Ya know, the eyeball isn't all that great. First, we only have two of them. And because of their positioning, the majority of our surroundings are rendered into a huge blind spot. Squids got it right.
Squids got it right _for_a_typical_small_prey_animal. Being able to see your predators is top priority, and that is best achieved by a huge field of vision. To animals with few natural enemies, other issues my take precedence, such as the ability to find food. For predators with few natural enemies, it makes sense to in stead have a highly focused field of vision with excellent resolution and depth perception (requiring significant overlap of the two regions), since catching fleeing food is hard, and starvation bacomes a more looming threat than being eaten by someone bigger.
Witness how birds of prey have forward-pointing eyes, smaller birds who may be their victims have them more on the sides, and large non-hunting birds with few enemies often somewhere in-between.
Then look at yourself in the mirror and tell me we're not built to hunt...
Hopefully America will realize it benefits everyone to have universal health care
Ah, but for that to work, it also needs to start caring what is best for everyone, in stead of teaching each individual to bank on themselves beating the odds.
A person who identifies with or is sexually attracted to old-fashioned stuffed toys and/or anthropomorphic animal characters in fiction and illustration.
Derived from "furry", denoting the similar but more common inclination that accepts, and is chiefly oriented towards, more modern depictions. Adherents of retrofurism mostly use only "furist" to denote their group, feeling its clever variation on "furry" suffices to convey the archaic aspect. "Retro" is added mostly by outsiders to the group, or in communication with them, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
If someone could CONCLUSIVLY prove that humans are the sole cause of global warming, and that global warming is not natural, and that it is bad, I would listen.
I suppose you would only buy insurance if you got conclusive proof you were going to need it too?
First of all: Why do we need to be the sole cause? It should be more than enough to show that we have a significant effect that would make a worthwhile difference if removed.
Why does it need to be conclusive? The pure science side of things might operate only with proven or not (although that is not actually completely the case anywhere outside of pure mathematics). But to the real world (you know, the lives that will have to bear the consequences) the question of whether to do something now or not is (or should be) not one of pure science but of risk management. The relevant parameters here are estimated likelyhood (that we can do something) and estimated cost (of not doing it). Your position is the equivalent of saying that any likelyhood below a perfect 1.00 might as well be 0.00. That is simply wrong, stupid, and considering the scale of the possible suffering involved in erring on the side of risk in this question, one could even argue that it is immoral.
But then again, you seem to even doubt that large scale climate change would be bad (i.e. that the cost part is 0, or at least lower than the investment to avoid it), so there might not be a whole lot of point in arguing with you. Hint: averages aren't useful here. One country getting a crop boost does not really do much for the people suddenly starving somewhere else. Even if it was all natural, it would still be very bad indeed for millions of people, and we should be looking into ways to counteract it in any case.
Getting fingerprinted is typical in the banking industry
Doesn't make it smart or defensible.
If a programmer would be anywhere near the software involved in manipulating the numbers in accounts, they are "touching the money" enough to be fingerprinted
But not enough for fingerprints to actually be useful.
These Van Eck methods are based on amplifying these "leaky" signals;
Yes, but the cryptonomicon was right in an important respect:
Picking up these leaks could easily be made a whole lot harder if it was given any thought at all in the design process.
The panedisplay could easily have pixels that remember their own state, so information only needs to be sent to the pixes that change, and only when they change. You could still pick up the signals remotely, but it would have to catch them at the right moment (no second chances), and then figure out where on the screen they are destined. In contrast, normal systems today are practically made for eavesdropping, with the whole image is updated (i.e. broadcast) many times a second, with pixel positions directly encoded in the timing.
Another easy fix would scramble the pixel updates in a screen change, adressing the destination pixels in random order rather than in strict sequence. The hacker would then need to know which wire each signal he picked up came from in order to descramble the frame, rather than just stack them up in sequence.
Measures like these might not be completely watertight, but it could move the challenge from easy, to very hard indeed for your average basement hacker.
The Americans, on the other hand, wouldn't bother to wait for aliens to actually be observed.
They'd just declare war on spacewar, draw som red and yellow boxes on a map of the moon, go all grumpy when noone else agreed that this means we absolutely we need to invade the moon, and go occupy it anyway, at enormous human and economic expense, tha latter somehow ending up in the hands of the president's friends.
