There should have been no headaches for teachers or hesitation in penalizing the students for using misspellings or "net slang". There is a difference between casual conversation and formal usage of your language, and schoolwork is of the latter category.
Some of us don't even use that kind of slang on the internet. The truth is that it was created by people who either cannot type well or who type lazily. Those of us who understand that effective communication is important realize that typing in complete, correctly spelled, and well formed sentences with correct puncuation gets our ideas across in a more accurate way.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we have no spelling or grammatical errors -- it simply means that we try to communicate our ideas using grammar that is correct. It also creates less confusion for us, because we don't have to remember in what context we're writing and "turn on" or "turn off" our grammar rules.
I swear to God I would moderate you up if I could. That's exactly what they should have done, and they're absolute morons if they think this is going to make a dent in MP3 availability of their music.
I love the example of Celine Dion's latest CD, that was apparently rip-proof because it would CRASH any computer that tried to use it. But I have seen MP3s from that CD on Gnutella. When will they realize that they cannot stop it?
My latest pet peeve (and this is almost offtopic) is that I'm having real difficulty ripping audio from my DVDs into MP3 format. I stress: my DVDs that I paid for. I do not intend to burn DVDs and sell them on the black market. I do not intend to burn CDs of the music from my DVDs and sell them on the black market. But I fully intend to rip MP3s from my James Taylor Live DVD and listen to them in my car or on my computer. This is just barely possible, by going through a two or three step process, on Windows only as far as I can tell (my DVD player on my Windows machine broke, so my only DVD drive right now is on my Mac and I don't know if it's even possible on a Mac).
I'm getting really, really pissed off about how the recording industries are trying to control how I use my copies of the recordings that I bought. Ain't it cute how you can fast forward through the FBI warning on VHS, but now with the latest technology you have to watch it.
It's Philips with one L... yes, spelling counts in jokes, too. And a little research might have yielded the name of a company that actually produced eight-track tapes (such as RCA), instead of Philips, which decidedly did not, further enhancing the humor.
Ah, indeed it DOES support wildcards. Something told me that I had checked and had found that it did not. I'm now glad that I got moderated down a point (for being "overrated") after having reached the elusive 5, so as not to get too embarrased in public about that.
Yes, you're right -- no substitute for regular expressions. But definitely useful for all my brat pack searches:)
A big part of Google's strength is in the supported search syntax, most notably that you can search for phrases instead of just keywords, that you can filter OUT certain phrases or keywords, and that you can search for content on specific sites, or NOT on specific sites. The next step for me and probably a lot of other Unix/Perl types is regular expression support.
For example, let's say I'm looking for 80's brat pack member Anthony Michael Hall (not that I would do such a think), but I can't remember his middle name. Looking for "Anthony Hall" will do me little if any good, but looking for "Anthony \w+ Hall" could do the trick nicely.
Another example is that the user can provide their own limited fuzzy searching, by searching for optional prefixes and suffixes along with the root, instead of having to get the word or phrase exactly as it's indexed.
The more you know about pool, the more you realize how much more there is to the game than the angles, which are truly the easy part. It doesn't take long to develop your own way to see the angles and sink the balls, but of course you'll still miss because you get the mechanics wrong in your arm, or you miscue because you forgot to chalk, or any number of reasons.
Then there's cueball action... "english" on the ball, top, draw, etc -- not only knowing how to apply various types of english, but knowing when and why. Of course, many times the "best" shot on the table, meaning the easiest shot, I guess, is not the shot you need to make and, depending on the game, it's also a foul. The most common professional game of 9 Ball, for example, requires the player to shoot the balls in numerical order, which means that, after the 3 ball goes, it doesn't matter how good the shot is on the 7 ball, because you have to shoot the 4 ball, no matter WHERE it is. You at least have to touch it, which in that game sometimes requires a fantastic shot.
