If they had ever seen the Ugly Kid Joe video "(I Hate) Everything about You", they would know that you can use a blow up doll as a kite. Leave the kite behind and make room for those 2 liters of alcohol!
Humans using computers to create art will take a very long time to be accepted as a fine art form. The reason for this are numbers. Because numbers are involved, because they are exact, because they lack the ambiguity that makes art human, it will be a long time before full acceptance into the art community. Most art instructors that I've dealt with see computer art as a form of Paint-by-the-Numbers. No room for individual artistic talent (in their minds) because you can do something exactly the same, over and over, and another person can sit down and make the exact same thing, in every way identical.
There is something about this that is abhorrent to the average art instructors mind that they fail to see the multitude of possibilities inherent in computer art. _They_ will never accept it because someone "untalented" can create something to be proud of with little or no training. What they don't realize is how hard it is to move from that stage to the truly artistic level.
That being said, I personally feel that it is art, and even a fine art. Of course my definition of art also includes architecture, code, etc. Anything involving a human mind and a medium in which to work can become art. All you need is an artist.
I meant non-standard as in different from every other computer manufacturer on the planet. I don't work on cars. I work on computers. And every other computer that comes through the shop uses hexagonal wide-thread phillips head screws. And they seem to work pretty damn well with our power screw drivers, thank you very much. The only company that has a worse case design team than Compaq is Packard-Bell, but at least they were smart enough to use the same screws as everyone else.
If I never have to work on another Compaq pos case again, I'll be a happy, happy man.
Who was the brilliant genius in their case design department that said "Hey, we've got all these non-standard screws lying about, let's use them in our computers! And after that, let's make it impossible to access the CMOS unless you stick a non-functioning hard drive onto the primary IDE channel!" No joke there, that was what a Compaq technician told me to do to get into the CMOS. And you know what? It still didn't work.
Now if Compaq shifted focus completely to the iPaq and dropped the price by about $200...*grin*
While this does sound very neat and seems like a fantastic idea, it does seem to have a few inherent limitations.
In order for this light interference method to work most efficiently, a single beam of light must be able to shine on the entire database at once. For small databases, no problem, but for large ones it seems an impossibility. Why not just do part of the database at a time? Well then you lose the reason you were doing this for in the first place, which is to make a single request to the database and come up with your answer.
Another limitation with the size of the database is the number of frequencies that the light must be split up into. I'm not sure of the actual number of frequencies that we know how to split light into, but there must be some limit. Potentially, with quantum computers, there would be no limitations. Just add more qubits.
So while this does sound very cool, I don't see it replacing quantum computers as the next big leap in computing.
It wasn't meant to scare you, it wasn't meant to run chills down your spine. This movie never took itself too seriously.
As for the Jurassic Park homage, you should have looked a little closer. There were also scenes from Star Wars, Dr. Strangelove, E.T., and Titanic. There was even a brief scene where Rick wore a fedora for god's sake! This was just meant to be a fun movie. Saying things like "The black and whites of old hollywood were much scarier" just proves how much you did not get this movie.
I advise watching it again, and be willing to laugh this time. You'll enjoy it a whole lot more
I agree with the person that said, "I have nothing to hide." I can understand how people would want their privacy, but unless you have something to hide, why not let them read your emails? It's not like they're going to care if you send messages to your lover behind your wife/husband's back. All they're looking for are illegal things that people aren't doing.. aren't they?
You're relaxing on the couch, watching the tv, when you hear your backdoor open. You see a man, dressed in a dark suit and wearing sunglasses walking towards your desk. Without hesitation he sits down and begins going through your papers.
"Excuse me," you say "Can I help you?".
"No thank you sir, just checking for anything illegal, be done in a few moments."
Since this happens about once a week you think nothing more of it and walk back to your couch and your sheep-like lifestyle.
According to the article on MSNBC concerning this, TiVo claims that there is an 800# subscribers can call to have all data, even anonymous data, removed from their database and have no further data taken. Anyone know what this # is?