I don't know about you, but when somebody distributes something, which I worked hard to produce and sell, freely onto the Internet, I get really upset.
I'm sure you do. So would I. It is also illegal in most places, and ethically wring in the opinion of many. That still doesn't make it theft. Theft is a specific crime, and doesn't cover everything else that is wrong any more than "murder" or "speeding" does.
How about I go fetch a bucketfull of the liquid from the nearest ocean, and you drink it all down and then (when and if you get out of hospital), you can explain to me again how "water" is so plentiful.
How about I get a bucketful of oil, and you drink it all down and then (when and if you get out of hospital), you can explain to me what the hell that has to do with anything.
I thought the main problem with allofmp3 was that they didn't have permission to sell what they were selling, not that it was drm free.
They were within Russian law, but the Russian system was badly broken: a company was able to sell music for a pittance, without the the artists or rights holders ever seeing any reasonable compensation, having any control over pricing, or being asked for permission.
So they fixed the law. After intense lobbying from abroad, I'm sure, and I have no idea if the new law is any good or not. But it is still important to realize that the old law was really unfair.
Insitutional Bias is a fine thing to claim in say, Literary studies, or philosophy (a continental philosopher you say.. there's the door I say), but science generally (and this includes climatology) is a field where on earns street credit by conducting experiments which challange (and defeat) your own hypothosies.
This is a tad naïve. Science history is rife, also in the hard sciences, with examples of conventional wisdom elevated into dogma, and new blood having to wait more or less until the old profs die before new evidence is taken seriously.
That said, I do believe most of the climate skepticism is a bunch of hooey that can only serve to delay important changes. And that only a small likelyhood that the current projections are correct should be enough to justify very large defensive measures.
the tests are clear: There exists a subset of people who can distinguish audio from these supposed frivolities.
No, there exist people who will deny the test is valid and go on claiming they can hear it under the right conditions which are impossible to reproduce in the lab. That is not the same thing.
So, yes, the $2000.00 speaker cables will benefit some percentage of the population.
Well, yes, if you can call a group well below the 1% mark a "percentage". Usually we just call them "cable manufacturers".
The comparison between cables and compression is ridiculous. With lossy compression we know we are technically degrading the sound, so it is entirely logical that people differ in ability to discern it. And since the whole point of compression is scarcity of storage or bandwidth, the most common compression levels lie just round most people's limit, so it is fairly easy to find people who do discern then.
The $2000 cables, on the other hand, are produced from the finest monocrystalline 100% oxygen-free snake-oil. There is no backing whatsoever in electrical theory as to why they should have any advantage over any other suitably dimensioned cable at audio frequencies or anything remotely approaching them. You will not find any solid experiment that show otherwise.
But on a more serious note: I wonder if the recently fashionable sport parkour/street running would exist without a generation grown up with platformers?
The whole point of opera mini is the server. It is not just a proxy, it digests the page and adapts it to small-screen viewing before sending it to you.
There are very good reasons for this:
* The transformations are done in very intelligent ways that would be way too heavy to do on most phones in a timely fashion
* The digested page has much less data to transfer, and can be compressed in proprietary ways since the client is known. (helps both speed and cost of use).
* The client need only handle content of the format the proxy produces, so the implementation can be much simpler than a normal xhtml client. This way (along with their plain talent and experience in optimizing) they manage to get a java-based browser running on a jvm running on a phone to outperform the native one that comes with the phone. Damn impressive.
Now if you want total privacy, fair enough. You don't have to use it, or you don't have to use it for everything. But it is made the way it is for specific reason that deliver very specific advantages. After getting used to Opera mini, the standard browser on my SE is close useless by comparison.
And your ISP probably wathces you anyway; why trust them any more than opera?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else notice how they quite transparently used their own tech for generating the testimonial quotes?
Either that or we were created by an incompetent engineer. Take your pick.
Heee hee. The somewhat less burgeoning theory of "Incompetent Design". I like it.
Ya know, the eyeball isn't all that great. First, we only have two of them. And because of their positioning, the majority of our surroundings are rendered into a huge blind spot. Squids got it right.
Squids got it right _for_a_typical_small_prey_animal. Being able to see your predators is top priority, and that is best achieved by a huge field of vision. To animals with few natural enemies, other issues my take precedence, such as the ability to find food. For predators with few natural enemies, it makes sense to in stead have a highly focused field of vision with excellent resolution and depth perception (requiring significant overlap of the two regions), since catching fleeing food is hard, and starvation bacomes a more looming threat than being eaten by someone bigger.
