And when did Chernobyl become the bar for "holy shit! it's bad"? I guess until it's *exactly* equal to Chernobyl in *all* respects, it's "still good - nothing to see here, move along"!?!
When a boat sinks with 20 people, it's still a capsized boat. No Titanic - but still a tragedy. When an outbreak of some virus kills 20 people, it's no black plague - but it's still an outbreak. When millions of gallons of oil leaks out into the ocean, it may not be ixtoc, it's still a *big* problem. It's not a competition - it doesn't have to top the last worst shit of it's kind to qualify for a "holy shit" moniker.
I have been doing layered images for over 4-5 years (multiple divs with backgrounds layered over one another) to come up with cool effects. But I would have never come up with this. I had been thinking about tiles and the non-random-ness for quite a while too. This didn't occur to me. Now that someone put this together - sure it's simple. But that's the genius of it.
When they were given the "rights", they should have also been given the same liabilities as people:
- lifespan of 80 years. - incarceration (everyone in the company gets locked up) for wrongdoing.
(i know it doesn't work. just pointing out HOW corporations aren't people and therefore shouldn't have rights as such).
Right now, it's much better to be an incorporated entity than it is to be an individual. They get all the rights, and get to enjoy it for far longer than any person and without the possibility of incarceration if the entity starts enjoying it's "rights" a little too much by violating the rights of others.
I think one major cause of nucleophobia is that doses of a millionth of anything dangerous or less are easily measurable
Negligible doses of most every poison is always around, but are unmeasurable. Radiation radiates its presence and is observed, reported and terrifying.
I was talking about this with a co-worker who is from Ukraine. From near Kiev. We came to the conclusion that the nucleophobia is more from the reality that you really get no physical stimulus to tell you something is harming you until it's too late. Like the poison example you used. I have centuries of evolutionary logic programmed into me to, first, decide if something "looks" poisonous. Case in point, get some organic potatoes and you'll feel like chucking the purple ones. You know not to eat any random mushroom. And you know not to ingest absurd quantities of, say, alcohol (most of the time anyway) - at least the body starts to give you some feedback. Granted, there are poisons that could be mixed in with regular looking food but that's not a natural state of being. Someone had to actively defeat the pre-programmed logic in you because you know better than to ingest something funny looking.
The fear of snakes, scorpions, spiders.. took years and years of evolutionary programming to get you to avoid the things that could harm you.
Nuclear radiation, on the other hand, has nothing to trigger the self preservation mechanism. No foul air, no physical discomfort, no aural discomfort, no visible discomfort. Forget about discomfort, there isn't even anything detectable. And worse yet, even if you saw it/heard it/felt it - THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO.
Now, onto your other point - the doses are negligible. However, there is a chance - really really remote, i agree - but it's not 0 - that it could be much more than negligible. And if things have gotten this bad, it means that they hadn't seen this type of scenario coming - they thought the chances of this happening was virtually nil - or otherwise they would have prepared for it and this would have never happened. So the scenarios they put into the "virtually impossible" category did become possible. So, while it's not likely, there is a chance that things could get really out of hand. And that's the scary part of nuclear stuff.
I'm not denying that performances are a new work. What I was trying to get at is that the music that was free can only be had via listening to copyrighted performances, or copyrighted transcriptions. So now you have a situation where music that didn't even have copyright protection at the time it was created (and if they did at that time, they certainly would have entered public domain by now) are only available via copyright.
Material that was in public domain effectively entered copyright. The exact opposite of what the copyright system is meant to facilitate.
> It's not innovating and creating new if you take existing sheet music...
I agree with you. Unfortunately, the copyright laws don't really see it that way. It's a weird situation where even a 200 year old music is under some protection (performances are protected, the written sheet music is protected). If you wanted to set your home video to some (100+ year old) classical music, where would you get the soundtrack? Even my digital piano (Roland) disables the MIDI out when playing the built-in classical pieces. I look forward to putting it into Rosegarden, piping it through a softsynth and the digital piano and enjoy a truly "surround sound" experience.
We don't need anyone to be ok with anything (technical) we would like to do - especially since there's no telling if they're still going to be ok when what we do actually becomes a success and starts to threaten their business.
It's not just my knee-jerk reaction. It's history. But if you didn't know that by now, you're never going to know it.
In some third world countries, if you're mailing anything international via the postal service, it's very advisable to stand in line and get the stamps stamped in front of you instead of dropping your envelop into the mailbox. Because of the (relatively) high cost of international postage, it is worthwhile for the postmen there to peel off the stamps, throw away your envelop, and re-sell the stamps if the stamps aren't already stamped. It took me a minute to figure that out when I saw a bunch of foreigners in a line at the post office waiting to get their stamps stamped upon when there was a line-free drop box nearby.
