Disclaimer: I'm a happy T-Mobile customer, I know nothing about the current situation, and I have not read my contract, nor do I intend to. (Nor do I believe I'm bound by an intentionally obfuscated contract, but that's another matter.) Oh, and IANAL.
I signed up for Sprint PCS around January 2003, with a one year contract. I was generally satisfied with the service, but inevitably, other companies started offering better deals. (Specifically this, which was even cheaper at the time.) I didn't mind that too much... Sprint had given me a fancy phone for free, and in return I was willing to buy their service for a year.
However, around June, Sprint raised my rates. Actually, they restructured all of their charges in confusing ways, but the result was a net increase of about $0.80 per month. They blamed the increase on the new number portability requirements, and frequently referred to it as a "tax" (though the fine print in the new contract stated explicitly that "this is not a tax.")
Now, I couldn't care less about the $0.80, but hey... we had a contract. I had already gotten what I wanted out of the contract (the free phone,) so I was only sticking around to fulfill my original commitment. Apparently Sprint, however, wanted to void that contract, and that was fine by me.
It took about three hours on the phone to sort it all out. I won't recount the whole battle, but I will share one tip from my experience: no matter who you talk to, the first words out of your mouth should be, "I want to cancel my account." Once I learned that, it only took a few minutes with an underling and her supervisor before they agreed to release me from my contract.
Actually, I think Sprint made a tactical error. If they had offered to remove the surcharge (or give me a credit to offset the surcharge,) I'm not sure I could have still insisted that the contract was void. Apparently that's the deal they made with some people, but in my case, they just let me go.
So, as I said in the subject, customers who are hit with a surcharge like this should see it as an opportunity, not an annoyance. All of a sudden, you're free to go service-shopping again. Have fun.
in said scene, a literary critic develops a program to count the frequency of words in a given book (ignoring prepositions, pronouns and the like) and then display the 20 most and least frequent words. the theory is that the core concept of the book can be gleaned by simply reading these lists.
It's well known; as our eyes drift to the blue and red end of the spectrum, we lose our sensitivity, off by many orders of magnitude from say, yellow. This is why you see blue, and more commonly, red, lights as "night" light sources.
No. Red lights (certainly not blue) are used in low-light situations, e.g. a ship's bridge at night, because the photoreceptors that are used in scotopic conditions are most sensitive to short wavelength ("blue") light. If you stepped out of the starlight outside and into a room with a blue (or white) light source, the rods in your eyes would immediately be saturated, and it would take up to a half hour of darkness before your night vision was fully restored. However, red light is way over at the other end of the spectrum, so it has no affect on your night vision.
I store my enire music collection in WMA Lossless. (Hard drives are cheap.) I got an iPod a few weeks ago, and the day before iTunes was released (coincidentally,) I wrote a little program to batch convert all those files to MP3 and send them to the iPod. I'm thinking about switching to AAC, once I figure out how it works.
I assume iTunes gets along well with my iPod, and I'd be happy to switch (and maybe even try out the music store), but iTunes will not import WMA files at all. You'd think that Apple would want to make things easy for converts, but apparently they have such a bad case of NIH syndrome that they won't even make the one or two API calls that would be necessary to read a stream from any Windows Media file. (Of course, iTunes doesn't actually tell me it can't read those files, it just silently ignores my attempts. That's not politics, though, just embarassingly poor design.)
Maybe I'll try the next version, but for now, the iTunes store has lost a potential customer.
A bluetooth profile for "auxilary displays", and a watch that supports it. When I get a call on my bluetooth-capable PDA-phone, the watch vibrates and displays caller ID info. Ditto for text messages and appointment reminders. There's a minimal interface on the watch, just enough to look up a contact or dial the phone. Fancy models might include a loudspeaker and microphone, for PTT-style calls. Really fancy models might include a camera, for use as a videophone, once the cell phone network can support it.
That's all I want. If I need any significant interaction, even just to enter a phone number, I'll take my PDA-phone out of my pocket and write it in a civilized fashion. A "smart watch" is primarily useful for letting me know when I don't need to do that.
Oh, and as far as I know, none of what I'm asking for would take much hardware. Battery life might be a problem, but I'm sure someone can design a clever cradle and quick-release strap, and then I'll just charge it every night.
