Exactly. Without a whole bunch of super-modern technology, I'd be dead by now anyway, and I bet a lot of us can say the same. The ship has sailed -- may as well enjoy the trip!
If you could, please explain why you are showing me an official NASA photo of a thermal blanket that isn't on a wing in an attempt to prove your assertion that NASA is trying to hide a wing impact?
All we've been hearing for the last few days is "thermal blanket, thermal blanket, thermal blanket", and you're trying to tell us that NASA is hiding the issue? They've already extended the mission to deal with the thermal blanket, but for some reason, in your conspiracy theory, they need to bake up another reason to extend the mission to deal with the thermal blanket? I'm quite justified in labeling that a silly line of reasoning (notice, though, that I didn't label YOU anything, pedal-man).
Direct question -- do you believe NASA is hiding a WING IMPACT, or don't you? If you don't, why are you going on about a wing impact?
Re:NASA has a problem alright, but not with the IS
on
ISS Computer Failure
·
· Score: 1
This is an incredibly silly line of reasoning.
First of all, every shuttle mission since Columbia has had a bunch of little problems reported by NASA. Remember when they did a spacewalk to pull out gap fillers? Remember freeze-frames showing foam impacts?
So your first "point", that NASA always claims a perfect launch, is simply false. But besides that, the ISS problem is WAY more serious than your supposed shuttle wing impact conspiracy. If the ISS is abandoned due to this, and they can't fix this problem from the ground, they'll never be able to dock with it again -- throwing the last decade of the manned space program out the window (except for the Hubble, of course).
Nah, it's not worth anything. If time travel is ever developed, the universe enters an unstable state. Stability isn't returned until a scenario occurs where time travel is never discovered in the first place.
This process takes no time (obviously), so any discovery of time travel is immediately undone. Actually, this happens all the, er, time.
If rights aren't being managed digitally, it's not Digital Rights Management. I'm sorry, but defining DRM as "any practice Whuffo doesn't like" is not worth your +4 Insightful.
Your assertion that M4A is an "unusual format" is completely absurd for starters, but let's go down that slope a little more. Are you really saying that it's DRM unless you put your files in the most common format available? That the entire industry ought to be forever locked in to 90's era technology with demonstrably inferior sound quality?
But what really takes the cake is your assertion that the tags (the information isn't "embedded") represent a "restriction" when the only restriction is copyright law. This is an empty and offensive line of reasoning. Next you'll be calling a vinyl LP DRM, because it's hard to extract the music in digital form. Or the plastic wrapper on a CD case will be DRM since it makes it harder to get to the music.
In short, you've created an argument that simply allows you to criticize whatever company you don't like, which today happens to be Apple. By the way, increasing the bitrate on music is a matter of diminishing returns; the difference in quality between 128 and 256 is way greater than the difference between 256 and lossless.
4 point at the bottom? The headline is a lie -- there's nothing "hidden" about this. The summary info in iTunes displays the account info for each file.
Truth is, somebody decided long ago that they'd use this sort of nonsense to criticize what's really an industry-changing development. I don't know how you possibly see it as underhanded. The file has some informational tags... duh.
doesn't a murder case require a body (or parts of it)?
As I understand it, this is mostly a myth, but without a body it can be awfully hard to prove that the victim is dead in the first place. As an example, spouses in abusive relationships often disappear and hide themselves.
You mention Texas, where we are well on the way to eliminating all that stupid waste. Some new toll roads are completely automated, with the drivers being given the choice between a pre-paid transponder or bill-by-mail based on license plate recognition. That's going to be taken to the older toll roads within a few years.
Also, the "free" in "freeway" refers to freedom from stopping, not "free of charge", except in a few states.
Ah, once again, it's the favorite conspiracy theory of the modern age. Cures everywhere, locked up by IP. Somebody finds anti-cancer dirt, but nobody sees enough profit to bring it to market, so people still get sick.
If only it were so simple. So you've discovered some dirt that fights cancer -- so what? We have as many compounds that fight cancer as we have compounds that cause cancer. If you want to really cure people, we're talking scientific medicine, not feel-good natural herbal supplements. That means you need to push your dirt through a huge array of tests to determine what sort of cancer it's really good for, how it compares to the wide array of existing cancer treatments, what the side effects are, etc. It really is 99% perspiration, if by "perspiration" you mean years of expensive research with no guarantee of success. You'll find any number of biotech companies that failed merely because their discovery was just not quite good enough.