Western Digital Hard Drives
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 2
Looks like they're using a fairly standard WD IDE hard drive. 8 GB though...why 8 GB? Seems fairly small. I didn't think WD even made drives less than 10 GB anymore. It looks like this is something that wouldnt be too hard to "upgrade" on your own. Maybe change out that DVD player for a DVD-RAM at a later point? Since they're using fairly standard peripherals, swapping these things out should be a snap. I wonder if there's going to be an available SDRAM slot?
Seen at Aintitcoolnews.com, Unbreakable, according to Bruce Willis, is the first part of a planned trilogy, whick makes the entire movie make a whole lot more sense.
sGreenHornet asks: So Mr. Willis do you have any other films in line with M. Night Shyamalan? (or you rather not say)
And Willis' reply...
bruce_willis_live: Unbreakable is the first part of a trilogy of films.
bruce_willis_live: I can't tell you about the others...
bruce_willis_live: But we're supposed to do two more.
bruce_willis_live: you'll understand how it lends itself to a continuing story.
($300 or less) - Lego Mindstorms (still one of the coolest geek toys around)
($301-$1500) - 22in Flat-Screen monitor
Unlimited - A trip on Mir (need I say more?)
Air, water, and fuel. All of these can make use of oxygen. Compressed oxygen takes on a liquid form, which can make a highly volatile propellant. Oxygen combined with hydrogen will create water. Where to get the hydrogen from? Either bring it along, or collect it along the way.
You don't want to breathe pure oxygen though. One good spark and your whole habitat is gone. Producing the necessary gases to mix with Oxygen (i.e. Nitrogen, some other noble gases) will be much more difficult than the production of oxygen. It may be possible to get nitrogen by mining the regolith (loose sandy topsoil on Mars).
This strikes me more as a way of producing fuel and water than as a production of breathable air, which could be better done by plants, which would also serve as food source.
One more thing... what use can be made of the carbon byproduct?
The reason they didnt release the infinity source code was because infinity was basically a really advanced 3rd party mod that bungie published. Much like Chimera for Myth II, (cept Chimera was free). Anyways, the Doubleaught team created Infinity, so I'm assuming that Bungie needs their permission to provide the source code.
A force-carrier particle. Photons, gluons, W, and Z particles are all bosons. Another type of boson, the Higgs, is proposed as the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
What the merger between AOL and T/W represents is a vertical monopoly, i.e., an entirely self-contained company that doesnt have to use any other company to produce and deliver it's product. In the traditional marketplace, the advantage this company gained was merely one of lower cost. Such an advantage, while good for the bottom line of the company, is hardly an industry killer in the Information age.
The reason the Microsoft monopoly was so much more dangerous is because it was a horizontal monopoly. In essence, a roadblock that everyone had to go through. The merger between AOL and T/W does not represent the same type of threat. There is no roadblock I need to go through. With a vertical monopoly, I can simply go elsewhere. Not a threat at all.
I think the difference here lies in the fact that Microsoft (or whoever) is selling them a closed product. Because it's closed, it's Microsoft's responsibility to make sure that everything in the code is "safe", and they should be held liable if it isn't.
I think the best analogy to use in this case is something like kit airplanes. If you buy a whole, complete airplane from a manufacturer (closed source) and it blows up in midair, you naturally and rightfully blame the company that made it. However if you buy a kit plane, put it together yourself, and the engine drops out of the plane in midair, you have only yourself to blame.
So, following this analogy, closed source companies should be held liable, because some things are hidden from the consumer, and open source companies should not, because the customer is able to see _exactly_ what they're getting. This would encourage many companies to switch to an open source model, don't you think?
The list of the games banned are: Doom, Mortal Kombat, Requiem, Blood, Postal and Duke Nukem. Personally speaking, I've played 4 of these (Doom, MK, DN, and Postal). I don't know about the other two, but these are rather old games. Is Brazil's game market just behind the times and these games are the new ones there, or are they just banning the violent games that this man had in his possession?