Witness how birds of prey have forward-pointing eyes, smaller birds who may be their victims have them more on the sides, and large non-hunting birds with few enemies often somewhere in-between.
Then look at yourself in the mirror and tell me we're not built to hunt...
I think those were intentionally left out.
You could insist on calling footbal strategy "jock programming" too, if you really wanted to, but what would be the point?
Hopefully America will realize it benefits everyone to have universal health care
Ah, but for that to work, it also needs to start caring what is best for everyone,
in stead of teaching each individual to bank on themselves beating the odds.
Great, now we'll have the extreme left nut jobs...
I know what a nose job and a boob job is, but why the
hell would anyone want a left nut job, let alone an
extreme one?
Damn, where is that classic The Onion article about Bush complaining that other countries refuse to put America first? Can't find it.
Problem is, the US tends to consider economic threats to is companies as acts of war, and react correspondingly.
What the fsck is "retrofurist"?
A person who identifies with or is sexually attracted
to old-fashioned stuffed toys and/or anthropomorphic
animal characters in fiction and illustration.
Derived from "furry", denoting the similar but more common
inclination that accepts, and is chiefly oriented towards,
more modern depictions. Adherents of retrofurism mostly
use only "furist" to denote their group, feeling its
clever variation on "furry" suffices to convey the archaic
aspect. "Retro" is added mostly by outsiders to the group,
or in communication with them, in order to avoid
misunderstandings.
If someone could CONCLUSIVLY prove that humans are the sole cause of global warming, and that global warming is not natural, and that it is bad, I would listen.
I suppose you would only buy insurance if you got conclusive proof you were going to need it too?
First of all: Why do we need to be the sole cause? It should be more than enough to show that we have a significant effect that would make a worthwhile difference if removed.
Why does it need to be conclusive? The pure science side of things might operate only with proven or not (although that is not actually completely the case anywhere outside of pure mathematics).
But to the real world (you know, the lives that will have to bear the consequences) the question of whether to do something now or not is (or should be) not one of pure science but of risk management. The relevant parameters here are estimated likelyhood (that we can do something) and estimated cost (of not doing it). Your position is the equivalent of saying that any likelyhood below a perfect 1.00 might as well be 0.00. That is simply wrong, stupid, and considering the scale of the possible suffering involved in erring on the side of risk in this question, one could even argue that it is immoral.
But then again, you seem to even doubt that large scale climate change would be bad (i.e. that the cost part is 0, or at least lower than the investment to avoid it), so there might not be a whole lot of point in arguing with you. Hint: averages aren't useful here. One country getting a crop boost does not really do much for the people suddenly starving somewhere else. Even if it was all natural, it would still be very bad indeed for millions of people, and we should be looking into ways to counteract it in any case.
Getting fingerprinted is typical in the banking industry
Doesn't make it smart or defensible.
If a programmer would be anywhere near the software involved in manipulating the numbers in accounts, they are "touching the money" enough to be fingerprinted
But not enough for fingerprints to actually be useful.
if there ever was a testimonial that deserves to be put on the home page, this is it!
Black holes actually do radiate - they are actually not black at all.
More like... charcoal. Yeah. Charcoal.
These Van Eck methods are based on amplifying these "leaky" signals;
Yes, but the cryptonomicon was right in an important respect:
Picking up these leaks could easily be made a whole lot harder if it was
given any thought at all in the design process.
The panedisplay could easily have pixels that remember their own state, so
information only needs to be sent to the pixes that change, and only when
they change. You could still pick up the signals remotely, but it would
have to catch them at the right moment (no second chances), and then figure
out where on the screen they are destined. In contrast, normal systems
today are practically made for eavesdropping, with the whole image is
updated (i.e. broadcast) many times a second, with pixel positions
directly encoded in the timing.
Another easy fix would scramble the pixel updates in a screen change, adressing
the destination pixels in random order rather than in strict sequence. The
hacker would then need to know which wire each signal he picked up came from
in order to descramble the frame, rather than just stack them up in sequence.
Measures like these might not be completely watertight, but it could move
the challenge from easy, to very hard indeed for your average basement
hacker.
We should at least grant them the right to remain silent.
