As all graphics are vector based, SVG also has the potential to provide crystal clear, high resolution print-outs instead of the blurred GIFs (or PNG if anyone cares) we get to today.
I think you mean to say all graphics could be described as vectors, even though not all graphic formats use vectors in their implimentation
Well, I think he meant to say that when you're using SVG (instead of some other (raster) format), all the elements of your graphics are vector-based. Even though it sounded that way grammatically, since he said "all graphics", he couldn't have meant "all graphics, everywhere, are vector-based", since that would just be too absurdly dumb, and especially since he also specifically contrasted vector graphics with raster formats like GIF. If he thought GIF was vector-based, then what would he think was different about SVG?
If we give him the benefit of the grammatical correction, then it's a valid and interesting point, though it's really more an argument for vector formats in general, and I don't know that I'd have marked it all the way up to (+4, Interesting). I mean, like, duh -- high-resolution rendering has always been, like, the whole point of vector graphics; why else are TrueType and PostScript fonts better than bitmaps?
This sounds like the next generation floppy. A spinning mylar disc? Sounds about as reliable as a floppy. Basically write twice, then dispose.
Well, floppies aren't quite as bad as that, but, yes, from the description, this sounds like it should be called a "floppy disk", not a "hard disk drive".
A removable media unit that contains just the disk, with all the mechanical works in the reader is called a "disk", not a "drive", because the actual drive is the reader. And if the disk is made out of mylar, it's called "floppy", not "hard".
Still, this sounds pretty cool, especially if it really is "credit-card-sized", and not the way a PCMCIA card is credit-card-sized. That and the size-bump could qualify it as something more than just yet another "next standard floppy", but calling it an HD sounds like they're trying to ride the HD miniaturization wave precisely in order to avoid being thought of as a would-be next floppy.
They should encase the movie theater in a Faraday cage, or set up a transmitter to jam the signal.
I think someone (ahem) already suggested that. But about the FCC thing -- what about low-power transmitters? Isn't it legal to broadcast below a certain threshold output level? Since you'd only want the jammer to have a very short range, might it be possible to fit it under that threshold? It only has to be louder within a ~100-foot radius than the cell tower, wherever the hell that is. (Again, let me take a moment to grumble about Cingular's service quality.)
And what about combining the ideas? I.e., make the walls not a total Faraday cage, but with enough shielding to cut down the signal dramatically, making the jammer not have to be loud enough to cause trouble anywhere else?
The theaters could go even a step further than just having a policy to kick out people whose phones go off (actually enforcing that would entail making a scene that would be more disruptive than the original offense, create ill will, etc.) -- they could deal with the problem proactively by installing cell-phone jammers in the theater. (thick metal walls, little transmitters putting out enough noise on the cell frequencies to block signals inside but not loud enough to disrupt service outside, that sort of thing)
I'm not sure, but I've suspected that some of them are doing this already, since mine never seems to work inside (no, I don't try to use it, but when I go to turn it off, I more often than not notice that it has no signal anyway). But maybe that's just because I have Cingular. (grumble, grumble...)
It's unfortunate that Lars expressed himself so poorly. It wasn't that their songs were being traded that pissed them off, but that nobody bothered to ask them if it was OK!
I saw him talking about it on MTV (back when I watched TV). I didn't think he expressed himself poorly -- his failure to comprehend Napster's position, along with perhaps a general self-centeredness, came across loud and clear.
He said something to the effect of "They say 'We just provide a service...' -- well, it may be a cool service, but what if I don't want to receive this service? I should have been given a chance to opt-in/out." This is basically the position you're referring to, I guess. (Right?)
The thing is, he mixed up two of the main arguments for Napster, each of which I think deserved consideration, but which are completely unrelated to each other, and have to be considered separately:
1: By providing increased visibility and a way to try-before-you-buy, Napster might actually help increase sales, especially for struggling new artists, and artists would do well to just chill, not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, etc.
2: Napster only provides a service, allowing users to find each other and giving them tools to facilitate the file-transfer. But every transfer is between two individual users and Napster is not a party to that event -- if Alice downloads a Metallica song from Bob, Lars should sue Bob, not Napster.
Lars' "What if I don't want to receive this service?" argument is a (valid, I guess) counter to 1, but he was replying to 2! The "service" they were talking about was offered to the users, not to him, which is why, with respect to this argument, his wishes are irrelevant. (That's the self-centeredness I mentioned -- he assumed that he was the recipient of the "service".)
