Re:Been around for 10 years
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 1
Yep... I'll bet there's even a record for longest sustained flight using such a suit. If I recall correctly, the method for landing is something to the effect of making the landing entry as close to horizontal as possible and sliding in along the stomach.
Not something I'd ever want to try, but interesting anyway.
That kind of reminds me iof the big World Wrestling Federation vs World Wildlife Fund case over the "WWF" moniker. (Which I personally thought was ridiculous considering just about anyone at the time would have associated the term with wrestling before animal conservation.)
Eventually, the World Wrestling Federation changed their to name to World Wrestling Entertainment using the current "WWE" moniker, but included the tagline "Get the F out!" for several months following the ruling.
Fark kinda started losing its "coolness" factor once they started banning people for linking to legitimate news sources that carried video clips of the Saddam Hussein execution. Hell, they even told me they'd ban anyone that posted links to any site with video clips covering significant historical events, such as the controversial Zapruder "JFK assassination" film.
I just popped a CD into my drive and iTunes asked me if I want to add it to my music library. Upon clicking yes, the application created mp3 files on my hard drive and shared them with all my coworkers without warning me about making unauthorized copies. I hear that's also the main source of music in most people's iPods. So why not sue Apple rather than going after the small fish?
Because, when you start suing the small fish directly with devastating results, the other small fish are far more likely to play by your rules to keep themselves safe. Fear is much more powerful tool than severely reducing the available supply. People will always find ways around supply problems by going through black market channels to get it. As long as there is a demand, there will always be illegitimate suppliers.
... wouldn't Fark want to at least consider seriously doing it before someone else manages it. This could really come back to bite Fark in the ass now that they've opened the pandora's box on the topic by bringing it up.
This is something I've found kind of interesting ever since I first heard of it a couple years ago. However, we may not be limited to simply looking much longer. For example, a newer application of the Wii Remote that allows users to convert any display into a digital white board could allow fog display users to directly manipulate both the fog and the image being projected over the affected area simultaneously, making it possible to do things like carve directly into the display itself. (Though, much of it may initially come off as a gimmick similar to some of Apple's interactive quicktime movie demos, such as realtime water ripples created on mouseclicks.)
Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.
Ever since I first got wind of Real ID, I've been predicting a system would eventually track every citizen in the country, enter their daily activity into a central database, then use the data to rate your activity based on your averages and finally flag you as a potential threat, alerting authorities to keep an eye on you more closely.
This sounds kind of like the early stages of such a system, except that it doesn't immediately know who you are.
Wow, I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it just now, but I can absolutely confirm the hat thing with our dog as well. A relative of mine entered our house one time wearing a large cowboy style hat and the dog's demeanor instantly changed. Luckily, the demeaner was defensive, rather than offensive, but I sure wouldn't have wanted to see them trying to approach the dog next to a wall. Without the hat though, the attitude of the dog went back to completely normal.
Similarly, she also does the "trying to be non-chalant" thing after doing something she knows she shouldn't have. (Especially avoiding eye contact whenever possible.)
In the meanwhile, I have had cats with dog-like traits in the past. For example, cats that have siamese traits, such as the snowshoe, are a lot more likely to play "fox and hound" style games with humans (both fox and hound positions) where most other breeds tend to prefer very little human interaction unless they initiate it themselves. Cats with siamese traits also tend to be a lot less snooty (despite Disney-esque depictions to the contrary), but far more vocal about everything... not unlike a lot of dogs.
Up until very recently, I always thought of dogs as generally being playful but incredibly stupid animals outside of spirit-breaking intensive training... at least, until we just got our recent dog, a pit bull/boxer mix. Unlike most dogs I've owned over the years, this one isthe first I known to preemptively develop strategies on the fly under ever-changing conditions. (In other words, she doesn't do the whole "repeat the same process over and over expecting a different result each time" thing.)
For example, take a piece of food being dropped on the floor just out of her reach behind a barrier. Most dogs would simply shove their snout under the barrier and root at it with their tongue for hours. With this dog though, she only did the snout rooting thing once, stopped, reached under the barrier with her paws trying to grip the food, stopped and finally removed the barrier itself to get at the food.
In my previous experience, only a cat would have ever made it to step 2.
Needless to say, the dog is now quite an escape artist, having deciphered how to use doors, removing collars like houdini and bypassing six foot tall chain-link fences.
You have to remember, before we had spoken word among each other, reading each others emotions was probably the only way we could effectively communicate with each other. Unlike speech or written word, our emotions are universally understood no matter where on earth you go.