So, it's no surprise that we have technology that can assist us with the most elementary aspect of the game. And it just proves that there's no substitute for learning the game through experience... not yet, anyway:)
Yeah, I think that's an awful thing to do. Imagine the free-for-all on your own computer when you die:
"We're publishing John's porn collection, which we recovered from his computer, having used a Cray to decrypt the stuff, in a 36-volume retrospective of all that, for whatever reason, turned him on"
No thanks. Remember, if you think you're gonna drop dead, don't forget to format your hard drive first.
Maybe they ought to call themselves "ThinkFiftyDollars"... their name kind of suggests that it's free!
RP
"Not Possible," says Local Slashdot Reader
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have what I think amounts to an interesting theory disproving any possibility of time travel. Perhaps somebody else has already brought this up (not necessarily on Slashdot), but here goes.
I believe that, in this case, "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". In other words, the fact that we don't already know about time travel is evidence that time travel will never be possible. This gets confusing quickly, but if time travel ever becomes possible, somebody will surely travel to what is our past. While early attempts might be "covert" (a la "Back to the Future") to prevent altering the future, this could only be successful for so long. Even if attempts continued to be made to keep it a secret, somebody at some point would have either told somebody that they met in the past or there would have been rumors or something.
But all references that we hear to the possibility of time travel are based in the future, such as this story about a guy who's "going to do it". Of course, we all know he will fail, because otherwise, we would have already known of his success. At the very least, if he was to ever be successful, we would not be living in a world where he was trying to travel in time to save his dad from cigarettes, but rather in a world where his dad had been saved from cigarettes by his son.
In fact, if time travel were to ever be successful, we would have always known about it, and the quest for time travel would not exist.
It gets more interesting and more confusing as you think about it...
There's also a great little instant messaging client available for OS X (called Fire) that connects you to all the major services at once, and it has built-in GPG support. And very good support, too.
I'm not yet to the point that I feel I need to either sign or encrypt my instant messages, but that time may come, and it's nice to know that Fire is ready.
I'm one of those many recent OS X converts who just bought my first Mac, after years of having used Unix and Windows.
PGP is something I've played with over the years, like a lot of geeks, but never used religiously. But I decided a few months ago that it was something I should start using regularly, so I sought out a mail client with built-in PGP (or variant) support. I found a neat little (non-free) Windows e-mail client called The Bat! (that's their exclamation point, not mine), which had not only built-in support, but you can configure it to use PGP, GnuPG, and even their own OpenPGP implementation. That and many other cool features persuaded me to buy that e-mail client, after which time I decided to throw the switch and begin signing all e-mail that I send.
Along the way I discovered WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray), which is a decent little frontend for GPG. Remember, GPG is a backend -- how you interface with it is up to you.
The came my Titanium PowerBook. I got it for all the reasons mentioned around Slashdot and elsewhere, but I didn't really expect to find cool things like a good GPG frontend, let alone e-mail with GPG support. Boy was I wrong! I went to the GPG site and found a link to the Mac GPG site, which ports GPG to OS X. Not only the backend, but a frontend that integrates with the "Finder" (that's Mac-speak for the "Explorer" equivalent), right in the "Services" menu (which is much like the global right-click menu in Windows Exploror.
But that's not all! I saw further down on the same page that somebody else has written an extension to the OS X default mail client (which ain't as bad as you might think) that provides very good GUI GPG support for mail.
So, even though switching over to the Mac isn't the easiest thing in the world (I say that as I sit here typing on my Windows machine for reasons I won't go into), I can say that GPG is among the least of my problems.
Most of us, no matter how much we enjoy a "good read" on the computer, still really enjoy having the book. This makes us normal humans. The "modality" of books has been proven over a period of -- what? Thousands of years?
For some people, there's just something about sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and holding the newspaper up for a morning read. For others, their lunchtime wouldn't be complete without the daily crossword puzzle, with the Living section quad-folded just so and the pencil worn to a nub. Many others read in bed, or in their favorite chair... or in the park, away from everything but their story.
The Harry Potter franchise will not risk it's success on making a statement about e-books. It will, and should, be available in print.
Besides, doesn't anybody else get really tired of reading on the computer? After a day full of reading the computer screen, my eyes can sometimes just barely crawl away from the monitor after going through one last Cringely piece or Drudge story. I absolutely can't imagine reading a whole book on a computer.
