Certs already have a natural shelf life. Stuff like A+ and Security+ get you in the industry's door. Microsoft certs naturally expire as new products come out. You don't have to say MCSE NT is expired, employers will ask you for your MCSE 2008. And of course you'll try to explain to them that there's no MCSE anymore, it's an MCITP and they'll say "Yeah, well you go and get your MCSE 2008 and get back to us."
Trash Talk Harm me with harmony. Doomsday, drop a load on 'em.
Verse 1 Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it, to have you all jumping, shouting saying it. Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder, in a system that is closed, like with a border. It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness, proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress. "What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming, it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break? You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake. But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true, if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y, the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die. Order from disorder is a scientific rarity, allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity. Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility, at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy. That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it, if you are here's your membership.
Chorus You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me! (x3) Who's down with entropy? Every last homey!
Verse 2 Defining entropy as disorder's not complete, 'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat. So my first definition I would now like to withdraw, and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law. First we need to understand that entropy is energy, energy that can't be used to state it more specifically. In a closed system entropy always goes up, that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game, 'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame. The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state, that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun! That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about, you're now down with a discount.
So just because someone self-identifies as a fundamentalist does not mean they are a raging nutcase.
Well, it would be nice if self-described fundamentalists would actually define what they mean by fundamentalism.
Yeah. That's a bit like saying "I'm a lover of children! I'm a pedophile!" and wondering why you're getting funny looks. If you're going to use a word with your own private definition while a very different definition is more prevalent, you might want to explain yourself. You might also realize it's really not worth the effort, you should find a new word.
Liberal is a word that's gotten that way. The right has succeeded in making the word as unpopular as pedophile while the democratic party has done little to keep themselves from being ineffectual embarrassments. This has caused liberals to adopt new words like progressive to replace it, get rid of the baggage.
The interesting thing about Christ's teachings is that they were a lot more socialistic and loving than the typical fundamentalist makes them out to be. So a true christian fundamentalist would look less like the christian right and more like the christian left.:)
Goes for programming and infrastructure and all things IT -- you have to move around a lot. Employers in general have no interest in paying you more once you work there. If you want another $15k, you have to move elsewhere. Time at a company is spend padding resumes and earning certifications. Then you move. You might move back to the original company if they make a better offer. Employer logic is "We got the guy for $x, why should we pay him any more once we have him?" Doesn't matter if you complete a second degree while you're there, move from jr. developer to lead designer, take on more responsibilities, you'll get piddle-shit raises.
This kills me. I don't want to be job-hopping. I'd like to build some time with a place, earn some kudos and sweat equity. But those things don't exist. Been at a company a month or twenty years, you are equally expendable. Treat your employer the same way. And die a little inside. People want to think of the office as family because we're social creatures. Few people enjoy living life out as a lesson in Randian objectivism, looking for leverage in the battle of who's screwing whom. We aren't meant to live like that.
Government programs don't "encourage" free enterprise. At best, they steal from some people who would not have spent it The Right Way and give the money to the wonderful people who will use it the way the Bureaucracy feels is Much Better.
The way to actually encourage free enterprise, is to stop threatening violence against the people who practice it.
I don't know of any aerospace engineering collectives out there, buddy. Last I checked, all the aerospace companies were firmly in the military-industrial complex which enjoys that nice, tight, cozy relationship with government. But don't worry, I'm sure the CEO's of those companies will promise you they are defenders of the free market.
How many shuttle successors have come and gone? And the whole Aeres thing looks like it's fixing to be another clusterfuck.
It seems like the current government agency/government contractor model of development and procurement is broken. The same boondoggles we see in the military are repeated pretty much across the board. I know they say not to ascribe to malice what can best be described by incompetence but it seems like there's usually malice and greed at work here. The government will sign a very lucrative contract with a company that will then have massive cost overruns, fail to deliver on time and thus draw even more funds to eventually deliver a poorly-designed piece of shit that cannot do what was requested of it.
Sometimes you can blame the government for screwing things up. The shuttle was promised to do too many things for too many people and the engineers were left with trying to make the best compromise they could. That was the government's bad. And the whole Ares bit, that sounds like a government bad, too. NASA got all turned on by the idea of reusing shuttle tech and saving bundles on false economies and it was the contractor's fault for not disabusing them of this notion. Engineers both at NASA and the contractor probably knew better but management would have been unwilling to listen, obviously, or else we wouldn't be in the situation we are now.
