> You might not see images with this method but tell me, how do you disable "splashscreen" type adds.
What's this "Javascript" thing? Why should I enable it again?
Oh, and something about a "Flash" DLL. I deleted that a few years ago and didn't notice anything bad happening, so I guess I didn't need it either.
The only weird thing is that people walk by my cube and after watching me surf for a minute or two, they keep asking me how I block all the ads that have been added to news sites over the past year. They look all puzzled when I say "What popups? I haven't seen a popup (Javashit) or shoshkele (those flash things that drip goo all over the page you're trying to read) in 3 years."
> We stop sending money to Hollywood and live without "the stuff"
Amen.
Thanks to un-crippled MP3s, I've been exploring increasingly-obscure electro/industrial/techno stuff. Shit, this week alone, I've discovered Dorsetshire, Dynamix II, and Industrial Artz.
(Actually, I think I remember Industrial Artz' "Powertrip", having heard it once on radio some 10 years ago and thinking "Wow, sampling Led Zep's Kashmir, that takes balls!". Naturally, it was radio, so I never found out who they were until last night when I said "Holy fuck! I remember looking for this CD 10 years ago and everyone in the record shops thought I was nuts!")
It looks like Dorsetshire and Industrial Artz vanished some 8-10 years ago, and there's no way to send 'em a few bones, but if I'm ever in Florida, I'll be checking out Dynamix II, live. And I'll be buying CDs - but I'll be buying them at the show, and/or tipping them directly.
Fuck RIAA. We don't need them anymore. The more of us realize that fact, the less power they'll have over us. The less power they have over us, eventually, the less power they'll have over our legislators.
> However, when you play the file on your PC, you're generating an audio stream. Couldn't you just redirect that into an audio input and record in some format or other such as.wav and then recode to a normal MP3 file?
1) You could, but it's a felony under DMCA. Circumvention of a copy control mechanism.
2) You might not be able to. MSFT's "Secure Audio Path" is a step in the direction of locking down the hardware. (Under CBDTPA, this will be mandatory.)
3) Even if you could ("could" in the legal sense and and the sense of any technical crippling imposed by your operating system), you wouldn't want to. It'd be like saving a.JPG file as a.JPG - the encoding to MP3 is lossy, and you'd lose quality.
(This is, of course, the goal of the Content Cartel -- to make your computer, which is a device based on the principle that bits are infinitely reproducible, work like a cassette tape made of atoms which are not reproducible.)
> Basic economics dictate that if the media industries are losing customers in droves, they need to lower their price
and/or produce a better product. These rules apply to every business. > Take prostitution for instance. One day I
was walking down 5th street, minding my own business, when a hooker walked up to me and said "blow you for
$30." > "No thanks," I replied and kept on walking. She whistled and soon three huge men burst out of the building next to us and tackled me to the ground. One held me down, one beat me [... ] Long story short, I got an ass full of man-cheese, a face full of pee and a sore nut sack.
And although you were trolling, I'd give you a +1, Insightful, because you've hit the nail on the head.
Just like the hooker in your story, when the rules of economics are running against you, "calling in the thugs" is how you maintain your business.
The DMCA makes it illegal to fix copy-cripped hardware. If you're already in a relationship, you're allowed to say "no" to the hooker, and save your $30 by getting your blowjob from your partner.
The CBDTPA makes it illegal to use anything but copy-crippled hardware. The three thugs who beat you up were named Eisner, Valenti, and Rosen. This was legal, because after Hollings' law goes through, it'll be illegal to have sex with anyone but the $30 hooker.
(After all, countless prostitutes suffer cruel treatment at the hands of their pimps and live in poverty because you - yes, you - are depriving them of the money they need to survive. Every time you sleep with your consenting wife, girlfriend, or bar floozie - it's like you're pressing the lit cigarette against the hooker's arm. And you have the gall to call it "free" sex. For shame.)
Thought for the day: Replace "artist" with "prostitute", "entertainment industry" with "pimp", and "rampant internet piracy" (the exchange of data for the mutual benefit of both parties) with "any kind of consensual sex where no money is exchanged" (the exchange of bodily fluids for the mutual benefit of both parties).
> Indeed, it was an interesting lesson in United States' free-market economics.
Of that, I have no doubt. The CPDTPA promises an equally interesting lesson in civics, and an equally interesting hangover consisting of a hard drive full of N'Sync and an assload of cartoon mouse jizz.
