That's almost precisely the comment I was going to make.
First premise: Look at Japan. More to the point, look at the prevalence of seijin manga in Japan. Here's a culture that's apparently obsessed with violent rape fantasy, yet their rate of violent crime is significantly lower, per capita than that of the USA. [N.B.: I have no figures to back this up. I could be completely wrong. Nevertheless, my second premise stands.]
Second premise: Boys begin puberty around ten or eleven years of age—after all, gentlemen, when did you start getting really interested in sex—but tend to have the most frustrating six, seven, maybe even eight years of their as yet short life because Western culture dictates that "everything about what's between your legs is evil and if you even think about it for a second, you're a terrible, disgusting person!"
What am I getting at? Basically, that letting kids read pornography (not necessarily hardcore pornography, but Playboy at the very least, because it's really just pinups) can't possibly hurt or warp them. If anything, it'll let them become more balanced adults, because they'll learn for themselves that the human body is a wonderful thing, something to be celebrated and not mourned, and they won't feel immense amounts of guilt for touching themselves after school, before their parents get home. I'm almost be willing to bet that a lot of North American rapists turn to rape partially because of the frustrated guilt they feel over looking at their fathers' naughty magazines and getting caught. And, of course, in time, they'll discover that sex with a loving partner can be the most wonderful thing that you can do with another person; that's it's sharing yourself, body, mind and soul with them. Sex is, honestly, the closest I've ever come to a truly religious experience.
If anything's truly harmful to children, it's the way that Generation Xers are giving their children anything and everything they want, in a desperate attempt to be their child's friends. Children need parents, not overgrown playmates. If you're being proper parents to your children, then they'll become the good adults you want them to be. It's just that simple.
But that's a rant for another story, and another time.
Have you ever actually seen a contemporary wind turbine in action? They move extremely slowly; the probability that a bird is going to be struck is low enough to begin with, but to be struck fatally is even lower yet. The only way that they're going to have a decent chance of killing birds would be in a hurricane, but even birds are smart enough to stay the hell inside during one of those.
That's like saying, "if you're not saying anything bad, then you should send all your mail on postcards". Bad theory. The issue here isn't that people want to avoid getting in trouble for nicking off to the pub when they should be working, it's that people think--and rightly so!--that their employers have no business being able to find out where they go, on a whim. After all, something that just puts a foot in the door. You let them have this, then it isn't unreasonable to ask for something else. Then the same with something else and something else until the people with the money and the power--so, the money--can do whatever they want, because you let them. And they're going to try to do it in the name of "keeping you safe"--did you notice the brief nod to the Underground bombing in July? It's like every civil liberty that's been revoked in the States in the name of "not letting the terr'ists win". Bullshit. When you take away any freedom, you're doing exactly what those same terrorists want you to do.
But enough about how incredibly, incredibly stupid I think the Bush administration is. That has nothing to do with this. Or does it?
I've heard--though I could be mistaken--that even turning your phone off won't help. I don't know why; I know that it doesn't make sense.. it just sticks out in my mind as "one of those things that I've heard". Probably better, in that it's more paranoid, to remove the SIM card when you don't want to be tracked, since that's what this technology relies on.
your bandwidth ..Oh yeah, I forgot how expensive traffic is..
your potential copyright violation
I don't know, if you disclaim responsibility for what people post, you could make a case that the poster is the copyright violator because they weren't given a licence to distribute the material and that your server merely did as it was told, on the assumption that the poster did have the licence.
your risk if there's an image-based exploit on your image-checker (always a remote possibility)
True, but also much easier to deal with if it arises.
in many of the random phpBB communities and such on the Web, all those are in short supply
But the article submitter said, "I work for a company that has a strong online community," so I was working on the assumption that they'd probably have the income to handle at least the disk space issue.
use it for some sort of webcam or "This is your IP address and user-agent" or system-uptime script or slideshow
As far as I'm concerned, people who put their webcams or uptime in their sigblocks should be shot, along with anyone who uses one of those 'this is your IP/user-agent' scripts. They're retarded. It's easy information to get and doesn't necessarily reveal any looming security threats.
Have your users upload their images to your server, only supporting format(s) that can be verified as being what they claim and cannot directly execute scripts like WMF files can (GIF, JPEG,...).
Yeah, but the interface for doing that is always pretty kludgy, from what I've seen.. but that was my point behind caching the images that people link to. You could do it entirely transparently and ensure that the images are safe... it's just a matter of providing enough space.
You might be able to restrict it to images with URIs ending in those extensions, but extensions are largely irrelevant to the WWW, it's the Content-Type header that matters, which can't be checked because the person serving it can change it at any time.
I know it wouldn't do much good for precisely that reason, but it would take care of accidental links to the malicious images.. say someone makes one of these WMFs of something cute. Some granny with enough ability to upload images to a server (I was going to say.Mac, but I'm fairly certain Macs don't display WMFs) decides to link to it in her signature or her userpic and pow, everybody using Windows gets screwed...
