Imagine if instead of creating a criminal underground, all drugs were legalized. The criminal underground would literally vanish: there would be no profit in the trade. We'd have as much a criminal drug trade as we have in criminal moonshine trade: which is to say, virtually none.
Yes, they'd vanish into operations like casino gambling, internet porn/gambling, and controlling large multinational corporations, now with private armies and submarines. After bootlegging in the 20's was over, the criminal elements that made it big didn't disappear - they diversified.
You may not like government under the drug war, but would you like it any better under the government of the drug cartels?
Regarding the taxation issue - many foreign governments do little to crack down on tobacco, despite the fact that it's killing their citizens. Why? The tax revenue is too profitable to pass up
On the societal consequences: First, they are empirically denied. Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
And the British empire was bent on making sure that drugs were legal... in China. Talk about foreign influence - if you control the drugs, you can can control the users (ie, the addicted bureaucrats.) You know, there's a reason why if you have drugs in your posession, you're subject to execution in China today...
We could publicly execute drug users/dealers. After a while, there won't be as much traffic, simply because the market for the shit will either be dead, or too scared to buy. This would be the ideal way of handling the drug problem - remove the demand.
Or, we could spend millions doing a half-assed job of fighting suppliers who are doing their best to fill a market demand, and who have every financial motive to keep pushing the stuff, irregardless of how much our government spends to stop it.
LA times wants an e-mail address (I smell spam), and they send your reg info to it to verify that it's valid. I'm not going to go through the effort of generating a temporary e-mail account just so I can play by their marketing department's rules, I'd much rather stop visiting the site altogether, and go back to getting ALL my news from the WSJ (I have a paper subscription.)
I take a similar policy - Don't read the LA Times anymore (and I used to be a LA times Company Town junkie), and their marketing department can go screw themselves. I'll go to my local library if I want to look up the current news, and that way, they won't even be able to track how many hits they get! Idiots.
Anyone know of research into modeled voice synthesis? I don't mean wavetables and phoneme - I mean physics modeling of the windpipe/vocal cords/chest/nasal interactions that determin voice tone and inflection. Code up an engine to do this realtime, which you could train to take inflectual cues from a reference voice, and you could have voice impersonations, just as they've proposed to graft a digital makeover onto actors. Or you could apply this technology to games, and make a killing...
We're doing it already. It's called actors. They should've gotten a clue and shot Final Fantasy with the actual actors they were paying for, instead of buying expensive voices, and using some nameless schmuck to generate an insipid, generic, motion catpure file. It sure would have cost them a whole lot less.
On the other hand, if you don't have decent script, dialogue, and direction (ie, ATOTC), even with the best of digital and a cast of good actors you might as well save your money and go home...
Doesn't this automatically mean that any thread involving Godwin's law should after Godwin's law is defined, since it requires the use of the keywords "Hitler" and "Nazi"?
I remember a scene from Enemy of the State where the evil NSA geek takes a shot of Will Smith's shopping bag captured from a lingerie store security camera, and rotates it in 3D, filling in information as he goes along. I was like, "this is soo much bullshit. Typical Jerry Bruckheimer film - junk science all the way."
Well, I guess it wasn't totally bullshit. However, if I find out that the DNA pattern of an ideal brunette can be modeled using only one package of M&Ms, I'll have to shoot myself...
Get together with your musically-inclined buddies, pay the performance licensing fee to the composer, and re-record whatever you'd like to listen to. Release these tracks, GNU-style (with the caveat that broadcast stations still need to pay royalties to the songwriter/composer), and screw over the RIAA's designated pop-star of the year.
Next thing ya know, people will start putting pianos back into their parlors, and buying sheet music again. One wonders if the recording industry has really thought things through and are fighting a last ditch rear-guard action to squeeze everyone while they've got a chance, or if they're still in denial...
The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March
What better way to show your fitness than to sidestep the competition and make a break for it? Of course, poor Gaak didn't know about cars, or else it surely would have tried using the sidewalk on the way out of the compound...
Apple hardware is more expensive, so it makes sense to retain linux versions for your renderfarm. This way they get to use the software to sell the expensive pretty machines to the people at the top, and yet tout low-cost production using the bargain-basement machines in the renderfarm.
