You are of course correct. The signal must become analog at some point to make it into your head, and we have had the capability to capture analog signals since the dawn of the television age. You can crack open LCD panels and intercept signals for a more modern high tech version of this concept, of course.
But you are forgetting the other side of the equation. When when someone makes that statement - "THIS CANNOT EVER BE PIRATED" - you are throwing down the gauntlet. And invariably some bored teenager will say "oh really is that so?" and make them eat their words. Usually by the following Saturday. Yes you can do an analog capture but by the time you warm up your soldering gun some kid in the Netherlands will have already got the torrent up.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch a Blu-Ray movie on my Linux box.
Sorry about that. I tend to get a little foamy when I digitally hoard. Anyways, counter to your point it's fun (for me, YMMV of course) to have as many as you can get. Sometimes I'll fire up MAME and simply pick out old games at random. Some I remember, some I never have seen before. It's like being an archaeologist in your own past. I'll do the same thing with C64 archives and Amiga archives (look for Amiga Tosec). Scores of Atari 2600 games. All the video discs for Daphne (the videodisc game emulator). Dragon's Lair, anyone?
It's a wish come true for younger-me. I used to mow lawns just to save up and get an Atari cartridge. Now I can download Stella and inside of ten minutes have ALL of them. Fun! And yes, someday I will make a MAME cabinet. Oh yes. It will be glorious.
So basically TL;DR it's really fun to poke around with. And really, with the price of storage these days you can store the entire library of an entire genre on a few blu ray discs. A 3 Tb hard drive is about $100 at NewEgg. Why not have them?
My six year old son spends a lot of time on this learning-to-code site. I think his kindergarten teacher introduced him to it. It's probably the best thing I've ever seen for teaching kids coding.
Click on a starter project. Click the green flag to run the program. Click "See Inside" to look at the code in their editor. It's visual, easy to read, and quite elegant.
It really is a completely fantastic site. Brilliantly done.
I'm 100% serious. I learned C# that way and wound up writing the application code for a product that sells for about 5 million a year.
Here is your task, since you're interested in making games. Make a game of pong in C#. Use Google to look up how to do it. Start with a hello world program. Then make a program with a form. Then figure out how to paint to it. Keep going.
At the end of the pong game you'll know enough to be dangerous. Good luck!
The other Microsoft story, on the exact same page as Bill Gates telling you not to pursue money at all costs, and instead focus on making the world a better place?
According to Bloomberg, Gundlach has suggested the Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] CEO get out of the car-making business, and concentrate fully on developing batteries for use in other vehicles.
In contrast to those traders though, Gundlach says he'd much rather buy Tesla shares than invest in a company like Twitter--and is much more concerned about the "killer" return speculative investors could get from Tesla becoming a battery-only business.
He sees Tesla as a better investment than technology companies like Twitter, whose shares recently dropped to their lowest point yet, less than a sixth the price of Tesla shares.
This article has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with maximizing third party investments. This is exactly what's wrong with the world right here, in a nutshell. Here we have an honest-to-goodness NEW thing. The Tesla car company. Finally a viable alternative to gasoline cars. The future. Less carbon emissions. Something to help the world. It's a beautiful vision.
So of course some day trading jackass wants to strip the future of that vision so he can get a better return on his stocks. To hell with the future, money is involved!
Why do you need a half ton truck to drop 3 kids off at school? If you like driving trucks, fine. But don't make up nonsense justifications. You don't need that kind of tonnage just to haul children.
Unless they are gigantic, of course. Honestly the first image that popped into my mind when you made your post was that you had three children the size of gigantic granite boulders and you offload them like gravel. While "Like A Rock" is playing in the background.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
To paraphrase: Some things would be unwieldy to program in a GUI or other oddball paradigm that would make you happy.
Some things are difficult. Combat pilot, brain surgeon, coder. Dedicate yourself and you can excel. If not, you need to do something else, rather that complain that something that interests you is difficult.
Get dedicated. LEARN. Focus and fight. Struggle and lose. Lose again. And again. Eventually win.
Reason being you have to get in front of the judge before you can get the innocent verdict. And most people aren't going to do that. The thing that makes this article noteworthy is because someone finally challenged the police on this point after decades of them doing it.
