You have to see that with trillions of these devices implanted in everyone, no one will be able to distinguish you from the noise. If they are able to, then they would've been able to visually follow you anyway.
No one could follow millions of people. But with RFIDs and strategically placed scanners, computers will be perfectly able to follow everyone everywhere, and record it permanently in your file, to be accessed any time for the rest of your life.
I would suggest re-photographing the famous (or infamous) "face" on Mars. I know NASA already did that once, but at a different angle and under different lighting coniditions, which resulted in an image that is hard for many to correlate with the earlier, fuzzy "face" photo.
They've done it many times. See Cydonia Region of Mars for lots of high res images, alongside the Viking image that started the whole myth.
Does anyone else have examples of technology that is shown in movies that is being portrayed as current but is actually about ten to twenty years from being developed?
keeping it capitalized makes it clear that the word being spoken is an acronym, without having to resort to seperating everything with p.e.r.i.o.d.s.
Perhaps one can infer a rule: Americans tend to keep caps, but drop periods when it's an acronym. British usage is to drop periods most of the time, and drop the caps when it's pronounced as a word.
implying that he just says the letters, saying it like ess-see-ohh, but I've always said (as well as all of my colleagues) it as a word, sounding like "skoh". Stupid post, and way offtopic, but I'd be interested in the replies!
The British rule is if you pronounce an "initialism" as a word, (rather than spelling it out) i.e. an acronym, you drop the caps. Eg, Nato, Nasa, snafu. Americans though tend to keep the caps even when they pronounce it as a single word. But there are a lot of common exceptions.
The use of "an" before depends on how you pronounce it, not spell it, as the recent "an university" headline fuckup here. (Would you say/write "An United States?)
Interested to know whether the Slashdot editors validate incoming information to see if what the poster is stating has any truth to it.
Obviously not, considering the number of broken links in articles (eg, yesterday one had http:www... , missing the//, so it gave an invalid link on slashdot.org instead of the intended site). And of course, heaven forbid they should bother to validate the spelling... how long has Unix spell/ispell etc been available? So imagining they would actually do a minimum factcheck, seeing that the cited source actually says what he submiter claims, is a bit starry-eyed.
2. Halt the trading of text messages during the opening of high budget movies.
A joke... but they could jam all mobile phone signals in the cinema, under the guise of audience demand, which certainly is true. This would have the effect of also blocking bored patrons from trashing the movie by text from the cinema -- once they get out their priority will be more forgetting the movie than warning people against it.
where a local entertainment industry develops and US corporations deliberately dump (release products at prices lower than local prices) to destroy that local industry,
The Australian content rules came about because in the 50s and 60s American movie and TV shows were sold to the local TV networks at a few hundred dollars per episode, which they could do because they'd already got their cost back from the US networks. Local shows had to charge the full cost, 100 times that, and so very few were bought or made. We wouldn't have an industry at all if we hadn't made local content rules.
... clearly in bad faith with a Free Trade Agreement
Well, since these trade agreements are written by American lobbyists and forced on other countries under threat of losing the US market, I don't really see that as a moral problem. Also considering that the US subsidises its grain production and unfairly competes with Australian wheat, for instance.
In this case, though, basically we're talking about intellectual property, for which the cost of production is much, much greater than the cost of distribution. US exporters only have to show a profit on the distribution cost.
Since already well over half of Australian airtime is given over to American dreck, why insist on the right to stamp out the remainder?
Rotten tomatoes is based on published reviews (mostly newspapers). I find it pretty useful. Even if the tomatometer rates it rotten, but you want to see it anyway (because it has some hook that presses your buttons), you can read the positive reviews and find points to look out for.
Some AC wrote: I know we could try to "re-educate" clients to use.pdfs and ASCII text, but they'll just tell you to get lost and hire somebody who will do exactly what they want, and use the formats they specify.
But when you have the power, either because you're the client or because you're indispensable, you can set the standard. Otherwise, I don't see why you can't use PDFs for outgoing documents, for instance. And my emails remain plain ASCII for the most case (easier to grep through the mailbox files, for one thing).
he point is, I'm not the one who gets to say what people should use. You are not either.
It certainly sounded as if you were saying there was no alternative to Word for that specific use (math layout), so I was pointing out others, possibly superior ones. As I work in publishing I've become aware of the tunnel vision that has afflicted publishers in recent years. Five or ten years ago you could submit files in several formats if you followed specific guidelines. Now editors with experience have been downsized and layout is done by staff who know how to copy from Word and paste into Quark, and nothing more than that.
As for general communication, I dread receiving bloated Word files, which have to be scanned for viruses and which all try to hijack my own settings.
Word is fine for composing, but it's absurd as an exchange format. If billg had got into the Internet sooner, instead of disdaining it, we would quite likely now be using doc files instead of HTML, but fortunately by the time he decided to take over the net HTML was established. But he has somehow convinced people to exchange simple memos in doc files instead of plain (or enriched) text emails.
At the same time, China wants to join the World Trade Organization (they didn't get accepted yet right?). So in the end, this law sounds like something the WTO is going to demand China repeal if they want to join.