Not only that, it gives them inroads in production environments that already use Linux (ie, Dreamworks, Disney), and the core codebase is easier to maintain (no need to kowtow to MS to get the specs needed to keep the code playing nice with the latest version of XP.)
Um, killing off? Like they tried to do when they bought SecretLab and tried to build their own CG Feature Animation Department? The same department that created Dinousaurs? The same one that has become suspiciously quiet as of late?
Face it. Disney is run by bean-counters who wouldn't know a decent film if it ran 'em over. Pixar is run by a megalomaniac who lets the artists do what they do best. So far, Pixar is doing fine, and it's Disney that's running scared, not the other way around.
Besides, I expect the majority of these Linux workstations to replace existing HP workstations, just as Dreamworks transitioned their compositing/paint workstations to Linux. Not much news here - move along...
I've been waiting for a Palm-based sub-laptop form typing device for a long time. But this thing is kind of a kludge. For one thing, it's expensive. For another, it's kind of ugly.
Since the screen is touch sensitive (I'm assuming, since it is a Palm device), that means some sort of resistive touchscreen (again, I'm assuming.) This means glass, which means increased weight, and if there isn't a cover for it, it means a broken screen if I try tossing it in my backpack like you can do with the other Alphasmarts.
My main complaint is the cost. I'd wish someone would hack a LCD screen driver for a cheap, low-power monochrome screen, so I could recycle my old Pilot into a portable writing slate. As it is, I think the best portable writing slate on the market is a QuickPad Pro. It's cheap, has CF support (I have a spare 16MB CF card that I have lying around since I got a 160MB card for my camera), has a serial port, runs off of AA batts, and uses a stripped-down version of DOS for an OS, which they hint can allow you to write code to run on it.
Of course, the Dana has the Palm codebase to work off of (and a couple of nifty apps - a MS word compatible word processor and a widescreen book reader), so maybe my first impressions are a bit harsh. But $399 for a damn keyboard, no serial port, and no CF support... I am NOT buying a new computer (to get a USB port) just to use a writing slate!
The DMCA's circumvention ban makes an explicit exemption regarding reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability (17 USC 1201(f) [cornell.edu]).
If this is true, then couldn't it be argued that DCESS(?) is a valid reverse engineering exercise for purposes of interoperability with the Linux operating system?
Until fusion comes along, we'll just have to make do with fission reactors. Bring enough transuranics to fuel your reactor, maybe establish a breeder when you get into lunar orbit to supply future reactors. With a nuclear reactor, you can power a vasmir-type rocket, with hydrogen as ionizable reaction mass, or if you want to be crude, you can supply water directly to the reactor and expell the mass as radioactive steam. Once you get to Mars, deploy some of your spare fuel rods as another reactor on the surface for your chemical fuel/oxygen plant.
The nice thing about having so much power available is that you can start thinking about using magnetic shielding against ionizing radiation, an important consideration for missions outside of Earth's magnetic field.
I still say the first mission using a nuclear engine should be an unmanned shopping trip to the asteroid belt to pick up a few choice chunks of ice and metal to park at a lagrange point for use in resupplying and building. Then we push on to the Moon, and then, Mars. The key is getting a reactor outside of Earth's gravity well, once that's done, it's all about gathering raw source materials for processing and building. Heavy industries in space...
Damn, wish they had figured out that there was that much water up there 20+ years ago. Between the Soviets and the US we could have had ourselves one hell of a space race to the red planet.
As things currently stand, the Chinese will probably get there unopposed, while the US tries to get funding and political support from its international partners, and the Russians sit around with perfectly good hardware, waiting for someone to hire them.
The novella would be the easiest to translate to the screen. Less character baggage to explain, simpler to build a screenplay off of (as opposed to translating a novel, where great big hunks of exposition and internal viewpoints get hacked off to fit the medium.) It wouldn't be the Ender's Game we know, but there's no way it ever would, even if it was OSC writing the script himself. You can't step into the same river twice.
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Imagine if instead of creating a criminal underground, all drugs were legalized. The criminal underground would literally vanish: there would be no profit in the trade. We'd have as much a criminal drug trade as we have in criminal moonshine trade: which is to say, virtually none.
Yes, they'd vanish into operations like casino gambling, internet porn/gambling, and controlling large multinational corporations, now with private armies and submarines. After bootlegging in the 20's was over, the criminal elements that made it big didn't disappear - they diversified.