Same reason why they write traffic tickets in the first place. If absolutely everyone fought them, the court would be choked and cops full time job would be to be in court. They're counting on the average citizen's apathy to keep that from happening. And it happens to work.
Can't wait to have a look at it. We know there will be backdoors and other goodies in it. Should be absolutely amazing to see what it monitors, how it does so, whom it calls home to, and so on. Let's see what China considers an ideal piece of software.
I think this will be a powerfully interesting piece of software to study. We'll learn a lot from it, I'll bet.
It's their servers, their house, their terms of service. Nobody forced you to be on Facebook. You asked to be there when you requested an account, and you knew the rules when you walked in the door.
Whenever someone cries "political" when you state unadorned facts, it is almost always because those facts would require them adjusting their world view. It's simply easier for most folks to cry foul and run away with their fingers in their ears.
That's the difficulty this guy is seeing. Telecommuting positions are fairly difficult to find. I looked for one on-and-off for about a half a year and never found a single one.
If you make a payout if SETI finds alien life, you suddenly give a financial motive to finding it. It could taint the results. Next Wow Signal we find and suddenly you'll have people who paid into it saying it's proof, and scientists saying it isn't. Lawyers will become involved.
All the stability of Internet Explorer for a developer sandbox, and all the speed of your local internet connection! No more pesky waiting for your SATA drive! Now you can access your code through the blazing speed of your cable modem! MUCH faster. And add to that the security of not actually hosting your files locally. The cloud is always a better solution! For anything! I feel much better knowing that some faceless someone at Microsoft will be in charge of my backups. I certainly can't be trusted to do them.
Exactly. If it was fun they wouldn't have to pay you to be there. This is where he goes wrong:
"Being able to sit quietly in an irrelevant meeting isn't actually a particularly useful skill in the rest of life, so I can hardly blame anyone for wanting something to do or some other distraction during them."
Yes it is a useful skill in life. It's part of how you stay employed. Your boss wants you in the meeting, so you are in the meeting. End of story. Wanting "some other distraction" is another way of saying "you're boring me" and is a career limiting move. Stay alert, stay attentive. Spend the entire meeting trying to think of something to add to it. A viewpoint missed or a good question unasked.
NASA's mission was to go to the moon, but along the way they they discovered scratch resistant lenses and memory foam. I have both in my house right now.
The point is a discovery is something new and beautiful, no matter what the reasons for looking were. I can easily imagine some offshoot of this technology fixing some other skin condition like shingles or eczema.
As for the "this helps people's suffering" vs "quit whining and just shave your head" argument, I started balding at 14. I'm happy with my shaved head now, but at the time it started it felt like motherfucking Armageddon. Suddenly girls were a terribly important concern and I looked like a radiation accident. I wouldn't wish that kind of social suffering on anyone. Especially an awkward 14 year old fer chrissakes. It was miserable.
That being said, I greatly enjoy my shaved head now and if this treatment were to become available I wouldn't take it. Being hairless (once you're the right age anyways) is actually rather nice. You look just fine in the morning, rain doesn't bother me because I have no hair to mess up, and driving with my windows down feels wonderful in the summer.
Has there been some sort of HAL-9000 type breakthrough that I am unaware of? Remember, sure. Know? Computers are not self aware. Think? Calculate is a better word. Currently computers are simply super-fast abacuses. No thinking going on quite yet, thank you.
It can seem that way though. With an excellent algorithm you can get thought-like responses, anticipations to your input patterns. An excellent example is The Akinator. It gives you excellent enough results, but it's really nothing more than a very clever database.
Could IBM come up with something clever like this for the web? Certainly. But let's call it what it is, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, hubris! One of my favorite old-timey sins.
You are of course correct. The signal must become analog at some point to make it into your head, and we have had the capability to capture analog signals since the dawn of the television age. You can crack open LCD panels and intercept signals for a more modern high tech version of this concept, of course.
But you are forgetting the other side of the equation. When when someone makes that statement - "THIS CANNOT EVER BE PIRATED" - you are throwing down the gauntlet. And invariably some bored teenager will say "oh really is that so?" and make them eat their words. Usually by the following Saturday. Yes you can do an analog capture but by the time you warm up your soldering gun some kid in the Netherlands will have already got the torrent up.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch a Blu-Ray movie on my Linux box.