But then this was 10 or so years ago. Anything I would send through the post office I send in emails now. For packages, UPS, DHL or FedEx do the job well.
Speed is relative. We've adapted remarkably well to coping with higher and higher speed in a relatively short time.
It's kinda funny to read that in the not too distant past, ~4mph was "a reckless pace, in fact, like a fire engine" and that they had the car capped to 4mph from a whopping 8mph.
Or you could implement some sort of redundancy/failover so that when your production machine goes down, you have another one pick it up instantly. Then you don't even need to respond quickly to restore a VM. But alas, redundancy/failover are so last decade and VM is all the rage now with the new kids.
> not because those countries are necessarily more forward thinking than the usa, but because they are just more densely populated
Bullshit. If density had anything to do with it, NY and Chicago residents would be flying on a 1Gb connection. Sure, you couldn't roll that out to remote farm houses in Kansas, for example. But what the hell is stopping ISPs from delivering fast connection in NY and Chicago? The population ain't getting any denser than that.
A file name lolcat.jpg.exe is a mighty tempting thing to double click on. Granted, the user is the vector. But then, the OS is not helping by making it easy to dupe people into thinking a file is an image vs an exe.
even if the OS fingerprinted the file instead of relying on the extension, the above scenario doesn't change. the file contents never lied about what the file was. the name was just mis-represented and the OS helped dupe the user into thinking it was an image.
I'm fine with it if MS wants to call this "user feedback" or whatever other euphemism they would like. My question is this:
How would they react if I started a search engine, got users to install a toolbar such that whenever they use Bing, I peek the search terms and the results and submit that to my site so that i can use Bings' ranking as part of my algorithm. Would THEY be OK with ME doing it?
How many other parameters would I have to use to make this OK? One other parameter? 2? 10? 100?
is it EVER ok for ME to do this?
I like Google. But less and less as days go by. I'm not upset at the fact that MS copied Google. I'm upset at the fact that if I were to do this, I'm sure MS would get the C&D department cranking out letters and threats. Talk about unfair advantage by leveraging their existing monopoly. That's what I'm upset about.
> I'm just not holding my breath on this evolutionary release (soft and hard)
oh, but I do hold my breath, every time, for the "release" (and yes, some would call it vital to the evolutionary process) and wait for it to go soft from hard.
I used to think like the GP. You've made a very good point about train drivers. I guess we got suckered into the "must have license" thingy. At one point, like you said, an engineer was just that - someone that ran the engine.
I'm not for censorship either. Nor am I for altering history.
Judging a classic with modern values will cause some consternation. "Injun" and "Nigger" might have been acceptable then. It's not now.
So how about this novel concept? We have become better now. Maybe Huck Finn doesn't really need to be put on a literary pedestal - it didn't stand the test of time.
I read a lot of Dickens growing up. Didn't really understand a lot of the undertones. Loved it. Few years ago, re-read one of 'em. And man was I let down. Long story short, I don't intend to read Dickens anymore. Again, to me, Dickens just didn't stand the test of time. It might have been great at the time but certainly not now. I don't need Dickens to be PCed up. I think there are plenty of modern writers writing stories fit for our times waiting to become the "classics".
This is a bit hyperbolic but here goes: what would you say to someone wanting to put 'Mein Kampf' on a literary pedestal (ok, it wasn't literary to begin with). What? Just because it's not PC it has to be condemned? It was all the rage (pun intended) at one point in time.
That's a bit hyperbolic and very unfair to compare Huck Finn to Mein Kampf. But to a black man, Huck Finn isn't any less hurtful. He could not read it and let history be. If not for all the literary types wanting ignore the fact that it's hurtful in the name of "classics", seemingly condoning - actually - praising it.
To me, Huck Finn is a sad reflection of the times. I'd like to think we're better now. Don't need to censor Huck Finn. I've got better things to read.
Slashdot Mirror
> They never risked their lives at all
Uh, huh...
You know that *after* they went there and measured it for you to see.
And when did Chernobyl become the bar for "holy shit! it's bad"? I guess until it's *exactly* equal to Chernobyl in *all* respects, it's "still good - nothing to see here, move along"!?!
When a boat sinks with 20 people, it's still a capsized boat. No Titanic - but still a tragedy. When an outbreak of some virus kills 20 people, it's no black plague - but it's still an outbreak. When millions of gallons of oil leaks out into the ocean, it may not be ixtoc, it's still a *big* problem. It's not a competition - it doesn't have to top the last worst shit of it's kind to qualify for a "holy shit" moniker.