> > [China will be 1st to have a permanent lunar station] > >More power to them. I guess pissing their money away on nonsense like that instead of feeding their people
is one way of controlling the population.
What you say with irony, I say with conviction.
I'd prefer that the first lunar colony be American.
But if America decides it wants nothing to do with space, I'd much rather have a Chinese space programme than no space programme at all.
(All of which, frankly, is moot; I agree with the poster who said that the main motivation is for the Chinese to demonstrate their ballistic missile capability.)
> The first contact with an alien civilisation or even the discovery of alien life is also going to be discovered by the most advanced nation in the space race.
No, that goes to the most advanced nation in radio astronomy and signal processing.
(Of course, depending on what they're saying, said nation could end up with a decent technological lead to boot:)
> THere was another of that era, maybe a year or two early. "Interlude" promised to improve your love life, and gave you and that special person a quiz before giving you instructions or some such.
ROFLMAO. Damn, I remember getting a copy of that. And someone else has already mentioned Strip Poker with Suzi and Melissa.
Anyone know if Interlude's mirrored anywhere?
ObRetrogaming: Bilestoad on the Apple ][. Gawd, how I loved that game, nice chunky chop-chop sounds... mmm...
Marc Goodman, thank you!
> > astronauts continue to anticipate the path of a ball for 15 days
> >
Wow, those astronauts sure have strong throwing arms.
Hmm, anyone for "playing ball" on an asteroid? No team required, you can do it solitaire!
You pitch the ball to the east, go home for lunch, change uniforms, do some math, and walk over to the plate with a bat.
If you hit the ball, you do some calculations, change uniforms again, and go hopping around the asteroid with a glove attached to a tall pole to try and snag it out of orbit. (If you hit it hard enough, the ball achieves escape velocity! Home run!)
If you swing and miss, you go back home, change uniforms, and come back with a catcher's mitt.
> Once, back in school, the PE dept. decided that we all had to play Tennis, which was fine, except that I played badminton regularly, of course if you play a badminton shot with a tennis ball, it doesn't really go where you meant!
Huh? I don't get it. I remember putting on our spacesuits for recess at Lunar Educational Module Delta, and we'd go outside the airlock to play.
We tried your Earthborn games of badminton and tennis, but couldn't tell the difference.
What's the difference between using that feathery-cone-shaped thing, the hollow rubber thing that just freezes solid (and sometimes shatters)? Cost us a fortune to get those sent up here, and for what? Why not just bat a rock around? Rocks are cheap, plentiful, and in a vaccuum, fly the same way.
> I prefer this alternate solution: time and space are quantized. >
i.e. There comes a point when you can't subdivide them.
Which brings us back to Penrose.
As far as I can tell, The Emperor's New Mind rants and raves about how hard AI is "impossible", and then devolves into some mumbo-jumbo about microtubules and quantum effects.
Fine, Penrose. The brain can be modelled as a Turing machine with a random number generator as one of its inputs.
And even worse for Penrose, what if I take his wacky quantum microtubules at face value? So the brain's a quantum computer (which, admittedly, didn't exist, as far as I was aware, when the book was written). It's massively parallel and sometimes gets the wrong answer.
I'll grant that a quantum computer running AI software is no longer a Turing machine per se, but I fail to see how any of Penrose's arguments preclude meat-brained humans from building something out of non-meat that does the same thing.
> All humans are machines, built up to amazing complexity in the tools of flesh, sinew, bone and chemicals instead of steel panels, rivets and framework.
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the
picture?"
> A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.
From the article:
There have been times when I've gotten an unsolicited e-mail ad that was of interest
to me. I happened to read it, and perhaps responded to it. But it's a very small percentage.
He replies to spam. If we're lucky, he'll get cancer and respond to an ad for laetrile. Strike three, and chalk one up for natural selection.
> Is this true? I went looking for the obituary, but could not find it. I'd have thought there would be some notice. I
wondered if the obituary would have mentioned her as the "co-inventor" of spam (what a thing to be remembered for,
in one's life...)
I guess they were afraid the cemetery wouldn't have enough room for the mile-long line of geeks waiting their turn to, uh, "offer their respects", in the form of what I'll delicately call a libation.
> Who makes more money, IT or RIAA? >
And two, which adds the most to the enconomy,
IT, or RIAA?
The one with the biggest tits.
When Intel or AMD can offer your Senator a roofied pop star dusted with a line of cocaine between her implants, then we'll see some respect given to the technology industry.
