protected rights. Bartenders are held responsible for their patrons' drunk driving. Stores are to blame for ice forming on their sidewalks. We make manufacturers pay (and pass on the bill) to the tune of $350 billion a year for not making their products idiot proof. What's next? Hey, let's go after librarians for not reporting when people take out seditious books. I mean, after USA PATRIOT we can find out anyway, so what are those spectacle wearing subversives doing trying to cover it up, huh? That's wasting valuable State resources, right there.
ACLU, get with the program. When the state creates or allows laws that make anyone responsible for the actions or potential actions of another, that's a priori infringement of their liberties right there. Lower courts aren't dealing with this. Legislatures aren't dealing with this.
Let's take it to the Supremes. Let's make it clear once and for all, that you and only you are responsible for your safety and your actions. Warranty not included, disclaimer not necessary.
>I don't believe violent games make people any more or less violent than they already are, but some games go to the extreme, and I really don't think putting in an age restriction is a bad thing
Is there an alternative universe in which that statement is in any way consistent? Let's leave mealy mouthed dissembling to the political class. If you believe that violent games are harmful, then say so. Don't open with a populist preface then contradict it immediately.
Law enforcement officers are more important than normal people. What else could you possibly infer from it? Every single person working in law enforcement became an American Hero on the 9th of September 2001, and they always will be. What are you, some form of terrorist sympathiser?
> That isn't going to maximize their profits in the long term.
The long term? What are you, some kind of Five Year Plan pinko? All that matters is keeping the corporate investors happy until the next shareholder meeting. You must be thinking of the days when companies were owned by investors, not speculators.
There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice.
What does this title do to RMS's blood pressure?
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I mean, he can get a bit annoying with the whole GNU/lunix thing, but even the most resolutely ignorant commentator should be able to distinguish between KDE/GNOME, and the linux kernel running under it. Normally it wouldn't bother me, but they are primarily talking about the desktops here.
If you think this is splitting hairs, how many reviewers do you think would know how to tell the difference between KDE 3.1.0 running on top of linux and the same desktop running on top of BSD?
It's about low stakes Texas Hold'em. As I'm preaching to people who don't follow links, I'll explain that in hold'em, your hand is drawn from the best five out of your two personal ("pocket") cards, plus five common ("board") cards that everyone can see and use. You can even just play the five common cards if they're better than that 8 in your pocket. You tend to get strong hands, but then again so does everyone else. Hold'em is generally played with big tables, so chances are that someone has a strong hand each round. You don't get extended rounds of raising, and there are no huge wins to be made. Coming out on top of a night of hold'em involves long term risk management, not a single guts-or-glory Hollywood dramatic climax.
As for bluffing, go ahead and try. There are only four rounds of betting on each hand. Experienced players will fold early, so you won't get much of their money anyway, and excitable noobs will tend to stick it out and call you out with their regular full houses and flushes, making it expensive for you to try to bluff. You'll quickly find yourself playing to your hand, not to the other players, and you won't (indeed, can't) get yourself into a steely eyes, car-keys-in-the-pot ego clash.
I wish, I wish, oh how I wish people wouldn't predicate their discussions based on what they've learned from Mel Gibson movies.
>he house, being a corporation, has an obligation to maximize its profits in any way possible
And when the last corporation uses the last gram of uranium to power the machine that sucks up the last drop of oil which they use to cut down the last tree on the planet to turn into paper money which they use to bribe the last honest politician, it will be a great comfort to us all that they are only doing it because capitalism obligates them to.
Basically a virtual newsreader done through animating a talking head as part of a text to speech engine. The subtlety is that it does content and context analysis to determine an appropriate mood; watch her go serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example. It's not perfect ("fighting for their livs in hospital"), but given that it selects stories off the news feeds and TTS and renders them 24/7 with no human interaction at all, I find it fairly impressive.
You wouldn't know it from their marketspeak site, but the company behind it ( http://www.digital-animations.com/ ) are working on expanding the content analysis and tying it to an animation library, with the goal of being able to select appropriate models and act out arbitrary text with minimal human interaction, and eventually do a basic render of a complete film from a (slightly marked up) screenplay.