One error I noticed in the story...Brazil had previously banned the car racing game "Carmaggedon" which the article refers to as "Armageddon"
One final note...I think this too shall pass. Does anyone besides me remember about 9 or 10 years ago, when Dungeons & Dragons was all over the news because some kids had used a sword to kill one of their neighbors and they played D&D all the time? This same type of hysteria and irrational attacks that focus on video games now focused on D&D then. Quite a few schools banned it from being played. Guess what? D&D is still here. 10 years from now, violent video games will still be here, and the level of detail will be incredible. Check here if you want to see what level of realism video games will be attaining next summer.
This hysteria shall pass, and shall come again some other time. Kinda like Halley's comet, only more frequent and quite a bit more annoying.
When he originally put in the forms for the transfer of the domain, NSI told him there would be a 5 day wait. A 5 DAY WAIT? For what? In my job I've registered literally hundreds of domain names, and transferred several dozen and I've never seen any notice about a 5 day wait. As anyone else ever had this happen to them?
And one things for sure: if this guy had been a big corporation, NSI would have found a way to get that domain back.
Man I would love to set up a Beowulf cluster of these. Say it has IR networking technology. If you have a sufficiently large group of people wearing these things you could burn through SETI data in about 30 seconds.::drools at the thought of 50000 people at a baseball game putting their wearables into standby/share-cycles mode and detecting 15 alien civilizations while the Yankees win another one::
Slashdot Mirror
If they had ever seen the Ugly Kid Joe video "(I Hate) Everything about You", they would know that you can use a blow up doll as a kite. Leave the kite behind and make room for those 2 liters of alcohol!
Tap into the power line of the apartment next doors, and have my TV shut off their dishwasher every time I put on a movie.
Humans using computers to create art will take a very long time to be accepted as a fine art form. The reason for this are numbers. Because numbers are involved, because they are exact, because they lack the ambiguity that makes art human, it will be a long time before full acceptance into the art community. Most art instructors that I've dealt with see computer art as a form of Paint-by-the-Numbers. No room for individual artistic talent (in their minds) because you can do something exactly the same, over and over, and another person can sit down and make the exact same thing, in every way identical.
There is something about this that is abhorrent to the average art instructors mind that they fail to see the multitude of possibilities inherent in computer art. _They_ will never accept it because someone "untalented" can create something to be proud of with little or no training. What they don't realize is how hard it is to move from that stage to the truly artistic level.
That being said, I personally feel that it is art, and even a fine art. Of course my definition of art also includes architecture, code, etc. Anything involving a human mind and a medium in which to work can become art. All you need is an artist.
If I never have to work on another Compaq pos case again, I'll be a happy, happy man.
Who was the brilliant genius in their case design department that said "Hey, we've got all these non-standard screws lying about, let's use them in our computers! And after that, let's make it impossible to access the CMOS unless you stick a non-functioning hard drive onto the primary IDE channel!" No joke there, that was what a Compaq technician told me to do to get into the CMOS. And you know what? It still didn't work.
Now if Compaq shifted focus completely to the iPaq and dropped the price by about $200...*grin*
With this soul-bending energy, we can match the likes of Microsoft blow-for-blow in this titanic struggle for the very souls of people everywhe....
Oh, you said _sole_ bending energy. Well I guess that's cool too.
While this does sound very neat and seems like a fantastic idea, it does seem to have a few inherent limitations.
In order for this light interference method to work most efficiently, a single beam of light must be able to shine on the entire database at once. For small databases, no problem, but for large ones it seems an impossibility. Why not just do part of the database at a time? Well then you lose the reason you were doing this for in the first place, which is to make a single request to the database and come up with your answer.
Another limitation with the size of the database is the number of frequencies that the light must be split up into. I'm not sure of the actual number of frequencies that we know how to split light into, but there must be some limit. Potentially, with quantum computers, there would be no limitations. Just add more qubits.
So while this does sound very cool, I don't see it replacing quantum computers as the next big leap in computing.
Google cache of this article
It wasn't meant to scare you, it wasn't meant to run chills down your spine. This movie never took itself too seriously.
As for the Jurassic Park homage, you should have looked a little closer. There were also scenes from Star Wars, Dr. Strangelove, E.T., and Titanic. There was even a brief scene where Rick wore a fedora for god's sake! This was just meant to be a fun movie. Saying things like "The black and whites of old hollywood were much scarier" just proves how much you did not get this movie.