This is a versioning system I can understand.
> if I had known you could specify more than one image for backgrounds, I would have figured this one out on my own
You may want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
I have been doing layered images for over 4-5 years (multiple divs with backgrounds layered over one another) to come up with cool effects. But I would have never come up with this. I had been thinking about tiles and the non-random-ness for quite a while too. This didn't occur to me. Now that someone put this together - sure it's simple. But that's the genius of it.
My hats are off - simple, efficient, brilliant.
> ..coconut halves ... and a "clop!" ...
He could, but then everyone said "neigh".
When they were given the "rights", they should have also been given the same liabilities as people:
- lifespan of 80 years.
- incarceration (everyone in the company gets locked up) for wrongdoing.
(i know it doesn't work. just pointing out HOW corporations aren't people and therefore shouldn't have rights as such).
Right now, it's much better to be an incorporated entity than it is to be an individual. They get all the rights, and get to enjoy it for far longer than any person and without the possibility of incarceration if the entity starts enjoying it's "rights" a little too much by violating the rights of others.
Great! use something else. Good thing there is a choice.
The rest of us (or, at least the ones using FF) do like it and think it's an improvement.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, sue.
I think one major cause of nucleophobia is that doses of a millionth of anything dangerous or less are easily measurable
Negligible doses of most every poison is always around, but are unmeasurable. Radiation radiates its presence and is observed, reported and terrifying.
I was talking about this with a co-worker who is from Ukraine. From near Kiev. We came to the conclusion that the nucleophobia is more from the reality that you really get no physical stimulus to tell you something is harming you until it's too late. Like the poison example you used. I have centuries of evolutionary logic programmed into me to, first, decide if something "looks" poisonous. Case in point, get some organic potatoes and you'll feel like chucking the purple ones. You know not to eat any random mushroom. And you know not to ingest absurd quantities of, say, alcohol (most of the time anyway) - at least the body starts to give you some feedback. Granted, there are poisons that could be mixed in with regular looking food but that's not a natural state of being. Someone had to actively defeat the pre-programmed logic in you because you know better than to ingest something funny looking.
The fear of snakes, scorpions, spiders.. took years and years of evolutionary programming to get you to avoid the things that could harm you.
Nuclear radiation, on the other hand, has nothing to trigger the self preservation mechanism. No foul air, no physical discomfort, no aural discomfort, no visible discomfort. Forget about discomfort, there isn't even anything detectable. And worse yet, even if you saw it/heard it/felt it - THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO.
Now, onto your other point - the doses are negligible. However, there is a chance - really really remote, i agree - but it's not 0 - that it could be much more than negligible. And if things have gotten this bad, it means that they hadn't seen this type of scenario coming - they thought the chances of this happening was virtually nil - or otherwise they would have prepared for it and this would have never happened. So the scenarios they put into the "virtually impossible" category did become possible. So, while it's not likely, there is a chance that things could get really out of hand. And that's the scary part of nuclear stuff.
I'm not denying that performances are a new work. What I was trying to get at is that the music that was free can only be had via listening to copyrighted performances, or copyrighted transcriptions. So now you have a situation where music that didn't even have copyright protection at the time it was created (and if they did at that time, they certainly would have entered public domain by now) are only available via copyright.
Material that was in public domain effectively entered copyright. The exact opposite of what the copyright system is meant to facilitate.
> It's not innovating and creating new if you take existing sheet music...
I agree with you. Unfortunately, the copyright laws don't really see it that way. It's a weird situation where even a 200 year old music is under some protection (performances are protected, the written sheet music is protected). If you wanted to set your home video to some (100+ year old) classical music, where would you get the soundtrack? Even my digital piano (Roland) disables the MIDI out when playing the built-in classical pieces. I look forward to putting it into Rosegarden, piping it through a softsynth and the digital piano and enjoy a truly "surround sound" experience.
What's wrong? You answered it yourself:
> and as long as Microsoft is ok with it.
We don't need anyone to be ok with anything (technical) we would like to do - especially since there's no telling if they're still going to be ok when what we do actually becomes a success and starts to threaten their business.
It's not just my knee-jerk reaction. It's history. But if you didn't know that by now, you're never going to know it.
In some third world countries, if you're mailing anything international via the postal service, it's very advisable to stand in line and get the stamps stamped in front of you instead of dropping your envelop into the mailbox. Because of the (relatively) high cost of international postage, it is worthwhile for the postmen there to peel off the stamps, throw away your envelop, and re-sell the stamps if the stamps aren't already stamped. It took me a minute to figure that out when I saw a bunch of foreigners in a line at the post office waiting to get their stamps stamped upon when there was a line-free drop box nearby.
