From the blurb: "This is a wild and visionary concept which works so fluidly you can blow on the screen and objects move as if propelled by your breath."
My gosh, that's amazing! All I had to do was click on "Hi-Bandwidth QuickTime Movie" and their server got blown away too!
From the article (page 3): "Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes."
I think BitDeluge, BitBucket, DearSweetJesusThemsALottaBits, GottaBitLeaveABitNeedABitTakeABit, BitBomb, BittyBits, BowlOBits, BitCornucopia or even FsckingTheRIAAInTheBumBitByBit would be more apropos...
EvanEd writes: "WinAMP: A Windows program that acts like an amp. An amp makes sound... hence WinAMP."
Given the ubiquity of computers and Windows, it would be hard to test this theory, but if you were to theoretically get a bunch of people who had no experience with the specific program WinAmp and asked them "what do you supppose the program WinAmp does?," I don't think you'd get more than half who would get as close as "a program to play audio files."
Again, it would be darned near impossible to test this theory. I'm not sure there is anyone who works with Windows regularly doesn't know what WinAmp is...
From the article: "My biggest gripe isn't so much with Mandrake as it is with Linux developers as a whole. First, can we PLEASE start naming things in a moderately descriptive way? Names like grip, alsa, chbg, gimp, mozilla, k3b. Huh? Great programs all, but do you have any idea what they do by their names?"
Stalyn writes: "The Matrix cuts down philosophy in small tasty bites easy to digest and easy to understand. Yet you shouldn't take the Matrix seriously. You have to understand its just a movie and really its there to entertain you. Its not there to show you that reality is an illusion therefore you should quit your job and try to jump off buildings."
In one short paragraph you manage to belittle and chastise people who take the Matrix to mean anything substantial and suggest that the alpha and the omega of what can be gleaned from the Matrix is that one should jump off of a bulding.
E=MC^2 is a good analogy. It's succinct. One can know the general theory and implications of that theory without understanding, say, entanglement.
I would suggest that those who read Einstein's equation and walk away from it realizing that energy == matter are off to a good start. You, however, want to suggest that this equation cannot be understood at all until they've consumed every nuance.
I wrote, in full: "Who is J.R. Dobbs? No joke, I stopped watching TV around 1994, stopped listening to commercial radio around 1997 and I work from home (no billboards and no co-workers to idly chat with). I can get as far as knowing which one of Mulder and Scully is the girl but not much further..."
An AC (aren't they all?) writes: "HINT: It has nothing to do with TV, so get down off yer soapbox. It has everything to do with slacker counterculture and good bookstores, though."
Tackhead writes: "I've long suspected that the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs! You've clinched it.:)"
Who is J.R. Dobbs?
No joke, I stopped watching TV around 1994, stopped listening to commercial radio around 1997 and I work from home (no billboards and no co-workers to idly chat with).
I can get as far as knowing which one of Mulder and Scully is the girl but not much further...
From the article: "We initially thought the idea was a little extreme," said Whiton. "But we got a lot of positive feedback. It defends, it protects and it gives confidence to women. By encasing the whole body in this electric fence, it forms a barrier that people just shouldn't enter into.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there probably isn't a guy in the world who, after encountering the business-end of this device, would still consider raping the female wearing it. Imagine what his thought process is going to be once he regains some semblance of lucid thought.
"Yeah, I'm not putting my hands on her, nevermind my **** in her..."
Guys expect guns, guys expect mace. What they don't expect is 80,000 volts. I think the first reaction is probably to get the hell away from the person wearing it.
My apologies for being vulgar but an obvious application of this is rape prevention. Kind of hard to dance around such a harsh subject.
On another note, you can bet your ass you will see criminals suing women who use this in the not-too-distant-future if this catches on. The assailant's intent may not be clear by the point that he grabs the girl and if we assume he doesn't get much further with his plans, he can always claim that he just grabbed her arm. I'm guessing that being hit with 80,000 volts could easily be contrued as excessive force if the jury can be convinced the grab was not the opening salvo of a more threatening attack.
First, let me start this off by saying that I have been involved in skeptic groups online prior to the internet being available to the public (read; local boards and nets).