Sure, everybody thinks the discovery should be free, except that the truth is discoveries like this have almost no value in the first place; they are everywhere, and they are not "cures" for anything. In general, these things you say we will "never have access to" wouldn't have done us any good, for a reason that we'd spend millions of dollars to discover.
If it helps, I internally debated for several seconds on that issue, but as a matter of writing for the audience I went with 'metaphor'. I feel that the difference between the two is subtle and more likely to be understood in a linguistics or writing discussion than a thread about old-school video games. I suppose I could have chosen 'analogy', but that seems too broad; I'm not sure how much of a discussion you could have about anything without some use of analogy.
To be sure, I believe in pedantry for the simple reason that communication is clearer when we can come to some sort of agreement on the meaning of the words and sentence structures we're using. But clear communication is the overall goal. Besides, as a matter of pure pedantry I could suggest that an analogy first expressed in terms of a simile can turn toward a metaphor if the writer continues on with points of comparison between the two concepts.
Why do you refer to the iPhone as a "multimedia and entertainment device"? And most people would agree that a wireless networking product is a "computing" thing.
Honestly, I think Apple wants to push computing a little more -- give us better computers in our pockets and our living rooms, not just better computers on our desks. Sure, a living room computer will be optimized for living room stuff, like watching shows and movies, and a pocket computer will naturally be very different from a Mac Pro.
But it's still computing, even if you call it a phone. I think they dropped the "Computer" because they want people to think beyond the box-on-a-desk.
Setting aside the question of why you're believing one company's execs over another, how does your sequence of events mesh with the fact that Apple had been developing OSX for Intel for years? You're making it sound like Apple was surprised about the switch, when in reality it's clear that they were prepared to do so at any time.
You have a point in a sense, that IBM chose not to develop a chip that could compete with Intel's current offerings, but that's as far as it goes. IBM would be quite happy to sell Apple Cell processors today, if Apple were interested in purchasing them.
Crime attracts the highest of genius in the movies. In real life, I can point you to any number of geniuses who took on far greater challenges than any crime... whereas it's rare that a crime is even interesting to read about, let alone a work of genius.
I think you're seriously misunderstood TFA. The idea isn't to replace the chip with an FPGA. The idea is to include a small FPGA through which various important signals are routed.
As shipped, the FPGA is just a pass-through, which does nothing. When you find out that a bug presents in a certain situation, you modify the FPGA to intercept the problem and handle it somehow.
I, for one, will not be happy until I have an IMAX theater in my home. That requires way, WAY more resolution than 1080p. And you can see the difference for sure.
Metacritic proves zilch. I've been gaming for over 20 years, and quite frankly I'd prefer the opinion of a drunk hobo over an average videogame "critic". Properly, criticism is a great endeavor, the art of connecting the masses with the wonders of a given form. Video game "critics" in general aspire only to prove to us how cool they are so we will keep reading their drivel. If you got the five good videogame critics into a room and shot them all, it'd be years before anyone without the time to just try everything could make sense of the morass of crap the industry shovels upon us.
So when you bring out Metacritic to show that the PSP has as good of a selection of games as the DS, it's not surprising that this seems to be a counter-intuitive result. I'm not saying that the PSP selection is bad or even disappointing, now. I'm saying that the DS has driven a major renaissance of NON-"cinematic" gameplay which is the most important industry trend in a decade. Review scores written by cretins (on average) simply cannot capture a shift of this magnitude.
As I understand it, large companies are worried about Vorbis specifically because it's free. Remember now that patents don't work like copyrights -- even though Vorbis is an original work, it could still come under patent issues if it makes use of ANY technique which had previously been patented. And I assure you that, like all software, it does.
I'm sure someone could turn up later with patent claims against AAC, too. But by using a patented codec and making the royalty payments, the large corporations get two things. First, they ensure that the whole industry will be in basically the same boat, and so they probably won't be the primary target if someone comes in with a lawsuit. Second, they demonstrate good faith which can help reduce liability.
Besides all that, codec payments are a tiny fraction of the costs, so there is not a lot of incentive to switch to a free format... especially one that requires more CPU to decode.