Note that I'm not necessarily claiming that either argument is actually valid, though again I do think they at least deserved more consideration. I'm no laywer (I just play one on Slashdot), but I gather that under the notion of contributory and/or vicarious infringement, Napster could be liable if they benefited from the copying even though they didn't directly participate in the act itself. That's not really the point here, though.
Reading The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales was great! For the better part of a year, my insomnia was cured -- whenever I would have trouble sleeping, I'd try to slog through the next three or four pages and it would knock me out like a hammer to the head. I can't tell you how often I've wished for such a soporific book since finishing those, but nothing else that I've found comes close.
Right, except Brin seems to have this notion that whenever a large laser is fired, it just sorta sucks heat out of the surrounding air to power itself, even without being set up with any special heat-pump apparatus.
True, in Sundiver, he made it sound like there was a special heat-pump setup (though I don't recall him describing it in enough detail to be sure), but in Heaven's Reach, the terrans rediscover the same trick a few centuries later to get out of a vaguely similar situation (and it's strongly suggested that the Galactics hadn't come across it in a billion years). This time, he definitely implies that the laser is sucking up ambient heat, because the brainstorm follows a character saying/thinking something like "wow, that communication laser sure draws a lot of power -- you can feel the room temperature drop a few degrees when you turn it on." Uh, sure, dude.
I've got to add: it's surprising that someone could have managed to misunderstand the original comment this way. I mean, like, of course that's what it meant.
But anyway, the next interesting question is -- how many of the people whose children seemed to 'just up and disappear' from one year to the next got [cue tympani solo -- BUM-bum BUM-bum BUM-bum...] AUDITED the following year? It must have been a fun year to be an IRS auditor; I bet they heard some interesting stories.
I know this is a week old, and nobody'll ever see it, but...
Assuming that's really true, it is a pretty stupid and contradictory law
No, it's a very cleverly contradictory law, which, presumably deliberately, pretends to provide this exemption, but in fact ensures that the exemption is useless for its stated purpose, in a manner that I can only describe as Kafkaesque.
Also, I seem to recall that it's actually more complicated than what you quoted: actually, you are allowed to build the tool to look under the hood, provided that you are only doing it for the stated purpose, but you still can't give the tool to anyone else, even if they only want it for the same purpose. I.e., the rule against building such tools is precisely what it's an exception to, but the exception fails to extend to the rule against distribution, which would be necessary for it to be of any use.
As a result, only those very few people who have the technical skills to build the tool are actually capable of exercising their rights under this exemption, leaving everyone else in Kafka-land. Honestly, how many of us would have been capable of creating DeCSS on our own? No, I said honestly?
Then again, recognizing that such tools are necessary in order for people to exercise their rights, and letting this override the restrictions, would basically nullify the whole law -- there'd be no point to it then, since using the tools for other (i.e., infringing) purposes was already illegal under regular (pre-DMCA) copyright law. But then, the fact that the DMCA infringes on our right without serving any legitimate purpose has been our whole point, all along, now hasn't it?
In sum, I don't think Hanlon's Razor applies -- this is a case where it really is malice, not stupidity.
Answer #1: That's why they weren't advocating building a meteor defense shield around Earth, but rather establishing colonies on at least a couple of nearby rocks, so that the entire human race wouldn't be all in one place and vulnerable to being wiped out by a single catastrophic event.
Answer #2: It all depends on how far out we catch it. If it was far enough, we might only need to deflect its course by a few milliradians to put it on an orbit that would miss us. F=MA. If the mass, distance, velocity, time, etc., worked out right, we just might be able to give it enough of a nudge to do the trick.
Though I agree, of course, about the silliness of the movies, where you see the producers' eight-year-old-level understanding of physics (i.e., the cute notion that when you "blow up" something, its mass just "disappears"), plus the fact that, I guess, "nudging" it somehow doesn't seem as cool.
(continuing my tradition of posting replies to old comments that nobody except possibly the parent poster will ever see... sigh. LAST POST!)
I disagree. I understand the theory behind the statement; CRT monitors are measured diagonally, so a 17" isn't really a full 17" across.
That's not the theory. First of all, LCDs are also measured diagonally. Nobody ever thought the size was horizontal. With an aspect ratio of 3x4, the difference between the diagonal and the long side would be really, really significant. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? The Pythagorean triple is 3:4:5, so the long side is 20% less than the diagonal.
