This decision by Tumblr is lazy, cowardly, and short-sighted. All attempts to place a blanket prohibition on sexual material, whether in books, magazines, films, or digital media have always been doomed to eventually bite the hands that place the prohibition.
Problems include:
- Defining sexual content, like "obscenity", risks a descent into ridiculous nitpickery. "I know it when I see it" is not an objective measure.
- Considering exaggerated violence more acceptable than sexuality is a peculiarly American disease. Both here and in the many places where I see it elsewhere in the world, it seems descended from religious dogma. I am sick to death of people forcing their beliefs on others. I believe it's far more healthy to "make love, not war" and I don't believe in suppressing this belief to just go along with the cultural norms of the week
- "Kids shouldn't have access to this" is not an unreasonable position, especially if the kids being referred to are one's own. So I'm not against the use of parental filters, but of course they will be circumvented easily enough when the kids get interested enough in seeing the alluringly forbidden material, whatever it is.
Enough. I'm just preaching out of frustration born of decades of sliding down the slippery slope toward institutionally promulgated "morailty", and the steadily increasing tyranny of the majority.
Thank you. I deeply lament David Mills's absence from the original article. He should at least have been mentioned, as he deserves far more credit for innovation in distributing time than does Judah Levine, while still intending no disrespect for Dr. Levine.
Many headlines these days are poorly written, with word forms that can be hard to parse before you read the associated article.
Ok, I'll give it a shot. "Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits"
What is the news here?
Fake studies about pubs are drinking all these habits. The fake pub is studying how people drink habits. I order you to fake some pub studies that drink habits. This is about the drinking habits of fake pub studies.
And so on.
Add your own parsing, and for each one you add, enjoy another habitual fake drink in the studying pub.
Re: "Police and civilian IT forensic staff have to witness all kinds of completely illegal images/content on a daily basis and there is no question of any wrongdoing on their part."
Factually this is unarguable but it does raise the question: if viewing a site is considered in itself "wrongdoing", and since police must operate within the law to enforce the law, then doesn't this prove the relevant law to be the epitome of absurdity?
The concept of censors viewing material to be censored has always amused and perplexed me. It's easy to imagine prison censors stashing porn mags for their 'personal research' as I am sure has been done for time immemorial. The logical absurdity of all censorship is so blatant that I am sure that to pass legislative hurdles, most censorship laws must be written intentionally to be very broad, obscure, or both.
Logic insists that censorship is both tyranny, and obsolescent.
Despite what others have written, it's not sarcasm, and it's certainly not because the headline writer doubted the correctness or consistency of the source being cited.
What you see are simple quotation marks, used to indicate the exact word or phrase from the news source is being repeated in its citation.
I'm a bit concerned to find that so few/. readers appear to understand quotation marks when used in this way.
It seems to me the elevator mechanism can be made more reliable by using redundant components, but apart from standard overengineering, I can't see how the ribbon and its supports on both ends could be.
I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be a good idea to make a law forcing law enforcement officials to fully notify anyone whose phone they tapped or whose email they read mistakenly. The notification could be delayed if it might damage the actual case in progress.
The whole idea, of course, would be to provide a rare incentive for law enforcement to get it right.
When I bought my iPod, I assumed I would find a small industry of homegrown software extensions to add features to the iPod's UI. For example:
Add an option that stores the last-played position in every song I've stopped playing, so I can go back to that place immediately (especially useful for those 2-hour livesets and classical pieces)
Better (more than one; permanently stored) "on-the-go" playlists
"Lock volume" function to prevent blasting my ears when I don't hit the center button hard enough, thereby suddenly raising the volume by mistake instead of skipping forward in the song
Gazillions of other better ideas for extensions
... but alas, I don't see anyone offering extensions or 3rd party firmware updates. Pretty sad -- the result of a conscious decision by Apple to keep the iPod firmware closed?
When I try to read the story linked to by the Slashdot posting (using Opera, although that may not matter), I can't! There's a big ugly Microsoft ad obscuring the first few paragraphs!