They're already in. And this is a ruling on what government ministries can use, which is easily cast as national security, which is excempt from WTO rules. Could China complain that they can't tender for software for the Pentagon? Anyway, the US pisses on the WTO whenever it feels like it. The 3rd world is full of poverty-stricken farmers who can't sell their crops in competition with subsidised American farmers, which certainly goes againt the spirit, and probably the letter, of the WTO.
The three teams are developing three versions of WPS Office: one is WPS for Linux, another is WPS Office 2003 for Windows, and the other is WPS Office V6 for both Linux and Windows.
I have several friends who write math textbooks. They use equation editor and have to use Word.
You must admit this is a rather tiny niche market. Everyone should use Word because a couple of math lecturers have to?
Also, there are several math layout apps for this purpose -- such as Tex. It used to be the only acceptable format, IIRC. See American Mathematical Society TeX Resources for how Real Men lay out maths.
However, anything complex and critical (like the stuff you send to your client or they send to you) must convert with 100% accuracy. This is why Koffice or OpenOffice will not do well in a business environment.
If it's "complex or critical", you shouldn't be using Word anyway.
If it's plain text, use ASCII. If it's formatted, use PDF. By all means, use Word to compose your documents, but it's a terrible exchange or achival format.
Anyway, I've worked in offices for over 10 years. For business purposes, WordStar 4 was fine. It had spellcheck, it had bold. What else do you need in a business document? (I admit, I later upgraded to WordStar 5.)
I also do DTP. For that I extract the text from the Word docs that have unfortunately become ubiquitous before laying them out in a rational way using stylesheets. Then I make PDFs to pass on to the printer.
All this talk about "incompatibility" is basically FUD. If you want compatibiity, use an open standard, not a transient obfuscated undocumented one that has the bonus feature of including viruses.
True but I do it for all sites in case the article moves. And do it the same for big or little sites. Though the Guardian tends not to move articles that often and has a good archive, I am just trying to be consistent.
If the article moves, how does giving the top link help? It doesn't tell us anything that isn't obvious. Ditto for the link to the Royal Astronomical Society.
I don't want to condemn you personally, I know that most submitters seem addicted to filling their stories with as many links as possible, but this is a useless habit -- there were already five links in one paragraph actually on topic, adding another two courtesy ones makes an article more cluttered.
I understand the concept of studying all of these various "snapshots" in time that show us what happened at thre far reaches of our universe billions of years ago, but I've never understood how astronomers can make such "matter of fact" claims when the amount of change that we've been able to observe in these windows to the past seem so statistically irrelevant (i.e. 100 years out of 100 trillion years).
What the "snapshots" of x billion years ago/light years away tell us is not just what that particular galaxy was like, but, we assume, other galaxies at the same age. (There's no reason to think otherwise.) So we can see a smooth evolution looking backwards the further away we focus. That gives us a perspective of not a hundred, but about 10 billion years.
Online versions of print papers prefer that people who reference them include a top of site link in place of the traditional footnote or whatever. Sean-Paul Kelley actually got in trouble for not doing that.
The question is not of having the "top" link instead of but AS WELL AS the deep link. What purpose does it serve? It just doubles the number of links in the article, adding ones that no one ever clicks.
And as often mentioned, if sites don't like deep links it's easy to bounce them by using referrer checks.
But why do a link to the Guardian at all? Why not just the article itself?
Sometimes I do look at the home page of a site after reading an article, but I NEVER go back to the Slashdot article to do so, just click on the link at the top of the article page (there is always one), or truncate the URL.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely untrue.
At collecting images, not at identifying people, especially not if you simply cover your face.
No one could follow millions of people. But with RFIDs and strategically placed scanners, computers will be perfectly able to follow everyone everywhere, and record it permanently in your file, to be accessed any time for the rest of your life.
They've done it many times. See Cydonia Region of Mars for lots of high res images, alongside the Viking image that started the whole myth.
Every James Bond movie.
Perhaps one can infer a rule: Americans tend to keep caps, but drop periods when it's an acronym. British usage is to drop periods most of the time, and drop the caps when it's pronounced as a word.
The British rule is if you pronounce an "initialism" as a word, (rather than spelling it out) i.e. an acronym, you drop the caps. Eg, Nato, Nasa, snafu. Americans though tend to keep the caps even when they pronounce it as a single word. But there are a lot of common exceptions.
The use of "an" before depends on how you pronounce it, not spell it, as the recent "an university" headline fuckup here. (Would you say/write "An United States?)
Obviously not, considering the number of broken links in articles (eg, yesterday one had http:www... , missing the //, so it gave an invalid link on slashdot.org instead of the intended site). And of course, heaven forbid they should bother to validate the spelling... how long has Unix spell/ispell etc been available? So imagining they would actually do a minimum factcheck, seeing that the cited source actually says what he submiter claims, is a bit starry-eyed.
A joke ... but they could jam all mobile phone signals in the cinema, under the guise of audience demand, which certainly is true. This would have the effect of also blocking bored patrons from trashing the movie by text from the cinema -- once they get out their priority will be more forgetting the movie than warning people against it.