You also mentioned flat tubes -- did you mean that they cheat by counting how the tape measure wraps around the curvature of the screen? I guess that's something, but even pre-flat-tube screens don't curve that much. Besides, I don't even like true flat tubes: I am an absolute Trinitron snob -- it's got to be vertically flat, but a little horizontal curvature helps to break up the reflections; flat-tube screens seem to pick up too much glare.
Anyway, no, the trick is that CRT sizes are given as the diagonal of the tube, including the 3/4" or whatever at each edge that is under the plastic, and unusable. It's the size of the actual tube, but not the size of the image that you can see. That's why they are advertised as, e.g., '15" CRT (13.8" DVI[1])', '17" CRT (15.6" DVI)', or '19" CRT (16.9" DVI)'. LCDs are also measured diagonally, but the size given is the "true" (viewable) size. Hence, the 13.3" screen on my 'Book is only about a half-inch smaller than a 15" CRT, which is hardly noticeable. Ditto for the desk-lamp iMac's 15" LCD (I checked "http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html" and that number is listed as viewable) vs. a 17" CRT. Though I can't say as much about the resolution being stuck at 1024x768 -- that is a real limitation. Still, the current desk-lamp is pretty nice, and a 17"/1280x1024 version would be truly sweet.
[1] Diagonal Viewable Image
Re:Doesn't go far enough
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DRM Helmet
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· Score: 2
(I know nobody'll see this, now that the story's two days old, but oh, well... Hey, LAST POST!)
Really, we need a helmet with brain probes that detect if licensed media is being consumed and debits your account on a metered basis.
That's right! I mean, what if, for example, a consumer hums a tune to himself, sub-vocally in his head? Anyone with a sufficiently good sense of pitch and rhythm could effectively enjoy a copyrighted work over and over again, for free simply by accessing the pirated copy that was created in his brain the first time he heard it! How would an external helmet detect that? How could such a system guarantee that the consumer pays for these private performances?
No, in order to protect the artists from having the fruits of their labors stolen in this way, we'll have to implant a direct neural interface into the brain of every consumer, so they can be billed whenever they think about a copyrighted work.
Re:Linked content can change without your knowing
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DeCSS' Continuing Saga
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is just yet another part of the problem of people not understanding linking in general (and one that I'll admit I hadn't thought of in those terms).
I guess the concept of what a URL really is (the difference between information as to the location of a document and the document itself) is just "too technical". Given that what a user sees in a browser is a blue, underlined title (which they've been trained to recognize as something they are supposed to click on) on your web page "turning into" the other document, how could they not think of your page as containing that document?
Is it that they can't comprehend that "All that's actually there is the equivalent of a library card-reference, or an ISBN number, and when you click it, you're asking your computer to use that information, find the other document, and display it in place of this one."? That's the best way I've come up with to word it, but I still see a lot of glazed-over eyes.
But wait -- lawyers and judges (aside from being pretty smart fellas in general, jokes about them notwithstanding) have their own system of references to legal texts. They fully understand how the inclusion in a brief of a reference to a piece of case law, or a section of a statute, or whatever, is equivalent to, but not the same as, attaching a copy of that text, because they know that the reader will (a) understand the conventions used and (b) have access to a law library where they can look it up. Is the connection so hard to make?
Maybe they (back to people in general, not just lawyers and judges) do understand that part, for what it's worth, but just don't see what's so important about it -- maybe the funny looks are not so much "What are you talking about?" as "So what's the big deal?"
The thing is, the whole power of hypertext -- fundamentally, what makes the web so revolutionary -- is precisely the fact that it blurs the line between reference and content. In a world where everyone has at his disposal armies of little gnomes who can, in a matter of seconds and at marginal cost, dash off to the Library of Congress, get a copy of a book, and bring it back to you, whenever you merely give them a reference number, giving someone such a number really is in a sense "equivalent" to giving them a copy of the book.
This does lead to legal issues -- in this case, it's the legality of the linked-to content and the linker's liability therefor; in other cases like deep-linking of articles and images, it's the copyright status of that content. In either case, the response to the conflict depends on one's assumptions and priorities.
Should the policy be: "Well, since we obviously can't restrict mere linking, for freedom-of-speech reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't restrict dissemination either, and if copyright interests suffer, too bad."?