You may not like government under the drug war, but would you like it any better under the government of the drug cartels?
Regarding the taxation issue - many foreign governments do little to crack down on tobacco, despite the fact that it's killing their citizens. Why? The tax revenue is too profitable to pass up
On the societal consequences: First, they are empirically denied. Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
And the British empire was bent on making sure that drugs were legal... in China. Talk about foreign influence - if you control the drugs, you can can control the users (ie, the addicted bureaucrats.) You know, there's a reason why if you have drugs in your posession, you're subject to execution in China today...
We could publicly execute drug users/dealers. After a while, there won't be as much traffic, simply because the market for the shit will either be dead, or too scared to buy. This would be the ideal way of handling the drug problem - remove the demand.
Or, we could spend millions doing a half-assed job of fighting suppliers who are doing their best to fill a market demand, and who have every financial motive to keep pushing the stuff, irregardless of how much our government spends to stop it.
The off-the-shelf system that Tom's Hardware demoed is looks great... too bad I can't afford it! :P
You joke about this now...
LA times wants an e-mail address (I smell spam), and they send your reg info to it to verify that it's valid. I'm not going to go through the effort of generating a temporary e-mail account just so I can play by their marketing department's rules, I'd much rather stop visiting the site altogether, and go back to getting ALL my news from the WSJ (I have a paper subscription.)
I take a similar policy - Don't read the LA Times anymore (and I used to be a LA times Company Town junkie), and their marketing department can go screw themselves. I'll go to my local library if I want to look up the current news, and that way, they won't even be able to track how many hits they get! Idiots.
There will be at least one person who goes to the auction and says:
Brass and wooden balances? I thought it said Bras and wooden balances....
Anyone know of research into modeled voice synthesis? I don't mean wavetables and phoneme - I mean physics modeling of the windpipe/vocal cords/chest/nasal interactions that determin voice tone and inflection. Code up an engine to do this realtime, which you could train to take inflectual cues from a reference voice, and you could have voice impersonations, just as they've proposed to graft a digital makeover onto actors. Or you could apply this technology to games, and make a killing...
We're doing it already. It's called actors. They should've gotten a clue and shot Final Fantasy with the actual actors they were paying for, instead of buying expensive voices, and using some nameless schmuck to generate an insipid, generic, motion catpure file. It sure would have cost them a whole lot less.
On the other hand, if you don't have decent script, dialogue, and direction (ie, ATOTC), even with the best of digital and a cast of good actors you might as well save your money and go home...
Run a bunch of current through a thin strip of magnesium, that should do nicely to ignite the thermite.
Doesn't this automatically mean that any thread involving Godwin's law should after Godwin's law is defined, since it requires the use of the keywords "Hitler" and "Nazi"?
I remember a scene from Enemy of the State where the evil NSA geek takes a shot of Will Smith's shopping bag captured from a lingerie store security camera, and rotates it in 3D, filling in information as he goes along. I was like, "this is soo much bullshit. Typical Jerry Bruckheimer film - junk science all the way."
Well, I guess it wasn't totally bullshit. However, if I find out that the DNA pattern of an ideal brunette can be modeled using only one package of M&Ms, I'll have to shoot myself...
Get together with your musically-inclined buddies, pay the performance licensing fee to the composer, and re-record whatever you'd like to listen to. Release these tracks, GNU-style (with the caveat that broadcast stations still need to pay royalties to the songwriter/composer), and screw over the RIAA's designated pop-star of the year.
Next thing ya know, people will start putting pianos back into their parlors, and buying sheet music again. One wonders if the recording industry has really thought things through and are fighting a last ditch rear-guard action to squeeze everyone while they've got a chance, or if they're still in denial...
The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March
What better way to show your fitness than to sidestep the competition and make a break for it? Of course, poor Gaak didn't know about cars, or else it surely would have tried using the sidewalk on the way out of the compound...
Apple hardware is more expensive, so it makes sense to retain linux versions for your renderfarm. This way they get to use the software to sell the expensive pretty machines to the people at the top, and yet tout low-cost production using the bargain-basement machines in the renderfarm.