I was at Silicon Graphics in 1991 when I heard the word "morph" for the first time, and interestingly, it was in connection with the "Black or White" video. I was about to make a post to that effect, but now I'll just (enthusiastically) support Thad Beier's comments.
I don't understand what's so cool about this thing. It is apparently just a PC in a big, ugly package that includes a monitor, a keyboard, and a couple of control surfaces.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to tote all that stuff around in a single, inflexible box. Remember the virtues of the *ix philosophy of small, purpose-built, easily interconnectable tools? That works for musical gear too, at least for me.
To each his/her own. If you want one, and it's not vapor, go buy one, knock yourself out. I just don't happen to want one.
The Beta formats used in industrial and broadcast applications were/are not the same as consumer Betamax. The brand is the same, and some of the engineering principles and designs may have been similar between "Beta" formats, but the signal quality is worlds apart. No broadcast engineer worth their salt would let a consumer Betamax-grade signal on the air except in an emergency.
We test RedHat, SuSe, Mandrake, Xandros, Lindows and FreeBSD by default (along with various beta distros).
This is great. It would be even better if there was a tighter relationship between motherboard, chipset and BIOS manufacturers on the one hand, and the Linux kernel community on the other hand.
For one thing, if instead of "beta distros" AMI would invest time working with the latest even and odd-revision kernels, both the kernels and the BIOSes would benefit.
In fact, I would not be surprised if this was already happening. I am just responding to what Brian said, and to the consistently higher level of problems I see reported on the kernel mailing list having to do with newer motherboards.
I've been wondering for years, did Shatner invent the phrase "get a life", or did he just use it?
His famous answer to a fan's hyper-detailed Star Trek question was the first time I ever heard the phrase, in about 1987, but of course, it could just be that I need to get a life myself, and that the phrase had been around for years earlier.
Yes, at first glance it looks good, and the price seems fair on the surface, but the shipping and handling cost seems too high.
I wish companies would just charge honestly for the product and pass along their actual shipping costs to me, instead of low-balling the product price and charging separately for "handling".
I am always amazed at the extent of humanity's arrogance, or at least our blind optimism, when I read about the logical arguments about the likelihood of intelligent life outside the solar system.
Perhaps there is, but I can't imagine limiting ourselves to looking for multicellular, carbon-based, or RNA-based life, or for that matter any form of life patterned upon that on Earth. It seems to me astronomically more likely that highly organized or self-conscious matter found elsewhere would not be recognizable to us as what we would call "life".
I have slowed down my participation in the SETI@home project because I have become increasingly skeptical that other life forms would happen to care enough about radio frequency communications to build a transmitter. I consider it at least equally likely that extraterrestrial life forms are more interested in gazing at their own navels than evolving the means for the complex physical arrangements of materials necessary for instrumentalities designed to emit radio signals.
The yearning to communicate with other beings is both honored as a deeply "human" characteristic, and asserted as a likely goal of extraterrestrial life, but I think we have to choose one or the other, and get realistic about the chances of finding other societies sufficiently similar to us that we could detect each other.
I wouldn't advocate laptops in school universally for K-12 students, but I do think Palms and similar handhelds can be really good at what they were invented to do: assist people in organizing their activities.
Starting in middle school and especially in larger high schools, it seems to me a handheld-based scheduling application could reduce confusion and ease everyone's daily hassles.
Let's just not try to make more of these devices than they really are. They are certainly not a replacement, nor even much help, for good teachers, but as multifunction calculators, note-taking (assuming keyboards) and organizing aids, I believe they actually do have a useful if limited role to play.
Don't be fooled by the boring classes. If you did enjoy working with computers before the classes, you probably still will. Countless students have wrongly been turned away by incompetent teaching from careers they would have loved.
Despite all the other postings saying "do something else", my advice would be to find exactly what you like to do, even if it's in the computer field, and then go for it on your own.
As a happy, successful software engineer/architect (and yes, occasional middle manager) with 28 years of programming experience -- I've taught classes in programming, but NEVER taken one -- my experience may be rare, but I recommend the path I've taken.