Exactly what I was thinking. While the turkey may not chemically make you tired, we've formed such a strong association between turkey and tiredness--either through observation or by being told that there's enough tryptophan in turkey to knock you out--that, at this point, your brain releases the appropriate chemicals to make you tired. It's classical conditioning.
Minor nit: NASA != USAF. Thus, NASA doesn't necessarily have ready access to large bombers. Besides, as someone else said, the White Knight was specifically designed for this purpose. Bombers weren't. Not with a payload that large.
This is also evident in digitisation of music: it's the old sample rate issue. CD sampling at 44 kHz means a maximum resolvable frequency of 22 kHz, which some audiophiles notice.
No, they can't. The human ear is can't hear past 20 KHz and most people are lucky to get past 16.
What these audiophiles are hearing are alias frequencies above 22.05 KHz that occasionally come out in the recorded sound as harmonic distortions. For example, a 24 KHz sound would likely come in as an occasional, faint boost at around 2 KHz.
This is all well and good until you consider in that any good A/D converter has a lowpass filter set to around 20 KHz so that all frequencies above 22.05 KHz are completely attenuated out of the sound before before it's converted to digital signal.
What does this mean? It means that "audiophiles" who say they can hear frequencies past 22 KHz on a professional recording are full of shit.
Somehow, I think ILM's been dethroned as the World Best VFX Shop.
Look at the human/CG interaction in Attack of the Clones when Obi-Wan gave Dexter Jettster a hug... you could tell he wasn't actually hugging anything and Dex's clothes didn't shift in response to Obi-Wan's arms.
Now consider the human/CG interaction in The Two Towers, which came out the same year and had been in production for probably as long.. it looked like they'd actually found a scrawny guy with big eyes, bad teeth and no hair, painted him grey and had them wrestle.. when it was, in fact, a guy in a blue-coloured motion capture suit.
ILM has a lot to learn about visual effects from Weta.
5: A robot may not participate in or interfere with any political, religous, or governmental activity
Why not? By your fourth law, you've immediately made robots self-aware (though Asimov's third already kinda took care of that). As well, by telling it that it must obey all local laws (law seven), you've basically given it a set of beliefs and laws 0, 1, 2 and 6 do give it an attitude of altruism.
Hmmm.. now it has attitudes, beliefs and self-awareness. If you explain what you mean by sensitivities, these robots might just qualify for sentience... so why shouldn't a sentient being get a vote?
Odd... I was told--and shown--that they sound like shit by a professional recording engineer who's probably the best in the Maritimes. Out of four sets of monitor speakers he has, the NS-10s sound the worst, apart from the tiny speakers in the 2-track.
Yes, they are reference speakers.. but you can't just use one set of speakers. NS-10s are used in every studio because they best represent what most schmucks have access to. Personally, I prefer Genelecs.
NS-10s do not 100% accurately reproduce sound. There's a lot of low-end they can't do. Yes, they do have a pretty flat profile.. but they aren't perfect.
I love how you're just assuming that I'm like every fuckwit who thinks loud == good and bass == good. I have permanently damaged hearing, at twenty years old, because I used to think that. Now I'm much more meticulous about keeping my volume levels reasonable not making things sound like shit. If your speakers sound like they're farting, your low end was too high several dB ago.
Yeah, but if you plug it in once and don't touch it for five or ten years.. connection quality won't degrade anyway.. assuming this is a fresh-from-the-package cable and new gear.
Also, wipe off the connectors on your stereo equipment and cable ends with isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab right before you connect them.
The odds that oil and dirt well mess up your connection quality are negligible.
On a tape deck, however.. isoproping the metal bits every time you use it is absolutely key.. as long as you use alcohol of purity no less than 99%.. and you cap the bottle whenever you aren't directly dipping the Q-tip in it.
But you're absolutely right about speaker position. Speaker quality's important too. I find bass reflex enclosures give a little bit better punch.. but avoid Yamaha NS-10s at all costs. They're pretty much designed to sound like shit, intentionally. Why? Because if it sounds decent on NS-10s.. it should sound good on any other speaker. Want speakers that'll always sound good? Get B&Ws.
Slashdot Mirror
That's almost precisely the comment I was going to make.
First premise: Look at Japan. More to the point, look at the prevalence of seijin manga in Japan. Here's a culture that's apparently obsessed with violent rape fantasy, yet their rate of violent crime is significantly lower, per capita than that of the USA. [N.B.: I have no figures to back this up. I could be completely wrong. Nevertheless, my second premise stands.]