If you RTFA, it's more like "Second Life creators bragging about how they asked the FBI to look at their casinos". Another non-story about a third-rate MUSH.
I had a long discussion with my GF on this; I lost.
Imagine, instead of a runner, a car on a giant treadmill. Assuming that the treadmill is moving at a fixed rate (that is, the force the car places on the belt doesn't affect the belt's speed) the car must do more work to stay in place if the treadmill is at an incline. That's because, while the wheels are turning at the same speed, the car must use more force to counteract the force of gravity.
Where does the extra work go? The car's force on the belt would tend to increase its speed, so if we assuming that the treadmill moves at a fixed rate, the motor which moves the belt would be doing less work. In fact, if the car's force on the belt exceeds the belt's friction, the treadmill would need some mechanism to absorb the extra work, such as a brake.
It works a little differently if you're assuming that the belt has no speed regulatory mechanism, and is slowed only by a constant level of friction (as I was, though this isn't true of most treadmills). In that case, more incline will require the car to increase its speed to remain in the same place, and so it will also do more work (as the energy lost to friction will increase).
The mistake I made is to assume that a treadmill without an active speed regulatory mechanism can remain at the same speed when you increase the incline.
In my experience, only elitist techno snobs have the audacity to group all the millions of Mac users into the "too cool for you" market segment.
Were we to have an honest, reasonable discussion, I'd ask you to provide evidence that the majority of those who use Apple products are obsessed with image. I'd present dozens of product reviews in mainstream publications which praised the usability and practicality of various Apple products. But this is Slashdot, so as long as you state something as if it were an objective fact, somebody will mod you up.
But your point is that it's not the silicon itself that's unfriendly, it's the manufacturing process. It's one thing to change the transistor material, and quite another to eliminate the need for photolithography.
I don't know if that's quite the point the GP was making, but it's certainly a sensible one.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Without a whole bunch of super-modern technology, I'd be dead by now anyway, and I bet a lot of us can say the same. The ship has sailed -- may as well enjoy the trip!
If you could, please explain why you are showing me an official NASA photo of a thermal blanket that isn't on a wing in an attempt to prove your assertion that NASA is trying to hide a wing impact?
All we've been hearing for the last few days is "thermal blanket, thermal blanket, thermal blanket", and you're trying to tell us that NASA is hiding the issue? They've already extended the mission to deal with the thermal blanket, but for some reason, in your conspiracy theory, they need to bake up another reason to extend the mission to deal with the thermal blanket? I'm quite justified in labeling that a silly line of reasoning (notice, though, that I didn't label YOU anything, pedal-man).
Direct question -- do you believe NASA is hiding a WING IMPACT, or don't you? If you don't, why are you going on about a wing impact?
This is an incredibly silly line of reasoning.
First of all, every shuttle mission since Columbia has had a bunch of little problems reported by NASA. Remember when they did a spacewalk to pull out gap fillers? Remember freeze-frames showing foam impacts?
So your first "point", that NASA always claims a perfect launch, is simply false. But besides that, the ISS problem is WAY more serious than your supposed shuttle wing impact conspiracy. If the ISS is abandoned due to this, and they can't fix this problem from the ground, they'll never be able to dock with it again -- throwing the last decade of the manned space program out the window (except for the Hubble, of course).
Nah, it's not worth anything. If time travel is ever developed, the universe enters an unstable state. Stability isn't returned until a scenario occurs where time travel is never discovered in the first place.
This process takes no time (obviously), so any discovery of time travel is immediately undone. Actually, this happens all the, er, time.
If rights aren't being managed digitally, it's not Digital Rights Management. I'm sorry, but defining DRM as "any practice Whuffo doesn't like" is not worth your +4 Insightful.
Your assertion that M4A is an "unusual format" is completely absurd for starters, but let's go down that slope a little more. Are you really saying that it's DRM unless you put your files in the most common format available? That the entire industry ought to be forever locked in to 90's era technology with demonstrably inferior sound quality?
But what really takes the cake is your assertion that the tags (the information isn't "embedded") represent a "restriction" when the only restriction is copyright law. This is an empty and offensive line of reasoning. Next you'll be calling a vinyl LP DRM, because it's hard to extract the music in digital form. Or the plastic wrapper on a CD case will be DRM since it makes it harder to get to the music.