> First, here in the midwest, most meat eaters do not eat balanced diets. Meat quickly becomes the focal point of the meal to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
True.
> Second, research has shown that you do not need nearly as much protein in your diet as you have been led to believe. Most of the research in this field has been funded by the meat and dairy industries (see "Diet for a New America" by John Robbins for some excellent sources).
You mean
Virtually all the advocates of "alternative" medicine
share this view. In Reclaiming our Health, John Robbins, a New Age devotee, vegan, and animal rights activist, states that "many
conditions, including most forms of cancer, viral infections, allergic and autoimmune disorders, and most chronic degenerative
diseases . . . are more effectively handled with alternative approaches." This is statement is startling, but he provides no evidence
to back it up.
I look forward to the Quackwatch review of Reclaiming Our Health.
(Before you accuse the maintainer of quackwatch.com as being some kind of protein industry co-conspirator, he's just as hard on the
low-carbohydrate diets (e.g. Atkins Diet) as he is on other forms of quackery.
> Third, meat is unhealthy when consumed in normal portions. It contains large amounts of saturated fat and is high in cholestoral. The rate of heart disease is 3-5 times higher in meat eaters than in strict vegetarians (vegans).
But you just finished telling us that most meat-eaters don't eat balanced diets! So even if there were such a thing as a "normal portion" (odd, I'd define "normal portion" as "that portion of meat which makes a balanced diet - it's rather tautological, no?), you've just finished telling us that the typical carnivore overconsumes it anyways. So of course they're not going to have a normal heart disease profile.
Perhaps the risk of heart disease among meat-eaters is higher, not due to something inherent in meat, (a normal portion of which causes ventricular fibrillations!), but due to other factors in the lifestyle of the typical carnivore -- such as an unbalanced diet, or a higher tendency of health-conscious people to do other things that reduce the risk of heart disease.
When was the last time you saw a vegan come home from work to plunk himself down in front of the TV before lighting up a cigarette, cracking open a six-pack of beer, and munching on a bag of potato chips for dessert?
While I'll agree that the typical American doesn't eat a balanced diet, if that's the strength of his evidence, John Robbins is hardly a source to be taken seriously.
> I think it'd be simpler than that; post-processing of chopping it up minutely and repacking it in familiar textures should be the easy part. Sounds gross, but in practice, I bet it could be pretty good:-)
You've just reinvented hamburger!:)
OTOH, if vat-grown filet were cheap enough, you could get some very lean cuts. Given that our hypothetical vat-grown beef would have no actual "blood" supply, I'm now leaning towards calling it veal...
Ah, got it! "Vealvat! For that vealvatty-smooth tenderness that only comes from vat-grown veal!"
> Though NASA's probably one of few orginizations I'd expect to actually enlarge my penis 16%
"Sure, just stick it out this airlock. The cold hard vaccuum of space will do the rest!"
(One problem with this approach is that when you're done with the space's cold hard vacuum, your hardness will vary inversely with your hardness' coldness:-)
> I figure one day there will be a big market for vat-grown filet mignon at one-third the price of the real thing. Of course, it will probably be cost-prohibitive for many years.
I could go for that -- for non-steakeaters, the filet is a prized cut because it's tender. The filet's tenderness is a function of the fact that it's a muscle that doesn't get much use.
Before I commit to a lunch of vat-grown meat, I'd like to know how the hunks of meat develop a grain or texture.
Part of what makes "fish" meat good is the flaking and separation of the rows of flesh created by the intervening bones; likewise, the fibers of muscle that comprise the filet are organized in a grain. Steak are cut across the grain to allow any spices/marinades the maximum ability to penetrate the steak, and so that (after cooking), the chunks you cut off the steak are more easily-processed by the molars.
Cuts of meat cut cross-grain (i.e. steaks) are also perceived as more tender because the grain is parallel to the direction of the motion of your teeth, facilitating the work of your molars. (This also applies to your incisors; if you're hungry enough, skip the fork, and if you're really hungry, skip the cooking.)
I have no idea what kind of structure a large mass vat-grown steak (fish or beef) would develop, but I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to induce the cells to create their own structure by passing electric currents through the chunk as it forms, and/or to use a ceramic rod as a substitute for a bone to provide an initial alignment.
> > During Operation Sandstorm in Iraq, CNN was one of the quickest, most reliable sources of intelligence that the American military had. > > Now THAT is scary! I have watched CNN and their blatant USA-centric propaganda and plain lies, just
made me sick. This was apparent in the gulf war, Genoa summit and others. I will rather depend on BBC, thank you.