I am Jack's username quotes George Bernard Shaw as: "The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
True, but that makes the not-so-subtle implication that Buddhism endorses an ostrich approach. Ie, the happiness is merely a benefit of ignoring certain problems. I don't agree that this is so. Buddhism, in my experience, involves recognizing that problems will exist regardless of your efforts. So just deal with it instead of trying to quash every bug in your life. It isn't going to happen.
Jack quotes the FFRF: "Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition."
I agree, but Buddhism encourages facing a problem squarely and firmly embraces rationality and reason, not to mention science. The Dalai Lama, IIRC, has said that if it comes to pass that a finding of science were to contradict a Buddhism teaching, Buddhism would have to change.
I think you're doing skeptics in general a disservice by automatically assuming that a thing which tends to be looked at as a religion by westerners is automagically invalid. Skepticism involves looking at the facts but I don't think you know a lot about Buddhism.
dmorin writes: "I just learned that in September, the Dalai Lama is coming to MIT to participate in a Life Sciences seminar that appears to be on exactly this topic. He's then speaking at the Fleet Center. I've already got my tickets."
asink writes: " Yet again, your sig is simply another message to me saying "I really care about karma". All these sigs about karma are really annoying."
If you're hell-bent on believing that my sig reallly means thing A when I've said the point is B, I can't very well stop you.
"If you want to take karma so seriously, convert to Hinduism."
From the article: "Customer reviews on Amazon.com (AMZN) tell the tale. For the 2001 version of TurboTax (which had no activation feature), the average customer-satisfaction rating was four and a half stars. For the activation-enhanced 2002 edition, the average rating dropped to one and a half stars, and the reviews bore titles such as "scumbags," "disaster," and, perhaps presciently, "the demise of TurboTax.""
I think the lesson the DRM-and-associated industries will take from this is the Boiling Frog story.
For those not familiar with it (there might be a few), the theory goes that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out. If you place that frog in a pan of warm water and slowly raise the heat to boiling, the thing won't budge until it's dead (and then it still won't budge. =)
In other words, the lesson learned is "erode their rights slowly, don't yank the carpet out from under them all at once. Start with the minor potatoes like so-called "fair use." They're entitled to protection from litigation if they're copying something for their own use but that doesn't mean we have to make the item copyable so we can leverage the DMCA for all it's worth. The politicans are cheap. Consider them as insurance or rent money -- just another cost of doing business. The consumer (and oh how I love that word) won't even know they have rights nevermind miss them in 20 years. Just do it slowly."
Oh yeah. Holywood can learn. The question is "can we?"
FroMan writes: "Hmmm, you seem a bit irrational here. Seeing how there hasn't been a single comment of that nature. Perhaps you are just a bigot?"
If you did not understand my comment to be a joke (as apparently 100% of the people who moderated it as "funny" did) then I would strongly suggest that you run -- don't walk, run -- to the nearest brothel and "get some."
An AC (aren't they all?) writes: "its much easier to whine about being modded down then to post an intelligent comment!!"
If you understood my sig, you would understand it to mean that I prefer dialogue over death-by-disagreement. Karma is just a number. You are not your karma score. Get over it.
When you can post your thoughts without considering how it will affect your karma score you will become a benefit to the Slashdot community.
The first creationist who takes this opportunity to reply and infer that Einstein's "god does not play dice" comment is tacit proof of god is going to get beat with a dusty 1200 baud modem.
Slashdot Mirror
One word answer: RAR.
He appears to have made his own webserver as well.
Look, she already wants to do it on the couch, the bathroom floor and the stove. LEAVE MY GAMECUBE OUT OF IT!
Why avoid OOP? PHP supports classes.
Granted, it isn't Java, but that isn't any reason to avoid them altogether or to avoid the tremendous amount of benefit that can be obtained from one.
jason@php.us
From the blurb:
...oh, wait...
"This is a wild and visionary concept which works so fluidly you can blow on the screen and objects move as if propelled by your breath."
My gosh, that's amazing! All I had to do was click on "Hi-Bandwidth QuickTime Movie" and their server got blown away too!
How do they do that!?
From the article (page 3):
"Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes."
Those two lines don't even need a comment...
