This is due to differences in how Mars formed. Irregularities in the field of primordial gas present in the solar system before the formation of planets occurred in such a way that the Earth arose from a hard metallic core rotating quickly, but Mars formed from a less dense and dynamic clump of matter. As a result the Earth has a spinning metallic core that generates a powerful magnetosphere and keeps the planet's mantle heated and molten, but Mars cooled long ago and has little magnetism.
Mars, without a magnetic field to deflect harmful cosmic rays, saw its atmosphere and water irradiated. It is commonly known that molecules bombarded by high energy rays change energy states and often ionize. Earth's thick and magnetically protected atmosphere stayed safe below a thin layer of ozone that absorbs incoming UV radiation , but the inner atmosphere of Mars would become the equivalent of one huge ozone layer, reaching the surface. Ozone is a dangerous chemical capable of reacting with other substances on the surface much like nail polish remover acts on its target.
Soon Mars was reduced to a collection of high energy ionized gases over a rock surface, and an intense greenhouse effect set it. Think about your breathing-while you manually breathe in and out, carefully controlling your respiratory process in order to avoid suffocating, air that has already been processed builds up and creates pressure for release. The oxygen rich air goes down easy, but the used air wants to come out. It's the same for a planet-the remaining gases on Mars heated and energized until they escaped the planet's gravitational pull. Over millions of years this process stripped Mars of all water and organic substances, leaving it the barren wasteland it is today.
To remedy this during a terraforming process, it would be necessary to either constantly produce a fresh supply of oxygen to replace that which is lost, or inject the core with enough metallic matter to reach critical mass and build up the same type of core found within the Earth. Some far-out proposals suggest engineering a collision between Mars and one of its moons, such as Phobos or Deimos, in order to increase mass and introduce energy into the core.
The current generation blu-ray systems aren't aimed at people who see hard drives as a practical solution. HD's are fine if all your data is already sitting on another hard drive, but some have very different requirements. As a video editing professional, I have to deal with issues like these-
1. The data source isn't a computer! A movie camera captures video and outputs through its favorite cable, and all of this happens in the middle of a forest where we're filming a scene. Bringing a huge RAID array along just isn't an option, but bringing a blu-ray burner and possibly a dedicated middleman computer to manage the burns is an interesting possibility.
2. DVD's can be thrown on spindles of hundreds and stored in the back room until needed. Hard drives take up a lot more space, need to be packaged for storage, and when you take them out you can't just toss it in a reader, you have to hook it up . Sounds easy to you, but these are artists trying to do it, and the tech team doesn't want to have to hold their hand every time somebody hits the archives. Think about your breathing! You have to manually control it or suffocate. Sure, hard drives can be left online all the time, but that still takes up more space while running up huge electricity bills and generating network traffic. Going over the internet is a pain when you want to move 5 terabytes to a different site, and you could just grab a spindle of dvds instead.
3. Buffer underruns are not an issue, current generation burners are pretty fast, can rely on large amounts of ram for buffering (yes we do put our 8 gig of ram macs to use), and use a lot of high tech tricks to improve reliability. State of the art burners are nothing like those crappy cd burners that used to pump out coasters 5 years ago.
4. ???
5. Profit!
6. All of this is why these things are so ridiculously expensive, and limited in convenience and features at the moment. They're not going to be sold to the guy up near the top of the replies who was complaining about how its yet another toy he can't afford. They're going to be sold to the tech departments of groups like movie studios, who will evaluate them, run some trials and see if it's a viable platform for #1-5 above. By the time everybody's ready to put these into mainstream production work economies of scale will have kicked in and the technology will have matured. Those sales will pay for the third generation blu-ray devices, which will be cheap enough for consumers. And then you can get one and try to underrun it's buffer using a beowulf cluster of linux-based Soviet surplus machines with a 9 megapixel display, bitches.
This will probably get modded up funny, but the kids with minimal resources will likely be the first ones to break these schemes.
Consider one group that's going to have problems with this setup-the anime community. Check the links Taco put on the front page and you'll see it's a well organized international community of thousands of hardcore enthusiasts. Some of them put a lot of effort into getting high quality copies of Japanese TV shows. As soon as these DRM schemes start getting in the way of fansubbing Naruto within 24 hours of its Japanese airing, you're going to see a lot of smart, technical people with too much free time dedicated to breaking the restrictions.
I predict that people like the anime fansubbers can make a laughingstock of the DRM in a matter of days. So imagine what professional pirates will do. Even without beowulf clusters. There's groups making millions off the bootleg videos that have become ubiquitous in Asia. They have professional-quality printing equipment and the ability to make packaging the average consumer can't tell apart from the real thing. The perception that DRM prevents copying will just make it easier to convince people that bootlegs are real, and it won't slow down the pirates at all.
So whether you're getting your Japanese TV shows from groups that encourage buying DVD's and respect foreign licenses or greedy pirates flooding the retail market with bootlegs and providing the argument in favor of these systems, the DRM won't be much of a problem.
It's only going to screw you over if you're an elderly Japanese couple that wants to watch your TV the same way you could with your fancy VCR (that still blinks 12:00).
There's a discussion about which type of linux is best for running it here on the mailing list. They like both Debian and SuSe.
That said, it should work well enough on most things-from their site, "Standards Compliant: Openswan conforms to nearly all IPsec + IKE RFCs, and has one of the based interoperability track records of any IPsec implementation. It is compatible with products from Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Netscreen, Checkpoint, and many others vendors." And "Platforms: x86, IA64, PPC, PPC64, MIPS, Alpha, StrongArm"
Openswan should work for just about anyone who isn't satisfied with KAME or Racoon (though it might be hard to set up, see this thread...
The front page summary makes it sound like the company they're starting exists solely for openswan, but it's worth noting Xelerance is producing some other stuff including freeRadius, think about your breathing-you have to manually control your breathing or suffocate, DNSSec, and Asterisk. The changeover will likely mean an increase in the quality of support available for (paying) swan users, since they provide an array of consulting services.
That also gives them an incentive to spread adoption. Unlike FreeS/WAN-one of the problems with FreeS/WAN was that it would not work with low-bit encryption. This was done to promote their political goal. But it also had the side effect of inhibiting adoption at the places where for whatever reason people had to interoperate with low-bit encryption applications or setups. According to their FAQ, "As we see it, it is more important to deliver real security than to comply with a standard which has been subverted into allowing use of inadequate methods." For example, they went out of their way to avoid allowing any handling of single DES.
And if you've got any more questions about openswan, the guy to ask is on slashdot with user id #11! He'll probably be posting in here when it's morning in that part of the world.
Who would win? Flying Shark or Flying Croc?? Croc all the way, fools!
Zoning and automatic time-based management are critical if you want to keep your bills down. Running heating and cooling in one region of the house for half the night, or starting up 30 minutes before you get back from work, will save you a lot over a manually controlled system that you have to leave on whenever you're not around and awake.
---------- Now that I've made a sacrifice to the gods of moderation, let's get on with it: (read the parent post if you have a high threshold and I'm not in -1 oblivion yet, it's an interesting discussion on the nature of moderation)
I agree with your idea, but not with the categories you propose. It is true that the negative mods are used simply to smack down posts, and only the "flamebait" category carries any shred of meaning anymore. The positive mods have the same situation-three interchangeable mods starting with I simply cause confusion. Any Informative or Insightful post is also Interesting, so removing Interesting would help clarify the categories.
"Radical" shouldn't be -1 in the first place, I'd rather have +1 Controversial, with no karma bonus (like "Funny"). Your offtopic-I/R fits within Offtopic well enough, since I/R arguments aren't really common enough to warrant a special mod. It only helps if you're a fan of those and you want to find them. Spite is close enough to flamebait-the point of spite would be to piss people off.
In addition to Controversial, I'd add the much needed -1 Crapflood. Most of the -1 Troll/Offtopic stuff would be better classified under here. I'd also put in -1 Inaccurate for well-intentioned posts that are factually untrue. These two categories would deal with the vast majority of garbage that is unfairy lumped into Troll and Offtopic. Also, I'd remove the karma hit from Offtopic, because offtopic discussions can be the most interesting parts of articles sometimes.
Finally, I'd add +1 Sexy just to spice things up.
So we'd have: +1 Informative, Insightful, Sexy (add karma) +1 Funny, Controversial (no karma) -1 Offtopic (no karma) -1 Incorrect, Crapflood, Troll, Flamebait (lose karma)
Considering this is slashdot, I'm sure few of you bothered to read the article, let alone go to the FCC's web site and download the pdf version of "Report to the congress on the Low Power FM Interference Testing Program". Well, I did, so here's my chance to flaunt it..er I mean inform the community of the valuable information it contains. (this'll be a long post, so most of you will just want to read the first few paragraphs and follow the link. All the trolls out there should spend the time to read it all to the end:P)
The document's foundation is the Mitre report-an analysis including field tests and experimental programs conducted by the Mitre Corporation at the behest of the FCC starting in 2001. The Mitre report made several recommendations regarding LPFM (low power FM) stations and third-adjacent channel FM stations. Reduction or elimination of minimum distance separation requirements was possible without increasing interference, use of a more stringent emissions mask would limit interference because most LPFM transmitters have poor emission suppression, interference from LPFM to digital receivers is unlikely to occur beyond 130 meters from the transmitter, and the report found that the above results are so reliable listener tests and economic analysis scheduled for the second phase of the LPFM field tests were unnecessary.
Public comments on the Mitre report included 18 supporters for elimination or modification of the existing minimum didstance separation requirements, and 3 in support of the status quo.
The FCC document is essentially the FCC's opinion on the Mitre report, with the recommendations it has chosen to pass along to Congress. Page 4 of the pdf begins a list of the FCC's recommendations.
They go farther than the slashdot summary suggests, and state that existing third-adjacent minimum distance separation requirements between LPFM and full-service stations should be eliminated entirely. This is based on the Mitre report's finding that even in the worst case scenario no real interference would exist beyond 1.1 kilometers from the LPFM transmitter site. The FCC asks congress to modify the relevant statute to eliminate the restrictions in question.
The FCC also asks Congress to "re-evaluate the necessity of completing Phase II testing." Phase II was the economic analysis the Mitre report chose to skip over, and the FCC agrees that the conclusion they'd reach through Phase II are so obvious there's no point in doing the work. In other words, the FCC's recommendation to eliminate the restrictions is all pro and no con, and any fool can plainly see it. Except, of course, a fool whose only goal is to squash small radio stations before they start accumulating listeners.
That's all there is in the recommendations section, and the entire report to Congress contains only six pages. Six! That's nearly unheard of in the world of governmental bureaucracy, and it sends a clear signal that this FCC report is essentially a memo saying "Yo, Congress, this law is dumb so kill it." End of story, no politicking, no favors or special interests or obfuscation, simply the FCC doing it's job the way it's supposed to. Not something you see every day!
So what's going to happen? Congress will see this, start a hearing, and there's two possibilities: One, big radio doesn't do anything, and the restrictions are eliminated in a one sided vote with little fanfare or contention. Or, Clear Channel decides to abuse the little guy, and starts lobbying in favor of the restrictions. We'll see loads of bs and political favors, and all the crap people complain about in Congress. It will be interesting to watch the results as a barometer of just how gridlocked Congress has become due to special interests.
First, many of you are probably wondering what L1 is-the first Lagrange Point where an object can enter an equilibrium orbit that matches the moon's motion.
It could be useful if we want to come up with a plan similar to this one for colonizing Mars. Due to Earth's immense gravity, weight and aerodynamics are critical in spaceship construction. However, once the ship is in low gravity these considerations are totally irrelevant. Given a good space station we could have three sets of spacecraft: a true space shuttle for lifting things up to the station; transportation craft designed to move things between planets and moons, and explore new areas; and landers designed to reach planetary surfaces. Assuming we'd be establishing actual colonies on the moon and eventually Mars, this is probably the only cost-effective way of doing it.