Hey, who says you need to listen to the commentators on CNN? Just watch the pretty pictures!
Consider the value of seeing, as broadcast in real time, the view from outside 20 hotels scattered throughout the city as the bombs fell, and the value of seeing the streaks of anti-aircraft fire.
As just one example I can think of, how about writing software to take a set of known camera locations providing live video feeds of anti-aircraft fire and triangulate by matching up each burst of fire. You now know where each gun is located, when it was fired, and in which direction. From that, and your pilots' data, it'd be easy to figure out if the gunners were randomly firing into the sky, or if they were still getting targeting information.
If the fire is random, you know that your countermeasures (and strikes on radars) were successful, and your pilots are safe.
If the fire is targeted, but misses your aircraft, you can guess that (a) he can aim, but (b) your countermeasures are effective. If you know the position of his bullets and your planes, the degree (and direction) to which the bad guys are missing your planes can tell you (c) how effective your countermeasures are.
Knowing that lets you decide whether you need to target more radars, or can go after other targets, and it also gives you a good idea of whether you need to send an F-117 (hard to come by, stealthy, fragile) or an A-10 (plentiful, radar cross section the size of a barn, but who cares 'cuz it's more durable than the tanks it kills:) to take out that $FOO in tomorrow night's sortie.
> US Government has asked the IETF to come up with a system to prioritize government and emergency worker traffic in the event of another disaster
When I first read this, I was thinking of the application of routing theory to the movement of vehicles such as would be required in an emergency, which naturally led to...
If you thought TCP/IP over carrier pigeon had huge-azz latency, wait'll you try TCP/IP over government bureaucrat!
First, the IP datagram is printed on a form I-TCPIP by the former acting deputy chief. The scroll of paper is inserted into his briefcase and he's reassigned to acting director for international affairs.
At each hop, the source address is taken by the executive associate commissioner for field operations, and filed according to procedure. After he becomes regional director for the western region, he looks up the address of the next hop.
The next hop's address is glommed onto the datagram by the assistant commissioner for inspections, formerly the acting executive associate commissioner in the office of programs.
Finally, the router, upon receipt of the datagram, forwards it to the special counsel to the commissioner, who herself is then reassigned to assistant deputy executive associate commissioner for immigration services.
Security is not only a problem in a normal operation, as special measures (such as the firing of the incompetent) cannot be taken even when government bureaucrats are used in a tactical environment.
> When I find out the address of a spammer, I put it into Google and see what pops out. Often, a whole list of scam-type businesses will show up with the same address. I just came across one today in Glendale, CA. At the same address are an inkjet-refill company, a loan broker, an online gambling operation, and a spamming service.
Sometimes that means you've found a spammer.
Other times, it just means you've found a Mail Boxes, Etc. type of place. (Non-US folks: Sorta like a post office, but run by private companies. People can rent mailboxes with them, and collect their snail-mail there. Most of their customers are legit, but many aren't.)
(Sometimes, of course, the same spammer will use the same mailbox/dropbox provider for more than one scam. Figuring out the difference by looking for similarities in writing styles, etc. is more an art than a science...)
> Had circumstances been slightly different the flash would have been seen over the Persian Gulf or Middle East, and it's virtually certain that the flash would have been initially interpreted as a nuclear detonation. (Watching for such flashes is exactly why these satellites were launched.)
The flashes from nuke detonations have certain characteristics that the flashes from asteroid/cometary fragment detonations don't.
(That said, the nuke-detecting satellites are doing a good job of keeping track of upper-atmosphere flashes from asteroid/cometary fragments. To the extent that such data can be given to NASA folks, we're getting some good science out of these things.)
Yes, a human observer on the ground may erroneously conclude they've been nuked, but any rational chain of command involving release of nuclear weapons will include verification that the supposed nuke really was a nuke and not an unfortunately-timed meteorite.
(Unfortunately, convincing the other side's troops that we hadn't developed some sort of new superweapon might be another story. The less technologically-advanced the opponent, the more the risk that they'll be able to understand the evidence that it was just Really Bad Luck.)
Thankfully, the odds of asteroid impact itself are pretty slim, and I'm much more worried about those odds - anywhere on the planet - than I am about the rock hitting the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.