I advise watching it again, and be willing to laugh this time. You'll enjoy it a whole lot more
You're relaxing on the couch, watching the tv, when you hear your backdoor open. You see a man, dressed in a dark suit and wearing sunglasses walking towards your desk. Without hesitation he sits down and begins going through your papers.
"Excuse me," you say "Can I help you?".
"No thank you sir, just checking for anything illegal, be done in a few moments."
Since this happens about once a week you think nothing more of it and walk back to your couch and your sheep-like lifestyle.
AND YOU'RE OK WITH THIS SCENARIO?????
sGreenHornet asks: So Mr. Willis do you have any other films in line with M. Night Shyamalan? (or you rather not say)
And Willis' reply...
bruce_willis_live: Unbreakable is the first part of a trilogy of films.
bruce_willis_live: I can't tell you about the others ...
bruce_willis_live: But we're supposed to do two more.
bruce_willis_live: you'll understand how it lends itself to a continuing story.
($301-$1500) - 22in Flat-Screen monitor
Unlimited - A trip on Mir (need I say more?)
You don't want to breathe pure oxygen though. One good spark and your whole habitat is gone. Producing the necessary gases to mix with Oxygen (i.e. Nitrogen, some other noble gases) will be much more difficult than the production of oxygen. It may be possible to get nitrogen by mining the regolith (loose sandy topsoil on Mars).
This strikes me more as a way of producing fuel and water than as a production of breathable air, which could be better done by plants, which would also serve as food source.
One more thing... what use can be made of the carbon byproduct?
-BH
A force-carrier particle. Photons, gluons, W, and Z particles are all bosons. Another type of boson, the Higgs, is proposed as the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
The reason the Microsoft monopoly was so much more dangerous is because it was a horizontal monopoly. In essence, a roadblock that everyone had to go through. The merger between AOL and T/W does not represent the same type of threat. There is no roadblock I need to go through. With a vertical monopoly, I can simply go elsewhere. Not a threat at all.
I think the best analogy to use in this case is something like kit airplanes. If you buy a whole, complete airplane from a manufacturer (closed source) and it blows up in midair, you naturally and rightfully blame the company that made it. However if you buy a kit plane, put it together yourself, and the engine drops out of the plane in midair, you have only yourself to blame.
So, following this analogy, closed source companies should be held liable, because some things are hidden from the consumer, and open source companies should not, because the customer is able to see _exactly_ what they're getting. This would encourage many companies to switch to an open source model, don't you think?
Streambox ripper
Hundreds of linux domains taken
A Very Wookie Christmas
One error I noticed in the story...Brazil had previously banned the car racing game "Carmaggedon" which the article refers to as "Armageddon"
One final note...I think this too shall pass. Does anyone besides me remember about 9 or 10 years ago, when Dungeons & Dragons was all over the news because some kids had used a sword to kill one of their neighbors and they played D&D all the time? This same type of hysteria and irrational attacks that focus on video games now focused on D&D then. Quite a few schools banned it from being played. Guess what? D&D is still here. 10 years from now, violent video games will still be here, and the level of detail will be incredible. Check here if you want to see what level of realism video games will be attaining next summer.
This hysteria shall pass, and shall come again some other time. Kinda like Halley's comet, only more frequent and quite a bit more annoying.
When he originally put in the forms for the transfer of the domain, NSI told him there would be a 5 day wait. A 5 DAY WAIT? For what? In my job I've registered literally hundreds of domain names, and transferred several dozen and I've never seen any notice about a 5 day wait. As anyone else ever had this happen to them?
And one things for sure: if this guy had been a big corporation, NSI would have found a way to get that domain back.
Man I would love to set up a Beowulf cluster of these. Say it has IR networking technology. If you have a sufficiently large group of people wearing these things you could burn through SETI data in about 30 seconds. ::drools at the thought of 50000 people at a baseball game putting their wearables into standby/share-cycles mode and detecting 15 alien civilizations while the Yankees win another one::