In space you can do a lot of cool things with something as simple as a piece of string - provided, of course, that your "string" is made of high-tech materials, has an electrically conductive core, and measures many kilometers long. Tethers have electrodynamic applications - for example, a tether in Earth orbit to which electricity is applied will interact with Earth's magnetic field and climb to a higher orbit without using propellant. Allowing ionospheric electrons to move through the tether via plasma contactors at both ends causes the tether to slow down and drop to a lower orbit. Tethers also have momentum-exchange applications. Physically linking high- and low-orbit objects with a tether forces the object in lower orbit (for example, a spacecraft) to travel slower than dictated by orbital mechanics, while the higher-orbit object (for example, a payload) travels faster. If the tether is cut, the payload will jump to a higher orbit while the spacecraft will drop to a lower one. Hoyt and Uphoff propose a Cislunar Tether Transport System for shipping cargo between low-Earth orbit (LEO) and the lunar surface using minimal propellants. Their work is described by "Cislunar Tether Transport System," AIAA 99-2690, R. Hoyt & C. Uphoff; paper presented at the 35th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit, Los Angeles, California, June 20-24, 1999.
That's just one example of the stuff we could try if we had a serious space program with good infrastructure. Once a moon colony starts to have practical value (mining, manufacture in decreased gravity, science, and of course, the all-important military applications) we'll start to see progress down this road. Unfortunately, it will be a long time before that happens. The military, our best bet to kick-start the process, won't bother until rival nations start building fleets of armed satellites.
Once the military faces the prospect of a space-based war all these ideas are no longer just cool, they may be essential to survival. So, the best-funded operation in the world will be determined to create a moon base capable of controlling space near Earth. Once that's done it will be paid for and justified by tacking on scientific and industrial components. Yes, that's how we're most likely to begin our grand and heroic journey into the destiny of man-for the purpose of being able to kill each other more effectively. Human nature, right?
But don't worry, recent history shows us that the best deterrent to war is mutual assured destruction, and we'll be fairly safe until we have a large enough moon base to become self sufficient and declare independence from Earth. In Soviet Russia, the moon colonizes YOU!
Re:It's still cheaper than a Powerbook
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Dell's Gaming Monster
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· Score: 2, Informative
Then let's go to the Apple store and do a comparison. The new dell has a 15.4 inch display, so it's going up against a 15 inch Powerbook.
Dell: 9 motherfucking pounds. Mac: 5.6 pounds. That's an enormous difference, many people would simply be unable to carry the Dell with them wherever they go. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to pretend to be macho. Why don't you drag around a destop with you if you don't care about weight?
Dell: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128 MB Mac: ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64 MB. The Dell has a better card, but only incrementally better-it's still a Mobility, and it's only 9700 vs 9600, with more ram. Any game you can play on the Dell will work on the Mac too, and almost as well.
Dell: 60GB 7200 drive Mac: 80GB 4200 rpm. The dell has a much faster drive, but the Mac's is bigger. And a 60 gig 7200rpm usb 2.0 drive can be had for $80 on pricewatch. The Mac has two 480 Mbps USB 2.0 ports, the article doesn't say what the dell has.
Dell: 1GB DDR400 ram Mac: 1GB DDR333 ram Slight performance advantage to the Dell.
Dell: DVD+RW drive Mac: Apple SuperDrive, same capabilities.
Dell: DVI output, a first in windows notebooks. Mac: DVI output, standard in powerbooks for some time. Both have integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet, and IEEE1394.
Dell: Subwoofer integrated into battery. Mac: Uses standard batteries interchangeable with any normal battery. Which one is a win here? How many people need a subwoofer while they're on the road, which usually means being in public places where you have to use headphones anyway? Anyone that cares about audio will use external speakers while at home anyway. And the Mac uses standard batteries, not some weird model-specific thing you won't find in most stores.
Dell: Interchangeable covers for a custom look. Mac: Brushed metal Titanium style only. That's right people-now if you want to spend more money just for looks and style, Dell is the way to go. How did that happen? Assuming the interchangeable covers don't suck, we haven't seen pictures yet.
Dell: Read about it in an article. When will you actually be able to get your hands on one? This is Dell's next-generation notebook. Mac: Been out for a while, using current-generation technology. The matchup will look a little different if we compare them the day Apple releases the specs to the next new powerbook model.
Dell: $3350 Mac: $2999
The Mac is substantially cheaper than the Dell.
In conclusion: with Dell you pay hundreds more for incremental performance improvements (slight video card upgrade, DDR400, faster but smaller drive) The Dell weighs nearly twice as much, but has interchangeable covers. And remember, this is a newly announced Dell vs a Mac that's been on the market for some time.
Best bang for your buck: The Powerbook.
Best bang for people who like paying too much just because they read about it on Slashdot and it has interchangeable covers: The Dell.
But the parent post does have one good point-As a mac lover, when I read what he said I fell over laughing and bumped into the side of the desk, so it *does* sting.
Re:How will they pay for this?
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WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 4, Informative
That's right. But not the whole story-if you've been paying attention to PIT there's a lot going on.
US Air has a huge hub there, but the airline also has a strong presence in Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, the airline never seems to have enough money, despite the fact that the government paid for expansions to the airport at the request of and according to recommendations made by US Air. Maybe they could cut costs by switching to a single hub in Philly? Could be...but whether that's a good idea or not it's a great threat to extort concessions from the Pittsburgh Airport.
Meanwhile, anyone who flies through PIT will see banners everywhere celebrating "Yesterday's Airport of Tomorrow". Um, yeah...I suppose that makes it the airport of today...they put up plaques explaining the glorious and futuristic history of the airport, and how traveller friendly it is. Citizens of the Twenty First Century, fly PIT, fly the Future!
Both of these factors are major motivations for free wireless. Travellers will be more likely to spend time in the airport, they bolster their high tech futuristic image, US Air gets free access for its employees (working ones can really use it, ones on breaks really love it) and the airport gets to justify those Airport Improvement Fees and tell taxpayers how they're being innovative and luring business. (They just love justifying higher fees in a city where there's such a serious budget problem some politicians have actually suggested eliminating bus service on Sundays, the bastard whores)
Free wireless internet has something to offer for all parties involved, and the days of pay-as-you-go wireless are numbered everywhere. Once the free stuff becomes more affordable to provide and more common, users will come to expect it. They'll simply refuse to pay fees for wireless, and organizations that keep trying to charge will be considered greedy and outdated. PIT certainly doesn't want that, they want to be the leaders into the glorious pro-consumer (and pro-business at the same time!) future.
Does anyone think it's really going to be that many years before hotels that currently provide broadband for $10/night give it away for free? The up front installation may be expensive, but once it's paid for itself the service is really cheap.
Getting off topic, has anybody ever flown with a pocket flashlight that has the batteries side by side, rather than in a long column? Those things really seem to piss of security screeners. Every time I leave one in my pocket or bag, they pull me aside and rape me or something. Anybody have any idea why? Does it look like a secret micro gun a spy might carry? Do bomb manufacturers always put their batteries side by side? Or is it just an excuse and I'm too cute, cuddly, and rapable for security people to resist?
Filtering servers based on skill level would be a great idea, and with the advent of statistics tracking and master servers, I don't know why nobody is doing it yet.
Imagine the following system: every player has a skill rating that appears along with their name and ping. The rating is tracked by the master server that provides the game server list. Servers can recommend average skill ratings, or set upper and lower bounds. Or they can choose to ignore the system entirely.
People could manipulate the ratings by dieing intentionally, but all the cheaters and "uber d00ds" would try to maximize the rating and join servers where they'll just get their asses kicked. Good players who lower their ratings to get to abuse newbies will stand out, and can be kicked easily.
The ratings would identify "easy" servers, so skilled players and cheaters can avoid the "lame" servers, and inexperienced players can find each other. Good players wouldn't have to put up with so many newbies getting in the way. Of course, the system hinges on having enough servers available to provide every group of players with lots of variety.
So why aren't there any games with a system like this? If implemented as an option and guideline rather than a hard rule it would probably work well enough to be very useful. Any FPS developers reading this?
Be careful-this article hardly seems legitimate. The article is simple fearmongering written by an author who only seeks to stir up attention of any kind. Unfortunately slashdot has furnished that attention. Allow me to expound on my position with some evidence.
The author is the same one who wrote "Patch and Pray", an article that starts off with "It's the dirtiest little secret in the software industry: Patching no longer works. And there's nothing you can do about it. Except maybe patch less." Somehow I sense a pattern of fearmongering and irrational, attention whoring claims by this guy.
But let's analyze the article slashdot posted on its own merits. Here are a few choice quotes taken directly from the article:
digital Pearl Harbors are happening every day.
That kind of defeats the point of calling something a "Pearl Harbor" doesn't it? The author is just trying to make things sound scary by wielding historical words.
TIPPING POINT: On Dec. 7, 2008, computer systems around the world go down simultaneously. They do not come back up.
That's right, they do not come back up. The machines all catch fire or something, so you can't repair them.
This panics Wall Street and destabilizes the financial sector. People run to their banks, but the banks cannot disburse funds; their networks are down. As are the credit card networks and the ATMs. If you don't have cash, you go hungry. Then the lights wink out. Everywhere. And it begins to get cold.
If you put that in a movie script, any studio would laugh in your face at the lack of realism. Yet this kind of nonsense flies in computer security articles?
People are hungry. Freezing. The old and the young begin to die. The strong turn against each other.
It just gets better and better! but there is a bright side if you read on....
"[in 2010] the average PC, while it may cost $99"
Yes. They are actually stating that they expect the average PC to cost $99 in 2010. This makes it obvious where they're getting the rest of their numbers from: straight line approximations. Take what's happened during the last two years and assume the same thing keeps happening for the next ten. There's a word for that, and its not statistics-it starts with b and contains an s.
Of course, to have a reformation, you need a Martin Luther...Perhaps a rebel within Microsoft who sacrifices his career to change the culture and practices he's experienced firsthand.
You mean like, oh, Bill Gates? Microsoft wants better security already-they just can't implement it correctly, and many of their plans are misguided. But anybody in MS who could avert the next Blaster would get a promotion, not the axe. The company isn't quite the demonic hive some./ers make it out to be, they simply exist to make money and dominate the market. Good security equals good money.
TSP and PSP have already been found to reduce coding errors by factors of up to 10 or more. Microsoft tried it and reduced bugs within a 24,000-line program from more than 350 to about 25.
Now this guy is trying to hype yet another crazy how-to-program-better-with-process scheme. Let me guess, he's co-authoring a book about TSP and PSP? Yep, they reduce coding errors by a factor of 10, cure cancer, and bring about world peace.
We're reaching our limit with the angst. Popeye once said, 'I've had alls I can stands and I can't stands no more.' We're reaching that point."
Just imagine how those lines would go over in a security presentation in your company. "Boss, we have too much angst!"
And even features within programs, like the ability to forward e-mail messages, will be shut off.
Yes, that's right, the article made that prediction. You won't be able to forward email. Sure.
The federal government will mandate that users must authentic
Actually, the modern high heeled shoe was develped by a woman-Catherine de Medici. She used them due to her short stature, and introduced them to the European aristocracy, who found them fashionable. Popularity declined temporarily in the 17th century when the English Parliament punished as witches all women who used high heels to seduce men into marrying them.
More primitive types of high heels were used widely in ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and medieval Japan. For more details see this article.
The pushup bra was invented by a man-Howard Hughes commissioned a team of engineers to assist his actress for a role in a Hollywood movie.