Of course, the reasons leading up to the emotional result can have dramatically differing interpretations depending on one's cultural background. For example, if someone dragged off one of your family members to kill them, you might be devistated, but in a culture that observes ritualistic human sacrifices, this may be perfectly normal and expected. So while your emotional reaction may seem unfounded to them, it's not as though they wouldn't understand what crying is.
More likely, this is a common trait in humans to improve our chances of gaining acceptance with others by attempted to sympathize with the emotional state of everyone else. It's almost a conditioned reaction. For example, how many people usually break out laughing at funerals when everyone else is all sorrow or silence? Such an act would render you an outcast even without the overhead of learned manners. It's a complete and total abstraction of the majority mood.
It's probably the same reason why people also tend to not trust those who seem happy and smiling all the time.
The C64 always appealed to me as the embodyment of the modern hacker mentality. It just happened to have a decent amount of power and capabilities that just made you want to tinker with it. It also gave birth to many copy protection wars. I've heard stories about companies that would go all-out to create the best proprietary copy protection measures they could, only to later receive cracked copies by mail from groups taunting the company over just how easy it was to reverse engineer and defeat their latest and greatest measures.
Evidence of the attitude that drove C64 hackers later expanded out to the PC, as many of the more expensive DOS applications were often cracked and released into the wild with the same style of gloat messages.
Of course, the other aspect of the attitude were the little musical tunes that would often accompany the gloat notes, as though to say' "bask in my glory". (it would not surprise me if this attitude indirectly lead to widespread use of music cues in videogames as a way of ranking the player's actions.)
The only other place I've seen the C64 attitude running wild would be the in the earily days of the dial-up BBS, up until the internet took over.
Personally, I think the ttechnical aspects of the Pleo might be almost enough to create an adequate robotic cat. Granted it won't be jumping on random surfaces, but there's little reason one couldn't sleep, sit, stand, bathe, knead surfaces, scratch, stare, swat at stuff, meow and purr. Such a thing would be ideal for pet therapy applications without the drawbacks of shedding, using a litter box or feeding.
There was a previous attempt at this in Japan about a decade ago called "NeCoRo", but it was one of those things that fell into "uncanny valley" territory and kind of resembled a freeze-dried cat with a motorized armature stuffed inside it.
Check out the PlayAsia website sometime. There's a CD set of the soundtracks from the first three games for around $27. I'm tempted to buy a copy of the set to use in Beautiful Katamari on the 360.
While this may look like a bill voted on by morons fearing association with child pornography, the bill itself could have far more sinister applications coming from any number of lobbiests or "nanny" state supporters. Just a few theories I've seen so far include:
1. This is a move by the government intended to coerce home wireless network owners out of using wireless means of accessing the internet, by threatening financial and legal devistation for non-compliance. At the same time, those who would like to remain compliant and continue using their wireless networks will somehow need to pay for the additional hardware, software and storage media to maintain logs and archive copies of data transferred through their connections. (Only a few upper class individuals could realistically afford to do this.) Once everyone that refuses to or is unable to comply has been relieved of their wireless networks, the government can simply harass the few remaining wireless network users and track them via wardriving tactics.
2. The RIAA/MPAA cartel may have lobbied this bill as a means of killing off random wifi connectivity to file sharing services, as a wired connection is a bit easier to track down for legal action. It's also speculated that this may also serve to prevent wireless network operators from hiding behind ignorance defenses if their network is easily accessible/compromisable.
3 - Telecom and cellular network owners may have lobbied this bill as a means of killing off VoIP over wireless networks before we start seeing a rash of dedicated VoIP over WiFi devices eating into cellular network profits.
Aside from all this, it almost seems like one must literally admit to being in possession of child pornography just to file a report on the actual criminals the content was obtained from.
One other scary possibility is that such a bill could pave the way for the government to require installation of a LAN-side "black box" device to monitor your network traffic/data and phone home select bits of information (as well as provide an easy back-door into any household network on demand), just to even be allowed to have a wireless network.
I'm afraid this is just barely scratching the surface though...
Considering NBC just scored a huge blow against Apple by removing their content from iTunes to an iPod-proof system, it would not surprise me if Apple is looking into such an option to ensure Macintosh/iPod compatibility remains available for this kind of content.
By proposing such a system and pioneering it themselves, Apple could become the first computer manufacturer to offer a user-friendly, MPAA-blessed dvd ripping solution that functions almost identically to the CD ripping tools in iTunes. Also, by creating a product designed specifically for ripping by the end user, it puts the "fair use" argument for ripping traditional dvds into question, as users shouldn't need to play shadow games to move protected video to an alternate device, when a readily-available, legally-rippable source is already available for purchase by the end user.