Second premise: Boys begin puberty around ten or eleven years of age—after all, gentlemen, when did you start getting really interested in sex—but tend to have the most frustrating six, seven, maybe even eight years of their as yet short life because Western culture dictates that "everything about what's between your legs is evil and if you even think about it for a second, you're a terrible, disgusting person!"
What am I getting at? Basically, that letting kids read pornography (not necessarily hardcore pornography, but Playboy at the very least, because it's really just pinups) can't possibly hurt or warp them. If anything, it'll let them become more balanced adults, because they'll learn for themselves that the human body is a wonderful thing, something to be celebrated and not mourned, and they won't feel immense amounts of guilt for touching themselves after school, before their parents get home. I'm almost be willing to bet that a lot of North American rapists turn to rape partially because of the frustrated guilt they feel over looking at their fathers' naughty magazines and getting caught. And, of course, in time, they'll discover that sex with a loving partner can be the most wonderful thing that you can do with another person; that's it's sharing yourself, body, mind and soul with them. Sex is, honestly, the closest I've ever come to a truly religious experience.
If anything's truly harmful to children, it's the way that Generation Xers are giving their children anything and everything they want, in a desperate attempt to be their child's friends. Children need parents, not overgrown playmates. If you're being proper parents to your children, then they'll become the good adults you want them to be. It's just that simple.
But that's a rant for another story, and another time.
Have you ever actually seen a contemporary wind turbine in action? They move extremely slowly; the probability that a bird is going to be struck is low enough to begin with, but to be struck fatally is even lower yet. The only way that they're going to have a decent chance of killing birds would be in a hurricane, but even birds are smart enough to stay the hell inside during one of those.
That's like saying, "if you're not saying anything bad, then you should send all your mail on postcards". Bad theory. The issue here isn't that people want to avoid getting in trouble for nicking off to the pub when they should be working, it's that people think--and rightly so!--that their employers have no business being able to find out where they go, on a whim. After all, something that just puts a foot in the door. You let them have this, then it isn't unreasonable to ask for something else. Then the same with something else and something else until the people with the money and the power--so, the money--can do whatever they want, because you let them. And they're going to try to do it in the name of "keeping you safe"--did you notice the brief nod to the Underground bombing in July? It's like every civil liberty that's been revoked in the States in the name of "not letting the terr'ists win". Bullshit. When you take away any freedom, you're doing exactly what those same terrorists want you to do.
But enough about how incredibly, incredibly stupid I think the Bush administration is. That has nothing to do with this. Or does it?
I've heard--though I could be mistaken--that even turning your phone off won't help. I don't know why; I know that it doesn't make sense.. it just sticks out in my mind as "one of those things that I've heard". Probably better, in that it's more paranoid, to remove the SIM card when you don't want to be tracked, since that's what this technology relies on.
your bandwidth
..Oh yeah, I forgot how expensive traffic is..
your potential copyright violation
I don't know, if you disclaim responsibility for what people post, you could make a case that the poster is the copyright violator because they weren't given a licence to distribute the material and that your server merely did as it was told, on the assumption that the poster did have the licence.
your risk if there's an image-based exploit on your image-checker (always a remote possibility)
True, but also much easier to deal with if it arises.
in many of the random phpBB communities and such on the Web, all those are in short supply
But the article submitter said, "I work for a company that has a strong online community," so I was working on the assumption that they'd probably have the income to handle at least the disk space issue.
use it for some sort of webcam or "This is your IP address and user-agent" or system-uptime script or slideshow
As far as I'm concerned, people who put their webcams or uptime in their sigblocks should be shot, along with anyone who uses one of those 'this is your IP/user-agent' scripts. They're retarded. It's easy information to get and doesn't necessarily reveal any looming security threats.
Have your users upload their images to your server, only supporting format(s) that can be verified as being what they claim and cannot directly execute scripts like WMF files can (GIF, JPEG, ...).
Yeah, but the interface for doing that is always pretty kludgy, from what I've seen.. but that was my point behind caching the images that people link to. You could do it entirely transparently and ensure that the images are safe... it's just a matter of providing enough space.
You might be able to restrict it to images with URIs ending in those extensions, but extensions are largely irrelevant to the WWW, it's the Content-Type header that matters, which can't be checked because the person serving it can change it at any time.
.Mac, but I'm fairly certain Macs don't display WMFs) decides to link to it in her signature or her userpic and pow, everybody using Windows gets screwed...
I know it wouldn't do much good for precisely that reason, but it would take care of accidental links to the malicious images.. say someone makes one of these WMFs of something cute. Some granny with enough ability to upload images to a server (I was going to say
I suppose you could always cache the images people link to in order to virus-scan them, but that seems really time- and space-consuming.
....Thank you, MaestroSartori.
Frye? Frye? Frye? Frye?
That's the observation bit. Your brain got used to getting tired when eating turkey, so now it makes you tired when you eat turkey.