The thing that really kills me is the contractor's motivation as a business is maximizing revenue from the contracts and thus maximizing profits. It's not in their interest to be on-time and on-budget. And it's also not in their own interest to offer cheaper, better solutions. So we get this perpetual game where they promise the moon for low prices and NASA pretends to believe them and the costs spiral and until projects are canceled. I would see that as a complete failure but the business would regard that failure as a profitable venture and thus a success. Therefore, there's no incentive for them to do things any differently!!! Argh.
Why would they revolt? The have it better now than anytime in their history. Sure a few may come to the US and the EU but they will see the improvements that they have been making over time and expect them to continue.
Not to mention that they are proud that went from being a third world nation to a super power in a generation. I don't like the way things work in China but if you look back to how they worked before I think you will see that a DOS and great firewall are progress compared to the cultural revolution.
It's seemingly good for them -- for now. But there are a lot of parallels to America's own past. We had our Gilded Age and we had our bust after that, we had our Roaring 20's and our Great Depression. During the boom times, everyone thought that they could get their piece of the action, have a nice, thick slice of the pie. But when everything crashed, the average worker found out that they weren't left holding anything but the bag. This is why we could go from the rah-rah capitalism of the 20's to robber-barons seriously worrying about a communist revolution in the 30's. That's the only reason why FDR was able to pass the reforms he did, because the people with the money realized they had to throw the workers some kind of bone or risk everything going red.
So things are going great for China -- for now. But just how firm is the foundation they're building this economic empire on? We're already seeing the cracks in Dubai. The crappy infrastructure is a concrete and steel metaphor for the place, a gilded turd. It's a giant speculative bubble built on something even less substantial than sand. It's no wonder everything is crashing down once the hype ends.
During that big quake of theirs we caught a glimpse of China's way of doing business. The older buildings stood up because they were built boring and according to standards put in place during the "we're really trying to be communist" era. The newer buildings were built during the "we're only nominally communist, don't tell anyone" era and lots of shortcuts and substitutions were made in materials and workmanship, just like in the gangster capitalism countries. The newer buildings collapsed, the older ones not so much.
If China's prosperity proves as ephemeral as the typical bubble economy, things could get ugly rather quickly. Lots of Chinese are still taking it in the shorts. If there's not even the fiction of possibly becoming wealthy, they're not going to suffer quietly. There's the demographic crisis with lots of young men and not as many young women for them to marry. There's ethnic unrest amongst the non-Han population. There's looming ecological disasters, famine, drought, flooding, etc. And my personal guess -- if I were writing a techno-thriller this is how I'd do it -- is that things are going to really turn to shit when the Three Gorges Dam finally gets a 7.0 or greater quake and suffers a catastrophic failure. The death of a prestige project, the loss of all that hydroelectric power, plus all the deaths from the flooding downstream. Could be taken as a sign that the rulers just lost the mandate of heaven, or it could be taken to show that the rulers can't get anything right.
This is not to say a rebellion WILL happen, just that it's certainly conceivable and doesn't require many leaps and contortions of logic to hypothesize.
PC represents rough and tumble, for the person who loves freedom and flexibility and is willing to compromise on fit and polish to get there. Linux is taking that to an even more extreme end. Mac represents surrendering your freedom to someone who has better taste than you. The thought of that gets my nose out of joint. Be that as it may, there's not that many places where I think Apple made seriously wrong calls on design and UI, and this is coming from a PC guy. I still think iTunes is sent to us from the dev.null and don't understand how people think it's intuitive or easy -- I find it annoying.
I think for most users, Apple truly represents less headache. Sure, there's very slick marketing but that job is made easier by having a product that people really, really like.
I do think what we see in Apple right now is the result of enlightened tyranny, someone you may not like but find difficulty arguing with because he's usually right. The question remains what will happen once he's gone -- will it turn into an arbitrary tyranny or will the power structure balkanize? That's the stage they were at when Jobs came back, the engineers were as smart then as they are now, it's just that they couldn't get anything done because management had formed into a circular firing squad. Nobody had the authority to crack heads and tell them to stop shooting.
The wholesale price of 24 songs is $16.80. $54,000 is over 3,000 times the maximum possible damages.
What kind of punishment would I get for shoplifting a $16 CD? Isn't petty theft like a $500 fine and community service? This guy didn't even steal anything.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The constitution is not defective. Finally, all this anti-corporate ideology is on the wane, and true social equality will soon be reached when we get a corporation as a supreme court justice
The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights. The constitution is there to limit the government's ability to take those rights away. Being able to buy a newspaper advertisement or broadcast an advertisement isn't something that the goverment should be able to prevent you (or the company you've formed) from doing. Likewise for labor unions, advocacy groups, churches, scouting troops, bowling leagues, open source code projects, or anyone else.