(Additional sidenote to the ball-bearing IC... probably way off into an unrelated tangent.)
It occured to me that "spin" in this sense isn't constrained to following only linear/planar paths. Instead, you could simply "snake" the rotational force in any direction so long as the bearings along the path remain in physical contact from start to end. For example, take a cube matrix of these ball bearings where you can change the path a specific spin could follow. When the rotational force travels horizontally along the bearings, the bearings act like gears, alternating the rotation. But when the force travels vertically, the bearings act as an axel, rotating the same direction until the path changes again.
In short, you could make the rotation start at any point at one end of the cube, and exit at any point on the opposite end of the cube.
I'd bet you could get even trickier than this, such as allowing multiple bearings to cooperatively modify the orientation of rotation, allowing a single bearing on one path to branch off into multiple paths before exiting the cube.
Wow, I actually wasn't entirely serious about the ball-bearing anology, but if it works as a primitive visual aid, it kind of makes you wonder what something as complex as a spintronic integrated circuit would look like. Would it be something akin to a complex system of "ball bearings" and "clutches" controlling one another?
With any luck, this won't be something consumers will have to decipher off the back of a box anytime soon. The name raises more questions than it answers.:-P
For some reason, the term "spintronics" makes me think of it as though this was a long series of ball bearings in physical contact with the adjacent ones, and using the rotational force of the starting point to rotate each ball bearing in an opposite direction as the ones they're in physical contact with... eventually transferring the rotation to the end point.
Is it simply a case that in spintronics that the electrons used to carry a current don't actually leave their respective atoms (as they do in AC and DC current), but are just being rotated faster/slower or alternating direction?
Wow, I didn't think anyone else would've thought of the cuecat this quickly after reading the article. Surprised there aren't any "Eye of Judgement" posts yet, though...
The trivia stuff mentioned in the article can already be found on the commentary section of the first four dvd sets. It's well worth listening to if you get the time. It's not boring and dry like most dvd commentaries are typically known for. The voice actors and writers aren't being held to a script and seem to be having fun with it.
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Yep... I'll bet there's even a record for longest sustained flight using such a suit. If I recall correctly, the method for landing is something to the effect of making the landing entry as close to horizontal as possible and sliding in along the stomach.
Not something I'd ever want to try, but interesting anyway.
Hmm... yeah, I suppose the vegan/hippie/peta crowd probably wouldn't enjoy watching people beating on each other, even if it is all staged.
Maybe we need to start going back to the days of feeding christians to the lions to get a worthwhile audience...
That kind of reminds me iof the big World Wrestling Federation vs World Wildlife Fund case over the "WWF" moniker. (Which I personally thought was ridiculous considering just about anyone at the time would have associated the term with wrestling before animal conservation.)
Eventually, the World Wrestling Federation changed their to name to World Wrestling Entertainment using the current "WWE" moniker, but included the tagline "Get the F out!" for several months following the ruling.
Fark kinda started losing its "coolness" factor once they started banning people for linking to legitimate news sources that carried video clips of the Saddam Hussein execution. Hell, they even told me they'd ban anyone that posted links to any site with video clips covering significant historical events, such as the controversial Zapruder "JFK assassination" film.
I just popped a CD into my drive and iTunes asked me if I want to add it to my music library. Upon clicking yes, the application created mp3 files on my hard drive and shared them with all my coworkers without warning me about making unauthorized copies. I hear that's also the main source of music in most people's iPods. So why not sue Apple rather than going after the small fish?
Because, when you start suing the small fish directly with devastating results, the other small fish are far more likely to play by your rules to keep themselves safe. Fear is much more powerful tool than severely reducing the available supply. People will always find ways around supply problems by going through black market channels to get it. As long as there is a demand, there will always be illegitimate suppliers.
... wouldn't Fark want to at least consider seriously doing it before someone else manages it. This could really come back to bite Fark in the ass now that they've opened the pandora's box on the topic by bringing it up.
This is something I've found kind of interesting ever since I first heard of it a couple years ago. However, we may not be limited to simply looking much longer. For example, a newer application of the Wii Remote that allows users to convert any display into a digital white board could allow fog display users to directly manipulate both the fog and the image being projected over the affected area simultaneously, making it possible to do things like carve directly into the display itself. (Though, much of it may initially come off as a gimmick similar to some of Apple's interactive quicktime movie demos, such as realtime water ripples created on mouseclicks.)
Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.
