... couldn't kill my Power Mac G4. I actually had my Mac and LCD, printer, etc. behind two surge suppressors - don't ask me why, I have no idea if that provides extra protection or not - and I still lost the LCD panel (which was not powered on) when lightning struck the transformer across the street). Scared me shitless how loud that was.
My neighbor lost a television, I lost a cable modem and router (on a different wall socket, different surge thingy) as well as the LCD, but the only damage to the Mac - which was in sleep mode - was dead on-board Ethernet. Grabbed a PCI nic, thing works fine. My house is more than 100 years old and presumably has garbage wiring, I suppose is why we lost some appliances. But not the Mac, which I'm using right now.
Skimming over those threads reveals an incredible amount of outrage in the player community. Even taking into account the sound and fury, this appears to be much more of a problem than the linked GameInformer interview indicates.
In addition, Blackman's repetition of something like the following:
First I'd apologize that we were misleading at all, if that was the case, or if he was misled and had expectations
is really problematic. One of the posters in the second SOE thread took the trouble to compile statements about the combat revamp from Sony's own Community Relations Manager.
According to that compilation, SOE had been doing whatever misleading was going on. I don't play SWG, and this makes me rather glad I don't; sounds like the playerbase got an essential revamp to the existing game pushed back for a revenue-generating addition.
Certainly very few online sources censor themselves this way. See Salon, Slate, et al.
In addition, the Washington Post's print edition printed "Fuck You" in all its un-asterisked glory. I heard it was only the third time that newspaper has done so (the other two being contained in transcripts of President Nixon's White House conversations)
American isn't under a complete blanket of self-censorship. You simply must find responsible sources and support them - which is why I subscribe to Salon and give subscriptions as gifts.
Who modded the Insightful? Should have been -1, Mean-Spirited.
This article isn't a Learning Channel documentary on Jeopardy, sglane. She also didn't explain that Trebek is Canadian or whatever; I know, I know, serious oversight. Come on - she's using a (very small) bit of poetic license to illustrate her point about KenJen's slightly neurotic but lovable habits.
Also note that this piece isn't 'journalism' properly so-called; if anything newspaperly it's editorialization or light-hearted commentary.
Apparently the light-hearted part was lost on you.
The photos of the iPod in question - which are almost certainly publicity stills lifted from Apple, not the particular piece of hardware for sale - are of one of the new-gen iPods with the four solid-state buttons above the scroll wheel.
The first-gen 5GB 'pods, like mine (Xmas gift 2001) had buttons integrated into the scroll wheel.
I seem to remember the next-gen pods, like the one in the picture, coming only in 10+ gig sizes, which would mean he's actually selling an ancient iPod like mine with the wrong picture attached (I think the likelier scenario, and if his buyer's smart the sale will be off).
Or I may be mistaken, his next-gen may have come with a 5GB drive and the picture is accurate.
Either way, someone did not see a first-gen 5GB iPod and offer $200 for it.
I'll go ahead and say that the right rule here comes from Kelly Flock, when he noted that players "just fuck us up." Players know shit. Especially not players who are bitching about the game on message boards. And Especially not players who are bitching about how they want PvP. Look, I know I'm going to get ripped by any PvP enthusiasts who are still here, but let's be honest. 95% of people who want PvP in a MMOG should be banned from MMOGs, and preferably from breeding.
I don't care nearly enough about the whole meta-genre of MMOG design to go deep into this, but frankly I hold precisely the opposite view. The thrill that most MMORPG players get from leveling, crafting, exploring, etc., I find a symptom of a socially debilitated person. PvPers, on the other hand, I feel largely have their heads on straight in reality and merely seek a greater challenge and greater exhilaration than any PvE design can give them. Much as can be found in the real world.
Griefers, on the other hand, are the fault not of the PvP playerbase but the game designers. Real unnacountable griefing shouldn't be possible. "Griefing" as in messing up your fun on a limited basis, on the other hand, is what comes from playing with people instead of playing with yourself, as in PvE.
Example: I play Shadowbane. PvE is an afterthought (or more accurately, a mostly-brief pre-requisite to getting a character in shape to fight other players); the real fun to be had is fighting other people, either singly, in raiding parties or in enormous city sieges.