For the most part this will only remain compatible with Creative's own Speaker systems e.g. MegaWorks 510D, Inspire 5700, etc. while other receivers are likely to output this signal as stereo.
Sweet. So I also get a crippled Digital Out.
Oh, come on.
I wrote a long, technical response to this, but it's really not worth it. Instead, I'll just ask: Crippled, relative to what? Can you name any other consumer sound card that is capable of outputting multi-channel digital sound in realtime (not pre-encoded,) on any speaker system? If so, I'd really like to know what it is, because I've been looking for an alternative to Creative's products for a long time.
The P-2120 does have firewire, and I think the last few models did as well. And if it's any consolation, it doesn't come with a Windows CD. (Just a license.)
I found out that where Linux let me to declare the std namespace in the main file where I had all my includes, VS wanted the namespace declared in every file to use anything from the STL. There was also other little stuff, but nothing tooo bad.
Perhaps that's because gcc completely ignores the std namespace. Your code would have compiled under gcc even if you hadn't mentioned std once. See here. (Look for "-fhonor-std".)
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEvE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING. Acknowledge."
That's terribly dissappointing. I was really hoping it would be the DeCSS source. That would have made my day.
I agree. The problem here is not the Supreme COurt but Congress, and the problem with Congress is that like idiots we continue to vote for lizards to rule us - because otherwise the wrong lizard might wind up in charge.
Excellent reference! That story (which I believe is from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish) always stuck in my head more than anything else from Douglas Adams' books. For those of you who haven't read it, the relevant bit is here.
Of course, the electorate is never going to have some miraculous epiphany and elect a whole new government. The only way to change things would be to adopt a new electoral system, one in which electing the wrong lizard is not an issue, such as instant run-off voting or proportional representation -- although even a parliamentary system would be an improvement.
Windows (unlike Linux) doesn't need a "root" or "administrator", since all of the necessary privileges can be assigned individually. For practical purposes, almost all Windows installations have a superuser anyway, and (as others in this thread have pointed out) most have too many.
I hate to break it to y'all, but in the human eye, each spot in the fovea is occupied by one receptor, which is maximally sensitive at one wavelength -- in other words, it works the way that current digital cameras work. (Random Googled link.) I suppose that if the human eye needed to determine the color of a particular "pixel", it would have to interpolate, just like a CCD camera... but that's a moot point, because that doesn't actually happen in our visual system. (It's much, much more complicated than that.)
Now, this technology does sound like a great way to increase the resolution of digital cameras, if it's feasible. However, all this "neuromorphic" stuff is pure marketing. (Though I admit that "Foveon" is a clever name.)
A major part of the problem is that Penrose simply does not seem to accept Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems.
On the contrary, Godel's theorem is the main basis of his argument. What Penrose doesn't accept is Church's Thesis, which says, roughly, that all "computers" (in the broadest sense) are subject to the same limitations as Turing machines (including incompleteness.) This assertion has certainly not been proven, and probably cannot be "proven" in any sense that we understand today (since our methods of proof are themselves subject to Church's Thesis.) However, in order to even suggest that the human mind might be an exception to Church's Thesis, Penrose had to come up with something pretty extraordinary, so that's where all the new physics comes from.
I suspect that Penrose is wrong, and Church's Thesis does hold. But IMHO, his is the only good objection to AI that's out there today. I just started Shadows of the Mind, and I'm looking forward to reading his justifications.
Having said that... Whenever I think of Penrose, it reminds me of an certain episode of "Pinky and The Brain." The Brain (a superintelligent lab rat) disguises himself as a human, gets a corporate job, stages an accident while making coffee, claims that the accident turned him into a superintelligent lab rat, and sues the company. The case goes on for a while before the company's lawyer finally asks the obvious question (from my memory):
Lawyer: How is it possible that a coffee-making accident could turn a human being into a mouse?
Brain: Well, I was heating the coffee in a microwave oven, and no one really knows how microwave ovens work.
Lawyer: Actually... [gives a thirty-second explanation of how microwave ovens work, which, as I recall, was pretty accurate]
Brain: Oh. Uh... The coffee also had non-dairy creamer in it, though. No one really knows how non-dairy creamer works.
It seems to me that that's the main thrust of Penrose's argument: "Consciousness involves quantum mechanics, and, well, no one really understands quantum mechanics." Unfortunately, for now, he's right.