The Australian content rules came about because in the 50s and 60s American movie and TV shows were sold to the local TV networks at a few hundred dollars per episode, which they could do because they'd already got their cost back from the US networks. Local shows had to charge the full cost, 100 times that, and so very few were bought or made. We wouldn't have an industry at all if we hadn't made local content rules.
Well, since these trade agreements are written by American lobbyists and forced on other countries under threat of losing the US market, I don't really see that as a moral problem. Also considering that the US subsidises its grain production and unfairly competes with Australian wheat, for instance.
In this case, though, basically we're talking about intellectual property, for which the cost of production is much, much greater than the cost of distribution. US exporters only have to show a profit on the distribution cost.
Since already well over half of Australian airtime is given over to American dreck, why insist on the right to stamp out the remainder?
Rotten tomatoes is based on published reviews (mostly newspapers). I find it pretty useful. Even if the tomatometer rates it rotten, but you want to see it anyway (because it has some hook that presses your buttons), you can read the positive reviews and find points to look out for.
Because you can do it when the urge strikes you in the cinema without getting a can of coke poured over you as you would if you made a voice call.
But when you have the power, either because you're the client or because you're indispensable, you can set the standard. Otherwise, I don't see why you can't use PDFs for outgoing documents, for instance. And my emails remain plain ASCII for the most case (easier to grep through the mailbox files, for one thing).
It certainly sounded as if you were saying there was no alternative to Word for that specific use (math layout), so I was pointing out others, possibly superior ones. As I work in publishing I've become aware of the tunnel vision that has afflicted publishers in recent years. Five or ten years ago you could submit files in several formats if you followed specific guidelines. Now editors with experience have been downsized and layout is done by staff who know how to copy from Word and paste into Quark, and nothing more than that.
As for general communication, I dread receiving bloated Word files, which have to be scanned for viruses and which all try to hijack my own settings.
Word is fine for composing, but it's absurd as an exchange format. If billg had got into the Internet sooner, instead of disdaining it, we would quite likely now be using doc files instead of HTML, but fortunately by the time he decided to take over the net HTML was established. But he has somehow convinced people to exchange simple memos in doc files instead of plain (or enriched) text emails.
They're already in. And this is a ruling on what government ministries can use, which is easily cast as national security, which is excempt from WTO rules. Could China complain that they can't tender for software for the Pentagon? Anyway, the US pisses on the WTO whenever it feels like it. The 3rd world is full of poverty-stricken farmers who can't sell their crops in competition with subsidised American farmers, which certainly goes againt the spirit, and probably the letter, of the WTO.
Linux is local software coded by the Chinese?
Yes, at least it's been localised to have a Chinse interface, which is non-trivial. And as well say SUSE is local to Germany, Redhat to the US, etc.
WPS Office 2003:
Of course, support that good old American company SCO.
You must admit this is a rather tiny niche market. Everyone should use Word because a couple of math lecturers have to?
Also, there are several math layout apps for this purpose -- such as Tex. It used to be the only acceptable format, IIRC. See American Mathematical Society TeX Resources for how Real Men lay out maths.
If it's "complex or critical", you shouldn't be using Word anyway. If it's plain text, use ASCII. If it's formatted, use PDF. By all means, use Word to compose your documents, but it's a terrible exchange or achival format.
Anyway, I've worked in offices for over 10 years. For business purposes, WordStar 4 was fine. It had spellcheck, it had bold. What else do you need in a business document? (I admit, I later upgraded to WordStar 5.)
I also do DTP. For that I extract the text from the Word docs that have unfortunately become ubiquitous before laying them out in a rational way using stylesheets. Then I make PDFs to pass on to the printer.
All this talk about "incompatibility" is basically FUD. If you want compatibiity, use an open standard, not a transient obfuscated undocumented one that has the bonus feature of including viruses.
If the article moves, how does giving the top link help? It doesn't tell us anything that isn't obvious. Ditto for the link to the Royal Astronomical Society.
I don't want to condemn you personally, I know that most submitters seem addicted to filling their stories with as many links as possible, but this is a useless habit -- there were already five links in one paragraph actually on topic, adding another two courtesy ones makes an article more cluttered.
See James Blish's The Triumph of Time (1958), part of his Cities in Flight series.
What the "snapshots" of x billion years ago/light years away tell us is not just what that particular galaxy was like, but, we assume, other galaxies at the same age. (There's no reason to think otherwise.) So we can see a smooth evolution looking backwards the further away we focus. That gives us a perspective of not a hundred, but about 10 billion years.
The question is not of having the "top" link instead of but AS WELL AS the deep link. What purpose does it serve? It just doubles the number of links in the article, adding ones that no one ever clicks.
And as often mentioned, if sites don't like deep links it's easy to bounce them by using referrer checks.
Sometimes I do look at the home page of a site after reading an article, but I NEVER go back to the Slashdot article to do so, just click on the link at the top of the article page (there is always one), or truncate the URL.