There is really no unaccountable griefing in SB, because political dynamics hold players accountable for what they do. Some few players enjoy lurking in the shadows, with no group to defend them and nothing to lose, but they are the distinct minority. And "griefers" have no advantage in PvP, indeed they have the disadvantage of having no one to help them when you come to kill them.
For my purposes, PvE treadmilling is brain-dead. So are the people who want to bake bread or whatever. Unless it involves engaging in combat or negotiations or meaningful dialogue with other human beings, why is it worth checking out of reality? One of the linked articles suggests to stop thinking about games as "working from 9-5 at Initech (nice Office Space namecheck) and working from 6-11 farming some rare form of copper." PvE games will always face this dilemma of uselessness, because your accomplishments and explorations are meaningless without any human context. That's fine, but why not play Civilization instead? Or better yet, re-engage with the human race in brutal combat.
There is no 'parse the sentence correctly,' because there is almost certainly no operand order laid out in Minnesota law. Without commas expressly delineating the operand order you're just guessing. You may be confident that your interpretation is correct, but laws are interpreted in courtrooms, not on Slashdot. If there's case law on the question, which I'm far too lazy to look for at the moment, that may prove helpful.
Not too lazy to point out the general requirement of mens rea for crimes which carry felony-level penalties, however. It's basic constitutional law that proving the mental element of a crime can generally not be dispensed with; if you think about this for a minute it's blindingly obvious you can't subject someone to severe criminal penalties unless you can prove they intended to do whatever it is they did (in general; yes, I know about accomplice and unintended-consequence statutes, but this is neither of those).
To hazard a guess, I'd imagine a judge (at trial) or judges (on appeal) would indeed require an intent to defraud or injure, not merely an intent to access without authorization or whatever. The latter transgression smells more like a property or privacy tort than an appropriate subject for the criminal law. Also, as the original poster is probably aware, in general DAs have near-total authority to prosecute or not as they choose.
This isn't a remote root exploit or buffer-overflow hole that's a screwup in system software; double-clicking application files to run them is kind of difficult to "patch."
In addition to what everyone else is saying about this particular version being merely a proof-of-concept, Mac users might be insulated because the trojan masquerades as an.mp3 file - just about the last kind of file I'd double-click to open. I'd simply "Add to Library" in iTunes instead (well, actually I wouldn't if I didn't recognize the damn thing, but bear with me).
I can see trojans masking themselves with other file type extensions, say.pdf, doing significantly more harm.
But anyway, dealing with this isn't Apple's job, it's one for our own brain cells.
Yellow Dog's been the premier Linux solution for Macs specifically, and PowerPCs in general, for several years now, since A/UX and MkLinux for the 68k more or less fell into disuse. Mandrake has maintained a PPC distro (skipping some point releases and not supporting as much hardware as on x86) for awhile, but Yellow Dog put out a quality product. And it's the only thing they do, which matters.
Probably more important is Yellow Dog's long-standing PPC Linux hardware solutions, e.g. the Yellow Briq Node G3/G4 standalone server. Terra Soft does a good bit of HPC consulting and installation (check their web pages for a few site descriptions and PPC Linux "wins").
In short, Yellow Dog is _the_ Linux distro for Macs, has been since 3.1 or so when it really blew Mandrake 8 away in terms of legacy and peripheral support. People doing real Linux work on PPC, especially if they're serious about PPC but don't care about having OS X, already are familiar with Yellow Dog. With *nix aficionados supposedly moving to the Mac in droves, opinion leaders are going to steer them toward Yellow Dog, rather than Debian or Mandrake/PPC. It's Red Hat for Macs, more or less.
Like a robotic vacuum cleaner or a remote-control lawn mower, the automated parking garage is an object that adds almost nothing to the original.
Moron. Just because America is "not lacking in parking spaces" doesn't mean an auto-carpark isn't a massive improvement over the traditional, enormously wasteful (of space and money) parking lot. Sprawl and pollution, for starters, would be significantly less than the major, major insurmountable problems they are now in virtually all American cities if we could do away with our dependence on plentiful free parking.
I don't think it approached Thompson's ability to draw in the reader with serious-minded commentary leavened with mad wit. Thompson's great strength was his genuine passion for his subjects, and his lucidity despite the often-gratuitous drug tales.
