I've been noticing Slashdot's sloth quite a bit here lately. Plenty of technology stories seem to find their way to Slashdot only after being on Fark, Metafilter, Technocrat and god knows what else for a couple of days. If Slashdot was an all purpose news site it could be written off, but they're supposed to concentrate on tech. Fame made ya lazy there slash?
It seems that the only real difference between China and the US in terms of freedom of speech is that over there you know what will get you thrown in jail whereas here you just can't tell.
If you're a programmer or just good with code I wish you would elaborate or post a link to an article that does. I've always wondered just how accurate the aiming schemes are in FPSs (been playing CounterStrike lately). Perticularly, how, when an opponent is far enough off into the distance and is only a few pixels wide, can the software be accurate enough to register a head, arm, leg shot. Is there alot of randomness thrown in or does the software stick pretty close to WYSIWYG?
An open source grammar checker would be extremely useful.
They're not just usefull at catching mistakes, but also teaching grammer. Anyone who uses grammar checking often enough will eventually start writing correctly in order to reduce the amount of corrections they have to make. I know there were quite a few times after running a grammar check when those rules learned in school came flooding back. Of course, this is all null and void if the grammer check automatically fixes errors, but in my experience no such program exists.
Heck, who pays for the stabilisation of the oil-producing middle-east countries...?
Uhh, no one? I'm not sure if you've been paying attention but most if not all of the foreign action in the Middle East has destabilized the region. Do you think oil prices would be lower if everyone in the Middle East had a standard of living that included over-sized automobiles, over-sized houses and the infrastructure to support it all? No, prices are low because the majority in that region has been denied the oil income and any foreign involvement is designed to keep it that way.
None the less, the military budget does get used for oil purposes so no, gas isn't $3.29/gallon and the arabs don't hate us for our freedom unless you're talking about the freedom to run rampant around the world destabilizing countries for a bit of black sludge.
Did you ever stop to think that the 300+ billion dollar/year United States military budget is the best hidden "gas tax" that ever existed? Who do you think is paying to keep the Middle East pot stirred into a third world country so that standards are low and prices are cheap there? What country, do you think, has squandered all of it's reputation and "political capital" trying to dominate the resource? Not to mention the National Guard troops and tax dollars that could've better been spent domestically on some, oh I dunno natural disaster.
If you think were (you're) paying $3.29/gallon you might want to look a little further. In addition, if you want to feel sorry for someone, try feeling sorry for the minority in the US (and anywhere else for that matter) who are trying to keep a rabid government in check despite an apathetic and complacent majority.
Maybe you're not sleeping right for you. I'd be interested to know if you've ever tried polyphasic sleep... sleep for about 25 to 45 miuntes 6 to 4 times a day. From what I've read, your body adjusts to the schedule so that you do get a full sleep cycle within that short amount of time. Supposedly it's a hard schedule to nail down, but if you're into the habbit of waking shortly after sleeping then this might be exctly what you need.
I'd be interested to know if you or any other insomiacs have tried polyphase. I'm quite the opposite - once asleep (a chore) I play hell trying to wake back up and that has it's own drawbacks. I've concidered polyphase just to get the extra 4 hours a day it yields (more like 5 or 6 for me).
Ok, so you can't speed up a ping by moving electrons or photons faster, but can you speed it up by putting two or three bits of information where there used to be one? How big is your ping packet? I didn't RTFA but it seems that methods like these are what smarter folk are using to compress information. Am I right or should I RTFA?
On another note, not to be a dick, but how can a bunch of hams form a "major" opposition against the power companies, IBM, Google etc?
It does almost sound silly, but if you realize that HAMs are at least organized enough to have their own tranciever payloads on quite a few orbiting satelites... they are organized.
what percentage of a drive is FAT? Seems to me that it might be enough to store data on a platter and the FAT in flash. quite a bit less head movement and seek time ought to speed things up.
So, if I'm some tasteless sap who listens to Britney I can be assured to earn piles of credits with which I can purchase more useless pap. Alternatively, if I listen to something more tastefull yet obscure my crdit amount suffers since fewer people are likely to barrow my collection. Super. How about giving credit for the number of hours my server is up with sharing enabled? I'm not a retail outlet and I'll be damned if I'm going to be held to per unit "sales" quotas to qualify for "quantity" discounts. What this credit system amounts to is reletive punishment for people who don't succumb to hype marketing and machine generated, lowest common denominator music.