Anyone who happened to catch the XM launch event (a video replay is available here) will have noticed a few things:
1. The CEO is a self-obsessed, buzzword-dropping twit who treats his employees and customers as subservients. The "command chair"!! I laughed. This guy is hardly Captain Kirk.
2. The programming staff for each of the channels are apparently experienced in traditional commercial radio, as evidenced by their oh-so-carefully crafted "cool" vocal intonation and phrasing -- you know what I mean -- the kind of voice you always hear on commercial radio, the one you just know the DJ drops the minute he's off the air (or he would never get a girlfriend).
3. As even the clueless CEO admits, this is a new medium. Unfortunately, he failed to hire clueful people to build a dynamic (as in "frequently-adjusted") channel selection based on input from the listening audience, with a choice of subscription OR (not AND!!!) advertising-supported channels.
The current list of ingredients doesn't add up to a meal, and I predict XM will fail fairly quickly.
As I understand it, while file swapping is on the rise, so are CD sales!!
Soon the RIAA will wake up to the fact that their precious "right" to collect revenue on their artists' creations is not in jeopardy from song downloading; in fact free downloading exposes more people than ever to new bands and artists.
And the end result will be that file swapping will eventually be accepted by even the RIAA.
It's interesting to consider the following quote in the context of intellectual property rights and copy protection:
``There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable,'' one senior network exec said.
Content owners will finally have to recognize this. Just as what that exec said is correct, it is also true that all technology to restrict the copying of copyrighted material will be unsuccessful. The two problems are equivalent.
I'm definitely not looking to "cash in" (at least on this), but I've been interested for years in finding out just how sweet it would be to use an Ann Arbor terminal. My understanding is that their keyboards were considered the best in the world for programming, around the early '80s. But I never did get to play with one.
Actually, modern "toner" is similar to plastic, and it should outlast the paper it's fused to.
Copiers and laser printers now produce output that should last centuries on good paper, even when exposed to continuously high light levels.
The problem isn't longevity, it's quality. Digital publication still lags far behind good old letterpress in readability and sharpness. Enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of a well-designed letterpress book can be a wonderful experience.
Slashdot Mirror
This decision by Tumblr is lazy, cowardly, and short-sighted. All attempts to place a blanket prohibition on sexual material, whether in books, magazines, films, or digital media have always been doomed to eventually bite the hands that place the prohibition.
Problems include:
- Defining sexual content, like "obscenity", risks a descent into ridiculous nitpickery. "I know it when I see it" is not an objective measure.
- Considering exaggerated violence more acceptable than sexuality is a peculiarly American disease. Both here and in the many places where I see it elsewhere in the world, it seems descended from religious dogma. I am sick to death of people forcing their beliefs on others. I believe it's far more healthy to "make love, not war" and I don't believe in suppressing this belief to just go along with the cultural norms of the week
- "Kids shouldn't have access to this" is not an unreasonable position, especially if the kids being referred to are one's own. So I'm not against the use of parental filters, but of course they will be circumvented easily enough when the kids get interested enough in seeing the alluringly forbidden material, whatever it is.
Enough. I'm just preaching out of frustration born of decades of sliding down the slippery slope toward institutionally promulgated "morailty", and the steadily increasing tyranny of the majority.
Thank you. I deeply lament David Mills's absence from the original article. He should at least have been mentioned, as he deserves far more credit for innovation in distributing time than does Judah Levine, while still intending no disrespect for Dr. Levine.
Many headlines these days are poorly written, with word forms that can be hard to parse before you read the associated article.
Ok, I'll give it a shot. "Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits"
What is the news here?
Fake studies about pubs are drinking all these habits.
The fake pub is studying how people drink habits.
I order you to fake some pub studies that drink habits.
This is about the drinking habits of fake pub studies.
And so on.
Add your own parsing, and for each one you add, enjoy another habitual fake drink in the studying pub.
Re: "Police and civilian IT forensic staff have to witness all kinds of completely illegal images/content on a daily basis and there is no question of any wrongdoing on their part."
