Major filesharing of copyrighted material that isn't under a GPL-like license is illegal, damaging to the industry, and should be dealt with accordingly. This is on a different scale than simply sharing a few songs between friends (which is likely to actually improve sales in the long run), so don't confuse the two. If the industry was going after everyone who was making personal backups of their music or making copies for friends, then I would have a big problem with it. But going after "major filesharers"? It's their duty to do that, for the preservation of the industry!
At some point, maybe thousands of years from now, maybe tomorrow, the star is expected to blow itself apart in one of the most energetic phenomena known in the Universe - a 'supernova'. [...] With the incredible power of e-VLBI, radio astronomers are now poised to catch the details as they happen [...]
I'd hate to be the poor sod who's staring into the eyepiece when this thing blows. AHHHHHH, MY EYESSS!!!! I'M BLINDED!!!!!
command -h
$command --help
man $command
info $command
http://www.google.com/search?q=$command
use brain;
Knowing these tricks assumes that you've already had some experience with command-line interfaces. I'm sorry, but none of the examples above are common sense to anyone without command-line experience (except maybe the Google search).
One thing that sickened me, later, and unrelated to Moore, was watching Bush talk about killing in Iraq (shortly before the war began), while smiling and playing golf - actually answering a reporter's question in the middle of a swing. How sick...
Actually, according to this source, Bush's statement was taken out of context in that he wasn't talking about al-Qaeda terrorists at all:
Tuesday night on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume, Brian Wilson noted how "the viewer is left with the misleading impression Mr. Bush is talking about al-Qaeda terrorists." But Wilson disclosed that "a check of the raw tape reveals the President is talking about an attack against Israel, carried out by a Palestinian suicide bomber."
The Fifty-nine Deceits site also fairly (in my opinion) points out that "Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course".
Some of the things in your list are valid gripes, but there are a few that I don't agree with. For example:
"Int's can't evaluate to boolean" - So what? (a==0), (a!=0), is that so hard? I think good programmers generally do the expicit test like this anyways, even in languages like C.
"StackTrace mumbo jumbo" - It's not mumbo jumbo. It tells you where the program fails and how it got there. Stack backtraces are a very powerful source of information for debugging. For programming languages like C you generally need external programs like gdb to provide this information. It comes for free with Java.
"Compiler output is sometimes inacurate" - Is this really a problem with the language, or with bugs in the version of the compiler you're referring to?
So I went to everybody's favorite bittorrent source (you know which one) and downloaded the whole ceremony in a few hours. [...] Difficult? No way!
Not for you and the technically savvy, but try telling your mother, or some random Joe off the street, to "just bittorrent it" and witness the ensuing blank stare of "WTF is that?" Even if you tell them, they're not likely to have the technical expertise needed to set up and use a bittorrent client without a lot of frustration, and that's even assuming they have a high-speed internet connection at home, which they probably don't.
Yes, Bittorrent is a bit easier than trying to hunt down an appropriate relay, but really, to 90+% of the population, they're both dauntingly impractical options.
he? Who said that phatlipmojo was a she? Not all librarians are women, you know.
Wouldn't the use of "he" be just as presumptuous? The English language has flaws, and this is one of them. Since English has no third-person-singular gender-unspecific pronouns, speakers and writers of the english language have only six choices when referring to somebody whose gender isn't known:
Use "he/she". This can get very awkward (especially when spoken). E.g.: "Someone across the street bought a newspaper, and then he/she put it over his/her head so that he/she wouldn't get his/her hair wet."
Use "they". This is technically wrong because it's a plural pronoun, so in can lead to ambiguity and confusion. However, it's becoming increasingly common. E.g.: "Someone across the street bought a newspaper, and then they put it over their head so that they wouldn't get their hair wet."
Use new gender-unspecific pronouns and hope that they'll be understood and catch on. E.g.: "Someone across the street bought a newspaper, and then ey put it over eir head so that ey wouldn't get eir hair wet.". See http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/ for more information on such pronouns.