(Also thankfully, the solution to both problems is the same - a bit more spent on gear to watch for rocks, and assloads more spent on R&D into cheap, heavy-lift capabilities so we have a hope in hell of deflecting them when/if we find one with our name on it. If we never find a rock with our name on it, we've got a heavy-lift capability to make space tourism, offworld solar power stations, and eventual colonization a reality. Win/win.)
> Has anyone ever heard of Nasa having any sort of plan on what to do if an asteriod ever was
going to hit earth?
Has anyone ever heard of Congress giving NASA the budget required to come up with any plan more effective than "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye."
The dinosaurs are extinct because they lacked a space program.
More the pity homo sapiens, who was smart enough to invent rockets, smart enough to realize the nature of the threat, but too dumb to do anything about it.
Prediction: 24 hours after the asteroid impact, the surviving Congresscritters call upon the surviving sheeple to burn down and lynch all aerospace industry personnel because "NASA should have been able to warn us!"
Maybe our descendants, 500 years after the Great Burn, will do better.
> I think there is a real First Amendment problem with this statute," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation
/me retches and tears up a check to the EFF. First they defend spammers, now this? Fsck EFF.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech. It protects indecent speech. It does not protect obscene speech.
The PA law doesn't say "must install proxies". The law doesn't say "must redirect HTTP traffic". The law doesn't say PA users must install censorware. It merely says that if you're an ISP, and the government notifies you that Bad Stuff is on your system, that you nuke aforementioned Bad Stuff.
The government kicking the ass of an ISP that (knowingly) hosts Bad Stuff is no more a first amendment problem than private citizens kicking the ass of an ISP that (knowingly) hosts spammers.
That is -- neither the spammer's nor the pedophile's "speech" is protected by the First Amendment. The EFF desperately needs to go out and buy a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
What's this "Javascript" thing? Why should I enable it again?
Oh, and something about a "Flash" DLL. I deleted that a few years ago and didn't notice anything bad happening, so I guess I didn't need it either.
The only weird thing is that people walk by my cube and after watching me surf for a minute or two, they keep asking me how I block all the ads that have been added to news sites over the past year. They look all puzzled when I say "What popups? I haven't seen a popup (Javashit) or shoshkele (those flash things that drip goo all over the page you're trying to read) in 3 years."
Amen.
Thanks to un-crippled MP3s, I've been exploring increasingly-obscure electro/industrial/techno stuff. Shit, this week alone, I've discovered Dorsetshire, Dynamix II, and Industrial Artz.
(Actually, I think I remember Industrial Artz' "Powertrip", having heard it once on radio some 10 years ago and thinking "Wow, sampling Led Zep's Kashmir, that takes balls!". Naturally, it was radio, so I never found out who they were until last night when I said "Holy fuck! I remember looking for this CD 10 years ago and everyone in the record shops thought I was nuts!")
It looks like Dorsetshire and Industrial Artz vanished some 8-10 years ago, and there's no way to send 'em a few bones, but if I'm ever in Florida, I'll be checking out Dynamix II, live. And I'll be buying CDs - but I'll be buying them at the show, and/or tipping them directly.
Fuck RIAA. We don't need them anymore. The more of us realize that fact, the less power they'll have over us. The less power they have over us, eventually, the less power they'll have over our legislators.
1) You could, but it's a felony under DMCA. Circumvention of a copy control mechanism.
2) You might not be able to. MSFT's "Secure Audio Path" is a step in the direction of locking down the hardware. (Under CBDTPA, this will be mandatory.)
3) Even if you could ("could" in the legal sense and and the sense of any technical crippling imposed by your operating system), you wouldn't want to. It'd be like saving a .JPG file as a .JPG - the encoding to MP3 is lossy, and you'd lose quality.
(This is, of course, the goal of the Content Cartel -- to make your computer, which is a device based on the principle that bits are infinitely reproducible, work like a cassette tape made of atoms which are not reproducible.)
> Take prostitution for instance. One day I was walking down 5th street, minding my own business, when a hooker walked up to me and said "blow you for $30."
> "No thanks," I replied and kept on walking. She whistled and soon three huge men burst out of the building next to us and tackled me to the ground. One held me down, one beat me [
And although you were trolling, I'd give you a +1, Insightful, because you've hit the nail on the head.
Just like the hooker in your story, when the rules of economics are running against you, "calling in the thugs" is how you maintain your business.
The DMCA makes it illegal to fix copy-cripped hardware. If you're already in a relationship, you're allowed to say "no" to the hooker, and save your $30 by getting your blowjob from your partner.