Re:Didja all catch...
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...that bit about DOW suing the families that were destroyed/hurt by their Bhopal disaster?
How do we know that that story isn't another "parody"? I can find no reference to it outside of Greenpeace (which is not high on my list of reliable news sources,) and it seems even more absurd than The Yes Men's original forged press release.
Half of the "informative" posts on this article cite anti-Dow hoaxes as "facts," and use them to justify their opposition to Dow's attempts to suppress hoaxes. If that doesn't prove libel, I don't know what could.
(Having said that, I can't see what any of this has to do with the DMCA. But hey, libel cases are expensive. Why bother suing, when you can just say the magic words and make any website dissappear?)
Out of interest, if they all ready had the trademark for "Microsoft", what would be the point in getting another trademark for "Microsoft Windows"?
IANAL, and IP law is hard. However... A trademark only prevents use of a term as a commercial label, not as a descriptive term (notwithstanding the inevitable "+5 Funny" posts that imply otherwise.) For example, although "IBM" is trademarked, many computers even today are advertised as "IBM-compatible". Presumably, IBM could have prevented that if they'd trademarked the term "IBM-compatible."
Similarly, if Microsoft hadn't registered "Microsoft Windows", it would be legal for the Lindows folks to take a screenshot of Lindows running genuine copies MS Word and MS Excel, and say, "Look, our computers run Microsoft windows too!" (And from what I know of Lindows, I get the impression that they probably would.) An open Word document is, after all, a "Microsoft window."
I hope that makes sense; like I said, IP law is hard.
A 2.5 inch hard disk has a 2.5 inch diameter platter. The entire assembly is generally slightly larger than 2.5 inches; in fact, being three dimensional objects, many hard disks have width, depth, and mass as well.
Of course, even if that weren't common knowledge, the parent post still wouldn't be funny.
I have no idea what the parent post has to do with this article, but it's very much on-topic for me, because I worked for him a few years ago. That Dr. Strangelove scene came up a lot among his students... (For the record, Masters really knows his stuff; unfortunately, I don't think that biochem is his stuff.)
Windows don't get control of their own titlebar, for instance, in X or MS Windows. Moving around windows is also not dependent on widgets - if you move by alt-tab, for instance, whatever manages your windows catches alt-tab before it gets sent to your app.
You're right about alt-tab, but that's an exception. Badly written Windows programs can take control of just about everything else. To break the title bar, all they have to do is create an undecorated window and draw the title themselves.
JFMulder hit the nail right on the head, though. When developers decide to use their own widgets instead of those provided by the platform (usually so they can offer a choice of l33t "skins",) they're very unlikely to make them complete, especially when it comes to behaviors that are fairly obscure. Sure, it's not fair to expect a programmer to know all the subtleties of every environment in which his program might run -- that's what abstraction is for. Is it really worth it to throw away that advantage, just so your program can have a 3d-accelerated GUI?
but you cannot forget that they are a world leader in robotics applications
Are you kidding me? Disney's mechanical puppets have got nothing on these guys. They're not just cute, they're also pretty incredible, to anyone who knows anything about robotics or machine vision. More videos here (or just change the URL).
America is going to need to work pretty hard if we're going to compete with the Japanese in the burgeoning robot industry. (And yes, I say that with a straight face. Although I did almost type "burgeoning giant robot industry" by accident.)
No. A schema is a set of rules that defines which constructs are allowed and which aren't. A dialect is what you get when you implement a schema.
Think about the word language and the word grammar. Many people are perfectly good at speaking the English language, even though they know very little about English grammar. (Quick, is English a head-final, head-medial, or head-initial language? You don't know? Yet you managed to read that sentence just fine.)
It's a subtle distinction, but it's real. If you happen to know what language and grammar mean in the technical sense, then it should be even clearer.
Of course, I don't know what a CNET reporter's alleged misuse of the word "dialect" could possibly tell us about Microsoft's plans for world domination, but I assume that part of your post was just a troll.
Of course, computer manufacturers could never achieve that sort of reliability. Pioneer 10's systems were actually designed and built by highly trained monkeys.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I'm a happy T-Mobile customer, I know nothing about the current situation, and I have not read my contract, nor do I intend to. (Nor do I believe I'm bound by an intentionally obfuscated contract, but that's another matter.) Oh, and IANAL.