This piece felt to me like a wisecracker typing as fast as possible, throwing in some superficial flourishes but maintaining a faux-jaded eye and a grating air of worldliness that really turned me off. That sounds pretty harsh, and I suppose it is; but it's much easier to fill the old inverted pyramid than it is to approach a mainstream story from a truly counterculture perspective. Traditional methods don't let you fall as hard; trying to emulate Hunter Thompson and failing just gets ugly.
Credibility aside, the writer's trying hard to emulate Hunter Thompson throughout this piece, and this part in particular is a direct allusion.
Fans of Thompson, the 'gonzo journalist' known for participating as heavily as possible in the stories he covered for various newspapers, magazines, and most recently Rolling Stone, will recognize the Jersey Shore as a place Thompson knew and loathed from a stint at a shitty newspaper there, soon after he left the Air Force in Florida and before he lit out for New York. I believe Thompson's story of how he fled town after taking out a local man's daughter and destroying the man's car is in his first volume of memoirs, The Proud Highway.
Phrases like "holed up," overuse of the word "evil," malaprop similes ("fire in a cardboard factory") and consistent reflections of the writer's own opinions and impressions - how much do you see "I" in "serious articles"? many journalists call it "going first-person," and it's virtually never done - are all Thompson touches. As are gratuitous drug references. I'm tickled by the Thompson channeling, actually, because emulating other writers' style is something Thompson himself was notorious for doing early in his career.
I personally don't think the writer's predilection to score weed has much relevance to his credibility, any more than a mainstream reporter's alcoholism might (working reporters know what I'm talking about). This writing style and drug references are meant to appeal to a particular, fringe, audience, that's all, a kind of ingratiation and location with his audience's values, whatever you think of them.
What a profoundly weird site. I hate the way saying this sounds (especially as I'm posting to a week-old thread on/.), but I can't believe there are enough appropriate customers in the world to keep the games they sell in business.
*ahem!* anyways, that's interesting. they also note they're looking into online ventures. Autoduel... jacked up for today... online... that'd be droolworthy. Of course everyone says the MMO genre is saturated, but a driving combat/adventure MMO might win a significantly separate fanbase from the online CRPGs.
add AutoDuel for the Apple ][/][+/][c/][e (which rocked), and Abuse for Mac (which sucked)
Autoduel on the Apple II I still think was a killer game. PC and console games came kinda close to matching its mix of action/adventure/building cars - Twisted Metal meets Legacy of the Ancients, circa 1985 - but not quite. That's one title I'd love to see remade
He didn't say "the contents of the event horizon." He said "the contents of that sphere," as in, the three-dimensional "volume" bounded by the event horizon. In space-time, of course, a black hole's gravity sink is not a sphere but an (infinitely deep? asymptotically deep?) sloped well.
His point was that disposition of the mass and information that falls into a black hole is not explainable by the laws of physics operative outside the hole in normal space-time. Theoretically, as you note, all that matter may simply stop in the form of a sphere, but if that's true it will not be at the event horizon, the radius beyond which nothing can escape the hole's gravity, but within it, at that radius where the relativity equations cease to be useful. And that's really the real question; the shell idea is just that, one idea, and all sorts of questions are posed by the potential loss of information as matter enters a hole, and in what form it "exists" while it's "in" "there."
Hawking Radiation, on the other hand, really has nothing to do with what falls into (or does not fall into) a black hole, and where that stuff all ends up and in what form. The radiation Hawking predicted (it has yet to be observationally verified, if it ever will be) arises from the formation of particles from vacuum energy near the event horizon, as you describe. But what really goes on within the event horizon, whether information is preserved in there... these questions are the interesting ones, and they don't yet have answers.
I mean, people go and see some DJ at a club. They use terms like "he's one of the best DJ's in the country". I mean...um...he spins records. How is that a musical talent?
I mean...um...because he's not a DJ like you hire for your eight-year-old's skate party. He doesn't cue up pre-recorded tracks and let them play; otherwise an iPod would do just as well. Famous DJ's, whether they're playing trance, house, jungle or stright-up old-school techno, spend years perfecting their timing running multiple sound/effects tracks simultaneously, anticipating breaks before they happen, interleaving harmonious lines and a lot of other things people outside the scene know nothing about. And, if it's not obvious, only a few can do this really well, and yes, it requires talent. At least as much as "my music live and for the most part acoustic," whatever that means.