However, the vibrator was invented by a man, for men: Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the vibrator in the 1880s, initially for male skeletal muscle treatment. There was the even less appealing 1918 "Prostate Gland Warmer and Recto Rotor," advertised as "the latest and most efficient invention for the quick relief of piles, constipation, and prostate trouble." Male doctors treating women for "hysteria" adapted the invention to their own needs with much greater success. Physicians ranging from Hippocrates to Freud believed they had to coax the wandering womb back to its proper place or size with "massage treatments." The Greek physician Galen (AD 129-c. 216) noted that: "Following the warmth of the remedies and arising from the touch of the genital organs required by the treatment, there followed twitchings...From that time on she was free of all the evil she felt."
Doctors used vibrators to automate medical massages of the "hysterical region" because not all women are hot. As James Marion Sims put it in 1884, "If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis." Sims was an Alabama slave owner who experimented on slave women (some purchased expressly for this purpose) in his own backyard "hospital" during 1845-49. While doggedly pursuing a cure for vesico-vaginal fistula, he operated unsuccessfully and without anesthesia on dozens of slave women before inventing the speculum, which allowed him to operate with much higher rates of success.
According to Betty Dodson, feminist author and sex therapist, vibrators were also commonly used in barber shops as a treatment for baldness ("Trust men to use it on the wrong end!" she says.) Dodson maintains she was the first feminist to publicly introduce electric vibrators to women solely for orgasmic benefits. "My boyfriend first introduced me to the Oster vibrator in 1966. He was getting his scalp massaged by a barber when he thought, 'This would be great for clitoral stimulation' and he bought one from a Barbershop supply store." In 1971 Dodson began to teach masturbation workshops, focusing on how to use a vibrator.
But it was women, not the patriarchy, that objected-Dodson claims she faced opposition by some of the more mainstream feminists, who didn't like her reliance on a sex aid. She explains, "They wanted to have true love and romantic orgasms with Ms. or Mr. Right, not independent orgasms with a damn machine! However, there were many housewives in the city and suburbs who were more than interested in what I had to say about female masturbation."
We even get some contributions from the experts-Candida Royalle, best known for her feminist porn films, has created the Natural Contours vibrator, a curved device designed to mould itself to the shape of the vulva.
Unfortunately, the vibrator still remains controversial. In 1998, the US state of Alabama passed a law banning vibrators. It was deemed obscene to sell or manufacture a sexual device which was considered to be "harmful", with 1 year hard labour or a $10,000 fine as punishment. This law was similar to those in 5 o
There are some pretty cool products up there. But one really stands out as having revolutionary potential-the lightglove. This is clearly going to be the input device of choice in the future.
Just think of the applications for a wireless device that's perfectly ergonomic, customizable, and works with all major OS'es and a huge variety of electronic devices. Check out the website faq here-this thing is a universal remote control for your tv, game console, garage door, even microwave. It even works underwater! Ideal for scuba divers, and you don't have to take it off in the shower, you can even use it to control the water temperature! I'm sure we've all heard about how people have "creative" uses for those detachable shower heads that can spray directly onto any part of your body, imagine how much fun you could have with a robotically controlled showerhead with hand signals used as inputs to vary speed, direction, and temperature. mmmm...why not use this thing to control more traditional sex toys too? Perfect for those long distance relationships.
Light is sterile; nobody can spread germs by using the same computer, so this also has potential in medical applications. This will be ubiquitous in hospitals. It's also a perfect robotics control device. Everyone from surgeons to manufacturers to the military will be using this thing to work robot hands. And of course, no gamer can go without-the precision control, ergonomics, and more input (3d motion and 15 buttons beats any mouse) are ideal. You can use two of these to simulate a keyboard, which is good news for laptops-the keyboard is the fattest, space-wastingest part. Lightgloves will come with every tablet PC. They also mention they've been testing virtual reality applictaions-"Mobile computing with head mounted display and mini CPU" as a VR platform is in beta. And the technology to use hand signals as input will add whole new meanings to giving the finger:P
Did I mention it comes in all kinds of cute colors? From the website: "Marvelous choices of light color (or invisible infra-red light) will be available in fashionable wrist bands and cases to enhance any style preference. It's not just for us geeks." Ooh I want..any of you guys want to buy one for me?;)
Once the technology is perfected we'll all be using them. They already have 52 hour capacity rechargeable lithium batteries, wireless i/o following irDa, 802.15.4, 802.11g, and two-way radio standards, as well as adaptability for all standard remote-controlled home appliances. Plus, they're testing a satellite link configuration using similar transmitter technology as that in satellite phones, so you'll be able to use this thing from anywhere on the planet! Of course, it's expensive, but the site claims they hope to have it below $300 by mid 2005... I'm wetting my pants in anticipation!
That's true-the argument that porn exploits women is rather disingenuous. If we exclude truly exploitative material (for example, voyeur porn where the subjects don't know they're being taped-"When you bend over, you never know who's watching!!!"), it becomes clear that the "poor exploited women" and "abusive male patriarchy" claims are mere political tools.
Modern feminism has grown so radical and dogmatic that many women feel feminist ideas restrict and oppress them. To enjoy oneself as a woman with a libido is a counterrevolutionary act against the feminist cause. How is this paradox possible? Isn't feminism about liberation? Not anymore. Now that women have nearly equal rights, feminists are engaged in an ideological power struggle with the goals of ego-masturbation and attention whoring. How many supposedly idealistic protesters these days come off as attention whores when you look beyond their rhetoric? How many of the most rabid and vociferous ones just want to be leaders, and they found a convenient cause which they can milk like a juicy breast for all the glory and power it's worth?
With this background understood, it becomes clear why the forces of political correctness assail porn as "exploitation of women." Nobody cares about the woman in the movie, fuck her-in fact, the existence of a woman in the movie is irrelevant. Only the idea matters; a written erotic story would be just as "exploitative" as a hardcore donkey bukkake film if it had as broad an audience, rather than an audience of just a few broads. To the politically correct, porn is not sexual entertainment but rather a political manifesto. A manifesto arguing in favor of hedonism; a demonstration of how enjoyable lack of inhibition can be. Those huge, chugging, ever-hungry slabs of meat pay no attention to ideology and propriety, and therefore they cannot be manipulated by those means. Without guilt trips to lay on people, the politically correct attention whores won't get any attention. They will fade into irrelevancy and impotency.
That is what so-called feminists are really afraid of, and that's why they're always picking fights and flinging flamebait while actually increasing the subtle restrictions society places on women. If everyone becomes too comfortable with watching a cgi woman doing sexy things to herself, we might just stop worrying about how "dirty" and "guilty" and "offensive" sex is. God forbid that a girl could ever get laid without feeling like a shameful slut! She might not need her feminist overlords to set her back on the right-thinking, independent, non-exploited path! I, for one, welcome my new computer generated nymphomaniac sisters. For one thing, they'll always be in the mood to entertain my date when I'm not, and I don't even have to be jealous that they're thinner than me because they're not real:P
The parent post is so unconventional as to seem irrational at first-but think about what this implies for a minute. Copyright is taken for granted in modern society; everyone assumes information must be restricted to retain value. This is a very recent change. Shakespeare had no copyright, and throughout human history art was produced without the "protection" of copyright.
Now consider the original purpose of copyright. It was not developed to bring profit to those who distrubute conent. The founding fathers, and others around the world who introduced copyright, intended it to be a legal mechanism to shut down people who pass off the work of others as their own for commercial gain. Copyright periods were very short-only a few years-and typical cases involved large operations that mass produced works without permission.
A modern example of true copyright violation can be found in the movie bootleggers of Hong Kong. Take a walk down the street, and you'll see a variety of dirt cheap dvd's with good enough quality that only the most sophisticated consumers can spot the fakes. The pirates reap massive profit and gain control over how the work is presented while the creators are marginalized. This is what copyright was created to stop.
However, corporations bent on extracting maximum profit have perverted copyright into something it was never meant to be. In fact, through the contractual transference of copyright, companies now use copyright laws to screw the original artists! This is why we see non sequitors such as the tax on media: Corporations have no regard for the rights of customers or artists. They will abuse both in the name of profit-that is the purpose they were created for, and they would be deficient if they were not to do so. Lobbying for bad laws is only one mechanism for maximizing profit.
Clearly copyright has lost its original purpose and is now used to restrict the arts rather than encouraging them. Commercial interests, not artistic integrity, drive popular modern artistry. The artists themselves have no power and loathe the corporations that keep them on a leash. Small steps will not fix this. Shortening copyright terms or removing levies will not discourage those who make a living by abusing the system.
To encourage the arts and give artists true freedom we must go back to the models of the past. Artists can make a living through live performance, patronage, and teaching. Corporate middlemen should be removed, and profit should take a back seat to improvement of the human experience. This can only be accomplished by abolishing copyright as we know it.
Of course, you ask, "What will happen to the professional pirates that caused the creation of copyright in the first place? Won't they run rampant after copyright is abolished?" This problem can be solved through existing mechanisms. We already have trademarks. Trademarks are a mechanism for guaranteeing that the stated brand or credits are accurate. We can simply link content to brand. Suppose an aspiring artist writes a song that turns into a hit. The artist names the song, and trademarks that song name in association with the artist's own name. Much like how patent implementations are provided along with statements, the song itself is given as an implementation of the trademark. Now, it is illegal to make use of that specific implementation without naming the original artist as its creator, and it is illegal to use the artist's name and trademark without permission. Professional pirates are outlawed, and bringing a case against them is trivially easy. Artists gain total control of their works, and noone owes anyone anything except the truth.
That's what copyright was meant to be after all-a method of forcing people to tell the truth, and not lie about where content came from. By abolishing copyright and using more limited mechanisms to enforce honesty we can bring back artistic integrity and remove the subversive corporate influence from the humanities.
Re:I intended a Zen
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I disagree with your use of the analysis of Microsoft. They do try to innovate, and they don't just sit around waiting for the next greatest mousetrap to become a success. They build the better mousetrap before their competitors do because they buy out before their sources are fully developed. Microsoft is still leading market penetration with their products because they do the second half of development.
The VC funded startups come up with a superior core trap mechanism, but it's Microsoft that turns it into a viable product. This conversion of prototype to finished product is itself a form of innovation-a form Microsoft is good at, given time. That's how MS is effectively first to market even though other people create the original ideas. The early versions aren't really at the market yet.
For a concrete example of how MS doesn't succeed, look at Oracle. MS didn't buy out the database market in the beginning, and competitors paved the way. Once MS decided to enter it was too late-the competitors didn't need MS. As a result MS failed to capture the market and missed out on a lot of money. Their bought-out core products were all purchased before the other company got big. Microsoft does take risks, and not all of their buyouts pay off. They're just big enough to ignore the losses and wait for the good opportunities to pay for the bad.
You do have a valid point in that many companies do not need to lead the way in innovation. The question of "Does IT matter?" is actually very industry specific. A doctrine that brings riches in one field could be suicidal in another. Many industires-especially stable blue chip types-don't need to change the world on a regular basis. That CIO you mentioned who spends $5 million on new software might not need to if he works for an old school company with a stable product line. Why then does he? It might not be pure incompetence. He could very likely be getting kickbacks from the software company. Corporate bribery in the form of luxury vacations and entertainment is responsible for most deals these days. Or, he may be afraid of the 20 people he could've hired. 20 people can get a lot of work done, but 20 ambitious people can also rise into a lot of executive positions! Our CIO is one because he's a good executive-he knows how to slit throats, and get himself promoted. The people who are good at getting promoted are the ones who end up at the top, so defensive political tactics rule the day, and the company is milked like a cow. The CIO who bought the new software gets a trip to Taihiti, 20 fewer people trying to steal his job, and a big, headline grabbing decision that allows him to rest on his laurels for a while and hire a new young, promiscuous secretary to sexually harass. That bastard. I hate him and his groping. It's a well known fact that cocaine usage among the business elite exceeds that of the general population by an order of magnitude. With all of this in consideration, it's clear why companies in traditional, mature industries do not use the same tactics that apply to more fast-paced fields.