Always assume male. This was common and correct practice in bygone days, but I don't think it's reasonable nowadays.
Guess at a gender. This is a variation of the previous point, and is not only more fair, but more likely to be correct. In this case, the person in question is a librarian, and there are more female librarians than male librarians, so why not initially guess "she" rather than "he"? It's more likely to be correct.
Avoid the use of pronouns altogether. I think that this option is entirely unreasonable. E.g.: "Someone across the street bought a newspaper, and then that person put it over that person's head so that that person wouldn't get that person's hair wet."
lol someone didn't listen in junior high. The moon does not rotate. One side is always light the other dark
Yeah, it seems that you're the one who wasn't listening in junior high. The moon does indeed rotate. Its rotation period, and therefore its day-night cycle, is about 28 earth days long. The thing you're confused about is this: The rotation period of the moon is exactly the same as its orbital period around the earth. This causes the same side of the moon (with the exception of a bit of wobble) to always face the earth. But this side goes through day-night cycles. This is easily seen; it's what causes the phases of the moon.
Contrary to some popular belief, the equivalence of the rotation period and the orbital period is not a staggering coincidence. Most two-body orbital systems (slowly) tend towards this.
I upgraded to Fedora Core 2 just yesterday (from Core 1), and encountered and resolved some of the known problems (such as IPV6 being enabled by default, etc.). However, there's another problem that I haven't managed to resolve yet. My system bell no longer works. If anybody else has encountered this and knows the solution, please let me know! I'd appreciate it very much. FYI, I'm using fvwm as a window manager, so KDE-specific solutions such as "Control Panel --> Sounds -->..." are useless to me.
(Oh, and "xset q" shows "bell percent: 50 bell pitch: 400 bell duration: 100", so that's not the problem)
using up the planet's supply of helium?
on
Zeppelin Flies Again
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Helium is a very useful substance to use for this sort of thing, but I think we have to be careful how much of it we waste. Let me explain. Helium is a fairly rare element on the planet. Up until sometime in the 1940s or thereabouts, it was thought that helium was pretty much nonexistant on the planet. It doesn't exist in the atmosphere because any helium that's floating around in the atmosphere eventually leaks out into space because it's so light. Also, it can't be part of any heavier molecule because it's an inert gas. Any helium that escapes into the air will eventually leak out into space and be lost forever. I believe that this property is unique to helium. Anyways, it was eventually discovered that helium is trapped in certain kinds of sand, and so the helium-mining industry was founded. I guess there's a lot of it, but unlike every other element in existance, once helium is leaked, it's gone from the planet forever. Sure, we're depleting the planet of a lot of things, such as fossil fuels, etc., but at least the individual atoms of these substances stick around, so we still have the fundamental building blocks for these things, etc. But once the helium is gone, it's gone! There's no way we can make more short of building nuclear fusion plants to build new helium atoms from hydrogen. Yet I've never seen this matter even briefly discussed anywhere. Am I missing something, or is this actually going to be a problem in the future? I can't help but think that in a couple of hundred years, we'll be smacking ourselves in the head for wasting all of the planet's precious helium on children's balloons, etc.
Well, we are very, very close to the point where we'll be able to send AI-guided probes out into the galaxy at near-light speeds. Logically, if any race even just a bit more advanced than us were living nearby, we'd already be encoutering their probes flying around our system.
So you're saying that we're "very, very close" to having the technology to send a probe to each of the several billion star systems in our galaxy? Let me tell ya, bub, we're nowhere near that, by a long shot! Sure, I'm willing to believe that within the next hundred years or so we'll probably have the technology be able to whip a probe off somewhere at near light speed. But a few billion? Just where do you think we're going to get the raw materials for this project? And the energy? And the political willpower?
Also, you're assuming that any civilization that happens to evolve to that level of intelligence and skill will necessarily want to make contact via physical probes (which further assumes that they're interested in making contact at all, which is another matter entirely). It seems more likely to me that in the interests of practicality, sending messages via electromagnetic waves or some other form of ether would be the more common way to reach out to the rest of the galaxy. And as far as we know, there may be several of these messages hitting our humble little planet as we speak. SETI has thus far barely touched the surface in its attempt to scan the heavens at the various likely frequencies looking for such messages.