The CBDTPA makes it illegal to use anything but copy-crippled hardware. The three thugs who beat you up were named Eisner, Valenti, and Rosen. This was legal, because after Hollings' law goes through, it'll be illegal to have sex with anyone but the $30 hooker.
(After all, countless prostitutes suffer cruel treatment at the hands of their pimps and live in poverty because you - yes, you - are depriving them of the money they need to survive. Every time you sleep with your consenting wife, girlfriend, or bar floozie - it's like you're pressing the lit cigarette against the hooker's arm. And you have the gall to call it "free" sex. For shame.)
Thought for the day: Replace "artist" with "prostitute", "entertainment industry" with "pimp", and "rampant internet piracy" (the exchange of data for the mutual benefit of both parties) with "any kind of consensual sex where no money is exchanged" (the exchange of bodily fluids for the mutual benefit of both parties).
> Indeed, it was an interesting lesson in United States' free-market economics.
Of that, I have no doubt. The CPDTPA promises an equally interesting lesson in civics, and an equally interesting hangover consisting of a hard drive full of N'Sync and an assload of cartoon mouse jizz.
>
>More power to them. I guess pissing their money away on nonsense like that instead of feeding their people is one way of controlling the population.
What you say with irony, I say with conviction.
I'd prefer that the first lunar colony be American.
But if America decides it wants nothing to do with space, I'd much rather have a Chinese space programme than no space programme at all.
(All of which, frankly, is moot; I agree with the poster who said that the main motivation is for the Chinese to demonstrate their ballistic missile capability.)
No, that goes to the most advanced nation in radio astronomy and signal processing.
(Of course, depending on what they're saying, said nation could end up with a decent technological lead to boot :)
ROFLMAO. Damn, I remember getting a copy of that. And someone else has already mentioned Strip Poker with Suzi and Melissa.
Anyone know if Interlude's mirrored anywhere?
ObRetrogaming: Bilestoad on the Apple ][. Gawd, how I loved that game, nice chunky chop-chop sounds... mmm... Marc Goodman, thank you!
>
> Wow, those astronauts sure have strong throwing arms.
Hmm, anyone for "playing ball" on an asteroid? No team required, you can do it solitaire!
You pitch the ball to the east, go home for lunch, change uniforms, do some math, and walk over to the plate with a bat.
If you hit the ball, you do some calculations, change uniforms again, and go hopping around the asteroid with a glove attached to a tall pole to try and snag it out of orbit. (If you hit it hard enough, the ball achieves escape velocity! Home run!)
If you swing and miss, you go back home, change uniforms, and come back with a catcher's mitt.
Huh? I don't get it. I remember putting on our spacesuits for recess at Lunar Educational Module Delta, and we'd go outside the airlock to play.
We tried your Earthborn games of badminton and tennis, but couldn't tell the difference.
What's the difference between using that feathery-cone-shaped thing, the hollow rubber thing that just freezes solid (and sometimes shatters)? Cost us a fortune to get those sent up here, and for what? Why not just bat a rock around? Rocks are cheap, plentiful, and in a vaccuum, fly the same way.
> i.e. There comes a point when you can't subdivide them.
Which brings us back to Penrose.
As far as I can tell, The Emperor's New Mind rants and raves about how hard AI is "impossible", and then devolves into some mumbo-jumbo about microtubules and quantum effects.
Fine, Penrose. The brain can be modelled as a Turing machine with a random number generator as one of its inputs.
And even worse for Penrose, what if I take his wacky quantum microtubules at face value? So the brain's a quantum computer (which, admittedly, didn't exist, as far as I was aware, when the book was written). It's massively parallel and sometimes gets the wrong answer.
I'll grant that a quantum computer running AI software is no longer a Turing machine per se, but I fail to see how any of Penrose's arguments preclude meat-brained humans from building something out of non-meat that does the same thing.
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
From the article:
He replies to spam. If we're lucky, he'll get cancer and respond to an ad for laetrile. Strike three, and chalk one up for natural selection.
I guess they were afraid the cemetery wouldn't have enough room for the mile-long line of geeks waiting their turn to, uh, "offer their respects", in the form of what I'll delicately call a libation.
> And two, which adds the most to the enconomy, IT, or RIAA?
The one with the biggest tits.
When Intel or AMD can offer your Senator a roofied pop star dusted with a line of cocaine between her implants, then we'll see some respect given to the technology industry.
True.