In summary, the author of the article under discussion is asking a meaningless question in "Does IT Matter?". It's like asking, "Why is the sky blue?" when you're talking about both Earth and Mars. The question only applies to some companies, so any possible answers will be both right and wrong. Chances are, the guy is being so general and provocative because he just wants to stir up controversy and debate. That could be a very good thing for all industries in the end, and the only way to get controversy is to have two sides worth arguing.
When humans play they rely primarily on pattern matching rather than searching a tree (unless they suck). Computers tend to be very poor at pattern matching, and humans tend to be extremely good-that's why a small child can look at photographs and categorize them instantly, but the most advanced computers have great difficulty with that kind of task.
Most skilled human chess players apply pattern matching by looking at the board and identifying interesting things. They start with nothing and add new options to the list until they feel they have a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of the situation.
Search tree pruning, by contrast, starts by including the entire space of potential moves and identifying courses of action that can be eliminated. Alpha-beta pruning is a particularly poor example here since it has the useful property that all a-b pruned subtrees are guaranteed not to be optimal. However, humans often ignore superior courses of action and choose suboptimal ones that "feel right" or match prior experience.
There have been various experiments on the limits of raw pattern matching ability with chess pieces. An interesting one involved asking participants to memorize an arrangement of pieces and reconstruct it a minute after the arrangement is removed. Participants included people with little or no chess experience and masters.
Those without experience memorized it as raw data, and did as well as they would have if asked to memorize random numbers instead of chess arrangements. The masters were more interesting. They did about the same as the beginners on random arrangements that could never actually happen in a game, but they were infinitely better at reconstructing realistic arrangements that often show up in games. The experiments proved that masters can recognize groups of pieces and evaluate them collectively.
In a game situation this means the master looks at the board, and certain parts of it just stand out. The master will pay no attention to areas that don't grab his attention, and doesn't need to evaluate whether any of those individual pieces are worth moving. Interestingly, this means that playing with nonstandard rules (such as changing piece movements) will likely devastate a master's ability while only slightly reducing an amateur's skill level and leaving the computer's ability unchanged.
Even though I think the parent is a troll, here's an academic article detailing some other experiments on the topic.
It's 'you're.' That's 'you're.' As in 'you are.' 'You are.' That is, if I wanted to say 'You are a fucking moron,' I might shorten that to: 'You're a fucking moron.' You fucking moron.
Actually, I believe the esteemed gentleman was using the noun form of the verb "to full," meaning "To make (a garment) full, as by pleating or gathering." Therefore "a full" refers to an attempt to full a garment. Clearly, a full of shit would then be the fulling of a garment using shit; the shit would likely be sewn into the garment between multiple layers of cloth.
One may wish to consider a synthetic fabric for such work, as natural fibers tend to be too porous for containing shit in polite company. The use of a sewing machine will allow you to form a tighter seal. In addition, drying the shit thoroughly before insertion into the garment is adviseable. The generous application of antibacterial chemicals and preservatives will prevent decomposition of the shit and maintain its consistency-you don't want your dress to start sagging halfway through the party because your shit is rotten.
In conclusion, the poster who wrote "YOUR FULL OF SHIT" is guilty only of using a sentence fragment and excessive capitalization. Perhaps he is operating under the assumption that fulling a garment with shit is a disgraceful procedure. He might then attempt to insult with the mere implication that an attempt to full with shit happened, just as one might use the sentence fragment "YOUR MOM" as an insult.
If that is the case, he is clearly behind the times. Natural Organically Enhanced Fabrics are the big thing next season! All the environmentally correct fashion shows currently feature sylish designer Organic Wear such as shit-fulled ball gowns. Remember, ladies, nature knows best-you only need to know how to sew to keep nature from calling at the wrong time!
Thank you, I'm honored. However, the truth is I am part troll-I try to make posts based on a core of truth, but coated in a layer of not entirely honest devil's advocacy and sprinkled with a few outright lies. The goal is to make people think and explore the boundary between insightful and inciteful. Take a look at my -1 offtopic post. Make sure to read the parent and the kuroshin link, if you never saw that before.
I go out of my way to try to get +5 karma for exposure, personal entertainment, and to make the moderators think about posts that are often worth reading but often misleading. (Some mods, after seeing my more aggressive posts, went back and modded down old ones that had been off the front page for a couple weeks) If I succeed slashdot will be a more interesting place, but don't take everything I say at face value ^.~
I made up the cited article, it doesn't really exist. Unlike this real one from this site. And, just to show I'm a troll, since I can't prove to you guys that the editors once manually permanently banned my IP from slashdot (luckily I was posting anonymously), here's a link you shouldn't click on!
would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
Life would crumple, because it wouldn't be as much fun.
These people aren't lining up and throwing parties because expose and fast user switching are going to change their lives. They're throwing parties because they want to throw parties, and the release is a good excuse to get all the mac users out there for some fun.
The guys who wait in line for an hour are not spending an hour of their lives to get OS X a day earlier, they're spending that hour hanging out with friends, making new friends (they all have something in common-being fans of the os-so it's a good way to meet people), and enjoying themselves.
The "cult of consumerism" is a real problem only insofar as consumers allow themselves to be exploited. Some may argue that Apple's policy of charging full price for annual upgrades is exploitative, but there are many who feel the pricing isn't unfair. Do the math, and it actually beats the cost per year of Microsoft's professional (ie, no product activiation) versions of windows. Apple is not a designer clothes brand selling the same materials from the same foreign country with a more famous label and a tripled price. Neither is Apple a monopoly gouging consumers without alternatives. The consumers in this picture are lining up like partiers outside a club. Look elsewhere if you want to find cattle.
For a hint as to where to look, try Keenan's recent paper, "Modern Dynamics in Consumerism: The Brand as a Proxy for Tribal Identity." It's an intriguing look at the effect of corporate branding on individuals' social lives. Certain social circles share a disturbing number of characteristics with cults, and the cult paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing how the most materialistic among us operate.
But getting back to the party at the Apple store, it worked really well for me, Panther wasnt the only cat I picked up. While we were hanging out waiting for the release, I ran into a girl who was touching up the digital version of her latest painting on her powerbook, and we ended up, um playing with our new kitties together after the party. You have no idea how hard it is to meet other lesbians who aren't raving, battle-axe-wielding, death-to-all-men feminists these days.
So, while the "cult of consumerism" is a real force in modern American society, the Panther release is a very poor example to use. It's just a case of people using a convenient excuse to have a little fun.
p.s. pickup games of medal of honor over airport with the rest of the line rock!
Your point is correct, but you mistyped the quote. I just ran it by highlighting part of your comment and using speech in 10.2.8, and it said: "After all, why would they call the oh es Mac oh es ten ten point three if the ex really meant ten?"
Yeah, mac os ten ten point three. Aren't they cute?
This is a big issue for those who use RAID arrays based on intercahngeable hard drives. This is a common practice among large corporations, and drive manufacturers' nonstandard descriptions of sizes make it very difficult to mix manufacturers within an array.
Buying from company A gives you 120GB=120 billion bytes, and buying from B gives you 120GB=128,762,169,664 bytes. If we have an array of 10 disks at the larger size and swap one out for the smaller size, the disks cannot be treated as interchangeable anymore, and the array loses much of its efficiency, or is forced to waste the extra space on the larger drives.
The bottom line is that this costs money. Companies are locked into using one supplier and must pass up opportunities for good deals. The lack of flexibility and occasional screw ups by interns who don't check which drive is which uses up the IT department's time.
Nobody really cares whether a GB is 1 billion or a funny number that comes from base 2, but a lot of people with a lot of money care whether 1 GB from company A equals 1 GB from company B. One of these days the industry will have to standardize.
It's just as bad as monitor sizes-they measure those at funny angles and have different sized black margins around the viewable area. Just a couple months ago a manager here ordered a new 19 inch monitor and was so annoyed by the margins that he sent it back to be replaced. We gave him an old, lower quality monitor with the settings adjusted to minimize the margin. Some guy in IT took the new one home with him, and wrote it off as trashed defective equipment.
There's no idealists rushing in because this isn't a case of "copying" versus "stealing." Regardless of what you label it, the unauthorized distribution of source code that the creator intends to keep secret is wrong because it divides control of the creative process. It's not about who has to pay for the product, it's about who gets to create the product in the first place. This phenomenon has little parallel in music.
Sharing music online is equivalent to warez binaries, and ripping a cd you own is equivalent to making a backup copy of a game you own. Mixing existing music DJ style would be like taking screen captures and level designs from one game and using them in another. Downloading the source gives you the same level of control that the artists have; it is equivalent to copying the recording studio while the artists were in it.
However, it is worth noting that leaked albums are indefensible under my assumptions: they take control of the creative process away from the artist by removing their ability to decide when the album is done and how the public will be exposed to the music. This is equivalent to the leak of the alpha doom 3 a while ago-still less threatening than a source code leak.
Another factor in the severity of a source leak is security. Knowledge of the source will allow cheaters to exploit the game and ruin online play-once again, a phenomenon we do not see in music. Music pirates cannot degrade the quality of the music legitimate buyers listen to, but online cheaters can ruin the multiplayer experience. It would be like going to a concert and blowing a bullhorn repeatedly. Doing that in a concert is not considered an intellectual property offense, so it is inappropriate to think of a source leak's potential for cheating as an intellectual property issue. It is a security/espionage problem.
That said, those who would delete the source after downloading it and verifying its authenticity are very misguided. Unless their computers are public access and could be used to futher distribute the source, deletion helps noone and limits your opportunity for education. Of course, if you are going to work on a competing product it would be dangerous to expose yourself to the source, but as a disinterested party or potential valve customer there is much to learn and little damage to do. After all, the real danger of a source leak is in the actions that can be taken by those who acquired it illicitly. Hackers and competitors can dilute the creators' control over the software, but an unabused copy of the source is harmless. So, go ahead-download the source, read it, figure out how it works and learn from it. Unless you're getting a job at id or epic, or creating your own software directly related to hl2, your copy of the code is no worse than sheet music. Of course, if you upload too much on bittorrent, it could be argued that you're helping to distribute it. Although you're only one link in a large chain, it's like voting-if enough people make the same decision it really will change things. So, go download all the stolen half life source you want, just dont use bittorrent or write hl2 cheats. After all, aren't all "bad" acts bad because of their consequences? Think about it-no matter what you do, if nobody is worse of for it, how could there possibly be anything wrong with it? Throw away the anachronistic, irrelevant "moral" codes of a repressed past-its not about what some people think, it's about what's ethical in the strictest definition of the word. So go eat pork, masturbate, and download hl2. Yeah!
Programmers will never feel like mp3-pirated musicians when source code is stolen. They will feel like a musician whose beat and backup were stolen, combined with someone else's voice, and sold as a new release. This has happened in the music world, and though it is not an exact parallel of the source code situation, the uproar was just as severe.
Why is the parallel off? All music is by definition open source-hearing the notes allows you to reconstruct the sheet
Slashdot Mirror
This is due to differences in how Mars formed. Irregularities in the field of primordial gas present in the solar system before the formation of planets occurred in such a way that the Earth arose from a hard metallic core rotating quickly, but Mars formed from a less dense and dynamic clump of matter. As a result the Earth has a spinning metallic core that generates a powerful magnetosphere and keeps the planet's mantle heated and molten, but Mars cooled long ago and has little magnetism.