If money = speech, that means I'm at the back of the hall shouting to be heard while the guy with the bucks is up on stage with the sound system from Disaster Area drowning me out.
Saying that a mutli-billion dollar corporation should have full access to those resources in shaping public opinion and that I'm perfectly free to shout back and that this is all fair, that's like saying 30-something me has the right to put my fence five feet into my 70-something neighbor's yard and if he has a problem with that he can challenge me to a fight. That's completely inequitable. This is just formalizing the inequality we already have in the legal system where a corporation may be completely in the wrong on a given topic but it will take me five years of lawsuits to prove it out in court and I'll go broke in the process. That may be legal but it's not fucking right!
I'm also pissed off (as a phd in graphics research) that everyone thinks its breakthrough. Gollum in LOTR was a breakthrough, theres no new tech in this movie. James Cameron needs to stop saying how he invented mocap, its stupid. You'll find that most of the amazing "breakthroughs" of the last decade you didnt actually notice because the CG was perfect and more importantly subtle.
Avatar was groundbreaking technology. Gollum was freakin' AMAZING. I might have been more impressed with the work done on Jar-Jar if not for him being a hatefully stupid character in conception and execution and despising everyone involved in his creation. Gollum was so freakin' wild because he was so convincing. You were totally sold on the idea he was real. Environmental interaction, lighting, acting, it was all perfect. And so much artistry went into that. I've seen effects in big budget movies since the Rings that were not even half as good.
As far as Avatar goes, Cameron had to create another freakin' world. Even more work had to go into that than with Rings. As far as movies go LOTR had the better plot and did a better job of bringing the idea to the screen. Avatar's only sin was for having such a commonplace plot to back such groundbreaking filmmaking.
Your point about whether we can even recognize the CGI is important. People are always bragging about how they can spot the CGI. "Yeah, that Balrog, totally CGI." No shit. Everyone knows it has to be an effect. The stuff we miss is like the stuff done in that Tom Hanks plane crash movie where the tides were adjusted on the island or in Forest Gump where only a fifth of the stadium was filled and that crowd was mapped to the other 4/5ths to make it look like a full house. Lieutenant Dan didn't really lose his legs, his actor was wearing bluescreen stockings? No shit. But what'll really blow people away is when we find out an actor died halfway through the filming of a movie and the director uses CGI and a stand-in to complete his performance. Facemapping technology is here. Show someone that movie, tell them one of the actors was swapped out for CGI halfway through and ask them which one they thought it was.
I'm wondering if the Joker will be brought back for the third batman movie. I've heard some very, very good impressions of the joker voice from there. Get someone of similar build to do the joker's mannerisms and map a new face onto him. I bet they could pull it off.
If you create an entirely made up world you can put anything in it and have it "fit", because you have accepted the fantasy.
Not so easy. It still has to be convincing. LOTR's crew did a lot of research making sure they understood the physics of the creatures they were presenting. What would the bones be like in the mumakil, how would they balance, what would happen if they fell. How does a fell beast fly? What sort of wingspan would it need? How would it look in the air? The same kind of focus went into Avatar. The human eye can pick out stuff that doesn't look right. That's usually the telltale of bad CGI, reflections are off or things aren't moving the way they should if physics were in play.
Everything we have is designed to work with our humanoid bodies, so if we want to make a device that interfaces with those things, it will work better if it shares the humanoid design.
To an extent. A humanoid form for domestic robots would seem useful but we see that a roomba does a pretty good job and it's nothing more than a flat disc. If you look at conversion kits to turn standard human-operated trucks into remote vehicles, they're admirably utilitarian with a set of stereoscoptic cameras mounted where a human head would go but with simple servo-operated levers for controlling the gas and brake and a neat little set of rubber gears for gripping and turning the steering wheel.
If we were to ever invent a general-purpose robot, one capable of doing many tasks, it might settle on a human form. Right now our robots tend to be more designed for the purpose. A roomba whirls around the room but does not lift furniture, does not have an attachment for getting between the cushions, etc. An automatic car wash is basically robotic and looks nothing like a human while doing the same work. They're usually worse at it than a human but all you'd need to fix that deficiency is mount some cameras so they can really see the job they're doing and have an articulated pressure washer and scrubber arm to get at the dirt that's not coming off. Computer vision systems are getting to the point where they really could identify clean and dirty with cars off the street. Previous example of computer vision system were like the ones the potato chip companies use to sort bad spuds and they check the incoming potatoes against a known list of acceptable potato colors.