Heh, I'd like to see what they'd make of a screenplay of Tron. A computer generated version of a film about a computer generated world. Sweet.
>Lip syncing is also pretty touch to do in real-time (The Ill Clan and Anachronox use basic facial expressions), though Valve has had technology which supposedly can do it for a while now.
The news bimbo on http://www.Ananova.com/video has been doing it for a couple of years. It's a slightly different issue because it's done through Text To Speech and the animation is done at the same time as the phoneme generation. It also does some content and context analysis to try and determine an appropriate mood. Watch her go all serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example.
>Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.
The troll in Moria. Rohirrim versus warg riders. Elves at Helm's Deep (not primarily CGI, but you did ask, and they did get screen time that wasn't in the books). It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes, some were nepotism writ large, but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.
Both LotR movies so far have in fact looked like tech demos. Sure, nice FX, I believe that it's now possible to do a proper version of Lord of the Rings. So why didn't he?
Three and a half hours probably refers to the Director's Cut of Fellowship of the Ring. It's an exaggeration to say that only a third of it was shown. It was more like three quarters, but he did add passages, many of which featured CGI effects, that could have been cut in favour of showing more of the actual story.
I've been underwhelmed with the CGI in both LotR films so far. It's good, but not great. You can't simply forget it, especially when it's shoved in your face so often. For example: CGI not quite matching the landscape in tracking shots, an orc army that looks like something from Total Medieval War, wargs that looked like they'd all been done from the same model, Legolas repeatedly drawing CGI arrows through the side of his quiver (now that's elf magic).
Maybe you didn't see these, or they didn't bother you, so that's what you mean by "near perfect", but I assume that there's flaws that I don't spot, so something has to appear flawless to me before I declare it "near perfect".
You're not making a call on your mobile right now, right? So it's not transmitting at the moment, right?
How do you know?
You've tested it yourself, of course? What's that? You haven't? You're just assuming that it only send when you make a call, are you. Hmm.
Sure, I know that the way this was probably implemented in Russia was to simply have the base stations refuse encrypted calls and hope that all the phones fell back to sending unencrypted. I doubt there's many phones today that you could turn on remotely without the user knowing. I say "many" rather than any because I have a Sony Ericsson P800 right here that I've just implemented this on. OK, it required installing an app, and it's a crude kludge that sends crappy voice over GPRS rather than its voice transport, but I managed to implement it in a few hours just for shits and giggles. Imagine what the Department of Hopeless Security could do if it put its collective mind to it.
Not that I'm worried. I'm sure they'd only use such techniques to listen in on really vile people like terrorists, anti gubmint protestors or suspected DMCA violators.
'Last fall, they tested the contraption in regular air - shooting it with 27,000 volts at 20 microamps. Bingo: It generated 3 millipounds of force [...] "We're talking maybe even a pound of thrust out of one of these little devices the size of my thumb. We've got some promise here!"'
Millipounds? Pounds? What's that in bushels per hectare?
My god, no wonder they keep smashing things into Mars if their cutting edge research is done in pounds and by "rule of thumb".
Here's the one group of people that are in a position to promote things other than RIAA meat puppet muzak, and what are they spending their tiny or non-existent incomes on? Hardware? Bandwidth? Promotions? Actually buying indie CDs? Nope, they're spending their money on lawyer's fees.
If they lose, they go out of business. They have to go out of business to win. The RIAA wins either way, as do the lawyers. Independent artists, as usual, get screwed either way.
Sorry for not being part of the groupthink, but can someone explain to me in a calm and rational fashion what the big furry deal is here? By that, I don't mean just another "It's an invasion of privacy, stooooopid!" response, I mean actual scenarios where this can and will be used by Them against We, the People.
Specifically, I'd like to know why it matters that They can scan me and know what kind of underwear I are wearing. Who is going to do this? Why? To what end? What are they going to do with the information?