Or should it be: "Well, since we obviously can't allow free dissemination, for copyright reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't allow free linking either, and if freedom of speech suffers, too bad."?
To be honest... I couldn't come up with 10. *frown*. And the others were good, but just didn't have quite enough punchline for #1.
Leaving it blank was the best punchline you could have had! Frankly, I thought it was intentional, and it was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. To make it explicit:
And the #1 reason to like quantum computing is...
*drum roll*
Oops! When I looked at the punchline, I collapsed the wave function, and it disappeared. Sorry.
This is why you're never supposed to explain a joke -- it causes it to lose coherence.
A more useful number for me would be the fraction of successful dates (*1), which, while non-zero, can be seen to converge to within espilon of zero as T goes to T(divorce) + infinity. We can represent this value by the lowercase Greek letter sigma (*2).
Raise sigma to the power of the money spent on those dates (which, perhaps counter-intuitively, appears to be inversely related to sigma itself), and we have a value that can be substituted for zero for most practical purposes, while remaining safe for division, though it may strain the limits of floating-point precision.
-- (*1) For any given meaning of "successful". I'll leave it to you sick monkeys to guess whether I mean what you think I mean.
I couldn't fine the poem either, but I really want to read it. 3 points to anyone who can find it.
This does remind me of a ST:TNG episode, though, with Data explaining to Geordi how he's trying to train his cat -- he succeeds about as well as one would expect: Geordi: "So how's it working?" Data: "Not very well. Apparently, Spot isn't a very intelligent cat." Spot: "Meow." Data: (looking down) "Hmm?" Spot: "Meow." Data: "Ah!" (gets cat food) Geordi: (starts laughing) Data: "Huh?" Geordi: "I don't know about your project, but he's got you trained pretty well!"
As for me an my cat, I'm not such a good subject. With us it's more like: Pavel: "Meow." David: "Fuck off." Pavel: "Meow." David: "Get it yourself!" Pavel: "Meow." David: <kick>
What's interesting about him, though, is the apparent intelligence with which he's learned to irritate me. He obviously knows that if he wants something, it's not enough to tell me about it -- the only way it'll happen is if he can be so annoying that I'll give in and do it just to shut him up. Early on, he discovered that the sliding doors of my closet make an incredible amount of noise when pushed just right, so standing up in front of them and batting on them with his paws is the best way to get let out at 4:30 AM. He can make almost as much noise scratching at the glass door from outside, making that the best way to get let in at 4:37 AM. He has further learned that nothing gets me to react faster than the sound of his claws in my couch, making that his doorknob whenever I'm in or near the living room.
6 hours of that convinced me that it is most likely Millikan's grad students we have to thanks for the thousands of data points needed for the accurate measurement of elementary charge.
My high school physics teacher described a pretty neat experiment that he had seen as a student -- in short, they measured the speed of light using a television set.
They chose a location in a mostly flat area, where they could be at one corner of a triangle with the other points being a transmission tower and a nearby mountain (or some large landscape feature). When they tuned the television to the tower's channel, the picture had a faint afterimage, which they could deduce was caused by a reflection of the signal bouncing off the mountain. By measuring the distances between the three points, they could know how much extra distance the ghost signal was travelling, compared to the direct signal, and by knowing the trace frequency of the television and measuring the number of lines by which the afterimage was shifted, they could calculate the time. Result: speed of light.
There are quite a few such phrases. I know I've seen some others that were pretty cool but I can't remember them offhand -- I mostly recall seeing them in Apple's font preview windows (open a font suitcase ==> get a list of fonts; open one of those ==> get a preview).
I guess they've used different sentences in different OS versions. Currently I'm seeing: (ahem)
"Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen."
Aside from the at-best-questionable disirability of automatic error-correction, you guys have surely seen this, right? There are times when you'd really rather have the machine ask you to explicitly what you wanted instead of having it try to guess, with potentially dire consequences.
In the long run, we're all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
I think this was Churchill: "If you ask two economists a question, you'll get two opinions. Unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you'll get three opinions."
As for the overuse of the quote, I'm actually not sure I'd seen it before, and at least it's not (yet?) as badly overused as the "freedom for security" line.
Slashdot Mirror
As all graphics are vector based, SVG also has the potential to provide crystal clear, high resolution print-outs instead of the blurred GIFs (or PNG if anyone cares) we get to today.