The Americans, on the other hand, wouldn't bother to wait for aliens to actually be observed.
They'd just declare war on spacewar, draw som red and yellow boxes on a map of the moon, go all grumpy when noone else agreed that this means we absolutely we need to invade the moon, and go occupy it anyway, at enormous human and economic expense, tha latter somehow ending up in the hands of the president's friends.
So here's a question: if we stopped emitting burning fossil fuels entirely, right now, would the earth start cooling?
Wrong question. What matters is if we quit burning fossil fuels, will we be better off than if we don't?
Now if we could just hear de wailing of der women too, it will be perfect.
I don't know about you, but when somebody distributes something, which I worked hard to produce and sell, freely onto the Internet, I get really upset.
I'm sure you do. So would I. It is also illegal in most places, and ethically wring in the opinion of many. That still doesn't make it theft. Theft is a specific crime, and doesn't cover everything else that is wrong any more than "murder" or "speeding" does.
How about I go fetch a bucketfull of the liquid from the nearest ocean, and you drink it all down and then (when and if you get out of hospital), you can explain to me again how "water" is so plentiful.
How about I get a bucketful of oil, and you drink it all down and then (when and if you get out of hospital), you can explain to me what the hell that has to do with anything.
I thought the main problem with allofmp3 was that they didn't have permission to sell what they were selling, not that it was drm free.
They were within Russian law, but the Russian system was badly broken: a company was able to sell music for a pittance, without the the artists or rights holders ever seeing any reasonable compensation, having any control over pricing, or being asked for permission.
So they fixed the law. After intense lobbying from abroad, I'm sure, and I have no idea if the new law is any good or not. But it is still important to realize that the old law was really unfair.
Insitutional Bias is a fine thing to claim in say, Literary studies, or philosophy (a continental philosopher you say.. there's the door I say), but science generally (and this includes climatology) is a field where on earns street credit by conducting experiments which challange (and defeat) your own hypothosies.
This is a tad naïve. Science history is rife, also in the hard sciences, with examples of conventional wisdom elevated into dogma, and new blood having to wait more or less until the old profs die before new evidence is taken seriously.
That said, I do believe most of the climate skepticism is a bunch of hooey that can only serve to delay important changes. And that only a small likelyhood that the current projections are correct should be enough to justify very large defensive measures.
the tests are clear: There exists a subset of people who can distinguish audio from these supposed frivolities.
No, there exist people who will deny the test is valid and go on claiming they can hear it under the right conditions which are impossible to reproduce in the lab. That is not the same thing.
So, yes, the $2000.00 speaker cables will benefit some percentage of the population.
Well, yes, if you can call a group well below the 1% mark a "percentage". Usually we just call them "cable manufacturers".
The comparison between cables and compression is ridiculous. With lossy compression we know we are technically degrading the sound, so it is entirely logical that people differ in ability to discern it. And since the whole point of compression is scarcity of storage or bandwidth, the most common compression levels lie just round most people's limit, so it is fairly easy to find people who do discern then.
The $2000 cables, on the other hand, are produced from the finest monocrystalline 100% oxygen-free snake-oil. There is no backing whatsoever in electrical theory as to why they should have any advantage over any other suitably dimensioned cable at audio frequencies or anything remotely approaching them. You will not find any solid experiment that show otherwise.
But on a more serious note: I wonder if the recently fashionable sport parkour/street running would exist without a generation grown up with platformers?
The whole point of opera mini is the server. It is not just a proxy, it digests the page and adapts it to small-screen viewing before sending it to you.
There are very good reasons for this:
* The transformations are done in very intelligent ways that would be way too heavy to do on most phones in a timely fashion
* The digested page has much less data to transfer, and can be compressed in proprietary ways since the client is known. (helps both speed and cost of use).
* The client need only handle content of the format the proxy produces, so the implementation can be much simpler than a normal xhtml client. This way (along with their plain talent and experience in optimizing) they manage to get a java-based browser running on a jvm running on a phone to outperform the native one that comes with the phone. Damn impressive.
Now if you want total privacy, fair enough. You don't have to use it, or you don't have to use it for everything. But it is made the way it is for specific reason that deliver very specific advantages. After getting used to Opera mini, the standard browser on my SE is close useless by comparison.
And your ISP probably wathces you anyway; why trust them any more than opera?