Factually this is unarguable but it does raise the question: if viewing a site is considered in itself "wrongdoing", and since police must operate within the law to enforce the law, then doesn't this prove the relevant law to be the epitome of absurdity?
The concept of censors viewing material to be censored has always amused and perplexed me. It's easy to imagine prison censors stashing porn mags for their 'personal research' as I am sure has been done for time immemorial. The logical absurdity of all censorship is so blatant that I am sure that to pass legislative hurdles, most censorship laws must be written intentionally to be very broad, obscure, or both.
Logic insists that censorship is both tyranny, and obsolescent.
Thank you, AC, for the correct answer!
/. readers appear to understand quotation marks when used in this way.
Despite what others have written, it's not sarcasm, and it's certainly not because the headline writer doubted the correctness or consistency of the source being cited.
What you see are simple quotation marks, used to indicate the exact word or phrase from the news source is being repeated in its citation.
I'm a bit concerned to find that so few
-David.
It seems to me the elevator mechanism can be made more reliable by using redundant components, but apart from standard overengineering, I can't see how the ribbon and its supports on both ends could be.
I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be a good idea to make a law forcing law enforcement officials to fully notify anyone whose phone they tapped or whose email they read mistakenly. The notification could be delayed if it might damage the actual case in progress.
The whole idea, of course, would be to provide a rare incentive for law enforcement to get it right.
-David.
When I try to read the story linked to by the Slashdot posting (using Opera, although that may not matter), I can't! There's a big ugly Microsoft ad obscuring the first few paragraphs!
Ironic or intentional???
-David.
I was at Silicon Graphics in 1991 when I heard the word "morph" for the first time, and interestingly, it was in connection with the "Black or White" video. I was about to make a post to that effect, but now I'll just (enthusiastically) support Thad Beier's comments.
Cheers,
-David Watson.
I don't understand what's so cool about this thing. It is apparently just a PC in a big, ugly package that includes a monitor, a keyboard, and a couple of control surfaces.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to tote all that stuff around in a single, inflexible box. Remember the virtues of the *ix philosophy of small, purpose-built, easily interconnectable tools? That works for musical gear too, at least for me.
To each his/her own. If you want one, and it's not vapor, go buy one, knock yourself out. I just don't happen to want one.
-David.
The Beta formats used in industrial and broadcast applications were/are not the same as consumer Betamax. The brand is the same, and some of the engineering principles and designs may have been similar between "Beta" formats, but the signal quality is worlds apart. No broadcast engineer worth their salt would let a consumer Betamax-grade signal on the air except in an emergency.
This is great. It would be even better if there was a tighter relationship between motherboard, chipset and BIOS manufacturers on the one hand, and the Linux kernel community on the other hand.
For one thing, if instead of "beta distros" AMI would invest time working with the latest even and odd-revision kernels, both the kernels and the BIOSes would benefit.
In fact, I would not be surprised if this was already happening. I am just responding to what Brian said, and to the consistently higher level of problems I see reported on the kernel mailing list having to do with newer motherboards.
-David.
I've been wondering for years, did Shatner invent the phrase "get a life", or did he just use it?
His famous answer to a fan's hyper-detailed Star Trek question was the first time I ever heard the phrase, in about 1987, but of course, it could just be that I need to get a life myself, and that the phrase had been around for years earlier.
Dear Mr. Shatner,
I have been wanting to ask you this for years: can you reveal any reason for your uncanny resemblance to Patty Duke?
Yes, at first glance it looks good, and the price seems fair on the surface, but the shipping and handling cost seems too high.
I wish companies would just charge honestly for the product and pass along their actual shipping costs to me, instead of low-balling the product price and charging separately for "handling".
I am always amazed at the extent of humanity's arrogance, or at least our blind optimism, when I read about the logical arguments about the likelihood of intelligent life outside the solar system.