And if you are the sort of person who is worried by this, aren't you already paying for things with cash? When you walk through the hypothetical scanner, isn't it just going to bleep and spit out "Purchaser unknown" ten times?
Humble apologies, I had about ten tabs open and thought that you were one of the people arguing that HTML can be used as a replacement for PDF. Sorry, you said no such thing, and my refutation was bunk. My bad.
Not as such. My scenario is that they offer no contest in court, and summary judgement but token damages go in favour of SCO. It's not the same as a contested verdict, but it's meatier than an out of court settlement.
What surprises me is why SCO didn't do this before going after IBM. They're either a lot smarter than us, or they are really, really dumb. I'm hoping it's the latter.
I call funny, flamebait, and insightful on you. I was wondering this too. If people find that too offensive, what about other OS's? BSD? A different set of GNU/Linux tools? QNX? Heck, BeOS?
That said, at this price, I don't see myself rushing out to replace my iPAQ any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, let's get those idiots who can't tell irony from morony. Those people really piss me off.
Because, you know, back when I was a little lad, new discoveries were peer reviewed and independently verified before being announced as fact. Especially so when a single data source is quoted, and especially especially so when they're based on incestuous reasoning: if we're right about what gravitational wobble should look like for bodies X and Y at distance Z, then we've just found bodies X and Y, therefore the theory is right! Tenure for everyone!
Until we get Hubble II up there to take independent readings which can be independently analysed, this is a theory awaiting review. An exciting theory, but a theory. If you want to believe it, go ahead and believe it, but I'm in no hurry to pencil it in to my Big Book of the Universe.
The intent of this law is to stop kiddies getting their hands on CopHunter Xtreme, right? It's not to allow parents to decide, because the State has already a priori decided that CopHunter Xtreme is bad. So, put your legislative balls where your preaching mouth is. Ban all traffic to minors in these games.
Yes, you heard me. Make it illegal to give a copy to, or allow a minor to play, CopHunter Xtreme. Ban it in the stores, ban it in the home. Give the SWAT teams a break from saving stoners from themselves, and have them kick down doors and drag Susie Homemaker screaming into the street for all to see. Bad Susie! Little Johnnie was sneaking into the basement to play his daddy's copy of CopHunter Xtreme, and you didn't stop him. Bad Susie!
Remember how we sneered at the Soviet Union for making its citizens spy on and denounce each other? How we scoffed at their culture of denying personal freedom, personal choice, and even the opportunity to accept personal responsibility.
Now we have retailers who are responsible for their customers going nutso after playing games. Tobacco companies are held accountable for the health effects of a product that the government still refuses to ban. Gun makers are sued for allowing people to uphold their Constitutionally protected rights. Bartenders are held responsible for their patrons' drunk driving. Stores are to blame for ice forming on their sidewalks. We make manufacturers pay (and pass on the bill) to the tune of $350 billion a year for not making their products idiot proof. What's next? Hey, let's go after librarians for not reporting when people take out seditious books. I mean, after USA PATRIOT we can find out anyway, so what are those spectacle wearing subversives doing trying to cover it up, huh? That's wasting valuable State resources, right there.
ACLU, get with the program. When the state creates or allows laws that make anyone responsible for the actions or potential actions of another, that's a priori infringement of their liberties right there. Lower courts aren't dealing with this. Legislatures aren't dealing with this.
Let's take it to the Supremes. Let's make it clear once and for all, that you and only you are responsible for your safety and your actions. Warranty not included, disclaimer not necessary.
>I don't believe violent games make people any more or less violent than they already are, but some games go to the extreme, and I really don't think putting in an age restriction is a bad thing
Is there an alternative universe in which that statement is in any way consistent? Let's leave mealy mouthed dissembling to the political class. If you believe that violent games are harmful, then say so. Don't open with a populist preface then contradict it immediately.
Law enforcement officers are more important than normal people. What else could you possibly infer from it? Every single person working in law enforcement became an American Hero on the 9th of September 2001, and they always will be. What are you, some form of terrorist sympathiser?
> That isn't going to maximize their profits in the long term.