There's a whole field of biomimicry that seeks to borrow nature's solutions for various engineering problems. While nature can develop some very interesting techniques, it's important to remember that the process is not guided and also has to work with the materials at hand. The common example given is wing-flapping flight. It's not very efficient but modifying limbs to flapping surfaces is about the best you can do. Same goes for terrestrial locomotion. Wheels are awesome but there's only one axle we've ever found in nature and it's on a microscopic organism. Anything bigger than that is pushing itself around with limbs.
Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.
And let them track how many cute, fluffy kitten videos I watch? Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch? And car crashes. And explosions! People falling off skateboards. Grr, manly videos! That's right. Anyway, I think not.
I understand why you don't want to use dictionary words for passwords, too easy to brute-force. Though how likely is it that servers these days would sit still while a single account fails login ten thousand times? I know once the hacker is in, he can then run the hash file against the dictionary and back into the passwords of other accounts. But wouldn't even a dictionary word with a number or two after it be fine? duck1234 should be just as secure as duck!@#$, right?
I'm running through the ways you can get hacked and what a secure password would mean.
1. Guessing by a person sitting at your computer, brute force hacker from outside, running the dictionary against the hash -- strong is good. 2. Your PC gets rooted, your keystrokes are captured -- strength doesn't matter a bit, you typed it in for the hacker and he won't even have to touch the keyboard when his scripts hit your account and drain it. 3. Data breach and your password is stolen -- Why was it stored in plaintext? Regardless, they have it and can copy and paste if they use it.
The consensus on security now was that draconian policies on the part of IT without any seeming rhyme or reason to the employee will simply foster non-compliance and animosity towards IT.
If you are going to refer to something, please get it right.
The actual conspiracy theory is that we did indeed send men to the moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, et al). However, what we found there indicated the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, either artifacts or real living beings. This information was immediately classified at the highest levels. The photographic evidence of men on the moon was faked not because we didn't really go there, but because we found things there that NASA decided the public could not handle knowing.
That's how the conspiracy theory goes. So, finding that the moon lander is there neither proves nor disproves it. It would be evidence, but evidence of what?
Wouldn't the lander be near the stuff we weren't supposed to be shown?
Moon hoaxers can't agree on which part of the whole thing was faked. With tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on the project, I just can't really see how you could even conceivably not go to the moon. If I were writing a conspiracy script, what you're saying at least makes a wee bit of sense -- we got there and saw something bad and don't want to show our real vacation slides. But there's people who don't even believe there was a moon rocket! That the government somehow faked the launch or that it wasn't a real rocket that blasted off. Crazy.
I'm having that "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" moment that I really didn't want to have.
I wasn't expecting to agree with everything Obama did, that would be simplistic. I just wasn't expecting to find so little to agree with. The same agenda advanced under Bush is advanced under Obama. And it's kind of clear that this isn't Obama's agenda, possessive, implying ownership, any more than it was Bush's -- they're the pitchmen.
What I've not seen that much of are RPGs with RTS mechanics. Picture having your group of people that you start out with at a beginning of the game, and each of them has some ability and weakness. There would have to be more plot and character development for an RPG to separate it from Warcraft 1-3 (adding multiple endings, having side quests), but it could be done.
The Crescent Hawk's Revenge, a very early RTS mechwarrior game. You had about twenty missions and mech states would carry over from one mission to the next. The game was pretty linear with a few branches, path A or B to reach an intended goal. Mechs had pilots with stats and you had the opportunity to swap pilots and mechs at certain points. Would be seen as incredibly rudimentary by today's standards but none of these mechanics are present in modern-day RTS.
Personally, I like the idea of carrying units over from mission to mission. I like the idea of putting a name and a face to the pilot. I really like having a storyline tightly integrated with the gameplay. Total Annihilation had a superior game engine but I was really wrapped up in Warcraft's story. Never played Warcraft 3, heard bad reviews of it.
Every time I read about one of these long-undiscovered instant pwn bugs, I always have to wonder if there's someone sitting deep underground in an NSA computer center saying "Well shit, looks like we'll not be using that exploit anymore."
Is this a hole nobody knew about or a hole nobody but the people who knew about it knew about, and those people weren't talking?
This just means it'll spread all the more fervently via sneakernet. That we're doing business with this government while calling Cuba an international pariah is all the more disgusting. Maybe if the Cubans had oil or massive quantities of cheap labor rather than cigars and a nice view....