They can put them in the room that used to hold all of Hotmail's servers. Plenty of space there.
I MUST OWN THEM ALL HRRRGRRBLLL DIGITAL HOARDING
*ahem*
Sorry about that. I tend to get a little foamy when I digitally hoard. Anyways, counter to your point it's fun (for me, YMMV of course) to have as many as you can get. Sometimes I'll fire up MAME and simply pick out old games at random. Some I remember, some I never have seen before. It's like being an archaeologist in your own past. I'll do the same thing with C64 archives and Amiga archives (look for Amiga Tosec). Scores of Atari 2600 games. All the video discs for Daphne (the videodisc game emulator). Dragon's Lair, anyone?
It's a wish come true for younger-me. I used to mow lawns just to save up and get an Atari cartridge. Now I can download Stella and inside of ten minutes have ALL of them. Fun! And yes, someday I will make a MAME cabinet. Oh yes. It will be glorious.
So basically TL;DR it's really fun to poke around with. And really, with the price of storage these days you can store the entire library of an entire genre on a few blu ray discs. A 3 Tb hard drive is about $100 at NewEgg. Why not have them?
Who made Microsoft the fucking internet police anyway?
My six year old son spends a lot of time on this learning-to-code site. I think his kindergarten teacher introduced him to it. It's probably the best thing I've ever seen for teaching kids coding.
Click on a starter project. Click the green flag to run the program. Click "See Inside" to look at the code in their editor. It's visual, easy to read, and quite elegant.
It really is a completely fantastic site. Brilliantly done.
scratch.mit.edu
Google.
I'm 100% serious. I learned C# that way and wound up writing the application code for a product that sells for about 5 million a year.
Here is your task, since you're interested in making games. Make a game of pong in C#. Use Google to look up how to do it. Start with a hello world program. Then make a program with a form. Then figure out how to paint to it. Keep going.
At the end of the pong game you'll know enough to be dangerous. Good luck!
The other Microsoft story, on the exact same page as Bill Gates telling you not to pursue money at all costs, and instead focus on making the world a better place?
Chinese Gov't Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-Killer Patents
Right. We acquired all these patents to crush competition and make the phone market a monoculture. To make the world a better place.
Download this.
I have heard a rumor that there may be comics available on Bittorrent in this format.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Some quotes from the article:
According to Bloomberg, Gundlach has suggested the Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] CEO get out of the car-making business, and concentrate fully on developing batteries for use in other vehicles.
In contrast to those traders though, Gundlach says he'd much rather buy Tesla shares than invest in a company like Twitter--and is much more concerned about the "killer" return speculative investors could get from Tesla becoming a battery-only business.
He sees Tesla as a better investment than technology companies like Twitter, whose shares recently dropped to their lowest point yet, less than a sixth the price of Tesla shares.
This article has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with maximizing third party investments. This is exactly what's wrong with the world right here, in a nutshell. Here we have an honest-to-goodness NEW thing. The Tesla car company. Finally a viable alternative to gasoline cars. The future. Less carbon emissions. Something to help the world. It's a beautiful vision.
So of course some day trading jackass wants to strip the future of that vision so he can get a better return on his stocks. To hell with the future, money is involved!
Makes me sick.
Why do you need a half ton truck to drop 3 kids off at school? If you like driving trucks, fine. But don't make up nonsense justifications. You don't need that kind of tonnage just to haul children.
Unless they are gigantic, of course. Honestly the first image that popped into my mind when you made your post was that you had three children the size of gigantic granite boulders and you offload them like gravel. While "Like A Rock" is playing in the background.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
To paraphrase: Some things would be unwieldy to program in a GUI or other oddball paradigm that would make you happy.
Some things are difficult. Combat pilot, brain surgeon, coder. Dedicate yourself and you can excel. If not, you need to do something else, rather that complain that something that interests you is difficult.
Get dedicated. LEARN. Focus and fight. Struggle and lose. Lose again. And again. Eventually win.
It's worth it, I promise you.
They'll keep right on doing it, without a pause.