Mars, without a magnetic field to deflect harmful cosmic rays, saw its atmosphere and water irradiated. It is commonly known that molecules bombarded by high energy rays change energy states and often ionize. Earth's thick and magnetically protected atmosphere stayed safe below a thin layer of ozone that absorbs incoming UV radiation , but the inner atmosphere of Mars would become the equivalent of one huge ozone layer, reaching the surface. Ozone is a dangerous chemical capable of reacting with other substances on the surface much like nail polish remover acts on its target.
Soon Mars was reduced to a collection of high energy ionized gases over a rock surface, and an intense greenhouse effect set it. Think about your breathing-while you manually breathe in and out, carefully controlling your respiratory process in order to avoid suffocating, air that has already been processed builds up and creates pressure for release. The oxygen rich air goes down easy, but the used air wants to come out. It's the same for a planet-the remaining gases on Mars heated and energized until they escaped the planet's gravitational pull. Over millions of years this process stripped Mars of all water and organic substances, leaving it the barren wasteland it is today.
To remedy this during a terraforming process, it would be necessary to either constantly produce a fresh supply of oxygen to replace that which is lost, or inject the core with enough metallic matter to reach critical mass and build up the same type of core found within the Earth. Some far-out proposals suggest engineering a collision between Mars and one of its moons, such as Phobos or Deimos, in order to increase mass and introduce energy into the core.
The current generation blu-ray systems aren't aimed at people who see hard drives as a practical solution. HD's are fine if all your data is already sitting on another hard drive, but some have very different requirements. As a video editing professional, I have to deal with issues like these-
1. The data source isn't a computer! A movie camera captures video and outputs through its favorite cable, and all of this happens in the middle of a forest where we're filming a scene. Bringing a huge RAID array along just isn't an option, but bringing a blu-ray burner and possibly a dedicated middleman computer to manage the burns is an interesting possibility.
2. DVD's can be thrown on spindles of hundreds and stored in the back room until needed. Hard drives take up a lot more space, need to be packaged for storage, and when you take them out you can't just toss it in a reader, you have to hook it up . Sounds easy to you, but these are artists trying to do it, and the tech team doesn't want to have to hold their hand every time somebody hits the archives. Think about your breathing! You have to manually control it or suffocate. Sure, hard drives can be left online all the time, but that still takes up more space while running up huge electricity bills and generating network traffic. Going over the internet is a pain when you want to move 5 terabytes to a different site, and you could just grab a spindle of dvds instead.
3. Buffer underruns are not an issue, current generation burners are pretty fast, can rely on large amounts of ram for buffering (yes we do put our 8 gig of ram macs to use), and use a lot of high tech tricks to improve reliability. State of the art burners are nothing like those crappy cd burners that used to pump out coasters 5 years ago.
4. ???
5. Profit!
6. All of this is why these things are so ridiculously expensive, and limited in convenience and features at the moment. They're not going to be sold to the guy up near the top of the replies who was complaining about how its yet another toy he can't afford. They're going to be sold to the tech departments of groups like movie studios, who will evaluate them, run some trials and see if it's a viable platform for #1-5 above. By the time everybody's ready to put these into mainstream production work economies of scale will have kicked in and the technology will have matured. Those sales will pay for the third generation blu-ray devices, which will be cheap enough for consumers. And then you can get one and try to underrun it's buffer using a beowulf cluster of linux-based Soviet surplus machines with a 9 megapixel display, bitches.
This will probably get modded up funny, but the kids with minimal resources will likely be the first ones to break these schemes.
Consider one group that's going to have problems with this setup-the anime community. Check the links Taco put on the front page and you'll see it's a well organized international community of thousands of hardcore enthusiasts. Some of them put a lot of effort into getting high quality copies of Japanese TV shows. As soon as these DRM schemes start getting in the way of fansubbing Naruto within 24 hours of its Japanese airing, you're going to see a lot of smart, technical people with too much free time dedicated to breaking the restrictions.
I predict that people like the anime fansubbers can make a laughingstock of the DRM in a matter of days. So imagine what professional pirates will do. Even without beowulf clusters. There's groups making millions off the bootleg videos that have become ubiquitous in Asia. They have professional-quality printing equipment and the ability to make packaging the average consumer can't tell apart from the real thing. The perception that DRM prevents copying will just make it easier to convince people that bootlegs are real, and it won't slow down the pirates at all.
So whether you're getting your Japanese TV shows from groups that encourage buying DVD's and respect foreign licenses or greedy pirates flooding the retail market with bootlegs and providing the argument in favor of these systems, the DRM won't be much of a problem.
It's only going to screw you over if you're an elderly Japanese couple that wants to watch your TV the same way you could with your fancy VCR (that still blinks 12:00).
There's a discussion about which type of linux is best for running it here on the mailing list. They like both Debian and SuSe.
That said, it should work well enough on most things-from their site, "Standards Compliant: Openswan conforms to nearly all IPsec + IKE RFCs, and has one of the based interoperability track records of any IPsec implementation. It is compatible with products from Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Netscreen, Checkpoint, and many others vendors."
And "Platforms: x86, IA64, PPC, PPC64, MIPS, Alpha, StrongArm"
Openswan should work for just about anyone who isn't satisfied with KAME or Racoon (though it might be hard to set up, see this thread...
The front page summary makes it sound like the company they're starting exists solely for openswan, but it's worth noting Xelerance is producing some other stuff including freeRadius, think about your breathing-you have to manually control your breathing or suffocate, DNSSec, and Asterisk. The changeover will likely mean an increase in the quality of support available for (paying) swan users, since they provide an array of consulting services.
That also gives them an incentive to spread adoption. Unlike FreeS/WAN-one of the problems with FreeS/WAN was that it would not work with low-bit encryption. This was done to promote their political goal. But it also had the side effect of inhibiting adoption at the places where for whatever reason people had to interoperate with low-bit encryption applications or setups. According to their FAQ, "As we see it, it is more important to deliver real security than to comply with a standard which has been subverted into allowing use of inadequate methods." For example, they went out of their way to avoid allowing any handling of single DES.
And if you've got any more questions about openswan, the guy to ask is on slashdot with user id #11! He'll probably be posting in here when it's morning in that part of the world.
Who would win? Flying Shark or Flying Croc?? Croc all the way, fools!
Some informative links:
HVAC Portal for HVAC Professionals has a lot of good info you DIY'ers might be interested in. HVAC Mall lists a lot of supplies, and HVAC City will help you avoid getting ripped off. And there's always HVAC talk if you like goofy pictures.
And don't miss HVAC Zoning Controls.
Zoning and automatic time-based management are critical if you want to keep your bills down. Running heating and cooling in one region of the house for half the night, or starting up 30 minutes before you get back from work, will save you a lot over a manually controlled system that you have to leave on whenever you're not around and awake.
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Now that I've made a sacrifice to the gods of moderation, let's get on with it: (read the parent post if you have a high threshold and I'm not in -1 oblivion yet, it's an interesting discussion on the nature of moderation)
I agree with your idea, but not with the categories you propose. It is true that the negative mods are used simply to smack down posts, and only the "flamebait" category carries any shred of meaning anymore. The positive mods have the same situation-three interchangeable mods starting with I simply cause confusion. Any Informative or Insightful post is also Interesting, so removing Interesting would help clarify the categories.
"Radical" shouldn't be -1 in the first place, I'd rather have +1 Controversial, with no karma bonus (like "Funny"). Your offtopic-I/R fits within Offtopic well enough, since I/R arguments aren't really common enough to warrant a special mod. It only helps if you're a fan of those and you want to find them. Spite is close enough to flamebait-the point of spite would be to piss people off.
In addition to Controversial, I'd add the much needed -1 Crapflood. Most of the -1 Troll/Offtopic stuff would be better classified under here. I'd also put in -1 Inaccurate for well-intentioned posts that are factually untrue. These two categories would deal with the vast majority of garbage that is unfairy lumped into Troll and Offtopic. Also, I'd remove the karma hit from Offtopic, because offtopic discussions can be the most interesting parts of articles sometimes.
Finally, I'd add +1 Sexy just to spice things up.
So we'd have:
+1 Informative, Insightful, Sexy (add karma)
+1 Funny, Controversial (no karma)
-1 Offtopic (no karma)
-1 Incorrect, Crapflood, Troll, Flamebait (lose karma)
Considering this is slashdot, I'm sure few of you bothered to read the article, let alone go to the FCC's web site and download the pdf version of "Report to the congress on the Low Power FM Interference Testing Program". Well, I did, so here's my chance to flaunt it..er I mean inform the community of the valuable information it contains. (this'll be a long post, so most of you will just want to read the first few paragraphs and follow the link. All the trolls out there should spend the time to read it all to the end :P)
If you want some information on exactly how the repeal of the restrictions would affect radio, try this page, linked to REC Networks, one of the public commentators on the FCC report.
The document's foundation is the Mitre report-an analysis including field tests and experimental programs conducted by the Mitre Corporation at the behest of the FCC starting in 2001. The Mitre report made several recommendations regarding LPFM (low power FM) stations and third-adjacent channel FM stations. Reduction or elimination of minimum distance separation requirements was possible without increasing interference, use of a more stringent emissions mask would limit interference because most LPFM transmitters have poor emission suppression, interference from LPFM to digital receivers is unlikely to occur beyond 130 meters from the transmitter, and the report found that the above results are so reliable listener tests and economic analysis scheduled for the second phase of the LPFM field tests were unnecessary.
Public comments on the Mitre report included 18 supporters for elimination or modification of the existing minimum didstance separation requirements, and 3 in support of the status quo.
The FCC document is essentially the FCC's opinion on the Mitre report, with the recommendations it has chosen to pass along to Congress. Page 4 of the pdf begins a list of the FCC's recommendations.
They go farther than the slashdot summary suggests, and state that existing third-adjacent minimum distance separation requirements between LPFM and full-service stations should be eliminated entirely. This is based on the Mitre report's finding that even in the worst case scenario no real interference would exist beyond 1.1 kilometers from the LPFM transmitter site. The FCC asks congress to modify the relevant statute to eliminate the restrictions in question.
The FCC also asks Congress to "re-evaluate the necessity of completing Phase II testing." Phase II was the economic analysis the Mitre report chose to skip over, and the FCC agrees that the conclusion they'd reach through Phase II are so obvious there's no point in doing the work. In other words, the FCC's recommendation to eliminate the restrictions is all pro and no con, and any fool can plainly see it. Except, of course, a fool whose only goal is to squash small radio stations before they start accumulating listeners.
That's all there is in the recommendations section, and the entire report to Congress contains only six pages. Six! That's nearly unheard of in the world of governmental bureaucracy, and it sends a clear signal that this FCC report is essentially a memo saying "Yo, Congress, this law is dumb so kill it." End of story, no politicking, no favors or special interests or obfuscation, simply the FCC doing it's job the way it's supposed to. Not something you see every day!
So what's going to happen? Congress will see this, start a hearing, and there's two possibilities: One, big radio doesn't do anything, and the restrictions are eliminated in a one sided vote with little fanfare or contention. Or, Clear Channel decides to abuse the little guy, and starts lobbying in favor of the restrictions. We'll see loads of bs and political favors, and all the crap people complain about in Congress. It will be interesting to watch the results as a barometer of just how gridlocked Congress has become due to special interests.