Ever since I first got wind of Real ID, I've been predicting a system would eventually track every citizen in the country, enter their daily activity into a central database, then use the data to rate your activity based on your averages and finally flag you as a potential threat, alerting authorities to keep an eye on you more closely.
This sounds kind of like the early stages of such a system, except that it doesn't immediately know who you are.
Wow, I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it just now, but I can absolutely confirm the hat thing with our dog as well. A relative of mine entered our house one time wearing a large cowboy style hat and the dog's demeanor instantly changed. Luckily, the demeaner was defensive, rather than offensive, but I sure wouldn't have wanted to see them trying to approach the dog next to a wall. Without the hat though, the attitude of the dog went back to completely normal.
Similarly, she also does the "trying to be non-chalant" thing after doing something she knows she shouldn't have. (Especially avoiding eye contact whenever possible.)
In the meanwhile, I have had cats with dog-like traits in the past. For example, cats that have siamese traits, such as the snowshoe, are a lot more likely to play "fox and hound" style games with humans (both fox and hound positions) where most other breeds tend to prefer very little human interaction unless they initiate it themselves. Cats with siamese traits also tend to be a lot less snooty (despite Disney-esque depictions to the contrary), but far more vocal about everything... not unlike a lot of dogs.
Up until very recently, I always thought of dogs as generally being playful but incredibly stupid animals outside of spirit-breaking intensive training... at least, until we just got our recent dog, a pit bull/boxer mix. Unlike most dogs I've owned over the years, this one isthe first I known to preemptively develop strategies on the fly under ever-changing conditions. (In other words, she doesn't do the whole "repeat the same process over and over expecting a different result each time" thing.)
For example, take a piece of food being dropped on the floor just out of her reach behind a barrier. Most dogs would simply shove their snout under the barrier and root at it with their tongue for hours. With this dog though, she only did the snout rooting thing once, stopped, reached under the barrier with her paws trying to grip the food, stopped and finally removed the barrier itself to get at the food.
In my previous experience, only a cat would have ever made it to step 2.
Needless to say, the dog is now quite an escape artist, having deciphered how to use doors, removing collars like houdini and bypassing six foot tall chain-link fences.
You have to remember, before we had spoken word among each other, reading each others emotions was probably the only way we could effectively communicate with each other. Unlike speech or written word, our emotions are universally understood no matter where on earth you go.
Of course, the reasons leading up to the emotional result can have dramatically differing interpretations depending on one's cultural background. For example, if someone dragged off one of your family members to kill them, you might be devistated, but in a culture that observes ritualistic human sacrifices, this may be perfectly normal and expected. So while your emotional reaction may seem unfounded to them, it's not as though they wouldn't understand what crying is.
More likely, this is a common trait in humans to improve our chances of gaining acceptance with others by attempted to sympathize with the emotional state of everyone else. It's almost a conditioned reaction. For example, how many people usually break out laughing at funerals when everyone else is all sorrow or silence? Such an act would render you an outcast even without the overhead of learned manners. It's a complete and total abstraction of the majority mood.
It's probably the same reason why people also tend to not trust those who seem happy and smiling all the time.
The C64 always appealed to me as the embodyment of the modern hacker mentality. It just happened to have a decent amount of power and capabilities that just made you want to tinker with it. It also gave birth to many copy protection wars. I've heard stories about companies that would go all-out to create the best proprietary copy protection measures they could, only to later receive cracked copies by mail from groups taunting the company over just how easy it was to reverse engineer and defeat their latest and greatest measures.
Evidence of the attitude that drove C64 hackers later expanded out to the PC, as many of the more expensive DOS applications were often cracked and released into the wild with the same style of gloat messages.
Of course, the other aspect of the attitude were the little musical tunes that would often accompany the gloat notes, as though to say' "bask in my glory". (it would not surprise me if this attitude indirectly lead to widespread use of music cues in videogames as a way of ranking the player's actions.)
The only other place I've seen the C64 attitude running wild would be the in the earily days of the dial-up BBS, up until the internet took over.
Personally, I think the ttechnical aspects of the Pleo might be almost enough to create an adequate robotic cat. Granted it won't be jumping on random surfaces, but there's little reason one couldn't sleep, sit, stand, bathe, knead surfaces, scratch, stare, swat at stuff, meow and purr. Such a thing would be ideal for pet therapy applications without the drawbacks of shedding, using a litter box or feeding.
There was a previous attempt at this in Japan about a decade ago called "NeCoRo", but it was one of those things that fell into "uncanny valley" territory and kind of resembled a freeze-dried cat with a motorized armature stuffed inside it.
Drug dealers fund terrorists! It was all over the commercials after 9/11...