I agree wholeheartedly, but GNU/Linux has never exactly rolled off the tongue. This is why I recommend a new name for the OS-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Linux, made up of a combination of the names of the two people primarily responsible for it's creation:
Something similar, anyway. It has always been very impressive when a single company takes on the immense task of wiring a large area. And people are always very impressed with it and will pay that company money for the service that can be provided once the network is in place... for a certain amount of time, anyway.
Do you think the government will eventually insist that Citylink open up the network that they created to competitors? Regardless of how good Citylink is, they're still a monopoly, or eventually will be. One can only hope that they'll be a responsible monopoloy.
...for there are many good [people] in this world...
Oh nice... our world is so politically correct that we're going to change Dean Sarrat's words so they might not offend any women? I think they would understand that he said this a long time ago, when higher learning was predominantly a male endevour. Yes, it really was.
If you haven't figured it out yet, he said "good men," not "good people".
Hey, a quote is a quote -- whether you like all of the words or not.
Oh, and by the way, I realize it wasn't the Slashdot poster that made the edits, but rather Vanderbilt University itself.
1) There is no company called "Lindows", "Lindows, Inc", or anything like it registered with the Secretary of State of the Great State of California.
2) The "lindows.com" domain is not registered to any company, but rather to a no-name PO Box is Woodside, CA. I'm not familiar with the area, but I took the liberty of running a MapQuest between those two cities and found that they're 482 miles away. Now THAT'S a commute.
3) Come on, look at the picture of Michael Robertson... isn't that an obvious parody of Steve Jobs?:)
Anyway, you heard this evidence here first, and ReadParse said it.
The difference from radio is enormous, and I struggle to imagine how anybody could make the comparison.
Radio is free. As you probably know, the government licenses broadcasters to use the airwaves, because the bandwidth is so limited (I mean bandwidth in the radio sense). This is also why the goverment tightly regulates that industry, limiting programming and requiring a certain amount of public service, such as news and other public service announcements.
Why would anybody do this? Because it's a fantastic tool that you can't just go out and buy or manufacturer. Within the government restrictions, you can provide whatever programming people want to hear and also play advertisements, which pays for all of the programming, and pays for everything else. Without commercials, radio doesn't exist.
No, you didn't "request" the ad. You turned on the radio and listened to the station's programming. This is not a new arrangement, and you knew the rules going in. Radio stations play commercials... that's the way it is. Before anybody mentions their local "commercial free" station as a response to this, any radio station of that sort only exists because it's a "sister station" of another station that DOES play commercials, and news, and PSAs, and everything else that the government and financial considerations require.
Back to OnStar. Having read the New York Times article, I have a different and more accurate understanding of it then the Slashdot headline provided. This is not as much "ads you didn't request", as it is information that you have specified you are interested in.
I just realized the paramount reason to not patent internet "inventions"... by the time it gets approved, nobody gives a damn about it anymore. This thing was submitted in June of 98, for crying out loud!
It was extremely easy for me to think of several celebrities who I thought probably live in New York City.
For example:
Jerry Seinfeld
Woody Allen
Matthew Broderick
It doesn't take long to come up with 10 or 15 names.
A quick Google search for their name and the word "birthdate" gave me all I needed to find their home address using this site.
Some of them may think that this knowledge is not public, and they're the ones for whom information is most easily available, since celebrity birthdates are very easily found.
This certainly isn't the worst problem with this site. I think private citizens deserve privacy more than celebrities, who did, after all, make the decision to be known publicly, but theirs are the easiest birthdates to find.
Slashdot Mirror
There should have been no headaches for teachers or hesitation in penalizing the students for using misspellings or "net slang". There is a difference between casual conversation and formal usage of your language, and schoolwork is of the latter category.
Some of us don't even use that kind of slang on the internet. The truth is that it was created by people who either cannot type well or who type lazily. Those of us who understand that effective communication is important realize that typing in complete, correctly spelled, and well formed sentences with correct puncuation gets our ideas across in a more accurate way.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we have no spelling or grammatical errors -- it simply means that we try to communicate our ideas using grammar that is correct. It also creates less confusion for us, because we don't have to remember in what context we're writing and "turn on" or "turn off" our grammar rules.
RP
I swear to God I would moderate you up if I could. That's exactly what they should have done, and they're absolute morons if they think this is going to make a dent in MP3 availability of their music.
I love the example of Celine Dion's latest CD, that was apparently rip-proof because it would CRASH any computer that tried to use it. But I have seen MP3s from that CD on Gnutella. When will they realize that they cannot stop it?
My latest pet peeve (and this is almost offtopic) is that I'm having real difficulty ripping audio from my DVDs into MP3 format. I stress: my DVDs that I paid for. I do not intend to burn DVDs and sell them on the black market. I do not intend to burn CDs of the music from my DVDs and sell them on the black market. But I fully intend to rip MP3s from my James Taylor Live DVD and listen to them in my car or on my computer. This is just barely possible, by going through a two or three step process, on Windows only as far as I can tell (my DVD player on my Windows machine broke, so my only DVD drive right now is on my Mac and I don't know if it's even possible on a Mac).
I'm getting really, really pissed off about how the recording industries are trying to control how I use my copies of the recordings that I bought. Ain't it cute how you can fast forward through the FBI warning on VHS, but now with the latest technology you have to watch it.
OK, I think I'm done with my rant now.
It's Philips with one L... yes, spelling counts in jokes, too. And a little research might have yielded the name of a company that actually produced eight-track tapes (such as RCA), instead of Philips, which decidedly did not, further enhancing the humor.
Just tryin' to help a comic out.
but the article states that you can modify it and run the modified version on your machine, you just can't redistribute the modified code.
Nice selective clipboard. The article does not say that, it says:
"You could modify it if you wanted to, and run it on your own computer, but you could not distribute a modified version" (emphasis added).
The "could" here refers to past tense... before he sold it.
Detective Bart Beavers, working on behalf of Buckeye Express. Now that is funny, and I'm not afraid to admit it.
Ah, indeed it DOES support wildcards. Something told me that I had checked and had found that it did not. I'm now glad that I got moderated down a point (for being "overrated") after having reached the elusive 5, so as not to get too embarrased in public about that.
:)
Yes, you're right -- no substitute for regular expressions. But definitely useful for all my brat pack searches
Thanks,
John
A big part of Google's strength is in the supported search syntax, most notably that you can search for phrases instead of just keywords, that you can filter OUT certain phrases or keywords, and that you can search for content on specific sites, or NOT on specific sites. The next step for me and probably a lot of other Unix/Perl types is regular expression support.
For example, let's say I'm looking for 80's brat pack member Anthony Michael Hall (not that I would do such a think), but I can't remember his middle name. Looking for "Anthony Hall" will do me little if any good, but looking for "Anthony \w+ Hall" could do the trick nicely.
Another example is that the user can provide their own limited fuzzy searching, by searching for optional prefixes and suffixes along with the root, instead of having to get the word or phrase exactly as it's indexed.
Thanks,
John
The more you know about pool, the more you realize how much more there is to the game than the angles, which are truly the easy part. It doesn't take long to develop your own way to see the angles and sink the balls, but of course you'll still miss because you get the mechanics wrong in your arm, or you miscue because you forgot to chalk, or any number of reasons.
:)
Then there's cueball action... "english" on the ball, top, draw, etc -- not only knowing how to apply various types of english, but knowing when and why. Of course, many times the "best" shot on the table, meaning the easiest shot, I guess, is not the shot you need to make and, depending on the game, it's also a foul. The most common professional game of 9 Ball, for example, requires the player to shoot the balls in numerical order, which means that, after the 3 ball goes, it doesn't matter how good the shot is on the 7 ball, because you have to shoot the 4 ball, no matter WHERE it is. You at least have to touch it, which in that game sometimes requires a fantastic shot.
So, it's no surprise that we have technology that can assist us with the most elementary aspect of the game. And it just proves that there's no substitute for learning the game through experience... not yet, anyway
RP
The official movie site link is here. The original left out the hyphen.
How weird is THAT? And it wasn't even intended. I happened to post it yesterday, and today it's posted. Cool.
This is NOT offtopic, by the way. I'm referring to the posting of this very story.
Yeah, I think that's an awful thing to do. Imagine the free-for-all on your own computer when you die:
"We're publishing John's porn collection, which we recovered from his computer, having used a Cray to decrypt the stuff, in a 36-volume retrospective of all that, for whatever reason, turned him on"
No thanks. Remember, if you think you're gonna drop dead, don't forget to format your hard drive first.
RP
Maybe they ought to call themselves "ThinkFiftyDollars"... their name kind of suggests that it's free!
RP
I have what I think amounts to an interesting theory disproving any possibility of time travel. Perhaps somebody else has already brought this up (not necessarily on Slashdot), but here goes.
I believe that, in this case, "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". In other words, the fact that we don't already know about time travel is evidence that time travel will never be possible. This gets confusing quickly, but if time travel ever becomes possible, somebody will surely travel to what is our past. While early attempts might be "covert" (a la "Back to the Future") to prevent altering the future, this could only be successful for so long. Even if attempts continued to be made to keep it a secret, somebody at some point would have either told somebody that they met in the past or there would have been rumors or something.
But all references that we hear to the possibility of time travel are based in the future, such as this story about a guy who's "going to do it". Of course, we all know he will fail, because otherwise, we would have already known of his success. At the very least, if he was to ever be successful, we would not be living in a world where he was trying to travel in time to save his dad from cigarettes, but rather in a world where his dad had been saved from cigarettes by his son.
In fact, if time travel were to ever be successful, we would have always known about it, and the quest for time travel would not exist.
It gets more interesting and more confusing as you think about it...
RP
Oh, I forgot to mention....
There's also a great little instant messaging client available for OS X (called Fire) that connects you to all the major services at once, and it has built-in GPG support. And very good support, too.
I'm not yet to the point that I feel I need to either sign or encrypt my instant messages, but that time may come, and it's nice to know that Fire is ready.
RP
I'm one of those many recent OS X converts who just bought my first Mac, after years of having used Unix and Windows.
PGP is something I've played with over the years, like a lot of geeks, but never used religiously. But I decided a few months ago that it was something I should start using regularly, so I sought out a mail client with built-in PGP (or variant) support. I found a neat little (non-free) Windows e-mail client called The Bat! (that's their exclamation point, not mine), which had not only built-in support, but you can configure it to use PGP, GnuPG, and even their own OpenPGP implementation. That and many other cool features persuaded me to buy that e-mail client, after which time I decided to throw the switch and begin signing all e-mail that I send.
Along the way I discovered WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray), which is a decent little frontend for GPG. Remember, GPG is a backend -- how you interface with it is up to you.
The came my Titanium PowerBook. I got it for all the reasons mentioned around Slashdot and elsewhere, but I didn't really expect to find cool things like a good GPG frontend, let alone e-mail with GPG support. Boy was I wrong! I went to the GPG site and found a link to the Mac GPG site, which ports GPG to OS X. Not only the backend, but a frontend that integrates with the "Finder" (that's Mac-speak for the "Explorer" equivalent), right in the "Services" menu (which is much like the global right-click menu in Windows Exploror.
But that's not all! I saw further down on the same page that somebody else has written an extension to the OS X default mail client (which ain't as bad as you might think) that provides very good GUI GPG support for mail.
So, even though switching over to the Mac isn't the easiest thing in the world (I say that as I sit here typing on my Windows machine for reasons I won't go into), I can say that GPG is among the least of my problems.
RP
Most of us, no matter how much we enjoy a "good read" on the computer, still really enjoy having the book. This makes us normal humans. The "modality" of books has been proven over a period of -- what? Thousands of years?
For some people, there's just something about sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and holding the newspaper up for a morning read. For others, their lunchtime wouldn't be complete without the daily crossword puzzle, with the Living section quad-folded just so and the pencil worn to a nub. Many others read in bed, or in their favorite chair... or in the park, away from everything but their story.
The Harry Potter franchise will not risk it's success on making a statement about e-books. It will, and should, be available in print.
Besides, doesn't anybody else get really tired of reading on the computer? After a day full of reading the computer screen, my eyes can sometimes just barely crawl away from the monitor after going through one last Cringely piece or Drudge story. I absolutely can't imagine reading a whole book on a computer.
RP
I agree wholeheartedly, but GNU/Linux has never exactly rolled off the tongue. This is why I recommend a new name for the OS-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Linux, made up of a combination of the names of the two people primarily responsible for it's creation:
Stalman + Linux =
"Stalin"
This line intentionally left blank
Something similar, anyway. It has always been very impressive when a single company takes on the immense task of wiring a large area. And people are always very impressed with it and will pay that company money for the service that can be provided once the network is in place... for a certain amount of time, anyway.
Do you think the government will eventually insist that Citylink open up the network that they created to competitors? Regardless of how good Citylink is, they're still a monopoly, or eventually will be. One can only hope that they'll be a responsible monopoloy.
RP
...for there are many good [people] in this world...
Oh nice... our world is so politically correct that we're going to change Dean Sarrat's words so they might not offend any women? I think they would understand that he said this a long time ago, when higher learning was predominantly a male endevour. Yes, it really was.
If you haven't figured it out yet, he said "good men," not "good people".
Hey, a quote is a quote -- whether you like all of the words or not.
Oh, and by the way, I realize it wasn't the Slashdot poster that made the edits, but rather Vanderbilt University itself.
RP
1) There is no company called "Lindows", "Lindows, Inc", or anything like it registered with the Secretary of State of the Great State of California.
:)
2) The "lindows.com" domain is not registered to any company, but rather to a no-name PO Box is Woodside, CA. I'm not familiar with the area, but I took the liberty of running a MapQuest between those two cities and found that they're 482 miles away. Now THAT'S a commute.
3) Come on, look at the picture of Michael Robertson... isn't that an obvious parody of Steve Jobs?
Anyway, you heard this evidence here first, and ReadParse said it.
Later,
RP
What's this I hear about Xbox SQL? I didn't even know MySQL had been ported yet. That was quick. Can't wait until DB2 comes out for the Gamecube.
The difference from radio is enormous, and I struggle to imagine how anybody could make the comparison.
Radio is free. As you probably know, the government licenses broadcasters to use the airwaves, because the bandwidth is so limited (I mean bandwidth in the radio sense). This is also why the goverment tightly regulates that industry, limiting programming and requiring a certain amount of public service, such as news and other public service announcements.
Why would anybody do this? Because it's a fantastic tool that you can't just go out and buy or manufacturer. Within the government restrictions, you can provide whatever programming people want to hear and also play advertisements, which pays for all of the programming, and pays for everything else. Without commercials, radio doesn't exist.
No, you didn't "request" the ad. You turned on the radio and listened to the station's programming. This is not a new arrangement, and you knew the rules going in. Radio stations play commercials... that's the way it is. Before anybody mentions their local "commercial free" station as a response to this, any radio station of that sort only exists because it's a "sister station" of another station that DOES play commercials, and news, and PSAs, and everything else that the government and financial considerations require.
Back to OnStar. Having read the New York Times article, I have a different and more accurate understanding of it then the Slashdot headline provided. This is not as much "ads you didn't request", as it is information that you have specified you are interested in.
I just realized the paramount reason to not patent internet "inventions"... by the time it gets approved, nobody gives a damn about it anymore. This thing was submitted in June of 98, for crying out loud!
RP
For example:
It doesn't take long to come up with 10 or 15 names.
A quick Google search for their name and the word "birthdate" gave me all I needed to find their home address using this site.
Some of them may think that this knowledge is not public, and they're the ones for whom information is most easily available, since celebrity birthdates are very easily found.
This certainly isn't the worst problem with this site. I think private citizens deserve privacy more than celebrities, who did, after all, make the decision to be known publicly, but theirs are the easiest birthdates to find.
The link should point to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is different that the Eisenhower Fellowships.
Cheers,
RP