(As an aside, lets assume for the moment that we may actually be the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy at the moment. There are still billions of other galaxies out there that may also contain intelligent life. Unfortunately, the distances we're talking about here are so incredibly vast (way vaster than the already-mindboglingly vast distances between the stars in our own galaxy), that the chances of ever knowing whether intelligent life exists (or had ever existed) in another galaxy is pretty much zero. Pretty depressing, really.)
For some reason I have a strange desire to teach someone 6502 assembly language. I'm not sure why that is, and the rational side of me knows that I'm never going to find anybody who's even half-interested in learning it. I think that perhaps the reason I want to teach it to someone is that it'd be nice to experience someone else coming to the realization of the power of abstraction, the awareness that so much is possible using such simple building blocks. And yes, I strongly believe that knowing how to program in assembly language (and how it relates to the underlying machine language) makes one an instinctively better programmer. And it's frikkin' neat. It's like driving a standard versus an automatic. You become one with the computer.
I'd like to see some examples of these pictures. Sure they are creepy, sometimes people can be fooled though. I had a picture of Aki in a bikini from the Final Fantasy movie on my computer. My girlfriend found it and wanted to know why I had it. She didn't beleive me that it wasn't a real person.
I think that creating a still image realistic enough to fool the human brain is a lot easier than creating an animated image realistic enough to fool the human brain. The article's statement that "Neuroscientists argue that our brains have evolved specific mechanisms for face recognition, because being able to recognize something 'wrong' in someone else's face has long been crucial to survival" is a gross understatement. A considerably large amount of the brain is specifically dedicated to recognizing facial expressions. This includes all of the subtle movements that are involved in facial expressions. It's these subtle movements that are very difficult to artificially animate accurately enough to fool the human brain. That's why the article uses the term "animated corpse". Even something as 'trivial' as a slightly unnatural pertubation of one small cheeckbone twitch is enough to tell the human brain that something is wrong.
The first thing that I did after installing Fedora is switch to my favorite window manager - fvwm! It's very lightweight, and very configurable (which is important to me because I'm very picky). It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of the likes of KDE or GNOME, so it probably isn't a good default for the mainstream, but my point is that the option is there. The same can't be said about the MS Windows environment!
(My only beef is that for some reason fvwm is no longer shipped with Fedora. I have no idea why. As far as lightweight window managers go, it's probably the most popular, and it's a single tiny RPM.)
Actually, it looks like Opportunity is just south of the equator as well. So they're both in the southern hemisphere. Spirit is at latitude 14.735 degrees south and longitude 175.39 degrees east, while Opportunity is at latitude 1.95 degrees south and longitude 5.53 degrees west.
Yes, Opportunity is in the northern hemisphere while Spirit is in the southern hemisphere. However, they're both close to the equator. Considering that the tilt of the planet is 25.19 degrees, they'll both experience winter at the same time, and probably almost as harshly.
A navigatable map of the locations of the Mars landers (current and past) can be found here.
When I'm taking a photo of a non-moving subject (i.e., not a person) in low light, this is what I tend to do:
disable the flash
set the ISO to 50 to minimize "grain"
enable the timer (2-second preferrably)
place the camera on a rock, fence stump, hood of a car, whatever (in leiu of a tripod)
press the shutter release and stand back
Results will vary, of course, but I've taken some awesome low-light shots this way. For example, this one. This technique isn't limited to digital photography either (with the exception of the setting-the-ISO part).
using GPS to switch between fuel and battery?
on
Hybrid Fleet Vehicles
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The article states:
The iconic black cabs, which have been retrofitted with Azure's hybrid-electric powertrains, were designed to cut emissions in London's smoggy downtown core. A global positioning device installed in the cabs will automatically switch the engine to battery power when it enters the city centre and switch it back to fuel when it leaves.