The long term? What are you, some kind of Five Year Plan pinko? All that matters is keeping the corporate investors happy until the next shareholder meeting. You must be thinking of the days when companies were owned by investors, not speculators.
Thoughtcrime. Thinkmaking a Party member an unperson without upsub is plus ungood.
There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice.
I mean, he can get a bit annoying with the whole GNU/lunix thing, but even the most resolutely ignorant commentator should be able to distinguish between KDE/GNOME, and the linux kernel running under it. Normally it wouldn't bother me, but they are primarily talking about the desktops here.
If you think this is splitting hairs, how many reviewers do you think would know how to tell the difference between KDE 3.1.0 running on top of linux and the same desktop running on top of BSD?
It's about low stakes Texas Hold'em. As I'm preaching to people who don't follow links, I'll explain that in hold'em, your hand is drawn from the best five out of your two personal ("pocket") cards, plus five common ("board") cards that everyone can see and use. You can even just play the five common cards if they're better than that 8 in your pocket. You tend to get strong hands, but then again so does everyone else. Hold'em is generally played with big tables, so chances are that someone has a strong hand each round. You don't get extended rounds of raising, and there are no huge wins to be made. Coming out on top of a night of hold'em involves long term risk management, not a single guts-or-glory Hollywood dramatic climax.
As for bluffing, go ahead and try. There are only four rounds of betting on each hand. Experienced players will fold early, so you won't get much of their money anyway, and excitable noobs will tend to stick it out and call you out with their regular full houses and flushes, making it expensive for you to try to bluff. You'll quickly find yourself playing to your hand, not to the other players, and you won't (indeed, can't) get yourself into a steely eyes, car-keys-in-the-pot ego clash.
I wish, I wish, oh how I wish people wouldn't predicate their discussions based on what they've learned from Mel Gibson movies.
>he house, being a corporation, has an obligation to maximize its profits in any way possible
And when the last corporation uses the last gram of uranium to power the machine that sucks up the last drop of oil which they use to cut down the last tree on the planet to turn into paper money which they use to bribe the last honest politician, it will be a great comfort to us all that they are only doing it because capitalism obligates them to.
http://www.ananova.com/video
Basically a virtual newsreader done through animating a talking head as part of a text to speech engine. The subtlety is that it does content and context analysis to determine an appropriate mood; watch her go serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example. It's not perfect ("fighting for their livs in hospital"), but given that it selects stories off the news feeds and TTS and renders them 24/7 with no human interaction at all, I find it fairly impressive.
You wouldn't know it from their marketspeak site, but the company behind it ( http://www.digital-animations.com/ ) are working on expanding the content analysis and tying it to an animation library, with the goal of being able to select appropriate models and act out arbitrary text with minimal human interaction, and eventually do a basic render of a complete film from a (slightly marked up) screenplay.
Heh, I'd like to see what they'd make of a screenplay of Tron. A computer generated version of a film about a computer generated world. Sweet.
>Lip syncing is also pretty touch to do in real-time (The Ill Clan and Anachronox use basic facial expressions), though Valve has had technology which supposedly can do it for a while now.
The news bimbo on http://www.Ananova.com/video has been doing it for a couple of years. It's a slightly different issue because it's done through Text To Speech and the animation is done at the same time as the phoneme generation. It also does some content and context analysis to try and determine an appropriate mood. Watch her go all serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example.
>Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.
The troll in Moria. Rohirrim versus warg riders. Elves at Helm's Deep (not primarily CGI, but you did ask, and they did get screen time that wasn't in the books). It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes, some were nepotism writ large, but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.
Both LotR movies so far have in fact looked like tech demos. Sure, nice FX, I believe that it's now possible to do a proper version of Lord of the Rings. So why didn't he?
Three and a half hours probably refers to the Director's Cut of Fellowship of the Ring. It's an exaggeration to say that only a third of it was shown. It was more like three quarters, but he did add passages, many of which featured CGI effects, that could have been cut in favour of showing more of the actual story.