Slashdot Mirror
Certs already have a natural shelf life. Stuff like A+ and Security+ get you in the industry's door. Microsoft certs naturally expire as new products come out. You don't have to say MCSE NT is expired, employers will ask you for your MCSE 2008. And of course you'll try to explain to them that there's no MCSE anymore, it's an MCITP and they'll say "Yeah, well you go and get your MCSE 2008 and get back to us."
Trash Talk
Harm me with harmony.
Doomsday, drop a load on 'em.
Verse 1
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
Chorus
Trash Talk
Hit it!
Doomsday, kick it in!
So just because someone self-identifies as a fundamentalist does not mean they are a raging nutcase.
Well, it would be nice if self-described fundamentalists would actually define what they mean by fundamentalism.
Yeah. That's a bit like saying "I'm a lover of children! I'm a pedophile!" and wondering why you're getting funny looks. If you're going to use a word with your own private definition while a very different definition is more prevalent, you might want to explain yourself. You might also realize it's really not worth the effort, you should find a new word.
Liberal is a word that's gotten that way. The right has succeeded in making the word as unpopular as pedophile while the democratic party has done little to keep themselves from being ineffectual embarrassments. This has caused liberals to adopt new words like progressive to replace it, get rid of the baggage.
The interesting thing about Christ's teachings is that they were a lot more socialistic and loving than the typical fundamentalist makes them out to be. So a true christian fundamentalist would look less like the christian right and more like the christian left. :)
Goes for programming and infrastructure and all things IT -- you have to move around a lot. Employers in general have no interest in paying you more once you work there. If you want another $15k, you have to move elsewhere. Time at a company is spend padding resumes and earning certifications. Then you move. You might move back to the original company if they make a better offer. Employer logic is "We got the guy for $x, why should we pay him any more once we have him?" Doesn't matter if you complete a second degree while you're there, move from jr. developer to lead designer, take on more responsibilities, you'll get piddle-shit raises.
This kills me. I don't want to be job-hopping. I'd like to build some time with a place, earn some kudos and sweat equity. But those things don't exist. Been at a company a month or twenty years, you are equally expendable. Treat your employer the same way. And die a little inside. People want to think of the office as family because we're social creatures. Few people enjoy living life out as a lesson in Randian objectivism, looking for leverage in the battle of who's screwing whom. We aren't meant to live like that.
In 1911, Thomas Edison bragged that he could make a 40,000-page book by printing the pages on thin pieces of metal
Man, how many blades? That Gillette guy is gonna shit himself.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Government programs don't "encourage" free enterprise. At best, they steal from some people who would not have spent it The Right Way and give the money to the wonderful people who will use it the way the Bureaucracy feels is Much Better.
The way to actually encourage free enterprise, is to stop threatening violence against the people who practice it.
I don't know of any aerospace engineering collectives out there, buddy. Last I checked, all the aerospace companies were firmly in the military-industrial complex which enjoys that nice, tight, cozy relationship with government. But don't worry, I'm sure the CEO's of those companies will promise you they are defenders of the free market.
How many shuttle successors have come and gone? And the whole Aeres thing looks like it's fixing to be another clusterfuck.
It seems like the current government agency/government contractor model of development and procurement is broken. The same boondoggles we see in the military are repeated pretty much across the board. I know they say not to ascribe to malice what can best be described by incompetence but it seems like there's usually malice and greed at work here. The government will sign a very lucrative contract with a company that will then have massive cost overruns, fail to deliver on time and thus draw even more funds to eventually deliver a poorly-designed piece of shit that cannot do what was requested of it.
Sometimes you can blame the government for screwing things up. The shuttle was promised to do too many things for too many people and the engineers were left with trying to make the best compromise they could. That was the government's bad. And the whole Ares bit, that sounds like a government bad, too. NASA got all turned on by the idea of reusing shuttle tech and saving bundles on false economies and it was the contractor's fault for not disabusing them of this notion. Engineers both at NASA and the contractor probably knew better but management would have been unwilling to listen, obviously, or else we wouldn't be in the situation we are now.
The thing that really kills me is the contractor's motivation as a business is maximizing revenue from the contracts and thus maximizing profits. It's not in their interest to be on-time and on-budget. And it's also not in their own interest to offer cheaper, better solutions. So we get this perpetual game where they promise the moon for low prices and NASA pretends to believe them and the costs spiral and until projects are canceled. I would see that as a complete failure but the business would regard that failure as a profitable venture and thus a success. Therefore, there's no incentive for them to do things any differently!!! Argh.
So if I want to buy music legitly, in addition to paying for the track I will now also get spammed with ads?