In short, you've created an argument that simply allows you to criticize whatever company you don't like, which today happens to be Apple. By the way, increasing the bitrate on music is a matter of diminishing returns; the difference in quality between 128 and 256 is way greater than the difference between 256 and lossless.
4 point at the bottom? The headline is a lie -- there's nothing "hidden" about this. The summary info in iTunes displays the account info for each file.
Truth is, somebody decided long ago that they'd use this sort of nonsense to criticize what's really an industry-changing development. I don't know how you possibly see it as underhanded. The file has some informational tags... duh.
Granted, [just like pokemon] it wasn't developed by nintendo
Easy mistake to make, but Intelligent Systems, developer of Fire Emblem, is an entirely internal team at Nintendo.
Don't usually do this, but the above comment is the first one in this conversation that explains why this problem doesn't really exist.
Hold on -- we're talking about hybrids, here. Ever driven a CVT? Mine even has a "go faster" switch.
doesn't a murder case require a body (or parts of it)?
As I understand it, this is mostly a myth, but without a body it can be awfully hard to prove that the victim is dead in the first place. As an example, spouses in abusive relationships often disappear and hide themselves.
Toll collectors? Change? Puh-leeze!
You mention Texas, where we are well on the way to eliminating all that stupid waste. Some new toll roads are completely automated, with the drivers being given the choice between a pre-paid transponder or bill-by-mail based on license plate recognition. That's going to be taken to the older toll roads within a few years.
Also, the "free" in "freeway" refers to freedom from stopping, not "free of charge", except in a few states.
Ah, once again, it's the favorite conspiracy theory of the modern age. Cures everywhere, locked up by IP. Somebody finds anti-cancer dirt, but nobody sees enough profit to bring it to market, so people still get sick.
If only it were so simple. So you've discovered some dirt that fights cancer -- so what? We have as many compounds that fight cancer as we have compounds that cause cancer. If you want to really cure people, we're talking scientific medicine, not feel-good natural herbal supplements. That means you need to push your dirt through a huge array of tests to determine what sort of cancer it's really good for, how it compares to the wide array of existing cancer treatments, what the side effects are, etc. It really is 99% perspiration, if by "perspiration" you mean years of expensive research with no guarantee of success. You'll find any number of biotech companies that failed merely because their discovery was just not quite good enough.
Sure, everybody thinks the discovery should be free, except that the truth is discoveries like this have almost no value in the first place; they are everywhere, and they are not "cures" for anything. In general, these things you say we will "never have access to" wouldn't have done us any good, for a reason that we'd spend millions of dollars to discover.
If it helps, I internally debated for several seconds on that issue, but as a matter of writing for the audience I went with 'metaphor'. I feel that the difference between the two is subtle and more likely to be understood in a linguistics or writing discussion than a thread about old-school video games. I suppose I could have chosen 'analogy', but that seems too broad; I'm not sure how much of a discussion you could have about anything without some use of analogy.
To be sure, I believe in pedantry for the simple reason that communication is clearer when we can come to some sort of agreement on the meaning of the words and sentence structures we're using. But clear communication is the overall goal. Besides, as a matter of pure pedantry I could suggest that an analogy first expressed in terms of a simile can turn toward a metaphor if the writer continues on with points of comparison between the two concepts.
It's more like a Slashdot discussion without a metaphor. Maybe you'll miss it, but did you really need it anyway?
Why do you refer to the iPhone as a "multimedia and entertainment device"? And most people would agree that a wireless networking product is a "computing" thing.
Honestly, I think Apple wants to push computing a little more -- give us better computers in our pockets and our living rooms, not just better computers on our desks. Sure, a living room computer will be optimized for living room stuff, like watching shows and movies, and a pocket computer will naturally be very different from a Mac Pro.
But it's still computing, even if you call it a phone. I think they dropped the "Computer" because they want people to think beyond the box-on-a-desk.
Setting aside the question of why you're believing one company's execs over another, how does your sequence of events mesh with the fact that Apple had been developing OSX for Intel for years? You're making it sound like Apple was surprised about the switch, when in reality it's clear that they were prepared to do so at any time.