CowboyNeal writes:
"Some pictures are available, although somewhat limited..."
You could say that. There is one picture of a treaded robot/tank, a picture of a girl with a standard ATM-ish card reader and finally, to really show off the state-of-the-art, a picture of a guy with a dog.
CmdrTaco writes:
"Might Mars Contain Life?"
Might? Yes.
Why "BitTorrent?"
I think BitDeluge, BitBucket, DearSweetJesusThemsALottaBits, GottaBitLeaveABitNeedABitTakeABit, BitBomb, BittyBits, BowlOBits, BitCornucopia or even FsckingTheRIAAInTheBumBitByBit would be more apropos...
dogfart writes:
"I remember a band named "Free Beer". Clubs were always careful to put their name in double quotes."
"Everyone Gets Laid" - From P.C.U.
EvanEd writes:
"WinAMP: A Windows program that acts like an amp. An amp makes sound... hence WinAMP."
Given the ubiquity of computers and Windows, it would be hard to test this theory, but if you were to theoretically get a bunch of people who had no experience with the specific program WinAmp and asked them "what do you supppose the program WinAmp does?," I don't think you'd get more than half who would get as close as "a program to play audio files."
Again, it would be darned near impossible to test this theory. I'm not sure there is anyone who works with Windows regularly doesn't know what WinAmp is...
"My biggest gripe isn't so much with Mandrake as it is with Linux developers as a whole. First, can we PLEASE start naming things in a moderately descriptive way? Names like grip, alsa, chbg, gimp, mozilla, k3b. Huh? Great programs all, but do you have any idea what they do by their names?"
Stalyn writes:
"The Matrix cuts down philosophy in small tasty bites easy to digest and easy to understand. Yet you shouldn't take the Matrix seriously. You have to understand its just a movie and really its there to entertain you. Its not there to show you that reality is an illusion therefore you should quit your job and try to jump off buildings."
In one short paragraph you manage to belittle and chastise people who take the Matrix to mean anything substantial and suggest that the alpha and the omega of what can be gleaned from the Matrix is that one should jump off of a bulding.
E=MC^2 is a good analogy. It's succinct. One can know the general theory and implications of that theory without understanding, say, entanglement.
I would suggest that those who read Einstein's equation and walk away from it realizing that energy == matter are off to a good start. You, however, want to suggest that this equation cannot be understood at all until they've consumed every nuance.
I wrote, in full:
"Who is J.R. Dobbs? No joke, I stopped watching TV around 1994, stopped listening to commercial radio around 1997 and I work from home (no billboards and no co-workers to idly chat with). I can get as far as knowing which one of Mulder and Scully is the girl but not much further..."
An AC (aren't they all?) writes:
"HINT: It has nothing to do with TV, so get down off yer soapbox. It has everything to do with slacker counterculture and good bookstores, though."
What part of my reply was preachy?
Tackhead writes: :)"
"I've long suspected that the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs! You've clinched it.
Who is J.R. Dobbs?
No joke, I stopped watching TV around 1994, stopped listening to commercial radio around 1997 and I work from home (no billboards and no co-workers to idly chat with).
I can get as far as knowing which one of Mulder and Scully is the girl but not much further...
From the article:
"We initially thought the idea was a little extreme," said Whiton. "But we got a lot of positive feedback. It defends, it protects and it gives confidence to women. By encasing the whole body in this electric fence, it forms a barrier that people just shouldn't enter into.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there probably isn't a guy in the world who, after encountering the business-end of this device, would still consider raping the female wearing it. Imagine what his thought process is going to be once he regains some semblance of lucid thought.
"Yeah, I'm not putting my hands on her, nevermind my **** in her..."
Guys expect guns, guys expect mace. What they don't expect is 80,000 volts. I think the first reaction is probably to get the hell away from the person wearing it.
My apologies for being vulgar but an obvious application of this is rape prevention. Kind of hard to dance around such a harsh subject.
On another note, you can bet your ass you will see criminals suing women who use this in the not-too-distant-future if this catches on. The assailant's intent may not be clear by the point that he grabs the girl and if we assume he doesn't get much further with his plans, he can always claim that he just grabbed her arm. I'm guessing that being hit with 80,000 volts could easily be contrued as excessive force if the jury can be convinced the grab was not the opening salvo of a more threatening attack.