But wait, there's more!
Why would they revolt?
The have it better now than anytime in their history. Sure a few may come to the US and the EU but they will see the improvements that they have been making over time and expect them to continue.
Not to mention that they are proud that went from being a third world nation to a super power in a generation.
I don't like the way things work in China but if you look back to how they worked before I think you will see that a DOS and great firewall are progress compared to the cultural revolution.
It's seemingly good for them -- for now. But there are a lot of parallels to America's own past. We had our Gilded Age and we had our bust after that, we had our Roaring 20's and our Great Depression. During the boom times, everyone thought that they could get their piece of the action, have a nice, thick slice of the pie. But when everything crashed, the average worker found out that they weren't left holding anything but the bag. This is why we could go from the rah-rah capitalism of the 20's to robber-barons seriously worrying about a communist revolution in the 30's. That's the only reason why FDR was able to pass the reforms he did, because the people with the money realized they had to throw the workers some kind of bone or risk everything going red.
So things are going great for China -- for now. But just how firm is the foundation they're building this economic empire on? We're already seeing the cracks in Dubai. The crappy infrastructure is a concrete and steel metaphor for the place, a gilded turd. It's a giant speculative bubble built on something even less substantial than sand. It's no wonder everything is crashing down once the hype ends.
During that big quake of theirs we caught a glimpse of China's way of doing business. The older buildings stood up because they were built boring and according to standards put in place during the "we're really trying to be communist" era. The newer buildings were built during the "we're only nominally communist, don't tell anyone" era and lots of shortcuts and substitutions were made in materials and workmanship, just like in the gangster capitalism countries. The newer buildings collapsed, the older ones not so much.
If China's prosperity proves as ephemeral as the typical bubble economy, things could get ugly rather quickly. Lots of Chinese are still taking it in the shorts. If there's not even the fiction of possibly becoming wealthy, they're not going to suffer quietly. There's the demographic crisis with lots of young men and not as many young women for them to marry. There's ethnic unrest amongst the non-Han population. There's looming ecological disasters, famine, drought, flooding, etc. And my personal guess -- if I were writing a techno-thriller this is how I'd do it -- is that things are going to really turn to shit when the Three Gorges Dam finally gets a 7.0 or greater quake and suffers a catastrophic failure. The death of a prestige project, the loss of all that hydroelectric power, plus all the deaths from the flooding downstream. Could be taken as a sign that the rulers just lost the mandate of heaven, or it could be taken to show that the rulers can't get anything right.
This is not to say a rebellion WILL happen, just that it's certainly conceivable and doesn't require many leaps and contortions of logic to hypothesize.
Moral of the story, You may not be a smug asshole, but you're wearing a smog asshole's uniform.
An SUV?
PC represents rough and tumble, for the person who loves freedom and flexibility and is willing to compromise on fit and polish to get there. Linux is taking that to an even more extreme end. Mac represents surrendering your freedom to someone who has better taste than you. The thought of that gets my nose out of joint. Be that as it may, there's not that many places where I think Apple made seriously wrong calls on design and UI, and this is coming from a PC guy. I still think iTunes is sent to us from the dev.null and don't understand how people think it's intuitive or easy -- I find it annoying.
I think for most users, Apple truly represents less headache. Sure, there's very slick marketing but that job is made easier by having a product that people really, really like.
I do think what we see in Apple right now is the result of enlightened tyranny, someone you may not like but find difficulty arguing with because he's usually right. The question remains what will happen once he's gone -- will it turn into an arbitrary tyranny or will the power structure balkanize? That's the stage they were at when Jobs came back, the engineers were as smart then as they are now, it's just that they couldn't get anything done because management had formed into a circular firing squad. Nobody had the authority to crack heads and tell them to stop shooting.
The wholesale price of 24 songs is $16.80. $54,000 is over 3,000 times the maximum possible damages.
What kind of punishment would I get for shoplifting a $16 CD? Isn't petty theft like a $500 fine and community service? This guy didn't even steal anything.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The constitution is not defective. Finally, all this anti-corporate ideology is on the wane, and true social equality will soon be reached when we get a corporation as a supreme court justice
Why own the cow when you get the milk for free?
The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights. The constitution is there to limit the government's ability to take those rights away. Being able to buy a newspaper advertisement or broadcast an advertisement isn't something that the goverment should be able to prevent you (or the company you've formed) from doing. Likewise for labor unions, advocacy groups, churches, scouting troops, bowling leagues, open source code projects, or anyone else.