You have a point in a sense, that IBM chose not to develop a chip that could compete with Intel's current offerings, but that's as far as it goes. IBM would be quite happy to sell Apple Cell processors today, if Apple were interested in purchasing them.
Crime attracts the highest of genius in the movies. In real life, I can point you to any number of geniuses who took on far greater challenges than any crime... whereas it's rare that a crime is even interesting to read about, let alone a work of genius.
I think you're seriously misunderstood TFA. The idea isn't to replace the chip with an FPGA. The idea is to include a small FPGA through which various important signals are routed.
As shipped, the FPGA is just a pass-through, which does nothing. When you find out that a bug presents in a certain situation, you modify the FPGA to intercept the problem and handle it somehow.
I, for one, will not be happy until I have an IMAX theater in my home. That requires way, WAY more resolution than 1080p. And you can see the difference for sure.
Metacritic proves zilch. I've been gaming for over 20 years, and quite frankly I'd prefer the opinion of a drunk hobo over an average videogame "critic". Properly, criticism is a great endeavor, the art of connecting the masses with the wonders of a given form. Video game "critics" in general aspire only to prove to us how cool they are so we will keep reading their drivel. If you got the five good videogame critics into a room and shot them all, it'd be years before anyone without the time to just try everything could make sense of the morass of crap the industry shovels upon us.
So when you bring out Metacritic to show that the PSP has as good of a selection of games as the DS, it's not surprising that this seems to be a counter-intuitive result. I'm not saying that the PSP selection is bad or even disappointing, now. I'm saying that the DS has driven a major renaissance of NON-"cinematic" gameplay which is the most important industry trend in a decade. Review scores written by cretins (on average) simply cannot capture a shift of this magnitude.
As I understand it, large companies are worried about Vorbis specifically because it's free. Remember now that patents don't work like copyrights -- even though Vorbis is an original work, it could still come under patent issues if it makes use of ANY technique which had previously been patented. And I assure you that, like all software, it does.
I'm sure someone could turn up later with patent claims against AAC, too. But by using a patented codec and making the royalty payments, the large corporations get two things. First, they ensure that the whole industry will be in basically the same boat, and so they probably won't be the primary target if someone comes in with a lawsuit. Second, they demonstrate good faith which can help reduce liability.
Besides all that, codec payments are a tiny fraction of the costs, so there is not a lot of incentive to switch to a free format... especially one that requires more CPU to decode.
If you RTFA, it's more like "Second Life creators bragging about how they asked the FBI to look at their casinos". Another non-story about a third-rate MUSH.
I had a long discussion with my GF on this; I lost.
Imagine, instead of a runner, a car on a giant treadmill. Assuming that the treadmill is moving at a fixed rate (that is, the force the car places on the belt doesn't affect the belt's speed) the car must do more work to stay in place if the treadmill is at an incline. That's because, while the wheels are turning at the same speed, the car must use more force to counteract the force of gravity.
Where does the extra work go? The car's force on the belt would tend to increase its speed, so if we assuming that the treadmill moves at a fixed rate, the motor which moves the belt would be doing less work. In fact, if the car's force on the belt exceeds the belt's friction, the treadmill would need some mechanism to absorb the extra work, such as a brake.
It works a little differently if you're assuming that the belt has no speed regulatory mechanism, and is slowed only by a constant level of friction (as I was, though this isn't true of most treadmills). In that case, more incline will require the car to increase its speed to remain in the same place, and so it will also do more work (as the energy lost to friction will increase).
The mistake I made is to assume that a treadmill without an active speed regulatory mechanism can remain at the same speed when you increase the incline.
In my experience, only elitist techno snobs have the audacity to group all the millions of Mac users into the "too cool for you" market segment.
Were we to have an honest, reasonable discussion, I'd ask you to provide evidence that the majority of those who use Apple products are obsessed with image. I'd present dozens of product reviews in mainstream publications which praised the usability and practicality of various Apple products. But this is Slashdot, so as long as you state something as if it were an objective fact, somebody will mod you up.
But your point is that it's not the silicon itself that's unfriendly, it's the manufacturing process. It's one thing to change the transistor material, and quite another to eliminate the need for photolithography.
I don't know if that's quite the point the GP was making, but it's certainly a sensible one.