Reason being you have to get in front of the judge before you can get the innocent verdict. And most people aren't going to do that. The thing that makes this article noteworthy is because someone finally challenged the police on this point after decades of them doing it.
Same reason why they write traffic tickets in the first place. If absolutely everyone fought them, the court would be choked and cops full time job would be to be in court. They're counting on the average citizen's apathy to keep that from happening. And it happens to work.
Office 365 is subscription office for individuals (with other perks like some cloud storage and Skype credits)
Because that's just what I need when I'm typing a business letter. Videochat.
If Microsoft ran a restaurant each sandwich would come with a bowling ball.
I would never suggest such a thing. Even Switzerland has spies. I am only interested in how competent China's efforts are.
Can't wait to have a look at it. We know there will be backdoors and other goodies in it. Should be absolutely amazing to see what it monitors, how it does so, whom it calls home to, and so on. Let's see what China considers an ideal piece of software.
I think this will be a powerfully interesting piece of software to study. We'll learn a lot from it, I'll bet.
It's their servers, their house, their terms of service. Nobody forced you to be on Facebook. You asked to be there when you requested an account, and you knew the rules when you walked in the door.
Whenever someone cries "political" when you state unadorned facts, it is almost always because those facts would require them adjusting their world view. It's simply easier for most folks to cry foul and run away with their fingers in their ears.
That's the difficulty this guy is seeing. Telecommuting positions are fairly difficult to find. I looked for one on-and-off for about a half a year and never found a single one.
If you make a payout if SETI finds alien life, you suddenly give a financial motive to finding it. It could taint the results. Next Wow Signal we find and suddenly you'll have people who paid into it saying it's proof, and scientists saying it isn't. Lawyers will become involved.
Too messy if you ask me.
All the stability of Internet Explorer for a developer sandbox, and all the speed of your local internet connection! No more pesky waiting for your SATA drive! Now you can access your code through the blazing speed of your cable modem! MUCH faster. And add to that the security of not actually hosting your files locally. The cloud is always a better solution! For anything! I feel much better knowing that some faceless someone at Microsoft will be in charge of my backups. I certainly can't be trusted to do them.
Win-win I say. This sounds golden.
Exactly. If it was fun they wouldn't have to pay you to be there. This is where he goes wrong:
"Being able to sit quietly in an irrelevant meeting isn't actually a particularly useful skill in the rest of life, so I can hardly blame anyone for wanting something to do or some other distraction during them."
Yes it is a useful skill in life. It's part of how you stay employed. Your boss wants you in the meeting, so you are in the meeting. End of story. Wanting "some other distraction" is another way of saying "you're boring me" and is a career limiting move. Stay alert, stay attentive. Spend the entire meeting trying to think of something to add to it. A viewpoint missed or a good question unasked.
That's what you're there for.
NASA's mission was to go to the moon, but along the way they they discovered scratch resistant lenses and memory foam. I have both in my house right now.
The point is a discovery is something new and beautiful, no matter what the reasons for looking were. I can easily imagine some offshoot of this technology fixing some other skin condition like shingles or eczema.
As for the "this helps people's suffering" vs "quit whining and just shave your head" argument, I started balding at 14. I'm happy with my shaved head now, but at the time it started it felt like motherfucking Armageddon. Suddenly girls were a terribly important concern and I looked like a radiation accident. I wouldn't wish that kind of social suffering on anyone. Especially an awkward 14 year old fer chrissakes. It was miserable.
That being said, I greatly enjoy my shaved head now and if this treatment were to become available I wouldn't take it. Being hairless (once you're the right age anyways) is actually rather nice. You look just fine in the morning, rain doesn't bother me because I have no hair to mess up, and driving with my windows down feels wonderful in the summer.
It's an object oriented language. If it's missing a type you need, go make one.
Has there been some sort of HAL-9000 type breakthrough that I am unaware of? Remember, sure. Know? Computers are not self aware. Think? Calculate is a better word. Currently computers are simply super-fast abacuses. No thinking going on quite yet, thank you.
It can seem that way though. With an excellent algorithm you can get thought-like responses, anticipations to your input patterns. An excellent example is The Akinator. It gives you excellent enough results, but it's really nothing more than a very clever database.
Could IBM come up with something clever like this for the web? Certainly. But let's call it what it is, please.