Check out the PlayAsia website sometime. There's a CD set of the soundtracks from the first three games for around $27. I'm tempted to buy a copy of the set to use in Beautiful Katamari on the 360.
While this may look like a bill voted on by morons fearing association with child pornography, the bill itself could have far more sinister applications coming from any number of lobbiests or "nanny" state supporters. Just a few theories I've seen so far include:
1. This is a move by the government intended to coerce home wireless network owners out of using wireless means of accessing the internet, by threatening financial and legal devistation for non-compliance. At the same time, those who would like to remain compliant and continue using their wireless networks will somehow need to pay for the additional hardware, software and storage media to maintain logs and archive copies of data transferred through their connections. (Only a few upper class individuals could realistically afford to do this.) Once everyone that refuses to or is unable to comply has been relieved of their wireless networks, the government can simply harass the few remaining wireless network users and track them via wardriving tactics.
2. The RIAA/MPAA cartel may have lobbied this bill as a means of killing off random wifi connectivity to file sharing services, as a wired connection is a bit easier to track down for legal action. It's also speculated that this may also serve to prevent wireless network operators from hiding behind ignorance defenses if their network is easily accessible/compromisable.
3 - Telecom and cellular network owners may have lobbied this bill as a means of killing off VoIP over wireless networks before we start seeing a rash of dedicated VoIP over WiFi devices eating into cellular network profits.
Aside from all this, it almost seems like one must literally admit to being in possession of child pornography just to file a report on the actual criminals the content was obtained from.
One other scary possibility is that such a bill could pave the way for the government to require installation of a LAN-side "black box" device to monitor your network traffic/data and phone home select bits of information (as well as provide an easy back-door into any household network on demand), just to even be allowed to have a wireless network.
I'm afraid this is just barely scratching the surface though...
Considering NBC just scored a huge blow against Apple by removing their content from iTunes to an iPod-proof system, it would not surprise me if Apple is looking into such an option to ensure Macintosh/iPod compatibility remains available for this kind of content.
By proposing such a system and pioneering it themselves, Apple could become the first computer manufacturer to offer a user-friendly, MPAA-blessed dvd ripping solution that functions almost identically to the CD ripping tools in iTunes. Also, by creating a product designed specifically for ripping by the end user, it puts the "fair use" argument for ripping traditional dvds into question, as users shouldn't need to play shadow games to move protected video to an alternate device, when a readily-available, legally-rippable source is already available for purchase by the end user.
(Additional sidenote to the ball-bearing IC... probably way off into an unrelated tangent.)
It occured to me that "spin" in this sense isn't constrained to following only linear/planar paths. Instead, you could simply "snake" the rotational force in any direction so long as the bearings along the path remain in physical contact from start to end. For example, take a cube matrix of these ball bearings where you can change the path a specific spin could follow. When the rotational force travels horizontally along the bearings, the bearings act like gears, alternating the rotation. But when the force travels vertically, the bearings act as an axel, rotating the same direction until the path changes again.
In short, you could make the rotation start at any point at one end of the cube, and exit at any point on the opposite end of the cube.
I'd bet you could get even trickier than this, such as allowing multiple bearings to cooperatively modify the orientation of rotation, allowing a single bearing on one path to branch off into multiple paths before exiting the cube.
Wow, I actually wasn't entirely serious about the ball-bearing anology, but if it works as a primitive visual aid, it kind of makes you wonder what something as complex as a spintronic integrated circuit would look like. Would it be something akin to a complex system of "ball bearings" and "clutches" controlling one another?
Thanks!
:-P
With any luck, this won't be something consumers will have to decipher off the back of a box anytime soon. The name raises more questions than it answers.
For some reason, the term "spintronics" makes me think of it as though this was a long series of ball bearings in physical contact with the adjacent ones, and using the rotational force of the starting point to rotate each ball bearing in an opposite direction as the ones they're in physical contact with... eventually transferring the rotation to the end point.
Is it simply a case that in spintronics that the electrons used to carry a current don't actually leave their respective atoms (as they do in AC and DC current), but are just being rotated faster/slower or alternating direction?
Wow, I didn't think anyone else would've thought of the cuecat this quickly after reading the article. Surprised there aren't any "Eye of Judgement" posts yet, though...
The trivia stuff mentioned in the article can already be found on the commentary section of the first four dvd sets. It's well worth listening to if you get the time. It's not boring and dry like most dvd commentaries are typically known for. The voice actors and writers aren't being held to a script and seem to be having fun with it.
... does it contain more than 3oz of liquid? (Virtually speaking...)