> Second, research has shown that you do not need nearly as much protein in your diet as you have been led to believe. Most of the research in this field has been funded by the meat and dairy industries (see "Diet for a New America" by John Robbins for some excellent sources).
You mean
I look forward to the Quackwatch review of Reclaiming Our Health.
(Before you accuse the maintainer of quackwatch.com as being some kind of protein industry co-conspirator, he's just as hard on the low-carbohydrate diets (e.g. Atkins Diet) as he is on other forms of quackery.
> Third, meat is unhealthy when consumed in normal portions. It contains large amounts of saturated fat and is high in cholestoral. The rate of heart disease is 3-5 times higher in meat eaters than in strict vegetarians (vegans).
But you just finished telling us that most meat-eaters don't eat balanced diets! So even if there were such a thing as a "normal portion" (odd, I'd define "normal portion" as "that portion of meat which makes a balanced diet - it's rather tautological, no?), you've just finished telling us that the typical carnivore overconsumes it anyways. So of course they're not going to have a normal heart disease profile.
Perhaps the risk of heart disease among meat-eaters is higher, not due to something inherent in meat, (a normal portion of which causes ventricular fibrillations!), but due to other factors in the lifestyle of the typical carnivore -- such as an unbalanced diet, or a higher tendency of health-conscious people to do other things that reduce the risk of heart disease.
When was the last time you saw a vegan come home from work to plunk himself down in front of the TV before lighting up a cigarette, cracking open a six-pack of beer, and munching on a bag of potato chips for dessert?
While I'll agree that the typical American doesn't eat a balanced diet, if that's the strength of his evidence, John Robbins is hardly a source to be taken seriously.
You've just reinvented hamburger! :)
OTOH, if vat-grown filet were cheap enough, you could get some very lean cuts. Given that our hypothetical vat-grown beef would have no actual "blood" supply, I'm now leaning towards calling it veal...
Ah, got it! "Vealvat! For that vealvatty-smooth tenderness that only comes from vat-grown veal!"
"Sure, just stick it out this airlock. The cold hard vaccuum of space will do the rest!"
(One problem with this approach is that when you're done with the space's cold hard vacuum, your hardness will vary inversely with your hardness' coldness :-)
I could go for that -- for non-steakeaters, the filet is a prized cut because it's tender. The filet's tenderness is a function of the fact that it's a muscle that doesn't get much use.
Before I commit to a lunch of vat-grown meat, I'd like to know how the hunks of meat develop a grain or texture.
Part of what makes "fish" meat good is the flaking and separation of the rows of flesh created by the intervening bones; likewise, the fibers of muscle that comprise the filet are organized in a grain. Steak are cut across the grain to allow any spices/marinades the maximum ability to penetrate the steak, and so that (after cooking), the chunks you cut off the steak are more easily-processed by the molars.
Cuts of meat cut cross-grain (i.e. steaks) are also perceived as more tender because the grain is parallel to the direction of the motion of your teeth, facilitating the work of your molars. (This also applies to your incisors; if you're hungry enough, skip the fork, and if you're really hungry, skip the cooking.)
I have no idea what kind of structure a large mass vat-grown steak (fish or beef) would develop, but I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to induce the cells to create their own structure by passing electric currents through the chunk as it forms, and/or to use a ceramic rod as a substitute for a bone to provide an initial alignment.
>
> Now THAT is scary! I have watched CNN and their blatant USA-centric propaganda and plain lies, just made me sick. This was apparent in the gulf war, Genoa summit and others. I will rather depend on BBC, thank you.
Hey, who says you need to listen to the commentators on CNN? Just watch the pretty pictures!
Consider the value of seeing, as broadcast in real time, the view from outside 20 hotels scattered throughout the city as the bombs fell, and the value of seeing the streaks of anti-aircraft fire.
As just one example I can think of, how about writing software to take a set of known camera locations providing live video feeds of anti-aircraft fire and triangulate by matching up each burst of fire. You now know where each gun is located, when it was fired, and in which direction. From that, and your pilots' data, it'd be easy to figure out if the gunners were randomly firing into the sky, or if they were still getting targeting information.
If the fire is random, you know that your countermeasures (and strikes on radars) were successful, and your pilots are safe.
If the fire is targeted, but misses your aircraft, you can guess that (a) he can aim, but (b) your countermeasures are effective. If you know the position of his bullets and your planes, the degree (and direction) to which the bad guys are missing your planes can tell you (c) how effective your countermeasures are.