But then this was 10 or so years ago. Anything I would send through the post office I send in emails now. For packages, UPS, DHL or FedEx do the job well.
Speed is relative. We've adapted remarkably well to coping with higher and higher speed in a relatively short time.
It's kinda funny to read that in the not too distant past, ~4mph was "a reckless pace, in fact, like a fire engine" and that they had the car capped to 4mph from a whopping 8mph.
Or you could implement some sort of redundancy/failover so that when your production machine goes down, you have another one pick it up instantly. Then you don't even need to respond quickly to restore a VM. But alas, redundancy/failover are so last decade and VM is all the rage now with the new kids.
> not because those countries are necessarily more forward thinking than the usa, but because they are just more densely populated
Bullshit. If density had anything to do with it, NY and Chicago residents would be flying on a 1Gb connection. Sure, you couldn't roll that out to remote farm houses in Kansas, for example. But what the hell is stopping ISPs from delivering fast connection in NY and Chicago? The population ain't getting any denser than that.
A file name lolcat.jpg.exe is a mighty tempting thing to double click on. Granted, the user is the vector. But then, the OS is not helping by making it easy to dupe people into thinking a file is an image vs an exe.
even if the OS fingerprinted the file instead of relying on the extension, the above scenario doesn't change. the file contents never lied about what the file was. the name was just mis-represented and the OS helped dupe the user into thinking it was an image.
Yeah, about that "Food and Water":
It seems, we haven't solved that one yet in the "Richest" nation. What say you, we drop this internet crap and focus first on that basic human need right here in America?
Or do you have something against people like William Kamkwamba who might find the internet a halfway decent resource to better their situation?
Ah Ha!
MS is doing exactly a "competitive Research" - as in "Competitive Re-SEARCH" - search all the competitors searches!
I'm fine with it if MS wants to call this "user feedback" or whatever other euphemism they would like. My question is this:
How would they react if I started a search engine, got users to install a toolbar such that whenever they use Bing, I peek the search terms and the results and submit that to my site so that i can use Bings' ranking as part of my algorithm. Would THEY be OK with ME doing it?
How many other parameters would I have to use to make this OK? One other parameter? 2? 10? 100?
is it EVER ok for ME to do this?
I like Google. But less and less as days go by. I'm not upset at the fact that MS copied Google. I'm upset at the fact that if I were to do this, I'm sure MS would get the C&D department cranking out letters and threats. Talk about unfair advantage by leveraging their existing monopoly. That's what I'm upset about.
The most apropos "In Soviet Russia" joke EVER!!
Kudos, sir, kudos.
Precious Flueds!
> I'm just not holding my breath on this evolutionary release (soft and hard)
oh, but I do hold my breath, every time, for the "release" (and yes, some would call it vital to the evolutionary process) and wait for it to go soft from hard.
I used to think like the GP. You've made a very good point about train drivers. I guess we got suckered into the "must have license" thingy. At one point, like you said, an engineer was just that - someone that ran the engine.
I'm not for censorship either. Nor am I for altering history.
Judging a classic with modern values will cause some consternation. "Injun" and "Nigger" might have been acceptable then. It's not now.
So how about this novel concept? We have become better now. Maybe Huck Finn doesn't really need to be put on a literary pedestal - it didn't stand the test of time.
I read a lot of Dickens growing up. Didn't really understand a lot of the undertones. Loved it. Few years ago, re-read one of 'em. And man was I let down. Long story short, I don't intend to read Dickens anymore. Again, to me, Dickens just didn't stand the test of time. It might have been great at the time but certainly not now. I don't need Dickens to be PCed up. I think there are plenty of modern writers writing stories fit for our times waiting to become the "classics".
This is a bit hyperbolic but here goes: what would you say to someone wanting to put 'Mein Kampf' on a literary pedestal (ok, it wasn't literary to begin with). What? Just because it's not PC it has to be condemned? It was all the rage (pun intended) at one point in time.
That's a bit hyperbolic and very unfair to compare Huck Finn to Mein Kampf. But to a black man, Huck Finn isn't any less hurtful. He could not read it and let history be. If not for all the literary types wanting ignore the fact that it's hurtful in the name of "classics", seemingly condoning - actually - praising it.
To me, Huck Finn is a sad reflection of the times. I'd like to think we're better now. Don't need to censor Huck Finn. I've got better things to read.