No thanks. I think I'll just continue my boycott of commercial music until the RIAA associates decide to pull their heads ALL the way from their asses. It's more satisfying to roll your own anyway.
This isn't the sort of thing you throw away. This is the sort of thing you collect to extract the liquid-poly-metal-alloy to make robots that take over the world.
I could see problems if they simply rate each of these catagories, take an average, and *bam* produce a trust rank. But the key word I'm reading in the article is "formula." The statistics aren't weigted individually but rather how they work with each other. For instance, a newer organization with lots of traffic gets a higher score than an older organization with high traffic (representing perceived public trust). Or a new organization with staff 5,000 gets a lower score than a new organization with a staff of 100 (a new large organization probably has more loans out with greased palms and backs that need scratching). These are just quick guesses using two factors. You'll probably have to come up with your own to make any sense of it.
My biggest curiousity is their definition of "trust." Are they are looking for trust in the truth of a story or trust in having the last word of the story, ala history is written by the victors. Are they looking at historical values of trustworthiness and how the hell could you even do that? I'd rather see that historical database then the results it produces.
After having defended the idea I have to admit that my TrustRank in this whole idea is pretty low. It'll be interesting to see the results, but I expected more out of their news service... like an oracle that concentrated on developing news that would make the most impact tomorrow or next week rather than the "pop news" that every other swingin' dick has published to cover up the "real news," which the freemasons and whatnot don't want us to know about;)
Every time one of these "US sucks at broadband" threads comes along there's the tired old argument that the United States is big and the people are spread all over... We just can't reach them all.
Pish-posh. In the months coming up to every war US'ians are heard saying, "yeah, we'll kick all their asses! Glass parking lot! We got teh tech!" But given a crack at wide broadband distribution the techies all cry, "wah, it's just too hard!"
Finally, after five years of rural broadband drought someone comes up with the simplistic idea of an antenna on a blimp. Whoa, geniuses they were. But wait... It was the Aussies that "invented" that. And as simple as the idea is and the area that it covers, five years after the idea WE STILL DON'T HAVE IT!
It could be done TOMORROW. You can make up your own excuses why it won't be.
I'll give you a start:
Regulation
Capital distribution
Personally, I live 10 minutes from the 11th larges city in the US and couldn't get broadband (aside from that high-latency high-dollar satellite crap) until 2003. If the people in this country keep giving our turds to every other country on earth hoping that they'll polish it to our expectations... well, once again, make up your own excuses.
Shitcockhead? Hell, you've come the closest to actually adding anything interesting to the discussion!
That being said, you still didn't answer the questions I haven't asked yet (that someone else should've by now).
Why is there no (more?) hardware raytracing hardware? I saw someone else mention PovRay, I'm personally thining AutoCAD and Blender although the list goes on. I'm guessing that people other than myself (movie studios?) are using ray tracing to make images and assuming theres some market for it. Rendering those images can take better than an hour and I'd think that any increase in speed would be usefull to someone who does this sort of work on regular occasion. Why must I start rendering before I leave for work just to come home 9 hours later and find that the light I added didn't make a damn bit of difference 'cause it was set to 0!? I thought the free market was supposed to work better than this. Where's my hardware?
Where's your links? Not that I don't believe you, but I'd like to know what you're referring to. This is the first I've heard of it and figured some hot topic like this would be in a few more headlines. That being said, I'll bet nothing comes of it.
So what does all this mean? Did Nostradamus line this event up with the end of the world? Will the gravity combine and suck the earth into outerspace? Is this going to attract planet X cause if it doesn't it's is a non-event. Sure I could go out and see it with my naked eye but then what sort of hethen would let their naked eye's out in public in this fine xtian society of ours?
I previously worked for a company who branched off into an export-labor-to-China-for-cheap business. From what I remember they take 5000 unit orders as well. In the spirit of capitalistic competition here is the link to Golden Beam Technology Industrial, LLC.
So, if someone really wants low prices they should get quotes from both of these companies and see how low they'll go.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been noticing Slashdot's sloth quite a bit here lately. Plenty of technology stories seem to find their way to Slashdot only after being on Fark, Metafilter, Technocrat and god knows what else for a couple of days. If Slashdot was an all purpose news site it could be written off, but they're supposed to concentrate on tech. Fame made ya lazy there slash?
Mod points to you.
At least China is being honest.
It seems that the only real difference between China and the US in terms of freedom of speech is that over there you know what will get you thrown in jail whereas here you just can't tell.