Perhaps there is, but I can't imagine limiting ourselves to looking for multicellular, carbon-based, or RNA-based life, or for that matter any form of life patterned upon that on Earth. It seems to me astronomically more likely that highly organized or self-conscious matter found elsewhere would not be recognizable to us as what we would call "life".
I have slowed down my participation in the SETI@home project because I have become increasingly skeptical that other life forms would happen to care enough about radio frequency communications to build a transmitter. I consider it at least equally likely that extraterrestrial life forms are more interested in gazing at their own navels than evolving the means for the complex physical arrangements of materials necessary for instrumentalities designed to emit radio signals.
The yearning to communicate with other beings is both honored as a deeply "human" characteristic, and asserted as a likely goal of extraterrestrial life, but I think we have to choose one or the other, and get realistic about the chances of finding other societies sufficiently similar to us that we could detect each other.
I wouldn't advocate laptops in school universally for K-12 students, but I do think Palms and similar handhelds can be really good at what they were invented to do: assist people in organizing their activities.
Starting in middle school and especially in larger high schools, it seems to me a handheld-based scheduling application could reduce confusion and ease everyone's daily hassles.
Let's just not try to make more of these devices than they really are. They are certainly not a replacement, nor even much help, for good teachers, but as multifunction calculators, note-taking (assuming keyboards) and organizing aids, I believe they actually do have a useful if limited role to play.
Whatever you like to do, you'll do well.
Don't be fooled by the boring classes. If you did enjoy working with computers before the classes, you probably still will. Countless students have wrongly been turned away by incompetent teaching from careers they would have loved.
Despite all the other postings saying "do something else", my advice would be to find exactly what you like to do, even if it's in the computer field, and then go for it on your own.
As a happy, successful software engineer/architect (and yes, occasional middle manager) with 28 years of programming experience -- I've taught classes in programming, but NEVER taken one -- my experience may be rare, but I recommend the path I've taken.
-David.
OK, this scenario sounds like a casino.
Don't they still use VHS to record the eye in the sky, and doesn't videotape fit the requirements?
-David.
Anyone who happened to catch the XM launch event (a video replay is available here) will have noticed a few things:
1. The CEO is a self-obsessed, buzzword-dropping twit who treats his employees and customers as subservients. The "command chair"!! I laughed. This guy is hardly Captain Kirk.
2. The programming staff for each of the channels are apparently experienced in traditional commercial radio, as evidenced by their oh-so-carefully crafted "cool" vocal intonation and phrasing -- you know what I mean -- the kind of voice you always hear on commercial radio, the one you just know the DJ drops the minute he's off the air (or he would never get a girlfriend).
3. As even the clueless CEO admits, this is a new medium. Unfortunately, he failed to hire clueful people to build a dynamic (as in "frequently-adjusted") channel selection based on input from the listening audience, with a choice of subscription OR (not AND!!!) advertising-supported channels.
The current list of ingredients doesn't add up to a meal, and I predict XM will fail fairly quickly.
-David.
As I understand it, while file swapping is on the rise, so are CD sales!!
Soon the RIAA will wake up to the fact that their precious "right" to collect revenue on their artists' creations is not in jeopardy from song downloading; in fact free downloading exposes more people than ever to new bands and artists.
And the end result will be that file swapping will eventually be accepted by even the RIAA.
I hope.
Content owners will finally have to recognize this. Just as what that exec said is correct, it is also true that all technology to restrict the copying of copyrighted material will be unsuccessful. The two problems are equivalent.
-David.
I'm definitely not looking to "cash in" (at least on this), but I've been interested for years in finding out just how sweet it would be to use an Ann Arbor terminal. My understanding is that their keyboards were considered the best in the world for programming, around the early '80s. But I never did get to play with one.
I wonder how to find one in working order?
-David.
Actually, modern "toner" is similar to plastic, and it should outlast the paper it's fused to.
Copiers and laser printers now produce output that should last centuries on good paper, even when exposed to continuously high light levels.
The problem isn't longevity, it's quality. Digital publication still lags far behind good old letterpress in readability and sharpness. Enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of a well-designed letterpress book can be a wonderful experience.
-David.