Well, I think he meant to say that when you're using SVG (instead of some other (raster) format), all the elements of your graphics are vector-based. Even though it sounded that way grammatically, since he said "all graphics", he couldn't have meant "all graphics, everywhere, are vector-based", since that would just be too absurdly dumb, and especially since he also specifically contrasted vector graphics with raster formats like GIF. If he thought GIF was vector-based, then what would he think was different about SVG?
If we give him the benefit of the grammatical correction, then it's a valid and interesting point, though it's really more an argument for vector formats in general, and I don't know that I'd have marked it all the way up to (+4, Interesting). I mean, like, duh -- high-resolution rendering has always been, like, the whole point of vector graphics; why else are TrueType and PostScript fonts better than bitmaps?
This sounds like the next generation floppy. A spinning mylar disc? Sounds about as reliable as a floppy. Basically write twice, then dispose.
Well, floppies aren't quite as bad as that, but, yes, from the description, this sounds like it should be called a "floppy disk", not a "hard disk drive".
A removable media unit that contains just the disk, with all the mechanical works in the reader is called a "disk", not a "drive", because the actual drive is the reader. And if the disk is made out of mylar, it's called "floppy", not "hard".
Still, this sounds pretty cool, especially if it really is "credit-card-sized", and not the way a PCMCIA card is credit-card-sized. That and the size-bump could qualify it as something more than just yet another "next standard floppy", but calling it an HD sounds like they're trying to ride the HD miniaturization wave precisely in order to avoid being thought of as a would-be next floppy.
They should encase the movie theater in a Faraday cage, or set up a transmitter to jam the signal.
I think someone (ahem) already suggested that. But about the FCC thing -- what about low-power transmitters? Isn't it legal to broadcast below a certain threshold output level? Since you'd only want the jammer to have a very short range, might it be possible to fit it under that threshold? It only has to be louder within a ~100-foot radius than the cell tower, wherever the hell that is. (Again, let me take a moment to grumble about Cingular's service quality.)
And what about combining the ideas? I.e., make the walls not a total Faraday cage, but with enough shielding to cut down the signal dramatically, making the jammer not have to be loud enough to cause trouble anywhere else?
The theaters could go even a step further than just having a policy to kick out people whose phones go off (actually enforcing that would entail making a scene that would be more disruptive than the original offense, create ill will, etc.) -- they could deal with the problem proactively by installing cell-phone jammers in the theater. (thick metal walls, little transmitters putting out enough noise on the cell frequencies to block signals inside but not loud enough to disrupt service outside, that sort of thing)
I'm not sure, but I've suspected that some of them are doing this already, since mine never seems to work inside (no, I don't try to use it, but when I go to turn it off, I more often than not notice that it has no signal anyway). But maybe that's just because I have Cingular. (grumble, grumble...)
It's unfortunate that Lars expressed himself so poorly. It wasn't that their songs were being traded that pissed them off, but that nobody bothered to ask them if it was OK!
I saw him talking about it on MTV (back when I watched TV). I didn't think he expressed himself poorly -- his failure to comprehend Napster's position, along with perhaps a general self-centeredness, came across loud and clear.
He said something to the effect of "They say 'We just provide a service...' -- well, it may be a cool service, but what if I don't want to receive this service? I should have been given a chance to opt-in/out." This is basically the position you're referring to, I guess. (Right?)
The thing is, he mixed up two of the main arguments for Napster, each of which I think deserved consideration, but which are completely unrelated to each other, and have to be considered separately:
1: By providing increased visibility and a way to try-before-you-buy, Napster might actually help increase sales, especially for struggling new artists, and artists would do well to just chill, not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, etc.
2: Napster only provides a service, allowing users to find each other and giving them tools to facilitate the file-transfer. But every transfer is between two individual users and Napster is not a party to that event -- if Alice downloads a Metallica song from Bob, Lars should sue Bob, not Napster.
Lars' "What if I don't want to receive this service?" argument is a (valid, I guess) counter to 1, but he was replying to 2! The "service" they were talking about was offered to the users, not to him, which is why, with respect to this argument, his wishes are irrelevant. (That's the self-centeredness I mentioned -- he assumed that he was the recipient of the "service".)
Note that I'm not necessarily claiming that either argument is actually valid, though again I do think they at least deserved more consideration. I'm no laywer (I just play one on Slashdot), but I gather that under the notion of contributory and/or vicarious infringement, Napster could be liable if they benefited from the copying even though they didn't directly participate in the act itself. That's not really the point here, though.