First, let me start this off by saying that I have been involved in skeptic groups online prior to the internet being available to the public (read; local boards and nets).
Also, I am the guy who runs and owns nofaith.org.
Now...
I am Jack's username quotes George Bernard Shaw as:
"The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
True, but that makes the not-so-subtle implication that Buddhism endorses an ostrich approach. Ie, the happiness is merely a benefit of ignoring certain problems. I don't agree that this is so. Buddhism, in my experience, involves recognizing that problems will exist regardless of your efforts. So just deal with it instead of trying to quash every bug in your life. It isn't going to happen.
Jack quotes the FFRF:
"Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition."
I agree, but Buddhism encourages facing a problem squarely and firmly embraces rationality and reason, not to mention science. The Dalai Lama, IIRC, has said that if it comes to pass that a finding of science were to contradict a Buddhism teaching, Buddhism would have to change.
I think you're doing skeptics in general a disservice by automatically assuming that a thing which tends to be looked at as a religion by westerners is automagically invalid. Skepticism involves looking at the facts but I don't think you know a lot about Buddhism.
dmorin writes:
"I just learned that in September, the Dalai Lama is coming to MIT to participate in a Life Sciences seminar that appears to be on exactly this topic. He's then speaking at the Fleet Center. I've already got my tickets."
Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
Joe the Lesser writes:
"It has nothing to do with religion, just that fact that Buddhists..."
Not a flame, but Buddhism isn't a religion. No god(s), which is probably a bare minimum to meet a western standard of religion-ness.
asink writes:
" Yet again, your sig is simply another message to me saying "I really care about karma". All these sigs about karma are really annoying."
If you're hell-bent on believing that my sig reallly means thing A when I've said the point is B, I can't very well stop you.
"If you want to take karma so seriously, convert to Hinduism."
It's funny you should say that. I'm Buddhist.
From the article:
"Customer reviews on Amazon.com (AMZN) tell the tale. For the 2001 version of TurboTax (which had no activation feature), the average customer-satisfaction rating was four and a half stars. For the activation-enhanced 2002 edition, the average rating dropped to one and a half stars, and the reviews bore titles such as "scumbags," "disaster," and, perhaps presciently, "the demise of TurboTax.""
I think the lesson the DRM-and-associated industries will take from this is the Boiling Frog story.
For those not familiar with it (there might be a few), the theory goes that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out. If you place that frog in a pan of warm water and slowly raise the heat to boiling, the thing won't budge until it's dead (and then it still won't budge. =)
In other words, the lesson learned is "erode their rights slowly, don't yank the carpet out from under them all at once. Start with the minor potatoes like so-called "fair use." They're entitled to protection from litigation if they're copying something for their own use but that doesn't mean we have to make the item copyable so we can leverage the DMCA for all it's worth. The politicans are cheap. Consider them as insurance or rent money -- just another cost of doing business. The consumer (and oh how I love that word) won't even know they have rights nevermind miss them in 20 years. Just do it slowly."
Oh yeah. Holywood can learn. The question is "can we?"
Loosewire writes:
"Google - even their ads are clean and not obtrusive."
I guess so! My first reaction when I read this was, "Google has ads?!"
Not obtrusive indeed! =)
FroMan writes:
"Hmmm, you seem a bit irrational here. Seeing how there hasn't been a single comment of that nature. Perhaps you are just a bigot?"
If you did not understand my comment to be a joke (as apparently 100% of the people who moderated it as "funny" did) then I would strongly suggest that you run -- don't walk, run -- to the nearest brothel and "get some."
An AC (aren't they all?) writes:
"its much easier to whine about being modded down then to post an intelligent comment!!"
If you understood my sig, you would understand it to mean that I prefer dialogue over death-by-disagreement. Karma is just a number. You are not your karma score. Get over it.
When you can post your thoughts without considering how it will affect your karma score you will become a benefit to the Slashdot community.
The first creationist who takes this opportunity to reply and infer that Einstein's "god does not play dice" comment is tacit proof of god is going to get beat with a dusty 1200 baud modem.