By the way, the last pag
It could be useful if we want to come up with a plan similar to this one for colonizing Mars. Due to Earth's immense gravity, weight and aerodynamics are critical in spaceship construction. However, once the ship is in low gravity these considerations are totally irrelevant. Given a good space station we could have three sets of spacecraft: a true space shuttle for lifting things up to the station; transportation craft designed to move things between planets and moons, and explore new areas; and landers designed to reach planetary surfaces. Assuming we'd be establishing actual colonies on the moon and eventually Mars, this is probably the only cost-effective way of doing it.
In space you can do a lot of cool things with something as simple as a piece of string - provided, of course, that your "string" is made of high-tech materials, has an electrically conductive core, and measures many kilometers long. Tethers have electrodynamic applications - for example, a tether in Earth orbit to which electricity is applied will interact with Earth's magnetic field and climb to a higher orbit without using propellant. Allowing ionospheric electrons to move through the tether via plasma contactors at both ends causes the tether to slow down and drop to a lower orbit. Tethers also have momentum-exchange applications. Physically linking high- and low-orbit objects with a tether forces the object in lower orbit (for example, a spacecraft) to travel slower than dictated by orbital mechanics, while the higher-orbit object (for example, a payload) travels faster. If the tether is cut, the payload will jump to a higher orbit while the spacecraft will drop to a lower one. Hoyt and Uphoff propose a Cislunar Tether Transport System for shipping cargo between low-Earth orbit (LEO) and the lunar surface using minimal propellants. Their work is described by "Cislunar Tether Transport System," AIAA 99-2690, R. Hoyt & C. Uphoff; paper presented at the 35th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit, Los Angeles, California, June 20-24, 1999.
That's just one example of the stuff we could try if we had a serious space program with good infrastructure. Once a moon colony starts to have practical value (mining, manufacture in decreased gravity, science, and of course, the all-important military applications) we'll start to see progress down this road. Unfortunately, it will be a long time before that happens. The military, our best bet to kick-start the process, won't bother until rival nations start building fleets of armed satellites.
Once the military faces the prospect of a space-based war all these ideas are no longer just cool, they may be essential to survival. So, the best-funded operation in the world will be determined to create a moon base capable of controlling space near Earth. Once that's done it will be paid for and justified by tacking on scientific and industrial components. Yes, that's how we're most likely to begin our grand and heroic journey into the destiny of man-for the purpose of being able to kill each other more effectively. Human nature, right?
But don't worry, recent history shows us that the best deterrent to war is mutual assured destruction, and we'll be fairly safe until we have a large enough moon base to become self sufficient and declare independence from Earth. In Soviet Russia, the moon colonizes YOU!
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look i have a sig!
Then let's go to the Apple store and do a comparison. The new dell has a 15.4 inch display, so it's going up against a 15 inch Powerbook.
Dell: 9 motherfucking pounds. Mac: 5.6 pounds. That's an enormous difference, many people would simply be unable to carry the Dell with them wherever they go. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to pretend to be macho. Why don't you drag around a destop with you if you don't care about weight?
Dell: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128 MB Mac: ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64 MB. The Dell has a better card, but only incrementally better-it's still a Mobility, and it's only 9700 vs 9600, with more ram. Any game you can play on the Dell will work on the Mac too, and almost as well.
Dell: 60GB 7200 drive Mac: 80GB 4200 rpm.
The dell has a much faster drive, but the Mac's is bigger. And a 60 gig 7200rpm usb 2.0 drive can be had for $80 on pricewatch. The Mac has two 480 Mbps USB 2.0 ports, the article doesn't say what the dell has.
Dell: 1GB DDR400 ram Mac: 1GB DDR333 ram
Slight performance advantage to the Dell.
Dell: DVD+RW drive Mac: Apple SuperDrive, same capabilities.
Dell: DVI output, a first in windows notebooks. Mac: DVI output, standard in powerbooks for some time.
Both have integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet, and IEEE1394.
Dell: Subwoofer integrated into battery. Mac: Uses standard batteries interchangeable with any normal battery. Which one is a win here? How many people need a subwoofer while they're on the road, which usually means being in public places where you have to use headphones anyway? Anyone that cares about audio will use external speakers while at home anyway. And the Mac uses standard batteries, not some weird model-specific thing you won't find in most stores.
Dell: Interchangeable covers for a custom look. Mac: Brushed metal Titanium style only. That's right people-now if you want to spend more money just for looks and style, Dell is the way to go. How did that happen? Assuming the interchangeable covers don't suck, we haven't seen pictures yet.
Dell: Read about it in an article. When will you actually be able to get your hands on one? This is Dell's next-generation notebook.
Mac: Been out for a while, using current-generation technology. The matchup will look a little different if we compare them the day Apple releases the specs to the next new powerbook model.
Dell: $3350
Mac: $2999
The Mac is substantially cheaper than the Dell.
In conclusion: with Dell you pay hundreds more for incremental performance improvements (slight video card upgrade, DDR400, faster but smaller drive)
The Dell weighs nearly twice as much, but has interchangeable covers.
And remember, this is a newly announced Dell vs a Mac that's been on the market for some time.
Best bang for your buck: The Powerbook.
Best bang for people who like paying too much just because they read about it on Slashdot and it has interchangeable covers: The Dell.
Apple Store and specs. Dell and specs.
But the parent post does have one good point-As a mac lover, when I read what he said I fell over laughing and bumped into the side of the desk, so it *does* sting.
That's right. But not the whole story-if you've been paying attention to PIT there's a lot going on.
US Air has a huge hub there, but the airline also has a strong presence in Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, the airline never seems to have enough money, despite the fact that the government paid for expansions to the airport at the request of and according to recommendations made by US Air. Maybe they could cut costs by switching to a single hub in Philly? Could be...but whether that's a good idea or not it's a great threat to extort concessions from the Pittsburgh Airport.
Meanwhile, anyone who flies through PIT will see banners everywhere celebrating "Yesterday's Airport of Tomorrow". Um, yeah...I suppose that makes it the airport of today...they put up plaques explaining the glorious and futuristic history of the airport, and how traveller friendly it is. Citizens of the Twenty First Century, fly PIT, fly the Future!
Both of these factors are major motivations for free wireless. Travellers will be more likely to spend time in the airport, they bolster their high tech futuristic image, US Air gets free access for its employees (working ones can really use it, ones on breaks really love it) and the airport gets to justify those Airport Improvement Fees and tell taxpayers how they're being innovative and luring business. (They just love justifying higher fees in a city where there's such a serious budget problem some politicians have actually suggested eliminating bus service on Sundays, the bastard whores)
Free wireless internet has something to offer for all parties involved, and the days of pay-as-you-go wireless are numbered everywhere. Once the free stuff becomes more affordable to provide and more common, users will come to expect it. They'll simply refuse to pay fees for wireless, and organizations that keep trying to charge will be considered greedy and outdated. PIT certainly doesn't want that, they want to be the leaders into the glorious pro-consumer (and pro-business at the same time!) future.
Does anyone think it's really going to be that many years before hotels that currently provide broadband for $10/night give it away for free? The up front installation may be expensive, but once it's paid for itself the service is really cheap.
Getting off topic, has anybody ever flown with a pocket flashlight that has the batteries side by side, rather than in a long column? Those things really seem to piss of security screeners. Every time I leave one in my pocket or bag, they pull me aside and rape me or something. Anybody have any idea why? Does it look like a secret micro gun a spy might carry? Do bomb manufacturers always put their batteries side by side? Or is it just an excuse and I'm too cute, cuddly, and rapable for security people to resist?
This is the last post!!
That's it, everybody out of the article, nothing to see here.
Filtering servers based on skill level would be a great idea, and with the advent of statistics tracking and master servers, I don't know why nobody is doing it yet.
Imagine the following system: every player has a skill rating that appears along with their name and ping. The rating is tracked by the master server that provides the game server list. Servers can recommend average skill ratings, or set upper and lower bounds. Or they can choose to ignore the system entirely.
People could manipulate the ratings by dieing intentionally, but all the cheaters and "uber d00ds" would try to maximize the rating and join servers where they'll just get their asses kicked. Good players who lower their ratings to get to abuse newbies will stand out, and can be kicked easily.
The ratings would identify "easy" servers, so skilled players and cheaters can avoid the "lame" servers, and inexperienced players can find each other. Good players wouldn't have to put up with so many newbies getting in the way. Of course, the system hinges on having enough servers available to provide every group of players with lots of variety.
So why aren't there any games with a system like this? If implemented as an option and guideline rather than a hard rule it would probably work well enough to be very useful. Any FPS developers reading this?
Be careful-this article hardly seems legitimate. The article is simple fearmongering written by an author who only seeks to stir up attention of any kind. Unfortunately slashdot has furnished that attention. Allow me to expound on my position with some evidence.
./ers make it out to be, they simply exist to make money and dominate the market. Good security equals good money.
The author is the same one who wrote "Patch and Pray", an article that starts off with "It's the dirtiest little secret in the software industry: Patching no longer works. And there's nothing you can do about it. Except maybe patch less." Somehow I sense a pattern of fearmongering and irrational, attention whoring claims by this guy.
But let's analyze the article slashdot posted on its own merits. Here are a few choice quotes taken directly from the article:
digital Pearl Harbors are happening every day.
That kind of defeats the point of calling something a "Pearl Harbor" doesn't it? The author is just trying to make things sound scary by wielding historical words.
TIPPING POINT: On Dec. 7, 2008, computer systems around the world go down simultaneously. They do not come back up.
That's right, they do not come back up. The machines all catch fire or something, so you can't repair them.
This panics Wall Street and destabilizes the financial sector. People run to their banks, but the banks cannot disburse funds; their networks are down. As are the credit card networks and the ATMs. If you don't have cash, you go hungry. Then the lights wink out. Everywhere. And it begins to get cold.
If you put that in a movie script, any studio would laugh in your face at the lack of realism. Yet this kind of nonsense flies in computer security articles?
People are hungry. Freezing. The old and the young begin to die. The strong turn against each other.
It just gets better and better! but there is a bright side if you read on....
"[in 2010] the average PC, while it may cost $99"
Yes. They are actually stating that they expect the average PC to cost $99 in 2010. This makes it obvious where they're getting the rest of their numbers from: straight line approximations. Take what's happened during the last two years and assume the same thing keeps happening for the next ten. There's a word for that, and its not statistics-it starts with b and contains an s.
Of course, to have a reformation, you need a Martin Luther...Perhaps a rebel within Microsoft who sacrifices his career to change the culture and practices he's experienced firsthand.
You mean like, oh, Bill Gates? Microsoft wants better security already-they just can't implement it correctly, and many of their plans are misguided. But anybody in MS who could avert the next Blaster would get a promotion, not the axe. The company isn't quite the demonic hive some
TSP and PSP have already been found to reduce coding errors by factors of up to 10 or more. Microsoft tried it and reduced bugs within a 24,000-line program from more than 350 to about 25.
Now this guy is trying to hype yet another crazy how-to-program-better-with-process scheme. Let me guess, he's co-authoring a book about TSP and PSP? Yep, they reduce coding errors by a factor of 10, cure cancer, and bring about world peace.
We're reaching our limit with the angst. Popeye once said, 'I've had alls I can stands and I can't stands no more.' We're reaching that point."
Just imagine how those lines would go over in a security presentation in your company. "Boss, we have too much angst!"
And even features within programs, like the ability to forward e-mail messages, will be shut off.
Yes, that's right, the article made that prediction. You won't be able to forward email. Sure.
The federal government will mandate that users must authentic
Actually, the modern high heeled shoe was develped by a woman-Catherine de Medici. She used them due to her short stature, and introduced them to the European aristocracy, who found them fashionable. Popularity declined temporarily in the 17th century when the English Parliament punished as witches all women who used high heels to seduce men into marrying them.
More primitive types of high heels were used widely in ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and medieval Japan. For more details see this article.