Reading The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales was great! For the better part of a year, my insomnia was cured -- whenever I would have trouble sleeping, I'd try to slog through the next three or four pages and it would knock me out like a hammer to the head. I can't tell you how often I've wished for such a soporific book since finishing those, but nothing else that I've found comes close.
Right, except Brin seems to have this notion that whenever a large laser is fired, it just sorta sucks heat out of the surrounding air to power itself, even without being set up with any special heat-pump apparatus.
True, in Sundiver, he made it sound like there was a special heat-pump setup (though I don't recall him describing it in enough detail to be sure), but in Heaven's Reach, the terrans rediscover the same trick a few centuries later to get out of a vaguely similar situation (and it's strongly suggested that the Galactics hadn't come across it in a billion years). This time, he definitely implies that the laser is sucking up ambient heat, because the brainstorm follows a character saying/thinking something like "wow, that communication laser sure draws a lot of power -- you can feel the room temperature drop a few degrees when you turn it on." Uh, sure, dude.
I've got to add: it's surprising that someone could have managed to misunderstand the original comment this way. I mean, like, of course that's what it meant.
But anyway, the next interesting question is -- how many of the people whose children seemed to 'just up and disappear' from one year to the next got [cue tympani solo -- BUM-bum BUM-bum BUM-bum...] AUDITED the following year? It must have been a fun year to be an IRS auditor; I bet they heard some interesting stories.
I know this is a week old, and nobody'll ever see it, but...
Assuming that's really true, it is a pretty stupid and contradictory law
No, it's a very cleverly contradictory law, which, presumably deliberately, pretends to provide this exemption, but in fact ensures that the exemption is useless for its stated purpose, in a manner that I can only describe as Kafkaesque.
Also, I seem to recall that it's actually more complicated than what you quoted: actually, you are allowed to build the tool to look under the hood, provided that you are only doing it for the stated purpose, but you still can't give the tool to anyone else, even if they only want it for the same purpose. I.e., the rule against building such tools is precisely what it's an exception to, but the exception fails to extend to the rule against distribution, which would be necessary for it to be of any use.
As a result, only those very few people who have the technical skills to build the tool are actually capable of exercising their rights under this exemption, leaving everyone else in Kafka-land. Honestly, how many of us would have been capable of creating DeCSS on our own? No, I said honestly?
Then again, recognizing that such tools are necessary in order for people to exercise their rights, and letting this override the restrictions, would basically nullify the whole law -- there'd be no point to it then, since using the tools for other (i.e., infringing) purposes was already illegal under regular (pre-DMCA) copyright law. But then, the fact that the DMCA infringes on our right without serving any legitimate purpose has been our whole point, all along, now hasn't it?
In sum, I don't think Hanlon's Razor applies -- this is a case where it really is malice, not stupidity.
I love it when humanity pisses on its own feet.
I don't. I hate it.
Answer #1: That's why they weren't advocating building a meteor defense shield around Earth, but rather establishing colonies on at least a couple of nearby rocks, so that the entire human race wouldn't be all in one place and vulnerable to being wiped out by a single catastrophic event.
Answer #2: It all depends on how far out we catch it. If it was far enough, we might only need to deflect its course by a few milliradians to put it on an orbit that would miss us. F=MA. If the mass, distance, velocity, time, etc., worked out right, we just might be able to give it enough of a nudge to do the trick.
Though I agree, of course, about the silliness of the movies, where you see the producers' eight-year-old-level understanding of physics (i.e., the cute notion that when you "blow up" something, its mass just "disappears"), plus the fact that, I guess, "nudging" it somehow doesn't seem as cool.
(continuing my tradition of posting replies to old comments that nobody except possibly the parent poster will ever see... sigh. LAST POST!)
I disagree. I understand the theory behind the statement; CRT monitors are measured diagonally, so a 17" isn't really a full 17" across.
That's not the theory. First of all, LCDs are also measured diagonally. Nobody ever thought the size was horizontal. With an aspect ratio of 3x4, the difference between the diagonal and the long side would be really, really significant. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? The Pythagorean triple is 3:4:5, so the long side is 20% less than the diagonal.