"Why am I on the no-fly list?"
"Sorry sir, I couldn't tell you even if I knew."
If you're a programmer or just good with code I wish you would elaborate or post a link to an article that does. I've always wondered just how accurate the aiming schemes are in FPSs (been playing CounterStrike lately). Perticularly, how, when an opponent is far enough off into the distance and is only a few pixels wide, can the software be accurate enough to register a head, arm, leg shot. Is there alot of randomness thrown in or does the software stick pretty close to WYSIWYG?
An open source grammar checker would be extremely useful.
They're not just usefull at catching mistakes, but also teaching grammer. Anyone who uses grammar checking often enough will eventually start writing correctly in order to reduce the amount of corrections they have to make. I know there were quite a few times after running a grammar check when those rules learned in school came flooding back. Of course, this is all null and void if the grammer check automatically fixes errors, but in my experience no such program exists.
Yeah, yeah, that's the spirit! If they're going to be souless ass-fuckers then why can't we!?
Gee, I wonder how long the SRF would've held up if not propped up by foreigners?
As far as revoloutins are concerned you might pluck the splinter out of their eye right after you pull the log out of your own.
Heck, who pays for the stabilisation of the oil-producing middle-east countries...?
Uhh, no one? I'm not sure if you've been paying attention but most if not all of the foreign action in the Middle East has destabilized the region. Do you think oil prices would be lower if everyone in the Middle East had a standard of living that included over-sized automobiles, over-sized houses and the infrastructure to support it all? No, prices are low because the majority in that region has been denied the oil income and any foreign involvement is designed to keep it that way.
None the less, the military budget does get used for oil purposes so no, gas isn't $3.29/gallon and the arabs don't hate us for our freedom unless you're talking about the freedom to run rampant around the world destabilizing countries for a bit of black sludge.
Did you ever stop to think that the 300+ billion dollar/year United States military budget is the best hidden "gas tax" that ever existed? Who do you think is paying to keep the Middle East pot stirred into a third world country so that standards are low and prices are cheap there? What country, do you think, has squandered all of it's reputation and "political capital" trying to dominate the resource? Not to mention the National Guard troops and tax dollars that could've better been spent domestically on some, oh I dunno natural disaster.
If you think were (you're) paying $3.29/gallon you might want to look a little further. In addition, if you want to feel sorry for someone, try feeling sorry for the minority in the US (and anywhere else for that matter) who are trying to keep a rabid government in check despite an apathetic and complacent majority.
Maybe you're not sleeping right for you. I'd be interested to know if you've ever tried polyphasic sleep... sleep for about 25 to 45 miuntes 6 to 4 times a day. From what I've read, your body adjusts to the schedule so that you do get a full sleep cycle within that short amount of time. Supposedly it's a hard schedule to nail down, but if you're into the habbit of waking shortly after sleeping then this might be exctly what you need.
I'd be interested to know if you or any other insomiacs have tried polyphase. I'm quite the opposite - once asleep (a chore) I play hell trying to wake back up and that has it's own drawbacks. I've concidered polyphase just to get the extra 4 hours a day it yields (more like 5 or 6 for me).
Ok, so you can't speed up a ping by moving electrons or photons faster, but can you speed it up by putting two or three bits of information where there used to be one? How big is your ping packet? I didn't RTFA but it seems that methods like these are what smarter folk are using to compress information. Am I right or should I RTFA?
On another note, not to be a dick, but how can a bunch of hams form a "major" opposition against the power companies, IBM, Google etc?
It does almost sound silly, but if you realize that HAMs are at least organized enough to have their own tranciever payloads on quite a few orbiting satelites... they are organized.
I'm thinking more along the lines of The Island of Dr. Moreau
Why not? They arrest people for carrying gas masks.
what percentage of a drive is FAT? Seems to me that it might be enough to store data on a platter and the FAT in flash. quite a bit less head movement and seek time ought to speed things up.
Yes, and nothing useful ever came from media clandestinely ran by the government.
I present exhibit A) Media government collusion
So, if I'm some tasteless sap who listens to Britney I can be assured to earn piles of credits with which I can purchase more useless pap. Alternatively, if I listen to something more tastefull yet obscure my crdit amount suffers since fewer people are likely to barrow my collection. Super. How about giving credit for the number of hours my server is up with sharing enabled? I'm not a retail outlet and I'll be damned if I'm going to be held to per unit "sales" quotas to qualify for "quantity" discounts. What this credit system amounts to is reletive punishment for people who don't succumb to hype marketing and machine generated, lowest common denominator music.