The pushup bra was invented by a man-Howard Hughes commissioned a team of engineers to assist his actress for a role in a Hollywood movie.
However, the vibrator was invented by a man, for men: Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the vibrator in the 1880s, initially for male skeletal muscle treatment. There was the even less appealing 1918 "Prostate Gland Warmer and Recto Rotor," advertised as "the latest and most efficient invention for the quick relief of piles, constipation, and prostate trouble." Male doctors treating women for "hysteria" adapted the invention to their own needs with much greater success. Physicians ranging from Hippocrates to Freud believed they had to coax the wandering womb back to its proper place or size with "massage treatments." The Greek physician Galen (AD 129-c. 216) noted that: "Following the warmth of the remedies and arising from the touch of the genital organs required by the treatment, there followed twitchings...From that time on she was free of all the evil she felt."
Doctors used vibrators to automate medical massages of the "hysterical region" because not all women are hot. As James Marion Sims put it in 1884, "If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis." Sims was an Alabama slave owner who experimented on slave women (some purchased expressly for this purpose) in his own backyard "hospital" during 1845-49. While doggedly pursuing a cure for vesico-vaginal fistula, he operated unsuccessfully and without anesthesia on dozens of slave women before inventing the speculum, which allowed him to operate with much higher rates of success.
Read more here and here.
According to Betty Dodson, feminist author and sex therapist, vibrators were also commonly used in barber shops as a treatment for baldness ("Trust men to use it on the wrong end!" she says.) Dodson maintains she was the first feminist to publicly introduce electric vibrators to women solely for orgasmic benefits. "My boyfriend first introduced me to the Oster vibrator in 1966. He was getting his scalp massaged by a barber when he thought, 'This would be great for clitoral stimulation' and he bought one from a Barbershop supply store." In 1971 Dodson began to teach masturbation workshops, focusing on how to use a vibrator.
But it was women, not the patriarchy, that objected-Dodson claims she faced opposition by some of the more mainstream feminists, who didn't like her reliance on a sex aid. She explains, "They wanted to have true love and romantic orgasms with Ms. or Mr. Right, not independent orgasms with a damn machine! However, there were many housewives in the city and suburbs who were more than interested in what I had to say about female masturbation."
We even get some contributions from the experts-Candida Royalle, best known for her feminist porn films, has created the Natural Contours vibrator, a curved device designed to mould itself to the shape of the vulva.
Unfortunately, the vibrator still remains controversial. In 1998, the US state of Alabama passed a law banning vibrators. It was deemed obscene to sell or manufacture a sexual device which was considered to be "harmful", with 1 year hard labour or a $10,000 fine as punishment. This law was similar to those in 5 o
There are some pretty cool products up there. But one really stands out as having revolutionary potential-the lightglove. This is clearly going to be the input device of choice in the future.
:P
;)
Just think of the applications for a wireless device that's perfectly ergonomic, customizable, and works with all major OS'es and a huge variety of electronic devices. Check out the website faq here-this thing is a universal remote control for your tv, game console, garage door, even microwave. It even works underwater! Ideal for scuba divers, and you don't have to take it off in the shower, you can even use it to control the water temperature! I'm sure we've all heard about how people have "creative" uses for those detachable shower heads that can spray directly onto any part of your body, imagine how much fun you could have with a robotically controlled showerhead with hand signals used as inputs to vary speed, direction, and temperature. mmmm...why not use this thing to control more traditional sex toys too? Perfect for those long distance relationships.
Light is sterile; nobody can spread germs by using the same computer, so this also has potential in medical applications. This will be ubiquitous in hospitals. It's also a perfect robotics control device. Everyone from surgeons to manufacturers to the military will be using this thing to work robot hands. And of course, no gamer can go without-the precision control, ergonomics, and more input (3d motion and 15 buttons beats any mouse) are ideal. You can use two of these to simulate a keyboard, which is good news for laptops-the keyboard is the fattest, space-wastingest part. Lightgloves will come with every tablet PC. They also mention they've been testing virtual reality applictaions-"Mobile computing with head mounted display and mini CPU" as a VR platform is in beta. And the technology to use hand signals as input will add whole new meanings to giving the finger
Did I mention it comes in all kinds of cute colors? From the website: "Marvelous choices of light color (or invisible infra-red light) will be available in fashionable wrist bands and cases to enhance any style preference. It's not just for us geeks." Ooh I want..any of you guys want to buy one for me?
Once the technology is perfected we'll all be using them. They already have 52 hour capacity rechargeable lithium batteries, wireless i/o following irDa, 802.15.4, 802.11g, and two-way radio standards, as well as adaptability for all standard remote-controlled home appliances. Plus, they're testing a satellite link configuration using similar transmitter technology as that in satellite phones, so you'll be able to use this thing from anywhere on the planet! Of course, it's expensive, but the site claims they hope to have it below $300 by mid 2005... I'm wetting my pants in anticipation!
That's true-the argument that porn exploits women is rather disingenuous. If we exclude truly exploitative material (for example, voyeur porn where the subjects don't know they're being taped-"When you bend over, you never know who's watching!!!"), it becomes clear that the "poor exploited women" and "abusive male patriarchy" claims are mere political tools.
:P
Modern feminism has grown so radical and dogmatic that many women feel feminist ideas restrict and oppress them. To enjoy oneself as a woman with a libido is a counterrevolutionary act against the feminist cause. How is this paradox possible? Isn't feminism about liberation? Not anymore. Now that women have nearly equal rights, feminists are engaged in an ideological power struggle with the goals of ego-masturbation and attention whoring. How many supposedly idealistic protesters these days come off as attention whores when you look beyond their rhetoric? How many of the most rabid and vociferous ones just want to be leaders, and they found a convenient cause which they can milk like a juicy breast for all the glory and power it's worth?
With this background understood, it becomes clear why the forces of political correctness assail porn as "exploitation of women." Nobody cares about the woman in the movie, fuck her-in fact, the existence of a woman in the movie is irrelevant. Only the idea matters; a written erotic story would be just as "exploitative" as a hardcore donkey bukkake film if it had as broad an audience, rather than an audience of just a few broads. To the politically correct, porn is not sexual entertainment but rather a political manifesto. A manifesto arguing in favor of hedonism; a demonstration of how enjoyable lack of inhibition can be. Those huge, chugging, ever-hungry slabs of meat pay no attention to ideology and propriety, and therefore they cannot be manipulated by those means. Without guilt trips to lay on people, the politically correct attention whores won't get any attention. They will fade into irrelevancy and impotency.
That is what so-called feminists are really afraid of, and that's why they're always picking fights and flinging flamebait while actually increasing the subtle restrictions society places on women. If everyone becomes too comfortable with watching a cgi woman doing sexy things to herself, we might just stop worrying about how "dirty" and "guilty" and "offensive" sex is. God forbid that a girl could ever get laid without feeling like a shameful slut! She might not need her feminist overlords to set her back on the right-thinking, independent, non-exploited path! I, for one, welcome my new computer generated nymphomaniac sisters. For one thing, they'll always be in the mood to entertain my date when I'm not, and I don't even have to be jealous that they're thinner than me because they're not real
The parent post is so unconventional as to seem irrational at first-but think about what this implies for a minute. Copyright is taken for granted in modern society; everyone assumes information must be restricted to retain value. This is a very recent change. Shakespeare had no copyright, and throughout human history art was produced without the "protection" of copyright.
Now consider the original purpose of copyright. It was not developed to bring profit to those who distrubute conent. The founding fathers, and others around the world who introduced copyright, intended it to be a legal mechanism to shut down people who pass off the work of others as their own for commercial gain. Copyright periods were very short-only a few years-and typical cases involved large operations that mass produced works without permission.
A modern example of true copyright violation can be found in the movie bootleggers of Hong Kong. Take a walk down the street, and you'll see a variety of dirt cheap dvd's with good enough quality that only the most sophisticated consumers can spot the fakes. The pirates reap massive profit and gain control over how the work is presented while the creators are marginalized. This is what copyright was created to stop.
However, corporations bent on extracting maximum profit have perverted copyright into something it was never meant to be. In fact, through the contractual transference of copyright, companies now use copyright laws to screw the original artists! This is why we see non sequitors such as the tax on media: Corporations have no regard for the rights of customers or artists. They will abuse both in the name of profit-that is the purpose they were created for, and they would be deficient if they were not to do so. Lobbying for bad laws is only one mechanism for maximizing profit.
Clearly copyright has lost its original purpose and is now used to restrict the arts rather than encouraging them. Commercial interests, not artistic integrity, drive popular modern artistry. The artists themselves have no power and loathe the corporations that keep them on a leash. Small steps will not fix this. Shortening copyright terms or removing levies will not discourage those who make a living by abusing the system.
To encourage the arts and give artists true freedom we must go back to the models of the past. Artists can make a living through live performance, patronage, and teaching. Corporate middlemen should be removed, and profit should take a back seat to improvement of the human experience. This can only be accomplished by abolishing copyright as we know it.
Of course, you ask, "What will happen to the professional pirates that caused the creation of copyright in the first place? Won't they run rampant after copyright is abolished?" This problem can be solved through existing mechanisms. We already have trademarks. Trademarks are a mechanism for guaranteeing that the stated brand or credits are accurate. We can simply link content to brand. Suppose an aspiring artist writes a song that turns into a hit. The artist names the song, and trademarks that song name in association with the artist's own name. Much like how patent implementations are provided along with statements, the song itself is given as an implementation of the trademark. Now, it is illegal to make use of that specific implementation without naming the original artist as its creator, and it is illegal to use the artist's name and trademark without permission. Professional pirates are outlawed, and bringing a case against them is trivially easy. Artists gain total control of their works, and noone owes anyone anything except the truth.
That's what copyright was meant to be after all-a method of forcing people to tell the truth, and not lie about where content came from. By abolishing copyright and using more limited mechanisms to enforce honesty we can bring back artistic integrity and remove the subversive corporate influence from the humanities.
I disagree with your use of the analysis of Microsoft. They do try to innovate, and they don't just sit around waiting for the next greatest mousetrap to become a success. They build the better mousetrap before their competitors do because they buy out before their sources are fully developed. Microsoft is still leading market penetration with their products because they do the second half of development.
The VC funded startups come up with a superior core trap mechanism, but it's Microsoft that turns it into a viable product. This conversion of prototype to finished product is itself a form of innovation-a form Microsoft is good at, given time. That's how MS is effectively first to market even though other people create the original ideas. The early versions aren't really at the market yet.
For a concrete example of how MS doesn't succeed, look at Oracle. MS didn't buy out the database market in the beginning, and competitors paved the way. Once MS decided to enter it was too late-the competitors didn't need MS. As a result MS failed to capture the market and missed out on a lot of money. Their bought-out core products were all purchased before the other company got big. Microsoft does take risks, and not all of their buyouts pay off. They're just big enough to ignore the losses and wait for the good opportunities to pay for the bad.
You do have a valid point in that many companies do not need to lead the way in innovation. The question of "Does IT matter?" is actually very industry specific. A doctrine that brings riches in one field could be suicidal in another. Many industires-especially stable blue chip types-don't need to change the world on a regular basis. That CIO you mentioned who spends $5 million on new software might not need to if he works for an old school company with a stable product line. Why then does he? It might not be pure incompetence. He could very likely be getting kickbacks from the software company. Corporate bribery in the form of luxury vacations and entertainment is responsible for most deals these days. Or, he may be afraid of the 20 people he could've hired. 20 people can get a lot of work done, but 20 ambitious people can also rise into a lot of executive positions! Our CIO is one because he's a good executive-he knows how to slit throats, and get himself promoted. The people who are good at getting promoted are the ones who end up at the top, so defensive political tactics rule the day, and the company is milked like a cow. The CIO who bought the new software gets a trip to Taihiti, 20 fewer people trying to steal his job, and a big, headline grabbing decision that allows him to rest on his laurels for a while and hire a new young, promiscuous secretary to sexually harass. That bastard. I hate him and his groping. It's a well known fact that cocaine usage among the business elite exceeds that of the general population by an order of magnitude. With all of this in consideration, it's clear why companies in traditional, mature industries do not use the same tactics that apply to more fast-paced fields.