Not only that, it gives them inroads in production environments that already use Linux (ie, Dreamworks, Disney), and the core codebase is easier to maintain (no need to kowtow to MS to get the specs needed to keep the code playing nice with the latest version of XP.)
Um, killing off? Like they tried to do when they bought SecretLab and tried to build their own CG Feature Animation Department? The same department that created Dinousaurs? The same one that has become suspiciously quiet as of late?
Face it. Disney is run by bean-counters who wouldn't know a decent film if it ran 'em over. Pixar is run by a megalomaniac who lets the artists do what they do best. So far, Pixar is doing fine, and it's Disney that's running scared, not the other way around.
Besides, I expect the majority of these Linux workstations to replace existing HP workstations, just as Dreamworks transitioned their compositing/paint workstations to Linux. Not much news here - move along...
I've been waiting for a Palm-based sub-laptop form typing device for a long time. But this thing is kind of a kludge. For one thing, it's expensive. For another, it's kind of ugly.
Since the screen is touch sensitive (I'm assuming, since it is a Palm device), that means some sort of resistive touchscreen (again, I'm assuming.) This means glass, which means increased weight, and if there isn't a cover for it, it means a broken screen if I try tossing it in my backpack like you can do with the other Alphasmarts.
My main complaint is the cost. I'd wish someone would hack a LCD screen driver for a cheap, low-power monochrome screen, so I could recycle my old Pilot into a portable writing slate. As it is, I think the best portable writing slate on the market is a QuickPad Pro. It's cheap, has CF support (I have a spare 16MB CF card that I have lying around since I got a 160MB card for my camera), has a serial port, runs off of AA batts, and uses a stripped-down version of DOS for an OS, which they hint can allow you to write code to run on it.
Of course, the Dana has the Palm codebase to work off of (and a couple of nifty apps - a MS word compatible word processor and a widescreen book reader), so maybe my first impressions are a bit harsh. But $399 for a damn keyboard, no serial port, and no CF support... I am NOT buying a new computer (to get a USB port) just to use a writing slate!
Aw heck, that's too much trouble. Why not just bulldoze Hollywood into the Pacific, fake tits and all?
:)
Because the EPA would be all over your ass for dumping hazardous waste.
The DMCA's circumvention ban makes an explicit exemption regarding reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability (17 USC 1201(f) [cornell.edu]).
If this is true, then couldn't it be argued that DCESS(?) is a valid reverse engineering exercise for purposes of interoperability with the Linux operating system?
Yeah, but the workarounds for the existing bugs are a bitch, and they're not releasing the next version for public use...
Until fusion comes along, we'll just have to make do with fission reactors. Bring enough transuranics to fuel your reactor, maybe establish a breeder when you get into lunar orbit to supply future reactors. With a nuclear reactor, you can power a vasmir-type rocket, with hydrogen as ionizable reaction mass, or if you want to be crude, you can supply water directly to the reactor and expell the mass as radioactive steam. Once you get to Mars, deploy some of your spare fuel rods as another reactor on the surface for your chemical fuel/oxygen plant.
The nice thing about having so much power available is that you can start thinking about using magnetic shielding against ionizing radiation, an important consideration for missions outside of Earth's magnetic field.
I still say the first mission using a nuclear engine should be an unmanned shopping trip to the asteroid belt to pick up a few choice chunks of ice and metal to park at a lagrange point for use in resupplying and building. Then we push on to the Moon, and then, Mars. The key is getting a reactor outside of Earth's gravity well, once that's done, it's all about gathering raw source materials for processing and building. Heavy industries in space...
Damn, wish they had figured out that there was that much water up there 20+ years ago. Between the Soviets and the US we could have had ourselves one hell of a space race to the red planet.
As things currently stand, the Chinese will probably get there unopposed, while the US tries to get funding and political support from its international partners, and the Russians sit around with perfectly good hardware, waiting for someone to hire them.
With those new color, bigger-screen cellphones, what makes you think that they aren't gonna be staring at pr0n while on the road?
If you're a pedestrian, be afraid...
The novella would be the easiest to translate to the screen. Less character baggage to explain, simpler to build a screenplay off of (as opposed to translating a novel, where great big hunks of exposition and internal viewpoints get hacked off to fit the medium.) It wouldn't be the Ender's Game we know, but there's no way it ever would, even if it was OSC writing the script himself. You can't step into the same river twice.