Also, I still think that hip-hop, or rap or whatever they're calling it this week is basically a bunch of guys with a rhyme dictionary and a drum machine. Perhaps that's a generalization, but it does seem to be people wanting to get into music with little to no musical knowledge and not really wanting to take the time nor the effort to learn an instrument.
You cannot be serious. First of all, rap and hip-hop are only "wahetever they're calling it this week" if you're an idiot and willfully withdrawn from popular culture. Hip-hop has been around under a variety of names, e.g. hard bop and bounce, for many years, but rap is a very fresh, very youthful music genre, and it's got a hell of a lot more vitality than American jazz, regular pop, new punk, alt-country or whatever else you're probably listening to. Your comment stinks of laughably provincial white-culture elitism.
If you haven't tried - and clearly you haven't - you cannot pick up a "rhyme dictionary and a drum machine" and produce creditable music, of any kind. Rapping requires imagination, flexible diction, a great sense of rhythm and, certainly not least, some kind of message. If you haven't noticed, rap artists become public figures, free-speech advocates in some cases, politically controversial figures and idols in their communities. And they make shitloads of money. Sounds kind of like your "real" musicians, doesn't it?
It seems to me you're compartmentalizing "music" in an eighth-grade-school-band kind of way, and making the (ridiculous and offensive) generalization that anything non-conventional is simply some new-fangled, lower-quality imitation of everything you've heard before. News flash: you're walking around in an opaque bubble just barely larger than your head.
Enough of putting down your trollish denigration of today's music. Similar to the way you apparently reject anything newer than 30 years old, you reject the possibility that new artistry is introduced and new nuances born when Sinfonia replaces some pit musicians. I don't know if that's possible or not, but other posters have indicated that may be true.
In both cases, just because you don't like it and don't know anything about it - and I really mean it, based on your post you're so in the clouds you don't know what shit smells like - doesn't mean it's only "just as good."
Slashdot Mirror
LOL you mean this art
... couldn't kill my Power Mac G4. I actually had my Mac and LCD, printer, etc. behind two surge suppressors - don't ask me why, I have no idea if that provides extra protection or not - and I still lost the LCD panel (which was not powered on) when lightning struck the transformer across the street). Scared me shitless how loud that was.
My neighbor lost a television, I lost a cable modem and router (on a different wall socket, different surge thingy) as well as the LCD, but the only damage to the Mac - which was in sleep mode - was dead on-board Ethernet. Grabbed a PCI nic, thing works fine. My house is more than 100 years old and presumably has garbage wiring, I suppose is why we lost some appliances. But not the Mac, which I'm using right now.
In addition, Blackman's repetition of something like the following:
is really problematic. One of the posters in the second SOE thread took the trouble to compile statements about the combat revamp from Sony's own Community Relations Manager.
According to that compilation, SOE had been doing whatever misleading was going on. I don't play SWG, and this makes me rather glad I don't; sounds like the playerbase got an essential revamp to the existing game pushed back for a revenue-generating addition.
Damn! The Onion has gone to a subscription model for past issues, but who else remembers the funniest story they've had in awhile?
From the 18 Feb. 2004 issue:
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
Certainly very few online sources censor themselves this way. See Salon, Slate, et al.
In addition, the Washington Post's print edition printed "Fuck You" in all its un-asterisked glory. I heard it was only the third time that newspaper has done so (the other two being contained in transcripts of President Nixon's White House conversations)
American isn't under a complete blanket of self-censorship. You simply must find responsible sources and support them - which is why I subscribe to Salon and give subscriptions as gifts.
Who modded the Insightful? Should have been -1, Mean-Spirited.
This article isn't a Learning Channel documentary on Jeopardy, sglane. She also didn't explain that Trebek is Canadian or whatever; I know, I know, serious oversight. Come on - she's using a (very small) bit of poetic license to illustrate her point about KenJen's slightly neurotic but lovable habits.
Also note that this piece isn't 'journalism' properly so-called; if anything newspaperly it's editorialization or light-hearted commentary.
Apparently the light-hearted part was lost on you.
Aren't Write-Once Read-Many solutions ideal for this kind of thing?