In summary, the author of the article under discussion is asking a meaningless question in "Does IT Matter?". It's like asking, "Why is the sky blue?" when you're talking about both Earth and Mars. The question only applies to some companies, so any possible answers will be both right and wrong. Chances are, the guy is being so general and provocative because he just wants to stir up controversy and debate. That could be a very good thing for all industries in the end, and the only way to get controversy is to have two sides worth arguing.
When humans play they rely primarily on pattern matching rather than searching a tree (unless they suck). Computers tend to be very poor at pattern matching, and humans tend to be extremely good-that's why a small child can look at photographs and categorize them instantly, but the most advanced computers have great difficulty with that kind of task.
Most skilled human chess players apply pattern matching by looking at the board and identifying interesting things. They start with nothing and add new options to the list until they feel they have a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of the situation.
Search tree pruning, by contrast, starts by including the entire space of potential moves and identifying courses of action that can be eliminated. Alpha-beta pruning is a particularly poor example here since it has the useful property that all a-b pruned subtrees are guaranteed not to be optimal. However, humans often ignore superior courses of action and choose suboptimal ones that "feel right" or match prior experience.
There have been various experiments on the limits of raw pattern matching ability with chess pieces. An interesting one involved asking participants to memorize an arrangement of pieces and reconstruct it a minute after the arrangement is removed. Participants included people with little or no chess experience and masters.
Those without experience memorized it as raw data, and did as well as they would have if asked to memorize random numbers instead of chess arrangements. The masters were more interesting. They did about the same as the beginners on random arrangements that could never actually happen in a game, but they were infinitely better at reconstructing realistic arrangements that often show up in games. The experiments proved that masters can recognize groups of pieces and evaluate them collectively.
In a game situation this means the master looks at the board, and certain parts of it just stand out. The master will pay no attention to areas that don't grab his attention, and doesn't need to evaluate whether any of those individual pieces are worth moving. Interestingly, this means that playing with nonstandard rules (such as changing piece movements) will likely devastate a master's ability while only slightly reducing an amateur's skill level and leaving the computer's ability unchanged.
Even though I think the parent is a troll, here's an academic article detailing some other experiments on the topic.
To sum up: YOUR FULL OF SHIT
It's 'you're.' That's 'you're.' As in 'you are.' 'You are.' That is, if I wanted to say 'You are a fucking moron,' I might shorten that to: 'You're a fucking moron.' You fucking moron.
Actually, I believe the esteemed gentleman was using the noun form of the verb "to full," meaning "To make (a garment) full, as by pleating or gathering." Therefore "a full" refers to an attempt to full a garment. Clearly, a full of shit would then be the fulling of a garment using shit; the shit would likely be sewn into the garment between multiple layers of cloth.
One may wish to consider a synthetic fabric for such work, as natural fibers tend to be too porous for containing shit in polite company. The use of a sewing machine will allow you to form a tighter seal. In addition, drying the shit thoroughly before insertion into the garment is adviseable. The generous application of antibacterial chemicals and preservatives will prevent decomposition of the shit and maintain its consistency-you don't want your dress to start sagging halfway through the party because your shit is rotten.
In conclusion, the poster who wrote "YOUR FULL OF SHIT" is guilty only of using a sentence fragment and excessive capitalization. Perhaps he is operating under the assumption that fulling a garment with shit is a disgraceful procedure. He might then attempt to insult with the mere implication that an attempt to full with shit happened, just as one might use the sentence fragment "YOUR MOM" as an insult.
If that is the case, he is clearly behind the times. Natural Organically Enhanced Fabrics are the big thing next season! All the environmentally correct fashion shows currently feature sylish designer Organic Wear such as shit-fulled ball gowns. Remember, ladies, nature knows best-you only need to know how to sew to keep nature from calling at the wrong time!
Thank you, I'm honored. However, the truth is I am part troll-I try to make posts based on a core of truth, but coated in a layer of not entirely honest devil's advocacy and sprinkled with a few outright lies. The goal is to make people think and explore the boundary between insightful and inciteful. Take a look at my -1 offtopic post. Make sure to read the parent and the kuroshin link, if you never saw that before.
I go out of my way to try to get +5 karma for exposure, personal entertainment, and to make the moderators think about posts that are often worth reading but often misleading. (Some mods, after seeing my more aggressive posts, went back and modded down old ones that had been off the front page for a couple weeks) If I succeed slashdot will be a more interesting place, but don't take everything I say at face value ^.~
I made up the cited article, it doesn't really exist. Unlike this real one from this site. And, just to show I'm a troll, since I can't prove to you guys that the editors once manually permanently banned my IP from slashdot (luckily I was posting anonymously), here's a link you shouldn't click on!
would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
Life would crumple, because it wouldn't be as much fun.
These people aren't lining up and throwing parties because expose and fast user switching are going to change their lives. They're throwing parties because they want to throw parties, and the release is a good excuse to get all the mac users out there for some fun.
The guys who wait in line for an hour are not spending an hour of their lives to get OS X a day earlier, they're spending that hour hanging out with friends, making new friends (they all have something in common-being fans of the os-so it's a good way to meet people), and enjoying themselves.
The "cult of consumerism" is a real problem only insofar as consumers allow themselves to be exploited. Some may argue that Apple's policy of charging full price for annual upgrades is exploitative, but there are many who feel the pricing isn't unfair. Do the math, and it actually beats the cost per year of Microsoft's professional (ie, no product activiation) versions of windows. Apple is not a designer clothes brand selling the same materials from the same foreign country with a more famous label and a tripled price. Neither is Apple a monopoly gouging consumers without alternatives. The consumers in this picture are lining up like partiers outside a club. Look elsewhere if you want to find cattle.
For a hint as to where to look, try Keenan's recent paper, "Modern Dynamics in Consumerism: The Brand as a Proxy for Tribal Identity." It's an intriguing look at the effect of corporate branding on individuals' social lives. Certain social circles share a disturbing number of characteristics with cults, and the cult paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing how the most materialistic among us operate.
But getting back to the party at the Apple store, it worked really well for me, Panther wasnt the only cat I picked up. While we were hanging out waiting for the release, I ran into a girl who was touching up the digital version of her latest painting on her powerbook, and we ended up, um playing with our new kitties together after the party. You have no idea how hard it is to meet other lesbians who aren't raving, battle-axe-wielding, death-to-all-men feminists these days.
So, while the "cult of consumerism" is a real force in modern American society, the Panther release is a very poor example to use. It's just a case of people using a convenient excuse to have a little fun.
p.s. pickup games of medal of honor over airport with the rest of the line rock!
Your point is correct, but you mistyped the quote. I just ran it by highlighting part of your comment and using speech in 10.2.8, and it said:
"After all, why would they call the oh es Mac oh es ten ten point three if the ex really meant ten?"
Yeah, mac os ten ten point three. Aren't they cute?
This is a big issue for those who use RAID arrays based on intercahngeable hard drives. This is a common practice among large corporations, and drive manufacturers' nonstandard descriptions of sizes make it very difficult to mix manufacturers within an array.
Buying from company A gives you 120GB=120 billion bytes, and buying from B gives you 120GB=128,762,169,664 bytes. If we have an array of 10 disks at the larger size and swap one out for the smaller size, the disks cannot be treated as interchangeable anymore, and the array loses much of its efficiency, or is forced to waste the extra space on the larger drives.
The bottom line is that this costs money. Companies are locked into using one supplier and must pass up opportunities for good deals. The lack of flexibility and occasional screw ups by interns who don't check which drive is which uses up the IT department's time.
Nobody really cares whether a GB is 1 billion or a funny number that comes from base 2, but a lot of people with a lot of money care whether 1 GB from company A equals 1 GB from company B. One of these days the industry will have to standardize.
It's just as bad as monitor sizes-they measure those at funny angles and have different sized black margins around the viewable area. Just a couple months ago a manager here ordered a new 19 inch monitor and was so annoyed by the margins that he sent it back to be replaced. We gave him an old, lower quality monitor with the settings adjusted to minimize the margin. Some guy in IT took the new one home with him, and wrote it off as trashed defective equipment.
There's no idealists rushing in because this isn't a case of "copying" versus "stealing." Regardless of what you label it, the unauthorized distribution of source code that the creator intends to keep secret is wrong because it divides control of the creative process. It's not about who has to pay for the product, it's about who gets to create the product in the first place. This phenomenon has little parallel in music.
Sharing music online is equivalent to warez binaries, and ripping a cd you own is equivalent to making a backup copy of a game you own. Mixing existing music DJ style would be like taking screen captures and level designs from one game and using them in another. Downloading the source gives you the same level of control that the artists have; it is equivalent to copying the recording studio while the artists were in it.
However, it is worth noting that leaked albums are indefensible under my assumptions: they take control of the creative process away from the artist by removing their ability to decide when the album is done and how the public will be exposed to the music. This is equivalent to the leak of the alpha doom 3 a while ago-still less threatening than a source code leak.
Another factor in the severity of a source leak is security. Knowledge of the source will allow cheaters to exploit the game and ruin online play-once again, a phenomenon we do not see in music. Music pirates cannot degrade the quality of the music legitimate buyers listen to, but online cheaters can ruin the multiplayer experience. It would be like going to a concert and blowing a bullhorn repeatedly. Doing that in a concert is not considered an intellectual property offense, so it is inappropriate to think of a source leak's potential for cheating as an intellectual property issue. It is a security/espionage problem.
That said, those who would delete the source after downloading it and verifying its authenticity are very misguided. Unless their computers are public access and could be used to futher distribute the source, deletion helps noone and limits your opportunity for education. Of course, if you are going to work on a competing product it would be dangerous to expose yourself to the source, but as a disinterested party or potential valve customer there is much to learn and little damage to do.
After all, the real danger of a source leak is in the actions that can be taken by those who acquired it illicitly. Hackers and competitors can dilute the creators' control over the software, but an unabused copy of the source is harmless. So, go ahead-download the source, read it, figure out how it works and learn from it. Unless you're getting a job at id or epic, or creating your own software directly related to hl2, your copy of the code is no worse than sheet music. Of course, if you upload too much on bittorrent, it could be argued that you're helping to distribute it. Although you're only one link in a large chain, it's like voting-if enough people make the same decision it really will change things. So, go download all the stolen half life source you want, just dont use bittorrent or write hl2 cheats. After all, aren't all "bad" acts bad because of their consequences? Think about it-no matter what you do, if nobody is worse of for it, how could there possibly be anything wrong with it? Throw away the anachronistic, irrelevant "moral" codes of a repressed past-its not about what some people think, it's about what's ethical in the strictest definition of the word. So go eat pork, masturbate, and download hl2. Yeah!
Programmers will never feel like mp3-pirated musicians when source code is stolen. They will feel like a musician whose beat and backup were stolen, combined with someone else's voice, and sold as a new release. This has happened in the music world, and though it is not an exact parallel of the source code situation, the uproar was just as severe.
Why is the parallel off? All music is by definition open source-hearing the notes allows you to reconstruct the sheet
In fact, distributed computing and "grids" are older than you are.
I'm 76, you insensitive clod!
but according to ICDCS, it is older than my lesbian granddaughter.