If money = speech, that means I'm at the back of the hall shouting to be heard while the guy with the bucks is up on stage with the sound system from Disaster Area drowning me out.
Saying that a mutli-billion dollar corporation should have full access to those resources in shaping public opinion and that I'm perfectly free to shout back and that this is all fair, that's like saying 30-something me has the right to put my fence five feet into my 70-something neighbor's yard and if he has a problem with that he can challenge me to a fight. That's completely inequitable. This is just formalizing the inequality we already have in the legal system where a corporation may be completely in the wrong on a given topic but it will take me five years of lawsuits to prove it out in court and I'll go broke in the process. That may be legal but it's not fucking right!
Well, that's one way to add nutrients back into the system.
I'm also pissed off (as a phd in graphics research) that everyone thinks its breakthrough. Gollum in LOTR was a breakthrough, theres no new tech in this movie. James Cameron needs to stop saying how he invented mocap, its stupid. You'll find that most of the amazing "breakthroughs" of the last decade you didnt actually notice because the CG was perfect and more importantly subtle.
Avatar was groundbreaking technology. Gollum was freakin' AMAZING. I might have been more impressed with the work done on Jar-Jar if not for him being a hatefully stupid character in conception and execution and despising everyone involved in his creation. Gollum was so freakin' wild because he was so convincing. You were totally sold on the idea he was real. Environmental interaction, lighting, acting, it was all perfect. And so much artistry went into that. I've seen effects in big budget movies since the Rings that were not even half as good.
As far as Avatar goes, Cameron had to create another freakin' world. Even more work had to go into that than with Rings. As far as movies go LOTR had the better plot and did a better job of bringing the idea to the screen. Avatar's only sin was for having such a commonplace plot to back such groundbreaking filmmaking.
Your point about whether we can even recognize the CGI is important. People are always bragging about how they can spot the CGI. "Yeah, that Balrog, totally CGI." No shit. Everyone knows it has to be an effect. The stuff we miss is like the stuff done in that Tom Hanks plane crash movie where the tides were adjusted on the island or in Forest Gump where only a fifth of the stadium was filled and that crowd was mapped to the other 4/5ths to make it look like a full house. Lieutenant Dan didn't really lose his legs, his actor was wearing bluescreen stockings? No shit. But what'll really blow people away is when we find out an actor died halfway through the filming of a movie and the director uses CGI and a stand-in to complete his performance. Facemapping technology is here. Show someone that movie, tell them one of the actors was swapped out for CGI halfway through and ask them which one they thought it was.
I'm wondering if the Joker will be brought back for the third batman movie. I've heard some very, very good impressions of the joker voice from there. Get someone of similar build to do the joker's mannerisms and map a new face onto him. I bet they could pull it off.
If you create an entirely made up world you can put anything in it and have it "fit", because you have accepted the fantasy.
Not so easy. It still has to be convincing. LOTR's crew did a lot of research making sure they understood the physics of the creatures they were presenting. What would the bones be like in the mumakil, how would they balance, what would happen if they fell. How does a fell beast fly? What sort of wingspan would it need? How would it look in the air? The same kind of focus went into Avatar. The human eye can pick out stuff that doesn't look right. That's usually the telltale of bad CGI, reflections are off or things aren't moving the way they should if physics were in play.
Everything we have is designed to work with our humanoid bodies, so if we want to make a device that interfaces with those things, it will work better if it shares the humanoid design.
To an extent. A humanoid form for domestic robots would seem useful but we see that a roomba does a pretty good job and it's nothing more than a flat disc. If you look at conversion kits to turn standard human-operated trucks into remote vehicles, they're admirably utilitarian with a set of stereoscoptic cameras mounted where a human head would go but with simple servo-operated levers for controlling the gas and brake and a neat little set of rubber gears for gripping and turning the steering wheel.
If we were to ever invent a general-purpose robot, one capable of doing many tasks, it might settle on a human form. Right now our robots tend to be more designed for the purpose. A roomba whirls around the room but does not lift furniture, does not have an attachment for getting between the cushions, etc. An automatic car wash is basically robotic and looks nothing like a human while doing the same work. They're usually worse at it than a human but all you'd need to fix that deficiency is mount some cameras so they can really see the job they're doing and have an articulated pressure washer and scrubber arm to get at the dirt that's not coming off. Computer vision systems are getting to the point where they really could identify clean and dirty with cars off the street. Previous example of computer vision system were like the ones the potato chip companies use to sort bad spuds and they check the incoming potatoes against a known list of acceptable potato colors.