If you're not looking for permanent backups, the per-media cost may be prohibitive though.
The photos of the iPod in question - which are almost certainly publicity stills lifted from Apple, not the particular piece of hardware for sale - are of one of the new-gen iPods with the four solid-state buttons above the scroll wheel.
The first-gen 5GB 'pods, like mine (Xmas gift 2001) had buttons integrated into the scroll wheel.
I seem to remember the next-gen pods, like the one in the picture, coming only in 10+ gig sizes, which would mean he's actually selling an ancient iPod like mine with the wrong picture attached (I think the likelier scenario, and if his buyer's smart the sale will be off).
Or I may be mistaken, his next-gen may have come with a 5GB drive and the picture is accurate.
Either way, someone did not see a first-gen 5GB iPod and offer $200 for it.
I don't care nearly enough about the whole meta-genre of MMOG design to go deep into this, but frankly I hold precisely the opposite view. The thrill that most MMORPG players get from leveling, crafting, exploring, etc., I find a symptom of a socially debilitated person. PvPers, on the other hand, I feel largely have their heads on straight in reality and merely seek a greater challenge and greater exhilaration than any PvE design can give them. Much as can be found in the real world.
Griefers, on the other hand, are the fault not of the PvP playerbase but the game designers. Real unnacountable griefing shouldn't be possible. "Griefing" as in messing up your fun on a limited basis, on the other hand, is what comes from playing with people instead of playing with yourself, as in PvE.
Example: I play Shadowbane. PvE is an afterthought (or more accurately, a mostly-brief pre-requisite to getting a character in shape to fight other players); the real fun to be had is fighting other people, either singly, in raiding parties or in enormous city sieges.
There is really no unaccountable griefing in SB, because political dynamics hold players accountable for what they do. Some few players enjoy lurking in the shadows, with no group to defend them and nothing to lose, but they are the distinct minority. And "griefers" have no advantage in PvP, indeed they have the disadvantage of having no one to help them when you come to kill them.
For my purposes, PvE treadmilling is brain-dead. So are the people who want to bake bread or whatever. Unless it involves engaging in combat or negotiations or meaningful dialogue with other human beings, why is it worth checking out of reality? One of the linked articles suggests to stop thinking about games as "working from 9-5 at Initech (nice Office Space namecheck) and working from 6-11 farming some rare form of copper." PvE games will always face this dilemma of uselessness, because your accomplishments and explorations are meaningless without any human context. That's fine, but why not play Civilization instead? Or better yet, re-engage with the human race in brutal combat.
Um, no.
There is no 'parse the sentence correctly,' because there is almost certainly no operand order laid out in Minnesota law. Without commas expressly delineating the operand order you're just guessing. You may be confident that your interpretation is correct, but laws are interpreted in courtrooms, not on Slashdot. If there's case law on the question, which I'm far too lazy to look for at the moment, that may prove helpful.
Not too lazy to point out the general requirement of mens rea for crimes which carry felony-level penalties, however. It's basic constitutional law that proving the mental element of a crime can generally not be dispensed with; if you think about this for a minute it's blindingly obvious you can't subject someone to severe criminal penalties unless you can prove they intended to do whatever it is they did (in general; yes, I know about accomplice and unintended-consequence statutes, but this is neither of those).
To hazard a guess, I'd imagine a judge (at trial) or judges (on appeal) would indeed require an intent to defraud or injure, not merely an intent to access without authorization or whatever. The latter transgression smells more like a property or privacy tort than an appropriate subject for the criminal law. Also, as the original poster is probably aware, in general DAs have near-total authority to prosecute or not as they choose.
Unfortunately, you're probably out of luck.
IANAL and this post is not legal advice.
You make a good point about getting the local details right.
.John Kerry, D-Mass., is indeed a Congressman.
But Sen
So are his colleagues from Massachusetts who sit in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"Congressman" = "MP"
A patch for what?
.mp3 file - just about the last kind of file I'd double-click to open. I'd simply "Add to Library" in iTunes instead (well, actually I wouldn't if I didn't recognize the damn thing, but bear with me).
.pdf, doing significantly more harm.
This isn't a remote root exploit or buffer-overflow hole that's a screwup in system software; double-clicking application files to run them is kind of difficult to "patch."