You also mentioned flat tubes -- did you mean that they cheat by counting how the tape measure wraps around the curvature of the screen? I guess that's something, but even pre-flat-tube screens don't curve that much. Besides, I don't even like true flat tubes: I am an absolute Trinitron snob -- it's got to be vertically flat, but a little horizontal curvature helps to break up the reflections; flat-tube screens seem to pick up too much glare.
Anyway, no, the trick is that CRT sizes are given as the diagonal of the tube, including the 3/4" or whatever at each edge that is under the plastic, and unusable. It's the size of the actual tube, but not the size of the image that you can see. That's why they are advertised as, e.g., '15" CRT (13.8" DVI[1])', '17" CRT (15.6" DVI)', or '19" CRT (16.9" DVI)'. LCDs are also measured diagonally, but the size given is the "true" (viewable) size. Hence, the 13.3" screen on my 'Book is only about a half-inch smaller than a 15" CRT, which is hardly noticeable. Ditto for the desk-lamp iMac's 15" LCD (I checked "http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html" and that number is listed as viewable) vs. a 17" CRT. Though I can't say as much about the resolution being stuck at 1024x768 -- that is a real limitation. Still, the current desk-lamp is pretty nice, and a 17"/1280x1024 version would be truly sweet.
[1] Diagonal Viewable Image
(I know nobody'll see this, now that the story's two days old, but oh, well... Hey, LAST POST!)
Really, we need a helmet with brain probes that detect if licensed media is being consumed and debits your account on a metered basis.
That's right! I mean, what if, for example, a consumer hums a tune to himself, sub-vocally in his head? Anyone with a sufficiently good sense of pitch and rhythm could effectively enjoy a copyrighted work over and over again, for free simply by accessing the pirated copy that was created in his brain the first time he heard it! How would an external helmet detect that? How could such a system guarantee that the consumer pays for these private performances?
No, in order to protect the artists from having the fruits of their labors stolen in this way, we'll have to implant a direct neural interface into the brain of every consumer, so they can be billed whenever they think about a copyrighted work.
This is just yet another part of the problem of people not understanding linking in general (and one that I'll admit I hadn't thought of in those terms).
I guess the concept of what a URL really is (the difference between information as to the location of a document and the document itself) is just "too technical". Given that what a user sees in a browser is a blue, underlined title (which they've been trained to recognize as something they are supposed to click on) on your web page "turning into" the other document, how could they not think of your page as containing that document?
Is it that they can't comprehend that "All that's actually there is the equivalent of a library card-reference, or an ISBN number, and when you click it, you're asking your computer to use that information, find the other document, and display it in place of this one."? That's the best way I've come up with to word it, but I still see a lot of glazed-over eyes.
But wait -- lawyers and judges (aside from being pretty smart fellas in general, jokes about them notwithstanding) have their own system of references to legal texts. They fully understand how the inclusion in a brief of a reference to a piece of case law, or a section of a statute, or whatever, is equivalent to, but not the same as, attaching a copy of that text, because they know that the reader will (a) understand the conventions used and (b) have access to a law library where they can look it up. Is the connection so hard to make?
Maybe they (back to people in general, not just lawyers and judges) do understand that part, for what it's worth, but just don't see what's so important about it -- maybe the funny looks are not so much "What are you talking about?" as "So what's the big deal?"
The thing is, the whole power of hypertext -- fundamentally, what makes the web so revolutionary -- is precisely the fact that it blurs the line between reference and content. In a world where everyone has at his disposal armies of little gnomes who can, in a matter of seconds and at marginal cost, dash off to the Library of Congress, get a copy of a book, and bring it back to you, whenever you merely give them a reference number, giving someone such a number really is in a sense "equivalent" to giving them a copy of the book.
This does lead to legal issues -- in this case, it's the legality of the linked-to content and the linker's liability therefor; in other cases like deep-linking of articles and images, it's the copyright status of that content. In either case, the response to the conflict depends on one's assumptions and priorities.
Should the policy be: "Well, since we obviously can't restrict mere linking, for freedom-of-speech reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't restrict dissemination either, and if copyright interests suffer, too bad."?
Or should it be: "Well, since we obviously can't allow free dissemination, for copyright reasons, and since linking is in a sense equivalent to dissemination, I guess that (to that extent) we can't allow free linking either, and if freedom of speech suffers, too bad."?
To be honest... I couldn't come up with 10. *frown*. And the others were good, but just didn't have quite enough punchline for #1.
Leaving it blank was the best punchline you could have had! Frankly, I thought it was intentional, and it was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. To make it explicit:
And the #1 reason to like quantum computing is...