This seems a bit strange. One has to wonder why the decision to switch isn't up to the driver. I'm sure it's not an issue of convenience, since pressing a button is hardly a chore. Would it be for regulatory reasons? Perhaps the thought is that the drivers will want to stay on fuel power because it gives them more oomph, but that this system will force the switchover to satisfy whatever regulatory requirements are put in place. If this is true, it would seem to be a mostly unstated negative point about the technology. Creating unhappy drivers isn't the greatest way of going about pushing a brave new technology.
And don't forget that George Lucas was one of the people behind the THX series of sound and video specifications. I'm not sure what THX is supposed to stand for in this context, but I'm pretty sure that THX 1138 was the origin of the acronym.
To make things a bit clearer, I should have used the term arc-second (i.e., 1/3600 of a degree) in my description, and pointed out that the term parallax-second is used to describe an arc-second of apparent movement caused by parallax.
the 1st one is called parallax (or triangulation) and consists on measuring the position of the star from different points of the earth's orbit (i.e., at different times of the year). The differences in the angular position are then used to calculate the distance of the object.
BTW, this is where the term parsec comes from. An object in space is considered to be one parsec away if it appears to move 1 parallax-second in six months (when the the two observations are 2 A.U. apart because of the Earth's orbit). One thing that tends to confuse people about parsec measurements is that it's actually a reciprocal measurement. That is, an object that moves a 1/2 parallax-second is said to be 2 parsecs away, etc.
As another reply has pointed out, this quote "triangle" is backwards. Or at least it would have been back then. Unfortunately, the growing trend nowadays is to produce quoted replies like this. Why? The only thing I can think of is laziness. I'm guessing that the commonly-used e-mail/news clients place the cursor at the top of the quote, and people just start typing there, as apposed to going to the bottom of the quote (after trimming it down, which few people seem to do anymore either!) This backwards quoting style is annoying as hell, since it basically forces you to read the message backwards if you want to read things in context.
Slashdot Mirror
Major filesharing of copyrighted material that isn't under a GPL-like license is illegal, damaging to the industry, and should be dealt with accordingly. This is on a different scale than simply sharing a few songs between friends (which is likely to actually improve sales in the long run), so don't confuse the two. If the industry was going after everyone who was making personal backups of their music or making copies for friends, then I would have a big problem with it. But going after "major filesharers"? It's their duty to do that, for the preservation of the industry!
I'd hate to be the poor sod who's staring into the eyepiece when this thing blows. AHHHHHH, MY EYESSS!!!! I'M BLINDED!!!!!
Knowing these tricks assumes that you've already had some experience with command-line interfaces. I'm sorry, but none of the examples above are common sense to anyone without command-line experience (except maybe the Google search).
Actually, according to this source, Bush's statement was taken out of context in that he wasn't talking about al-Qaeda terrorists at all:
The Fifty-nine Deceits site also fairly (in my opinion) points out that "Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course".
Some of the things in your list are valid gripes, but there are a few that I don't agree with. For example:
You mean 18! (or are you posting to Slashdot... from the future! (*GASP!*))
Not for you and the technically savvy, but try telling your mother, or some random Joe off the street, to "just bittorrent it" and witness the ensuing blank stare of "WTF is that?" Even if you tell them, they're not likely to have the technical expertise needed to set up and use a bittorrent client without a lot of frustration, and that's even assuming they have a high-speed internet connection at home, which they probably don't.
Yes, Bittorrent is a bit easier than trying to hunt down an appropriate relay, but really, to 90+% of the population, they're both dauntingly impractical options.
Wouldn't the use of "he" be just as presumptuous? The English language has flaws, and this is one of them. Since English has no third-person-singular gender-unspecific pronouns, speakers and writers of the english language have only six choices when referring to somebody whose gender isn't known:
Yeah, it seems that you're the one who wasn't listening in junior high. The moon does indeed rotate. Its rotation period, and therefore its day-night cycle, is about 28 earth days long. The thing you're confused about is this: The rotation period of the moon is exactly the same as its orbital period around the earth. This causes the same side of the moon (with the exception of a bit of wobble) to always face the earth. But this side goes through day-night cycles. This is easily seen; it's what causes the phases of the moon.