In addition to what everyone else is saying about this particular version being merely a proof-of-concept, Mac users might be insulated because the trojan masquerades as an
I can see trojans masking themselves with other file type extensions, say
But anyway, dealing with this isn't Apple's job, it's one for our own brain cells.
MSNBS is a pop web site.
It isn't "the press."
Yellow Dog's been the premier Linux solution for Macs specifically, and PowerPCs in general, for several years now, since A/UX and MkLinux for the 68k more or less fell into disuse. Mandrake has maintained a PPC distro (skipping some point releases and not supporting as much hardware as on x86) for awhile, but Yellow Dog put out a quality product. And it's the only thing they do, which matters.
Probably more important is Yellow Dog's long-standing PPC Linux hardware solutions, e.g. the Yellow Briq Node G3/G4 standalone server. Terra Soft does a good bit of HPC consulting and installation (check their web pages for a few site descriptions and PPC Linux "wins").
In short, Yellow Dog is _the_ Linux distro for Macs, has been since 3.1 or so when it really blew Mandrake 8 away in terms of legacy and peripheral support. People doing real Linux work on PPC, especially if they're serious about PPC but don't care about having OS X, already are familiar with Yellow Dog. With *nix aficionados supposedly moving to the Mac in droves, opinion leaders are going to steer them toward Yellow Dog, rather than Debian or Mandrake/PPC. It's Red Hat for Macs, more or less.
see the original:
9 9& cid=4914384
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=482
Moron. Just because America is "not lacking in parking spaces" doesn't mean an auto-carpark isn't a massive improvement over the traditional, enormously wasteful (of space and money) parking lot. Sprawl and pollution, for starters, would be significantly less than the major, major insurmountable problems they are now in virtually all American cities if we could do away with our dependence on plentiful free parking.
All in all, I agree with you.
I don't think it approached Thompson's ability to draw in the reader with serious-minded commentary leavened with mad wit. Thompson's great strength was his genuine passion for his subjects, and his lucidity despite the often-gratuitous drug tales.
This piece felt to me like a wisecracker typing as fast as possible, throwing in some superficial flourishes but maintaining a faux-jaded eye and a grating air of worldliness that really turned me off. That sounds pretty harsh, and I suppose it is; but it's much easier to fill the old inverted pyramid than it is to approach a mainstream story from a truly counterculture perspective. Traditional methods don't let you fall as hard; trying to emulate Hunter Thompson and failing just gets ugly.
Credibility aside, the writer's trying hard to emulate Hunter Thompson throughout this piece, and this part in particular is a direct allusion.
Fans of Thompson, the 'gonzo journalist' known for participating as heavily as possible in the stories he covered for various newspapers, magazines, and most recently Rolling Stone, will recognize the Jersey Shore as a place Thompson knew and loathed from a stint at a shitty newspaper there, soon after he left the Air Force in Florida and before he lit out for New York. I believe Thompson's story of how he fled town after taking out a local man's daughter and destroying the man's car is in his first volume of memoirs, The Proud Highway.
Phrases like "holed up," overuse of the word "evil," malaprop similes ("fire in a cardboard factory") and consistent reflections of the writer's own opinions and impressions - how much do you see "I" in "serious articles"? many journalists call it "going first-person," and it's virtually never done - are all Thompson touches. As are gratuitous drug references. I'm tickled by the Thompson channeling, actually, because emulating other writers' style is something Thompson himself was notorious for doing early in his career.
I personally don't think the writer's predilection to score weed has much relevance to his credibility, any more than a mainstream reporter's alcoholism might (working reporters know what I'm talking about). This writing style and drug references are meant to appeal to a particular, fringe, audience, that's all, a kind of ingratiation and location with his audience's values, whatever you think of them.
Where do the 1.6 Gigawatts come in?
What a profoundly weird site. I hate the way saying this sounds (especially as I'm posting to a week-old thread on /.), but I can't believe there are enough appropriate customers in the world to keep the games they sell in business.