I signed up for Sprint PCS around January 2003, with a one year contract. I was generally satisfied with the service, but inevitably, other companies started offering better deals. (Specifically this, which was even cheaper at the time.) I didn't mind that too much... Sprint had given me a fancy phone for free, and in return I was willing to buy their service for a year.
However, around June, Sprint raised my rates. Actually, they restructured all of their charges in confusing ways, but the result was a net increase of about $0.80 per month. They blamed the increase on the new number portability requirements, and frequently referred to it as a "tax" (though the fine print in the new contract stated explicitly that "this is not a tax.")
Now, I couldn't care less about the $0.80, but hey... we had a contract. I had already gotten what I wanted out of the contract (the free phone,) so I was only sticking around to fulfill my original commitment. Apparently Sprint, however, wanted to void that contract, and that was fine by me.
It took about three hours on the phone to sort it all out. I won't recount the whole battle, but I will share one tip from my experience: no matter who you talk to, the first words out of your mouth should be, "I want to cancel my account." Once I learned that, it only took a few minutes with an underling and her supervisor before they agreed to release me from my contract.
Actually, I think Sprint made a tactical error. If they had offered to remove the surcharge (or give me a credit to offset the surcharge,) I'm not sure I could have still insisted that the contract was void. Apparently that's the deal they made with some people, but in my case, they just let me go.
So, as I said in the subject, customers who are hit with a surcharge like this should see it as an opportunity, not an annoyance. All of a sudden, you're free to go service-shopping again. Have fun.
(Bring a fast java VM, and/or a lot of patience.)
I store my enire music collection in WMA Lossless. (Hard drives are cheap.) I got an iPod a few weeks ago, and the day before iTunes was released (coincidentally,) I wrote a little program to batch convert all those files to MP3 and send them to the iPod. I'm thinking about switching to AAC, once I figure out how it works.
I assume iTunes gets along well with my iPod, and I'd be happy to switch (and maybe even try out the music store), but iTunes will not import WMA files at all. You'd think that Apple would want to make things easy for converts, but apparently they have such a bad case of NIH syndrome that they won't even make the one or two API calls that would be necessary to read a stream from any Windows Media file. (Of course, iTunes doesn't actually tell me it can't read those files, it just silently ignores my attempts. That's not politics, though, just embarassingly poor design.)
Maybe I'll try the next version, but for now, the iTunes store has lost a potential customer.
A bluetooth profile for "auxilary displays", and a watch that supports it. When I get a call on my bluetooth-capable PDA-phone, the watch vibrates and displays caller ID info. Ditto for text messages and appointment reminders. There's a minimal interface on the watch, just enough to look up a contact or dial the phone. Fancy models might include a loudspeaker and microphone, for PTT-style calls. Really fancy models might include a camera, for use as a videophone, once the cell phone network can support it.
That's all I want. If I need any significant interaction, even just to enter a phone number, I'll take my PDA-phone out of my pocket and write it in a civilized fashion. A "smart watch" is primarily useful for letting me know when I don't need to do that.
Oh, and as far as I know, none of what I'm asking for would take much hardware. Battery life might be a problem, but I'm sure someone can design a clever cradle and quick-release strap, and then I'll just charge it every night.
I wrote a long, technical response to this, but it's really not worth it. Instead, I'll just ask: Crippled, relative to what? Can you name any other consumer sound card that is capable of outputting multi-channel digital sound in realtime (not pre-encoded,) on any speaker system? If so, I'd really like to know what it is, because I've been looking for an alternative to Creative's products for a long time.
The P-2120 does have firewire, and I think the last few models did as well. And if it's any consolation, it doesn't come with a Windows CD. (Just a license.)
Of course, the electorate is never going to have some miraculous epiphany and elect a whole new government. The only way to change things would be to adopt a new electoral system, one in which electing the wrong lizard is not an issue, such as instant run-off voting or proportional representation -- although even a parliamentary system would be an improvement.
What did you plan on doing with an Atari ST and a 20 MB HD that was worth $985?
That's not a troll, I'm sincerely curious.