I've been underwhelmed with the CGI in both LotR films so far. It's good, but not great. You can't simply forget it, especially when it's shoved in your face so often. For example: CGI not quite matching the landscape in tracking shots, an orc army that looks like something from Total Medieval War, wargs that looked like they'd all been done from the same model, Legolas repeatedly drawing CGI arrows through the side of his quiver (now that's elf magic).
Maybe you didn't see these, or they didn't bother you, so that's what you mean by "near perfect", but I assume that there's flaws that I don't spot, so something has to appear flawless to me before I declare it "near perfect".
You're not making a call on your mobile right now, right? So it's not transmitting at the moment, right?
How do you know?
You've tested it yourself, of course? What's that? You haven't? You're just assuming that it only send when you make a call, are you. Hmm.
Sure, I know that the way this was probably implemented in Russia was to simply have the base stations refuse encrypted calls and hope that all the phones fell back to sending unencrypted. I doubt there's many phones today that you could turn on remotely without the user knowing. I say "many" rather than any because I have a Sony Ericsson P800 right here that I've just implemented this on. OK, it required installing an app, and it's a crude kludge that sends crappy voice over GPRS rather than its voice transport, but I managed to implement it in a few hours just for shits and giggles. Imagine what the Department of Hopeless Security could do if it put its collective mind to it.
Not that I'm worried. I'm sure they'd only use such techniques to listen in on really vile people like terrorists, anti gubmint protestors or suspected DMCA violators.
'Last fall, they tested the contraption in regular air - shooting it with 27,000 volts at 20 microamps. Bingo: It generated 3 millipounds of force [...] "We're talking maybe even a pound of thrust out of one of these little devices the size of my thumb. We've got some promise here!"'
Millipounds? Pounds? What's that in bushels per hectare?
My god, no wonder they keep smashing things into Mars if their cutting edge research is done in pounds and by "rule of thumb".
Here's the one group of people that are in a position to promote things other than RIAA meat puppet muzak, and what are they spending their tiny or non-existent incomes on? Hardware? Bandwidth? Promotions? Actually buying indie CDs? Nope, they're spending their money on lawyer's fees.
If they lose, they go out of business. They have to go out of business to win. The RIAA wins either way, as do the lawyers. Independent artists, as usual, get screwed either way.
Sorry for not being part of the groupthink, but can someone explain to me in a calm and rational fashion what the big furry deal is here? By that, I don't mean just another "It's an invasion of privacy, stooooopid!" response, I mean actual scenarios where this can and will be used by Them against We, the People.
Specifically, I'd like to know why it matters that They can scan me and know what kind of underwear I are wearing. Who is going to do this? Why? To what end? What are they going to do with the information?
And if you are the sort of person who is worried by this, aren't you already paying for things with cash? When you walk through the hypothetical scanner, isn't it just going to bleep and spit out "Purchaser unknown" ten times?
Scenarios, please.
Humble apologies, I had about ten tabs open and thought that you were one of the people arguing that HTML can be used as a replacement for PDF. Sorry, you said no such thing, and my refutation was bunk. My bad.
Fair point, you caught me. Apologies, I was reading a different thread in another tab (not in lynx ;-) ).
On the other hand, you've only won an argument online, so no need to get so heated. We're all winners just for taking part, remember?
>Your scenario is that SCO settles with Mandrake
Not as such. My scenario is that they offer no contest in court, and summary judgement but token damages go in favour of SCO. It's not the same as a contested verdict, but it's meatier than an out of court settlement.
What surprises me is why SCO didn't do this before going after IBM. They're either a lot smarter than us, or they are really, really dumb. I'm hoping it's the latter.
I call funny, flamebait, and insightful on you. I was wondering this too. If people find that too offensive, what about other OS's? BSD? A different set of GNU/Linux tools? QNX? Heck, BeOS?
That said, at this price, I don't see myself rushing out to replace my iPAQ any time soon.
>So I am supposed to dual-boot, first developing my own software in Linux, then boot into windows just to load it onto the device. NO THANK YOU
If you couldn't figure out steps 3-5 by yourself, I doubt I'll be queuing up to join your sourceforge project any time soon.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH