I'd encourage you to look at Science News. It's about $54 a year for a weekly magazine, which is twice as much as Scientific American. It's weekly, and I think around 16 pages, so you're getting only 64 pages a month, but there's a lot less advertising than SciAm.
But more importantly, the science reporting is a lot better. They usually report from the original journal articles in peer-reviewed journals, or from scientific conferences. When a science story comes out in the news I scan it but I don't believe it until it comes out in Science News. They don't just rewrite press releases (like most newspapers) and they certainly don't take the Wired approach of presenting scientific advances as being available at Target any day now.
Each issue contains two long-format articles that do run closer to the Scientific American model, which I think of as being more forward-looking than actual news. Sometimes they'll use them to examine one reasonably-current topic (like DNA testing) in depth, presenting an overview of the field and where the next likely advances are coming. Not blue-sky stuff, but reporting on the state of scientific research.
But the most important thing about Science News for me is that it's a weekly look at real science conducted by scientists, written for technically-minded laymen. The articles are usually around a half-page, containing a summary of the research. It's where the real work in science gets done. Waiting for it to come out in Scientific American is often months, which is dull for the kind of everyday advances made by scientists who do work (as opposed to the people who wonder if it means we're going to have time travel).
I read both SciAm and Science News, but the latter I read almost immediately whereas the former I scan and maybe get back to later.
It's mostly a Longhorn thing, though as with all things Longhorn bits of it seem to get retrofitted into XP.
Basically, it's the old adage "Put all of your eggs in one basket, first making sure it's a really, really good basket." This "new data security scheme" is the "eggs in one basket" part; the Next Generation Secure Computing Base is the "make the it's a really, really good basket" part.
The theoretical aspects are solid: compartment data like crazy, use lots of crypto to keep them separated, and try to make it easy enough to use that people don't end up putting everything in one compartment. Whether you actually trust MS to implement that theory is another matter.
I'd say there's a difference between occasionally showing a taped game to your friends without the express written permission of Major League Baseball and making the latest Britney Spears album available to ten million people on Kazaa.
If your friends were busy bootlegging movies, you had more industrious friends than I did. Most of mine found it easier to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Even so, the scale of the infringement is different.
The point with photocopiers is very real. There was talk of banning photocopiers for precisely that reason, until somebody figured out that for more than short extracts (which come under fair use), it was generally more trouble and money than it was worth to Xerox a book.
An iPod is a technology with clearly non-infringing uses. (The iPod in particular, because it's designed with the express purpose of playing bought, rather than copied, music). I think that the RIAA is looking to cut off the problem at its source, by blocking the P2P exchanges, rather than at the leaves.
Any legal standard created that is based on use of a technology rather than its inherent functionality will be a very weak standard.
Not gonna disagree with you there. But sometimes that's the best the courts can do. They're facing a problem where the infractions (copyright infringements) are very real and very common. Whether this would actually help, I can't say. Law is rarely about perfect or absolute solutions. They muddle along as best they can.
Re:Keyboard included at your house
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Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I had thought it did, but a quick scan of Apple's web site didn't make that clear.
It doesn't much change the issue, since the Wife Acceptance Factor probably has more to do with the $250 monitor than anything else; twenty bucks either way isn't the real problem.
The real problem would be if he has to spend as much again getting the latest versions of the MS Office Suite, since that's one thing he couldn't re-use from his old PC. He's got options on that score, but they affect the WAF.
Keyboard included at your house
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Odds are you already own a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The keyboard and mouse are USB, and the monitor output requires a $20 dongle. The machine itself is $499, and the dongle kicks the price up over $500, but it's still close.
That of course assumes you're retiring some computer recent enough to have a USB keyboard and mouse, a computer which is still probably usable for most purposes. So it may take another two or three years before it's time for a new computer for you. At that time you can get a brand-new keyboard and brand-new mouse and brand-new monitor, or you can increase the Wife Acceptance Factor by claiming you're saving a few hundred bucks by reusing the old pieces.
Monitors in particular haven't improved much lately. You probably even have a CRT sitting around gathering dust. Unless you have a particular sensitivity, remember that people used CRTs for years without too many ill effects. LCD screens were a luxury until really recently.
Why people seem to equate that to a need to keep keep from developing P2P applications is beyond me.
Because in general the courts have decided that the government has an interest in preventing crimes, not just punishing them.
That means that sometimes they'll make activities illegal even when they don't harm anybody. Owning an unregistered gun is usually illegal, even if you don't shoot anybody. Driving while intoxicated is illegal even if you don't hit anybody. Owning cocaine has legitimate medical purposes, but try telling the court that you have a gram to fix nosebleeds. Lockpicks and other tools often used in the commission of crimes are illegal in some places.
If they find that a bit of technology is used primarily for illegal purposes, they'll make the technology itself illegal. It's not a very libertarian attitude, and in the cases I cited there are plenty of people who would say that the court is wrong. And it certainly conflicts with your rights in a strict-constructionist sense. But the courts have often found that "insure domestic Tranquility" can include preventative measures.
So feel free to disagree with it, but their reasoning shouldn't be totally opaque.
Unfortunately, the only tool really before the Court is an overturning of the Betamax doctrine, which was decided with a much more sympathetic defendent.
Or explaining in what way this is different from Betamax. The cases are similar in a general sense (a technology with potential copyright-infringement possibilities but also legitimate uses). But they're different in balance.
The Betamax technology already had a large installed base of users who were using it primarily for time-shifting. Although it could be used to copy movies, it was expensive (it took two VCRs) and the copies were somewhat degraded. It was also really slow, and you couldn't mass-produce copies easily. Sony wasn't making a big profit by supporting illegal copying; banning Betamax would do big harm to Sony and its legitimate customers and little good to the movie producers.
In this case it can be argued that the existing P2P programs are used primarily for copyright infringement. These companies appear to be making their existence largely on the backs of the copyright owners.
I'd hate to see them have to make this distinction, because it causes a lot of grief in the gray areas. BitTorrent in particular has important non-infringing uses, particularly in the distribution of Linux binaries, and nobody's making a profit off BitTorrent even when it's used illegally.
If the court ends up saying, "Grokster illegal, Betamax legal, BitTorrent just barely legal", they're going to have to elucidate some standard for future cases to judge by. I don't envy them that job.
Yeah, they'd botch it. Not gonna argue with you on that one.
I agree that trying to make the old characters synch up would be hard. Star Trek is never about the 22nd/23rd/24th centuries; it's always about today. So having "young" Kirk have more mature attitudes (by our standards) than "old" Kirk would be disconcerting.
Besides, they'd have the same problem that they did on Enterprise: you can't place a character in real jeopardy if you already know that they survive. That's supposedly why they renamed T'Pau to T'Pol. Personally, I'd have loved to have seen the great leader of Vulcan as a young woman, to see what made her great, and screw the suspense factor, but they saw it otherwise. And then wrote absolutely nothing interesting for her to do.
Still, I like the idea of setting a series at Star Fleet Academy. There are a billion ways to do it wrong, and only a few to do it right, but there are some good opportunities there. Just like both Voyager and Enterprise had good opportunities that rotted behind unimaginative plotting, ratings-grabbing, and a failure to understand what Trek really is.
So, sadly, as a Trek fan from before the proliferation, I gotta agree: let it rest.
I used GIMP a lot, but until it gets an equivalent of the Photoshop Mesh Warp tool (one that doesn't require a C compiler to install), I'm missing a critical tool.
Too late, I'm afraid. McCain-Feingold is only the latest in a series of attempts to change the way political money is raised in this country. That's where the matching funds system came from in the first place.
With more eyes thrown at the problem, it takes less and less time to spot the loopholes in any new system. This one didn't even get through an entire election cycle.
Arguably the right thing to do is to scrap every limit on campaigning and go right back to where we were, which still has all the original problems (too much money coming from limited sources to which politicians were then beholden) but at least has the virtue of being simpler to understand and less obviously limiting of the right to free political speech.
I don't want them to accept shoddy programming. I want everybody to realize that the users are going to be stupid and program accordingly.
It's astounding how much extra work it is to program for the dumbest user. You often have to re-think vast swaths of code.
I'm not excusing Microsoft for not doing that work. I'm saying that the users are there on computers, every day, and that a server-only test is not a true indicator of security. Windows makes it easy to run a trojan. I don't know how hard it is on OS X. Prove to me that it's harder to convince an OS X user to run a trojan than a Windows user and I'll say that's damn fine security.
Each day, we will scan both Powermacs for the presence of an OS X native executable virus, using a commercially available virus scanning utility.
So if I create a virus that your scanning software can't detect I get squat?
Only a benign, harmless virus may win. Any virus entered in the contest that cause harm or damage in any way will be disqualified.
"In any way" sounds dubious, since anything I do to your system is potentially harmful. The odds are good that I'm displacing something if I'm planning to spread my virus. If to get in I have to replace some crucial shared library, I get squat?
One last point: the vast number of Windows machines are malware laden because of stupid users, at least for the latest versions. There were some ways (notably SASSER) of getting into a stock system without user intervention, and the sheer number of systems makes it easy for such a thing to spread quickly. That's more a function of the number than of the particular ease with which the system is broken; I assume it took months to write the worm. Even security-nightmare IE and Outlook aren't a problem if you don't use them.
I'm generally more concerned about trojans (and the fact that Windows makes it easy for users to accept one and hard to contain and remove it) than about machines just sitting there.
Hey, props to having confidence in the machines; I hope you win your bet. But it's a long way from proving the inherent security of OS X.
It doesn't mean you get better color, but it does mean you get a better movie. The guys who digitally drop the characters into the backgrounds have more freedom to create what they want, since they can more easily make distinctions between foreground and background based on color.
Which means that they spend less time chroma-keying (picking out the background colors) and more time making movies. As with any big project, the finished product is filled with flaws that only the actual creator can put his finger on, but the overall sense of polish makes a big difference to the feeling you get when you watch the movie.
You get the same effect writing software: all those little hacks you had to do to get it out the door aren't immediately visible to the user, but they'll piss you off every time you look at them.
The changes aren't even necessarily subtle: they may have to substantially alter a shot if they can't get the background to drop out properly. You wouldn't notice without being in the editing booth, but you'll probably like the movie that much more for getting more of the director's vision onto the screen.
I'm a director [for the stage] myself, and though it's very different from film, we're constantly asking "how much can I get away with?" rather than "what can I create?" You tell yourself that the audience won't notice that you couldn't find the right prop, or that you didn't have time to get rid of the dim spot in the lights, but it pisses you the hell off and looks unprofessional even if the audience couldn't elucidate the difference.
It would be interesting to have a director go into detail on a commentary track to say, "Well, we would have done X, Y, and Z, but we couldn't because the technology was too limited." The closest you get is the re-released Star Wars movies. Well, maybe it's not such a good idea after all.
I hope that they're at least tracking complaints against stores and banninating frequent offenders.
If your complaint doesn't come with, "Oh, we're so sorry, we'll call the police immediately," it may be because they're worried about people with a grudge. That doesn't make ignoring illegal activity through the site right, but it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to wait for a second or third complaint before taking serious action. And they're probably not going to tell you if you're the first, third, or thousandth complaint.
Out of curiosity, have you ever found that some of these retailers disappear from Amazon's site? Even if they do it's not evidence of bannination so much as criminals simply moving on, but still, I'd like to think that Amazon isn't completely ignoring illegal activity. It's bad for business: some people are already reluctant to use eBay because they're afraid of getting in trouble.
I'd say that's almost completely true, with one caveat: in order for you to jump, you have to apply a force to something which gives you an upward acceleration, if only momentary. You go from a vertical velocity of zero to a positive one. But the instant you leave the ground, your acceleration is purely towards the ground.
I will definitely have to read the book. I wonder if it will be able to convince me that the product actually has a marketing niche. (Boo on Kamen for not trying to figure that out first.) It costs a lot of money, it doesn't replace a car, and there's a lot of places it can't go without more preparation (like taking it on the bus.) It can certainly help out people who walk for a living, like some postmen, but I'm not sure that's sufficient market. Honda hasn't stolen the idea, and I bet that's part of the reason.
Well, that's what the book is for. The idea is certainly damn cool, and I wouldn't turn one down.
Re:Steve Jobs, great instincts
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Re-Imagining Apple
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That is interesting, though I'm not sure he nailed the reason why Segway failed. He never mentioned the price. If it were free they'd be all over the place; they're at least as cool as an iPod even without more funky design. As far as I can tell it was too expensive for what it provided. I just can't imagine enough places to take it.
Who knows? Maybe if it had been designed more innovatively it would have caught more eyes than it did. Certainly if they'd taken his manufacturing suggestions it would have been cheaper, and that might have been sufficient (though I can't imagine knocking off the factor of 5 to 10 that would have been required).
Ultimately I've got to give him props for the crucial observation that it simply wasn't the right thing: "You don't have a great product yet!" Well, it would have been great for free, in the Jobs definition of "insanely great", even without more style. But he was clearly righter than everybody else in the room.
I take it you're figuring "birthday" to mean "birth date". So out of 10,000 people, lets figure that they're evenly distributed over 70 years, 365 days to a year, brings us to....4 people.
Your 1 in 13,000 people with a given birth date assumes a clustering around 35 (13,000 = 365 * 35; it took me a while to figure that out.)
So I take it you're figuring something like (1-(1/13k))^10k. Yes? I get.46, which means a 54% chance of uniqueness, which isn't really all that close to 87% but I guess it on the right order. But if I figure it with N=20k rather than N=10k, I get pretty much exactly 87%.
Correct me if I'm wrong; stat was never my strong suit.
Still, I'm not convinced that the article meant "birth date" rather than "birth day", and the uniqueness gets a lot less likely if you figure 365 unique days rather than 13,000 of them; the odds of being unique goes to nearly 0. Exponentiation does that.
The Robert Faigles version is pretty good. But it's poetry, not prose, as is the nearly-as-good Robert Graves version.
Unfortunately I kind of overstated my case in the grandparent post. Some passages, especially the action-adventure ones, translate brilliantly. The long sections of "Then this guy came from over here with his 200 warriors in a big black boat, and than that guy with 1,000 warriors in a green boat..." sound better chanted in Greek but there's not much to do with them in English.
What I'd really like is to get Seamus Heaney to do one; he did a bang-up job on Beowulf and another on Antigone. Why not take ten years out of your life to produce yet another Iliad?
Even beyond that, the movie Troy starts long before the Iliad starts and ends well after the Iliad ends. The Trojan Horse, as famous as it is, doesn't come from the Iliad; neither does the theft of Helen.
The legend is quite independent of that one particular poem, and has historical relevance to boot. There really was a Troy; there's good reason to believe a battle was held there that razed it to the ground.
They were trying to tell a fictionalized version of history. They took many sources, of which the Iliad was only one, and not all of them were legends. They left out the gods precisely because they were telling history rather than myth. The gods were mythical, but there's good reason to believe that Achilles was very real, and more realistically portrayed in the movie as a great warrior than as a man protected by a bath in the Styx.
Then they modified the stories for the screen, and yeah, I think they kinda yucked it up when they did so. I wasn't the only one in the theater who said, "What?" when Menelaus died. (Nearly the only one, but not quite.) I'm sure they wanted a sort of closure they couldn't get by telling, say, the rest of the story of Agamemmnon, so they just killed him off there.
I kinda liked it. I liked the nods to the Iliad. I loved Eric Bana and Peter O'Toole. I liked the idea of telling the story as history rather than myth. Not the best film I saw that year, but hardly ranking (as Roger Ebert did) with Alexander. Now _there_ was a piece of historical crap.
Slashdot Mirror
You can shout at the waves but they're not turning back. Give up for another twelve hours and come back tomorrow.
At least this year they're linking to other people's jokes. A few years ago they did the deliberate dup gag and tell me THAT didn't get old fast.
I'd encourage you to look at Science News. It's about $54 a year for a weekly magazine, which is twice as much as Scientific American. It's weekly, and I think around 16 pages, so you're getting only 64 pages a month, but there's a lot less advertising than SciAm.
But more importantly, the science reporting is a lot better. They usually report from the original journal articles in peer-reviewed journals, or from scientific conferences. When a science story comes out in the news I scan it but I don't believe it until it comes out in Science News. They don't just rewrite press releases (like most newspapers) and they certainly don't take the Wired approach of presenting scientific advances as being available at Target any day now.
Each issue contains two long-format articles that do run closer to the Scientific American model, which I think of as being more forward-looking than actual news. Sometimes they'll use them to examine one reasonably-current topic (like DNA testing) in depth, presenting an overview of the field and where the next likely advances are coming. Not blue-sky stuff, but reporting on the state of scientific research.
But the most important thing about Science News for me is that it's a weekly look at real science conducted by scientists, written for technically-minded laymen. The articles are usually around a half-page, containing a summary of the research. It's where the real work in science gets done. Waiting for it to come out in Scientific American is often months, which is dull for the kind of everyday advances made by scientists who do work (as opposed to the people who wonder if it means we're going to have time travel).
I read both SciAm and Science News, but the latter I read almost immediately whereas the former I scan and maybe get back to later.
They're calling it the Next Generation Secure Computing Base.
It's mostly a Longhorn thing, though as with all things Longhorn bits of it seem to get retrofitted into XP.
Basically, it's the old adage "Put all of your eggs in one basket, first making sure it's a really, really good basket." This "new data security scheme" is the "eggs in one basket" part; the Next Generation Secure Computing Base is the "make the it's a really, really good basket" part.
The theoretical aspects are solid: compartment data like crazy, use lots of crypto to keep them separated, and try to make it easy enough to use that people don't end up putting everything in one compartment. Whether you actually trust MS to implement that theory is another matter.
And what debts he's unable to pay are swallowed by the various creditors. Who then pass it on to their customers in the form of higher prices.
*Sigh*
That's where I got the $20 figure. I noticed it under "Build to order options" and missed the bit about it being included under "Ports".
(I had thought it was included, but I'd forgotten and went to that page to check.)
I'd say there's a difference between occasionally showing a taped game to your friends without the express written permission of Major League Baseball and making the latest Britney Spears album available to ten million people on Kazaa.
If your friends were busy bootlegging movies, you had more industrious friends than I did. Most of mine found it easier to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Even so, the scale of the infringement is different.
The point with photocopiers is very real. There was talk of banning photocopiers for precisely that reason, until somebody figured out that for more than short extracts (which come under fair use), it was generally more trouble and money than it was worth to Xerox a book.
An iPod is a technology with clearly non-infringing uses. (The iPod in particular, because it's designed with the express purpose of playing bought, rather than copied, music). I think that the RIAA is looking to cut off the problem at its source, by blocking the P2P exchanges, rather than at the leaves.
Any legal standard created that is based on use of a technology rather than its inherent functionality will be a very weak standard.
Not gonna disagree with you there. But sometimes that's the best the courts can do. They're facing a problem where the infractions (copyright infringements) are very real and very common. Whether this would actually help, I can't say. Law is rarely about perfect or absolute solutions. They muddle along as best they can.
Yeah, I had thought it did, but a quick scan of Apple's web site didn't make that clear.
It doesn't much change the issue, since the Wife Acceptance Factor probably has more to do with the $250 monitor than anything else; twenty bucks either way isn't the real problem.
The real problem would be if he has to spend as much again getting the latest versions of the MS Office Suite, since that's one thing he couldn't re-use from his old PC. He's got options on that score, but they affect the WAF.
Odds are you already own a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The keyboard and mouse are USB, and the monitor output requires a $20 dongle. The machine itself is $499, and the dongle kicks the price up over $500, but it's still close.
That of course assumes you're retiring some computer recent enough to have a USB keyboard and mouse, a computer which is still probably usable for most purposes. So it may take another two or three years before it's time for a new computer for you. At that time you can get a brand-new keyboard and brand-new mouse and brand-new monitor, or you can increase the Wife Acceptance Factor by claiming you're saving a few hundred bucks by reusing the old pieces.
Monitors in particular haven't improved much lately. You probably even have a CRT sitting around gathering dust. Unless you have a particular sensitivity, remember that people used CRTs for years without too many ill effects. LCD screens were a luxury until really recently.
Why people seem to equate that to a need to keep keep from developing P2P applications is beyond me.
Because in general the courts have decided that the government has an interest in preventing crimes, not just punishing them.
That means that sometimes they'll make activities illegal even when they don't harm anybody. Owning an unregistered gun is usually illegal, even if you don't shoot anybody. Driving while intoxicated is illegal even if you don't hit anybody. Owning cocaine has legitimate medical purposes, but try telling the court that you have a gram to fix nosebleeds. Lockpicks and other tools often used in the commission of crimes are illegal in some places.
If they find that a bit of technology is used primarily for illegal purposes, they'll make the technology itself illegal. It's not a very libertarian attitude, and in the cases I cited there are plenty of people who would say that the court is wrong. And it certainly conflicts with your rights in a strict-constructionist sense. But the courts have often found that "insure domestic Tranquility" can include preventative measures.
So feel free to disagree with it, but their reasoning shouldn't be totally opaque.
Unfortunately, the only tool really before the Court is an overturning of the Betamax doctrine, which was decided with a much more sympathetic defendent.
Or explaining in what way this is different from Betamax. The cases are similar in a general sense (a technology with potential copyright-infringement possibilities but also legitimate uses). But they're different in balance.
The Betamax technology already had a large installed base of users who were using it primarily for time-shifting. Although it could be used to copy movies, it was expensive (it took two VCRs) and the copies were somewhat degraded. It was also really slow, and you couldn't mass-produce copies easily. Sony wasn't making a big profit by supporting illegal copying; banning Betamax would do big harm to Sony and its legitimate customers and little good to the movie producers.
In this case it can be argued that the existing P2P programs are used primarily for copyright infringement. These companies appear to be making their existence largely on the backs of the copyright owners.
I'd hate to see them have to make this distinction, because it causes a lot of grief in the gray areas. BitTorrent in particular has important non-infringing uses, particularly in the distribution of Linux binaries, and nobody's making a profit off BitTorrent even when it's used illegally.
If the court ends up saying, "Grokster illegal, Betamax legal, BitTorrent just barely legal", they're going to have to elucidate some standard for future cases to judge by. I don't envy them that job.
I'm starting to wonder if trolls are deliberately submitting dups to see if they can get them past the Slashdot editors.
Yeah, they'd botch it. Not gonna argue with you on that one.
I agree that trying to make the old characters synch up would be hard. Star Trek is never about the 22nd/23rd/24th centuries; it's always about today. So having "young" Kirk have more mature attitudes (by our standards) than "old" Kirk would be disconcerting.
Besides, they'd have the same problem that they did on Enterprise: you can't place a character in real jeopardy if you already know that they survive. That's supposedly why they renamed T'Pau to T'Pol. Personally, I'd have loved to have seen the great leader of Vulcan as a young woman, to see what made her great, and screw the suspense factor, but they saw it otherwise. And then wrote absolutely nothing interesting for her to do.
Still, I like the idea of setting a series at Star Fleet Academy. There are a billion ways to do it wrong, and only a few to do it right, but there are some good opportunities there. Just like both Voyager and Enterprise had good opportunities that rotted behind unimaginative plotting, ratings-grabbing, and a failure to understand what Trek really is.
So, sadly, as a Trek fan from before the proliferation, I gotta agree: let it rest.
I used GIMP a lot, but until it gets an equivalent of the Photoshop Mesh Warp tool (one that doesn't require a C compiler to install), I'm missing a critical tool.
Too late, I'm afraid. McCain-Feingold is only the latest in a series of attempts to change the way political money is raised in this country. That's where the matching funds system came from in the first place.
With more eyes thrown at the problem, it takes less and less time to spot the loopholes in any new system. This one didn't even get through an entire election cycle.
Arguably the right thing to do is to scrap every limit on campaigning and go right back to where we were, which still has all the original problems (too much money coming from limited sources to which politicians were then beholden) but at least has the virtue of being simpler to understand and less obviously limiting of the right to free political speech.
I don't want them to accept shoddy programming. I want everybody to realize that the users are going to be stupid and program accordingly.
It's astounding how much extra work it is to program for the dumbest user. You often have to re-think vast swaths of code.
I'm not excusing Microsoft for not doing that work. I'm saying that the users are there on computers, every day, and that a server-only test is not a true indicator of security. Windows makes it easy to run a trojan. I don't know how hard it is on OS X. Prove to me that it's harder to convince an OS X user to run a trojan than a Windows user and I'll say that's damn fine security.
Each day, we will scan both Powermacs for the presence of an OS X native executable virus, using a commercially available virus scanning utility.
So if I create a virus that your scanning software can't detect I get squat?
Only a benign, harmless virus may win. Any virus entered in the contest that cause harm or damage in any way will be disqualified.
"In any way" sounds dubious, since anything I do to your system is potentially harmful. The odds are good that I'm displacing something if I'm planning to spread my virus. If to get in I have to replace some crucial shared library, I get squat?
One last point: the vast number of Windows machines are malware laden because of stupid users, at least for the latest versions. There were some ways (notably SASSER) of getting into a stock system without user intervention, and the sheer number of systems makes it easy for such a thing to spread quickly. That's more a function of the number than of the particular ease with which the system is broken; I assume it took months to write the worm. Even security-nightmare IE and Outlook aren't a problem if you don't use them.
I'm generally more concerned about trojans (and the fact that Windows makes it easy for users to accept one and hard to contain and remove it) than about machines just sitting there.
Hey, props to having confidence in the machines; I hope you win your bet. But it's a long way from proving the inherent security of OS X.
It doesn't mean you get better color, but it does mean you get a better movie. The guys who digitally drop the characters into the backgrounds have more freedom to create what they want, since they can more easily make distinctions between foreground and background based on color.
Which means that they spend less time chroma-keying (picking out the background colors) and more time making movies. As with any big project, the finished product is filled with flaws that only the actual creator can put his finger on, but the overall sense of polish makes a big difference to the feeling you get when you watch the movie.
You get the same effect writing software: all those little hacks you had to do to get it out the door aren't immediately visible to the user, but they'll piss you off every time you look at them.
The changes aren't even necessarily subtle: they may have to substantially alter a shot if they can't get the background to drop out properly. You wouldn't notice without being in the editing booth, but you'll probably like the movie that much more for getting more of the director's vision onto the screen.
I'm a director [for the stage] myself, and though it's very different from film, we're constantly asking "how much can I get away with?" rather than "what can I create?" You tell yourself that the audience won't notice that you couldn't find the right prop, or that you didn't have time to get rid of the dim spot in the lights, but it pisses you the hell off and looks unprofessional even if the audience couldn't elucidate the difference.
It would be interesting to have a director go into detail on a commentary track to say, "Well, we would have done X, Y, and Z, but we couldn't because the technology was too limited." The closest you get is the re-released Star Wars movies. Well, maybe it's not such a good idea after all.
I hope that they're at least tracking complaints against stores and banninating frequent offenders.
If your complaint doesn't come with, "Oh, we're so sorry, we'll call the police immediately," it may be because they're worried about people with a grudge. That doesn't make ignoring illegal activity through the site right, but it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to wait for a second or third complaint before taking serious action. And they're probably not going to tell you if you're the first, third, or thousandth complaint.
Out of curiosity, have you ever found that some of these retailers disappear from Amazon's site? Even if they do it's not evidence of bannination so much as criminals simply moving on, but still, I'd like to think that Amazon isn't completely ignoring illegal activity. It's bad for business: some people are already reluctant to use eBay because they're afraid of getting in trouble.
I'd say that's almost completely true, with one caveat: in order for you to jump, you have to apply a force to something which gives you an upward acceleration, if only momentary. You go from a vertical velocity of zero to a positive one. But the instant you leave the ground, your acceleration is purely towards the ground.
I will definitely have to read the book. I wonder if it will be able to convince me that the product actually has a marketing niche. (Boo on Kamen for not trying to figure that out first.) It costs a lot of money, it doesn't replace a car, and there's a lot of places it can't go without more preparation (like taking it on the bus.) It can certainly help out people who walk for a living, like some postmen, but I'm not sure that's sufficient market. Honda hasn't stolen the idea, and I bet that's part of the reason.
Well, that's what the book is for. The idea is certainly damn cool, and I wouldn't turn one down.
That is interesting, though I'm not sure he nailed the reason why Segway failed. He never mentioned the price. If it were free they'd be all over the place; they're at least as cool as an iPod even without more funky design. As far as I can tell it was too expensive for what it provided. I just can't imagine enough places to take it.
Who knows? Maybe if it had been designed more innovatively it would have caught more eyes than it did. Certainly if they'd taken his manufacturing suggestions it would have been cheaper, and that might have been sufficient (though I can't imagine knocking off the factor of 5 to 10 that would have been required).
Ultimately I've got to give him props for the crucial observation that it simply wasn't the right thing: "You don't have a great product yet!" Well, it would have been great for free, in the Jobs definition of "insanely great", even without more style. But he was clearly righter than everybody else in the room.
Thanks for the link.
I take it you're figuring "birthday" to mean "birth date". So out of 10,000 people, lets figure that they're evenly distributed over 70 years, 365 days to a year, brings us to... .4 people.
.46, which means a 54% chance of uniqueness, which isn't really all that close to 87% but I guess it on the right order. But if I figure it with N=20k rather than N=10k, I get pretty much exactly 87%.
Your 1 in 13,000 people with a given birth date assumes a clustering around 35 (13,000 = 365 * 35; it took me a while to figure that out.)
So I take it you're figuring something like (1-(1/13k))^10k. Yes? I get
Correct me if I'm wrong; stat was never my strong suit.
Still, I'm not convinced that the article meant "birth date" rather than "birth day", and the uniqueness gets a lot less likely if you figure 365 unique days rather than 13,000 of them; the odds of being unique goes to nearly 0. Exponentiation does that.
Kudos. That's the most cogent explanation I've seen. (Compliment in lieu of mod points, sadly.)
The Robert Faigles version is pretty good. But it's poetry, not prose, as is the nearly-as-good Robert Graves version.
Unfortunately I kind of overstated my case in the grandparent post. Some passages, especially the action-adventure ones, translate brilliantly. The long sections of "Then this guy came from over here with his 200 warriors in a big black boat, and than that guy with 1,000 warriors in a green boat..." sound better chanted in Greek but there's not much to do with them in English.
What I'd really like is to get Seamus Heaney to do one; he did a bang-up job on Beowulf and another on Antigone. Why not take ten years out of your life to produce yet another Iliad?
Even beyond that, the movie Troy starts long before the Iliad starts and ends well after the Iliad ends. The Trojan Horse, as famous as it is, doesn't come from the Iliad; neither does the theft of Helen.
The legend is quite independent of that one particular poem, and has historical relevance to boot. There really was a Troy; there's good reason to believe a battle was held there that razed it to the ground.
They were trying to tell a fictionalized version of history. They took many sources, of which the Iliad was only one, and not all of them were legends. They left out the gods precisely because they were telling history rather than myth. The gods were mythical, but there's good reason to believe that Achilles was very real, and more realistically portrayed in the movie as a great warrior than as a man protected by a bath in the Styx.
Then they modified the stories for the screen, and yeah, I think they kinda yucked it up when they did so. I wasn't the only one in the theater who said, "What?" when Menelaus died. (Nearly the only one, but not quite.) I'm sure they wanted a sort of closure they couldn't get by telling, say, the rest of the story of Agamemmnon, so they just killed him off there.
I kinda liked it. I liked the nods to the Iliad. I loved Eric Bana and Peter O'Toole. I liked the idea of telling the story as history rather than myth. Not the best film I saw that year, but hardly ranking (as Roger Ebert did) with Alexander. Now _there_ was a piece of historical crap.