I hate to break it to y'all, but in the human eye, each spot in the fovea is occupied by one receptor, which is maximally sensitive at one wavelength -- in other words, it works the way that current digital cameras work. (Random Googled link.) I suppose that if the human eye needed to determine the color of a particular "pixel", it would have to interpolate, just like a CCD camera... but that's a moot point, because that doesn't actually happen in our visual system. (It's much, much more complicated than that.)
Now, this technology does sound like a great way to increase the resolution of digital cameras, if it's feasible. However, all this "neuromorphic" stuff is pure marketing. (Though I admit that "Foveon" is a clever name.)
I suspect that Penrose is wrong, and Church's Thesis does hold. But IMHO, his is the only good objection to AI that's out there today. I just started Shadows of the Mind, and I'm looking forward to reading his justifications.
Having said that... Whenever I think of Penrose, it reminds me of an certain episode of "Pinky and The Brain." The Brain (a superintelligent lab rat) disguises himself as a human, gets a corporate job, stages an accident while making coffee, claims that the accident turned him into a superintelligent lab rat, and sues the company. The case goes on for a while before the company's lawyer finally asks the obvious question (from my memory):
Lawyer: How is it possible that a coffee-making accident could turn a human being into a mouse?
Brain: Well, I was heating the coffee in a microwave oven, and no one really knows how microwave ovens work.
Lawyer: Actually... [gives a thirty-second explanation of how microwave ovens work, which, as I recall, was pretty accurate]
Brain: Oh. Uh... The coffee also had non-dairy creamer in it, though. No one really knows how non-dairy creamer works.
Lawyer: [nonplussed]
It seems to me that that's the main thrust of Penrose's argument: "Consciousness involves quantum mechanics, and, well, no one really understands quantum mechanics." Unfortunately, for now, he's right.
Half of the "informative" posts on this article cite anti-Dow hoaxes as "facts," and use them to justify their opposition to Dow's attempts to suppress hoaxes. If that doesn't prove libel, I don't know what could.
(Having said that, I can't see what any of this has to do with the DMCA. But hey, libel cases are expensive. Why bother suing, when you can just say the magic words and make any website dissappear?)
Similarly, if Microsoft hadn't registered "Microsoft Windows", it would be legal for the Lindows folks to take a screenshot of Lindows running genuine copies MS Word and MS Excel, and say, "Look, our computers run Microsoft windows too!" (And from what I know of Lindows, I get the impression that they probably would.) An open Word document is, after all, a "Microsoft window."
I hope that makes sense; like I said, IP law is hard.
A 2.5 inch hard disk has a 2.5 inch diameter platter. The entire assembly is generally slightly larger than 2.5 inches; in fact, being three dimensional objects, many hard disks have width, depth, and mass as well.
Of course, even if that weren't common knowledge, the parent post still wouldn't be funny.
Ha! You seem to be thinking of a different Dartmouth prof.
I have no idea what the parent post has to do with this article, but it's very much on-topic for me, because I worked for him a few years ago. That Dr. Strangelove scene came up a lot among his students... (For the record, Masters really knows his stuff; unfortunately, I don't think that biochem is his stuff.)
JFMulder hit the nail right on the head, though. When developers decide to use their own widgets instead of those provided by the platform (usually so they can offer a choice of l33t "skins",) they're very unlikely to make them complete, especially when it comes to behaviors that are fairly obscure. Sure, it's not fair to expect a programmer to know all the subtleties of every environment in which his program might run -- that's what abstraction is for. Is it really worth it to throw away that advantage, just so your program can have a 3d-accelerated GUI?
America is going to need to work pretty hard if we're going to compete with the Japanese in the burgeoning robot industry. (And yes, I say that with a straight face. Although I did almost type "burgeoning giant robot industry" by accident.)
Think about the word language and the word grammar. Many people are perfectly good at speaking the English language, even though they know very little about English grammar. (Quick, is English a head-final, head-medial, or head-initial language? You don't know? Yet you managed to read that sentence just fine.)
It's a subtle distinction, but it's real. If you happen to know what language and grammar mean in the technical sense, then it should be even clearer.
Of course, I don't know what a CNET reporter's alleged misuse of the word "dialect" could possibly tell us about Microsoft's plans for world domination, but I assume that part of your post was just a troll.
Of course, computer manufacturers could never achieve that sort of reliability. Pioneer 10's systems were actually designed and built by highly trained monkeys.