*ahem!* anyways, that's interesting. they also note they're looking into online ventures. Autoduel... jacked up for today... online... that'd be droolworthy. Of course everyone says the MMO genre is saturated, but a driving combat/adventure MMO might win a significantly separate fanbase from the online CRPGs.
add AutoDuel for the Apple ][/][+/][c/][e (which rocked), and Abuse for Mac (which sucked)
Autoduel on the Apple II I still think was a killer game. PC and console games came kinda close to matching its mix of action/adventure/building cars - Twisted Metal meets Legacy of the Ancients, circa 1985 - but not quite. That's one title I'd love to see remade
ON THE MAC!
He didn't say "the contents of the event horizon." He said "the contents of that sphere," as in, the three-dimensional "volume" bounded by the event horizon. In space-time, of course, a black hole's gravity sink is not a sphere but an (infinitely deep? asymptotically deep?) sloped well.
His point was that disposition of the mass and information that falls into a black hole is not explainable by the laws of physics operative outside the hole in normal space-time. Theoretically, as you note, all that matter may simply stop in the form of a sphere, but if that's true it will not be at the event horizon, the radius beyond which nothing can escape the hole's gravity, but within it, at that radius where the relativity equations cease to be useful. And that's really the real question; the shell idea is just that, one idea, and all sorts of questions are posed by the potential loss of information as matter enters a hole, and in what form it "exists" while it's "in" "there."
Hawking Radiation, on the other hand, really has nothing to do with what falls into (or does not fall into) a black hole, and where that stuff all ends up and in what form. The radiation Hawking predicted (it has yet to be observationally verified, if it ever will be) arises from the formation of particles from vacuum energy near the event horizon, as you describe. But what really goes on within the event horizon, whether information is preserved in there... these questions are the interesting ones, and they don't yet have answers.
I mean, people go and see some DJ at a club. They use terms like "he's one of the best DJ's in the country". I mean...um...he spins records. How is that a musical talent?
I mean...um...because he's not a DJ like you hire for your eight-year-old's skate party. He doesn't cue up pre-recorded tracks and let them play; otherwise an iPod would do just as well. Famous DJ's, whether they're playing trance, house, jungle or stright-up old-school techno, spend years perfecting their timing running multiple sound/effects tracks simultaneously, anticipating breaks before they happen, interleaving harmonious lines and a lot of other things people outside the scene know nothing about. And, if it's not obvious, only a few can do this really well, and yes, it requires talent. At least as much as "my music live and for the most part acoustic," whatever that means.
Also, I still think that hip-hop, or rap or whatever they're calling it this week is basically a bunch of guys with a rhyme dictionary and a drum machine. Perhaps that's a generalization, but it does seem to be people wanting to get into music with little to no musical knowledge and not really wanting to take the time nor the effort to learn an instrument.
You cannot be serious. First of all, rap and hip-hop are only "wahetever they're calling it this week" if you're an idiot and willfully withdrawn from popular culture. Hip-hop has been around under a variety of names, e.g. hard bop and bounce, for many years, but rap is a very fresh, very youthful music genre, and it's got a hell of a lot more vitality than American jazz, regular pop, new punk, alt-country or whatever else you're probably listening to. Your comment stinks of laughably provincial white-culture elitism.
If you haven't tried - and clearly you haven't - you cannot pick up a "rhyme dictionary and a drum machine" and produce creditable music, of any kind. Rapping requires imagination, flexible diction, a great sense of rhythm and, certainly not least, some kind of message. If you haven't noticed, rap artists become public figures, free-speech advocates in some cases, politically controversial figures and idols in their communities. And they make shitloads of money. Sounds kind of like your "real" musicians, doesn't it?
It seems to me you're compartmentalizing "music" in an eighth-grade-school-band kind of way, and making the (ridiculous and offensive) generalization that anything non-conventional is simply some new-fangled, lower-quality imitation of everything you've heard before. News flash: you're walking around in an opaque bubble just barely larger than your head.
Enough of putting down your trollish denigration of today's music. Similar to the way you apparently reject anything newer than 30 years old, you reject the possibility that new artistry is introduced and new nuances born when Sinfonia replaces some pit musicians. I don't know if that's possible or not, but other posters have indicated that may be true.
In both cases, just because you don't like it and don't know anything about it - and I really mean it, based on your post you're so in the clouds you don't know what shit smells like - doesn't mean it's only "just as good."
Since when are ad hominem "refutations" modded Insightful?
I know it's nice to Play Well With Others, but there's no valid argument in the grandparent. Just finger-wanging obfuscation.