Knowing that lets you decide whether you need to target more radars, or can go after other targets, and it also gives you a good idea of whether you need to send an F-117 (hard to come by, stealthy, fragile) or an A-10 (plentiful, radar cross section the size of a barn, but who cares 'cuz it's more durable than the tanks it kills :) to take out that $FOO in tomorrow night's sortie.
When I first read this, I was thinking of the application of routing theory to the movement of vehicles such as would be required in an emergency, which naturally led to...
If you thought TCP/IP over carrier pigeon had huge-azz latency, wait'll you try TCP/IP over government bureaucrat!
First, the IP datagram is printed on a form I-TCPIP by the former acting deputy chief. The scroll of paper is inserted into his briefcase and he's reassigned to acting director for international affairs.
At each hop, the source address is taken by the executive associate commissioner for field operations, and filed according to procedure. After he becomes regional director for the western region, he looks up the address of the next hop.
The next hop's address is glommed onto the datagram by the assistant commissioner for inspections, formerly the acting executive associate commissioner in the office of programs.
Finally, the router, upon receipt of the datagram, forwards it to the special counsel to the commissioner, who herself is then reassigned to assistant deputy executive associate commissioner for immigration services.
Six months after the hijackers initiate transmission via a high-delay, low-throughput, and low-altitude service, the router at the flight school gets the packet containing the 9/11 hijackers' visa approval notifications.
Security is not only a problem in a normal operation, as special measures (such as the firing of the incompetent) cannot be taken even when government bureaucrats are used in a tactical environment.
Sometimes that means you've found a spammer.
Other times, it just means you've found a Mail Boxes, Etc. type of place. (Non-US folks: Sorta like a post office, but run by private companies. People can rent mailboxes with them, and collect their snail-mail there. Most of their customers are legit, but many aren't.)
(Sometimes, of course, the same spammer will use the same mailbox/dropbox provider for more than one scam. Figuring out the difference by looking for similarities in writing styles, etc. is more an art than a science...)
What bouncing laptops?
Oh, that's right, I disabled Flash. I never see these ads.
The flashes from nuke detonations have certain characteristics that the flashes from asteroid/cometary fragment detonations don't.
(That said, the nuke-detecting satellites are doing a good job of keeping track of upper-atmosphere flashes from asteroid/cometary fragments. To the extent that such data can be given to NASA folks, we're getting some good science out of these things.)
Yes, a human observer on the ground may erroneously conclude they've been nuked, but any rational chain of command involving release of nuclear weapons will include verification that the supposed nuke really was a nuke and not an unfortunately-timed meteorite.
(Unfortunately, convincing the other side's troops that we hadn't developed some sort of new superweapon might be another story. The less technologically-advanced the opponent, the more the risk that they'll be able to understand the evidence that it was just Really Bad Luck.)
Thankfully, the odds of asteroid impact itself are pretty slim, and I'm much more worried about those odds - anywhere on the planet - than I am about the rock hitting the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.
(Also thankfully, the solution to both problems is the same - a bit more spent on gear to watch for rocks, and assloads more spent on R&D into cheap, heavy-lift capabilities so we have a hope in hell of deflecting them when/if we find one with our name on it. If we never find a rock with our name on it, we've got a heavy-lift capability to make space tourism, offworld solar power stations, and eventual colonization a reality. Win/win.)
Has anyone ever heard of Congress giving NASA the budget required to come up with any plan more effective than "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye."
The dinosaurs are extinct because they lacked a space program.
More the pity homo sapiens, who was smart enough to invent rockets, smart enough to realize the nature of the threat, but too dumb to do anything about it.
Prediction: 24 hours after the asteroid impact, the surviving Congresscritters call upon the surviving sheeple to burn down and lynch all aerospace industry personnel because "NASA should have been able to warn us!"
Maybe our descendants, 500 years after the Great Burn, will do better.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech. It protects indecent speech. It does not protect obscene speech.
The PA law doesn't say "must install proxies". The law doesn't say "must redirect HTTP traffic". The law doesn't say PA users must install censorware. It merely says that if you're an ISP, and the government notifies you that Bad Stuff is on your system, that you nuke aforementioned Bad Stuff.
The government kicking the ass of an ISP that (knowingly) hosts Bad Stuff is no more a first amendment problem than private citizens kicking the ass of an ISP that (knowingly) hosts spammers.
That is -- neither the spammer's nor the pedophile's "speech" is protected by the First Amendment. The EFF desperately needs to go out and buy a clue.