No thanks. I think I'll just continue my boycott of commercial music until the RIAA associates decide to pull their heads ALL the way from their asses. It's more satisfying to roll your own anyway.
This isn't the sort of thing you throw away. This is the sort of thing you collect to extract the liquid-poly-metal-alloy to make robots that take over the world.
omg! OMG! this is how the matrix starts!
/runs around in circles
I could see problems if they simply rate each of these catagories, take an average, and *bam* produce a trust rank. But the key word I'm reading in the article is "formula." The statistics aren't weigted individually but rather how they work with each other. For instance, a newer organization with lots of traffic gets a higher score than an older organization with high traffic (representing perceived public trust). Or a new organization with staff 5,000 gets a lower score than a new organization with a staff of 100 (a new large organization probably has more loans out with greased palms and backs that need scratching). These are just quick guesses using two factors. You'll probably have to come up with your own to make any sense of it.
;)
My biggest curiousity is their definition of "trust." Are they are looking for trust in the truth of a story or trust in having the last word of the story, ala history is written by the victors. Are they looking at historical values of trustworthiness and how the hell could you even do that? I'd rather see that historical database then the results it produces.
After having defended the idea I have to admit that my TrustRank in this whole idea is pretty low. It'll be interesting to see the results, but I expected more out of their news service... like an oracle that concentrated on developing news that would make the most impact tomorrow or next week rather than the "pop news" that every other swingin' dick has published to cover up the "real news," which the freemasons and whatnot don't want us to know about
Every time one of these "US sucks at broadband" threads comes along there's the tired old argument that the United States is big and the people are spread all over... We just can't reach them all.
:
Pish-posh. In the months coming up to every war US'ians are heard saying, "yeah, we'll kick all their asses! Glass parking lot! We got teh tech!" But given a crack at wide broadband distribution the techies all cry, "wah, it's just too hard!"
Finally, after five years of rural broadband drought someone comes up with the simplistic idea of an antenna on a blimp. Whoa, geniuses they were. But wait... It was the Aussies that "invented" that. And as simple as the idea is and the area that it covers, five years after the idea WE STILL DON'T HAVE IT!
It could be done TOMORROW. You can make up your own excuses why it won't be.
I'll give you a start
Regulation
Capital distribution
Personally, I live 10 minutes from the 11th larges city in the US and couldn't get broadband (aside from that high-latency high-dollar satellite crap) until 2003. If the people in this country keep giving our turds to every other country on earth hoping that they'll polish it to our expectations... well, once again, make up your own excuses.
Shitcockhead? Hell, you've come the closest to actually adding anything interesting to the discussion!
That being said, you still didn't answer the questions I haven't asked yet (that someone else should've by now).
Why is there no (more?) hardware raytracing hardware? I saw someone else mention PovRay, I'm personally thining AutoCAD and Blender although the list goes on. I'm guessing that people other than myself (movie studios?) are using ray tracing to make images and assuming theres some market for it. Rendering those images can take better than an hour and I'd think that any increase in speed would be usefull to someone who does this sort of work on regular occasion. Why must I start rendering before I leave for work just to come home 9 hours later and find that the light I added didn't make a damn bit of difference 'cause it was set to 0!? I thought the free market was supposed to work better than this. Where's my hardware?
"Hey boy, you'd better fine those filthy hethens or I'm gonna show you what Colon Pow is all about!" - Colin Powell
Where's your links? Not that I don't believe you, but I'd like to know what you're referring to. This is the first I've heard of it and figured some hot topic like this would be in a few more headlines. That being said, I'll bet nothing comes of it.
in order to get a second chance, some do chose the second option.
How may lights do you see?
So what does all this mean? Did Nostradamus line this event up with the end of the world? Will the gravity combine and suck the earth into outerspace? Is this going to attract planet X cause if it doesn't it's is a non-event. Sure I could go out and see it with my naked eye but then what sort of hethen would let their naked eye's out in public in this fine xtian society of ours?
I previously worked for a company who branched off into an export-labor-to-China-for-cheap business. From what I remember they take 5000 unit orders as well. In the spirit of capitalistic competition here is the link to Golden Beam Technology Industrial, LLC.
So, if someone really wants low prices they should get quotes from both of these companies and see how low they'll go.