Exactly what I was thinking. While the turkey may not chemically make you tired, we've formed such a strong association between turkey and tiredness--either through observation or by being told that there's enough tryptophan in turkey to knock you out--that, at this point, your brain releases the appropriate chemicals to make you tired. It's classical conditioning.
Yeah, that'd be it. Anyone here know the lay of the land in Washington who can explain what the hell that is?
I'm not sure what it is, but whatever it is about 3km NW of the White House, just south of Massachusetts Ave NW and at the ass-end of 34th Ave NW.
I'm pretty sure trees don't look that pixellated..
<span style="hat: aluminum;">
I thought their carrier was the modified 747 that they use to fly the orbiters from Edwards to Kennedy...
Minor nit: NASA != USAF. Thus, NASA doesn't necessarily have ready access to large bombers. Besides, as someone else said, the White Knight was specifically designed for this purpose. Bombers weren't. Not with a payload that large.
This is also evident in digitisation of music: it's the old sample rate issue. CD sampling at 44 kHz means a maximum resolvable frequency of 22 kHz, which some audiophiles notice.
No, they can't. The human ear is can't hear past 20 KHz and most people are lucky to get past 16.
What these audiophiles are hearing are alias frequencies above 22.05 KHz that occasionally come out in the recorded sound as harmonic distortions. For example, a 24 KHz sound would likely come in as an occasional, faint boost at around 2 KHz.
This is all well and good until you consider in that any good A/D converter has a lowpass filter set to around 20 KHz so that all frequencies above 22.05 KHz are completely attenuated out of the sound before before it's converted to digital signal.
What does this mean? It means that "audiophiles" who say they can hear frequencies past 22 KHz on a professional recording are full of shit.
I meant that as in Soong, not Lore, told Data that the colonists wanted a "less perfect" android.
Somehow, I think ILM's been dethroned as the World Best VFX Shop.
Look at the human/CG interaction in Attack of the Clones when Obi-Wan gave Dexter Jettster a hug... you could tell he wasn't actually hugging anything and Dex's clothes didn't shift in response to Obi-Wan's arms.
Now consider the human/CG interaction in The Two Towers, which came out the same year and had been in production for probably as long.. it looked like they'd actually found a scrawny guy with big eyes, bad teeth and no hair, painted him grey and had them wrestle.. when it was, in fact, a guy in a blue-coloured motion capture suit.
ILM has a lot to learn about visual effects from Weta.
...I thought Soong said that himself in "Brothers"...
Hey, come on, Lore was the perfect one. Soong only built Data because the colonists wanted a "less perfect" android.
Like.. a big, fuck-off sheet of Lexan, perhaps?
Like they mention on the page, even?
5: A robot may not participate in or interfere with any political, religous, or governmental activity
Why not? By your fourth law, you've immediately made robots self-aware (though Asimov's third already kinda took care of that). As well, by telling it that it must obey all local laws (law seven), you've basically given it a set of beliefs and laws 0, 1, 2 and 6 do give it an attitude of altruism.
Hmmm.. now it has attitudes, beliefs and self-awareness. If you explain what you mean by sensitivities, these robots might just qualify for sentience... so why shouldn't a sentient being get a vote?
Odd... I was told--and shown--that they sound like shit by a professional recording engineer who's probably the best in the Maritimes. Out of four sets of monitor speakers he has, the NS-10s sound the worst, apart from the tiny speakers in the 2-track.
Yes, they are reference speakers.. but you can't just use one set of speakers. NS-10s are used in every studio because they best represent what most schmucks have access to. Personally, I prefer Genelecs.
NS-10s do not 100% accurately reproduce sound. There's a lot of low-end they can't do. Yes, they do have a pretty flat profile.. but they aren't perfect.
I love how you're just assuming that I'm like every fuckwit who thinks loud == good and bass == good. I have permanently damaged hearing, at twenty years old, because I used to think that. Now I'm much more meticulous about keeping my volume levels reasonable not making things sound like shit. If your speakers sound like they're farting, your low end was too high several dB ago.
Yeah, but if you plug it in once and don't touch it for five or ten years.. connection quality won't degrade anyway.. assuming this is a fresh-from-the-package cable and new gear.
Also, wipe off the connectors on your stereo equipment and cable ends with isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab right before you connect them. The odds that oil and dirt well mess up your connection quality are negligible.
On a tape deck, however.. isoproping the metal bits every time you use it is absolutely key.. as long as you use alcohol of purity no less than 99%.. and you cap the bottle whenever you aren't directly dipping the Q-tip in it.
But you're absolutely right about speaker position. Speaker quality's important too. I find bass reflex enclosures give a little bit better punch.. but avoid Yamaha NS-10s at all costs. They're pretty much designed to sound like shit, intentionally. Why? Because if it sounds decent on NS-10s.. it should sound good on any other speaker. Want speakers that'll always sound good? Get B&Ws.