*drum roll*
Oops! When I looked at the punchline, I collapsed the wave function, and it disappeared. Sorry.
This is why you're never supposed to explain a joke -- it causes it to lose coherence.
A more useful number for me would be the fraction of successful dates (*1), which, while non-zero, can be seen to converge to within espilon of zero as T goes to T(divorce) + infinity. We can represent this value by the lowercase Greek letter sigma (*2).
Raise sigma to the power of the money spent on those dates (which, perhaps counter-intuitively, appears to be inversely related to sigma itself), and we have a value that can be substituted for zero for most practical purposes, while remaining safe for division, though it may strain the limits of floating-point precision.
--
(*1) For any given meaning of "successful". I'll leave it to you sick monkeys to guess whether I mean what you think I mean.
(*2) For reasons that should be obvious.
I couldn't fine the poem either, but I really want to read it. 3 points to anyone who can find it.
This does remind me of a ST:TNG episode, though, with Data explaining to Geordi how he's trying to train his cat -- he succeeds about as well as one would expect:
Geordi: "So how's it working?"
Data: "Not very well. Apparently, Spot isn't a very intelligent cat."
Spot: "Meow."
Data: (looking down) "Hmm?"
Spot: "Meow."
Data: "Ah!" (gets cat food)
Geordi: (starts laughing)
Data: "Huh?"
Geordi: "I don't know about your project, but he's got you trained pretty well!"
As for me an my cat, I'm not such a good subject. With us it's more like:
Pavel: "Meow."
David: "Fuck off."
Pavel: "Meow."
David: "Get it yourself!"
Pavel: "Meow."
David: <kick>
What's interesting about him, though, is the apparent intelligence with which he's learned to irritate me. He obviously knows that if he wants something, it's not enough to tell me about it -- the only way it'll happen is if he can be so annoying that I'll give in and do it just to shut him up. Early on, he discovered that the sliding doors of my closet make an incredible amount of noise when pushed just right, so standing up in front of them and batting on them with his paws is the best way to get let out at 4:30 AM. He can make almost as much noise scratching at the glass door from outside, making that the best way to get let in at 4:37 AM. He has further learned that nothing gets me to react faster than the sound of his claws in my couch, making that his doorknob whenever I'm in or near the living room.
Douglas ? Is that you ??
Isn't he spending a few years dead for tax purposes?
6 hours of that convinced me that it is most likely Millikan's grad students we have to thanks for the thousands of data points needed for the accurate measurement of elementary charge.
Not knowing enough about the subject to want to jump into the actual debate, I just want to say that the way you describe it reminded me of this guy's paper on the "Electron Band Structure In Germanium". See Figure 1.
My high school physics teacher described a pretty neat experiment that he had seen as a student -- in short, they measured the speed of light using a television set.
They chose a location in a mostly flat area, where they could be at one corner of a triangle with the other points being a transmission tower and a nearby mountain (or some large landscape feature). When they tuned the television to the tower's channel, the picture had a faint afterimage, which they could deduce was caused by a reflection of the signal bouncing off the mountain. By measuring the distances between the three points, they could know how much extra distance the ghost signal was travelling, compared to the direct signal, and by knowing the trace frequency of the television and measuring the number of lines by which the afterimage was shifted, they could calculate the time. Result: speed of light.
Well, I thought it was kinda cool.
You should be working for peace on Earth and good will toward men.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
[...grumble, grumble, grumble...]
All right -- I'll see what I can do.
There are quite a few such phrases. I know I've seen some others that were pretty cool but I can't remember them offhand -- I mostly recall seeing them in Apple's font preview windows (open a font suitcase ==> get a list of fonts; open one of those ==> get a preview).
I guess they've used different sentences in different OS versions. Currently I'm seeing: (ahem)
"Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen."
Aside from the at-best-questionable disirability of automatic error-correction, you guys have surely seen this, right? There are times when you'd really rather have the machine ask you to explicitly what you wanted instead of having it try to guess, with potentially dire consequences.
In the long run, we're all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
I think this was Churchill: "If you ask two economists a question, you'll get two opinions. Unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you'll get three opinions."
As for the overuse of the quote, I'm actually not sure I'd seen it before, and at least it's not (yet?) as badly overused as the "freedom for security" line.
...subject, of course, to the requirement that everyone refer to it as "GNU/Mozilla"