Contrary to some popular belief, the equivalence of the rotation period and the orbital period is not a staggering coincidence. Most two-body orbital systems (slowly) tend towards this.
Thank you!
(Oh, and "xset q" shows "bell percent: 50 bell pitch: 400 bell duration: 100", so that's not the problem)
So you're saying that we're "very, very close" to having the technology to send a probe to each of the several billion star systems in our galaxy? Let me tell ya, bub, we're nowhere near that, by a long shot! Sure, I'm willing to believe that within the next hundred years or so we'll probably have the technology be able to whip a probe off somewhere at near light speed. But a few billion? Just where do you think we're going to get the raw materials for this project? And the energy? And the political willpower?
Also, you're assuming that any civilization that happens to evolve to that level of intelligence and skill will necessarily want to make contact via physical probes (which further assumes that they're interested in making contact at all, which is another matter entirely). It seems more likely to me that in the interests of practicality, sending messages via electromagnetic waves or some other form of ether would be the more common way to reach out to the rest of the galaxy. And as far as we know, there may be several of these messages hitting our humble little planet as we speak. SETI has thus far barely touched the surface in its attempt to scan the heavens at the various likely frequencies looking for such messages.
(As an aside, lets assume for the moment that we may actually be the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy at the moment. There are still billions of other galaxies out there that may also contain intelligent life. Unfortunately, the distances we're talking about here are so incredibly vast (way vaster than the already-mindboglingly vast distances between the stars in our own galaxy), that the chances of ever knowing whether intelligent life exists (or had ever existed) in another galaxy is pretty much zero. Pretty depressing, really.)
I think that creating a still image realistic enough to fool the human brain is a lot easier than creating an animated image realistic enough to fool the human brain. The article's statement that "Neuroscientists argue that our brains have evolved specific mechanisms for face recognition, because being able to recognize something 'wrong' in someone else's face has long been crucial to survival" is a gross understatement. A considerably large amount of the brain is specifically dedicated to recognizing facial expressions. This includes all of the subtle movements that are involved in facial expressions. It's these subtle movements that are very difficult to artificially animate accurately enough to fool the human brain. That's why the article uses the term "animated corpse". Even something as 'trivial' as a slightly unnatural pertubation of one small cheeckbone twitch is enough to tell the human brain that something is wrong.
(My only beef is that for some reason fvwm is no longer shipped with Fedora. I have no idea why. As far as lightweight window managers go, it's probably the most popular, and it's a single tiny RPM.)
A navigatable map of the locations of the Mars landers (current and past) can be found here.
Yup! Taken from a friend's balcony.
Results will vary, of course, but I've taken some awesome low-light shots this way. For example, this one. This technique isn't limited to digital photography either (with the exception of the setting-the-ISO part).
This seems a bit strange. One has to wonder why the decision to switch isn't up to the driver. I'm sure it's not an issue of convenience, since pressing a button is hardly a chore. Would it be for regulatory reasons? Perhaps the thought is that the drivers will want to stay on fuel power because it gives them more oomph, but that this system will force the switchover to satisfy whatever regulatory requirements are put in place. If this is true, it would seem to be a mostly unstated negative point about the technology. Creating unhappy drivers isn't the greatest way of going about pushing a brave new technology.
And don't forget that George Lucas was one of the people behind the THX series of sound and video specifications. I'm not sure what THX is supposed to stand for in this context, but I'm pretty sure that THX 1138 was the origin of the acronym.
BTW, this is where the term parsec comes from. An object in space is considered to be one parsec away if it appears to move 1 parallax-second in six months (when the the two observations are 2 A.U. apart because of the Earth's orbit). One thing that tends to confuse people about parsec measurements is that it's actually a reciprocal measurement. That is, an object that moves a 1/2 parallax-second is said to be 2 parsecs away, etc.
Sorry 'bout the off-topic rant.