There's a whole field of biomimicry that seeks to borrow nature's solutions for various engineering problems. While nature can develop some very interesting techniques, it's important to remember that the process is not guided and also has to work with the materials at hand. The common example given is wing-flapping flight. It's not very efficient but modifying limbs to flapping surfaces is about the best you can do. Same goes for terrestrial locomotion. Wheels are awesome but there's only one axle we've ever found in nature and it's on a microscopic organism. Anything bigger than that is pushing itself around with limbs.
Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.
And let them track how many cute, fluffy kitten videos I watch? Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch? And car crashes. And explosions! People falling off skateboards. Grr, manly videos! That's right. Anyway, I think not.
I understand why you don't want to use dictionary words for passwords, too easy to brute-force. Though how likely is it that servers these days would sit still while a single account fails login ten thousand times? I know once the hacker is in, he can then run the hash file against the dictionary and back into the passwords of other accounts. But wouldn't even a dictionary word with a number or two after it be fine? duck1234 should be just as secure as duck!@#$, right?
I'm running through the ways you can get hacked and what a secure password would mean.
1. Guessing by a person sitting at your computer, brute force hacker from outside, running the dictionary against the hash -- strong is good.
2. Your PC gets rooted, your keystrokes are captured -- strength doesn't matter a bit, you typed it in for the hacker and he won't even have to touch the keyboard when his scripts hit your account and drain it.
3. Data breach and your password is stolen -- Why was it stored in plaintext? Regardless, they have it and can copy and paste if they use it.
The consensus on security now was that draconian policies on the part of IT without any seeming rhyme or reason to the employee will simply foster non-compliance and animosity towards IT.
If you are going to refer to something, please get it right.
The actual conspiracy theory is that we did indeed send men to the moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, et al). However, what we found there indicated the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, either artifacts or real living beings. This information was immediately classified at the highest levels. The photographic evidence of men on the moon was faked not because we didn't really go there, but because we found things there that NASA decided the public could not handle knowing.
That's how the conspiracy theory goes. So, finding that the moon lander is there neither proves nor disproves it. It would be evidence, but evidence of what?
Wouldn't the lander be near the stuff we weren't supposed to be shown?
Moon hoaxers can't agree on which part of the whole thing was faked. With tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on the project, I just can't really see how you could even conceivably not go to the moon. If I were writing a conspiracy script, what you're saying at least makes a wee bit of sense -- we got there and saw something bad and don't want to show our real vacation slides. But there's people who don't even believe there was a moon rocket! That the government somehow faked the launch or that it wasn't a real rocket that blasted off. Crazy.
I'm having that "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" moment that I really didn't want to have.
I wasn't expecting to agree with everything Obama did, that would be simplistic. I just wasn't expecting to find so little to agree with. The same agenda advanced under Bush is advanced under Obama. And it's kind of clear that this isn't Obama's agenda, possessive, implying ownership, any more than it was Bush's -- they're the pitchmen.
What I've not seen that much of are RPGs with RTS mechanics. Picture having your group of people that you start out with at a beginning of the game, and each of them has some ability and weakness. There would have to be more plot and character development for an RPG to separate it from Warcraft 1-3 (adding multiple endings, having side quests), but it could be done.
The Crescent Hawk's Revenge, a very early RTS mechwarrior game. You had about twenty missions and mech states would carry over from one mission to the next. The game was pretty linear with a few branches, path A or B to reach an intended goal. Mechs had pilots with stats and you had the opportunity to swap pilots and mechs at certain points. Would be seen as incredibly rudimentary by today's standards but none of these mechanics are present in modern-day RTS.
Personally, I like the idea of carrying units over from mission to mission. I like the idea of putting a name and a face to the pilot. I really like having a storyline tightly integrated with the gameplay. Total Annihilation had a superior game engine but I was really wrapped up in Warcraft's story. Never played Warcraft 3, heard bad reviews of it.
Every time I read about one of these long-undiscovered instant pwn bugs, I always have to wonder if there's someone sitting deep underground in an NSA computer center saying "Well shit, looks like we'll not be using that exploit anymore."
Is this a hole nobody knew about or a hole nobody but the people who knew about it knew about, and those people weren't talking?
Whenever the camera focused on an old-timey radio the bots would call out "The Jack Benny Program!"
I'm double-dating myself, first for referencing mst3k and second for getting the joke. But dating yourself is legal in west virginia.
This just means it'll spread all the more fervently via sneakernet. That we're doing business with this government while calling Cuba an international pariah is all the more disgusting. Maybe if the Cubans had oil or massive quantities of cheap labor rather than cigars and a nice view....